The search for Bob Batdorf

Karen Zekan

Saturday, Oct. 31, 1998 | 10:36 a.m.

Looking back, Bob Batdorf's last days seem so predictable, like re-reading the first chapters of a mystery novel.

Neighbors in his St. Petersburg, Fla., complex remembered seeing people moving furniture out of his apartment shortly before he disappeared. A pawn shop ticket with his name and thumbprint on it prove he hocked the last of his things, among them the ceramic W.C. Fields and Marx Brothers figurines his mom gave him for Christmas.

He sold his Honda Accord back to the dealer for $5,400 the day he left town, deposited the check in the bank, left the key to his apartment in the night drop box and a note inside the unit among a few odds and ends -- "Whatever you find is yours to do with as you want."

And with that he headed out to the airport to catch a plane bound for Las Vegas, a month after buying a .357-magnum revolver.

The details spell suicide.

Except that Batdorf, 37, left no suicide note behind when he left town the end of July 1996. And he said no goodbyes to friends or family.

All activity stopped on his credit cards and bank statements a little over two months later in Las Vegas -- about the same time a man's body matching Batdorf's description turned up in the desert, dead from a .357-caliber gunshot wound in the head.

The body was found a quarter-mile directly east of the Vacation Village hotel-casino, which is just south of Sunset Road off Las Vegas Boulevard.

It took two years for police to match the missing person's report the family filed in Florida with the unidentified body Las Vegas authorities had labeled as John "Flightline" Doe, so named because it was found beneath the flight pattern of planes coming into McCarran International Airport.

Two years of family heartache because of miscommunications between detectives thousands of miles apart.

Two years of heartache that today has left this family with unanswered questions and a small package containing cremated remains. Authorities insist the remains are that of Bob Batdorf. But the family says it cannot be sure.

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Flightline Doe's case is one of a few dozen that stump coroner's investigators and police each year -- the John and Jane Does who linger for years without a name, history, or link to a family member who can claim them.

More than 5,000 bodies roll through the coroner's examining rooms annually, and as many as 25 on any given day. Coroners investigate all suicides, suspicious deaths, and deaths not attended by hospice or medical staff, which account for the majority of the bodies.

Frequently no positive identification comes with the discovered bodies, like those pulled from the wreckage of a fiery accident, those found floating in Lake Mead, or those with pockets emptied after drug deals gone bad.

They end up on the roster as John and Jane Does until a true name surfaces.

"Within a day or two, 90 percent of them are going to be identified because we have an idea of who they are," said Clark County Coroner Ron Flud. "It's just a matter of finding the right person and getting the fingerprints, and, when we have those, we can make identification that quick."

It is the other 10 percent, however, that cause the problems.

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A calm wind was blowing the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1996, when the two men got off the Citizen's Area Transit bus at the stop outside Vacation Village hotel-casino. Heading east on foot, according to their statements to police, they crossed into the open desert that Tuesday afternoon -- the path they took together every day to start their shift at a nearby metal fabrication shop.

It was hot for October -- 93 degrees, 4 degrees cooler than the month's high the day before. A quarter-mile through sand and sagebrush was where they found him on his back at 2:30 p.m., dressed in tennis shoes, jeans, a pocketed short-sleeve shirt and a gun a few inches from his rigid right hand.

A dried crimson trail from his head down the sloped desert sand to his feet hinted he'd been shot; they told the 911 dispatcher what they had seen after running back through the brush to a casino phone.

Police had blocked off the area when general assignment detectives and crime-scene analysts arrived to begin their investigation.

The detectives' first thoughts: Everything reads suicide. A body, a gun, an apparent fatal shot through the mouth, no signs of a struggle.

A coroner's investigator arrives, the first person by law permitted to physically examine a body. He finds one expended casing in the .357-caliber stainless steel Smith and Wesson, the revolver's five other chambers filled with hollow-point ammunition. Six more copper-jacketed Frontier brand cartridges and $12 are found in his right front jeans pocket. Eighty-one cents are noted in his left. No identification can be found, no suicide note.

He's labeled John "Flightline" Doe on the paperwork that followed, named for the dozens of planes en route to McCarran that passed overhead during the hours detectives jotted down particulars before the body was sealed in a bag marked 228349 at 5:03 p.m.

A van from the now-defunct Hines Mortuary carried the body down Interstate 15 to the morgue.

All suicide reports taken by Metro Police go to the homicide section. Homicide Lt. Wayne Petersen explained, however, that because suicides do not involve criminal prosecution, no detectives are assigned to do follow-up.

Investigators who initially handled the Flightline case did run the gun's serial number through its pawn & gun detail's database to determine if the weapon was wanted locally. They stopped there; there is no national database easily accessible to officers to find out a gun's registered owner.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms does maintain a database of gun sales histories -- who bought them and where. But it's not standard police procedure to check a gun through ATF, Metro Police say. The process is long and may lead to a dead end because it doesn't necessarily show the amount of times and into whose hands the guns may have passed.

"The coroner's office is responsible for identifying the body," Petersen said. "Often we have no way to know that the deceased has been identified."

It's virtually impossible to determine the exact time of death, but coroner's investigators placed Flightline Doe's demise at least three days earlier. His body had begun to decompose and mummify. His fingertips were soaked and a set of 10 prints -- some barely a blur of ink -- placed in his file.

Flightline's fingerprints were run through the North Las Vegas Police Department's WIN/AFIS system Oct. 10, 1996, a national database for all fingerprints on file with law enforcement, but no match was found.

(Metro has its own national Automated Fingerprint Identification System, but uses North Las Vegas' computer, which also can access prints entered into the Western Identification System logging prints from people in the West.)

Eight sets of prints of missing men Metro was looking for were sent to the coroner's office Oct. 11 but none matched Flightline Doe. Four people called with names of relatives missing from Nevada, California and Minnesota, but their prints didn't match.

Flightline's case was turned over to Clark County Social Services Nov. 15. "All efforts have been exhausted by the Clark County Coroner-Medical Examiner's Office," the coroner's report reads, "in attempting to make a positive identification ... and locate his next of kin."

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The barbecue on her son's apartment patio was what Carole Walke went looking for the first week in August when she reached a recording that his phone had been disconnected.

A neighbor at the complex explained the grill wasn't there because a new tenant had already moved in, an attorney. The apartment manager suggested the mother check a pawn shop down the street. Seconds after Walke passed through the shop's front door, she saw on the shelves some of Batdorf's things, including the figurines she'd given him.

The shopkeeper provided her with the ticket bearing her son's thumbprint.

"It didn't make sense that he'd leave town and not tell us," Batdorf's aunt, Barbara Moody, said. "We're close. We don't get in each other's way, but we're close."

Moody was the last one to talk to Batdorf. Phone records show he spent 20 minutes on the phone with her July 27 from his home in St. Petersburg. He spent 17 minutes on the phone the next day, calling her from his room at the Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas to find out about the Reba McIntyre concert she'd gone to the night before.

"He sounded fine," she said. "He never once let on where he was."

Weeks passed with nothing from Bob. So the family started searching.

They have bank statements showing that Batdorf drained his $17,000 Florida bank account in 11 days. Between August and September he made $600 daily ATM withdrawals as often as three times a day and maxed out his credit cards that put him $72,000 in debt.

One bill retrieved by the family shows he rented a car for $49.50 and stayed a night at a hotel in Universal City, Calif. In Las Vegas, he stayed some nights on the Strip, others downtown.

Walke wasn't sure what to think. Bob, her oldest, had always been responsible and independent like her three other boys who include a real estate executive, a Naval officer and her youngest, a family man with two young children.

Bob was a straight-A student who left home at 18 with a scholarship to the University of Miami to study architecture. According university records, he switched his major to business. This was about the time he got a part-time job in a campus restaurant where he met a family that asked him to design their restaurant and run it as his own.

He did, and left college in 1981 after four years without a degree. He moved on to other that jobs he would hold anywhere from six months to two years, mostly managing or troubleshooting for restaurants in Florida and Georgia before moving to St. Petersburg to be closer to his family.

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Given its university, nationally recognized for its hotel and restaurant management program, in a booming city thriving on tourism, Las Vegas seemed to Walke a reasonable destination for her son.

Batdorf's credit card activity and phone bills stop Oct. 1, 1996 -- the same day a wallet was found on the steps of Metro's Downtown Area Command. Inside were a Florida driver's license and eight credit cards of a man named Robert Batdorf.

Given the details known today, it may be that he threw the wallet there perhaps to let the end of his life remain a mystery.

An officer inventoried the contents. The report form includes three empty boxes -- the lack of check marks indicates that the name was not run through databases accessible to Metro officers, among them databases known as NCIC and SCOPE, or Metro's pawn shop section.

The bypassing of such searches is not unusual, police say.

The pawn shop section would only have information on tangible items that would have been turned over for cash -- things like jewelry and guns.

NCIC (National Crime Information Center) is the FBI's tool that logs stolen property and vehicles, and people who are wanted or with criminal records.

SCOPE (Shared Computer Operations for Protection and Enforcement) would have been the only possibility had Batdorf been reported missing from this area. Much like databases in other cities, SCOPE is limited to criminal and non-criminal information on people in Southern Nevada.

The report does not indicate whether the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles was contacted, or any of the credit-card companies.

Even had the checks been run, nothing would have popped up. Batdorf didn't have a criminal record or any fingerprints on file. The Floridian always paid his bills.

His name wouldn't enter the nationwide database for missing persons until his family reported his disappearance Oct. 14 -- two weeks after the wallet was found, six days after Flightline Doe arrived at the morgue.

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Joseph Cillian had only recently been promoted to the St. Petersburg Police Department's missing-persons detail when Batdorf's family reported him missing. Cillian took a personal interest in the case: his son used to play on the same baseball team as the missing man's nephew.

Cillian was on the phone with Walke many times. He thought he'd solved the case when he checked NCIC in late October.

Listed as found in Las Vegas was the body of a white man about 35, dark hair, 175 pounds, 5 feet 10, with a .357-caliber gunshot wound in the head.

Cillian today doesn't remember if Las Vegas authorities told him then whether it was a suicide or homicide victim. "It was just described as a man shot in the head with a .357," he said.

Eyeglasses found in the man's pocket was the detail Cillian keyed in on. Batdorf wore glasses. Walke sent a coroner's investigator her son's prescription from his eye doctor. The investigator took the glasses and the prescription to a Las Vegas eyeglass store.

Cillian's log reflects the disposition: "11/16 -- Eyeglass prescription of M/P (missing person) was completely different from that of unident. deceased. Determined Flightline Doe not M/P."

The glasses were then released for storage at one of the county public administrator's cramped warehouses where thousands of deceased people's possessions, year after year, go unclaimed.

After several months, Flightline Doe's glasses -- deemed by officials to be of minimal value -- were given to the local Lion's Club for distribution to the poor.

Back in Florida, Batdorf's family tried to stay optimistic. Even when a psychic told them Bob was dead.

"I didn't want any part of it," brother Kevin Batdorf said of the psychic's tale of a woman in a red dress she sensed Bob had met up with in a bar. "But we listened. We kept all doors open."

Cillian arranged in January 1997 for a police artist to draw a composite of the mystery woman with long dark hair the psychic sensed Batdorf had met at "New York-New York" -- the name of a nightclub in Florida, as well as the Las Vegas casino then under construction that was visible from the spot where Flightline's body was discovered.

The artist also drew the woman's vision of a bearded man with dark hair -- ironically similar to a police officer's notation Oct. 8 of a man seen wandering in the desert a distance from the body.

It was Cillian's first out-of-state case. He admits he'd handle it differently now, and has apologized to the Batdorf family for making a mistake: He didn't think then to ask Las Vegas authorities for a copy of the coroner's and police department's reports on Flightline Doe when he started his investigation back in 1996.

Had he asked, he would have seen in both the serial number CAU 8085 on the gun found near the victim's hand. It was the same number on the registration form Bob Batdorf signed June 1996 at Bill Jackson's sporting goods store in Pinellas County, Florida, when he purchased the .357-magnum revolver.

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A Metro Police volunteer would end up cracking the case this past July.

A retired police officer and former coroner's investigator, the volunteer came across Flightline Doe's case -- one of many in the drawer of John and Jane Does he periodically sifts through, hoping to close.

He noticed something unusual in the file: Why didn't anyone run the serial number on the gun found next to the body through ATF?

The volunteer notified missing-persons Detective Jeff Rosgen, whose office holds Metro's files on unidentified bodies and missing persons. Soon the connection was made. The ATF database showed the gun was originally purchased by a Robert Batdorf in Florida. A call was made to authorities in Florida, and in a few days fingerprint examiners in Nevada and Florida, working with a print from the St. Petersburg pawn shop thumb print, confirmed a match with Flightline Doe.

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Kevin Batdorf was home when the call came. Police in Florida and Las Vegas had confirmed that Flightline Doe was indeed his brother.

Anger smothered what should have been relief. Batdorf had been told by coroner's investigator James Becvar in March 1998 during a face-to-face interview in Las Vegas that there was no way his brother was Flightline Doe.

"Suddenly now they're saying it is him," a frustrated Batdorf said. "How am I supposed to believe them?"

The family flew out to Las Vegas two weeks ago to get the remains, eager to seek the help of DNA experts on what bit of corpse might be left. The pieces of the puzzle have been linked together to explain Batdorf's disappearance, but two years of questions have simultaneously bred suspicion that police may well be wrong.

Their frustration intensified when they learned the body had been cremated. At a few thousand degrees, a crematorium destroys almost any trace of DNA.

"How can they tell us in March it's not him and now it is, based on fingerprints they now say match up?" Walke demands. "Without a body, how do you rule out murder? They never did an autopsy. How do we know the gun wasn't stolen?"

The family's stress made for a hostile encounter with the coroner, who has come to expect such tension and anger, especially in suicide cases.

"I feel sorry for this family," Flud said. "I only have one child. If I was in (Walke's) position, I probably wouldn't have been as nice as she was ... What we are looking at is a preponderance of evidence that would more clearly support a suicide than a homicide.

"We're assuming because of his size, he's 5 feet 10, 175 pounds, he's not a small man by any account, he's not going to walk out into the desert willingly and let somebody kill him.

"We do see people that will come to Las Vegas and have their last fling, they run up a lot of bills, they do a lot of stuff, they party. And then they kill themselves.

"We try to be as sensitive (to relatives) as we can. There is a lot of guilt there, a lot of questions left unanswered, and they're just trying to understand."

What proof authorities are offering isn't enough to convince the family. They worry that the remains they were given might just as easily be someone else's -- ashes to let authorities close a case and make a family go away.

While in town three weeks ago, the Batdorf family turned the ashes over to Metro. Initially doubtful, Metro lab scientists were amazed: pieces of teeth and bone had somehow withstood the crematorium's heat. The find means, maybe, some DNA may be left.

The family now waits for the phone to ring with news of the analysis.

They realize it may never happen. But they can't give up hope.

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