Hiker’s Discovery Rekindles Families’ Painful Memories : Crash: A plane disappeared 32 years ago, leaving relatives baffled. Now, finally, there are some answers.

This town of Russian Baptists on a bend of the Sacramento River has kept its porch light burning for 32 years, captive to a mystery.

On a cloudless day in July, 1962, three young emigres from Bryte boarded a tiny plane bound for a Billy Graham revival in Fresno, 180 miles away. They never returned.

It was Cold War summer, the Bay of Pigs a fresh wound and the Cuban missile crisis only months away. Scores of local Russians who had escaped religious persecution in the Soviet Union fanned out from this town, scouring the farms and foothills and high mountains of Central California for any hint of the plane. They turned up nothing.

“My mother believed they had been hijacked to Cuba and sent to prison in Russia,” said Nadia Lokteff, whose brother, Ben Amegin, and brother-in-law, Nick Lokteff, were both on board. “She got a phone call. The voice said, ‘Mom! Mom!’ and she screamed, ‘Ben! Ben! Is that you?’ Then he hung up.”

Her mother died in 1979, still wondering, still waiting.

Seven weeks ago--almost 32 years to the day after the three young men and their American pilot friend vanished--a chance turn by a hiker in Yosemite National Park yielded much of the answer.

On a sheer granite wall in the park’s high northern reaches, 30 miles from the nearest trail head, the Piper 180 Comanche had crashed, exploded and come to rest. Its mutilated fuselage, sheared propeller and perfectly preserved glass compass were hidden inside a crack in a gorge at 9,000 feet. The mountain had swallowed them up.

Now, Ben Amegin, 27, Nick Lokteff, 17, Paul Sokol, 27, and pilot Alvie Taylor, 26, are coming home--14 pieces of bleached white bone, two teeth, three leather shoes, a 35mm camera, a roll of exposed film, and an immigration card burned except for the last name, “Sokol.”

There are questions only now being asked: Why were they flying so many miles off course, into the maw of a monster? How will four families divide and bury such scant remains, fragments that can never be positively identified and will probably be recorded as John Does?

“The feelings are recharged. Everything is alive again,” said Michael Lokteff, 57, one of four surviving brothers. “Maybe it would have been better had they not disturbed the remains. Maybe they belong on that mountain forever.”

How could the sons of two Baptist ministers--one of them a minister-to-be--escape Russia and China, where Baptists died every day, only to perish in the land of dreams? And perish minutes after praying with Billy Graham?

“I still blame Billy Graham for being in Fresno,” said Vasily Lokteff, 65, the oldest brother.

“It is more than Billy Graham,” countered Valentina Lokteff. Her husband has carried on a 32-year-old argument with God himself. “I never spoke, not even in my mind, one word against God,” Vasily insisted. “But I did drift away from the church. Why? . . . I’ll never find out myself, maybe.”

As the Tuolumne County coroner tries to resolve the issues surrounding the bones in time for a Saturday memorial service here, U.S. Park Service investigator Greg Jablonski traces the echoes.

It is one thing to see a tragedy’s immediate impact, he said, a cop’s standard fare. But the decades-long period between the crash and its discovery has allowed him to stop time, and to go fast-forward and in reverse.

He sees the wife of pilot Taylor, in a drunken binge, plunging to her death in the river 12 years later. He sees their five children shipped off to foster homes and county facilities, and the hard luck that will consume their lives. And then he fast-forwards to the crash site and his visits with the families in Bryte and the blame and subtle finger-pointing that come with the new information.

“Once the wreck was found, we were obligated to investigate and dispose of the remains,” Jablonski said. “It closes the circle. But maybe it would have been better for all concerned if this was never dredged up.”

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Of the parents, only Alexandria Lokteff has lived to see the circle close. Despite a lifetime of exile and suffering, she still tends her vegetable garden and quince trees and fingers the dough for her pellimeny, Russian dumplings. Her blue eyes still twinkle beneath a bandanna tied babushka-style.

“These eyes have seen much,” the 82-year-old matriarch says in Russian.

They can still see her youngest son, Nick, waving goodby that July day. She remembers that her husband, Daniel, a Baptist minister, did not want Nick to go to Fresno.

But how could he tell the boy no? After all, he was going to a Billy Graham crusade and he was going with Ben Amegin.

The Lokteffs and Amegins had been bound by the irrevocable past. Both clans, under the cover of darkness in the 1930s, fled Stalin’s terror campaign against Baptists. On horse-and-buggy they crossed the desert into northern China and eked out 16 years of hardscrabble living before making it to America--the Amegins arriving first in 1948 and then sending for the Lokteffs.

They settled a stone’s throw from each other in Bryte, a fishing village west of the state capital, where the Sacramento River takes a sharp turn north and where the blue onion dome of Holy Myrrhbearers Orthodox Church has served as beacon to four generations of Soviet emigres.

In the 1950s, Peter Amegin, a Baptist minister by day and department store janitor by night, brought over dozens of families from Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan--so many that he had to build a new Baptist church. In the 1960s, the church grew again and this time it was Pastor Daniel Lokteff who built the new sanctuary.

By then, Amegin’s daughter Nadia and Lokteff’s son Michael were married and had two children. “It was life that brought us together and made us go to the same places and serve the same churches,” said the Lokteff matriarch.

“And whenever people are brought together by life, there is bound to be tragedy they share.”

To Ben Amegin, Billy Graham was some kind of Baptist. The 27-year-old minister-in-training was home on summer break from a Christian college in Oregon when he heard that Graham would be in Fresno. He had seen him twice in Sacramento and this time wanted to share the joy with three friends who, he felt, were at a crossroads.

Little Nick Lokteff was caught between generations, the youngest of six siblings whose lives were consumed by the church and things Russian. He wanted something more.

Paul Sokol, 27, had fled the Soviet Union with his parents and sister in the 1940s and came to Bryte by way of Germany and Venezuela. He was an artist with the opposite problem of Lokteff. He had come too late to America and the possibilities for him were limited. He couldn’t get a job and spent whole days in his bedroom putting bold strokes on oil portraits.

“Sometimes he didn’t come out for dinner,” recalled his sister Lydia. “When he did, my father would ask him, ‘What are you thinking?’ and Paul wouldn’t answer.”

Sokol’s mother did not want him flying on a plane. But when he said he had to go, she wasn’t about to stand in his way.

Alvie Taylor, 26, a tall, strapping airplane mechanic and pilot, grew up on a farm in Knights Landing, 30 miles upstream on the Sacramento River. It was a world away from Bryte, though also shaped by the water. He and four older brothers hunted and fished and swam the strong current that swirled in three directions. When you made it across, Glen Taylor said, you came to think of yourself as a man. You never again doubted your physical skills.

“Sometimes he had to do daredevil things,” the brother, 59, recalled. “I remember once he put the plane in a stall to show off for my parents and he very nearly didn’t bring it back up. I jumped him that night. I told him he didn’t have enough altitude to make that move.”

Alvie Taylor worked at the Sacramento Municipal Airport where Ben Amegin took flying lessons, thinking it would help him spread the gospel. They became fast friends. Taylor, the father of five, confided his marital problems.

“My brother was searching for something in life and Ben was giving him religious counseling,” Glen Taylor said. “I think that’s why he agreed to fly them that night to see Billy Graham in Fresno.”

Late that night, not knowing the plane’s fate, Glen Taylor was awakened by his brother’s voice. “That never happened before and never happened again. He was inside an airplane and he was saying, ‘You’re not listening. It’s too late.’ ”

Amegin’s sister, Nadia Lokteff, didn’t sleep that night either. “My mother called shortly before midnight. She said Ben and Nick never came home. We stayed up all night just watching and waiting. I can still remember going out and looking up at the sky and it was just the most beautiful night. It was clear and the moon was full and stars were bright.”

They found out the next day that the four had attended the Graham revival and were driven to the Fresno airport by a Russian Baptist minister about 9 p.m. They were headed straight home.

An intensive military and Civil Air Patrol sky search failed to produce a trace. The Lokteffs, Amegins and Taylors, those who could fly and those who could drive, combed the entire midsection of the state. Taylor’s mother took to the airwaves imploring Central Valley farmers to search their fields.

Michael Lokteff remembers the futility. “We drove up and down the mountains and through Yosemite. I remember saying to myself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ But I went, to be going, to be doing something. My father didn’t want to stop. ‘Well, let’s go to the next hill. And the next hill.’ ”

He doesn’t recall when the active search ended, but slowly the realization hit. They’re gone. Maybe they’re gone forever. In the absence of any clues, rumors of intrigue--Soviets exacting revenge against the Baptist emigre community--began to surface.

The Lokteffs dismissed the talk. The Amegins weren’t so sure.

“The Communists once told my parents that wherever you go we will come and get you,” said Leida Amegin Juedes. “My father said, ‘Leida, they got him! They’ve got him!’

“Wherever I went I looked for Ben. When I traveled to Russia in 1978, I looked in every man’s eyes looking for my brother Ben’s. . . . I have been looking for Ben ever since.”

At every diner and honky-tonk along his truck route, Glen Taylor saw a man who resembled his brother. Every time he heard about an old plane wreck surfacing, he called authorities to make sure.

He never found his brother--but he did find his brother’s wife, floating in Cache Creek in the winter of 1974 after her car slammed into a bridge embankment and fell into the raging waters. Later, after losing touch, he found his brother’s daughter in a Sacramento County children’s facility. It was her birthday and she had written a card to herself. It said, “Happy Birthday Mandy . . . From Mandy.”

“Those kids had a tough life,” Taylor said. “Deep down, some of them thought my brother was alive and had abandoned them. They never knew he loved them more than anything.”

Then a few weeks ago, Taylor read a short piece in the Sacramento Bee about an old Piper Comanche found above the treeline in Stubblefield Canyon, 20 miles north of Yosemite Valley. The plane was undisturbed and undetected for three decades, it said. One and possibly two skeletons were inside. He called authorities to say it might be his brother and the others. The Lokteffs and Amegins had already called.

“We had multiple people remembering the same crash with the same people on board,” said park service investigator Jablonski. “But we couldn’t be sure until we flew up there in a helicopter and brought back the remains.”

Jablonski wasn’t prepared for what he found--not a skeleton or two, but a handful of bones, the longest an eight-inch piece of femur. The plane had become one with the mountain. And yet in the center of the devastation, Jablonski spotted one compass and one gauge with glass covers perfectly intact. He thought of the pristine teacup on the Titanic.

“It was ironic. Like a flower in the middle of a desert. I will never forget that.”

He surmised that Taylor had deviated from the flight path over U.S. 99 to show his friends Reno at night. Once he entered the canyon, with sheer wall on both sides and the 10,945-foot Snow Peak looming ahead, he tried to turn back. He didn’t have enough airplane for it.

Jablonski took a video of the crash site and drove to Sacramento to show it to the families, who had begun to point fingers at each other over whose brother pushed whose brother into going to the Graham revival. Nadia Lokteff still refused to believe it was them.

“Jablonski told us he had Paul Sokol’s half-burned immigration card and he was 90% sure it’s them. I said 90%? It has to be 100%, the real thing. It can’t be, ‘We think it’s them’ or ‘We’re pretty sure it’s them.’ ”

On Tuesday, she called the Tuolumne County coroner to find out if the remains could be handed over in time for Saturday’s memorial.

“I asked him how much was left and he said, ‘Half a grocery bag.’ That’s when it hit home. I thought, ‘My God, how could I have expected more?’ The wild animals and snow. It’s amazing that much is left after all these years.”

In the same cemetery in old Sacramento, the elders of the Amegin and Lokteff clans have been laid to rest alongside many of their fellow emigres. But because of the problems of identifying and separating the bones, Nadia Lokteff doesn’t think her brother and brother-in-law will be buried there. She thinks maybe it’s appropriate they be cremated as one, and their ashes scattered over Yosemite.

Search Finally Over

More than 30 years after three young men from Bryte and their pilot friend disappeared on a flight to Fresno, their remains have been found in Yosemite.