In Which Mary Grimes Wallace Makes Life Difficult For Everyone

"Dayton Daily News," October 6, 1966, via Newspapers.com

Investigating a violent death can be difficult enough if it is uncertain whether it is a case of suicide, or murder.  When even trying to establish the identity of the victim leads everyone down various rabbit holes, and the unfortunate corpse gets permanently misplaced…well, have some pity for the police detectives involved.

32-year-old Mary Grimes Wallace of Xenia, Ohio, did not have an easy life.  After her husband deserted her, she found that her job as a cook at a supper club left her unable to adequately provide for their two young sons, forcing her to put them into state-run orphanages.  She eventually moved in with a man named William Byrd, but he soon proved to be yet another source of misery.  Byrd was an abusive bully who, during his frequent fits of rage, would threaten to kill Mary.  She told friends that she wanted to break things off with William, but feared what he might do if she left him.

At 7:38 a.m. on the morning of January 10, 1954, the engineer of a Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive phoned the Xenia Police Department.  He said that as the train neared the crossing at Jasper Street, he saw a man walking hurriedly away from the east side of the tracks.  Immediately after that, he saw the body of a woman lying in his train’s path.

When police arrived at the scene, they noted that the woman’s gruesome head injuries (the body was undamaged) were consistent with being hit by a train, although they found it curious that there was little blood at the site.  The coroner was unable to say if the woman was a suicide, or a murder victim who had been placed on the tracks.

For reasons not given publicly, police immediately identified the woman found on the tracks as Mary Wallace.  However, the woman’s face had been so disfigured as to render her unrecognizable.  Mary’s father Oliver believed that the corpse probably was his daughter, but he could not say for certain.

The assumption that the dead woman was Mary Wallace made things a bit easier for investigators, because it gave them an obvious suspect in her death:  William Byrd.  When interviewed by police, William insisted he was innocent.  He stated that last saw Mary when she returned home from work at about 3 am on the morning of the 10th.  After that, he fell asleep on the sofa, and knew nothing more until the detectives arrived to put him into custody.  His lack of an alibi earned William a visit to the county jail, under investigation for possible homicide.  However, after a month went by without police finding anything connecting him to the murder--if it was indeed a murder--they were forced to release him.

Investigators had one more lead to pursue:  Nine days before the woman’s body was found on the tracks, Mary was a witness to a murder.  She had been a bystander when someone had fatally shot their domestic partner during a “lovers’ quarrel.”  No further details about the incident were given to the public, as apparently police wound up concluding that it had no discernable connection to Mary’s death.

Just two days after the body was discovered, the dead woman was buried in Silvercreek Cemetery.  Despite the highly ambiguous nature of her death, no autopsy was done, and no blood or fingerprint samples were kept.  Everyone seemed content to shrug off the whole strange business and move on.

The case was considered closed until five years later, when none other than William Byrd insisted on reopening it.  He told the local sheriff, Russell Bradley, that rumors were rampant in Xenia that Mary was still alive, and he  begged police to investigate.  He hoped to finally remove the cloud of suspicion that had hung over him for so long.  Mary’s relatives also visited Sheriff Bradley saying that they too had heard the rumors.  In fact, they had been contacted by an old friend of Mary’s who was now living in Cincinnati.  This friend told them that she had run into Mary at a Cincinnati bar.  She said that Mary had remarried, started a new life, and most definitely did not want to be found.  When shown photographs of the corpse found on the railroad tracks, Mary’s family now said that the dead woman was definitely not their missing relative.

Sheriff Bradley felt there was nothing for it but to go to Cincinnati.  He interviewed Mary’s friend, who confirmed that Mary was living in the city, but had begged her friend to not tell anyone where she was.  Bradley found several other people who claimed to have seen Mary around Cincinnati, but his efforts to find the elusive Mary herself were unsuccessful.

Bradley was still determined to learn if Mary Wallace was alive or dead.  He obtained a set of her fingerprints from when Mary had worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and obtained a court order that the body buried under her name in Silvercreek Cemetery be exhumed in order to compare prints.

There was, unfortunately, an unexpected complication:  When the grave presumed to be Mary’s was opened, it was found to hold a different female corpse.  After re-reading the cemetery’s burial records, they tried again.  This time, they exhumed the corpse of a man.

Perhaps third time would be the charm?  After a careful probe, an unmarked coffin was found, in the location where Mary’s family believed she had been buried.  However, this coffin was found to hold another man.  After this, one cannot really blame the authorities for throwing up their hands and giving up on Mary Wallace.

Was Mary murdered?  Did she commit suicide?  Or--as seems very possible--did she escape the unhappiness of her life and start anew?  In which case…who was the woman on the railroad tracks?

What a fine mess this world can be.

Newspaper Clipping of the Day

Via Newspapers.com

I put this missing-persons story into the “mini mysteries” file, due to the unsettling lack of information surrounding the case.  The “Miami Herald,” October 6, 1985:

You could set your clock by Irene Matheson.

Since Perrine Elementary School opened six years ago, Matheson was always the first person to arrive. She unlocked the cafeteria door at 5:45 a.m., let in the cook at 5:50 a.m. and began baking the rolls, breads, cakes and pies that feed students and faculty at five South Dade schools.

"She was never late--not once," cafeteria manager Michelle Perkins said Friday. "That's why we know something is terribly, terribly wrong."

After hearing the concern of co-workers, Metro-Dade Sgt. Carl Baaske agreed and began an immediate search when Matheson, 69, did not show up for work Tuesday morning.

Police usually will not take missing persons reports until the person missing has been gone for 48 hours. This seemed different, Baaske said. 

"It's as though she dropped off the earth," Baaske said Thursday night. "With two million people in Dade County, someone should have seen her or her car by now."

Police initiated a statewide hospital search for Matheson and her 1977 tan Honda station wagon. Officers in police helicopters looked in the many South Dade canals. They were joined by Matheson's son-in-law Tony Klopp.

Klopp, an Eastern Air Lines pilot, rented two light planes for two days so he and a friend could check out the coastline, junk yards, dumps and fields. Her daughter, Cindy Klopp, spends her days driving around looking for her mother's car or sitting by the telephone, waiting for a call.

"I pray she's had a stroke or just driving around," Klopp said. Her mother is in good health with no history of mental illness.

Matheson was last seen at 11 p.m. Monday. Klopp thinks whatever happened to her mother occurred after she left for work Tuesday. The condominium near The Falls where Matheson lives was in perfect order.

"Her coffee cup and a spoon were in the sink," Klopp said, sorting through snapshots of her mother taken at family parties. "Throw pillows were put up so the puppy wouldn't get them and the door was double-locked," she said.

Police have pieced together the hours before Matheson was reported missing from information gathered from family, friends and neighbors. Grandson Scott Klopp was the last family member to see Matheson. She drove the 12-year-old from his Redland home to the Perrine Khoury League baseball field at Franjo and Old Cutler roads.

A follow-up story appeared in the “Miami News” on December 5:

The discovery--almost by coincidence--last night of the car owned by a Kendall woman who has been missing more than two months is the first significant clue police have had in weeks, but may not be helpful if the woman does not want to be found, Metro police said.

"She's an older woman, and it could be a case that she might have gone senile for some reason and doesn't want to come home," said Metro Sgt. Ernest Pruitt, of the department's missing persons unit. "I've seen cases like that before."

Irene Matheson's 1977 tan Honda was found backed into a parking space in an apartment complex at 7941 S.W. 104th St. Police learned the car belonged to Matheson, a 69-year-old baker for the Dade County school system, while running a license plate check on the car and another nearby, Pruitt said.

The two parked cars were struck by a driver who then quickly fled the scene, he said. A resident of the complex reported the hit-and-run accident--in which no one was injured--and it was only while police were investigating the accident that they learned the slightly damaged Honda belonged to the missing woman, Pruitt said.

Pruitt said residents told police that the car had been parked in the space for about a week and had been seen parked in other spaces for about a month.

Police dusted the car for fingerprints and searched it before towing it to the station where it will be vacuumed and examined by laboratory technicians, Pruitt said.  A sticker in a panel of the car's door indicated the vehicle was serviced at a station on Oct. 1, the day she was reported missing.  The sticker also indicated how many miles the car had been driven since the time of servicing.  Since then, the car had been driven about 99 miles, Pruitt said.

Apparently the last driver of the car backed the vehicle into the parking space and against a fence in order to make it more difficult to read the license tag, Pruitt said.

Matheson was last seen on the night of Sept. 30. Her relatives believe she dressed for work at Perrine Elementary School the next morning, and left in her Honda from her home at Heatherwalk Condominium complex--a few miles from where her car was found.

The discovery last night was the first break in the case. "We worked this case continuously for the first two weeks," Pruitt said. "We searched the area around the canal, had the Water and Sewer Authority people search the canals around the house in case she may have accidentally driven into one, conducted surveillances of the area around her house, conducted aerial searches of the area using heat-sensitive equipment in case we could find a body. And we came up with nothing.”

The discovery of Matheson’s car seems to have done exactly nothing to indicate the whereabouts of Irene herself.  To date, the mystery of her disappearance remains unsolved.

A Hogmanay Mystery: The Vanishing of Alex Cleghorn

On this blog, I have covered a few missing-persons cases where the victim appeared to instantly vanish into oblivion, never to be seen again.  One minute they’re going about their normal business, the next…gone.  And nobody can ever figure out why.  As peculiar and disturbing as these disappearances may be, the following mystery is startling enough that it not only made the local newspapers, but the pages of that journal devoted to all forms of High Strangeness, the “Fortean Times.”

A few hours into the first day of 1966, 19 year old Alex Cleghorn and his two older brothers, David and William, left their Glasgow home to “first foot” some friends.  (“First foot” is a Scottish New Year tradition where the first people to cross a home’s threshold on January 1 bring symbolic gifts such as coal or whisky to ensure good luck for the year.)  As they walked down Govan Road, the brothers reached a crossroads.  David and William turned to ask Alex which way they should go.  Except that Alex suddenly wasn’t there.  David and William, assuming their brother had fallen behind, retraced their steps and searched side-streets to see if Alex had taken a shortcut.  No Alex.  They called his name repeatedly.  No response.

Not knowing what else to do, David and William returned home, but Alex wasn’t there, either.  When daylight came with no sign of him, the family called around to friends and relatives, but no one had seen him.  They checked with police stations and hospitals, only to hit the same brick wall.  The following day, Alex’s father called the factory where his son worked, but they hadn’t seen him, either.  Alex’s insurance card and a week’s salary had not been picked up.

And…that’s all, folks.  From that day to this, the whereabouts of Alex Cleghorn have remained a complete mystery.  A few years after he vanished, his brothers reenacted that fateful walk, hoping it would give them some clue about what had happened, but they were still left completely baffled.

If ever a disappearance could literally be called “into thin air,” this one is it.

The Vanished Gold of Gippsland

Martin Weiberg, 1880

Every now and then during my wanderings through the historical weeds, I come across a story where I think, “What a movie this would make!”  The following tale of devious thefts, daring escapes, and hidden treasure is a prime example.

In 1877, the Australian ship “Avoca” had among its cargo 5,000 gold sovereigns.  The ship’s carpenter, a Norwegian named Martin Weiberg, learned of the enticing proximity of this small fortune, and began to dream a dream.  His plan was ridiculously simple:  he had a duplicate key made for the chest where the gold was kept, and when nobody was watching, he opened the box and replaced the loot with metal bolts.  He then resealed the chest so expertly that it appeared untouched.  

Of course, once the chest arrived at its destination in Ceylon, it became instantly obvious that someone had been up to no good.  The police, naturally, centered their investigations around the crew of the “Avoca,” but were unable to find anything that would lead them to the culprit.  Weiberg continued quietly performing his duties aboard the ship as if he was as innocent as a babe in the cradle.  Fortunately for him, it was right at this time that the legendary Aussie bad guy Ned Kelly shot dead three policemen.  The hunt for the desperado naturally distracted authorities from the relatively minor crime of missing gold.  Five months after the theft, Weiberg--who had by now married--left his ship to settle on the Tarwin River, South Gippsland, for what he hoped would be a long and gold-filled future.

Weiberg must have been a bit too careless about how he spent his ill-gotten wealth, because some unknown person evidently suggested to the police that they pay the Norwegian a visit.  When detectives headed for Weiberg’s home, they bumped into their quarry on a nearby road.  When he was searched, a number of gold sovereigns were found in his pockets, thus causing Weiberg one of life’s embarrassing moments.  After throwing the carpenter in jail, officers conducted a search of his home.  They eventually found over 1300 coins, all cleverly hidden in various places.

While Weiberg was in custody, he was interrogated about his accomplices.  It was assumed that one man could not have carried off such a large stash of gold.  He eventually named the first officer of the “Avoca” as his confederate, but an investigation managed to clear the man.  Weiberg then volunteered to show police where he had buried a container full of gold, but while leading them to the alleged spot, he managed to escape.  Weiberg hid out in the bush for five months, after which he acquired an accomplice to help him move enough gold to Melbourne to buy a boat, which he hoped to use to flee Australia for good.  However, before this plan could come to fruition, he was recaptured in May 1879, and sentenced to five years hard labor.  Meanwhile, the police had no success in finding the remaining sovereigns.  Only one man knew where the gold was hidden, and he wasn’t talking.

After Weiberg was released from prison, he and his brother bought a yacht, which he moored in Gippsland’s Waratah Bay.  While there, he went ashore in a skiff to visit his family, who lived in the area.  More importantly, it was assumed that he went to get his hands on some of his hidden gold.  While returning to his yacht, Weiberg was caught in a sudden squall which capsized his little boat.  

Although it was presumed that Weiberg had drowned, his body was never recovered, which led to some highly entertaining speculation about what might have really happened to our elusive carpenter.  Did he fake his own death in order to get the authorities off his back once and for all?  Mysterious lights were seen on the normally uninhabited Glennie Group islands, causing locals to speculate that Weiberg was hiding out there.  Some reports claimed that he had been spotted in various European cities.  Or was he the proprietor of a hotel in Sweden?  Did he, against all odds, manage to get away with a fortune in gold?

Sometime around 1890, a skeleton was found at Waratah Bay, with part of the skull missing.  Was this the missing Weiberg?  Did he let the world think he had drowned, only to be murdered by some accomplice?  Nobody knows.

Twenty years after this unidentified skeleton turned up, a stash of 75 gold coins was found in an old tree.  All in all, despite the diligent efforts of treasure-hunters, to date, only about 1800 of the stolen sovereigns have been recovered.  Most people believe the rest are still concealed somewhere in the Gippsland area, just waiting to be uncovered by some lucky person with a metal detector.

Or--if you want to take the more romantic view--did Martin Weiberg’s crime pay big for him, in the end?

The Abduction of Nefertiri Trader

I don’t usually write about recent crimes--it feels like prying, somehow.  I also rarely cover cases where it seems indisputable that the victim was kidnapped, simply because there’s usually not much to say about it.  However, the following mystery is so peculiar--not to mention creepy as all hell--that I have made an exception to both those rules.  Besides, it’s a case that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it deserves.

33-year-old Nefertiri Trader lived with her three children in New Castle, Delaware, where she worked in the housekeeping department at Christiana Hospital.  From the little that was reported, she was an outgoing, energetic person who was generally liked.  Around 3:30 a.m. on June 30, 2014, Trader, who was on medical leave from her job (the nature of her illness was not made public) went to a nearby 7-11.  The clerk knew Trader by sight, as she often visited the store, although he didn’t recall her ever coming by at such an odd hour.  She bought a pack of cigarettes, a loaf of bread, and two cups of coffee.

She never made it into her home.  At 4 a.m., a neighbor of hers heard some sort of commotion outside.  When he looked out a window, he saw a man dragging a woman he later identified as Trader to a car, where she was placed in the back seat.  The neighbor assumed she was merely being taken to the hospital, so he shrugged off the incident and went back to sleep.  The car is believed to be Trader’s own vehicle, (a 2000 silver Acura RL with the license plate 404893) as it disappeared with her.  Nefertiri’s 17-year-old son also heard noises, but by the time he went out to the front porch, he saw nothing.  

It was not until about 4:30 on the following afternoon that Nefertiri’s family, concerned that they were unable to contact her, phoned police.  When officers arrived some two hours later, they found in the front yard a loaf of bread that had been stepped on.  On the front porch were the rest of Trader’s purchases from the night before.  There was also an unopened condom.  Trader’s flip-flops were by the front door. 

Unfortunately, that appears to be all anyone knows about Trader’s disappearance.  The police investigation failed to find any suspects, or any indication where the unfortunate woman was taken.  Her car was also never seen again.

There is one possible clue regarding Trader’s abduction.  In February 2014, Trader was drinking at a bar called Club Rebel with a man named Radee Prince.  The two were sitting in her car outside the club when five or six men pulled Prince out of the car and beat him up.  Trader later told police that she didn’t see much of the attack, and could not identify the men responsible.  Prince believed that one Jason Baul hired these men to assault him. 

Although Prince told police he “had no idea” if Trader played any role in his beating, the fact that an unknown man kidnapped her a few months after the incident is, to say the least, intriguing.  However, I have found no indication that police pursued that angle.  If Prince--who was convicted in 2020 of gunning down five people, including Baul, killing three of them--had any notion about what had happened to Nefertiri, he kept that to himself.

As usually happens in unsolved crime cases, there are a lot of unanswered questions.  Why did Trader go to 7-11 at such an unusual hour?  Why did she buy two cups of coffee?  Was she expecting to meet someone?

This was probably not a random abduction.  Trader was most likely kidnapped by someone who knew when she left the house, and when she would return.  But who could that have been?  And considering that her assailant used Trader’s car to take her away, how did this person arrive at her home?  (No strange cars were found in her neighborhood.)

There is yet another thing that puzzles me:  If I approached my front door, only to have someone suddenly appear and drag me back to the car, I would shriek loud enough to wake the dead.  I bet you would, too. But although Trader’s neighbor and her son heard noises, neither mentioned hearing any screams.  This suggests that Trader’s abductor was someone she knew, and someone she did not initially see as any serious threat.

The abduction of Nefertiri Trader is one of those crimes that, given dogged police work and a bit of luck, should have been solved.  Perhaps, it still can be.

Where is Jason Jolkowski?

Often, the eeriest missing-persons cases are the ones where there is the least information about them.  One minute, someone is going about their ordinary life, the next minute…they’re gone.  And no one seems to be able to find out why.

19-year-old Jason Anthony Jolkowski lived in Omaha, Nebraska.  He is described as an intelligent, shy, pleasant young man who had a happy family life.  He had no issues with drugs or alcohol, and no enemies.  He was a part-time student at Iowa Western Community College, where he was enrolled in their radio broadcasting program.  (He had hopes of eventually becoming a DJ.)  He also worked at a local Fazoli’s restaurant, but he was scheduled to soon begin another job at a radio station, which he was said to be very happy about.

On June 13, 2001, the restaurant called Jolkowski into work early.  As his car was in the repair shop, Jolkowski initially thought of walking to work, but then he made arrangements with a co-worker to pick him up at Benson High School, about eight blocks from his home.  (The co-worker did not know where Jolkowski lived, so Jason, who had difficulty giving directions, thought it easiest for them to meet at a local landmark they both knew.)  While leaving his home, at about 10:45 a.m., a neighbor saw Jolkowski helping his younger brother Michael take trash bins into their garage.  It is presumed that he then left for the high school, although there do not appear to be any witnesses who actually saw him leave.  His route took him through an ordinary residential area, full of people going about their normal workday routines.

Some 30 or 45 minutes after Jolkowski would have left his home, his co-worker called both his family and their workplace to find out why he didn’t meet her at the high school.  The school’s security cameras showed that although the co-worker arrived on the campus, Jason never did. During that eight-block walk, Jolkowski simply vanished.

To date, the young man has never been seen again, and neither the police or a slew of amateur internet sleuths have been able to find the slightest clue what happened to him.  He probably had very little cash on him at the time of his disappearance, and none of his personal items were missing, so the idea that he left voluntarily seems extremely unlikely.  His bank account containing $650 remained untouched, and his car was unclaimed from the repair shop.

Unsurprisingly, this baffling case has attracted any number of online theories, usually involving the possibility of a stranger abducting him, or some sort of foul play involving neighbors, friends, or family members, but they all seem to be based on nothing but baseless speculation and rumor.  Every now and then, I come across a disappearance where I find myself muttering about things like alien abduction and invisible portals into another dimension.  The ongoing mystery of Jason Jolkowski is one of them.

Murders, Disappearances, and Mystery: A Family Affair

Steve Snedegar, "Orlando Sentinel," March 27, 1994, via Newspapers.com

“These are not natural people.”

~Sheriff’s detective Lynn Wagner

On this blog I have covered many weird, dysfunctional, or even criminal families, but I don't think I have ever written about one where simple, straightforward evil so consistently lurked in the background.  This saga of murder and multiple disappearances may not be, strictly speaking, an unsolvable mystery--we have a pretty good guess what happened--but it is nonetheless a puzzle.  It stands as a perfect example of the unfathomable dark side of human nature.

One suspects that Steve Snedegar was rarely mistaken for an altar boy.  He first caught the attention of the authorities in the early 1970s, when he spent two years on the lam from the FBI.  (He was suspected of being involved in a tractor theft ring and the murder of a deputy sheriff in Ohio.)  After he was finally caught in Houston, the charges against him were mysteriously dropped.  It was believed that Snedegar cut some sort of deal with the FBI, but the details remain hidden from public view.

In 1978, Snedegar was penniless.  Three years later, he was a multi-millionaire.  The source of his sudden fortune is, like everything else in his life, both murky and deeply sinister.  Relatives believed that Steve, a licensed pilot, was making his money flying drugs out of Cuba.  Steve himself told people that he knew Fidel Castro “real well” and had “business” dealings with him.  By 1979, Snedegar also had a flourishing oil recycling business.  Two acquaintances, Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough tried to buy the business from him, but were rebuffed.  This was said to have led to bad feelings between the three men.

Snedegar had more personal disputes.  His 22-year-old daughter Lora had recently married.  Steve and his wife, Trudy, had bitterly opposed the match.  They had nothing in particular against Lora’s husband Bryce Morris--rather, they did not want Lora marrying or escaping their domination in any way.  Steve and Trudy were control freaks when it came to their children.  The offspring were given all the money they wanted, but in return, they were expected to submit to their parents’ domination.  (Considering all the skeletons in Steve’s closet, it’s not surprising that he did not want outsiders getting an intimate peek at his family.)

Lora, however, was the family rebel, the one with the spirit to talk back to her parents.  It’s clear that she married chiefly to escape her suffocating home life.  Unfortunately for her, it was an unsuccessful effort.  Soon after her marriage, Steve and Trudy had managed to pressure her into leaving her husband.  However, when in 1981, Lora’s parents ordered her to move to Florida with them, she refused.  She wanted to reconcile with her husband.  This led to bitter fights with her parents.  Just before Steve moved to Florida, a neighbor of Lora’s saw father and daughter arguing in the backyard.  Steve was screaming curses at Lora and finally spat in her face.

It was the last time Steve would see his daughter alive.

On August 10, 1981, Trudy made an unannounced visit to her daughter’s home in Greenfield, Indiana, apparently hoping to persuade Lora to end her marriage for good.  According to Trudy’s later account, she had dinner with her daughter, and went to bed.  When she woke up the next morning at 6 a.m., she found that the lights and television were still on, the sliding glass door was open, and Lora’s bed had not been slept in.  There was no sign of her daughter.  When the police arrived--seven hours later--they initially found nothing to suggest foul play.

Then, Trudy told them that Lora had left her purse behind.  John Munden, the chief deputy at the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office, immediately knew something was up.  He said, “I believe that a woman’s pocketbook is like a minister’s Bible--they don’t go anyplace without it.”  When he said as much to Trudy, she “looked at me funny.”  From then on, Munden was convinced he was dealing with a homicide.

So was Steve Snedegar.  As soon as he learned that Lora was missing, he walked into the sheriff’s office and dumped $10,000 in cash on Munden’s desk.  He told the deputy that he knew his daughter was dead.  One of his many enemies, he said, had kidnapped and murdered Lora in order to get back at him.  The money was to pay reserve officers to monitor a list of people he wanted watched 24 hours a day.

Munden was so unnerved that he silently accepted the money.  He wanted to use it to keep a close eye on Steve.

Steve told Munden that he and Trudy had two leading suspects in Lora’s disappearance--Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough.  He apparently made such a convincing case against the two men that Munden began to think the Snedegars might have been right.  However, before the sheriff’s office could launch any real investigation, it seems that Steve took matters into his own hands.  Three weeks after Lora vanished, he invited Tony Lambert to a business meeting in New Orleans.  He told Lambert he was interested in making him manager of Steve’s waste-oil business.  In truth, he told Munden he would use his private plane to fly Lambert out of town, where he would “get my answers” out of the man.

To date, Tony Lambert has never been seen again.  Steve told police that he did indeed meet with Lambert in New Orleans, but Tony denied having anything to do with Lora’s disappearance, and angrily left in a red Cadillac driven by a young blonde.  Or was it a green Cadillac?  Or a white one?  Whatever.  All Munden was ever able to learn is that Lambert’s last known whereabouts was when Steve flew him on a “sightseeing trip” over the Gulf of Mexico.

In April 1982, a farmhand discovered Lora’s badly decomposed body in a cornfield.  She had been shot in the head three times with a .25 caliber gun.  When Steve’s worst fears about his daughter were confirmed, he broke out sobbing and vowed that Lora’s murderer would pay.

One day in 1985, Tony McCullough received a phone call from a stranger named Gary Stafford, a mercenary who advertised his unusual services in “Soldier of Fortune” magazine.  Stafford informed him that someone had hired him to kill McCullough, and how much was McCullough willing to pay him to welsh on the bargain?  The two men settled on a payment of $10,000.  McCullough then called the FBI, with the result being that Stafford got two years in prison for extortion.

Stafford told the FBI that some guy in Florida hired him to eliminate a man he felt was involved in the murder of his daughter.  He got $5,000 up front, with the promise of another $20,000 when the deal was done.  When police questioned Steve about the matter, he merely shrugged and gave a smile that said, “Prove it.”

Chuck Smith, a former truck driver for Steve’s business in Indiana, had told police that the day before Lora vanished, he saw her with a “rough-looking character” who clearly frightened her.  When Smith told Trudy of this, she urged him not to go to the authorities, saying “We know who that is, and the police already know.”  

Trudy may have known who this man was, but the police certainly didn’t.  Trudy then went to Munden, trying to get Smith’s unlisted phone number from him.  She said she had a job offer for Smith.  “Dumb-ass me gives the number out,” Munden ruefully recalled.  “She looked at me with those cold glassy eyes and made the remark, ‘Steve does not have to know about this.’”

Smith subsequently got a phone call from a man who said he was with John Rogers Trucking in Knoxville Tennessee.  He said that Steve had recommended him for a job.  Smith, unemployed and desperate to find work, readily agreed.  The man sent him a bus ticket.  Smith boarded the bus…and was never seen again.  Police soon learned that there was no such company as “John Rogers Trucking.”

In the summer of 1986, Trudy confided to her other daughter, Brenda, that for the last five nights, she had awakened to find Steve holding a gun to her head.  “He’s going to kill me,” she said.  “I just don’t know when.”  Soon after that, Trudy and Steve left their house to go “country dancing.”  Only Steve returned.  The next morning, he told Brenda that Trudy had left him to go live in Tallahassee.  Later that day, Steve showed Brenda a suitcase containing $1 million dollars in large-denomination bills that he was hiding in the trunk of his Mercedes.  He told her to get the money if the police arrested him.  Brenda asked no questions.  She had clearly learned how to survive in the Snedegar family.  The following day, Steve and a never-identified man dumped a plastic-wrapped, human-body-sized object in the Ocklawaha River.  Although it is easy to guess what this “object” may have been, it has never been found.

Although no missing-persons report had been filed, authorities knew that Trudy had vanished, and they did not have to enlist Hercule Poirot to guess who was responsible.  It took police an entire year to persuade Brenda and her husband to report her mother’s disappearance, but they would only do so in Indiana.  “Fear,” said Detective Lynn Wagner, who had been investigating the complex Snedegar case since 1985.  “That’s the word they used.  They wouldn’t do it here because they were afraid Steve would kill their family.”

Over the next two years, Wagner repeatedly interrogated Steve about Trudy’s whereabouts, but all he got out of Snedegar were “head games.”  Then, Wagner heard that Steve was a dying man.  Assuming this was just another “head game,” Wagner did not believe it until he subpoenaed Steve’s medical records.  They confirmed that Snedegar had malignant melanoma.

Wagner last spoke to Steve in the late fall of 1989.  He begged Snedegar to spend what little time he had left clearing up the many dark mysteries surrounding him.  Steve refused.  He said he didn’t want to die in jail.  However, he told Wagner that he would be willing to write down everything he knew about all the deaths and disappearances.  The police could have this record once Steve was dead, allowing them to close the books on the cases.  Wagner believed that Steve kept that promise.  However, two hours after Steve died in January 1990, someone set a small bonfire of papers behind his house.  It’s a safe bet that the most reliable record we will ever get in this bizarre case was turned to ashes.

Although all these deaths and disappearances will never be judged in a court of law, Wagner and Munden were able to solve to their own satisfaction what had happened.  As for the death of Lora Snedegar, the tragedy that kicked off all the subsequent tragedies, they felt they knew who committed the murder: her own mother.  And if Trudy had lived, they believed they could have proved it.  

Their scenario was this:  Lora and Trudy fought over Lora’s marriage, and during the brawl, Trudy accidentally--or impulsively--shot her daughter.  (Trudy owned a .25 caliber gun, although investigators did not learn of this until after her disappearance.)  Wagner and Munden believed that Trudy’s father helped her dispose of the body.  (The father died not long after Lora vanished.)

It is believed that Trudy engineered Chuck Smith’s disappearance, because she feared that his story about the man who had frightened Lora might have somehow incriminated Trudy.  Trudy had probably also encouraged Steve to blame Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough for Lora’s murder, as a way of directing his suspicions away from herself.

Trudy’s fatal error was not disposing of Lora’s purse.  If she had thought to do that, the police may have well concluded that Lora had left voluntarily.  Munden noted that on the night that Trudy disappeared, she had left her own purse at home.  “I think she deliberately left her pocketbook at home that night as a sign,” said Munden.  “She knew she made that mistake with Lora, and it alerted police.  I think she did it on purpose that night because she knew she and Steve would argue.”

Munden believed that Steve had long suspected Trudy of murdering Lora, but he only knew for sure on the night Trudy disappeared.  Perhaps she finally confessed.  Perhaps she accidentally let something slip.  We will never know.  In any case, Steve finally got what he wanted.  He made his daughter’s killer pay.

In December 1993, Steve and Trudy’s son Joe was clearing out Steve’s house in Astor, Florida, when he found a paper tucked away in the guest book for Lora’s funeral.  It showed a map of Steve’s property with a mysterious “X” marked on one spot.  The area was excavated, but nothing was found.  Steve managed to continue his “head games” even from beyond the grave.  As for the million dollars in cash Steve hid in his Mercedes, that proved to be yet another unsolved disappearance.  It’s suspected that Steve’s girlfriend, who moved in with him after Trudy vanished, ran off with the loot.

As Wagner said, these were not natural people.

The Natives of the Red Dragon

A journal dedicated to stamp-collecting seems like an unlikely place to find a prime slice of The Weird, but that just goes to show that life is full of surprises.  In 1928, “The Stamp Lover” carried an article by one C.H.R. Andrews titled “The Red Dragon Stamps” that is, frankly, not quite like anything I’ve ever heard of.  I’m a bit surprised that Andrews’ story seemed to languish in total obscurity until it was revisited in a 1987 issue of “Fortean Times.”

According to Andrews, for some months past, stamp aficionados had been puzzled by the unexplained appearance of some small-denomination British stamps that were overprinted with red dragons.  They appeared on at least 20 letters and postcards which had pairs of stamps, with only the one on the left side sporting the overprint.  The stamps began to appear soon after a noted Welsh book collector named Rhys Evans inexplicably disappeared.

On April 4, 1928, Evans left his home to show a friend named Jenkins, who was a professor at nearby University College, an ancient book of Welsh stories and folklore.  The book spoke of a secret society tasked with guarding five sacred dragons, and included some sort of coded map which Evans hoped Jenkins could interpret.

Evans never made it to the College.  In fact, he seemed to vanish completely.  Two days after his disappearance, his wife received a letter postmarked from Cardiff.  It bore two stamps, one of which was the dragon overprint.  The letter--written in Welsh--was clearly in Rhys’ handwriting.  It stated that her husband was doing well, and she should not worry about him.  The note ended with the words “Trigolion y ddraig Goch.” (Natives of the Red Dragon.)

Other people subsequently received letters purporting to be from the “Natives of the Red Dragon,” all bearing the strange dragon stamps.  The letters all discussed old Welsh legends.  They were sent from various places around Wales, largely from towns on the sites of ancient Roman camps.

Five days after Evans disappeared, he was found sitting by a lake in Brynmill Park, Swansea.  He seemed in good health and spirits, but he refused to give any explanation of why he had vanished, or where he had been during his absence.  He no longer had the book he wished to show Professor Jenkins, and seemed rather relieved to be rid of the thing.  All he would ever say about his mysterious experience was “There were dragons in Wales today.”

There is a footnote which may--or may not--be connected to our little tale.  Around the time Evans vanished, three children from the Welsh village of Llandegley saw a strange beast in nearby Radnor Forest.  One of the children was brave--or foolhardy--enough to try to follow the creature, but his path was blocked by two men.  These men were dressed in white, with depictions of red dragons on their chests.

Where Are James and Nancy Robinson?

The following is yet another case where a husband and wife disappear simultaneously, but in this instance the circumstances were particularly inexplicable, not to mention sinister.

Up until the day their lives took a sudden dark turn, we know very little about 39-year-old James Robinson and his 25-year-old wife Nancy, other than that they had been married a relatively short time and were, as far as anyone can tell, happy with each other.  When our story opens, they had spent the last seven months as caretakers for the Winter’s Creek Equestrian Ranch in Washoe Valley, Nevada, with no apparent problems on or off the job.

Winters Creek Ranch

On Saturday, March 8, 1982, a Reno family came by the ranch to rent horses for the day.  Unfortunately, the weather took a sudden turn for the worse, forcing them to cut their ride short.  James and Nancy assured them that they could come by the next day to finish their excursion, at no extra charge.  However, when the family returned the following morning, they found the ranch locked up, and seemingly deserted.  The only signs of life were the horses roaming free in the yard.  The group apparently just shrugged and left.

On the morning of Monday, March 10th, a man who had been hired to do some construction work on the ranch became concerned when he saw that the Robinson’s living quarters had a broken window and blood on the front steps, and contacted police.

When the police entered the house, it was immediately obvious that something terrible had happened.  The place was in disarray, and pools of blood were found on the floor.  Several saddles and a few pieces of jewelry were gone, but many other items of at least equal value remained.  Several guns were found inside the house, but none of them had been recently used.  Later that day, the Robinson pickup truck was found on the side of the road on Highway 50, near Lake Tahoe, with a flat tire.  More blood was found inside the truck, along with the missing saddles and jewelry, and another gun which had also not been fired.  (Oddly, tests performed on all these blood stains were reported as being “inconclusive” about the blood types.  In 2000, it was reported that the blood samples would be resubmitted for DNA testing, but I’ve been unable to find what the results may have been.)  The last known person to talk to James and Nancy was the owner of the ranch, who phoned them on the evening of March 6th to talk about a horse show they had attended that afternoon.  He stated that everything seemed perfectly normal.

Although it’s assumed that some sort of foul play was involved, to date, we still have no idea what happened to the Robinsons.  The only possible clue to their disappearance was the fact that three months before the couple vanished, the main house on the ranch burned down in what was believed to be an act of arson.  The Robinsons had agreed to take a polygraph test as part of the investigation, but they went missing before this could be done.  It was never determined who set the fire, or if it had any connection to James and Nancy’s disquieting exit.  Eighteen years after the couple vanished, Larry Canfield, the lead detective in the mystery, could only say, “Everybody loves a mystery, and this is a good one.”

Not the sort of epitaph anyone wants to leave behind.

A Double Disappearance

When one person inexplicably disappears, it’s weird.  When two people vanish, presumably together, things get stranger still.  When two people and a boat all go missing, never to be seen again…

In the late 1960s, an Irish couple named Kieran and Ornaith Murphy emigrated to California.  They settled in the Bay Area, where they soon did very nicely for themselves.  The couple made a small fortune investing in increasingly prestigious real estate.  As landlords, they were considered “tough, but fair.”  Kieran, a brilliant mathematician,  also worked as an actuary for San Francisco’s retirement system.  Ornaith, meanwhile, became a skilled long-distance sailor, often voyaging alone.  In 1998, she became the first woman to sail alone from San Francisco to Cape Horn.  Arthritis and a serious car accident left Ornaith unable to walk without difficulty, causing her to cherish all the more the freedom and mobility she was able to find on the water.  “I just want to go as far as I can and as far as my legs will let me,” she wrote.  “I don’t want to triumph.  I don’t want to conquer.  I’m just very happy being at sea.”  The Murphys were both witty and intellectually-inclined, fond of reading and discussing literature.  The couple had two sons.  The family was seen as hard-working, talented, and friendly.

Unfortunately, the beginning of the 21st century was not nearly as kind to the couple as had been the end of the 20th.  They hit a rocky patch, both personally and professionally.  Ornaith was deeply distraught to discover that her husband was having an affair, and the couple separated.  A divorce was planned.  They also began facing problems with their real estate holdings.  In 1999, there had been a fire at an apartment building they owned which left a child badly burned, and the Murphys were facing a costly lawsuit over the incident.

These were grave problems, to be sure, but no worse than those successfully weathered by other couples.  For the Murphys, however, things would soon take a far darker turn.  On December 15, 2001, the estranged pair planned to meet to discuss their various legal issues.  Ornaith was seen doing work on her 39-foot sloop, the Sola III, as it was docked at Oakland’s Jack London Marina.  A friend stopped by that afternoon.  Ornaith mentioned that she was planning to go for a sail with a friend that evening.  (However, she did not file a sail plan for this trip, which would be highly unusual for this experienced and meticulous sailor.)

That night, people nearby saw a man onboard who matched Kieran’s description.  (If this was indeed Kieran, it would be unusual for him to be on the sloop--he did not know how to sail and hated being on the water.)  A short time later, witnesses heard a disturbance coming from the direction of the Sola III, a loud bang that may--or may not--have been a gunshot.  At 8:36 p.m., the Sola III sailed out of the marina.  It had about a week’s worth of food onboard, but it was not otherwise outfitted for a long journey.

Early the next morning, Ornaith phoned a niece whom she had been living with, saying she was in Berkeley.  She declined an invitation to breakfast.  She also left several voicemails for one of her sons, saying she was at the Berkeley Marina, on her boat.  She sounded quite calm and normal.  But that day, the Sola III vanished.  So did the Murphys.  No one has seen either Kieran or Ornaith--or the boat--since.

"San Francisco Examiner," December 28, 2001, via Newspapers.com

The complete paucity of clues in this triple disappearance has led to any number of wildly-varying theories.  Did Ornaith lure her husband on board her boat, only to shoot him, deliberately sink both the boat and the body somewhere, and disappear to start a new life?  Or was it Kieran who was the murderer?  Was it murder/suicide?  Did the beleaguered couple agree to reconcile and escape their problems together?  

Or was a third party responsible for their disappearance?  Everyone who knew Ornaith insisted that she had no thoughts of ending her life, and was utterly incapable of plotting her own disappearance.  And Kieran was too unskilled a sailor to take the boat for even a short journey.

At least some investigators believed this was a grim case of murder followed by suicide (they declined to state publicly who they believed to be the killer.)  However, to date, not a scrap of evidence about the final fate of the couple has been found, leaving this as a particularly eerie mystery.

The Lorius/Heberer Mystery

This blog has featured several stories about people who disappear or run into some other sort of disaster while on long road trips.  This week, we’ll look at yet another case that makes a strong argument for just staying at home.

Fifty-year-old George Lorius was president of a coal company in East St. Louis, Illinois.  He and his wife Laura had been married for a number of years, but had no children.  They were close friends with another childless middle-aged couple, Albert and Tillie Heberer.  We know little else about the quartet, but they were evidently prosperous, pleasantly ordinary citizens.

A favorite pastime of the two couples was going on trips together.  In May 1935, they set off in George’s 1929 Nash sedan with the goal of visiting the Boulder Dam, and then San Diego, California.  Along the way, they made various side trips, which they chronicled in frequent postcards sent to family and friends.

One of these side trips was to Vaughn, New Mexico, in order to look up an old friend who had moved there.  On May 21, they checked into the Vaughn Hotel.  It is unclear if they were ever able to locate this person, but we do know that the following morning, they had breakfast at the hotel and checked out.  George mentioned to the clerk that they planned to go to Santa Fe, and then Gallup.  Later that day, Tillie sent home a postcard from Albuquerque saying, “Came through this place in the a.m.  No trouble of any kind.  Going to Boulder Dam, then to Los Angeles.”  A clerk at an Albuquerque hotel later said that she spoke to the two couples.  They asked about available rooms, but in the end decided to drive to Gallup instead.  They later stopped at a gas station in Quemado, about 150 miles from Albuquerque.

This was the last confirmed sighting of the two couples.  After this stop, they all appeared to vanish into oblivion.  On June 5, family members, concerned about not hearing from them, notified police.

New Mexico authorities--concerned about the effect the mystery might have on local tourist trade--launched an exhaustive search for the two couples, even bringing the National Guard into the hunt.  A week into the investigation, they made an extremely unsettling discovery: the burned remains of the missing quartet’s belongings had been dumped along a highway near El Paso, Texas.  The following day, George’s sedan was found on a street in Dallas.  The gas tank was full, and the keys were left in the ignition.  Bloodstains and hair were found on the left door of the car.  Also in the car was George’s notebook of odometer readings.  The final entry was made in Socorro, New Mexico, on May 23.

In June, George’s traveler’s checks began turning up throughout New Mexico and Texas, but were clearly clumsy forgeries.  Bertha Williamson, the owner of a boarding house, was the recipient of one of these checks, and she went to the police.  She said it had come from a “nervous young man” with dark hair and a tattoo who had spent a night at her establishment.  He was driving a Nash sedan.  A Dallas gas station owner also reported getting a forged check from a dark young man with a tattooed arm.  That same man had also taken the sedan in to be repaired at a garage in El Paso.  He said he had been in an accident in New Mexico.

It was getting disturbingly obvious that the two couples had been robbed and probably murdered, most likely by the tattooed man.  But who was he, and where were his victims?

"Albuquerque Journal," June 20, 2010, via Newspapers.com

Over the years, a number of dark-haired, tattooed men of questionable character were brought in for questioning, but it proved impossible to tie any of them to the mystery.  Walter Duke, an Albuquerque real estate agent who had taken a deep interest in the case, came to believe that the two couples had been murdered during their brief stay in Vaughn.  In 1963, he was contacted by a woman who claimed to have been a waitress in the Vaughn Hotel in 1935.  She alleged that the couples had checked into the establishment, but--Hotel California style--never left.  She believed they were taken down into the basement, murdered by unspecified robbers, and buried there.  Was this true?  Maybe.  Or maybe not. 

Although the case is still considered an active one, it seems highly unlikely that the mystery of the Lorius/Heberer disappearances will ever be solved.  Curiously enough, the most solid clue we have to their fate comes from the supernatural realm.  On the night of May 22, 1935--long before anyone had reason to suspect that this road trip had gone terribly wrong--Laura Lorius’ sister suddenly woke up in horror.  She told her husband that she dreamed that Laura came to her saying, “I’ve been murdered and buried under the floor of an old building.  You’ll have trouble finding me.”

That last sentence, at least, has proven to be only too accurate.

A Christmas Eve Mystery: Where Are the Sodder Children?

A family named Sodder once lived in Fayetteville, West Virginia.  It was a large household:  The parents, Jenny and George, and nine of their ten children.  (Their eldest son was away serving in the military.)  Their life was, as far as is known, a perfectly ordinary one until Christmas Eve 1945, when their routine middle-class existence suddenly morphed into something out of the most chilling psychological horror story.

On that night, as the family prepared to go to bed, five of the younger Sodders--Maurice, Martha, Louis, Jennie, and Betty--asked to be allowed to remain downstairs to play with their presents.  Their parents indulgently agreed, and went upstairs to retire for the night.  It was the last time they would see these children again.

The Sodders did not notice anything amiss until around midnight, when Jenny Sodder was awakened by a phone call.  She noticed that lights were still on in the house, the shades were up, and the doors unlocked.  The house was quiet, and she assumed everyone was now asleep.  When she picked up the receiver, an unfamiliar female voice asked to speak to a name Jenny did not recognize.  In the background of the other end of the line, she could hear wild laughter and glasses clinking.  Before she could respond, the caller hung up.  Shrugging it off as a prank, she went back to sleep.  Some time later, she thought she heard a noise on their roof.  Not long after that--around 1:30 a.m.--she smelled smoke.  The house was on fire.

Jenny began screaming for everyone to get out of the house.  Once they were outside, Jenny and George saw that five of their children were still missing--the same five that had stayed downstairs past their bedtime.  Mr. Sodder went for a ladder he always kept by the house, so he could climb up to the bedrooms, but it was gone.  It was later found in an embankment some distance away.  He tried to drive off for help, but his trucks--which had worked perfectly the previous day--now refused to start.

By the time the fire department arrived--in this small town, with primitive communications and equipment, it took them seven hours--the house was a mass of smoldering ashes.  In less than an hour, it had completely burned to the ground.  Officials assumed bad wiring was to blame for the conflagration, but that seemed questionable, considering that lights in the home were still on after the fire started.  Besides, just a few months before, the local power company had inspected their wiring.  We simply do not know for sure why the home was destroyed.

Whatever the cause of the blaze may have been, the most important question was, where were the five Sodder children?  Some newspapers reported that some fragmentary bones and flesh were found in the ruins, but other accounts say that not a single trace of human remains were ever found on the site.

Despite the eerie events preceding the fire--not to mention the fact that telephone line had been cut just before or after the flames erupted--the authorities shrugged the incident off as a tragic accident and ignored the Sodders' pleas for an investigation.

The many peculiar circumstances surrounding the fire, coupled with the lack of remains, increasingly convinced the Sodders that their missing children had not died in the fire, but were kidnapped.  Searches of the site in the years after the fire eventually turned up a few stray pieces of bone, but a pathologist working with the Sodders noted that it was highly unusual not to find more of the children's bodies.  The fire simply did not burn long enough to completely incinerate bodies.  Another oddity is that these bones were not fire damaged, leading pathologists from the Smithsonian to theorize that the  fragments were in the dirt George Sodder used to bury the site of the fire.  And was it anything more than coincidence that the children who were allowed to stay up late were the only family members to disappear?  No one could say.  

"Calgary Albertan," October 6, 1953, via Newspapers.com

George Sodder--who was, like his wife, Italian-born--had been very vocal about his dislike of Mussolini.  This had made him very unpopular in their Italian-American community, leading the family to harbor the fear that the tragedy had been some horrendous payback for his political views.  This may well have been merely paranoia, but unless they found some definitive answers, it was a paranoia they could never shake.

The Sodders lived through years of painful uncertainty about the fate of their children.  The events of that Christmas Eve seemed just too strange to be an ordinary accident, but, on the other hand, the idea of some maniacs singling them out and torching their house in order to spirit off their children was too weird to even contemplate.  George and Jenny did everything in their power to publicize the mystery--they even rented a billboard with photos of the missing children that stood for forty years--but no one came forward with any information.  The private detectives they hired to chase every possible lead, every "sighting" of the missing children, came up with nothing.  The remaining family members were left in a nightmarish limbo.

Life went on, with no concrete developments in the case until 1968, when the Sodders were anonymously mailed a photograph of a man who looked to be in his mid-twenties.  On the back of the photo someone had written, "Louis Sodder," "I love brother Frankie," "ilil Boys," and the cryptic "A90132 or 35."

The Sodders were convinced the young man in the photo was their son Louis, who was nine when he disappeared.  No one can say for sure if they were correct, or if the mailing was merely a sick prank by some unknown creep.

That unsettlingly enigmatic photo is the last word to date on the Sodder mystery.  George Sodder died in 1969 and his wife twenty years later.  Sylvia, the last living Sodder child, (that we know of, at any rate,) was only two when disaster struck.  She passed away in 2021, still haunted by what had befallen her family.  She believed her siblings did not die in the fire, but she had no more luck than her parents in finding evidence of that theory.  The story of what really happened that Christmas Eve remains as baffling as ever.

The Disappearances of James Cole

"Idaho Statesman," August 13, 1976, via Newspapers.com

It’s generally strange enough when a person mysteriously vanishes.  But when they pull off the feat of disappearing twice…

James Thomas Cole of Boise, Idaho, seemed to have a perfectly ordinary middle-class life.  He was 24 years old, married, and a father of a small son.  Since 1970, he had been working as a warehouse foreman at Mountain States Wholesale.  He was a good worker who was liked by everyone who knew him.  In short, Cole was one of the last people you would expect to see get into some very shady business.

Just after 4 a.m. on the morning of August 12, 1976, Cole drove a semi to the Boise Fruit & Produce Company, four blocks from his workplace.  It was expected that he would then walk back to work.  Instead, at around 4:30, a co-worker, Gary Anchustegui, got a startling phone call.  It was from an unlisted number.  A “jovial” sounding man informed Anchustegui that he had kidnapped Cole, and was demanding a $200,000 ransom.  Although Anchustegui assumed the call had to be some sort of childish prank, as a precaution he phoned the night supervisor, Ivan Edney, to check if Cole was there.  He was told that Cole had left for Boise Fruit an hour previously, and had yet to return.  When 8 a.m. arrived with no sign of Cole, police were called in.  When Albertson’s Food Centers, the parent company of Mountain States, was informed of what had happened, an emergency Board of Directors meeting was called, where it was decided that the company had no choice but to pay the ransom.

Around 5 a.m. the following day, the police received a phone call from none other than James Thomas Cole.  Cole said that as he was walking back to work after delivering the semi, someone had abducted him.  He was then drugged and taken to Mission Manor Apartments in nearby Nampa.  Later that day, police arrived at the apartment building to investigate a drunk and disorderly complaint.  Their presence so unnerved his captors, they again drugged Cole, and fled.  When Cole recovered his senses, he went to the Nampa Chief Motel three blocks away, where he contacted the police.

When officers searched the apartment where Cole said he had been held, they found a brand-new Honda motorcycle, as well as a new TV and a motorcycle helmet.  Cole told them that the men who abducted him had been driving a 1972 turquoise pickup truck with a white camper shell.  This was an identical description of Cole’s own car.  Odd, that.  The “odd” factor only increased when police found out that the registered owner of the Honda motorcycle was Gary Anchustegui.  Two employees of the shop where the motorcycle was sold identified the purchaser as James Cole.

But wait, there’s more!  Around the time Cole was abducted (although by this point, everyone was probably putting scare quotes around that word,) over $1600 disappeared from the safe at Albertson Food Center.  Both Cole and Anchustegui had access to that safe.  After the two men both failed polygraph exams, Cole was arrested on August 18 and charged with attempted extortion, embezzlement, and forgery.  (The last charge was because police believed Cole had forged Anchustegui’s name on the forms to buy the motorcycle.)  Police decided that there was not enough evidence to charge Anchustegui with any crime.

Cole initially pleaded “not guilty,” but he eventually admitted guilt to extortion, in exchange for the other charges being dropped.  However, he continued to insist that he genuinely had been kidnapped.  In August 1977, Cole was sentenced to three years in prison (although he only served 30 days) and a $3,000 fine.

So far, we have nothing more than an idiotic petty con gone wrong.  But a year later, Cole’s life took another, even weirder turn.  In March 1978, Cole told people that he had been phoned by someone who claimed to know who had kidnapped him in 1976.  On March 13, Cole was seen going to a pre-arranged location where he was to meet his mysterious informant.

After that, Cole disappeared again--this time for good.  Considering that his car was found abandoned at the Boise Airport, and that he had taken out a $25,000 life insurance policy just one month before he vanished, it was generally assumed that Cole had left voluntarily, but as he was never heard from again, his fate remains unknown.  (After seven years, Cole’s wife was able to have him declared dead, and she finally collected the insurance money.  She remarried, and went on with her life.)

There is a postscript to this case, one that deals with another mysterious event.  On December 4, 1982, a man walked into the Sacred Heart Church in Boise.  He seemed to want to use the confessional, but it was already occupied, so he merely sat silently in a pew.  A few hours later, as parishioners began to gather for the 6 p.m. mass, they were stunned to find the stranger lying on the ground, dead.  It was later discovered that he had swallowed cyanide.

The man was young, dressed in Western attire.  His wallet carried no identification--just $1900 in cash and a note reading:  “In the event of my death, the enclosed currency should give more than adequate compensation for my funeral or disposal (prefer to be cremated) expenditures.  What is left over, please take this as a contribution to this church.  God will see to your honesty in this.”  The note was signed “Wm. L. Toomey.”

No record could be found for anyone by that name, and as it was also the name of a company that manufactured ceremonial clothing for priests, it was presumed the man was using a pseudonym.  Police were unable to trace any of the man’s relatives, or even anyone who knew him, so the church had no choice but to bury him under the name of "Toomey."  (The permission of relatives would have been needed to cremate him.)

There is one haunting clue that may solve the twin mysteries of the disappearance of James Cole and the identity of “William Toomey.”  In 2021, an anonymous letter was sent to the “Idaho Press" about the Toomey case.  The writer suggested “This man may be James Thomas Cole who went missing in 1978.  Compare his picture to that of ‘William Toomey’ and compare the resemblance.”

Some believe that the police sketch of “Toomey” does bear a resemblance to James Cole, and it is not implausible that after four years of being away from his old life, Cole felt he had had enough of a solitary existence.  All one can say is that if Cole was indeed “William Toomey,” he certainly paid a terrible price for his 1976 escapades.

"William Toomey"

A Halloween Mystery: The Disappearance of Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer

Halloween is a day of ghosts, witches, goblin cats…and occasionally, as the case below will demonstrate, an eerie real-life mystery.

16-year old Pamela Hobley and Patricia Spencer, who was a year younger, were high school students in Oscoda, Michigan.   The public learned relatively little about the girls, but they appeared to be normal, unremarkable middle-class teenagers.  Pamela was engaged to be married, but I presume the wedding was intended to be in the distant future.  There were rumors that the girls liked to party and did a bit of experimenting with drugs and alcohol, but if so, that does not seem to have had any major negative impact on their lives.

Pamela Hobley

On October 31, 1969, some anonymous idiot decided to celebrate the holiday by phoning a bomb threat to the girls’ high school.  It was believed to be a mere hoax, but Pamela and Patricia signed out of school early.  They were seen walking away from the building at around 2 p.m.  The fact that they left together was considered odd.  The girls knew each other, but were not considered friends.  Neither of them had their purses or any other belongings with them.  

Both the girls had plans to attend a homecoming game that evening, followed by a Halloween party, so when Pamela’s mother, Lois, and younger siblings returned home from trick-or-treating, they were not surprised that she was not at home.  They only started to worry when Pamela’s boyfriend phoned, asking why she was not at the party.  Lois began phoning the families of other students, but none of them had seen Pamela.  When she reached the Spencer home, and learned that Patricia was missing as well, Lois contacted police.

Patricia Spencer

This was one of those missing-persons cases where investigators had almost nothing to work with.  At first, police assumed the girls had simply run away, but if such was the case, why did neither of them take even the basics like money or ID?  Also, both the girls seemed happy enough with their lives, with no discernible reason to disappear.  Police believed that after leaving the high school, Pamela and Patricia hitched a ride to Oscoda’s downtown area, but after that, it was as if they simply walked into oblivion.  We have no reliable clues for what subsequently became of either girl.

There is one odd footnote to this disturbingly vague case:  Shortly before the girls disappeared, an old boyfriend of Patricia’s named Francis Tebo got into some sort of trouble with the law, which caused him to be sent to Whitmore Lake Boys’ Training School.  In November 1969, he underwent an appendectomy in a Detroit hospital.  Soon after the operation, Francis ran away from the hospital and vanished.  At first, there was speculation that Francis’ disappearance was somehow linked to the Hobley/Spencer mystery, but it appears that the boy was subsequently traced, and police were able to satisfy themselves that he knew nothing about the two girls.  

Police learned that in 1968, one of the girls had, without her knowledge, been given a drugged drink by an airman at nearby Wurtsmith Air Force Base, after which she was found “in the woods having hallucinations.”  (The airman was subsequently convicted of the crime.)  However, no one could find any connection between this incident and the girls’ disappearance.

Despite the long passage of time, police are still hoping to solve the case.  Over the years, they have pursued various leads, but without any success.  The girls’ remaining family members are also actively searching for answers, but at least some of their relatives are convinced Pamela and Patricia were murdered soon after they vanished.  Pamela’s sister Mary Buehrle, who was eight when her sibling vanished, told a reporter in 2023 that "We watched my mom on her deathbed and she saw Pam.”

A Road Trip Into Oblivion: The Disappearance of David Lovely

Missing-persons cases can be tough to solve, but investigators usually have at least an approximate idea of when and where the person vanished.  However, when no one can even guess at the time and place, you’re probably dealing with a mystery that could be solved only by a miracle.  That is what makes the following disappearance particularly haunting.

David Vernon Lovely was born in Massachusetts in 1965.  Although he grew into a very tall, seemingly fit youth, he had underlying health problems.  He was born with an oversized kidney, which required major surgery when he was three years old.  He was left with a permanently scarred, vulnerable abdomen.  As a result, he was unable to play sports or drink more than very small amounts of alcohol.  Despite that, he was able to lead a happy, essentially normal life.

When David was a teenager, his parents divorced, and he and his father moved to California.  In 1985, his mother, Jackie, moved there as well.  However, the Golden State evidently did not suit her, for in the summer of 1985, Jackie, David, and David’s 18-year-old sister Alison all decided to go back to Massachusetts.  

The move would be a complicated cross-country road trip.  Jackie drove a Ryder moving truck towing a pickup driven by Alison.  David rode his newly-purchased 1978 maroon Yamaha motorcycle.  As David’s bike was much speedier than the truck, they worked out a plan where every 30 miles or so they would stop to touch base.

On August 4, the little caravan left Salt Lake City, with the agreement that they would meet again at a gas station in Evanston, Wyoming.  Before they parted, David told Jackie and Alison that his motorcycle was acting up a bit, so he hoped to find a mechanic along the way.

Unfortunately, before David could find anyone to look at his bike, the machine broke down, forcing him to spend the night along the side of the I-80 highway.  On the morning of August 5, he pushed the bike three miles to a truck stop in the tiny town of Fort Bridger, Wyoming.  He used the pay phone there to call his aunt, Barbara Janiak, in Massachusetts.  He told her about his problems with the bike, adding that a “rough-looking” man on a Harley Davidson had managed to fix it.  David said that although the man had initially seemed “scary,” he now felt at ease around him.  David told Barbara that he would reunite with Jackie and Alison at Rock Springs, a city about 70 miles away, and call her again once he got there.

That phone call turned out to be the last time anyone has heard from David Lovely.  When Jackie and Alison arrived at the next rest stop, David failed to appear.  On the morning of August 6, Jackie phoned Barbara, where she learned of David’s plan to meet them at Rock Springs.  However, when they reached that city, they were unable to find him.  Not knowing what else to do, the two women pushed on to Lincoln, Nebraska, where they spent several days waiting for him.  Finally, working on the assumption that David had tired of this stop-and-start travel and just went straight to Massachusetts, they left.  At every rest stop, they asked state troopers if they had seen David.  No one had.

When the women reached home, David was not there, and nobody had heard from him.  Realizing that something was very wrong, the family immediately contacted police.

Law enforcement was initially reluctant to take David’s failure to show up seriously.  They pointed out that he was 19 years old, an adult.  He had probably just decided to go away somewhere without telling anyone.  And, of course, there was the question of which jurisdiction should investigate his disappearance:  David was a Massachusetts resident who had last been seen in Wyoming, and he was riding a bike registered in California.  Police in all three states were inclined to shrug and say, “It’s not our problem.”

Authorities were finally forced to take the matter seriously when on August 14, a couple who had been camping in a remote area outside of Rock Springs reported finding an abandoned motorcycle that was soon proved to be David’s.  It had been left in a dirt path off Middle Baxter Road, surrounded by nothing but empty desert.  It was about 70 miles away from David’s last known location.  The keys were in the ignition, the tank was half-full of gas, and it was in perfect working condition.  Resting against the bike was David’s helmet and backpack containing his possessions and $150 in cash.

The couple who had found the bike told police that a few days earlier, they had seen a person (they could not tell if the figure was male or female) with long dark hair riding a large turquoise motorbike away from the area where they would later find David’s bike.  That person has never been identified, and it’s anyone’s guess if he/she had any involvement with David’s disappearance.  Authorities searched the area, without finding any clues to David’s whereabouts.  It was a remarkably desolate, inhospitable place, with many ravines, cliffs, and gullies.  The search was further hampered by several thunderstorms, which could have potentially washed away any evidence.

That was essentially the end of any official investigation into David’s disappearance.  In November 2023, a hunter found a human skull in the general area where David’s bike had been found.  It was unknown if the skull belonged to David, or any of the other (frighteningly numerous) other people who had vanished from the Rock Springs vicinity in recent years.  I have been unable to find if the skull was ever identified.

This is a missing-persons case where virtually anything could have happened.  It’s possible that foul play was not involved--perhaps David himself rode his bike to the Baxter Road area, intending to camp overnight there, only to come across some mishap--or a dangerous wild animal--in the rough terrain.  If he was killed elsewhere, why did the murderer bother to abandon the bike and David’s other belongings in this remote location?  Or, as some have suggested, did David camp out where his bike was found, only to run into some wandering serial killer?

Who knows?