Full Transcript for S09E26: In Through the Out Door (The Brian Shaffer Mystery)

had died from an aggressive, fast moving cancer. Although Brian had been stoical about it on the surface, Randy knew his son was in pain. He tried to convince Brian to take some time off school. Surely the college would understand, he thought, but Brian wouldn't hear of it. He insisted that missing his exams would just derail his whole med school career and stress him out even more. Clearly, Brian needed to keep things as normal as possible in order to cope. That's why Randy had insisted on taking him out to dinner to celebrate the end of the semester. It was their tradition, after all. But they were here in their favorite steakhouse, Renee's absence felt all the more glaring, but neither of them wanted to acknowledge it. Instead, they just made small talk about the exams, which Brian said had gone pretty well all things considered, and they talked about Brian's vacation plans for spring break. At the end of their dinner, Randy was surprised when Brian said he was going to meet some friends for drinks at a local bar, considering how tired he clearly was. What he really needed was an early night, and Randy almost said so, but decided better of it. After all, maybe a night out with friends to blow off some steam was exactly what he needed. He couldn't possibly have known then it was the last time he'd ever see his son. Brian Schaeffer was born and raised in Pickerington, a suburb just outside of Columbus, Ohio. He was a bright, energetic kid who made friends easily and was good at almost everything he tried. He was a model student, played multiple sports, and as a teenager, had even taught himself how to play the guitar. He loved it so much that he had dreams of starting his own alternative rock band one day, but it was never more than a passing fantasy. In truth, Brian was far too disciplined and sensible to do that. As the older of two brothers, he also had a strong sense of responsibility. Being the first child, he felt it was important to set a good example for his younger brother. His father, Randy, an electrician, and his mother, Renee, who was a nurse, had always encouraged him to choose a stable career path, and medicine seemed about as solid as they come. In two thousand and three, Brian earned his undergraduate degree in microbiology from Ohio State University before taking a place at their medical school. It seemed like a natural fit to his friends and family. He had the right mix of smarts and social skills to become an excellent doctor. Despite the grueling pace of that first year at med school, Brian adapted well. He kept up with all of his course work while still carving out some time for a social life and the occasional guitar jam session. In the fall of two thousand and five, right at the beginning of his second year, Brian started dating fellow medical student Alexis Wagoner. Things quickly got serious between them, in part because soon after they met, Brian was shaken by some devastating news from home. His mother, Renee, was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of blood cancer. Brian had always been close to his mum. She was his closest confidante, and the idea of life without her was unthinkable. But Renee didn't want Brian to worry, so she did what she could to play down her condition. But with Brian now a med student, he couldn't be fooled. He understood the prognosis too well. Even so, the speed of his mother's decline still stunned him. In early March of two thousand and six, only six months after her diagnosis, Renee passed away in hospital, surrounded by her family. Brian was shattered by the loss, but he was also determined not to let it derail him, so rather than take any time off school, he doubled down in his studies in his mum's honor, trying to do what he thought she would want, or, as he put it on his MySpace page, she will always inspire me to do my best, and I don't want to let her down. As Brian's friends could tell, he was handling the loss of his mother about as well as could be expected. He planned to just stay focused until his exams were out of the way, and then he could take some much needed time to try and process it all during spring break, when he and Alexis had booked a vacation to Florida. By then, the couple's friends and family were pretty sure that Brian was planning to propose during that trip. Between grief and the pressures of med school, it seemed that Brian had grown up a lot in the past year, and maybe the idea of settling down appealed to him, being a chance to get some stability and control back into his life. Besides, as some of them figured, it was probably what his mum would have wanted for him. On March thirty first, the final day of classes before spring break, back in Brian's home, his father Randy Shaeffer stood in the doorway of his bedroom, still utterly devastated by his wife's death. He hadn't been able to bring himself to touch any of her belongings. Her clothes were still draped over a chair, her jewelry still out on her make up table. Even the books she'd been reading when she died was still on her nightstand. Randy took it all in and then switched off the light and headed out to meet his son. That night, he drove over to the Outback steakhouse in the city of Reyneldsburg, Situated almost exactly half way between the shaef A home and the Ohio State University campus. It had become the family's favorite meeting spot ever since Brian started his undergrad studies. That night, Randy was determined to put on a brave face for Brian, and the reverse was also true, so they both made an effort to keep things light as they ate their rebbied steaks. At some point, Randy asked Brian about his upcoming trip to Miami with Elector. Brian had always loved Florida. In fact, he loved anywhere with a beach and a tropical climate. Before he'd committed to medical school. It sometimes joked about leaving it all behind and moving to an island where he could make music and drink margarita's all day. This vacation, he thought, would

give him at least a taste of that dream. Then, when the night was over, Randy paid the bill and said goodbye to his son. He gave him a quick hug and jokingly told him, don't do anything I wouldn't do. And in that moment, as he watched his son walk away into the night, Randy would later say that he suddenly felt an all consuming sense of foreboding and had the sudden urge to run after Brian and hold him back, as if he somehow saw the city for what it was in that moment, a gaping, snarling mouth about to swallow his son whole. Whether that was true or just the distorted way that he remembered that night in the aftermath of what was to come. Either way, if it had been true, it would have been with good reason. After dinner, Brian drove back home to his apartment on campus where he lived alone, to park his car, and then walked a few blocks to OSU's South campus gateway, A sprawling shopping and entertainment complex for students. There, he met up with his former roommate William Florence, also known as Clint, at the Ugly Tuna saloona a busy college bar. The place was packed with students celebrating the start of spring break, and there was a restless kind of excitement in the air, laughter and chatter almost drowning out the music. Brian and Clint both drank a beer and had a shot, taking advantage of that night's special offer, and talked about how their exams had gone. A bit before ten pm, Brian stepped outside to make a phone call, and he dialed Alexis, who was visiting her family in Toledo that weekend. The pair finalized their travel plants and agreed to meet at Columbus Airport on Monday morning to catch their flight to Miami. Brian told Alexis he loved her and told her to say hi to her parents from him. Just as Brian was finishing his call, Clint emerged from the bar and suggested they get started on their bark crawl. They worked their way gradually southwards across the city, stopping every now and again along the way at every bar, they each had a single shot of hard liquor, never lingering long before moving on. Two hours and as many miles later, they reached a bar in the Short North neighborhood, where they met up with a friend of Clint's called Meredith Reid. But it was getting close to midnight and Brian was beginning to succumb to all the sleepless nights and stresses of the exam week. Sensing that the night was winding down, Meredith offered to give the guys a ride back to the University district and get one last drink there with them. A short time later, at one fifteen am, the three of them rode up the escalator to the main entrance of the Ugly Tuna Saluna, where Brian and Clint had begun earlier in the night. Both were several drinks deep at this point, but weren't visibly drunk or out of control. By then. The bar was much less packed than it had been earlier, but the atmosphere was still buzzing and a life band was playing. The trio mingled and danced. Then at some point Brian got separated from the others. It's been suggested that shortly After re entering the Ugly Tuna Saluna, Brian and Clint got in to an argument, but this has never been confirmed in any case. By the time the bar closed at two am, Clint and Meredith appeared to have completely lost Brian. They both lingered by the exit as other patrons descended the escalator, wondering if perhaps Brian was still in the bar, maybe using the restroom or finishing up a conversation with someone. They tried texting and calling him as they scanned the faces of the thinning crowd of people as they emerged one by one from the bar, but Brian didn't respond, and neither did he appear to emerge from the bar Barely a few minutes later, the Ugly Tuna saloona turned out its lights and locked its doors. A security guard confirmed that there was nobody left inside. Confused, Clint and Meredith assumed that Brian must have simply gone home without them. It was a little strange, but he wouldn't be the first person to pull a French exit when he got tired. The next morning, Brian's dad, Randy, knew better than to try calling his son so soon after a night out, even when he finally shot off a text to him on Saturday afternoon, how was last night? He wasn't surprised not to get a reply. Brian's girlfriend, Alexis, who was busy with her family and Toledo for most of Saturday, had tried calling him earlier in the day to check in, but her call went straight to voicemail, so she figured he was just sleeping off a hangover. She tried again that evening, but again it went to voicemail. A thread of unease began to twist in her stomach, but she tried to shake it off. They'd already finalized their plans and agreed to meet at the airport on Monday morning, so there wasn't anything pressing they needed to talk about. Even still, Brian had always been communicative, and it was rare for them to go a full day without any contact. On Sunday, she tried him again, but yet again, it went to voicemail. By now, Alexis was beginning to wonder if Brian had lost or broken his phone. She thought about calling his dad, but the family had been through so much recently that she didn't want to worry him unnecessarily. On Monday morning, Alexis arrived at the airport as planned, but Brian was nowhere to be seen. Alexis could only wait at the security gate, watching as one after another passenger filed pass to get onto their flight. On the huge illuminated departures board above her head, she watched as the status of their flight to Miami moved from go to gate, to boarding to final call. Then she felt her phone vibrate in her pocket, and for a second her heart leapt. But it wasn't Brian, it was his dad. As Alexus answered the phone call, she realized for the first time that her hands were shaking. Her voice came out strangled with panic, and finally she told Randy everything. She told him that Brian was missing. For Andy, it was almost a relief to finally hear the words out loud. Like Alexus, he'd been desperately trying to convince himself that everything was okay,

even as his texts and calls went unanswered. Now finally he could spring into action. As soon as he got off the phone with Alexis, Randy reported Brian missing to the Columbus Police and told them everything he knew about his son's Friday night plans. The cops began by interviewing Clint, who gave them a rough timeline of the evening. As he explained it to them, he'd last seen Brian inside the Ugly tunis Lie around one forty am, but hadn't been able to find him when the bar closed at two. This location was good news for the investigation thanks to high crime rates in the surrounding neighborhood. The South Campus Gateway complex where the bar was located, had numerous security cameras. When the police reviewed the security footage, they quickly identified Brian, Clint, and Meredith going up the escalator towards the bar at one fifteen am. This matched the timeline that Clint had given them, which lent credibility to his statement, but otherwise didn't give them much to go on. And then at one fifty five am, just five minutes before the bar closed, incredibly, Brian was picked up on CCTV emerging from the bar into the street outside. He appeared to talk to two young women there before heading back into the bar. The CCTV footage then revealed Clinton Meredith leaving a few minutes later, along with the rest of the bar's remaining punters. That night, but Brian wasn't among them. Despite scourring the footage again and again, the police couldn't find a glimpse of him leaving the club. No one in the footage really looked like him or was wearing the same clothes as him that night. The position of the camera also eliminated any blind spots. It was inconceivable that anyone could have used that main entrance without showing up on the footage, which left two possible explanations. Either Brian had deliberately disguised himself by changing his clothes and hiding his face from the cameras sneaking out with the crowd at two a m. Or else he'd left by a different route. Officially, the Ugly Tuna Saloona's main entrance was the only way in and out of the building, but there was a service door tucked away in the side of the bar, not far from the spot where Brian had last been seen. It led to a first floor hallway, which in turn led to a construction area there wasn't technically open to the public, but wasn't locked either. There were security cameras in that area too, and when the police reviewed that footage there was no sign of Brian there either, but the camera coverage there was much more patchy and had multiple blind spots, so it was entirely possible that he could have slipped past unrecorded. Still, there was no mistaking that service door for a public exit. If Brian had chosen to leave the bar that way, it was because he didn't want to be seen, because he wanted to disappear. Even though multiple bars in the area had security cameras too, Brian wasn't visible on any of them. After one fifty five a m. On the morning of April first, there wasn't a glimpse of him anywhere in the city. In the days following Brian's disappearance, the police mounted a vast search effort, which spiraled outwards from the Ugly Tuna SALOONA and Brian's apartment nearby. As many as fifty officers went door to door asking for information. They searched local hospitals and homeless shelters, while police docks were used to comb through dumpsters, landfills, and abandoned buildings for any evidence of Brian, but there was nothing. They questioned Brian's family, friends and fellow students, hoping to uncover some dark secret that might offer a clue a drug habit perhaps, or gambling debts, or even a known enemy. But yet again they came up empty handed. Nobody had anything bad to say about Brian, nor any clue where he might have gone. Brian's own apartment offered no leads either. His car was still parked outside, so wherever he'd gone, he hadn't used his own vehicle to get there. This was significant because detectives were considering the possibility that Brian had disappeared voluntarily. By anyone's standards, he'd been under intense stress before he disappeared. There was the fresh grief of his mother's death, the sleep deprivation and stress from his exams, maybe even the pressure he'd felt to propose to Alexis. But Brian's friends and family dismissed this out of hand, and even the detective who thought it was possible had to admit that Brian didn't fit the profile. Typically, people who deliberately disappear tend to do so to escape financial ruin abuse, or a similarly unbearable and inescapable situation. Despite everything that Brian had been through, he had a stable life and a loving family. He was close to it just didn't feel right if Brian hadn't intended to disappear, The police figured there were only two real possibilities to explain what had happened to him. Either he'd fallen victim to an accident, or a deliberate act of violence. Because that service door from the bar led into a construction area which wasn't well lit at night, investigators thought it might be possible that Brian had fallen there and somehow died, but after an exhaustive search of the whole site, no body was ever found. As for an act of violence, there was no sign of a struggle or foul play at the bar, and Brian was a strong, athletic young man who was more than capable of defending himself even after several drinks. It is hard to fathom how he could have been overpowered and taken against his will without anybody noticing, and without any video evidence, every possibility seemed equally implausible. Before long, the police began to wonder if Clint or Meredith were hiding something. They asked the pair to take polygraph tests. Meredith agreed happily and passed the test, but Clint refused such tests. Are notoriously unreliable, so perhaps Clint figured not unreasonably, that he didn't want to subject himself to something so unpredictable, especially if he didn't have anything to hide. Either way, there was no evidence to suggest

that Clint had anything to do with Brian's disappearance, and the security footage clearly showed him leaving the bar with Meredith after they appeared to have innocently failed to find him. All the while, brian father Randy continued to search relentlessly for his son. Losing his son so soon after his wife's death without any closure was too much for him to bear. Throwing himself into the search was just about all he could do to keep it together, and so as the official investigation began to lose steam, he wrapped up his own. He and Brian's younger brother Derek formed a search party with some of their neighbors, and together they spent hours trudging along the shores of the Olan Tangy River searching for any sign of Brian. Meanwhile, Alexis would repeatedly call Brian's cell phone, in part just so she could hear his voice on the voicemail, but also in the hope that one day somebody might answer, and for months it went straight to voicemail. But then one night she called Brian's phone again and it began to ring. As Alexis sat listening to that ring tone, she was instantly seized by hope. But after only a few rings, the call once again went to voicemail as usual. Investigators determined that this was probably just caused by a glitch on the cell phone network, but then Brian's phone from that exact call was later found to have pinged a tower in Hilliard, a northwestern suburb of Columbus. This cell phone ping is the closest thing to new evidence that submerged since Brian went missing, but in the end, just like everything else, it led nowhere. Although dozens of tips came in from members of the public claiming to have seen Brian in locations as far apart as Texas to Sweden, none of these leads panned out either. In September two thousand and eight, Brian's father, Randy, was killed in a freak accident by a falling tree branch during a storm. Then, in the comments of his online obituary, a post appeared claiming to be from Brian, giving his location as the Virgin Islands, but the police soon determined that the post was just a cruel hoax. Today, the investigation into Brian's disappearance is officially still active and remains one of Ohio's most notorious cold cases. In twenty twenty one, authorities released an age progressed photo showing what Brian would look like in his forties, in the hopes that he might still be located one day. Hope doesn't have an expiration date. The Ohio Attorney General set Every Missing Person Counts. This spring of twenty twenty six marks twenty years since Brian's was last seen. This episode was written by Emma Dibden and produced by me Richard McLain smith. Thank you as ever for listening. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation or a story of your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through X and Blue Sky at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com, Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast