Madison Scott's disappearance haunted Vanderhoof for 12 years. Now, the community is grappling with her death

Madison Scott's face is everywhere you turn in Vanderhoof. It's plastered on billboards plastered every few kilometres along the highway into town. It's on store windows and truck bumper stickers and enlarged on the side of a building.

She was 20 years old when she was last seen, the posters say. She was five feet four inches tall with ginger hair down to her shoulders, a piercing in her left nostril and the silhouette of a bird on the inside of her left wrist.

For the past decade, these posters and billboards have been put up in the hope that Scott might someday be found alive, able to return home to this tight-knit community in central B.C. that has dedicated itself to finding her for the past decade.

But now friends and family and even people who never met her are grappling with a new reality: On May 29 — nearly 12 years to the day since Scott was first reported missing — RCMP announced they had found the remains of "Maddy." No cause of death has been released, but police say foul play has not been ruled out, and a team of investigators is carrying out a search of a rural property just a few kilometres away from the campsite where Scott was last seen alive.

"It's really a state of shock," says Mayor Kevin Moutray, speaking to CBC News in council chambers the day after the news was announced. Outside, the municipal flag has been lowered to half-mast, a sign of just how much this young woman's death has impacted the community.

"We are mourning," Moutray says. "The community as a whole is taking a step back [and] thinking of Maddy."

The District of Vanderhoof is home to roughly 4,300 people and bills itself as being in the geographic centre of the province, 100 kilometres west of Prince George and 800 kilometres north of Vancouver.

It hosts an international airshow in the summer and is home to a sturgeon recovery centre and a bird sanctuary that sees hundreds of migrating geese and swans pass through during the spring. But to countless people worldwide, it's home to the mystery of what happened to Madison Scott.

"This story ... has defined the last decade of Vanderhoof," says Chris Mushumanski, a search and rescue volunteer who helped lead the efforts to find Scott 12 years ago. Her disappearance has been recounted on multiple true crime podcasts, investigative documentaries on U.S. network television and through word-of-mouth campaigns, such as when a group of her friends travelled to the Grey Cup in Vancouver to distribute 6,000 flyers asking for clues.

The basic outline of the story is this: Scott was last seen at approximately 3 a.m. on May 28, 2011, while celebrating a friend's birthday at Hogsback Lake, a group campsite roughly 26 kilometres southeast of town popular with locals.

She had been texting with her parents during the party, but they could not reach her the next day. She was reported missing on May 29 when her tent and truck were found abandoned at the campsite, and extensive air, ground and water searches were carried out to no avail.

Hogsback Lake southwest of Vanderhoof is the last place Madison Scott was seen alive. Police are now searching a rural property near the campsite in connection with the discovery of her remains.

Mushumanski recalls that aside from her iPhone, the other personal belonging of note she was believed to have with her were flip-flops, which would have been difficult to walk on through the dense brush surrounding the area. Both police and family say it was unusual for her not to be in touch with loved ones, and her disappearance was considered suspicious.

The search for Scott also came at a particularly dark time for the region: Vanderhoof is along Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, a stretch of road known by many as the Highway of Tears due to the number of  women and girls — primarily Indigenous — to go missing or be murdered along it, including several in the same time period as Scott. And in 2014, it would be confirmed that a serial killer was operating in the area, killing at least four women in the two years prior to Scott's disappearance.