journey lost scarf

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A player with a fully charged scarf

In Journey , each player has a scarf that they can charge up with magic to fly.

Growing and Charging [ ]

The scarf grows by collecting the 21 glowing symbols throughout the game. To charge the scarf, stand near other pieces of cloth such as:

• Cloth fragments
• Long flowing pieces of cloth ("cloth seaweed")
• Cloth "jellyfish"
• Cloth "dolphins"

You can also power up by wearing the White Robe , swimming in the magic water in The Temple area, or by riding the shark/whale in The Temple area. The Summit area also provides seemingly unlimited flight power.

Destruction [ ]

The scarf will be cut in half if you are caught by one of the guardians in The Tunnels or The Mountain areas. In The Mountain area, your scarf will drain energy as you walk through the snowstorm. It will shorten and shorten as you reach the end of the area. Getting hit too often by Guardians can reduce the scarf's lenght to Zero. Collecting Glowing Symbols or completing the area will restore the scarf to one segment.

Second Playthroughs [ ]

You will have to recollect the glowing symbols on subsequent playthroughs, as they do not carry over. If you earn and wear the White Robe , while you still have to collect the symbols to extend your scarf, your starting scarf will be longer, its charge will deplete more slowly, and it will recharge itself upon landing.

• 1 The Traveler
• 2 White Robe
• 3 Walkthrough

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Journey: How to Get a Long Scarf

In Journey, the ability to soar and glide is the most important skill you have. The longer you can stay airborne, the more you can adventure and enjoy the beautiful sights the game has to offer. Easily the best way to stay up in the air for longer periods of time is to have a longer scarf. Getting a longer scarf isn’t all that difficult, but it will take some time and a decent bit of exploring.

Your character’s scarf in Journey does more than act as a very cool cosmetic attachment to your cloak. It also acts as your energy for flight. The longer your scarf length, the more energy you have to lift off and fly. Because of this, increasing your maximum scarf capacity can be a really nice way to smoothly work your away through the game. Throughout the game you will notice Glowing Symbols hidden away and when you collect the symbol your scarf will lengthen, adding more scarf energy to your character. There are 21 Glowing Symbols hidden throughout the various chapters and gathering each one will culminate to the longest scarf you’ve probably ever seen. Keep in mind that when beating the game and started a brand new one, your scarf will be reset back to its original length and you will have to collect the Glowing Symbols all over again.

After collecting all of the Glowing Symbols you will also gain access to the White Robe. This new cloak will give you an even longer scarf as well as the ability to automatically recover scarf energy over time while on the ground. Check out our guide on how to get the White Robe here. With the White Robe and a slew of Glowing Symbol upgrades you’ll be able to soar throughout the skies to your hearts content and enjoy everything Journey has to offer.

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Journey (PS4) Review

• First Released Mar 13, 2012 released

The light by which my spirit's born.

By Kevin VanOrd on July 23, 2015 at 10:41AM PDT

This review contains spoilers. For a spoiler-free review of Journey, you can read our original review here .

It was my eighth playthrough and the tears still streamed, almost inexplicably; Journey is a song without words, reliant on its rapturous presentation and liberating movement to stir your mind and move your heart. With many games, I have wished that I could play them again for the first time--to experience that buzz that inevitably diminishes with each return visit. I will never need to waste this wish on Journey, however: each pilgrimage is as bittersweet as the last. How appropriate, given the game's theme of death and rebirth, that it feels so sorrowful, so joyous, and so true , each and every time.

"Journey would be just as effective as a movie," a friend once told me, but I must contradict her. Not that I can argue against the game's sumptuous environments and its sublime musical score, which earned masterpiece status the moment Journey was initially released on the PlayStation 3 in 2012. Certain landscapes have rightfully gained iconic stature, becoming the very definition of video game beauty. One shot depicts the cloaked figure you control standing atop a sand drift and gazing at the mountain you must reach, which rises above the desert and pierces the clouds. The view is a master class in simplicity and color story; the peach-orange tones of the sand give way to a sea-green sky--hushed hues for a hushed visual revelation. Another seminal sight: you skate across the sand from right to left, illuminated by a godly beam of sunlight while watching the remnants of a lost culture rush past. The screen is awash with shades of amber, and the warm sand glimmers as if mixed with golden crystals. Yes, even as a work of cinema, Journey would instill wonder.

But Journey is not a film, and its power is not gained by pretty pictures alone, but by your presence in its world. That side-scrolling glide would not choke me up if I couldn't feel the sand beneath my feet, and couldn't hit a ramp in just the right way to propel myself into the air. I wouldn't feel so beat down by the wind if I didn't feel it pushing against me as I trudged forward, and I wouldn't be so euphoric if I didn't personally experience the joy of skimming the ground. You see, you hear, and, vitally, you do . You surf the sand, you ride the wind, you seek shelter from danger, you make a friend. Seeing is believing, but it takes interaction to understand and know.

Describing Journey means describing these moments and these emotions. The mechanical basics are almost secondary, and quickly explainable. As a mysterious robed figure, you cross sand and other terrain en route to a far-off mountain. You make use of only two buttons. By pressing X, you leap into the air and soar, an ability that is limited by the length of the scarf that trails behind you. By pressing circle, you cry out to whatever or whomever might heed your call. Journey is desolate, but you are not alone. You call to flocks of ribbons that hover about like restless robins, and they provide energy to your scarf. You meet cloth creatures that become travel guides and provide magic-carpet rides to higher ground. And presuming you play while connected to the Internet, you may encounter another lone individual in your travels--an individual you can ignore, or one you can accompany, chirping to her when you locate secret hieroglyphs, or when a fearsome ribbon-dragon appears and you don't want to continue alone.

The mechanics are simple, but they establish a direct connection to the heart. Consider that flowing scarf, which trails behind you as you surf and soar, growing larger whenever you locate and touch a glowing flower. On a mundane level, it functions as a power bar that you fill up by making contact with cloth, and deplete by leaping. In context, the scarf is your life force, governing your ability to joyfully drift through the air. Gliding is Journey's most exuberant act, and by limiting its use, the game makes joy itself a currency.

Journey uses this ecstasy-based economy to craft an emotional arc across its entirety, as well as to emphasize individual moments. Your scarf grows longer and longer, but a frightful encounter with that terrible ribbon-monster turns your rippling shawl into a mere stub. You cannot fight--you can only hide. Being discovered is devastating because the scarf is where the cheer and comfort of flight are stored. You were offered a heartwarming gift, only to have it yanked from your hands. Journey also uses this moment to connect you with your wordless cooperative companion. By this stage, you understand the meaning the scarf carries with it. Seeing your sidekick succumb like this forges empathy: you know that the monster has abolished his joy.

This give-and-take is how the final levels gain their potency. Your ability to glide is diminished, then revoked. You no longer drift through sand, but brace yourself against an exhaustive wind. Then, the moment comes when all hope seems lost. You hold your breath and assume the worst. And then, the controller rumbles--just once, like a single heartbeat. And all that was taken away is restored, then multiplied, and multiplied again.

This is the source of those tears. It is not the sadness of the loss, but the bliss of being honored for your perseverance. These are tears of elevation, so perfectly described by Roger Ebert in 2009 . I have heard people describe this final climb in terms of an afterlife, and that's a reasonable interpretation of the scene, in which you float higher and higher towards the mountain's zenith. But even in the moment, whether or not you make this conscious religious association, you might feel weepy in spite of yourself. The gift was given, and it was taken away. And then, you were liberally showered with gifts, and so you ascended, higher and higher, towards your next journey.

It is possible that Journey will not move you. In such a case, it is simply a beautiful game with a glorious soundtrack, grounded by a wistful cello melody later threaded through a warm quilt of winds and strings. The chance you might be swept away, however, makes it worth plunging your feet into the warm sand. If you are returning to Journey, a higher resolution and a higher frame rate are your ostensible rewards for returning--a return that doesn't cost you anything if you already own the game on the PlayStation 3. But Journey's real rewards aren't so pedestrian. Journey offers you comfort. It gives you companionship in a lovely but forsaken world. It gives you reason to dream even when facing loss.

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• Sumptuous visuals
• One of the best game soundtracks written to date
• Simple mechanics that elicit powerful emotions
• Instills empathy between cooperative partners
• Iconic moments that stay with you for years

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Kevin VanOrd

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GameFAQs Q&A

• Will you be able to play Journey offline instead of just only online? General 7 Answers
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Journey's 12th Anniversary Poster Winner! Congratulations Kbak! Join players around the world in celebration of Journey's 12th Anniversary fan event on March 13th!

Scarfless Saturday

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Scarfless Saturday Event The objective of this event is to complete a full Journey without collecting Symbols and keeping your Scarf as short as possible.

What is it for? [ ]

A fun challenge to attempt while playing solo or with a Companion . When traveling with a Companion, the focus on team work is essential to explore and reach areas together. If choosing to play solo, exercise your patience and puzzle solving skills as you make your way across the sands.

How to participate? [ ]

• Journey any time on the set date for the event.
• Refrain from collecting symbols through the journey.
• Scarf must be at minimum length for the entire travels.

Things to be aware of: [ ]

• Players without scarf are unable to jump unless glowing from Chirp or Companion touch.
• A Red Robe starts with a shorter Scarf than a White Robe.
• In most levels, players will have a short Scarf.
• If the player has no Scarf at all when entering Tower level from Underground, a small Scarf will return.
• This can be useful to save time when ridding your Scarves.
• To make it more challenging, we recommend using a Red Robe.

Scheduling [ ]

Recurring: First Saturday of every month.

We recommend coordinating the event on the Journey Fan Discord or on the JourneyPS3 subreddit for better chances to meet Companions.

If you plan to participate in the event with a friend, see Guide to arranging a meetup .

See you there and leave your scarf behind!

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Stowaway Cat Gets From Utah to California in Amazon Returns Package

Galena, a 6-year-old shorthair, was found in an Amazon warehouse a week after she climbed into a 3-by-3-foot cardboard box at her owner’s home.

By Yan Zhuang

When Carrie Clark got a phone call on April 17 from a veterinarian in California informing her that her cat, which had vanished from her Utah home a week earlier, had been found some 500 miles away, her first reaction was disbelief.

“I could not believe that it was true,” Ms. Clark said in an interview on Sunday night. “I told her: I think this is a prank.”

It wasn’t. Galena, her 6-year-old American shorthair, had sneaked inside a 3-by-3-foot cardboard Amazon returns package alongside five pairs of steel-toed boots. Then the cat was transported two states away to one of the company’s warehouses, where it was discovered by Amazon employees.

Galena survived the unexpected journey without any food or water, Ms. Clark said.

Despite her ordeal, Galena was in relatively good health with no issues apart from mild dehydration, Ms. Clark said. Two factors had helped: One seam on the box had come unglued, allowing oxygen to circulate, and mild weather kept Galena from overheating or freezing.

“It’s really a miracle that she was able to survive,” Ms. Clark said.

Ms. Clark said she thought that Galena got into the box while her husband was packing it, by jumping inside when he left to fetch some tape to seal it up.

“She doesn’t meow a lot and she loves boxes, so for her, she was really happy in that moment, I’m sure,” Ms. Clark said. “Although I’m sure that wasn’t the case later on.”

Since the box already weighed over 30 pounds, Ms. Clark and her husband, who live in the city of Lehi, near Salt Lake City, did not notice the added weight of a stowaway when they mailed it on April 10, she said.

But they did quickly notice that their shy, indoor cat was missing that same day. After days of searching the house and the neighborhood turned up nothing, worst-case scenarios started running through her mind, Ms Clark said. Had Galena darted outside without anyone noticing? Had she been snatched up by a predator? Or end up in the river behind the house?

“We had absolutely no idea what had happened,” Ms. Clark said. “It was really challenging; I was definitely in a lot of grief.”

Then she received the call from a veterinarian in Riverside, Calif. An Amazon employee, Brandy Hunter, had brought Galena in, and the veterinarian identified her through her microchip and contacted Ms. Clark.

Ms. Hunter, who could not immediately be reached for comment, said on Facebook that she received a call from co-workers who had opened a returns box and found a cat inside.

“We have gotten some pretty crazy things in my time but never anything like this!” Ms. Hunter wrote. She said she had driven to the warehouse to catch and look after the cat, which she said had spent days in the box “in the back of a trailer full of items being returned to Amazon.”

Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment. After products are dropped off at an Amazon returns center, they are inspected for damage and signs of use to determine if they can be re-listed for sale, according to the company.

When Ms. Clark got the call, she and her husband quickly booked a flight to California. The next day they arrived at the veterinarian’s clinic, where they were reunited with Galena.

“When I got to hold her again, she stopped shaking and knew that I was there for her,” Ms. Clark said. “It was such a miraculous moment.”

Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news. More about Yan Zhuang

April 25, 2024

10 min read

An Indigenous Archaeologist’s Journey to Find the Lost Children

How “heart-centered” archaeology is helping to find the Indigenous children who never came home from residential schools

By Kisha Supernant

A staked child’s dress near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia memorializes the Indigenous children who died at the institution, where young people faced abuse and neglect.

Cole Burston /AFP/Getty Images

A late summer prairie wind swung my beaded earrings as I looked down at a gray-and-black pattern on a computer screen. The grass beneath my feet quieted as I paused. A disruption appeared, changing the radar image on the screen. My breath caught. “There,” I thought, anticipating what might come to light when we took the data back to the lab. My feet grew heavier, as did the ache in my heart.

I will never get used to walking over the land that may hold the unmarked graves of Indigenous children.

I did not start my journey as an Indigenous archaeologist in Canada with the intention of working with the dead. But I now find myself using my technical knowledge and research abilities to help my relatives find the unmarked graves of our children. Beginning in the late 1800s and over the course of more than a century, Canadian authorities forcibly removed more than 150,000 Indigenous children from their families and placed them in residential schools . Thousands never came home. In recent years, many First Nations have begun the sacred and difficult work of trying to find the children who are lost, and they are calling on archaeologists for help.

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Along the way, people have gained a better understanding of how complicated it can be to find the answers that families of missing children deserve. But even when radar surveys locate anomalies in the soil that may indicate an unmarked grave, a lot of uncertainty remains. Present-day archaeologists are collaborating with survivors and communities to bring together all the information they can to locate the children and bring them home.

These efforts are an example of how archaeology is transforming to become more engaged, more ethical and more caring about the people whose past we are privileged to study. Historically, archaeologists have collected Indigenous belongings (calling them “artifacts”) and ancestors (“human remains”) without the consent of descendant peoples and used these to formulate theories about their past lives. In contrast to this top-down approach, archaeology is now being used to support restorative justice for communities who have been historically and systemically oppressed.

This new archaeological practice, which I describe as “heart-centered,” brings my colleagues and me back in time to the places touched by our ancestors. We use the material pieces they left behind to try to reanimate their lives, revive their stories—and, by informing their descendants of what became of their loved ones, to help bring closure and heal trauma . Though the journey is long, archaeological methods can be used to tell the stories of the past, both of ancient Indigenous lives and the impacts of colonization, to help build a brighter future.

In 2021 the unmarked graves of about 200 Indigenous children were found near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Alper Dervis/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The nation known as Canada and the colonies that preceded it created policies and practices designed to eliminate the ways of life of Indigenous peoples. Central to this effort were government-funded, church-run residential schools. Established in the 1880s, these institutions incarcerated Indigenous children—separating them from their families and forcing them to attend, indoctrinating them into Christianity and punishing them for speaking their own languages or engaging in their own cultural practices. “I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” said Duncan Campbell Scott of the Department of Indian Affairs in 1920 upon mandating school attendance for Indigenous children. “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question.”

The residential school system tore families apart and placed children in environments of physical, psychological, cultural and often sexual abuse. Thousands of them died at schools from neglect, substandard living conditions, diseases, malnutrition and abuse. Some were buried in cemeteries or graveyards at the schools, while others were disposed of in more clandestine ways. Parents were often not notified of their children’s death; their kids simply never came home.

Survivors of the schools shared their knowledge about their missing companions for decades, but neither the churches nor the federal government took significant action to find the remains. Too often, these testimonies were ignored or downplayed. Over time, physical markers that might have indicated the locations of the graves were erased through both neglect and deliberate actions. In the 1960s, for example, a Catholic priest removed the headstones from the cemetery of the Marieval Residential School at Cowessess, Saskatchewan. Other cemeteries were decommissioned and erased from the landscape. It took Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which published its first shattering reports in 2015, along with the announcement of the results of ground-penetrating radar surveys conducted by First Nations investigators in 2021, to bring the horror of residential schools into the international spotlight. The trauma inflicted by residential schools have affected Indigenous people across generations. My great-grandmother attended a residential school, and this sacred work is therefore part of my own journey of healing and coming home.

In 1953 my then 19-year-old grandmother gave birth to my father in a Catholic hospital in Edmonton, Alberta. She was part of the Métis Nation, an Indigenous identity that emerged out of early unions between European fur traders and Indigenous women. The descendants of these unions formed a community with a distinct way of life, culture, and language and are now one of three recognized Indigenous groups in Canada.

Young, unmarried and Indigenous, my grandmother was not given a chance to raise her firstborn son. After she left the hospital, she never saw him again. The baby was taken from her and deposited in an orphanage, where he spent the first two years of his life . Many of these orphanages operated like residential schools; in fact, some residential schools housed orphanages, such as the St. Albert Indian Residential School, also called Youville, in Alberta. Then came foster care—my father bounced from family to family before he finally landed in a more stable placement with a French-Canadian farming household. Never adopted, he spent two unfulfilling and alienating years as an undergraduate at the University of Alberta before leaving behind his Métis homeland.

In his early 20s, he met my mother, a woman of European (mostly British) descent, in British Columbia. I was born and raised away from my ancestral homeland of prairie fields and thunderstorms. My childhood was instead spent exploring the towering cedar trees and damp mosses of the temperate rain forest near the Pacific coast. I had an unusual upbringing, being homeschooled for much of my childhood. My interests were wide-ranging, but in my teenage years, my father introduced me to archaeology, and it sounded like the most exciting and adventurous life, traveling around and exploring ancient places. My path forward seemed clear.

Archaeology emerged as a discipline in Europe and was brought to North America as part of colonial institutions such as universities and museums. Early archaeologists, almost all of them nonindigenous, excavated Indigenous sites and took what they found to museums. They framed themselves as the rightful stewards of Indigenous pasts, using our creations and ancestors for their scientific studies without our involvement or consent.

In the 1970s and 1980s, coinciding with codification of human and civil rights legislation, archaeologists began to call for a shift toward understanding individual experiences of diverse peoples from the past. Concurrently, many Indigenous activists were pushing for museums and universities to return ancestors to their communities, leading to the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in the U.S. in 1990. This act required institutions that received federal funding to inventory and return ancestors and burial objects wherever cultural affiliation could be proven. It caused consternation among many archaeologists and biological anthropologists, who voiced concern that their respective fields were in danger. They were so used to the idea that nonindigenous scholars had a right to study whatever they wanted about the past, even if living Indigenous people strongly disagreed, that returning the stolen ancestors seemed a significant threat to the foundations of their discipline.

As a teenage archaeology enthusiast in the mid-1990s, I had no idea about the changes occurring in the field, and yet they had a huge impact on my training. I was educated after NAGPRA and in British Columbia, where many archaeologists were working closely with Indigenous communities.

In 2001 I excitedly stepped off a boat—I remember the midsummer sun glinting off its metal hull—onto a rocky shore. I was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia, and my classmates and I were on the territory of the Sq’ewá:lxw First Nation, along the lower Fraser River in British Columbia, to learn field archaeology. I glimpsed the rich red ocher spread across the insides of my wrists before instinctively brushing my fingers against my temples to check that I remembered to put the paste there. The ocher allowed us to be visible to the ancestors while digging at the archaeological site nearby; every person stepping off the boat that day had to follow this protocol.

Walking up the gentle slope to the excavation that awaited, I fell into conversation with our community partners from the Sq’ewá:lxw Nation. As they shared their knowledge and connections with the past, they were as much our teachers as the academics on site were. They helped me, an Indigenous student entering my last year of university, continue my own journey of reconnecting with my ancestors. The Sq’ewá:lxw elders planted seeds in my mind that led me to where I am today: using archaeology to help Indigenous communities find our children.

Survivor Evelyn Camille was forced to spend a decade at Kamloops Indian Residential School, where, she reported, the students were subjected to physical and sexual abuse.

Cole Burston/AFP via Getty Images

In mid-2021 Tk̓emlúpste Secwépemc Nation announced that about 200 probable graves had been detected near the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. While work to locate unmarked graves had been ongoing at other locations, this announcement brought unprecedented attention to the issue of unmarked graves. The community had worked with an anthropologist who used ground-penetrating radar to locate these potential grave sites.

Since that announcement, many archaeologists have been called on by Indigenous communities in Canada and the U.S. to help find the unmarked graves of their children. This collaboration represents a significant change: communities that have been the unwilling subjects of archaeological research in the past are now asking for assistance.

Supporting Indigenous communities in this painful task requires archaeologists to lead from the heart. It is emotional and highly sensitive work, requiring great care, sincerity and scientific rigor. Instead of an extractive practice that takes knowledge, belongings and ancestors away from Indigenous communities, this new archaeology can support redress and restorative justice.

In 2020 three colleagues and I published a book envisioning a heart-centered archaeological practice flowing through the four chambers of care, emotion, relation and rigor. We invited fellow archaeologists to care for the living and the dead, to recognize the emotional content of archaeology (such as the emotions inherent in the lives of ancient peoples and evoked by the materials they used), to accept that the past relates to the present (so it’s important to build ties with the living and respect their boundaries) and finally to acknowledge that rigor comes in many forms (all knowledge systems have internal rigor that determines what the nature of knowledge is, who has knowledge and how knowledge is passed on).

It is also in heart-centered archaeology that I can find a space to be both an archaeologist and an Indigenous person. It has taken me a lifetime, but I am finally here, practicing archaeology in my own way that respects my Métis relatives. My heart has brought me back home to my homelands. The relationship I have built with my community has brought me to the most meaningful and sacred work I could imagine: helping to find the missing children. I am learning the stories of my family, including my great-grandmother, the one who attended a residential school, and my grandmother’s first cousin, who died at the age of seven and was buried in a cemetery beside a residential school. I am learning the truths of our experience, working to heal so my young daughter can have a brighter future.

Two decades after my undergraduate work in 2001, I sat down with a survivor of a residential school in a building that was right next door to what was once such a school. A church spire from the mission that had run the institution was visible through the window. A crispness in the fall air carried the promise of a frigid prairie winter to come. I lit the sage leaves gathered in a small cast-iron pan, the flame from the wooden match creating a burst of heat. Tendrils of fragrant smoke enveloped me as I pulled the cleansing smudge, or smoke, toward my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart. I stood, my ribbon skirt constricting my movement, to offer the survivor the smudge, knowing the pain that would come with what the team was about to share.

Earlier that day, I had surveyed the field behind the school with ground-penetrating radar while my team analyzed the images that appeared on my computer screen. Back in the lab, the data had resolved into a few colorful oval shapes on a white background, each about three feet long, three feet deep and similarly oriented. These were most likely buried children. No trace of their graves remained visible on the grassy field behind the residential school building, whose shadowed windows hid many secrets still to be discovered.

I told the survivor what the team had found. They needed to step away; the grief and pain were overwhelming. I stepped away, too, because I heard my own heart echo their heartbreak. Each of these shapes represented a cherished child. Yet the search was only beginning. Thousands of graves had yet to be found—and we were coming to terms with the fact that we would never find them all.

How many times can you break a broken heart?

There is still a long journey ahead. Many sites surrounding the residential schools have not even begun to be searched. The landscapes of these institutions are vast, and the process of searching is slow. It will take years of work to locate possible graves, and Indigenous people continue to discuss the question of what happens once they are located. But maybe, after years and years of asking, there might be some accountability for those responsible for taking the children away—only if the government and churches support the work to come and the public keeps the pressure on for real action.

The journey for archaeology as a discipline is equally challenging. There are still people in our field who insist that collaboration with Indigenous communities and the return of ancestors are a threat to the very foundations of our discipline. But if a foundation is fundamentally flawed, do we just continue building the same way, or do we imagine a different foundation?

We can, and will, do better. And we will help find the children.

Kisha Supernant (Métis) is director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology at the University of Alberta and co-editor of Archaeologies of the Heart (Springer, 2020).

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LAS VEGAS – Chris Padilla has been riding high for a minute now, and after this past Saturday he hopes the momentum keeps on going.

Padilla (14-6 MMA, 1-0 UFC) made his short-notice UFC debut on the prelims against James Llontop (14-3 MMA, 0-1 UFC) at UFC on ESPN 55 and pulled off the event’s biggest upset with a second-round submission. Llontop, who also was making his UFC debut, was as much as a 5-1 favorite.

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“When I say literally 16 years in the making, it was 16 years in the making,” Padilla told MMA J Junkie and other reporters after UFC on ESPN 55 in Las Vegas. “I told my coaches – we talked about it – I talked to myself and I told myself I wasn’t going to rush a single minute. I know most people want to get in and out, but nope – I wanted all 15 minutes if possible.”

Padilla gave credit to his Fight Science MMA coaches for helping take him to the next level. Before his current four-fight finishing streak, he was mired in a 1-4 rut that included losses in promotions like Bellator and CES MMA.

And going back to 2016, Padilla said he had an early shot to impress the UFC brass, and it went awry, extending his life outside the UFC even longer – nearly eight more years, as it turned out.

“I don’t want to blame outside forces,” he said. “I’m going to take responsibility for myself and say I just wasn’t ready. I was just too much of a kid. I had an opportunity … where I fought for ‘Dana White: Lookin’ for a Fight,’ and I fought Jason Gonzalez. He ended up beating me, but I hurt him and I rushed to finish and I got super desperate and I blew all my gas. Second round, he finished me. So I just don’t think personally I would’ve been ready to fight at this level.”

Nowadays, though, it’s a different story. Padilla thinks he’s ready to stick around a while.

“I lost hope a bunch of times, man. I won’t even lie to you. … Every second was what I imagined,” Padilla said. “When I started this sport, I was 13 years old, so I felt like that was the wild West of the UFC, where it was (all kinds of) sponsors, Dennis Hallman wearing a thong, all that stuff. I felt like I came in at the right time because I don’t know how I would have done in the early UFC.”

For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC on ESPN 55 .

Be sure to visit the MMA Junkie Instagram page and YouTube channel to discuss this and more content with fans of mixed martial arts.

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Her family thought her death was a tragic accident. It was years before the truth came out.

Theresa Neubauer was at work five years ago at a Georgia university when she got a phone call that stunned her.

Her son-in-law — a prominent fertility doctor who’d authored or edited several medical books — had just been arrested on suspicion of murder in the mysterious death of her daughter, Susann Sills, 45.

Susann’s body had been found at the bottom of a staircase in the couple's suburban Southern California home in 2016.

Up until that April 2019 phone call, Neubauer said, her family hadn’t even known that authorities were investigating the death as suspicious. She’d viewed her daughter’s husband, Scott Sills, 59, as a man who’d lost his wife in a tragic accident, she said, and she viewed herself as his ally as he raised the couple’s twins on his own.

“I thought the police were satisfied with the investigation — that he had nothing to do with it and he was this poor single father,” Neubauer told “Dateline” in her family’s first interview. 

“I hadn’t thought of him as a threat in any way,” she said. “It did not enter my mind.”

During Sills' murder trial last year, the prosecutor said there had been a violent struggle that ended with him strangling his wife and staging her body on the staircase. His lawyer attributed the death to an accidental fall.

Sills was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced in March to 15 years to life in prison.

At the bottom of the stairs

On the morning of Nov. 16, 2016, Sills dialed 911 and said that he’d found his wife’s body at the bottom of the stairs in their home in San Clemente, roughly 60 miles south of Los Angeles. 

“I don’t have a pulse, and she’s cold,” he told the 911 operator, according to audio of the call.

Paramedics arrived minutes later, and Susann was pronounced dead at 6:35 a.m., her death certificate shows.

When Sills told his mother-in-law what happened in a phone call the next day, Neubauer recalled him saying that he’d heard a noise overnight but didn’t bother checking since the couple had two dogs and 12-year-old twins.

“There’s always noise in the house at night — somebody’s always doing something — so it didn’t concern him,” she recalled Sills saying. “But then in the morning, he found her downstairs.”

Sills told investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department that he thought his wife’s death was a tragic result of migraine medication that may have caused her to lose her balance and tumble down the stairs, investigator Eric Hatch told “Dateline.”

Neubauer believed her daughter must’ve suffered a sudden and unexpected ailment — an aneurysm, perhaps — because she had always been especially agile and graceful. She’d done ballet and gymnastics as a child, Neubauer said, and as a teenager, she’d been a cheerleader and ran hurdles. 

As an adult, Susann — who helped her husband run their fertility clinic, the Center for Advanced Genetics — even made an audition video for the reality show “Survivor.”

“She never fell,” Neubauer said. “She didn’t even fall when she was a child.”

Neubauer said she wanted the detectives to know how “physically capable” her daughter was. When she related that information, she said, one of the investigators responded: “Yes, well, but accidents do happen.”

“Which, of course, is true,” Neubauer said. “I had no reason to think they would not have done a thorough investigation. So I thought it was done and it was over.”

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• Fueled by jealousy, Kaitlin Armstrong fatally shot an elite cyclist and then led officials on an international manhunt
• A Pennsylvania murder case went cold for years until police started asking questions about their own
• Before a California bomber killed his ex-girlfriend , his wife died a 'mysterious' death, officials say
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• His wife was killed the day before their eviction . A decade later, he faced another foreclosure — and a murder charge.

Another investigator looking into the death, Dave Holloway, described their communication with the family as typical for a law enforcement investigation: sympathetic but limited. 

“We wouldn’t come right out and tell the family that it was definitely an accident,” he said. “We wouldn’t come out and say it was definitely a murder. We would tell them that we are conducting our investigation because at some point, we may need to ask them questions and we wouldn’t want to prejudice their answers.”

A fight, injuries and a topless photo 

That meant Susann's relatives were unaware that investigators found possible evidence early on indicating that there could be more to her death than her husband’s theory suggested. 

In the bedroom where she had slept the night of her death, the detectives found hair and bloodstains on a curtain and baseboard, Hatch said. A preliminary autopsy showed that she suffered a considerable number of injuries, including what appeared to be defensive wounds on her arms and a ligature mark across her neck, he said.

Her husband also had an injury that the detectives found suspicious — a fresh-looking laceration on his head that he’d covered with a beanie, Hatch said. When detectives questioned Sills about it, Hatch recalled, he said it had happened while fixing his car a few days earlier. He denied knowing anything about the blood in the bedroom, Hatch said.

The investigators also found evidence that there may have been problems in the couple’s relationship. One of their children recalled his parents arguing the night of Susann’s death, Hatch said, and text messages showed her telling her husband that she was “trapped” and would “never be free.”

In Sills’ office, the detectives found a cryptic note — a message they later learned was linked to a bet Susann had made on a conservative website that Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election. 

When Trump won, Hatch said, Susann fulfilled her end of the bet and posted a topless photo of herself on the site. The message, which had been printed out and was sitting on Sills’ printer, was in response to her photo. 

“All I’ve got to say is you must have a super cool husband,” the message said.

“That told me that this posting had been on someone’s mind,” Holloway said. “That wasn’t something that just happened to be up there that day.”

When investigators asked Sills about the note, he denied printing it and said his wife had probably put it there. The argument was about his wife needing to get rest when she wasn’t feeling well, Hatch recalled Sills saying, and the texts were about finances in their business, according to his lawyer.

A long-awaited cause of death

Despite the detectives’ suspicions about Sills, the coroner was yet to determine the cause or manner of his wife's death. That process took a year.

Elise Hatcher, a former Orange County prosecutor who later handled the case, attributed the delay to the complexity of the woman’s injuries. With gunshots or stabbings, she told “Dateline,” the cause of death is clear and it’s far easier for prosecutors to file charges in those cases.

But with Susann, Hatcher said, the case couldn’t move forward until the coroner completed extensive testing looking at the ligature marks and her neck structure. 

“They’re very methodical,” Hatcher said. “In this case, it took a very long time.”

By November 2017, that testing was finally complete: Susann's death was a homicide, Hatch said. She’d been strangled with a ligature. 

Forensic testing showed that the blood in the bedroom belonged to both the dead woman and her husband, Holloway said. Stains on a shirt that Sills wore in the aftermath of his wife’s death that he attributed to chocolate milk were actually her blood, Holloway said, and his blood was found under her fingernails. 

While a toxicology analysis found pain medication in Susann's system, there didn’t appear to be enough to affect her balance, according to the report.

As the investigators worked 

Susann’s relatives had no idea about the coroner’s findings. Nor was her mother aware of any problems in the couple’s relationship. Neubauer said she spoke with her daughter weekly, and the only issues Susann's related to her about her husband were minor.

“If there was a problem there, she never brought it up,” Neubauer said. “And she was not the meek kind of person.”

After Susann's death, Neubauer said, she’d remained in touch with Sills about the twins and found they worked well together. For a vacation to the Caribbean with his wife’s family, Sills updated the twins’ passports, filled out all the paperwork for diving classes and “seemed very happy about it,” she said.

“He did nothing to prevent them from coming out and being with us,” she said. 

For Sills, life continued as though he were not the subject of a homicide investigation.

Sympathetic neighbors said they organized prayers and meal drop-offs while Sills continued to raise their twins at the home where his wife died. He appeared on a Las Vegas radio show to discuss the dangers of a now-discontinued birth control device, and he worked on a new book, “Ovarian Reboot: A Personal Journey to Hormone & Fertility Renewal.”

The detectives, meanwhile, had returned to Sills and interviewed him again about the results from the coroner and the forensics testing. He was cooperative, Hatch said, but “he didn’t have an answer. He continued to deny that he had anything to do with Susann’s death — that it was an accident or she fell down the stairs.”

Although the investigation hadn’t uncovered a clear motive, investigators believed Sills was responsible in the murder of his wife and forwarded their findings to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Hatcher, the prosecutor assigned to the case, said that by the time she reviewed the two boxes of evidence, it had been roughly two years since Susann’s death.

“I felt very disturbed for the family and for Susann that it took so long to get to the bottom of it,” Hatcher said. “But by the time I reviewed it, there was enough there.”

Hatcher said she came to believe there had been a violent struggle in the bedroom where the blood was found. That struggle ended with Sills strangling his wife and staging her body on the stairs, she said. 

His lawyer, Jack Earley, maintained that Susann's death was from an accidental fall and said the ligature marks may have come from her dogs tightly pulling a scarf that had been found around her neck. 

On April 25, 2019, as Sills drove to work, undercover deputies pulled him over and arrested the doctor on suspicion of murder. 

Hatcher alerted Neubauer to the news, and five years later — after Covid-related delays — she was in court when her son-in-law went on trial. A jury convicted Sills of second-degree murder.

“Initially, there’s a moment of relief,” she said, recalling what it was like to hear the guilty verdict. “And then after that — but there’s no Susann. And there never will be.”

Tim Stelloh is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Michelle Madigan is a producer for "Dateline."