Reader's Digest Australia Feb/Mar 2026

Anybody could have looked up the basic details of his dad’s disappearance. But two things stick with him. The first: Why would someone scam him 20-plus years later? The second: Coo- per’s voice. There is a softness that makes Joseph sense kindness, not chicanery. About 15 minutes later, Joseph calls back. “Hi, this is Joseph Stampfl, returning your call.” “Hi, Joseph. My name is Ryan Coo- per. I’m in Peru, and I’m sure this is a shock, but I found your dad.” Joseph doesn’t say anything. He’d accepted that this call might never come. Now it’s happening, and he has given up on figuring out what to say next. Cooper fills the air with details. He tells Joseph what his dad was wearing, and that he’d seen his dad’s driver’s license and taken a bunch of photos. Joseph asks if Cooper could send him the photos, struggling to shake the feel- ing that this is some sort of cruel joke. But when Cooper texts him the pho- tos, he melts. Now he knows it is real. And when Cooper says, “Tell me about your dad,” Joseph finally finds his words. He tells Cooper that Bill Stampfl worked as an engineer. He had two kids, himself and his sister, and two stepsons. Bill would launch himself into projects with complete abandon, including 90 February/March 2026 becoming an elite mountaineer. He wasn’t the kind of guy who dabbled with playing the guitar or going for hikes; he wouldn’t stop until he felt he had mastered it. For the Stampfls, the sadness of Bill’s death was outweighed by the pain of his not havingmastered his own ending. “It was crushing for him dying to be so open-ended,” Joseph says to Cooper. He’s silent for a few seconds, and then says it again. “Crushing.” After talking to Cooper, Joseph tracks down his sister, Jennifer Stampfl, his stepmom, Janet Stampfl-Raymer, and his dad’s brother, Herb Stampfl. Joseph says only that his dad’s body has been found—he wants Cooper to tell the full story. When they all sync for a phone call, Cooper recounts what happened. At the end of the call, they all express deep appreciation. Then, the family calls each other. Janet had remarried a few years after her husband vanished, and her contact with her stepchildren had dwindled over the years. She moved to Missouri, Joseph relocated to New Jersey and Jennifer remained in the L.A. area, so the drift had seemed natural. They are together again, with a final- ity none of them knew they needed as much as they realized. “We had clo- sure,” Janet says. “Finally.” But now they’re presented with a new question: How will they get Bill home? For a month aFter Cooper’s voicemail, Joseph Stampfl squeezes his full-time job as an architect around a second job—finding a rescue team in Peru to retrieve his dad. Cooper helps from afar, but getting a body from high on Huascarán to the United States is a complicated ordeal. Joseph needs to book a rescue crew and a police presence to accompany them on the retrieval. He manages to do that from his New Jersey home. Once Bill Stampfl’s body is brought to the bottom of the mountain, Joseph then must find a local funeral home to cremate his father’s remains and ship them to the U.S., requiring a morass of paperwork. The Peruvian police send out a news release on the day the crew goes to the location of the body. Joseph Stampfl still gets a little hot talking about the tone of the release, which makes it sound as if the police had discovered his dad’s body. “Ryan and his group deserved all the credit for finding my dad,” he says. The next day, some American media outlets report on the discovery. The family sits down for interviews and signs off on Cooper telling his part of the story. They want the world to know the gratitude they feel toward him. “He’s a hero to us,” Jennifer Stampfl says. Bill Stampfl’s body makes it down the mountain and is cremated. His ashes readersdigest.com.au 91 Drama in Real Life reader ’ s digest “HE’S A HERO TO US,” JENNIFER SAYS OF COOPER.