You’d also think the LE would have been able to find him 3 football fields from his car. He’d been missing over a week so the smell alone would have been a major clue, not to mention the buzzards circling and the swarm of flies. It’s obvious they couldn’t be bothered.
The other possibility is that the kid had wandered twenty miles into the wilderness and only managed to find his way back to his car just as he died from exposure or thirst a mere 100 yards from where he started.