December 15, 2024 • 20 mins
This episode takes us to Columbus, Ohio for the unsolved 1979 disappearance of medical school student Brian Shaffer.
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All music by Kai Engel licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For more info, please visit https://www.kai-engel.com/.
Produced, written, edited, and hosted by Steve from Great Lakes True Crime.
**Positive reviews really help out the show and are always appreciated**
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Brian_Shafferhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ8PM3YXHbA&t=248s
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/6192-myelodysplastic-syndrome-myelodysplasia
https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Files/Briefing-Room/News-Releases/BCI/Volume-17-Number-02-Missing-Person-Brian-Shaffer-A.aspx
https://www.reddit.com/r/BrianShaffer/comments/10h2ucb/what_99_of_people_dont_know_about_the_brian/
Buy Me Coffee (please!) - https://paypal.me/greatlakestruecrime
Website - www.greatlakestruecrime.net
X - https://twitter.com/greatlakescrime
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/greatlakescrime
All music by Kai Engel licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For more info, please visit https://www.kai-engel.com/.
Produced, written, edited, and hosted by Steve from Great Lakes True Crime.
**Positive reviews really help out the show and are always appreciated**
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Brian_Shafferhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ8PM3YXHbA&t=248s
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/6192-myelodysplastic-syndrome-myelodysplasia
https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Files/Briefing-Room/News-Releases/BCI/Volume-17-Number-02-Missing-Person-Brian-Shaffer-A.aspx
https://www.reddit.com/r/BrianShaffer/comments/10h2ucb/what_99_of_people_dont_know_about_the_brian/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Born in February nineteen seventy nine. Brian Schaeffer was a
medical student at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
He has been missing since the early hours of April first,
two thousand six, after security cameras recorded him just outside
a bar in Columbus, Ohio. He had gone out with
(00:22):
friends earlier in the evening of March thirty first, to
celebrate the beginning of spring break. Later, he was separated
from them and they assumed he had gone home. The
security camera outside the entrance to the second floor bar
recorded Brian briefly talking to two women just before two
a m. And then walking off screen without any further
(00:44):
evidence of him leaving the area. Brian Shaefer has never
been seen or heard from again from the south shore
of Lake Erie. This is Great Lake's True Crime. Brian
(01:23):
Schaeffer grew up in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb outside of Columbus,
the elder of Randy and Renee Shaeffer's two sons. He
graduated from the local high school in nineteen ninety seven
and went to Ohio State University for his undergraduate work.
Ohio State University was founded in eighteen seventy and is
(01:45):
located several miles north of downtown Columbus, Ohio. With an
enrollment of over sixty five thousand students, Ohio State is
one of the largest universities in America. It is a
member of the University System of Ohio, along with thirteen
(02:05):
other research universities, including the prestigious Bowling Green State University.
Brian graduated from Ohio State with a bachelor's degree in microbiology,
founding that he began studies at the Ohio State College
of Medicine in two thousand four. During his second year there,
(02:27):
in March two thousand and six, his mother died of
miel dysplasia, which is a cancer that keeps your blood
stem cells from maturing into healthy blood cells. Without enough
healthy blood cells, he can develop serious conditions like anemia, infections,
and bleeding issues. Friends of Ryan say that although he
(02:48):
appeared to be handling it well externally, her death was
understandably very hard on him during his time at medical school.
During his time at medical school, Brian started dating another
medical student named Alexis. Along with family and friends, Alexis
(03:09):
thought Brian might propose to her on a trip to Miami.
They were scheduled to take during that spring break. Brian's
disappearance has been especially puzzling to investigators. The bar he
was in only had one publicly accessible entrance and exit,
although there was a service exit for deliveries and employees
(03:29):
to use. Columbus police have several theories about what happened.
Some interest in suspicion has been directed at a friend
of Brian's who accompanied him that night, who reportedly has
refused to take a polygraph regarding the incident. I don't
see that as any sign of potential guilt. However, I
(03:49):
don't know that I would take a polygraph either, even
if I had nothing to hide. On March thirty first,
a Friday, classes at Ohio's ended for spring break. The
following week. Brian and his father, Randy celebrated the occasion
by having a steak dinner earlier that evening. Randy noted
(04:11):
that Brian seemed exhausted from having fooled all nighters earlier
in the week, cramming for some critical exams. He did
not think Brian should go out with his friend Clint
later that night, as he planned to do, especially since
he had the trip to Miami coming up, but he
didn't say anything to Brian to discourage him from going out.
(04:33):
At nine pm that Friday night, Brian met up with
Clint at the Ugly Tuna Saluna, a college bar at
fifteen forty six North High Street in Columbus, Ohio. It
was located in a newer urban renewal type development known
as the South Campus Gateway Complex. An hour later, around
(04:54):
ten pm, Brian called his girlfriend Alexis, who had returned
to her home a couple hours away in Toledo, Ohio,
to visit with her family before she and Brian went
on their Miami vacation. Brian and Clint went bar hopping,
visiting several other drinking establishments and working their way down
(05:14):
to the Arena District, which is named after Nationwide Arena
home of the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets. At each stop,
the two men reportedly had a shot of liquor. After midnight,
Brian and Clint met up with a friend of Clint's
named Meredith in the Short North neighborhood of Columbus. The
(05:36):
Short North is an RT hipster type neighborhood just north
of downtown Columbus. It apparently got its name from local
police who referred to the area as being north of
downtown but short of the Ohio State University campus, which
sits farther north up High Street. Meredith gave the two
(05:57):
a ride back to the Ugly Tuna saloona where they
had begun the night out, and she joined them for
one last drink before they called it a night. This
is where things get murky. Clint and Meredith lost track
of Brian around this time. He was last seen on
the security camera at the bar around one fifty five
(06:18):
a m. When they could not locate Brian, the two
friends kept calling him. Eventually, they left with the other
patrons when the bar closed at two a m. Waiting
outside the front door for Brian to come out. When
he was not among the departing crowd, they assumed he
had returned to his apartment without letting them know. Both
(06:42):
Alexis and Randy tried calling Bryan later that weekend, but
he didn't answer any of their calls. On Monday morning,
he missed the flight to Miami that he and Alexis
had scheduled. It was at this point that friends and
family knew something was seriously wrong, and he was reported
missing to the Columbus Police. Police began their search for
(07:08):
Brian back at the Ugly Tuna Saluna, the bar where
he had been last seen. Like many businesses, the gateway
building which housed the Ugly Tuna and other businesses, had
installed security cameras. Police reviewed the security camera footage, which
showed Brian, Clint, and Meredith going up an escalator to
(07:32):
the bar's main entrance at one fifteen am. Brian was
seen outside the bar around one fifty five am, talking
briefly with two young women and saying goodbye, and then
moving off camera. The camera did not record him leaving
shortly afterward when the Ugly Tuna closed, so this was
(07:53):
the last known time that Brian was seen. It was possible.
Investigators realized that if Brian was trying to purposely leave
the bar undetected, he could have changed his clothes in
the bar, or put on a hat and kept his
head down, hiding his face from the camera. He might
have also left the building by another route. That service
(08:18):
store that we mentioned before, which is not generally used
by the public, was a short distance from where Brian
was last seen. This exit led to a first floor
hallway which featured access at the time to a construction
area with its own exterior exit. Some officers believed this
would have been difficult to walk through while sober, and
(08:41):
nearly impossible after a night of bar hopping. However, the
cameras in that area might have also missed Brian. One
panned across the area constantly, and the other was operated manually.
The Ugly Tuna Yuna itself had several exits aside from
(09:02):
the one public entrance. The upper level had a traditional
firescape and a freight elevator. When Brian was standing with
his friends at the top of the escalator, he sometimes
stood under the camera out of view. There were two
wooden doors on the second floor that were chained together,
but a person could possibly squeeze through the opening. Those
(09:25):
wooden doors led to the ground level and the service
and construction exits that we mentioned earlier. Police watched video
of the service exit that showed bar staff and a
band that played there that night leaving, but Brian was
not seen in that video. So when investigators then checked
(09:46):
the construction exit camera, they found that the manual override
had been turned on, so that camera was not recording
at all that night. Since videos from the main entry
and the service exit showed no sign of Brian leaving.
Police began to focus on that construction exit since it
(10:08):
was the one known exit that had no video. That
does not mean that Brian necessarily left out of the
construction exit, though, because there were other businesses in that
building complex. Remember this was a mixed development complex that
included other restaurants, several of which were open late at night.
Like the Ugly Tuna. Many of these businesses left their
(10:32):
interior service doors open to the inside of the complex,
meaning Brian could have walked into one of those other
restaurants from the inside and then left through their front doors.
So this possibility occurred to police officers as well, and
they next looked at video footage from the other establishments
(10:53):
in the complex to see if they showed any sign
of Brian leaving that night. However, those cameras all so
showed no sign of Brian. The search began to fan
out from the Ugly Tuna, with officers sometimes accompanied by
police dogs, looking closely in the street, inspecting dumpsters and
(11:15):
other waist containers, and asking residents if they had seen Brian.
Flyers bearing his picture showing a distinctive tattoo on Brian's
upper right arm were posted, and police even went down
into the City of Columbus's sewer system and searched there,
but with no luck in any of their searches. At
(11:39):
Brian's apartment, which was located about six blocks from the bar,
his car was still parked in the parking lot, and
nothing inside the apartment seemed suspicious or provided any clues
on his whereabouts. After searching extensively for Brian both near
(12:01):
and far, police began to consider other possible reasons for
Brian's apparent disappearance. Earlier, we noted that Brian's mother had
recently died, and it was speculated that he could have
gone off on his own to grieve in solitude, but
he never came back home and missed his important trip
(12:22):
to Miami, so this theory was not taken too seriously.
Not wanting to give up hope, Alexis continued to call
Brian's phone every night for quite a long time after
the disappearance. Her calls would typically go straight to voicemail,
(12:43):
but one night, about five months after the disappearance, it
rang three times before going to voicemail. When police looked
into this anomaly, the cell phone provider said that the
three rings were likely the result of some type of computeritch. However,
a ping from the phone was detected at a cell
(13:05):
tower in Hilliard, Ohio, which is about fourteen miles northwest
of Columbus. It's not clear how or why that would
have happened. It's also been said that Brian's phone had
pinged in the few days following his disappearance, which, if true,
(13:25):
would mean it's very likely that he left the bar
and went somewhere else. Of course, it could also mean
that he got separated from his phone at some point,
perhaps he dropped it, or maybe someone else ended up
with it somehow. Meanwhile, police received hundreds of tips from
(13:48):
the public, but none of them resulted in any breakthroughs
in the case. Brian was a huge fan of the
band Pearl Jam, and at a Pearl Jam concert later
that year in Cincinnati, Ohio, the lead singer of the band,
Eddie Vetter, briefly paused the concert to ask concertgoers to
submit any tips they had on Brian's disappearance. Again, though,
(14:12):
nothing useful came from those tips, which included reported sightings
in Michigan, Texas, and even Sweden. Brian's father. Randy had,
of course, recently suffered the death of his wife, and
now he continued the search for Brian on his own.
After police resources were redirected elsewhere. Randy Schaeffer went so
(14:39):
far as to ask for help from a psychic who
told him she believed Brian's body was in water near
a bridge. So Randy, Derek's brother Brian, in another concerned
area residence, bought waiters and spent a lot of time
along the banks of the nearby Old Tangy River, which
(15:01):
flows through the city of Columbus. Those valiant efforts also
came up empty, though. A couple years later, in September
two thousand and eight, tragedy unfortunately struck the Shaeffer family
yet again. Randy Shaeffer was working in the yard of
(15:21):
his home in Ohio during a strong windstorm. During the storm,
a large branch blew off a tree in the yard,
hit Randy and killed him. Neighbors found his body the
following day and reported it to police. When Randy's obituary
(15:42):
was posted online, it was accompanied by an online condolence book.
One of those posts in the condolence book said, quote
to Dad love Brian and in parentheses US Virgin Islands unquote.
This suggested Brian my have left for Columbus for a
new life elsewhere. However, upon further investigation, the note was
(16:07):
found to have been posted from a publicly accessible computer
at a library in the Columbus area. It was determined
to be just a tasteless hoax. In a twenty fourteen
story published in a local magazine, Columbus police said they
were still receiving at least two tips a month on
the case via the local crime Stoppers hotline, though none
(16:29):
had proven fruitful. Police stated that they had three theories
about what happened to Brian, but would not discuss them,
not even in general terms. Five years later, in twenty nineteen,
a photo of an alleged American man in Tijuana, Mexico,
began circulating on online, with the man bearing some resemblance
(16:52):
to Brian. Columbus police were provided with the photo, and
they sent the image to the FBI for facial recognition analysis,
but the FBI determined that the man was not Brian Shaeffer.
In March twenty twenty one, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal
(17:12):
Investigation released an age progressed photo of what Brian might
look at age forty two, nearly fifteen years after his disappearance.
After Brian's disappearance, Randy Shaeffer joined with families of other
missing adults in Ohio to advocate for a state law
(17:34):
establishing a protocol for local police to follow. At the
time Brian disappeared, it was left up to individual police
departments how to handle the cases, and some felt that
the investigations into the relative's disappearance had suffered as a result.
By the time Randy Shaeffer died, the bill had become
law in Ohio. Brian was last wearing jeans, a blue
(18:02):
or green striped shirt, and sneakers. He is a white male,
six feet two inches tall. He weighed about one hundred
and seventy pounds at the time of his disappearance, and
has brown hair and hazel eyes. So the question remains
what happened to Brian Schaeffer. Did he purposely disappear to
(18:25):
live off the grid. Was he a victim of foul play?
Was he involved in a fatal accident? Who were the
two young women he was seen talking to just before
the bar closed. It is truly a mystery, and let
me know what you think. Also, Anyone with information about
(18:45):
the case is asked to call the Columbus Division of
Police at area code six one four six four five
two three five eight. And that's all for this episode
of Great Leight Makes True Crime. You can say hi
to us on Facebook and the X just search for
Great Lakes True Crime. You can also check out the
(19:08):
show notes for sources and more information. Please send any
thoughts or case suggestions to Great Lakes Truecrime at gmail
dot com. And if you like the show, please give
us a positive review and encourage your friends to subscribe.
We need new subscribers as that really helps us out
(19:31):
for Great Lakes True Crime. This has been Steve, your
host and producer. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Buys the Report Recorder and cap Conticent.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
The cont
Born in February nineteen seventy nine. Brian Schaeffer was a
medical student at the Ohio State University College of Medicine.
He has been missing since the early hours of April first,
two thousand six, after security cameras recorded him just outside
a bar in Columbus, Ohio. He had gone out with
(00:22):
friends earlier in the evening of March thirty first, to
celebrate the beginning of spring break. Later, he was separated
from them and they assumed he had gone home. The
security camera outside the entrance to the second floor bar
recorded Brian briefly talking to two women just before two
a m. And then walking off screen without any further
(00:44):
evidence of him leaving the area. Brian Shaefer has never
been seen or heard from again from the south shore
of Lake Erie. This is Great Lake's True Crime. Brian
(01:23):
Schaeffer grew up in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb outside of Columbus,
the elder of Randy and Renee Shaeffer's two sons. He
graduated from the local high school in nineteen ninety seven
and went to Ohio State University for his undergraduate work.
Ohio State University was founded in eighteen seventy and is
(01:45):
located several miles north of downtown Columbus, Ohio. With an
enrollment of over sixty five thousand students, Ohio State is
one of the largest universities in America. It is a
member of the University System of Ohio, along with thirteen
(02:05):
other research universities, including the prestigious Bowling Green State University.
Brian graduated from Ohio State with a bachelor's degree in microbiology,
founding that he began studies at the Ohio State College
of Medicine in two thousand four. During his second year there,
(02:27):
in March two thousand and six, his mother died of
miel dysplasia, which is a cancer that keeps your blood
stem cells from maturing into healthy blood cells. Without enough
healthy blood cells, he can develop serious conditions like anemia, infections,
and bleeding issues. Friends of Ryan say that although he
(02:48):
appeared to be handling it well externally, her death was
understandably very hard on him during his time at medical school.
During his time at medical school, Brian started dating another
medical student named Alexis. Along with family and friends, Alexis
(03:09):
thought Brian might propose to her on a trip to Miami.
They were scheduled to take during that spring break. Brian's
disappearance has been especially puzzling to investigators. The bar he
was in only had one publicly accessible entrance and exit,
although there was a service exit for deliveries and employees
(03:29):
to use. Columbus police have several theories about what happened.
Some interest in suspicion has been directed at a friend
of Brian's who accompanied him that night, who reportedly has
refused to take a polygraph regarding the incident. I don't
see that as any sign of potential guilt. However, I
(03:49):
don't know that I would take a polygraph either, even
if I had nothing to hide. On March thirty first,
a Friday, classes at Ohio's ended for spring break. The
following week. Brian and his father, Randy celebrated the occasion
by having a steak dinner earlier that evening. Randy noted
(04:11):
that Brian seemed exhausted from having fooled all nighters earlier
in the week, cramming for some critical exams. He did
not think Brian should go out with his friend Clint
later that night, as he planned to do, especially since
he had the trip to Miami coming up, but he
didn't say anything to Brian to discourage him from going out.
(04:33):
At nine pm that Friday night, Brian met up with
Clint at the Ugly Tuna Saluna, a college bar at
fifteen forty six North High Street in Columbus, Ohio. It
was located in a newer urban renewal type development known
as the South Campus Gateway Complex. An hour later, around
(04:54):
ten pm, Brian called his girlfriend Alexis, who had returned
to her home a couple hours away in Toledo, Ohio,
to visit with her family before she and Brian went
on their Miami vacation. Brian and Clint went bar hopping,
visiting several other drinking establishments and working their way down
(05:14):
to the Arena District, which is named after Nationwide Arena
home of the NHL's Columbus Blue Jackets. At each stop,
the two men reportedly had a shot of liquor. After midnight,
Brian and Clint met up with a friend of Clint's
named Meredith in the Short North neighborhood of Columbus. The
(05:36):
Short North is an RT hipster type neighborhood just north
of downtown Columbus. It apparently got its name from local
police who referred to the area as being north of
downtown but short of the Ohio State University campus, which
sits farther north up High Street. Meredith gave the two
(05:57):
a ride back to the Ugly Tuna saloona where they
had begun the night out, and she joined them for
one last drink before they called it a night. This
is where things get murky. Clint and Meredith lost track
of Brian around this time. He was last seen on
the security camera at the bar around one fifty five
(06:18):
a m. When they could not locate Brian, the two
friends kept calling him. Eventually, they left with the other
patrons when the bar closed at two a m. Waiting
outside the front door for Brian to come out. When
he was not among the departing crowd, they assumed he
had returned to his apartment without letting them know. Both
(06:42):
Alexis and Randy tried calling Bryan later that weekend, but
he didn't answer any of their calls. On Monday morning,
he missed the flight to Miami that he and Alexis
had scheduled. It was at this point that friends and
family knew something was seriously wrong, and he was reported
missing to the Columbus Police. Police began their search for
(07:08):
Brian back at the Ugly Tuna Saluna, the bar where
he had been last seen. Like many businesses, the gateway
building which housed the Ugly Tuna and other businesses, had
installed security cameras. Police reviewed the security camera footage, which
showed Brian, Clint, and Meredith going up an escalator to
(07:32):
the bar's main entrance at one fifteen am. Brian was
seen outside the bar around one fifty five am, talking
briefly with two young women and saying goodbye, and then
moving off camera. The camera did not record him leaving
shortly afterward when the Ugly Tuna closed, so this was
(07:53):
the last known time that Brian was seen. It was possible.
Investigators realized that if Brian was trying to purposely leave
the bar undetected, he could have changed his clothes in
the bar, or put on a hat and kept his
head down, hiding his face from the camera. He might
have also left the building by another route. That service
(08:18):
store that we mentioned before, which is not generally used
by the public, was a short distance from where Brian
was last seen. This exit led to a first floor
hallway which featured access at the time to a construction
area with its own exterior exit. Some officers believed this
would have been difficult to walk through while sober, and
(08:41):
nearly impossible after a night of bar hopping. However, the
cameras in that area might have also missed Brian. One
panned across the area constantly, and the other was operated manually.
The Ugly Tuna Yuna itself had several exits aside from
(09:02):
the one public entrance. The upper level had a traditional
firescape and a freight elevator. When Brian was standing with
his friends at the top of the escalator, he sometimes
stood under the camera out of view. There were two
wooden doors on the second floor that were chained together,
but a person could possibly squeeze through the opening. Those
(09:25):
wooden doors led to the ground level and the service
and construction exits that we mentioned earlier. Police watched video
of the service exit that showed bar staff and a
band that played there that night leaving, but Brian was
not seen in that video. So when investigators then checked
(09:46):
the construction exit camera, they found that the manual override
had been turned on, so that camera was not recording
at all that night. Since videos from the main entry
and the service exit showed no sign of Brian leaving.
Police began to focus on that construction exit since it
(10:08):
was the one known exit that had no video. That
does not mean that Brian necessarily left out of the
construction exit, though, because there were other businesses in that
building complex. Remember this was a mixed development complex that
included other restaurants, several of which were open late at night.
Like the Ugly Tuna. Many of these businesses left their
(10:32):
interior service doors open to the inside of the complex,
meaning Brian could have walked into one of those other
restaurants from the inside and then left through their front doors.
So this possibility occurred to police officers as well, and
they next looked at video footage from the other establishments
(10:53):
in the complex to see if they showed any sign
of Brian leaving that night. However, those cameras all so
showed no sign of Brian. The search began to fan
out from the Ugly Tuna, with officers sometimes accompanied by
police dogs, looking closely in the street, inspecting dumpsters and
(11:15):
other waist containers, and asking residents if they had seen Brian.
Flyers bearing his picture showing a distinctive tattoo on Brian's
upper right arm were posted, and police even went down
into the City of Columbus's sewer system and searched there,
but with no luck in any of their searches. At
(11:39):
Brian's apartment, which was located about six blocks from the bar,
his car was still parked in the parking lot, and
nothing inside the apartment seemed suspicious or provided any clues
on his whereabouts. After searching extensively for Brian both near
(12:01):
and far, police began to consider other possible reasons for
Brian's apparent disappearance. Earlier, we noted that Brian's mother had
recently died, and it was speculated that he could have
gone off on his own to grieve in solitude, but
he never came back home and missed his important trip
(12:22):
to Miami, so this theory was not taken too seriously.
Not wanting to give up hope, Alexis continued to call
Brian's phone every night for quite a long time after
the disappearance. Her calls would typically go straight to voicemail,
(12:43):
but one night, about five months after the disappearance, it
rang three times before going to voicemail. When police looked
into this anomaly, the cell phone provider said that the
three rings were likely the result of some type of computeritch. However,
a ping from the phone was detected at a cell
(13:05):
tower in Hilliard, Ohio, which is about fourteen miles northwest
of Columbus. It's not clear how or why that would
have happened. It's also been said that Brian's phone had
pinged in the few days following his disappearance, which, if true,
(13:25):
would mean it's very likely that he left the bar
and went somewhere else. Of course, it could also mean
that he got separated from his phone at some point,
perhaps he dropped it, or maybe someone else ended up
with it somehow. Meanwhile, police received hundreds of tips from
(13:48):
the public, but none of them resulted in any breakthroughs
in the case. Brian was a huge fan of the
band Pearl Jam, and at a Pearl Jam concert later
that year in Cincinnati, Ohio, the lead singer of the band,
Eddie Vetter, briefly paused the concert to ask concertgoers to
submit any tips they had on Brian's disappearance. Again, though,
(14:12):
nothing useful came from those tips, which included reported sightings
in Michigan, Texas, and even Sweden. Brian's father. Randy had,
of course, recently suffered the death of his wife, and
now he continued the search for Brian on his own.
After police resources were redirected elsewhere. Randy Schaeffer went so
(14:39):
far as to ask for help from a psychic who
told him she believed Brian's body was in water near
a bridge. So Randy, Derek's brother Brian, in another concerned
area residence, bought waiters and spent a lot of time
along the banks of the nearby Old Tangy River, which
(15:01):
flows through the city of Columbus. Those valiant efforts also
came up empty, though. A couple years later, in September
two thousand and eight, tragedy unfortunately struck the Shaeffer family
yet again. Randy Shaeffer was working in the yard of
(15:21):
his home in Ohio during a strong windstorm. During the storm,
a large branch blew off a tree in the yard,
hit Randy and killed him. Neighbors found his body the
following day and reported it to police. When Randy's obituary
(15:42):
was posted online, it was accompanied by an online condolence book.
One of those posts in the condolence book said, quote
to Dad love Brian and in parentheses US Virgin Islands unquote.
This suggested Brian my have left for Columbus for a
new life elsewhere. However, upon further investigation, the note was
(16:07):
found to have been posted from a publicly accessible computer
at a library in the Columbus area. It was determined
to be just a tasteless hoax. In a twenty fourteen
story published in a local magazine, Columbus police said they
were still receiving at least two tips a month on
the case via the local crime Stoppers hotline, though none
(16:29):
had proven fruitful. Police stated that they had three theories
about what happened to Brian, but would not discuss them,
not even in general terms. Five years later, in twenty nineteen,
a photo of an alleged American man in Tijuana, Mexico,
began circulating on online, with the man bearing some resemblance
(16:52):
to Brian. Columbus police were provided with the photo, and
they sent the image to the FBI for facial recognition analysis,
but the FBI determined that the man was not Brian Shaeffer.
In March twenty twenty one, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal
(17:12):
Investigation released an age progressed photo of what Brian might
look at age forty two, nearly fifteen years after his disappearance.
After Brian's disappearance, Randy Shaeffer joined with families of other
missing adults in Ohio to advocate for a state law
(17:34):
establishing a protocol for local police to follow. At the
time Brian disappeared, it was left up to individual police
departments how to handle the cases, and some felt that
the investigations into the relative's disappearance had suffered as a result.
By the time Randy Shaeffer died, the bill had become
law in Ohio. Brian was last wearing jeans, a blue
(18:02):
or green striped shirt, and sneakers. He is a white male,
six feet two inches tall. He weighed about one hundred
and seventy pounds at the time of his disappearance, and
has brown hair and hazel eyes. So the question remains
what happened to Brian Schaeffer. Did he purposely disappear to
(18:25):
live off the grid. Was he a victim of foul play?
Was he involved in a fatal accident? Who were the
two young women he was seen talking to just before
the bar closed. It is truly a mystery, and let
me know what you think. Also, Anyone with information about
(18:45):
the case is asked to call the Columbus Division of
Police at area code six one four six four five
two three five eight. And that's all for this episode
of Great Leight Makes True Crime. You can say hi
to us on Facebook and the X just search for
Great Lakes True Crime. You can also check out the
(19:08):
show notes for sources and more information. Please send any
thoughts or case suggestions to Great Lakes Truecrime at gmail
dot com. And if you like the show, please give
us a positive review and encourage your friends to subscribe.
We need new subscribers as that really helps us out
(19:31):
for Great Lakes True Crime. This has been Steve, your
host and producer. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
Buys the Report Recorder and cap Conticent.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
The cont
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