A mystery in the San Antonio suburb of Garden Ridge ended Thursday in the worst possible way, as the body of 33-year-old Leanne Bearden was discovered on a wooded property just a few blocks from her in-laws’ house which she left about a month ago, saying she would be gone about an hour but never returning.
Authorities searched all over the San Antonio suburbs for Bearden, but reportedly they did not search the 2.4 acre lot in the Fairview Circle area of the San Antonio suburb. In the end, that’s where Leanne Bearden was found dead.
The owners of a home on the wooded property refused to speak to the media. But a neighbor, 77-year-old Jay Hamm, told The San Antonio Express News that Bearden’s family came to search the area on January 18, the day after she vanished.
As The Inquisitr reported in an initial story on the case , Bearden and her husband Josh had returned only recently from a two-year trip around the world, which they chronicled on a blog . The trip took them to dozens of exotic locales from Israel, to Bolivia, Mount Kilimanjaro to Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. They had been back in the United States about a month and were visiting Josh Bearden’s San Antonio family, intending to resettle in Denver afterward.
But after her two year adventure around the globe, Leanne Bearden somehow lost her life in this quiet bedroom community about 25 miles northeast of San Antonio.
Police have made no comment on the cause of the woman’s death. They have not said if they plan to investigate her death as a homicide, suicide, accident or something else. They identified her body by a backpack, several articles of jewelry and an identification document on her person. An autopsy is pending.
After searches turned up nothing, her family said that Leanne was having trouble re-adjusting to ordinary life in the United States and was often “very anxious and stressed.” They said they feared she may have simply run away.
The family even hired a private investigator who tracked down reported sightings of Leanne Bearden outside of San Antonio, in other Texas cities such as Laredo and Austin. But all efforts proved fruitless.
On a Facebook page that had been dedicated to the search for Leanne Bearden around the San Antonio area and elsewhere, her family wrote, “Our family is understandably devastated by the news of the recovery of the remains of our beloved Leanne. We wish to thank the myriad of people who helped us search for Leanne and who supported us during this entire nightmare.”