Your comment speculates that they intentionally chose to withhold information. The article tells a different story of someone who had enough people who knew and cared about him, but who also knew him as someone who lived in such a way that due to it not being unusual to go long stretches without contact with others, his disappearance and death could easily go unnoticed. And of course, when people did realize the dead hiker was theirs, they came forward. It's the whole reason this article was able to be written in the first place. These are two different pictures that aren't especially compatible. (It's bad enough to participate in those types of speculation fests, but even worse that at the moment the fog lifts and it should be approached with a newly sober attitude, you instead show up to pimp out your (wrong) theory.)