But this sequence doesn’t even begin to describe how vanishingly remote the odds of what happened to them really were. For scale, the parent tornado was 2.6 miles across, which is wider than Manhattan. The subvortex, meanwhile, was roughly the width of a couple of football fields. Yet in all that survivable space within the parent tornado—scary though it would have been—they encountered the subvortex at one of only two locations where it would have been nearly stationary, and where they would have been exposed to its lethal winds for a protracted period.
Whether you believe in fate, bad luck, or neither, this was an unlikely outcome. It’s a little reminiscent of Jarrell, Texas, and the Double Creek Estates. The neighborhood was so small, and there was so much open farm- and ranchland surrounding it. Yet the tornado found that little postage stamp of a subdivision. So it was with Tim, Carl, and Paul. They ended up on that particular stretch of Reuter Road, the worst place in the storm, at precisely the wrong moment.
Once the car was overtaken, the details are grounded in fact but open to interpretation. Kathy Samaras asks Tim Marshall, one of Josh Wurman’s collaborators, to glean whatever information possible from the vehicle’s event data recorder, commonly known as the black box. She wants to know if there was something wrong with the Cobalt. Upon examination, however, the recorder gives no indication of a flat tire or any other mechanical malfunction that would have prevented escape. The transmission, though, holds one clue: it was in reverse, and the black box seems to indicate this gear shift happened shortly before the recording ended. “My guess is they probably knew they were in trouble,” Kathy says. “I think they saw something that made them realize they couldn’t go into what they were going into, and they had to get out. ‘We have to put it in reverse and get out of here.’ ”
A second theory comports with a last-ditch strategy employed by chasers who know they’re going to take a hit. In 2004, Tim was in pursuit of a tornado near Crystal Springs, Kansas, when he was overtaken by a rain curtain. He shouted to the driver, “Turn your car into the wind.” He wanted to give it the profile of least resistance, rather than allowing the broad, aerodynamically clunky flank of the minivan to take the brunt of the gale.
“The winds are coming out of the north, and Tim Samaras knew that,” Garfield says. Perhaps as Carl was backing up to angle the Cobalt into the wind, the subvortex came unexpectedly out of the east and caught them broadside.
Of course, there is a simpler third scenario: that the reverse gear was accidental, caused by tumbling metal against earth.
One of the few facts known with any certainty is that the three never had a chance to deploy the probes. The devices were all switched off.
More than a month later, Doug Gerten, the sheriff’s deputy who found Tim’s body, takes another drive along Reuter Road. He stops near the creek and walks along its banks. Pieces of the Cobalt—a car-stereo speaker, a headlamp, a bumper—still litter the fields and the ditch. Down in the creek, he spots something black partially submerged in a few inches of water. From the shallow water, he plucks out Paul’s camera.
What he holds in his hand is the final record. There is one thing about Tim’s son that everyone knows: he was always filming and probably had been up to the last moments of his life. These may be stored on the camera’s data disk, or they may have been erased by weeks spent in the water. “I talked with Kathy about that,” Garfield says. “She does not want to know what happened. She’s content with what she knows.”
The deaths of Tim and Paul are a hard blow to everyone in their family and the chasing community. For Tim’s son Matt Winter, there is a sense of whiplash. It had been only seven years since he’d met his biological father. They’d had so many years to catch up on, and years to do so—but now that time is gone. Tim and Winter hadn’t talked much during 2013. On May 20, eleven days before Tim died, Winter had sent him a picture of his five-year-old son, Peyton, climbing an archway in the house like a little monkey. Winter thought it was funny because his older son, Nick, had done the same thing at Tim’s Lakewood house the first time Winter brought his family to visit.
“Does this look familiar?” Winter wrote.
“Yes, very much so,” Tim had responded. “Looks like a certain other little guy I know.”
On May 31, Winter remembered pulling up the radar feed depicting the storm over El Reno while he was at work at Nationwide Insurance. To him, it looked like a hurricane—bigger than any other mesocyclone he had ever seen. A couple of days later, Jenny called. He took the call in the conference room, and she tried to tell him the news—that his father and half brother were gone—but she couldn’t get out the words. Kathy picked up the phone and finished for her.
Winter sagged into the nearest chair, and a wave of nausea washed over him. When he hung up, he told his boss he had to leave and walked outside to the parking garage. It was a sunny day, but he says he heard the concussion of thunder. He ran to the edge of the parking garage and looked up. “It’s one tiny, low-topped thunderstorm over Des Moines,” he says. “It was so random. Dew
