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Aug. 31, 2015 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:15:23
Edition 219 - Missing 411 Update

Ex-Detective David Paulides on his latest intensive research into the mysteries of missingpeople...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Return of the Unexplained.
Thank you very much for bearing with me for a lovely crop of emails that I've had recently.
A lot from new listeners.
If you are new to the show, if somebody's referred you to it, or you've just discovered it by yourself, do let me know where you are.
Tell me what you think of the show, how you found it, all that kind of stuff, because I'm trying to put together a kind of profile of who likes this show, where they are, how they found it, and the kind of stuff they want to hear on the show.
Very, very important to me to feed back to me.
You can do that very easily by going to the website theunexplained.tv and following the link, send me a message, just a short one if you want to.
Tell me about yourself and where you are and anything else you want to say.
Lovely to hear from you.
Had some really nice, very heartwarming emails and some nice suggestions, not only about the show, but also about me and my life and all sorts of stuff.
I think we are becoming a family, and it's a lovely feeling to think that this little tiny podcast put together by some broadcaster in the UK is reaching many corners of the world and many different people, many different backgrounds.
It's what I always dreamt I would do when I set out in this broadcasting and journalism career of mine, but I could never have dreamt that one day we would be able to do this.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on all of this.
Adam is the guy who basically puts the show out to you, makes sure that everything is ticking over and is responsible for the look of that website that so many of you have been praising.
Watch out for some developments with the website and with what we're doing here in the coming months.
And yes, I know that I've been told that I often say that, but this time, I think we're going to do some big things.
He is hoping.
You know, there are no guarantees in this world, but let's see.
The guest on this show is one of the most popular guests of The Unexplained's history.
His name David Paulidis.
Dave Paulidis, former detective who writes books about missing people in the most incredible detail.
And I never really thought too much about the chronology of and the circumstances of people who go missing.
Not until I discovered Dave and his books.
Now I think every time if I have on the news, for example, when I'm on the radio to report the case of a missing person, I try and think about the circumstances and any commonalities of that missing person to other cases.
And in many cases there are.
Dave has done the most incredible research.
His latest book is only just out.
We may be the first interview with him, certainly one of the first.
This book released, I think, August 31st, September 1st.
So you're hearing this literally hot off the press.
And this one features a lot of young guys who've gone missing near water in very often mysterious circumstances.
And once again, in common with other books that Dave has written, other books in the missing 411 series, missing 411 series, once again, we find holes and discrepancies in investigations.
Sometimes investigations are abandoned, they're not done properly, and bizarre strangenesses about the actual discovery, if the person is discovered dead, sometimes they're not discovered at all, but the actual discovery of the person, which may be very close to the person's point of disappearance, which seems utterly bizarre.
Sometimes six or ten or more days, sometimes a period of months elapse, and the person is then found in or near water, very close to where they went missing.
And we have to ask ourselves, don't we, how can this be?
One of the common threads of this book, Missing 411, this particular edition, a sobering coincidence, is that these people often are pillars of the community.
They're young, fit men who are highly responsible people and are not known for going out, getting, as we say here in the UK, plastered and doing stupid things.
You know, these are not the kind of people in many of these cases, most of them, all of them, that do that kind of stuff.
Now, I know you will say that people sometimes behave out of character, but so many?
Well, the thing that struck me more than anything else about Dave Paulitis' research is that so many people do go missing.
And often, the cases are closed, the book is shut, and the only people to remember and keep the flame burning for these people are their immediate family, loved ones, friends.
Everybody else seems to forget, and it's all left to newspaper archives and books and people like David Paul Leitis to research it.
That's why we're going to talk with him about his new book, Missing 411, a sobering coincidence.
So let's cross now to Dave Paul Leitis in the USA.
Dave, thank you very much for coming back on The Unexplained.
It's always my pleasure, Howard.
Dave, you're a very patient man.
We had certain issues technically setting this up.
First of all, we've had torrential rain in London, so the telephone lines here have got really wet.
We had like a month's worth of rain in a day or two, and the phone lines are wet.
And so we're trying to do this by a digital workaround.
And I think it's a nice one.
It's nice and clear.
We had lots of scrunching noise when we tried to do this.
But the water from the rain very rarely gets into the phone lines where I live.
And that's what happens.
But we're okay.
We're there now.
Thank the Lord.
Dave, you know, you are a very popular guest on this show.
Whenever you have come on here, as soon as the show has gone out, I start getting the emails saying, great show with Dave Paulitis.
When's he coming back?
You know, that's the effect that you seem to have on people.
How does that make you feel?
Humbled.
I appreciate it, and I just feel graced that somebody is willing to listen to me.
And what is it in you, I know there's the police background, the detective background there, but what is it about you that makes you want to do this?
You know, Howard, after you meet a couple of families that have gone through the loss of a loved one and there aren't answers and they're pained and nobody seems to help them and nobody wants to listen, after a while, it really goes to the core of you as a person.
And I think anybody who has a heart is going to be drawn to these people to see what you can do to help them.
And unfortunately, the government, the search and rescue people, nobody has the time or the resources to really look into this and to be an ear for these people and try to help them.
And for whatever reason, I think I'm that person at this point.
And that's an interesting phenomenon you point to here.
And I think that it speaks to a lot of our lives, both sides of the Atlantic.
As more and more people come into this world, as more and more organizations use fewer and fewer people and more technology, everything becomes very impersonal.
So when police have concluded their inquiries, even if the result of those inquiries has not been very satisfactory, in other words, there are many questions that still need to be answered, they close the book and everybody walks away from it, apart from the people directly affected whose lives will forever be scarred by the disappearance of somebody who's subsequently found dead in strange circumstances or perhaps is never found.
That is a fact.
And we recently did, for the people that don't know, but for the last four or five months, we've been working on a movie about missing 411.
And we've been with people, the victims, out in the environment where their loved ones have disappeared.
And sometimes the response from the agencies when we're there isn't comforting.
It isn't understanding.
It's rude.
It's abrupt.
It's curt.
You know, why don't you guys go away?
The problem's over.
We can't find your loved one.
There isn't a lot of sympathy.
There isn't a lot of warm affection there at all.
And that is a terrible thing to have to bear if you're a loved one, isn't it?
And you know, sometimes what these people want, and you hear it in the cases of natural disasters and accidents and all of these things, and murders and disappearances, people want closure.
And in many of these cases, it seems to me that is exactly what they don't get.
They don't get, and it doesn't appear as though anyone within the government resources that are assisting these people want to really pursue it.
They just want to wash their hands of it when it's that seven to ten day period when the person disappears.
It's over, it's done, that's all we can do, go away.
That's the general feeling.
And we're going to go through some of these cases in the new book, A Sobering Coincidence.
I hope that the spread of cases does your work justice, but we've got to say there are so many commonalities in these cases.
And one of the great commonalities is the fact that at the end of the day, the authorities, the coroners, both sides of the Atlantic, the police, just declare closed on an investigation because they've got other stuff to do, I guess.
And that has to be it for the families.
They have to accept that.
Well, it's a phenomenon that I think is unusual, number one.
And after meeting a couple of medical examiner coroners, you start to realize, hey, these people really kind of know what's going on, but they're in the background and they don't have the big political voice that others do.
Probably the biggest spout that anyone's given on either side of the Atlantic has been somebody who was a coroner medical examiner from Great Britain that kind of realized what was going on and spoke up.
But in this new book, it's different from the other four books where I focused on force and woods and extreme rural disappearances.
This one is a monumental step in a different direction.
We're talking about young men and women that have disappeared in an urban setting and have been found in water.
And those specifics is a categorical change from what we started from.
But those profile points of these missing people match the profile points of the people that have gone missing in the woods and forests of the woods of the world.
And in the introduction to the book, and this is something that you haven't done before because you couldn't do it up to now, this is the summation of your work to date, really.
In the intro, you talk about commonalities, the key elements, and you sum up some of those, and I'll just go through some of them if I may.
Clusters of missing people.
People missing in the same circumstances in the same place, maybe not the same time, but possibly close to that time.
The use of canines and bloodhounds that sometimes don't pick up the scent for reasons we don't understand.
Loss of time.
Some people lose time.
Water, as these cases, water is involved.
And perhaps the absolute clincher here is that in so many cases, including many of the ones that we will discuss here, these people are found, their bodies are found, or maybe they are found if they're lucky, in a previously searched location, somewhere that has already been gone over by the canines, by the copters, maybe by the divers, but yet there they are in a place that they shouldn't be.
And therein lies the real paradox of this investigation, because to put all of those fingerlings of facts together and to tie them into 1,400, 100 other cases that I've documented, it was a monumental task.
But then once I was onto it, I started to realize, wow, the factors here are the same.
And that can't be coincidental because there's too many of these.
I mean, in the book that we're talking about, there's over 100 cases there in many countries where the facts are essentially the same.
The disappearance leading up to the disappearance, the disappearance itself, and the facts going into the recovery are almost the same, case to case to case.
And some people, the hard hearts out there, would tend to say, I mean, we're going to look at the case of a lot of young men here, the cases of a lot of young men here.
A lot of people would say, young men go out celebrating, leave a bar or some public place where they've been drinking, go to somewhere near water, fall in the water, die, or vanish.
There's no great mystery there, is what a lot of these people would say.
I think that many people will easily go to that place in their mind if they don't read the book.
But I think once you read it, it's overwhelming how accurate these cases are, case to case to case, how many of them there are.
And then when you get together and you just put them on a map, you start to think, oh my gosh, how can these be just here?
Because if kids went missing in the same way all over the world, then why aren't these scattered at every university that's anywhere near a water anywhere in the world?
I can't answer that.
That is a fascinating fact and one that needs to be investigated, and that's what you've done.
Let's start on page nine of your book in Illinois.
We work our way through the American states and then we'll go abroad after that.
But Illinois, case of Trevor Ho Heisel or Ho Heisel.
Age 27, all of these people are young.
This is Chicago, Illinois.
One went to Chicago town or city to watch a baseball game or basketball game with a friend.
They went to a bar.
He was seen near the river after that visit to the bar, but the coroner ruled out drowning after a body was found.
That is a very common theme, isn't it?
Fill me in on some of the details of this case and why it's odd.
So Trevor, 27 years old, he went with a friend to a Minnesota Golden Gophers basketball game.
He used to be an equipment manager for the team.
He knew it well.
They were playing in a Big Ten tournament in Chicago.
They went to the game, and afterwards, they all went to a place called Dick's Last Resort Bar.
And this is one block from their hotel, which happened to be the Sheraton Towers.
The Sheraton Towers sits on the Chicago River right at Lake Michigan.
It's the closest hotel to both points.
Now, what's interesting about this is that I write about two incidents where both people were staying at the Sheraton Towers.
And out of the hundreds and hundreds of hotels in the Chicago area, I think it's really weird that both these that I happen to write about were the Sheraton Towers.
Why do you think that is weird?
People stay at hotels, don't they?
And that's a big hotel.
I think the statistical odds of people who drown in rivers, and of the only four in that urban Chicago area that I wrote about, two out of the four came from the Sheraton.
I think it's weird.
Right.
Now, in this case, in Trevor's case, here we have somebody who is, and this is another common theme running right through these cases.
You know, we're not talking about party people.
We're not talking about people who do reckless things on a regular basis.
We're talking about responsible people with responsible places in society.
Either they're students or they're people who've got good educations and are holding down good positions.
And that exactly is the template this man fits.
You know, Howard, you just hit on something that a lot of people are going to miss.
I write in the book that these people that I've documented are some of the brightest, smartest, best people.
And I'm saying wholesomely nice people you could ever meet.
These aren't drug dealers, criminals, alcoholics.
These are stellar individuals that happen to disappear under the same circumstances time after time.
So I applaud you for realizing that.
But anyhow, they went to a bar called Dick's Last Resort Bar.
They stayed till about 1130.
Trevor said he was tired.
He was leaving.
Surveillance footage outside showed Trevor in an isolated section near the Chicago River.
And this is after he was reported missing.
The police went out and they pulled footage from throughout the Chicago area.
And they found this one closed-circuit television that happened to catch him in this isolated area.
And they couldn't even figure out why he was there.
But as the camera pans back and forth, he's there in one second.
The camera pans back and he's gone.
And the roommate reported him missing.
Divers went in the river.
They found the body.
But the cameras never caught him going in or what caused him to go in the river.
And this in itself is one thing in the dozens of cases where cameras are involved.
Never is the individual seen on camera disappearing.
There's a lot of cameras in these cases where nobody sees the person leaving the bar.
The cameras are on the bar the whole time and never catch him leaving the bar.
And even law enforcement talks about they reviewed 40 hours of footage at this one bar.
And the detective said, as far as I could tell, the guy never left the bar.
So how he ended up where he did, I don't know.
And yes, because of the progression of police business and official business, I presume a line has been drawn under that case.
When did it happen?
Let me just check.
I mean, they're all recent cases.
This was 1998.
So, you know, that's the end of the matter for the officials involved in this case.
Exactly.
I mean, okay, we found him in the river.
He's drowned.
Not too bad.
Sorry.
Move on to the next case.
Well, let's, you and I do that now.
Harsha Medulla, Evanston, Illinois, 18 years of age.
You know, quite a few people in this book are that kind of tender age.
It's just the beginning of your life when everything should be starting for you.
One of a number of brilliant students working towards being a physician, you say, top of the class, went to a party, was seen to leave that party, told a friend by phone that he'd reached home, but it seems that he didn't.
And his cell phone records show that he walked to a place called Wilmette Harbor.
There was a five-day search.
There were divers involved.
We're going to hear this again.
Helicopters involved as well.
And as the search is winding down, lo and behold, they find a body in the area that had already been extensively searched and nothing found.
And a great mystery about that.
Exactly.
Harsha was top of the class, described as everybody as brilliant.
He wanted to be a physician.
He had everything to do it.
He was stellar.
And he went with some friends to a party.
I actually went to the location where the party was located.
And then we drove from that house to the harbor.
And what's interesting is that we all agreed, there's a group in the car with me, and we all agreed there was no way that he could mistake the direction he was going to the harbor versus the direction he was going back to his dorm.
And then once you get to the harbor, it's blatantly obvious you're at a harbor.
There's a lot of boats there.
It's right off of Lake Michigan.
There's a big Coast Guard station there.
Now, what's interesting about this case and fascinates me is that when Harsha disappeared, right away the FBI arrives.
Now the FBI doesn't arrive on cases where there isn't physical evidence of a crime that's occurred unless it's a very, very small child.
So they get there, there's no evidence of a crime, and they have an FBI agent on scene that's monitoring the case.
Now, I've said this in past books that I've written, that the FBI doesn't do this for their health.
They're doing this for a specific reason, and they're the best documentation source in the world on criminal activity.
So he's there, the agent's there, he's documenting what's happening, but why?
This is just a college kid who disappeared.
And as you say, Harsha disappears, and there's a huge search of the harbor, and it's not a big harbor.
And they used sight scanning sonar.
They made sure that that area was completely clear.
Well, days after he disappeared, a fisherman's there, and a fisherman sees a body in the water.
They recover it.
It's Harsha.
He has a blood alcohol level of 0.12, which wouldn't be staggeringly drunk.
And the determination is freshwater drowning, accidental drowning.
And his family comes back and says, this is absolutely bogus.
There's no way my brother would have ended up there by accident.
And he's a really good swimmer.
If he would have fallen in, he would have just swam out.
We have to say that, look, I live near the River Thames.
There are many times when, you know, in my days when I worked in central London on the radio, when I'd have to go to charity dues and things like that, and sometimes I'd have a little too much to drink.
I wouldn't be rolling drunk, and I would have to go by the river on my way home.
But I knew what the river was, where it was, and I knew that, you know, I would be unwise to go into that river under any circumstances.
So a very strange case.
There is another factor about this, and I'm trying to find a delicate way of putting this, but he was discovered with his zipper down.
And so that made it easy for people investigating this to say, well, he obviously was trying to relieve himself on the riverbank and fell in.
And that may seem as an appropriate answer until you look at the vast amount of evidence that we've accumulated in the last five years.
And that is, is that we found these people with their pants down to their knees.
We found them with their pants down to their ankles.
We found them without clothes on, without shoes on.
It's almost as though somebody is redressing these people and doesn't complete the task.
Sometimes they're found with their clothes on backwards.
Sometimes the parents say, well, this is weird because my son or daughter can't even dress themselves or undress themselves and they're found in a state of undress.
So I don't put a lot of credence into that at all.
The missing shoes thing is a phenomenon we've seen in your other books.
And I had an email from a police officer here in the UK recently who said it is quite common for people to be found without shoes in circumstances like that because sometimes trauma to the body of various kinds makes the, I think he was trying to put the point, makes the feet expand and the shoes are expelled.
Well, I used to be a fatal accident investigator, and when somebody's hit by something that's going fast, whether it's a train, a car, you get knocked right out of your shoes.
So I see the point he's trying to make, but the reality is, is that many times when a huge search is occurring, not only are the clothes not found, but the shoes aren't even found, and the victim's found later on.
So really, where did the shoes go and where did the clothes go?
And more questions, once again, and somebody behaving in a way, you know, if that was supposed to be party behavior and the guy came to a mishap, it's just out of character.
Here's another person, a brilliant person who vanished in a place that I know, this one, Portland, Maine.
Nathan Billmeyer, 31 years of age, was celebrating, this is page 46 of your book, celebrating graduation with friends.
There was a strange phone call saying that he was lost near an official-looking stone building.
In your other books, we've heard cases like this, where people have been apparently lost somewhere where you wouldn't expect them to be lost.
And they've said things like that.
His flip-flop shoes were found near the water.
He was found dead with blood alcohol level.
I'm not sure what that blood alcohol level was.
Maybe you can explain that.
But here was somebody very, very responsible again.
Yeah, he was one of the oldest people I've written about in the book.
He was 31.
And Portland is a beautiful city.
Sits right on the water.
Nathan Billmeyer was his name.
Brilliant.
Raised in Osborne, Kansas.
His mixed name was Nate.
He was a valedictorian of his high school class.
And he got a scholarship to the University of Kansas where he graduated with a B.S. degree in IT.
And he ended up working in healthcare where he met his wife.
He was an outdoors person.
He liked to golf, ski, stuff like that.
And later in life, he enrolled in Harvard University in their MBA program.
And he had essentially finished all of his requirements.
And the incident we're talking about happened on May 20th, 2012.
He was scheduled to graduate four days later.
Well, on May 19th, he went with two friends to Portland to celebrate graduation.
They were staying at a Hilton Garden Inn across the Street directly across the street from a club that they went to to drink.
Now, there's conflicting reports from his friends and others about how intoxicated he was, but he supposedly bumped into some band equipment at about 11:30 at night and he left the premises.
He called his friend about midnight saying he was lost and he was near some kind of official-looking building.
There was a lot of talk about what that building might have been, but there was nothing finalized about what he meant when he was lost because it was hard to get lost.
And we have to, for people who don't know Portland, Maine, now I've been there and I spent a couple of days in Portland, Maine.
Portland, Maine may be a city, but it comes across as a little town.
And in those two days or so that I was there, you know, I saw people that I recognized by sight.
It's a very small, intimate kind of place.
And the kind of place you would think it would be very hard to get lost.
And the kind of place, actually, you would find it very hard, I would have thought, to go missing without somebody noticing.
Exactly.
Well, he didn't return to the room.
His friends called the police.
And for three days, there was a massive search.
And you've got to understand, Nathan was absolutely a straight arrow guy, married, didn't mess around, didn't play games, was with lifelong friends on this couple-day adventure.
Well, after three days, they still hadn't found him.
And what the police said is that they couldn't understand where Nate was after he left because they interviewed a lot of people, a lot of businesses that were open.
His cell phone had gone dead.
This is another thing that's really common in these cases.
The cell phone goes dead or isn't on the victim when they're found or is found destroyed.
Well, on May 21st, they put divers in the water and they found one piece of clothing, but they didn't say what it was.
And at about that same time, they found Nathan's flip-flops, two of them, on the bank near the water.
Again, we go back to missing shoes, missing clothing.
A couple days later, at 11.45, divers found his body in the bay adjacent to the club.
And they ruled that accidental drowning.
There was caffeine in his system.
His blood alcohol level was 0.22.
His wife was four months pregnant, ended up giving birth to a child after Nathan was found deceased.
What a tragedy.
But again, we have to say that it is the kind of thing that you wouldn't expect to happen in a tiny, tiny place like that.
66,000 people in Portland.
And, you know, I'm sure there are people living there who could name most of them.
It is a very intimate kind of place.
So for there to be a mystery of this dimension in a place like Portland is bizarre.
Very.
Again, if you look at the map that's on the back of the book, you'll notice that most of these disappearances occurred in pretty close proximity to large bodies of water, rivers, ponds, great lakes, oceans, and from what I remember about Portland, you know, you have to make a very, if you're going to end up in the water in Portland, you have to make a very deliberate effort to go there.
It's not as if there's a riverbank that you can easily slip off.
You know, we're talking about harbor fronts and that kind of thing.
And there's, if my memory serves me right, there's a whole, almost like a coastal path in Portland that goes all the way to one of the crowning glories of Portland.
If you go there, it's even on the map, the big sewage works, right?
Which is you have to walk about a mile along this coastal path.
But the idea of ending up in the water by accident, well, these things happen, we know, but it does, in the case of somebody like that, in those circumstances, stretch credulity a bit.
Okay, let's move on.
The case of William Hurley.
This is Boston, Massachusetts, page 51.
Once again, another intelligent, quote, reliable man in the military, aged 24, sent to Boston, went to see a hockey game.
His wife was going to pick him up there.
She called him.
She could hear somebody yell an address in the background for location purposes.
And when she arrived, even though that was very, very closely connected to the time when the phone call was made, in other words, not a lot of time had elapsed, no sign of him.
His body found after a total of six days.
No word on the cause of death at the end of all of this.
But we ask the question in this case, as in so many of the others, as you just did, why did his cell phone go dead in the way that it did?
It actually went dead, I think, at the end of the phone call to his wife.
Exactly.
And we're kind of marching down this path of, okay, so the first case, maybe you could just wash it away in your mind.
It was an accident.
He fell in.
Maybe the second case.
But now this case, you're starting to walk into the area as I walk people down through the book of saying, okay, this doesn't make any sense.
Bill, his nickname was Will, was 24 years old.
He lived with his girlfriend.
This happened October 8th, 2009, 8.30 p.m. right in downtown Boston.
His friends called him Mr. Reliable, never late, always on time.
He was raised in Nashville, North Carolina.
He joined the Navy out of high school.
Most of the time he was stationed in Florida, but at one point the military group had to go to Boston on some work.
And on leave from there, he met the love of his life, a girl named Claire, on St. Patrick's Day.
They ended up getting together, and they've lived together since in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Well, on October 8th, he woke up at 4.30 a.m. and he was a groundskeeper at a golf club in Weston, Mass, at Weston Country Club.
Well, his best friend at the country club at the time was Brendan Venti.
And Brendan invited Will to go to a Boston Bruins hockey game that night.
And they went, and the Anaheim Ducks were playing.
And at the end of the first period, Will had been up so long that he was tired.
So he told Brendan that he had called Claire and he was going to go home.
He left the arena, he called Claire, and she started driving.
When she was two blocks away, she called Will and asked for the exact location he was at.
And she heard someone yell in the Background 99 Nashua Street, which is right where the arena was at.
Claire was less than a mile away, turns the corner, and at that time, he says, Hey, my phone, I think, is about to go dead, and it goes dead.
Well, as she turns that corner onto Nashua Street, she looks down the street, and nobody's there.
She pulled up to the arena, she parked the car, she walked around, she didn't see anybody, she called his name, nothing happened, she called the phone, nothing happened.
She got frustrated after about an hour, got into the car, went home, and called Boston and Quincy police.
She was told at the time she had to wait 24 hours to make a missing person's report.
The following day, she passed out flyers, made the report, called Boston PD.
They put two boats on the water looking for a body and looking for any evidence.
They found nothing.
But what they did find is they found his cell phone smashed into pieces not far from the arena.
Now, friends and family were interviewed by the police, and they described this, and I'll quote it, stunningly out of character.
He was the one person in the world that would be on time, that was stable.
If he was getting too tired at night, he'd make sure he got somebody to pick him up so he'd be fresh for work the next day.
Six days after he disappeared on October 14th, Boston police had an officer on routine patrol near the Suffolk County Jail, which is just down the street from Nashua Street.
They saw a body in the water and they recovered it 25 feet from shore.
And it was Will, and he had a wallet and his keys on his body.
Now, the district attorney made a statement that the body had been in the water for a couple of days.
Now, what's important about this is the body had been in the water for five days and six hours.
Now, as you're going to read, as you go forward in the book, that somebody along the lines is starting to pick up and starting to be smart.
There's an old saying, local cases are made and local reports are written for those local authorities.
Local reports for local authorities, meaning they're written to appease whatever the issue is in that local community.
They're not written all the time for the facts.
Now, the coroner in Boston stated the fact.
Body had been gone for five days, six hours, but it had only been in the water for a couple of days.
Meaning, in this case, it probably was overlooked, but where was the body for three days and six hours?
And as you read these other cases, there's facts that show some of these bodies have been out of the water for weeks.
So do you think that when the coroner made that inexact statement, a couple of days, was that merely an error or was that trying to fudge the fact for the appeasement of the local populace?
I think they were trying to hedge their bet in a way.
They wanted to say what was true, but they didn't want to raise the ire of the community.
But I couldn't find one article that picked up on this, but nobody's looking for this either.
You know, a body goes in the water.
Oh, so why did he drown?
You know, obviously.
But he wasn't.
This guy wasn't even drunk.
And there's no cause of death listed.
The coroner couldn't even figure out why he died.
And the phone was found smashed.
Yeah.
Which is, I mean, there are so many elements of this.
That's why I picked it that simply do not add up.
I am really surprised that let's just go back to when did this happen, you said?
October of 2009.
Yeah, 09.
You know, it's not that long ago.
I'm surprised that they are not investigating this still to this day, that they, you know, that they're not assiduously trying to find out exactly what happened in case and it may well have happened in case it happens again.
Exactly.
Well, I mean, look, you said that you wrote a very nice little note in the front jacket of this book for me, and you said this book should shake every parent to the core.
And I think unfortunately it will.
It will shake loved ones and parents to the core.
Okay, let's talk about the case of an all-American boy, another one, a 20-year-old Patrick McNeil.
This case comes from New York City.
Football player studying north of New York City went to a bar.
Friend asked him to wait for her, but he seemingly didn't wait.
He was then reported missing.
Police scoured the city.
A month and a half after he vanished, a body is found at a water pollution plant 12 miles from where he was last seen.
An autopsy, this is chilling, found burn marks and a possible ligature sign around the neck.
What do you make of this case of Patrick McNeil?
Boy, this one shook me.
And people may not believe this, but when I do the research on these cases, a lot of times I get teary-eyed because I have a son, and just listening to what these parents go through and the stress and the lack of assistance that goes into this, thank God it didn't happen to me because I know it ruined these people's lives.
Patrick was 20 years old.
This happened February 17, 97 in New York.
He was a football player in high school.
He went on to Fordham University.
His hometown was Chester, about 20 miles outside of New York City.
And Chester, Port Chester, New York is famous for the making of lifesaver candies.
In February of 97, he was a junior at Fordham majoring in accounting.
The kid was absolutely on the path.
He wanted to be an FBI agent.
In the States, back in 97, if you wanted to be an FBI agent, you had to be either an accountant or you had to be an attorney.
He was en route.
He drove for a volunteer ambulance corps.
He was an intern for the New York City Department of Investigation, and he was taking emergency medical training classes for his ambulance job.
The guy was doing everything as though to help the community.
On the 16th, he went to Dapper Dog Bar on 2nd Avenue in Manhattan.
He got inside.
A girl, after drinking for several hours with friends, a girl asked him to wait for her.
She came out of the Restroom.
He wasn't there.
Someone allegedly, although it can't be proven, saw him leave the bar.
Nobody can say for sure if anybody did, but one person said maybe he did.
His dad worked nonstop to, well, he disappeared.
He wasn't seen again after he walked outside the bar.
His dad worked nonstop to find the boy for a long time.
He did get help from Senator Diamato in New York.
And by pure chance, there's a guy named Kevin Gannon who was a New York City detective who happened to get this case.
And he checked hospitals, jails, shelters.
I write a lot about Gannon because he's one of the only people that figured this out that something really weird is going on.
50 days after Patrick disappears, his body's found in the East River in Upper New York at a place called Owl's Head Water Pollution.
Found 12 miles from where he's last seen, and he's found just wearing socks, boxers, and jeans.
No shirt, no shoes.
He's found floating face up.
Men are almost always found floating face down.
And it's unusual the location he was found in.
And also, let's not put too fine a point on it, but it's a month and a half.
It's more than that.
It's an awful long time.
It's nearly two months.
Oh, exactly, Howard.
So the coroner gets the body.
There's no evidence of hypothermia.
He disappeared in February, which it's a cold time of the year in New York.
There's no location of any lividity on the body knee.
Now, lividity, when you die, if you're laying on your back, lividity is the settling of blood at the lower portions of your body.
So it would settle in your buttocks and in the back of your back.
There was no section of the body that showed lividity, meaning it had to have been either turned or rotated, otherwise lividity, blood settles, and you see almost this black and blue effect.
Now the key point about this is that there were flies, a certain type of fly, in his groin.
What that means to any corner is that he died on land.
Now, if he died on land, then the flies would be in the groin and would be seen even if he went in the river.
Now they listed the cause of death as drowning.
This is very confusing.
Well, it is confusing because how can he die on land and then drown?
Exactly.
And so how was this case left?
I mean, this case is egregious, isn't it?
It's glaring.
How was it left for the people who loved him?
So his blood alcohol level was 0.16, not outrageously high.
Now he had second and third degree burns on his head and torso.
And that ligature mark.
Yeah, some people said that was a ligature mark, and I reported that, but the coroner in the report stated that was caused by his shirt around his neck.
So I won't play anyway on that.
But based on the reports and photos, Gannon believed that the boy was only in the water three to four days.
Now, that shows that he was held and then later dumped in the river.
His parents paid an extraordinary amount of money for a doctor named, a famous doctor, medical examiner named Cyril Wecht, to review the case.
And he believed that the boy was bound, burned, and killed on land and dumped in the water.
Now, this case wouldn't be in the book, and no one would even think about it, except that you're going to walk down this path with me where I'm going to show you many cases where there's factual evidence the person didn't die in the water.
They died on land.
They were dumped in the water later on, but it's completely ignored.
Nobody is looking at this.
Where was this boy for 45 days?
And you deliberately don't make conclusions about all of this, but you leave us with questions, chilling questions at that.
But, I mean, this could almost be the action of somebody who maybe is a serial killer who is still out there.
And that's exactly the place people go on my other books.
But the problem being, this has happened in many other countries with the exact facts I'm giving you right here over a very wide span of time pointing to evidence that it can't be one person.
It almost can't be any group of people because remember, these people are seen on closed circuit television.
Some are never seen leaving a building.
They're never seen leaving with other suspects.
There's never a suspect in the case.
It's as though there's a complete dearth of any evidence about what happened.
It's terrifying.
Look, it would make you, if you were concerned for your own safety, which I think all of us are, it would make you not want to do anything that isn't in a big group of people who see you all the time.
Wouldn't it?
Oh, for sure.
Okay, let's move on.
Next case, Shane Montgomery, 21 years of age, happened last year.
And the FBI started really seriously checking out the disappearances of college-age males after this.
Bright young man found where he went missing, where he was last seen on CTTV, even though police expected him to be miles away down the river.
Talk to me about this case.
So, Howard, this is a game changer.
In my books, I've written that the FBI doesn't get involved in missing people unless it's a small, small child under five.
But when it comes to adults, they don't investigate missing people unless there's absolute evidence of criminal activity.
In Shane's case, 21 years old, disappeared November 27, 2014 at 1.45 a.m. in Philadelphia.
Almost immediately, the FBI agents were on scene.
And what I've told many people who have asked me about this is I said, this is a game changer.
They don't come into events unless they have evidence that they're trying to accumulate and they're trying to understand.
Now, with Shane, he was a graduate of a Roman Catholic high school.
He was attending Westchester University.
He was at a cousin's house before they went bar hopping.
And they went to a bar about 1.15 a.m.
Shane sent a text to his cousin saying he was inside the bar, but he couldn't locate his friend.
At 1.28, he called another friend.
At 1.45 approximately, he left the bar.
People said he wasn't staggeringly drunk, but he was never seen alive again by people after that.
He didn't show up on November 27th for a family function, and he was reported as a missing person.
Now, immediately, the Federal Bureau of Investigation gets on scene, and they take over the interview of the staff at the bar he's at.
Now, this is important because if the agents understood the issues that went into these disappearances, they wouldn't be going all the way back and participating in the interviewing of the staff because they'd already understand the circumstances.
And the FBI, the resources are super expensive.
For the FBI to come in and interview staff rather than the local police, it's almost unheard of in these cases.
But they interview the staff.
Now, they did locate closed-circuit television footage of Shane crossing between a pub and a parking lot and crossing over a footbridge.
Now, there's two bodies of water in this immediate area.
There's a small canal that parallels what's called the Shaikill River.
Now, after he disappears, a group called the Garden State Underwater Recovery Team starts searching the canal that the footbridge went over.
They didn't find anything.
But on November, I'll correct that.
On December 21st, Shane's keys are found in the Shikill River that they're searching.
Now, imagine how thorough this search has got to be if they find his keys in the river.
That's how close they're searching.
Now, they interview a detective on the news that I watched, and he said, you know, if Shane went in the canal, he's going to be pretty near the buildings where he was crossing over the footbridge.
But if Shane went in the river, it's flowing so fast, he's going to be miles downstream.
Well, the recovery team stays with it.
These are a bunch of volunteers, and there really was no place else to look other than the water.
And the same underwater team was about in 10 foot of water behind a brewery and found his body.
And it was almost in the exact location as he was seen parallel to the canal on the CCTV.
Now, if you think about what the detective said about their bodies in water and the location he was recovered, doesn't make any sense at all.
And why would it take a month to find the body in a location where they were able to find his keys doesn't make any sense?
Now, to this day, because I looked yesterday, the medical examiner has never released a report on his body.
His blood alcohol level has never been released.
And the family said that the coroner told them that his cause of death was accidental, but that's all that they were told.
And this, it's been, you know, eight, nine months, and still nothing about the actual body and the state of the body has ever been released.
As far as you're aware, Dave, is this case still active?
So when you say active, right away when the coroner tells the family that it's an accidental cause of death, well, there's no crime.
It's over.
There's no more investigation.
Unless, as I think, the FBI knows that there's something really, really unusual about these cases.
That's why they're involved.
And that there's something they're trying to figure out.
Like, why are these kids going in the river or water?
How are they going in?
And what's killing them?
Because they're not saying or nobody really knows.
And if you try to ask the FBI, what's going on, what kind of response do you get?
Well, half the time, I've done this on many cases.
I get a redacted couple of pages where you would have to be one of the smartest people in the world to figure out like one every three lines, there's one word that you can read and everything else is blocked out and you can't read it.
It's blacked out.
Right.
So that leaves us absolutely nowhere.
And again, the people who suffer most are the family of this person.
I think the families are suffering because when you, I'm sure the Montgomery family has no understanding how many of these cases there are.
And they're just very grateful that a big law enforcement agency like the FBI is involved.
But they don't understand that the FBI really isn't there because the family wants them there.
They're there because something really unusual is going on.
Killing again.
Let's move to the case of Mick Garza.
Middlebury, Vermont, 19 years of age, page 132 of the book.
Believed that he walked home from a social haul along a fairly lonely route, but still within the campus precincts.
Went missing.
Huge effort to find him.
The organizations were involved.
They did everything.
They even checked his emails.
He was found in the water in May.
He went missing in February, half a mile from where he was found.
So another case like that, he didn't drown, and police have now closed the case.
Strange case, if ever there was one, this.
So I originally put this in one of the books, my earlier books, because it happened at Middlebury College in a very big wilderness area, and it was unusual.
And the case fit in that book because of the circumstances, but I couldn't not put it in this book because it was so on-key.
February 5th, 08, Middlebury College, Vermont.
He was born in Chino, California, 19 years old, moved to Albuquerque, a stellar individual, great student.
And in February 5th, it was winter break for the college.
So a lot of the school left, went home, went on vacation.
He was one of the few people that stayed behind.
He would text his mom every day because his mom was so worried about him all the time.
February 5th was the last text that she got from Nick saying everything was good, no problems.
You know, have a great day, blah, blah, blah.
Well, investigators put together their timeline on his disappearance, and they found out that earlier in that day, he had gone to a store to purchase some alcohol.
He went between different dormitory units seeing friends.
And then he went with a friend to a place called Stewart Hall, another dorm, and saw another friend.
Well, his friend left early because a group of Nick's friends were going to a cabin in New Hampshire for the week.
Nick stayed behind at that dorm with a friend that was in a room.
At 11.06 p.m., Nick left that hall alone.
Now on college campuses, you use a passkey to go in and out of the various dorms, so they have this specific timeline.
So when he left Stewart Hall, he was a half a mile from the nearest creek, and there was no reason to go near it.
On February 6th, nobody realized Nick never made it back to his room.
That night, rain and snow hit the area.
It started at about 3.42 a.m. and the next day, friends reported him missing.
That next day, his mom started traveling to Vermont because she couldn't get her son, and she knew something really wrong was going on.
So the formal effort to find Nick didn't start until February 11th.
50 organizations started looking for him.
And the police department pulled his computers, phone texts, phone logs.
They went through everything they could find.
And immediately they started concentrating on the woods near a place called St. Mary's Cemetery right next to the campus.
And there was never a clear answer why, but they focused on that.
And this is documented in the reports, and I have the report.
There were 35 separate searches, aircraft, ground, water, six different canine teams, three swift water rescue teams went into the creek, ground-penetrating radar, forward-looking infrared radar, and an underwater artifact special recovery team went into the creek.
And they described Otter Creek as searched extensively.
Nick's last cell phone call was February 5th at 11.06 p.m. from campus.
Friends said he was no way stumbling drunk.
Police department report said canine searches along Otter Creek reported no live scent and no cadaver scent during this period of time.
They called, the police department called the FBI and the behavioral analyst profiling team went in and wrote a report.
There's no evidence of immersion in the creek, according to the FBI.
On May 27th, he disappeared February 5th.
May 27th, a body was found in Otter Creek.
It was Nick.
His wallet and cell phones were in the pockets.
Body went to the coroner.
They couldn't determine the cause of death, and they didn't give a blood alcohol level.
And crucially, as we said, they said he did not drown.
Exactly.
And also bizarre, strange indeed, that he would be found with things like his cell phone still on him after such a very long time.
And I say this in a lot of those cases.
Not only is it weird that he has these things in his pocket, if the water was as rapid as some claim it could have been, those things would have fallen out over time.
And as almost in every one of these cases, the parents say there has to be foul play involved and people are ignoring it.
And in this case, Natalie Garza said exactly that.
And how frustrating and how distressing for the family in this case, particularly because of the circumstances of it, because there are so many loose ends still untied.
And yet people are expected to go away with the answers that they have and carry on living their lives.
And of course you can't.
Imagine you have the love of your life, your son, your daughter, they disappear, nobody's given you answers, and they're gone, and you're trying to get an understanding of what happened that night to cause my son to go way off campus, end up in a creek that was cleared 30 plus times.
How did he get there?
Where was he?
And again, somebody, we can't stress this enough, really, can we, Dave?
Somebody responsible, somebody responsible enough to keep calling his mom all the time to let her know that he was okay, you know, not somebody who was a wild party person who would do crazy, zany things.
No, exactly.
A stellar person in the community, like I've said.
All right.
And here's another bright person, another stellar person.
Tom Hecht.
Case from Wisconsin, Milwaukee, 2012 was the date of this.
28-year-old graduate, been to a bar, missing for 12 days, big search of the area.
Police actually made a statement, another wrong statement.
There was no evidence that he'd gone into the water, but that is where he was found.
Again, close to where he disappeared.
Another case where police apparently got it wrong.
So this is also a location in Milwaukee where you start to draw a line out from Milwaukee of a radius of 100 miles, and there's a lot of these cases.
28 years old Tom Hecht, graduate, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He worked in commercial real estate, super responsible guy, owned his own condo.
He went down with some friends for St. Patrick's Day, and his last stop with friends was a place called Rosie's.
He left the bar early because he had to go to work the next day.
One friend said he took a cab.
Another friend said he walked, but he was reported missing the next day.
There are very, very few clues by the police department about where he Went or where he could go.
No calls were made from his cell phone after he left the bar.
The police department and the harbor unit put people right into the river that flows right through the middle of town, and they came out and said there was no evidence he fell on the water.
12 days later, at 11:05, Milwaukee Fire Department receives a report of a body in the Milwaukee River.
Coast Guard response recovers the body of Tom halfway between the bar and his condo.
The ruling accidental drowning with a blood alcohol level 0.22.
And more unanswered questions.
Now understand that this river that goes through the middle of town, there's high railings all around the river.
This isn't an area where you're going to just fall in stinking drunk and roll into the river and die.
All of these places have high railings around most of them, and it's just hard to get there.
I don't know how he got there.
And what comes out clearer than anything, and time is always our enemy in these things, so we're drawing to the end of this now, Dave, is that, okay, we don't know what happened, and we can't really suggest what happened.
We don't know if there's a serial killer, if It's some kind of phenomenon that we are not clever enough to consider.
But the fact that nobody is putting these things together, as far as we know, and asking these questions about bright young people who vanish and die in very, very iffy circumstances, the fact that nobody's putting this together and researching this, they're just closing the case files, is a massive worry.
And this not only goes on in your country, it also goes on in my country and seemingly almost every other, Well, probably every other country.
I don't doubt it.
It's happening much, much more than we have any idea right now, Howard.
I mean, just a group of people I work with, we've only been onto this for about 16 months, so who knows how many there are.
Since you completed writing this latest edition, have you been given more cases?
Have you got more cases coming in that aren't in the book?
You know, since the visibility about what we're talking about today hasn't even been made public and won't be, this is pre-recorded, so it won't be for a few days.
I haven't heard anything about these cases from other people, but I am getting tons of cases that match the profile in the books I've written in the past.
It's terrifying.
So please keep me posted about what you hear now after you've done this interview, and I know you're doing other interviews as well.
I want to skip forward now because of time to one of the Canadian cases.
That's Matthew Sloan, 26 years of age, New Brunswick, page 196.
This happened in 2006.
So again, it's contemporary.
It's recent.
Another intelligent, well-rounded, quotes, individual, six days missing, six days again, found in the water.
Coroner again said that the cause of death could not be definitively determined.
Very similar to another case where the person had also been to a music festival, which this person had been, this 26-year-old, and was found in a river.
More strangeness here and also a connection, a direct connection to another similar case.
Yes, Matthew, September 17, 2006, New Brunswick, that's far, far north of Fundy in the northeast area of Canada.
Sits on the St. John River.
Well-rounded guy, plays sports, big community, had a degree in kinesiology from the University of New Brunswick.
He worked in education his whole life, played in coached sports, coached soccer for many, many summers, taught middle school then.
He went to a harvest and jazz and blues festival in Fredericton.
How he disappeared, nobody really knows.
But late on September 17th or early September 18th, he vanished.
There was an extensive search along the river by canines.
They smelled nothing.
They found nothing.
November 23rd, six days later, a woman sees something in the water, calls police, and they recover his body.
The coroner couldn't determine the cause of death.
Two people attending the music festivals, both found in an adjacent river.
The other one was Robert Lee in Edmonton, Alberta.
He was at a music festival.
He was found in a river in Edmonton under almost identical conditions as Matthew.
More questions, no answers, and again, more heartbreak for the family.
I want to conclude this with a British case.
This is from a very nice city.
If you've ever been there, Dave, and if you haven't, I recommend you go to a beautiful, beautiful place called Bath in Somerset.
Roman town, very ancient.
Americans love to go there.
If they go to two places in the UK, they go to London, and often they get the train, they go to Bath.
This is Samuel Armin, 18 years of age, described as polite, well-mannered, and courteous.
Went to a bar at 2 a.m., seen, or a young man is seen on CCTV on Dorchester Street, one of the main streets there.
Divers searched the river that runs right through the middle of Bath, and a body is found after four days.
Parents said the disappearance completely out of character.
It is believed he drowned.
But the coroner in this case is the only one, I think, in your book to actually call for some action and some more research into cases like this.
So Samuel Memanji's, like you said, one of the nicest, well-mannered, courteous people you had ever meet.
And he was attending the Bath Community Academy.
Now, there are eight cases in the UK that I document between 1990 and 2015 with the ages ranging from 18 to 28.
Thank goodness, somebody steps up and says the obvious.
Maria Voisey, the medical examiner, says, we have to have somebody take responsibility for what's going on here and demanded to know what's being done to stop it.
What is happening here with these young people falling into rivers and drowning?
This makes no sense.
How are they getting there?
What's being done?
And of all of the cases around the world that I've written about, she's the only one that steps up and says the obvious.
Okay, I mean, there may be a spate of terrible and regrettable accidents here, or there may be something else going on.
But whichever side of the world you're on, somebody needs to be putting together.
And look, digital technology allows you to do this really easily.
So I don't think we can say it's too difficult a task.
It isn't these days.
It can be done pretty easily.
Somebody has to give it the time.
And I guess of the many messages and the many chilling things to come out of your book, the message that we must take away is that there is a phenomenon here and a phenomenon that at least deserves for the peace of mind of the families and the loved ones of the victims here or the, you know, I'm calling the victims of the missing here.
For their peace of mind, somebody needs to do something further about this because I cannot imagine, and you've seen it firsthand, I haven't, I cannot imagine what it is like to have to go through your life knowing that the person that you loved went missing, subsequently died in circumstances that are not properly explained, and you've just got to go forward with the rest of your life knowing that.
A terrible, terrible cross to have to bear.
Unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
Yeah, I couldn't even begin to understand how bad they feel.
I think you need to keep doing your work, Dave, and I hope this movie that you're planning to do actually comes about.
I know that it's gathering momentum, isn't it, the whole project?
It is.
Just finally, there is a case at the very end of the book where you discuss coincidences and connectivity between cases.
This is the case of Dan Zamlin.
And you say here, I'm not sure if you believe in coincidences, but during the investigation of nearly 1,400 missing people, I've run into many, many strange coincidences.
A strange coincidence with the Zamlin case is the location where his body was found adjacent to the Ford Motor Plant.
Jay Polehill was found not far from the Ford Motor Plant on the little Calumet River in southern Chicago.
Another very odd coincidence.
Remember the Wisconsin cases when evidence was found at the base of the chief Hiawatha statue.
But coincidence is a theme that's run all the way through this.
Very much so.
I mean, Dan's case, it's one of those key cases at the back of the book because everything has come together.
Outstanding character.
I got teary-eyed several times when I wrote this.
He was raised in Eveleth, Minnesota, 50 miles north of Duluth, just west of Lake Superior.
There's a geographical cluster of missing people in this area.
He was a member of the Resurrection Catholic Church.
He was an altar boy, a Sunday teacher, Eagle Scout, outstanding pianist.
He lettered in three sports, cross-country, Nordic skiing, and track.
He was a National Honor Society member, academic scholar, played in the band and the orchestra.
He traveled to Mississippi for Habitat and Humanity volunteer work.
In 2008, he graduated from high school with enough advanced credits to start his college career as a sophomore.
He enrolled at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, a private Catholic liberal arts school, about four blocks to the Mississippi River and about a mile south of the University of Minnesota.
He received six different scholarships to attend school.
The guy was a stellar individual.
On April 4th, 2009, he and a bunch of friends went to a party in about the 2,100 block of St. Paul Avenue, six blocks east of the Mississippi River the party was at.
At 2 a.m., he left the party.
A friend named Anna called him and said, where are you going?
Why don't you go back to my house?
She drove toward where he stated he was at.
He said on the phone, as he's talking to Anna, oh my gosh, Anna, where are you?
Help.
The voice grew more and more distant as his words were ending, and then the phone cut off.
And he was never seen again and never heard from.
His father stated in front of the Minnesota House of Representatives that eight different dog bloodhound teams went and searched the area and none of them ever went near the river.
They used side-scanning sonar in the river, and they found nothing even close to resembling a body.
After four days of searching, the effort to find Dan was called off.
People believe they saw him at different places, although it was never confirmed.
And then on May 1st, an employee at the Ford Motor Plant on the Mississippi River intake port found his body just south of campus.
His wallet and his ID was on him.
The coroner ruled it was freshwater drowning.
Now, police don't know where or when he entered the river.
The parents paid for a second autopsy, and GHB was found in his liver.
Now, his parents don't believe anything about the investigation or that a real investigation occurred.
And that is, if he be such a straight-up, stand-up person would be unlikely to have GH, of all things, alcohol maybe, but GHB?
Now, GHB is something I've talked about extensively in the book, and it's found in several of these cases.
GHP is a drug that would put your body into a comatose state where you wouldn't be able to move.
It's like a date rape drug.
You know what's happening to you, but you can't move and do anything about it.
Imagine if you had GHP and you were put into a river.
You wouldn't be able to fight.
You would merely drown and end up dead in the river to be found later on.
Now, GHB is found in very low doses on the body after death, but never in high doses.
The idea that Zamlin took GHB is ridiculous.
But his statements on the phone asking for help as the voice is trailing off is one of these things that has happened several times where people are on the phone and they make statements just before they're never heard from again.
And as you say, this case has similarities to another case.
But, you know, of all of the cases, and this is right at the end of the book, this is the one that I'm feeling a sense of outrage about.
It's an appalling thing.
You know, you would leave no stone unturned to find out the presence of GHB, the circumstances, this being such a stellar individual once again.
You know, you couldn't close the book on this case, could you?
So imagine if you're a family and you've gone through this and you have authorities telling you, hey, your son just drowned, you know, these things happen.
And you think that, well, maybe my son made a mistake.
Maybe he did do something wrong.
When authorities tell you certain things and they try to drive you down that road and you don't have support around you that, hey, there's hundreds of these cases and they're all unexplained and it is unusual and you shouldn't just drop it.
Well, pressure starts to come onto those families and they start to think, maybe this is normal, but it's not.
So at the end of this, Dave, and we've talked many times, but these are very, very emotive and emotional cases.
Do you feel a sense of responsibility now that you almost have to start to campaign about these people?
It almost sounds like you could form an organization campaigning for the families of these people.
So Howard, I think one of the big turning points in this has to be that some brave journalist in mainstream media has to take this and say, okay, enough's enough.
There's enough factual evidence here in the coroner's reports and in the police reports that these boys were not in the water the entire time.
Something's happened.
We have to write a story about this And let people know that they aren't alone and they can talk about it.
I think that says it all.
Dave, another fascinating, chilling, and disturbing conversation.
You know, hats off to you for the quality of your research, and I wish you well with the movie project and everything else that you do.
This latest book, of course, has just hit the streets.
I've had some communications from people in the UK and places like Australia saying that they have difficulty getting hold of your books.
And sometimes, as you know, on various websites, for that reason, they go up and up and up in price.
Have you any news for those people?
We ship daily to Australia and the UK.
Website is Can Am, C-A-N-A-S-N-ORA, A-Mazon Mary, CanAmMissing.com.
We ship there daily.
Dave, thank you very much for doing this, and thank you for bearing up with my digital dilemmas.
And I wish you well, and I know that we'll talk again.
Thank you very much.
Always my pleasure, Howard.
Thank you.
Please do let me know what you think about that.
Dave Paulitis, the book, as we said, is called Missing 411, Missing 411, A Sobering Coincidence.
David Paulitis, it is a book that I know sometimes outside the U.S. can present you with difficulties obtaining.
We did talk about that, but it's well worth getting your hands on one, and it is out right now.
And please let me know what you thought about him.
You can email me through the website at theunexplained.tv.
If you can possibly make a donation to the show to allow this work to develop and continue, that would be great.
And if you have recently, I am extremely grateful to you and thank you.
Thank you to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work, as ever.
More great shows coming soon here at The Unexplained.
So until we meet next time, my name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe, stay calm.
Above all, stay in touch.
Thank you.
Take care.
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