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- [00:01]
Carter Roy
Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy Happy America 250. If you want to binge all four parts of our limited series about the crimes that built America, ad free, subscribe to Crime House Plus. With Crime House plus, you'll get all four episodes right now instead of waiting. You'll also get every episode of Murder True Crime Stories and the rest of the Crime House shows ad free and released early. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of this show's page. This is crime house. There's something comforting about being in a crowded place. The cameras at the entrance, the security guards on the landing, the friends two feet away. You assume that if anything went wrong, someone would notice. Someone would catch it on tape. Brian Schaefer was in a crowded place when he vanished. A bar in Columbus, Ohio, packed for last call. Friends two feet away. A uniformed security guard standing 20ft from him. Cameras on the escalators. Cameras at the entrance. Cameras pointed at every exit you'd think would matter. But somehow, in the span of just six minutes on the morning of April 1, 2006, a 27 year old medical student walked out of frame and never came back. Twenty years later, no one can agree on what happened to him. Some people think he ran. Some people think he was killed. Others believe he's still out there, living quietly under a new name somewhere far from Ohio. But the simplest question is the one nobody can answer. If hundreds of people were watching Brian Shaffer that night, how is it possible that none of them saw him leave? This is the mysterious disappearance of Brian Shaffer. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon. And we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the Crime House community. Please rate, review and follow the show and for early ad free access to every episode, subscribe to Crime House plus, you'll get part one and part two at the same time. I Plus exclusive bonus content. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Stories show page on Apple Podcasts. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays where I'M covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. The ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Murder True Crime Stories and be sure to like and subscribe. Today's story is about an Ohio State medical student named Brian Schaefer. He had a girlfriend he was planning to propose to a Miami vacation booked for the following Monday and his second year of medical school finally behind him. On Friday, March 31, 2006, he went out to celebrate with friends. The cameras caught him going into the bar, but they never showed him coming out. This case has been picked apart by detectives, podcasters, online sleuths, and the FBI. But all these years later, the two big theories still haven't moved an inch. Either Brian Shaffer walked away from a life he didn't want anymore, or somebody made sure he never walked anywhere again. And the people who knew him best can't agree on which is true. All that and more Coming up.
- [04:44]
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- [06:05]
Carter Roy
Brian Schaefer's story is the kind that bends you in two directions at once. If you looked at him on paper, you'd see a kid who grew up in a Columbus suburb, played in a garage band, loved his mom, and was about to propose to the woman he loved. But if you looked a little closer, you'd see something else. A young man who'd buried his mother three weeks earlier. Someone running on fumes through med school finals, and someone whose decisions had been getting more and more unpredictable in the weeks before he disappeared. Both of those versions of him were real. The question is, which was stronger? Brian Randall Schaeffer was born on February 11, 1979. His parents, Randy and Renee, raised him in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb just east of Columbus. Randy worked as an electrician, and Renee was a nurse. Brian had a brother named Derek, who was two years younger than him. They were close, but their personalities went in opposite directions. Derek was the quiet one, the introvert. Brian was the extrovert. People described him as friendly and funny, but they also said he could be impulsive and stubborn. That stubborn streak showed up most clearly in high school. Brian was the captain of the tennis team. His senior year, he was two games shy of the state tournament. When his coach told him he needed a haircut. Brian refused and quit the team instead. Now that stubborn streak had its roots in something else, too. Music. By the time Brian was a teenager, music was outweighing everything else in his life. He picked up a guitar. He played in a garage band. His old MySpace page listed everyone from Elton John to Nine Inch Nails as artists he loved. But the band he was obsessed with was Pearl Jam. He even had a graphic from the COVID art of their single Alive tattooed on his upper right arm. A stick figure they called the Pearl Jam stickman. His friends would later say Brian had two career plans running side by side. One was a daydream about dropping everything, moving to a beach somewhere, and starting a Jimmy Buffett style band. The other was becoming a doctor. His mom, Renee, was a nurse, and Brian had been saying he wanted to follow her into medicine since he was a kid. He talked about both plans like they were equally possible. After high school, Brian took a couple of years off to figure out which route he was going to take. He worked, he hung out. And eventually, in 1999, at 20 years old, he made his decision. He enrolled at Ohio State University. The OSU campus is just north of downtown Columbus from Pickerington. It's maybe a half hour drive so Brian could go to college and still stay close to home and close to his mom. At osu, he majored in microbiology with a minor in molecular genetics and graduated with his bachelor's degree in 2003. Then, in 2004, he enrolled at OSU's College of Medicine, his first year of med school. Brian noticed a woman in his class named Alexis Wagoner. He didn't make a move at first, but when a mutual friend tipped him off that she was interested, too, he emailed her and asked her to dinner. By June 2005, they were dating. By the end of that year, Brian and Alexis were almost inseparable. He had his own apartment just off campus, and she was over there constantly. They hadn't moved in together, but they were talking about marriage. They'd even looked at engagement rich rings. Then, in the middle of all this, the floor dropped out. Brian's mom got sick. The doctors said she had myelodysplasia, a rare form of bone marrow cancer. Renee was 50 years old, and by Christmas of 2005, the family knew it was terminal. That last Christmas was bittersweet. Renee wanted to do something special for Brian and Alexis, so she helped Brian pay for a trip the two of them were planning. They were going to Miami over spring break the following April. That trip wasn't just a vacation. It was Renee's way of giving Brian something to look forward to, even if she didn't make it that far. As the winter went on, Renee got sicker. Brian spent every minute he could at her side. And during one of those visits, Renee told him she wanted him to settle down. She wanted him to have a family, and she really loved Alexis. When Brian admitted he'd been thinking about proposing, Renee didn't just encourage it. She handed him the name of a jeweler. The people closest to Brian and Alexis say they all kind of knew the proposal was probably going to happen on the Miami trip. Sadly, Renee didn't get to see it. On March 6, 2006, Rene Shaffer passed away at 51 years old. Brian took it hard. In the weeks that followed, his behavior turned into a kind of roller coaster. Shortly after the funeral, he asked Alexis to run away with him. A little while later, he told her he was struggling so badly that. That she should probably find someone else and move on. Then, with finals looming at the end of March, he asked her something else. He said, quote, skip class tomorrow. Let's go get married. Alexis didn't know what to do with any of it. Brian's mom had just died, so a little instability was understandable. But this was also a guy who'd spent months looking at engagement rings. Maybe he was just acting out of grief or impulse, or he was simply trying to find his footing again. But there was one more week of finals to get through first and then Miami. So Brian buckled down and studied. Finals week ended on Friday, March 31, 2006. The Miami tickets, the ones Rene had helped pay for, were for that Monday, April 3rd. Brian and Alexis had the weekend in between. That Friday, Alexis and her brother drove up to Toledo to visit their parents. The family dog, Ellie, was sick and nearing the end of her life and Alexis wanted to see her. Alexis planned to come back to Columbus on Sunday so she could pack for Miami. While Alexis headed north, Brian made plans of his own. He was going out on the town to celebrate the end of finals. Before leaving his apartment, Brian sent Alexis a message on MySpace. He told her he couldn't wait for the trip. Then he jokingly asked if she planned to go topless at the beach. He said, quote, a man can dream, can't he? After sending that message, Brian headed out to meet his dad, Randy, at a steakhouse. He invited his brother Derek, too, but Derek already had plans. He and his girlfriend were seeing a comedy show. Derek told Brian he'd try to catch up with him afterward if the show didn't run too long. That left Brian and Randy with the table to themselves. They talked, they caught up, and later Randy would remember thinking that Brian seemed exhausted. Like the kind of tired that finals week was beats into you. After dinner, Brian headed back to his apartment. Sometime between 9 and 9:30pm his friend and former roommate Clint Florence came by. Brian and Clint were super close and would go out together all the time. Brian's apartment was also right near downtown Columbus, So they decided to just walk to a place called the Gateway Film Center. It's a huge entertainment complex with a movie theater on one side and a string of bars and restaurants in the building. On the second floor, there's a little nautical themed bar called the Ugly Tuna Saluna. That's where Brian and Clint were headed. They got there, settled in, and threw back three or four shots each. They hung out for about an hour. Around 10:30, Brian called Alexis from the bar. She didn't pick up, so he left a voicemail saying he loved her. About half an hour later, Alexis called back. She told him how Ellie was doing and he told her to enjoy the time with her family. Around 11pm Brian and Clint left the Ugly Tuna and headed to an area of Columbus called the Short north they hit three more bars there. Somewhere around midnight or 12:30am they decided to go back to the Gateway. They were supposed to meet up with some other friends at the Ugly Tuna for last call. The problem was they drifted about a mile and a half south of the Gateway. So Clint called his friend Meredith Reed and asked if she could come pick them up. By 1:15am Brian, Clint and Meredith were riding up the escalator at the Gateway. That Gateway is the kind of place that's basically built for late night foot traffic. The area around it had been a problem spot for crime for years. So when they built the complex, they put cameras everywhere at the entrances, on the escalators, on the bars, landings. That night, on the second floor landing where the escalator drops people off, one of those cameras was rolling. It was pointed right at the top of the escalator, and it caught Brian on the way up. He was wearing jeans, a blue and green striped shirt and tennis shoes. He was leaning back against the rail facing his friends, talking to them. Inside the bar, their other friends were waiting. Some of them were Clint students. Clint worked as a teaching assistant at Ohio State. One of them was a woman named Amber Ruick. She brought a friend named Brighton Zatko. Clint went over to catch up with Amber, and while they were talking, Brian started chatting with Brighton. Now, this is one of the parts of the case that didn't come out publicly until years later. According to Brighton, Brian was flirting with her that night. Well, she didn't know he had a girlfriend, so she went along with it. She said that as the night wore on, Brian. Brian kissed her on the neck and she put her number into his phone. That went on for about half an hour. Everyone was mingling. Closing time was approaching, and at some point, Clint pulled Brian aside and told him not to wander off. When he drank. He had a tendency to disappear and turn up in unexpected places. Multiple friends would later describe him as the kind of guy who could end up sleeping on a stranger's lawn. After that conversation, Clint says he didn't see Brian again for the rest of the night. A few people in the bar later told police they thought they saw Brian and Clint arguing sometime after that. But the bar was loud and no one could hear what they were actually saying. And Clint has never commented on whether the alleged arguments actually happened. At 1:55am Brian was back outside the bar, standing on that landing at the top of the escalators. The camera caught him chatting with Brighton and Amber. People were still going up and down the escalators. Around them. There was a security guard watching from the top of the landing. After a minute or two, the trio stepped slightly off camera into an alcove just out of the way of foot traffic. Brighton says she and Amber talked to Brian for a few more minutes there, and they parted ways. At around 1:57am Brian started heading in the direction of the bar entrance, but neither woman remembers actually seeing him go back inside. Minutes after Brighton and Amber said goodbye to Brian, Clint and Meredith realized he wasn't in the bar. The Ugly Tuna had cleared out after last call, so it didn't take long to scan the room. They checked the bathrooms. They walked around the bar. Brian wasn't there. At 2:01am Meredith called his cell phone. It went straight to voicemail. She left him a message. She said, quote, where are you? Where in the hell are you? In less than six minutes, Brian Shaffer had vanished without a tr. Look, we all hit points in life where anxiety, depression or ADHD feel like a lot more than just a rough patch. I have been there and honestly, sometimes standard self help tools or talk therapy aren't the total answer. We need a little more if you need a deeper level of care, Talk Iatry connects you with real virtual psychiatry. This isn't a therapy app, it a 100% online psychiatry practice providing comprehensive evaluations, diagnoses and ongoing medication management for conditions like adhd, anxiety and more. You're actually seeing a medical provider who takes the time to understand what you're going through and build a personalized treatment plan. Plus, they accept major insurers, meaning you can use your existing insurance instead of paying massive out of network costs. Getting started is incredibly simple. You just complete a short online assessment, get matched with clinicians who fit your specific needs and schedule your first virtual visit in days rather than months. Head to tokyetry.com mtcs to complete the short assessment and get matched with an in network psychiatrist in just a few minutes. That's talkiotry.com MTCs to get matched in minutes hi listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of Murder True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling and and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or you can binge all of them right now ad free with crime house plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap Try free at the top of this show's page. Tyler reddick here from 2311 Racing and Bubba Wallace. You know what's the worst part of a race? A rain delay. Sitting around waiting for the track to dry is dull. But instead of waiting, we hang out with Chumba Casino Social Casino slots, Bingo, Solitaire. Plenty of fun to keep us entertained. So why let a rain delay slow you down? Play now@chumbacasino.com let's Chumba sponsored by Chumba Casino. No purchase necessary. BGW prohibited by law 21 terms and conditions apply. In the early morning hours of April 1, 2006, Brian's friends Clint and Meredith left the Gateway without him. A camera captured them leaving. Brian's phone was going straight to voicemail, but nobody was panicking just yet. Clint was house sitting for one of his professors in a Columbus neighborhood called Clintonville, just north of campus, and he and Meredith spent the rest of the night there. In the morning, Meredith drove him back to Brian's apartment to pick up his car. They didn't knock on the door, but later that day Clint left Brian a voicemail to check in. He never heard back. The next day was Sunday, April 2nd. Brian was supposed to swing by his dad's house, but he never showed up. Randy figured he was probably sleeping off finals week and didn't think much of it. Alexis didn't try calling until around 3 or 4 in the afternoon. The call went straight to voicemail and she came to the same conclusion as Randy. Brian was just sleeping, so she tried again at midnight, same thing. By 2am she was starting to actually worry. Around dawn she got in her car and drove back to Columbus. When she got to Brian's apartment and his car was sitting in the parking lot. Inside, nothing looked out of place, but Brian wasn't there. She and the Shaffer family started working the phones, calling everyone Brian knew. None of them had seen him since the bar that afternoon. They called the police officers came and took Alexis statement, but they weren't willing to open a formal investigation yet. They wanted to see if Brian would make his flight to Miami the next day. Alexis spent the night alone at his apartment. On Monday, April 3, the flight to Miami left without him, and that's when things kicked into high gear. A Columbus detective named Sergeant John Hurst was assigned to lead the investigation, and for those first few days he assumed that Brian was out There, somewhere, alive. Maybe he'd had too much to drink and ended up sleeping it off on someone's couch. Maybe he was holed up at a friend's apartment. Maybe he'd lost his phone. But Brian's friends and family weren't waiting for the police to figure it out. They printed flyers with his picture. They walked the neighborhoods around the Gateway, knocking on doors. Buttons with his face on them started showing up around campus. Meanwhile, the detectives interviewed the people who'd been at the bar and checked hospitals and jails. Nothing came back. After about a week, the tone of everything started to shift. If Brian was alive, somebody should have heard from him by now. He hadn't used his bank cards. He hadn't checked into a hotel. He hadn't called his dad. That's when Hurst was forced to think about a question he'd been hoping to avoid. Where was Brian's body? One of the earliest theories he chased was that Brian had been drinking, gotten sick, maybe passed out next to a dumpster. Or in the darker version, that someone had put him in one. Either way, if Brian was in a dumpster, time was running out. The trash doesn't stay where you leave it. Hearst's team raced to track down the Gateway's dumpsters. Some had already been emptied. The privately owned ones didn't even go to local landfills. They went all the way down to Tennessee. Police searched the dumpsters they could find, but came up with nothing. But the whole time, another question was eating at them. How had Brian even gotten out of the Ugly Tuna in the first place? The last footage of Brian was at the alcove outside the bar where he'd just said goodnight to Brighton and Amber. He turned and started walking back toward the entrance. Then the cameras lost him, but the bar's surveillance didn't show him leaving. It also didn't show him going back into the main room. That left a short hallway with three possible exits in front of him. One was a service elevator that employees used. One was an emergency fire exit that was supposed to set off an alarm if it was was opened. And one was a nondescript beige door that led down to a part of the Gateway that was still under construction. The construction zone was the first place they zeroed in on. It was huge. It took up most of the basement level of the Gateway, and at the time, there were no cameras inside. Had three different entrances to the street, and none of them had proper doors. They were padlocked with boards that someone could squeeze through the interior door from the bar's hallway was supposed to be locked, too, But Amber had actually opened it earlier in the night to step out and call her boyfriend. So police knew it wasn't. The cameras watching. Those street level exits weren't motion activated, either. They panned slowly across a wide area, which meant anyone slipping out could have walked off while a camera was pointed somewhere else. Hearst has publicly said that's exactly what he thinks happened with Brian. Still, that left two other doors. The service elevator was almost certainly not it. Its cameras were working, and Brian never showed up on that footage, which pointed the investigation toward the emergency fire exit. And that's where things really started to get strange. The problem was, the camera pointed at the fire exit Was set to autorecord over itself. By the time police got around to asking for that specific footage, it had been taped over and was gone. But ugly tuna management insisted that nobody could have gone out the fire exit because they'd had someone stationed there. And even if a person slipped past the guard, the door was clearly marked opening. It was supposed to set off an alarm, and no alarm went off that night. But there's a wrinkle. Even though it never really got reported in the news, Multiple locals later told investigators it was kind of an open secret that the fire exit wasn't actually alarmed. Which blows up the official explanation. If the alarm was disabled, Brian could have walked right out that door, and not a single person inside the bar would have known he was gone. Police also pulled footage from cameras on nearby streets, Hoping to spot Brian walking somewhere, anywhere after he left the building. They found that a lot of those nearby cameras were either broken or dummy cameras. They weren't recording anything at all. Same with the cameras along Brian's normal route home. Eventually, they brought in cadaver dogs to search the gateway and the surrounding area. And they got exactly one possible hit At a Wendy's across the street. But in a twist that almost feels like a bad joke, the camera at that Wendy's was one of the broken ones, too. While the police were chasing every theory they could think of, Brian's dad, Randy, was falling apart. He'd recently buried his wife. Now his son was just gone. And although everyone in Brian's orbit was searching in their own way, no one was as committed as randy. He chased down every lead. He drove the streets around campus over and over. He kept paying Brian's rent so the apartment wouldn't be cleared out. He talked to anyone who claimed to have any information. Some of the calls he took were genuinely cruel strangers, saying they had reason to believe Brian had been killed or sexually assaulted. He even talked to a psychic who said Brian might be in the Olontangi river, which runs about a mile from the Gateway. The river was only a few feet deep at that point in the year, and police had already searched it. Randy went anyway. He spent hours walking the banks, wading in, looking for his son. After about a month, detectives started seriously considering another possibility, that Brian had run away. They looked into his mental health history. They found that he'd struggled with depression in the past and had been on medication for it. One of his old high school girlfriends called and told police she suspected Brian might be secretly bisexual. She wondered if he'd been hiding something he wanted to walk away from. But the theory came from her alone, and nothing else in Brian's history backed it up. It went nowhere. Then, in early May, everything changed. Around 3:00am on the morning of May 11, 2006, police called Alexis. Someone had broken into Brian's apartment. They needed her to come over and figure out what was missing when she got there. It was strange. The only things taken were a small TV, a DVD player and a handful of CDs. Brian had music equipment and guitars sitting out in plain sight, and none of that had been touched. For a few hours, police thought maybe this was it. Maybe the killer had come back to destroy evidence. Maybe Brian himself had come back for something. But the hopes died pretty quickly. They learned that two other apartments in the same area had been broken into that same night. It was a string of routine burglaries. A few more months went by. Then, in August, a Columbus detective named Andre Edwards finally finished combing through every minute of footage from the Gateway. His idea was simple. If he could trace every single person who entered the Ugly Tuna that night and then watch them leave, anyone who didn't leave would be a person of interest, maybe even a suspect. So Edwards did exactly that. He cataloged every patron going in, and then he watched them all walk out. His conclusion? Brian Schaefer was the only person who went into the bar that night who didn't come out on camera. According to him, wherever Brian went, he must have come out a different way than he went in. But what happened next?
- [33:17]
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- [35:10]
Carter Roy
It had been almost five months since Brian Schaefer walked into the Ugly Tuna Saloona and didn't walk back out. Alexis and Randy were still paying his cell phone bill just so they could keep calling, hoping one day he'd answer. Every day. Alexis called the number every day. It went straight to voicemail. Then on Friday, September 8, 2006, around 11:30 at night, Alexis called the number right before bed and this time the phone rang. She said, quote it scared the crap out of me. I had no idea what I would say if a person answered it. But nobody picked up. After it rang for a while it kicked back to voicemail. Alexis lived with her brother at the time, so she had him try calling from his phone just in case hers was acting up and his call rang too. She called Randy. She called the police. The Police started calling Brian's phone over and over. It kept ringing until about 4 or 5 the next morning. After that it went silent. Then on Sunday, September 10 the phone rang again between 8am and 8pm and after that, it went straight to voicemail for good. At the time, the carrier, Singular, told police it could have been a glitch, especially if the nearby tower was overwhelmed. But years later, a local advocate on the case named Lori Davis followed up, and she was told the ping meant the phone could have been on. In an interview from around 2019 to 2020, Sgt. Hurst said there had actually been other phone pings police hadn't talked about publicly. He didn't get into many specifics, but. But he said Brian's phone had pinged off a few towers shortly after he disappeared. One ping came from the west side of Columbus. Another was in Upper Arlington, a neighborhood just west of campus. Hearst said another was near the intersection of Lane and kenny roads, about 2 and a half miles from the Gateway. The tower Brian's phone pinged on the weekend it rang was in Hilliard, a Columbus suburb about 14 miles from the bar. All three towers are on the west side of the city, and they're all pretty close together. Either Brian was on the west side that weekend, or someone with Brian's phone was. But whoever it was never surfaced again after September 2006. The leads basically stopped. But Randy never stopped looking. He worked with a local private investigator named Don Corbett, who offered up his services for free that first year. But Randy was the one running down every tip, every theory. He never believed Brian had just walked away. And then, on September 14, 2008, two and a half years after his son disappeared, Randy was killed in a freak accident. Hurricane Ike had moved up through the Midwest and slammed Ohio with severe winds. Randy was in his backyard cleaning up storm debris. The winds were still gusting, and a heavy tree branch came down and struck him on the head. He died there. After Randy's funeral, people started leaving condolences on the online obituary. And one of them stopped everyone cold. The comment simply said, to dad, love Brian, and in parentheses, US Virgin Islands. The case got reopened immediately. By October 7, 2008, Columbus police had traced the origin of that comment to a public computer. The computer wasn't in the Virgin Islands. It was in Franklin County, Ohio, about 20 miles from where Brian had disappeared. Sergeant Hurst said the comment was almost certainly a hoax. But here's the thing. There had been an alleged sighting of Brian in the US Virgin Islands. At one point, the FBI had even looked into it. But the few times police ever spoke about that sighting publicly, they said it didn't go anywhere. Same with most of the other sightings that came in over the years. There was one in Mexico in 2020 that the FBI investigated and ruled out. Twenty years after Brian went missing, the people who knew him best can't even agree on what happened to him. When he first vanished, Alexis was sure someone had hurt him. She didn't see how someone who was that excited about their future could have just run. But years later, she softened on that. She replayed the things Brian said to her in the weeks after his mother died. Let's run away. Let's get married tomorrow. You should find someone else. She started to wonder if he was telling her exactly what was about to happen, and she just wasn't hearing it at the time. She's not committed to either theory anymore. She's opened all possibilities. Brian's brother Derek went the opposite direction. At first, he wanted to believe Brian had just taken off for a while. But as the case got colder, Derek let go of that hope. He leans toward foul play now. Derek has also gone on record saying he thinks Brian's friend Clint Florence knew more than he was letting on. Their dad, Randy, thought the same thing before he died. And it's worth remembering Clint was the last person who's confirmed to have spent time with Brian inside the Ugly Tuna. Patrons that night told police they thought they saw the two of them arguing, even though the bar was too loud for anyone to make out what they were saying. In the early days of the search, Clint had been out on the ground helping. He passed out flyers. He stayed in touch with Randy. But as the investigation intensified and police started polygraphing people more aggressively, Clint hired a lawyer. His attorney advised him not to take a polygraph. That created a rift between him and the Shaffer family that never really healed. We don't know exactly why Randy and Derek became convinced Clint was holding something back. But Clint has never been charged. And his lawyer put out a statement saying he has nothing to hide and had already shared everything he knew. But it turns out the police haven't. In early 2026, new details emerged. Things the Columbus police had never told the public. You heard about those phone pings earlier? The one at Lane and Kennedy, the west side, Hilliard. Those weren't a handful of isolated signals. Singular tracked Brian's phone moving through successive locations across Columbus for close to a month after he disappeared. And detectives weren't just cataloging those pings. They were cross referencing them against another detail. The address of a person of interest. Not Clint, Florence. Someone else. Someone whose name Columbus police had been given independently by two separate people. Shortly after Brian vanished in 2006, a name the department has kept quiet for nearly 20 years. When a researcher working the case passed that same name to a detective in 2026, the detective's reaction said everything. Holy hell. How do you know that name? Between the triangulation data and the person's 2006 address, police had enough for a search warrant on a house near Lane Avenue. A section of the basement floor appeared to have been disturbed. Investigators dug into the concrete. They found an old fuel oil tank, nothing else. Officially, the case is still unsolved, but I want to be careful about what that actually means here because I think it's easy to confuse unsolved with uninvestigated. Columbus police have had a name since 2006. They tracked Brian's phone for a month. They got a warrant, they dug. And as of 2026, the department is under direct orders from the police chief not to discuss the case publicly. That is not a forgotten case. That's an active one that nobody was allowed to talk about. Derek is the last surviving member of the Shaffer family. On the 10th anniversary of Brian's disappearance, he told the Dispatch he regrets not joining Brian and Clint that night. He said, quote, I've thought about that night over and over and over, over for 10 years. What if I had been there that night? Would things have been different? Would my brother still be here? Sergeant Hurst also spoke to the media on the 10 year anniversary when he was asked whether he thought it was more likely that Brian had run or was a victim of foul play. He said both theories were equally possible. Online. The speculation is gotten ugly. People haven't just accused Clint over the years. There are corners of Reddit where people have accused Brighton, Amber, Meredith, and even Derek. In 2024, two brothers from Ohio with no public connection to the case actually filed a defamation lawsuit against an anonymous Reddit user. The user had repeatedly accused them of being involved in Brian's decision appearances. The brothers said they'd never met Brian and were seeking to put a stop to the posts. But for all the noise and the new developments, not much has changed, at least that we know of. The reward for information about Brian's disappearance reached $100,000. The ugly tuna saluna closed years ago. If Brian is alive today, he would be 47 years old. He's 6ft 2 inches tall with brown hair and hazel eyes. He has a distinctive dark fleck in his left iris and on his upper right arm, the Pearl Jam stickman tattoo. If you have any information about his case, the Columbus police can be reached at 614-645-4545. When I think about Brian Shaffer, I keep coming back to what Amber said about all those contradictory comments. If you read those as a sign that he was planning to disappear, they look like one thing. If you read them as a grieving 27 year old trying to hold on to the only person who still felt like home, they look like something completely different. That's this whole case in a nutshell. The same set of facts pointing in two opposite directions and a family that's been forced to live in the middle of that for 20 years. Brian's mother is gone. His father is gone. His brother is the only one left to wonder. And somewhere out there, maybe in Columbus, maybe in the Virgin Islands, maybe nowhere at all, the answer to what happened to Brian is still waiting. Whatever the truth is, it deserves to come out. And Brian deserves to be remembered as more than the guy who walked into a bar and never walked out. He was a son, a brother, a boyfriend who'd already picked out a ring, a future doctor. And his story isn't over. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of a new murder and all the people it affected. True Crime Stories is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. Your feedback truly makes a difference and to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get both parts of every story dropped on Tuesday completely ad free. No waiting for part two plus ad free and early access to every show across Crime House and bonus episodes every month. To join, go to Crime Houseplus or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Murder True Crime Stories page. We'll be back on Tuesday. True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy and is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertofsky, Alyssa Fox, Cassidy Dylan and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening.