Disappearance Of Brian Shaffer

On March 31, a Friday, classes at OSU ended for spring vacation the following week. Brian and Randy Shaffer, his papa, celebrated the event by going out for a steak feast together earlier that evening. Randy noticed that his son looked drained from having pulled all-nighters earlier in the week cramming for some crucial upcoming exams. He did not guess Brian should go out with a friend, William "Clint" Florence, later that night as he schemed to do, but did not express his misgiving to his son.

At 9 p.m., Brian met Florence at the Ugly Tuna Saloona, a bar in the South Campus Gateway complex on High Street. An hour later, Brian called Waggoner. She had come back to her cabin in Toledo to visit with her family before she and Brian were due to left for Miami. He and Florence went bar-hopping, touring many other drinking establishments and working their way down to the Arena District. At each stop, the two had one shot each of hard liquor, according to Florence.

After midnight, the two met Meredith Reed, a companion of Florence, in The Short North. She provided them with a ride back to the Ugly Tuna Saloona, where they had begun the night, and joined them there for the final round. While the three were there, Brian separated from his friends. Florence and Reed had been striving to discover him, repeatedly calling him. They left with other patrons when the bar closed at 2 a.m., staying outside for Brian. When he was not among the exiting crowd, they inferred he had gone back to his apartment without letting them know.

Waggoner and Randy Shaffer both attempted to call Brian later that weekend but he did not reply. On Monday morning he missed the flight to Miami he and Waggoner had planned long before. He was then reported missing to the Columbus police. Police started their investigation for Brian at the Ugly Tuna, the bar where he had last been noticed. Since the region around South Campus Gateway was somewhat blighted with a huge crime rate, the bar had inducted security cameras. They checked out the footage, which revealed Brian, Florence and Reed going up an escalator to the bar's major entrance at 1:15 a.m. Brian was observed outside of the bar around 1:55 a.m., chatting briefly with two young women and saying goodbye, then moving off-camera in the way of the bar, apparently to re-enter. The camera did not tape him evacuating quickly afterwards when the Ugly Tuna closed; that was the final time he was noticed.

It was likely, detectives acknowledged, that he could have altered his clothes in the bar or put on a hat and kept his head down, protecting his face from the camera. The cameras might also have skipped him—one panned across the region constantly, and the other was operated manually. He might have also fled the building by another way. Nonetheless, the building's only other exit, a service door not normally used by the public, unlocked at the time onto a construction site that officials thought would have been hard to walk through while sober, much less drunken, as Brian probably was at the time.

Since Columbus has the most security cameras of any city in Ohio, more than Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo combined, police next glanced to the footage from other bars to glimpse if cameras there could clarify how Brian had left the Ugly Tuna. Nonetheless, footage from cameras at three other close bars revealed no evidence of Brian.

The investigation started to fan out from the Ugly Tuna, with officers, sometimes escorted by police dogs, glancing closely in the street, examining dumpsters and other trash containers and inquiring inhabitants if they had noticed him. Flyers of Brian's picture, exhibiting a tattoo on his upper right arm of a stick figure logo from the cover artwork for the single of "Alive" by Pearl Jam, one of his favourite bands, and noting a unique fleck in one of his irises, were posted widely. The police even urged the city to let them into the sewer system and survey there. No valuable evidence was disclosed. At Brian's apartment on King Avenue six blocks from the Ugly Tuna, his car was still parked outside. Inside, nothing seemed amiss.

After surveying miles away from the bar in every way, police started to deem other likelihoods besides a disaster or foul play. Since his mum had recently perished, it was assumed he had gone away temporarily to mourn in solitude. Yet, his disappearance proved endless. No obvious motives appeared for him voluntarily vanishing.

Those who had noticed Brian that evening, including his dad, were asked to take lie detector tests. Reed and Randy Shaffer passed theirs, as did reportedly all the others, while Florence rejected. The two women Brian had last been noticed talking to were later recognized; they told in 2009 that they had never been inquired to take one themselves.

Waggoner called Brian's phone every night before going to bed for a long time after the disappearance. Usually, it went to voicemail, but one night in September it rang three times. "I maintained phoning it to listen to it purely because it was one of the nicest sounds I have ever listened to, even if no one picked up", she wrote on her MySpace page. Cingular, Brian's wireless provider, told what Waggoner heard may have been due to a computer glitch. A ping from the phone was observed at a cell tower in Hilliard, 14 miles (23 km) northwest of Columbus.

The police earned many tips, none of which transpired in any breakthroughs in the case. At a Pearl Jam show later that year in Cincinnati, lead singer Eddie Vedder took time between songs to ask for tips in Brian's disappearance, but none of those was helpful either. Possible sightings in Michigan, Texas and even Sweden were examined.

Randy Shaffer, who had lately endured the casualty of his wife, proceeded the search for his son on his own. A psychic he consulted told him Brian's corpse was in the water near a bridge pier. He and Derek, Brian's brother, along with some other inhabitants who had become enthusiastic in the case, purchased waders and expended much of their free time along the shores of the Olentangy River, which streams through Columbus adjacent to the OSU campus, searching in vain for the corpse near bridges.

This likelihood also directed police to briefly deem the heavily disputed Smiley face killing theory. Brian Shaffer, under this theory, would be the murderer's only victim whose corpse had not yet been discovered. Columbus police ultimately dismissed any relation to the apparent murderer in Brian's case, following the lead of most law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that have looked into it.