He left a restaurant, on his motorcycle, with a gal he had just started dating a couple of weeks earlier and neither one was ever seen again.

He was missing for several days before anyone realized. There were several reasons for this. He was divorced and selling his house. His children were with his parents on a trip to see Mount Rushmore and were out of cell phone range. He had sold his business a few months earlier so he could spend the summer with his kids and take some time to decide what he wanted to do next, so no one from work was missing him. He was selling his house and was living with a friend but his friend traveled on business so he wasn’t always there. He went out on a date Sunday Night, July 6th. The gals teenage daughter didn’t put out a missing person’s report till Tuesday but they didn’t really know Chris. Her friends, on the news, seemed to suspect him of doing something. The news reports were not accusing him of anything but they definitely were leaning towards suspecting that this guy had probably done something. No one from our side of the family had meet her, so her family and friends weren’t making contact with his family, to alert anyone. No one in the family was alerted about him missing for days. His high school friend (that he was living with) was home from a business trip and had not seen him the day before but thought maybe he had headed to the lake or something–after all his kids were out of town and he had the summer off. Typically, he spoke with his kids EVERY day but because of the mountainous region his parents were in, there wasn’t good cell reception and he wasn’t talking to them. His best friend from high (the one he was living with) was sure he would see Chris at the concert the next night, he knew Chris would be there, he had never missed one. When he never arrived, he KNEW something was wrong and made contact with Chris’ sister. She was trying to make contact with her parents (in the mountanous region) but didn’t alarm any other family so we all found out on the news. (It had been a busy week and we had not watched the news all week long.) Talk about a shocking bolt of information. By the time we heard it, suspision was quite elevated. It was late Friday night, around 11 at night so there was nothing we could do but think and pray.

A group of his high school friends had been out searching for him for days. They had spent a lot of their time in one area, then they received a message that her cell phone had pinged in Kansas (just across the state line so they headed 30 minutes to that side of town to search, still nothing.)

Chris’ sister, Stacy had finally made contact with her parents and they began the road trip back in their RV. I think about them often and what that trip must have been like. They had their grandchildren and had to break the news that their Dad was missing. I’m sure there were things they wanted to talk about and share with each other but needed to wait till they got back to Kansas City so the kids weren’t more upset. Then just driving for hours, non-stop to look for their son, their first born, who was now a man of 41 but missing. My husband’s Uncle made contact with another of his best friends who was a fireman and his crew went out, every time they weren’t on a call and searched the area that they thought made the most sense, if he had left the restaurant and was heading back to take her home. the same area the high school friends had been when they got the message about the ping.

My husband sat and thought and thought. He looked up the location of the restaurant-the last known place that they had been seen and looked at the area she was from. He said , “if I were Chris, and on a motorcycle, dating someone new, I would take the scenic route not the highways, there were 2 ways he could have gone so my husband took the path that was opposite of the fireman and went out looking up and down streets- but found nothing. He was on his way in to work so he couldn’t go look at the other path but planned on going that way, on his way home. The other path is where the fireman found them that same day, just feet away from where the high school friends had stopped looking, 10 more minutes in that area and they would have fouond their bodies. We would have never found him, driving by-you couldn’t even tell anyone had gone off the road. There were no skid marks and they believe he must have been reacting quickly to a deer jumping out in front of him. The fireman found him from searching with the ladder looking down into the thick trees. I feel so bad for his 2 kids that he left behind, his parents-no parent should ever have to bury a child and his sister who was so close to him. Although we did not know her I feel for the gal who was with Chris, she left behind a daughter.

It was 2 years ago tomorrow that we attended the funeral of my husband’s cousin and 2 years later it still doesn’t seem possible.