Pine after pine rolls by on a windy winter day, until the road becomes sand and snakes its way through this wild stretch of New Jersey.
For millions of visitors, these Pine Barrens are a magical, mysterious place, full of folklore. For Sue Quackenbush, the pines feel ominous, a place to fear ever since her daughter, Danielle Lopez, disappeared there in April 2024.
“This isn’t grief, yet. This is terror,” Quackenbush said on a January afternoon there.
Vanished from camp
Lopez was 37 at the time of her disappearance and staying with a boyfriend, James Scott Dunn, at a campground in Brendan T. Byrne State Forest, about 16 miles north of Lost Lane, in April 2024.
Just after 9 a.m. on April 13, 2024, Lopez was captured on surveillance buying coffee at a Burlington County Wawa, not far from the campground.
Later on April 13, around 6 p.m., witnesses saw her walking alone on Lost Lane, a desolate, sandy road pocked with muddy puddles deep in the Pine Barrens.
She was never seen again.
Quackenbush reported Lopez missing 11 days later on April 24. Dunn went to see the police a week later, at Quackenbush’s urging, and was arrested on unrelated drug charges. According to the New Jersey Department of Corrections, Dunn was sentenced to five years in prison on Oct. 25, 2025, on those charges, along with a theft by deception charge. He is currently incarcerated at South Woods State Prison.
Lopez’s car, a 2008 Hyundai Accent, was not discovered until May 1, 2024, disabled and abandoned on Lost Lane, in one of the many muddy holes that dot the road.
Quackenbush, whom the Inquirer has been speaking to since January, said her daughter, known as “D-Lo,” was vivacious and loud. She also had some issues with alcohol, and had sought help for it in the past.
“There’s no denying Danielle had alcohol issues. I’ve never tried to mislead or cover that up. There’s no denying that most people don’t go camping in April … in New Jersey,” she said.
The investigation
The New Jersey State Police are investigating Lopez’s disappearance and have declined to comment to The Inquirer on the case.
In a social media post on the two-year anniversary of her disappearance, police said they were still “seeking the public’s assistance in locating Danielle and gathering any information related to her disappearance.”
In 2024, investigators told NBC’s Dateline that witnesses who saw Lopez walking on Lost Lane that evening on April 13 were filming with a GoPro camera. Based on the footage, investigators told Dateline that Lopez was alone and “did not appear to be in distress” in the video, which has not been released. Lopez allegedly asked those witnesses to help push her car out, but they didn’t.
Investigators told Dateline they found “multiple items” belonging to Lopez in her car, but not her phone. Police told Dateline there were no signs of suspicious activity associated with the abandoned car.
In an interview with The Inquirer in prison, Dunn said he and Lopez were “homeless” and living in and out of hotels before moving to the campground, which has a 14-day camping limit.
He discussed a handful of alibis that kept him away from the campground for several days: He said he picked up a motorcycle, visited friends, hotels, and a truck stop. When he returned to the campground after April 13, 2024, he said it was in “disarray.”
“And I was wondering where Danielle was,” he said.
(A New Jersey Department of Corrections spokesman sat in on The Inquirer’s interview with Dunn and recorded it for “recordkeeping.” NJSP investigators later shared the recording with Quackenbush. The NJSP did not return a request for comment on why they shared the interview with Quackenbush.)
A mother’s grief
Quackenbush now brings pepper spray when she drives to Lost Lane from Pennsylvania, and her voice trembles a bit as she gets closer to the desolate road where her daughter was last seen alive. On a January afternoon, a large puddle stopped Quackenbush and The Inquirer from visiting the memorial she erected near the site. The water was too murky, and there was no way to tell how deep it was.
Quackenbush suspects her daughter wanted to see Lake Oswego near Lost Lane when the car got stuck, and believes she could have walked the 16 or so miles back to the Brendan Byrne campground, if she knew the way.
Quackenbush holds on to hope, the belief that her daughter is alive, because she suffered so deeply in the past.
“More than most,” she said.
Quackenbush lost her eldest son, Eric, to suicide in 2015. Her younger son, Michael, a Marine who served in Afghanistan, died in a Florida car crash in 2016.
Lopez struggled with loss as well, Quackenbush said, including the deaths of her grandfather in May 2020 and her father a month later. Roscoe, Lopez’s beloved rescue dog, had to be euthanized a few months before her disappearance.
Quackenbush is offering a $25,000 reward to anyone with information that could solve the case. In January, she said many tips have come in as a result. She’s also been on podcasts and is an administrator of a Facebook group dedicated to the case that has over 1,500 followers.
“Danielle, no day shall erase you from the memory of time,” she wrote on Facebook on the second anniversary of her disappearance.
In January, Quackenbush cried during her visit to the Pine Barrens as she clutched photos of her daughter and sons. The memorial for Lopez was still a 20-minute walk beyond the puddle, on Lost Lane.
“It’s my goal to get the name of this road changed,” she said.
Anyone with information is urged to contact the New Jersey State Police Missing Persons Unit at (609) 882-2000 ext. 2554 or email missingpinformation@njsp.gov.
