Finding a fabled gold mine had become the life’s obsession of Jesse Capen, but his quest likely ended the same day he trudged into the Superstition Mountains of central Arizona.

“I believe he slipped and fell off a sheer cliff while hiking back to his camp at night,” said Capen’s mother, Cynthia Burnett, 64.

DNA testing may confirm as early as Monday that a skeleton recently found in the Superstitions about 60 miles east of Phoenix is the remains of 35-year-old Jesse Capen. Fearing since 2009 that their son was killed by gun-toting prospectors, Burnett said she and her ex-husband, David Capen, find some solace in the news.

For 10 years, Jesse Capen, a graveyard-shift bellhop at the Sheraton Denver Downtown Hotel, had studied myriad theories about the location of the Lost Dutchman gold mine first discovered in the 1870s.

In late November 2009, Capen drove to Arizona and left enough supplies for a month at an Apache Junction hotel. He planned to return to the room every weekend to resupply. But he never did.

In the past three years, hundreds of volunteers have scoured the desert looking for Capen’s remains.

A trail of evidence he left behind strongly suggests Capen died Dec. 4, 2009, before he even had a chance to unroll his sleeping bag on the first night of his trip.

Capen’s parents became nervous after Christmas and New Year’s Eve passed without hearing from their son as he had promised.

The next summer, David Capen said he began believing rumors about trigger-happy prospectors in the Superstitions after three Utah gold prospectors vanished. The bodies of Curtis Merworth, Malcolm Meeks and Ardean Charles were found six months later — they had gotten lost.

A discovery at the end of 2011 helped searchers focus on 4,892-foot Tortilla Mountain: Hikers found a note in a metal can atop the peak that said: “Jesse Capen was here. Dec. 4, 2009.”

At the end of November 2012, a day pack containing Jesse’s GPS equipment, his mother’s camera and his identification was found at the bottom of a 180-foot cliff on the same mountain. Searchers spotted a boot in steeper terrain above the day pack.

“All of a sudden — out of the blue — they found him,” David Capen said.

The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department sent a helicopter to the side of the cliff, and deputies rapelled down to a skeleton, which was retrieved in a wire basket.

The skeleton was large. Jesse had been 6 feet 4 inches tall. His parents recognized the teeth they had paid dentists to repair, but they couldn’t find their son’s dentist. The boots and clothing matched as well.

There was no sign that Jesse had been shot. Burnett said she believes her son was caught too far from camp that first day to make it back by sunset. He was just too excited about the possibility of a quick discovery.

She speculates that he slipped off a ledge and tumbled to his death.

“He was a half mile from camp as the crow flies,” Burnett said.

If the bones are Jesse Capen’s, his remains will be cremated and returned to Denver, where friends and family will have a memorial service, she said.

She has bought an urn made of tan marble that reminds her of the desert that had been the focus of her son’s dreams for so many years.

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206, facebook.com/kmitchelldp or twitter.com/kmitchelldp