Kit Durgin is turning 82 this week. But she won’t be celebrating the way she usually does.
She’ll be surrounded by loved ones, but this year they will be consoling her as she grapples with the disappearance of her wife, Margaret Elaine McKinley.
Last year, Kit spent her birthday hiking with Elaine and a friend. “I wanted to hike, ‘cause it was my 81st birthday and it was peak season for the wildflowers,” Kit told Dateline.
That’s when the unthinkable happened: Elaine vanished.
Kit has been searching for her ever since.
“She has a wonderful, very quick wit,” Kit said. The night before her birthday, Elaine and a friend got Kit a chocolate ice cream cake. “And she put the candles on backwards, on purpose. So it’s my 18th birthday.”
“Elaine and I were together for 34 years,” Kit told Dateline. “We were involved in the same nonprofit organization called the Women’s Foundation, located in San Francisco.”
“We got to know each other,” Kit said. “And the rest is history.”
The couple got married at City Hall in San Francisco in June of 2014. “That was a big celebration,” Kit remembered.
Kit and Elaine raised Elaine’s niece, Charlotte, as their own. Elaine’s mother also lived with them. “So we were a community,” Kit said. They also had a horse for a while. “We had a little farm in the hills of California,” Kit added. Their interests were varied. They were patrons of the opera, but also backpacked and hiked throughout their relationship. “We were hiking three days a week,” Kit said. “And then the other four days of the week, we were ballroom dancing.”
On May 1, 2025, Kit, Elaine, and a friend set out for a hike at the Windy Hill Preserve in Portola Valley, California, about 10 miles from their home in Emerald Hills. “There are a lot of trails and challenging hikes,” Kit said.
They chose a four-mile hike on a trail called Lost Trail. “It’s not particularly rigorous,” Kit said. “We were maybe a quarter of a mile from the picnic area. And Elaine, as she almost always did — she’s faster and stronger than I am — she runs ahead.”
Kit says she figured they’d catch up to Elaine at the picnic area. “She wasn’t there,” Kit said, so they asked some other hikers nearby if they had seen her. “Nobody had seen her.”
Kit describes Elaine as physically strong and able-bodied. “But she did have Alzheimer’s,“ she said. “So, you know, did she get disoriented? I mean, she never had a very good sense of direction.”
Kit and the friend split up to search for Elaine. “I actually went down to the bottom of the preserve and started to hike up, thinking I’d run into her,” Kit said. “Maybe an hour went by, and that’s when we called the rangers, ‘cause neither of us were finding her.”
According to Kit, the response was immediate. Rangers quickly covered all the trails, and when they didn’t find Elaine, they brought in the search and rescue volunteer organization that reports in to the sheriff’s office. “We had drones, and we had dogs, and we had thermal planes,” Kit detailed. “The poison oak is like five feet high. They’re like walls,” she said. “And then there’s ravines… It’s very difficult searching.”
The day Elaine vanished, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office put out a community alert on Facebook. “On Thursday, May 1, 2025, at around 2 p.m., the Midpeninsula Rangers requested assistance from the Sheriff’s Office after an elderly woman with dementia became separated from her family while visiting the preserve,” they wrote. “The woman, 79-year-old Margaret “Elaine” McKinley, was last seen wearing a red jacket and black pants.”
Over the first few days of their search, the sheriff’s office continued to post updates on their page.
“We remain very hopeful that we will locate Elaine so she can be reunited with her loved ones. We extend our appreciation to the many specially trained volunteers who have answered the call to assist with the search,” Sheriff Christina Corpus said on a May 2 Facebook post.
On May 3, the sheriff’s office asked local residents to check their cameras starting at 10 a.m. on Thursday, May 1, as Elaine was last seen by Kit and their friend around noon.
“I was at the command center the whole time, and they had a big TV screen that was showing where the volunteers were looking,” Kit said. “They covered a huge area, the whole top of the preserve and the communities on either side.”
By May 6, the sheriff’s office stated that “the search will move into a Limited Continuous Search phase, in accordance with search and rescue best practices.”
On May 12, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office posted an update on Facebook. “Unfortunately, despite exhaustive efforts and utilizing all available resources, there have been no confirmed sightings of Elaine,” they wrote. “Though the number of search and rescue teams have scaled back, our commitment to finding Elaine has not wavered.”
Kit says she hired three private searchers to go out on their own after the official search and rescue teams left. “They went way down into the ravines on ropes,” she said. “They were there for three days, sun up to sun down, and they didn’t find her.”
In July, the sheriff’s office posted on Facebook again, sharing that “more than 700 specialized search and rescue volunteers across 25 agencies have searched for Elaine on foot, on horseback, and using drones and specialized K-9s.” Still, they found nothing.
“In December, when the vegetation was somewhat pulled back, they had another search,” Kit said.
The San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office shared another update on Facebook in December. “Not a day has gone by that we haven’t thought of Elaine and her loved ones,” they wrote. “With hope that late fall conditions would change the preserve’s otherwise dense vegetation and challenging terrain, 70 professional search and rescue volunteers on Saturday, Dec. 13, conducted a coordinated, daylong search of the preserve and surrounding areas.”
It was the 12th coordinated search operation for Elaine. By then, more than 1,000 professional search and rescue volunteers had gone out looking for her. “Unfortunately, Saturday’s search yielded no new information,” the Facebook post said.
Kit told Dateline that some bones were found during that search, but “all the bones they found were determined to be animal bones.”
Dateline reached out to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office to request an interview and get an update on Elaine’s case, but has not yet heard back.
Kit says people have thrown out different theories about what might have happened, including that Elaine could have been kidnapped. But that doesn’t make much sense to her. “Why would you want to kidnap a 79-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s?” she questioned. “And nobody’s contacted me for money,” she added. “It doesn’t seem plausible.”
Over the past year, Kit has found support from others in similar situations.
One person she met was Sue Quackenbush, the mother of Danielle Lopez — a missing New Jersey woman whose case Dateline featured in its “Missing in America” digital series in 2024 and on the podcast in 2025. “We’re both in ambiguous loss support groups,” Kit said. “They talk about, in ambiguous loss, they talk about frozen grief,” she said. “It’s like you can’t quite put it to bed, because there are all these questions.”
“Just learning that language pretty soon after this happened has been such a help, ‘cause it just puts a name to what this is,” Kit said.
She says she also received support from the Fowler O’Sullivan Foundation, which was founded by the families of missing hikers Kris Fowler and David O’Sullivan, and provides assistance to families of missing hikers.
“I just would like to know what happened,” Kit told Dateline. “And that would, you know, give me peace.”
This year, Kit’s birthday will look very different.
“We are having a gathering of her — she has eight friends that she’s known for 50 years that live in the area, and so we’ll all be together. And five of her family — closest family members are coming from out of state,” Kit said. “We’ll be together to laugh and cry and hug and reminisce.”
Elaine McKinley is 5’2” and about 130 lbs. She has gray hair and was last seen wearing a red jacket, black pants, hiking boots, and carrying a backpack. She would be 80 years old today.
If you have any information about Elaine’s disappearance, please call the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office at 650-363-4911.
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