The Disappearance of Brian Shaffer

Do you think that in today’s world, laden with electronic gizmos and gadgets and CCTV cameras around every corner, that a person can literally just disappear?  Because I can tell you, that they can. Today we are going to discuss the disappearance of a man, who to this day remains one of the most puzzling disappearances of all time.  But maybe today, one of you can help bring Brian Shaffer home.  I’m John Dodson and this is The Secret Sits.

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Transcript

Do you think that in today’s world, laden with electronic gizmos and gadgets and CCTV cameras around every corner, that a person can literally just disappear?  Because I can tell you, that they can. Today we are going to discuss the disappearance of a man, who to this day remains one of the most puzzling disappearances of all time.  But maybe today, one of you can help bring Brian Shaffer home.  I’m John Dodson and this is The Secret Sits.

Brian Shaffer was born on February 25th, 1979, he grew up in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus, and he was the eldest of two sons to Randy and Renee Shaffer. His maternal uncle was the comic book artist Mike Parobeck.  Uncle Mike’s claim to fame was his work on Batman Adventures, a comic book tie-in to the animated TV series Batman: The Animated Series. By 1995, Mike was living in Chicago. Halfway through his run-on Batman Adventures, when he was diagnosed with Type one diabetes, which can be controlled by taking insulin. According to his friends, however; he was somewhat careless with his own medical care, sadly, this carelessness ultimately led to his death in 1996, Mike Parobeck was only 30 years old.

Brian Shaffer graduated from the local high school in 1997 and went to Ohio State University (OSU) for his undergraduate work. Six years later he graduated with a degree in microbiology. 

Following that, Shaffer began studies at the OSU College of Medicine in 2004. Despite his interest in pursuing a medical career, Brian often expressed that his ultimate dream was to start a band and play music akin to one of his favorite performers, Jimmy Buffet; he had always been fascinated by the laid-back ambiance and routine of tropical locations. 

During his second year in med school, in March 2006, Brian’s mother Renee died of myelodysplasia, a form of bone marrow cancer. Brian was very close to his mother and although he, understandably, took her death hard, those close to him claimed he was handling it well.

During his time at medical school, Shaffer had become romantically involved with another medical student, Alexis Waggoner. She, along with their families and friends, believed that Brian would probably be proposing marriage to her later in 2006, most likely on a trip to Miami the couple had planned for spring break at the beginning of April. Tropical locations such as Miami were attractive to Shaffer; as I said, he liked the relaxed lifestyles. 

On March 31, a Friday, classes at OSU ended for spring break the next week. Shaffer and his father Randy celebrated the occasion by going out for a steak dinner together early that evening at a local Outback Steak house. Randy Shaffer noted that Brian seemed exhausted, but that was to be expected after having pulled all-nighters earlier in the week, cramming for some of his important exams. The weight of grief over his mother’s death only weeks before, was probably also a contributing factor in his exhaustion.  Brian initially planned to celebrate that night with his brother Derek. When Derek and his wife canceled their plans with Brian, Brian then arranged to go out later with his friend William “Clint” Florence.  Randy, did not think Brian should go out with his friend, Clint, later that night as he planned to, however; he did not express his reservations to his son. 

At 9 p.m., Brain met Clint at the Ugly Tuna Saloona, a seafood restaurant and bar in the South Campus Gateway complex on High Street in Columbus. An hour later, Brian called Alexis, who had returned to her home in Toledo to visit with her family before she and Brian were due to depart for Miami. Brain told Alexis that he loved her and went on about his night.

Brain and Clint went bar-hopping, visiting several other bars and working their way down to the Arena District. At each stop the two had one shot each of hard liquor, according to Clint. 

After midnight, Brain and Clint met up with Meredith Reed, a friend of Clint’s, in The Short North, an art district between downtown Columbus and the Ohio State campus. Meredith gave them a ride back to the Ugly Tuna, where they had started the night, and joined them there for a last round. The three were caught on CCTV cameras at 1:15 AM riding the escalator up to the second floor which contains the entrance to the Ugly Tuna. 

While the three were there, Brain separated from his friends. Some online sources claim that he told Clint and Meredith that he was going to talk to one of the members of the band but all that is known is that, again on camera, around 1:55 AM, Brian was seen outside the bar speaking briefly with two young women, he then moved off-camera in the direction to re-enter the bar.

Clint and Meredith attempted to find Brian, before the bar closed, repeatedly calling him. They were shuffled outside with all of the other patrons when the bar closed at 2 a.m., the two searched for Brian in the crowd of drunken college kids for a while and then waited outside of the building for Brian. When they had no luck finding Brian among the departing crowd, they assumed he had gone back to his apartment without letting them know. Alexis and Brian's father Randy both tried to call him later that weekend, but he did not answer.  Out of concern, Alexis went to his apartment but while she found his car was parked in its spot and nothing looked out of place in his apartment, there were just no sign of Brian.

On Monday morning, Alexis arrived at the airport hoping that Brian might show up, explain his absence, and the couple would go on their romantic getaway and move on with their lives. Her hopes were short-lived.  Brian missed the flight to Miami he and Alexis had been scheduled on. He was then reported missing to the Columbus police. 

Police began their search for Brian at the Ugly Tuna Saloona, the location where he had last been seen. Since the area around South Campus Gateway was somewhat beleaguered with a high crime rate, the bar had installed security cameras. The police officers reviewed the CCTV footage, which showed Brian, Clint and Meredith going up an escalator to the bar's main entrance at 1:15 a.m. Brian was seen outside of the bar around 1:55 a.m., talking briefly with two young women and saying goodbye, then moving off-camera in the direction of the bar, apparently to re-enter. The camera did not record him leaving shortly afterwards when the Ugly Tuna closed; this footage at 01:55am was the last time Brian has ever been seen alive, in fact, it is the last time Brian has ever been seen…at all.

Since Columbus has the most security cameras of any city in Ohio – more than Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Toledo combined – officers next looked to the footage from other bars to see if cameras there could explain how Brian had left the Ugly Tuna Saloona.  Yet after examining all of this additional footage, there was still no trace of Brian.

It was possible, investigators realized, that Brian could have changed his clothes in the bar or put on a hat and kept his head down, hiding his face from the camera. The cameras at the Ugly Tuna might also have missed Brian as one camara panned across the area constantly, and the other was operated manually.  The building's only other exit was a service door not generally used by the public, which opened, at the time, onto a construction site that officers believed would have been difficult to walk through while sober, much less intoxicated, as Brain likely was at the time. 

The search began to fan out from the Ugly Tuna Saloon, with officers, sometimes accompanied by police dogs, looking closely in the street, inspecting dumpsters and other waste containers, and asking residents if they had seen Brain. Flyers bearing his picture were passed out and posted everywhere, they showed a tattoo on Brian’s upper right arm of a stick figure logo from the cover artwork for the single  "Alive" by Pearl Jam, one of his favorite bands, and noting a distinctive fleck in one of his irises. Police even persuaded the city of Columbus to let them into the sewer system to search there. Unfortunately, no useful information was uncovered. At Brian's apartment on King Avenue, six blocks from the bar, his car was still parked outside. Inside, nothing appeared amiss. 

After searching miles away from the Ugly Tuna in every direction, police began to consider other possibilities besides an accident or foul play. Since Brian's mother had recently died, it was speculated he had gone away temporarily to grieve in solitude. Yet, his disappearance proved permanent. 

Those who had seen Brain that evening, including his father, were asked to take lie detector tests. Randy and Meredith passed their tests, as did everyone else who took a polygraph, however; for some unknown reason, Clint Florence refused to take a polygraph test and he also lawyered up.  Now I do not want the context of this statement to be that refusing a polygraph and hiring a lawyer proves that Clint was guilty, in fact, Clint provided police with everything he knew about that night.

The two women Brian had last been seen talking to at 1:55am were later identified; they said in 2009 that they had never been asked to take a lie detector test themselves. 

Alexis called Brain's phone every evening before going to bed for a very long time after he had disappeared. Usually, it went directly to voicemail, but one night in September, Alexis is about to go to bed and she picks up her phone to call Brian just before bed and it actually rang three times.  Alexis wrote on her MySpace page, "I kept calling it, to hear it, purely because it was one of the best sounds I have ever heard, even if no one picked up". Cingular, Brian's wireless provider, said what she had heard may have been due to a computer glitch. A ping from the phone was detected at a cell tower in Hilliard, 14 miles northwest of Columbus. There was no activity detected on his cell phone or bank accounts at any time after he had disappeared.

The police received many tips, none of which resulted in any breakthroughs in the case. At a Pearl Jam concert later that year in Cincinnati, lead singer Eddie Vedder took time between songs to ask for tips in Brain’s disappearance, but none of those were useful either. Possible sightings in Michigan, Texas, and even Sweden were investigated. 

Randy Shaffer, who had recently suffered the death of his wife, continued the search for his son on his own. A psychic he consulted told him Brian's body was in water near a bridge pier. He and Derek, Brian's younger brother, along with some other citizens who had become interested in the case, bought waders and spent a lot of their free time along the shores of the Olentangy River, which flows through Columbus adjacent to the OSU campus, searching in vain for Brian’s body near bridges. 

This possibility also led police to briefly consider the heavily disputed Smiley face murder theory. Ok, The Smiley face murder theory is a theory advanced by retired New York City detectives Kevin Gannon and Anthony Duarte, and Dr. Lee Gilbertson, a criminal justice professor and gang expert at St. Cloud State University. They allege that a number of young men found dead in bodies of water across several Midwestern states from the late 1990s to the 2010s did not accidentally drown, as concluded by law enforcement agencies, but were victims of a serial killer or an organized group of serial killers.

The term "smiley face" became connected to the alleged murders when it was made public that the police had discovered graffiti depicting a smiley face near locations where they think the killer dumped the bodies in at least a dozen of the cases.  The response of law enforcement investigators and other experts has been largely skeptical.  Brian, under this theory, would be the purported serial killer's only victim whose body had not yet been found. Columbus police eventually rejected any connection to the alleged killer in Brain's case, following the lead of most law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, that have looked into it. 

An unexpected and bazar event took place in September of 2008, when during a heavy windstorm, Randy Shaffer was out in the yard of his Baltimore home clearing debris. Out of nowhere a branch blew off of a nearby tree and fatally struck him. Neighbors found his body the next morning and called police. 

After his obituary ran online, a condolence book was posted. One of the signatures in it said, "To Dad, love Brian (U.S. Virgin Islands)". This suggested Brian might have left Columbus for a new life elsewhere. However, upon further investigation, the note was found to have been posted from a computer accessible to the public in Franklin County; it was determined to be a hoax. 

Shortly after Randy Shaffer's death, Neil Rosenberg, the attorney for Clint, wrote to Don Corbett, a private investigator who has volunteered his time to help the Shaffer family find Brian, regarding his client's ongoing refusal to take a lie detector test. Rosenberg suggested that he had learned that the Columbus police investigating the case believed Brian was alive. 

In April 2009, The Lantern, OSU's student newspaper, disclosed the exchange. "If Brian is alive, which is what I'm led to believe after speaking with the detective involved, then it is Brian, and not Clint who is causing his family pain and hardship," Rosenberg wrote. "Brian should come forward and end this." Clint, he said, did not have anything to hide; he had merely told everything he knew from the beginning and did not see the value of doing so again. 

Rosenberg's assertions notwithstanding, many of those who were close to Brian Shaffer have criticized Clint for not being forthcoming enough. "As soon as the detective started getting involved, that's when he pretty much had no contact with anybody," recalled Derek. "I've always thought he definitely knows something–just won't come forward with it." He believes it is still possible that Brain is alive, and Clint knows where he might have gone. "If Brian did take off somewhere, if that is the case, we just always had a strong feeling that Clint would possibly know that," he said. Alexis also thinks that Clint is withholding information, but believes that it's likely her former boyfriend is dead and did not run off. "I can't imagine he would have just done that," she said. 

In 2014, Columbus police said they were still receiving at least two tips a month on the case via the local Crime Stoppers hotline, though none had proven useful. The evidence in the case filled four evidence boxes. One of the original investigators, Andre Edwards, told Columbus Monthly that after extensive review of the camera footage at the Ugly Tuna Saloona from the night Brian disappeared, which was intended to rule out the idea that he could have left in disguise, he could "say with 100-percent certainty" that Brian did not leave via the escalator. Police say they have three theories about the case but declined to discuss them even generally with the magazine. 

In 2019, an image of an alleged American homeless man in Tijuana, Mexico bearing a resemblance to Brian began circulating online. Columbus news station 10TV forwarded the image to the detective in charge of Brian's case in 2020. The detective sent the image to the FBI for facial recognition analysis, which ruled him out as the identity of the man. 

In March 2021, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation released an age-progressed photo of what Brian might look like at age 42, nearly 15 years after his disappearance. 

Between Brian's disappearance and his own death, Randy joined the families of other missing adults in Ohio in lobbying the state legislature to pass a bill establishing a statewide protocol for such cases. At the time Brian disappeared, it was left up to individual departments on how to handle the cases, and some parents felt that investigations into their relatives' disappearances had suffered as a result. By the time Randy died, the bill had become law. 

Now, there are many theories that can be found online as to what may have happened to Brian Shaffer. Many feel that he never made it out of the Ugly Tuna, they believe that he may have met with foul play somewhere inside the bar. Other’s feel that he was a victim of the Smiley Face killer and met his end in the Olentangy River, or that he could have taken a walk by the river and accidentally fallen in. As the service door of the bar was not equipped with security cameras, some believe that Brian may have exited through there and had trouble maneuvering his way through the construction site and fatally hurt himself and, fearing a lawsuit, the owners of the Ugly Tuna disposed of his body.

Since the years have gone by and his body and other personal belongings have never been found, many have a hard time accepting the theory that he was either thrown or fell into the river. Security cameras around the area showed no evidence that Brian had been walking around there and as it is a high-traffic area, someone should have seen him at some point. 

The neighborhood around South Campus Gateway was known at the time to be a high crime area. There is a possibility that Brian could have been attacked after exiting the bar, especially if he used the unmonitored exit that opened up to the construction site.

One theory that those who knew Brian tend to dismiss is that he either took his own life or disappeared on his own, choosing to start a whole new life somewhere else. 

Those closest to Brian never detected signs of depression, they claim that although he was grieving over the loss of his mother just weeks prior, he was handling it well. Something that should be noted was that shortly after Renee passed away, in a phone call to Alexis, Brian told her that he was having difficulty coping with everything and that she should move on and find someone new. Not long after that conversation, Brian took back his words and asked her to go away with him.

While many feel that Brian would never have left behind his family whom he was very close with, or his promising career as a doctor, or his loving and beautiful girlfriend whom he planned to marry, stranger things have happened. Do we truly know what Secrets thoughts lie in the minds and hearts of those closest to us?

Honestly, I think the most heartbreaking part of this story is that Brian’s little brother Derek has lost both of his parents and his older brother in such a short amount of time and in such tragic ways.  My hope for him is that he eventually finds all of the answers he is looking for and that at some point he can dig through the secrets and come up for some fresh air and feel the sunshine again.  I’m John Dodson and this has been, The Secret Sits.  Audio Engineering by Gabriel Dodson.  Original art work, provided by Tony Ley.