Welcome back to the Path Went Chile for part two of our series about the
disappearance of Curtis Pashan. Robin, do you want to catch everyone up on
what we talked about in our previous episode. Curtis Pachan was forty years old
and lived in New Hampshire. He had always dreamed about wanting to be a
police officer, but during the early to mid nineteen nineties, he started to
suffer from multiple sclerosis and then was forced to resign, and he became very
depressed. For a while, he developed a drinking problem, but he eventually
did get a job as a security guard in the town of Sebra at a
plant called the Venture Corporation, which manufactured automobile parts. He was working the
graveyard shift on July the fourth, two thousand, but sometime in the middle
of the shift, his car mysteriously caught on fire. The fire department arrived,
dowsed the flames, and everything seemed to be fine, but no one
knows how it happened, and Curtis decided to continue, remaining to work the
rest of his shift, but some time later he would just vanish without a
trace. At first, police looked into the possibility that Curtis took his own
life, that he could have gone somewhere and decided to kill himself because he
was feeling depressed, but of course that seemed very unlikely because of his ms
making it very difficult for him to walk it anywhere, and it would not
be till a few years later when the investigator started looking into a suspect named
Robert April Third, who had actually been working at the plant that night and
was on duty when Curtis was working, and had allegedly bragged about causing his
disappearance. The rumors have circulated that April and an unnamed accomplice who also worked
at the plant had been breaking into a bunch of vending machines and a change
machine in order to conduct some sort of theft, and that Curtis caught them
in the act and wound up being beaten to death, and they proceeded to
smuggle his body out of the plant and dispose of them somewhere. It seems
like a lot of people in the community think that April did it, but
there's never been any hard evidence of foul play. So as it is right
now, the case is still in a holding pattern and Curtis is still missing
and no one has been arrested anyway. When I first became familiar with this
case after seeing on Unsolved Mysteries many years ago, I thought it was a
truly perplexing mystery. As you probably know, one of the more memorable cases
the show ever featured was the nineteen eighty seven disappearance of Dale Curstetter, another
case involving a security guard who went missing while working a graveyard shift at a
factory. Like Curtis Bashan, Dale, Cursetetter may have been murdered because he
interrupted the theft, but while it was fairly easy to formulate a number of
theories about what happened in that case, Curtis's disappearance did not seem to make
any sense. The most bizarre detail was undoubtedly Curtis's car catching on fire in
the middle of his shift, only about two hours before he went missing,
and while the two events were most likely connected, it was just very difficult
to figure out how. The Unsolved Mystery segment has a lot more ambiguity about
whether Curtis was the victim of foul play or if he might have wandered away
from the scene voluntarily and ended his own life somewhere. However, as the
years have gone by, the ambiguity has faded away, and it now seems
like this is one of those cases where law enforcement has a pretty good idea
about what happened and who was responsible, but they just lacked the evidence to
make an arrest. Even so, there are still a lot of unanswered questions
about how these events might have played out. Before he even went missing.
It sounds like Curtis's life story was already a pretty tragic one, as working
as a police officer was pretty much the only thing he ever wanted to do,
but due to circumstances beyond his control, he was forced to end his
career early. Multipler sclerosis is already such a horrible disease to live with,
but it's got to be extra devastating when it prevents you from doing the one
thing you love. And this is the main reason that people cannot initially dismiss
the possibility of Curtis's disappearance being a suicide. It sounds like working as a
security guard did give Curtis some purpose, but I'm sure he was still suffering.
Apparently, after his shift ended every morning, it was pretty much his
daily routine to go across the street to the Extra Mark to purchase a twelve
pack of beer before he headed back to his hotel room to watch pornography,
get drunk and pass out. So he obviously kept experiencing a lot of regret
about how his life turned out. I think, of course, anybody can
sit there and empathize with someone who's struggling with a diagnosis so difficult is MS.
It's this very bizarre disease that is so unpredictable. You wake up one
day and you're feeling okay. You wake up the next day and you're possibly
almost experiencing paralysis across your body. You're in pain. For him, he
couldn't even grip a gun. He couldn't do his job as a police officer,
and that was his passion. And so to judge or to say,
like, look at this guy. He's miserable and he doesn't even love his
life. Look what he's doing, you also have to look at the fact
that he is a functioning employee, that he is trying to get his life
together, he has plans, and the fact that you talk about suicide,
would it be possible, absolutely absolutely? You never know what someone's going through,
but with someone in his condition, someone who is struggling physically, I
just don't see how a man could get far enough away to complete suicide and
not have his body located. Given where he was. He wasn't mobile.
His car was burned, so he didn't have his own transportation, no record
of him catching a cab or something like that halfway through his shift. So
I'm more inclined to think that the burned car is a distraction, and that
we know there were issues happening inside the factory and he was a hard rear
end about rules, and so I think he walked in he said, not
going to happen. You're all going to lose your job, and they said,
we're actually not. You're going to lose your life over what we're doing
right now, and that's more likely what happened. I've never heard a hard
rear end. My daughter was standing next to me trying to give me a
kiss, so you know, I didn't want to say hard ass. It's
okay, that's a good one. But yeah. We talked about in our
last episode how Curtis did have a drinking problem in the past while he was
a police officer and did a stint and rehab, and he had also been
fired from a previous security job for showing up drunk. And obviously, as
we talked about, Curtis was still drinking heavily at this point. But it
sounds like he took his job seriously enough that he never showed up to work
intoxicated and seemed to take it seriously. So I do think that if he
caught someone doing something illegal, such as an attempt at theft or something in
the middle of a shift, he would go all out to stop it in
spite of his limitations. I truly empathize with Curtis as somebody who has dealt
with addiction in the past, and you know, every day, of course
you have to, you know, be very cognizant of what your triggers are
and be sure that you don't get triggered and do the work, because it
doesn't just turn off. If you are somebody that is prone to that,
you will always be. And I can only speak to my own experience at
that time, but I know that when you are trying to escape something and
it can be trauma, and for him it was likely his MS diagnosis.
If you are using alcohol and pornography, to escape that you're escaping being depressed
and you're escaping being anxious, but yet the substance, being alcohol, makes
it worse, and continue using pornography to that ends also can make you feel
worse, so you're ending up feeling more depressed. And it's this loop that
just goes round and round and round, this vicious cycle where you're taking your
drinking alcohol and you're watching pornography because you're depressed, but you're depressed because you're
drinking alcohol and watching pornography. So it's just a really awful cycle that you
can feel really trapped in without some kind of intervention. But I agree with
everything that you said, Ash. I don't think that somebody who had his
mobility issues without being able to have access to a vehicle or a cab,
which we pretty much can say for certain he did not, And I just
don't think that he would have been able to have reached a destination where he
would have been able to end his own life and his body would have never
been discovered. Given the many of Curtis's personal possessions were destroyed when his car
caught fire, there was speculation that this was the breaking point which caused him
to either become suicidal or suffer some sort of mental breakdown before he wandered off.
If he jumped into a body of water or found an isolated spot to
end his life, that could explain why his body was never found. Well,
even though that theory might be plausible in some cases, like we just
mentioned, it's hard to imagine a person with MS being able to make it
that far, as the disease really makes it difficult to walk long distances.
The only conceivable way for him to have left the area undetected is if he
hitchhiked, but the distance from the guard shack to the main road still would
have made it a challenge for someone with Curtis's condition. The fact that Curtis
bought back a gun from his father only a day and a half before he
went missing could be seen as a major red flag that he was contemplating suicide,
But since the gun was ultimately found in Curtis's hotel room, I'm sure
it doesn't have any relevance to his disappearance. So I definitely think that the
only way Curtis left the Venture Corporation premises is if someone abducted him or he
was killed on the premises. When the Unsolved Mystery segment originally aired in two
thousand and one, there was a lot more uncertainty about what actually happened to
Curtis, but it sounds like things change when Seabrook Police Lieutenant Mike Gallagher took
over the investigation a few years later. During Curtis's tenure at the Venture Corporation,
Gallagher was working as a patrolman and said that he sometimes stopped by the
factory during his patrols to chat with Curtis in the guard shack and thought that
he was a very nice guy. When Gallagher started handling the investigation, he
received an anonymous tip advising him to look closer at the skeleton crew who was
working at the factory during Curtis's final shift. Under normal circumstances, there would
have been at least one hundred people working that shift, and it would have
been very difficult for an employee to abduct or murder Curtis without anyone noticing.
However, because this was the fourth of July holiday and there were only twelve
other employees working there that night, it's not implausible that one or more of
them could have gotten away with something like that. And it's not abnormal for
them to know how many people are going to be on that shift. It's
a holiday weekend. They know that nobody is in the building. There's twelve
people versus the normal one hundred. That's an amazing time to plan a more
advanced crime. You have people in that building that we know were causing issues.
And if there's ever a time to pull off something bigger, it's the
time that you know one tenth of the employees are present. I think when
you go back to the gun issue, I believe Curtis had even told people
he felt like there were problems at work. He was stressed out about people
at work. And so to me, I interpret the fact that a former
police officer is trying to, you know, be in recovering things like that
he doesn't have a weapon, But when he starts to get concerned, he
knows that, given his physical state with MS, he needs to have a
physical weapon that allows him to defend himself in the event of being attacked at
work or on his way home from work or something like that. So I
think that lack of physical strength and not really knowing if on a given day
he's going to be able to take care of his own body. A gun
becomes a protective mechanism, and it was found in his hotel room. There's
just no way that's a relevant fact that points to what his mental health was
at the time. Of course, Curtis's family have claimed that prior to his
disappearance, he told them he felt unsafe because there was a legal activity taking
place at the factory and one of his coworkers had supposedly threatened him for giving
him a parking ticket. Now we know that the primary person of interest,
Robert April, third, worked there and that he was one of the twelve
employees who was present on the night Curtis went missing. However, I'm not
sure if April was the same coworker whom Curtis came us of threatening him,
because it's been reported that this employee had an alibi, which might imply that
he was not working at the factory that night. But interestingly enough, before
Lieutenant Gallagher took over the investigation, he says that one of the people who
had been most adamant about pushing forward the theory that Curtis went off somewhere and
took his own life is the same person he now suspects of committing the crime.
If true, it definitely sounds like this was an act of intentional misdirection
given what we now know. There's some leads in this case which ultimately turned
out to me nothing like the allegations of drug dealing in the factory parking lot,
the sighting of the Hispanic individuals acting rowdy at the extramart across the street,
and the allegations that Curtis had affairs with some police officers wives during his
time on the force. The most significant clue seems to be the vandalism of
the vending machines at the factory, and I always thought that detail was downplayed
a bit during the original Unsolved Mystery segment. The car fire and this vandalism
taking place on the same shift when Curtis went missing is just a few too
many coincidences. While the primary theory seems to be that Curtis was killed while
interrupting the theft of some vending machines, it's not entirely clear to me if
anything was actually stolen that night. It's possible that if the actual theft was
halted because they needed to dispose of Curtis's body, the perpetrator or perpetrators never
actually got the chance to steal from the machines. Curtis had previously expressed his
concern that because his skeleton crew was working that night, he would have no
backup if any problems arose, with the only security being in a mobile man
with multiple sclerosis. I wouldn't be surprised if the responsible party thought this would
be the perfect opportunity for a theft, but things still went horribly wrong.
That's exactly what I was thinking. I believe that there was somebody who said,
this is the night if we're ever going to pull this off. No
one's here to watch us. Do We have one security guard on staff,
and we know that he has his own limitations, and so we're going to
go for this goal of committing a crime. And if caught, they hurt
him and had time to hide the body, to move the body. And
when you look at the police investigation, they didn't inspect that factory as if
there had been a murder that took place or that could have happened. They
were wondering did he go off and kill himself? And so for me,
you look back and you cringe at this fact that they had all the time
in the world to get rid of evidence that something had happened there, and
by the time the police circled back around to say there was probably foul play,
it was just too late. Yeah, it is pretty frustrating to me
that they found these broken vending machines and also the door to the union room
that had the union meeting room that had been kicked in, and it didn't
raise more red flags. I think I remember reading that at the time they
weren't even sure if this damage took place on that particular night, or if
the machines might have been kicked in on a previous occasion. But it's just
so strange to me that they would find the signs of vandalism and still go
with the idea that Curtis walked off and decided to end his own life.
But then we hear that the prime suspect was in the police's ear pushing forward
this theory. And unfortunately it sounds like if this was an act of misdirection,
then the police fell for it. It's really too bad because it might
have turned out completely differently if they would have if they would have actually investigated
right from the jump, Because these guys if they were committing some kind of
theft and they were interrupted by Curtis, then it would have just been a
crime of opportunity. They would have grabbed something close by and beat him or
whatever they chose to do if that was how it played out, And there
may or may not have been a lot of evidence left behind. If it
was a blunt force injury, there might not have been a lot of blood.
If it was a sharp force injury or he hit his head or something
like that, there could been a great deal of blood. So either way,
they would have had ample time to clean this up because the police weren't
approaching this like there could have been a murder. I feel like this was
a real missed opportunity. They could have at least done had a couple patrol
people walk through and see if there's any evidence of anything strange, because we
knew about the theft, and because of the car fire, there's just way
too many strange things going on here for them to just be like, oh,
yeah, he probably walked off the man who's suffering with MS, who
has limited mobility, who has no access to a car, who didn't call
a cab for all we know, and like, what is the probability that
he hitchhiked and was picked up by somebody, then taken somewhere and ended his
life. It just doesn't really track, and it just feels like it was
a little bit of lazy police work initially. Now, before we talk any
more about this theory, I should mention that the Venture Corporation factory would close
down less than four years after Curtis went missing, and it sounds like there
was a lot of shadiness going on in this company. The main reason the
factory wound up closing is because the Venture Corporation's owner, Larry Wingett, was
involved in a scandal for he and his family siphoned more than three hundred and
fourteen million from the company before it went into bankruptcy, and in two thousand
and three, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration find the company fifty five
thousand dollars for serious safety violations after a worker at the Seabrook factory was killed
when a large mold slipped from a horizontal mold injection machine and crushed him.
Long story short, this did sound like a bit of a dysfunctional workplace,
so employees breaking into vending machines in the middle of a shift. Doesn't sound
like a stretch. No, I agree. I think when you look at
this dysfunction that we know was happening, and you have issues with safety protocols,
you have violations and safety areas. We already know there were mainstream issues
really with the system. But then you look at the behavior and this idea
that employees were known to be doing damage to the property, It was known
that internal criminal behavior was going on, and you have a disabled man on
a shift responsible for taking care of I mean, I think the system failed
him. The company had its own shortcomings, it was easy for the employees
to exploit that. And it's kind of mind blowing that this company are sipeing
off three hundred and fourteen million dollars like that involves a lot of work for
a prolonged period of time without anyone noticing anything. So it's probably a good
thing that this company is no longer around. And like, how much would
that be in today's money? Would that be like double do you think?
I don't know if it'd be that much because this is two thousand, but
yeah, maybe round five hundred million or so. Like I didn't even know
the company was worth that much. But here they are like sipeening off hundreds
of millions of day. But how do we explain the strange fire which engulfed
Curtis's car? I have to admit that part of the story still baffles me.
The theory presented by Lieutenant Gallagher is that the fire was started by the
perpetrators as a diversion while they orchestrated their theft. After all, it's believed
that they used a forkliff to break into the vending machines, which would have
created a lot of noise, so perhaps they felt the fire would keep Curtis
occupied. However, the problem is that Curtis's car was parked only about eight
feet away from the guard shack he occupied, So how did he not notice
this? I mean, I guess he could have been somewhere else at the
time, But like we mentioned numerous times, Curtis's MS made it very difficult
for him to walk. In fact, while it was standard practice for the
security guards to do the rounds and walk the perimeter at the start of their
shifts, the guard whom Curtis relieved on this particular night, offered to do
it because he knew that sort of thing was difficult for him. Did someone
manage to set fire to Curtis's car while he was eight feet away without him
noticing? I guess as possible. But even though the insurance investigators believed that
arson had taken place, I'm not sure if they were able to determine how
exactly the fire was started. A lot has been made of the fact that
Curtis seemed unusually calm when the fire department was putting out the flames, but
this could be explained away by the fact that he was looking into purchasing a
new vehicle sometime in the near future. In fact, once we learned that
piece of information, we wondered if perhaps Curtis might have started the fire himself
for insurance reasons, since he would not need that car for much longer.
But since many of Curtis's favorite possessions were inside the vehicle and wound up being
destroyed, that makes it less likely he was responsible, and it's just too
much of a coincidence that he would go missing shortly thereafter. All that being
said, setting fire to a car as a diversion in order to orchestrate a
theft seems like an incredibly stupid plan, since Curtis wound up calling the fire
department, and I don't think he'd to be breaking into vending machines with all
those extra people on site. No, I think that's very true. It's
very bizarre that it's only eight feet from the guard shack. But think about
his condition, right MS has that kind of paralysis, feeling, the stinging
in your legs, all of that pain that goes through your body. Is
it possible that Curtis also didn't just sit in the guard shack. It's a
slow night, there's a lot of quiet time there because there's only twelve people
working. Is it possible that he was up and about that he went to
go to the restroom, that he went to go on a stroll to try
to stretch his legs and get his muscles warmed up. I feel like it's
very possible he just wasn't sitting right there when it got set and maybe that
would lure him back out to be attentive to his car. He does call
all of the people to the scene, so the focus is out in the
parking lot, and then even though there's a lot of people on site,
I think it still gives people a cloak to be able to perform things inside
that building and not have individuals coming towards the building. They're all going out
towards the parking lot, Robin. Do we know if Curtis liked to read
books or magazines or like girly megs while he was in the guard shack,
Because if that were true, then I could see a scenario where somebody would
be able to creep up behind his vehicle, ducking down and maybe put some
accelerant or light a match, something like that, and then he might not
even see even though it could be directly behind him. If he was known
to do that, then somebody could plan like, hey, this is the
time where Curtis is typically reading a magazine to pass the time. Yeah,
we don't really have that information about what he would do to pass the time.
They did mention a couple of items that were left behind in the guard
shack. They said there were cigarettes and a lunch pale, but they never
said anything about any books or magazines. But we also don't know the line
of sight that Curtis had, Like, even though they said the car was
only eight feet from the guard shack, we don't know if he would have
been able to see it from his position. For all we know, it
could have been behind something, so it would have been easier for someone to
set fire to the vehicle without him noticing. But if it was eight feet
south, you really can't see. It's completely not in your field of vision,
not even in your peripheral So I think where it would be located as
far as direction, is extremely important. It's just too bad we don't have
that information. The timeline prior to Curtis's actual disappearance is a bit jumbled,
as we have some workers who claimed they saw Curtis walking around the facility at
three point fifteen am, which could imply that he was able to walk in
on the people at the vending machines. Well, the security supervisor said he
checked in on Curtis in the booth at around three twenty, so I wonder
if someone is mistaken about the exact time. Curtis was first noticed to be
missing from the guard shack at three forty five, and shortly before that is
when the foreman thought he saw two vehicles speeding out of the factory's parking lot.
So if the police's theory about Curtis being killed while interrupting a theft is
correct, then you could infer that the drivers of those vehicles were transporting his
body off the premises. But if this scenario is correct, then the big
question is can Robert April's whereabouts be accounted for during this time period? If
April or anyone else suddenly disappeared from the factory during the middle of the shift,
you'd think that his coworkers would have noticed. During numerous interviews about the
case, Lieutenant Gallagher has made reference to a code of silence and once stated,
quote, trust me, the mafia's code of silence has nothing on the
one you'll find in Seabrook end quote. The implication seems to be that many
people from the area know exactly what happened to Curtis, but none of them
are willing to come forward and go on the record. Why would two vehicles
be speeding out of the perku lot when you're leaving a parking lot, not
speeding anywhere. You're creeping along, getting to the front of the parking lot,
putting your blinker on, figuring out which direction you're going. So the
fact that they were speeding out does make them very suspicious vehicles. I'm assuming
they could identify those those vehicles. I mean, these are people who should
have been at the factory and we're leaving, right. That's the thing it's
very weird is we have no specifics here about which vehicles they were. I
mean, there were only a dozen people working, so it's not like there
have been a lot of vehicles parked there to begin with. And like I
said, it's kind of odd. Did no one remember if Robert April or
another coworker just suddenly disappeared from the plant's premises during this time period. So
yeah, I do have to think it's connected that like one of these vehicles
could have been contained Curtis's body, and that maybe the second vehicle was driving
with an accomplice who had to go with his partner to help dispose of Curtis's
body. But it just seems weird that they could just like drive out and
then come back and no one notices, which is why there has been speculation
that maybe some other workers there know exactly what happened, but of just our
maintaining the code of silence and will not say anything. We already talked about
Robert April allegedly bragging about Curtis's death while threatening David Horwitz, who would later
recant his story on the witness stand. Well, guess what. This is
not the only criminal trial against April which fell apart after a crucial witness backed
out. In July twenty eleven, April was arrested and charged with one count
of burglary and two counts of criminal threatening after he allegedly broke into a home
and threatened to people with a knife, but the charges against him would eventually
be dismissed when the homeowner ignored a subpoena and failed to show up in court
to testify against April as the key witness for the prosecution. And in August
of twenty thirteen, April wound up having a run in with the law for
entirely different reasons after his nineteen year old son, Robert April fourth, was
arrested for stabbing his father in the temple. The injuries turned out to be
non life threatening, and I've been unable to find out how this particular case
ultimately turned out, But it seems like trouble just happens to follow around Robert
April the third everywhere he goes. Over the years. It sounds like both
law enforcement and the Pieshan family have repeatedly heard stories from many different sources about
what April allegedly did to Curtis, but these sources are either anonymous or are
just passing along third hand information. No one has been able to provide hard
solid evidence to implicate anyone, and unfortunately, you cannot get a search warrant
or make an arrest based on unsubstantiated hearsay, no matter how many times the
exact same story is spread around. But when you consider the fact that no
less than two unrelated criminal cases against Robert April have fallen apart because key witnesses
have flaked out, this gives off the impression that he knows how to frighten
or intimidate people, and this might explain why no one has been willing to
come forward and go on the record about Curtis's disappearance. Now, even if
April is the guilty party, it sounds like he did not act alone.
While Lieutenant Gallagher considers April to be the primary person of interest, he thinks
that at least one other factory worker was involved. This unnamed accomplice might not
have been physically involved in Curtis's murder, but at the very least likely participated
in the theft and the cover up. Well, we know that April's able
to intimidate because he threatens all the time with physical violence. And when the
officer actually says, if you only knew how tight lipped this community was,
all the code of silence it exists here. It beats out the mafia.
Clearly, there's a verbal, physical kind of threat that exists. And I
wonder if the dynamic with law enforcement is such that people aren't willing to get
involved in any crime, whether there's threats or not. There are certain communities
that when you have law enforcement asking questions, everyone's tight lipped because they don't
have a trust for them, and so there's that factor that could go into
it. You also know that April has a history of being physically intimidating,
of threatening, of attacking. This is a very known pattern. And so
if you threaten my family, there's an easy way to get me to stop
talking. You're dangerous. You came in with a knife, and now you've
threatened me. Yeah, I'm going to keep my mouth quiet. So I
could see that being a very real possibility. And the fact that he came
onto the radar in the first place, because he bragged to David Horowitz saying
that if you say anything, then the same thing that happened to Curtis Bashan
is going to happen to you. And he essentially bragged that he buried Curtis's
body in his own backyard, though they never found any evidence that to be
for that to be true. But it just shows how brazen it is that
he probably knows that I've gotten away with this for so many years, and
even if I openly brag about it, going to continue to get away with
it. And he also definitely sounds like a guy a great character that his
own son is attempting to stab him. If April is responsible, he didn't
get away with this because he's a super criminal who's highly intelligent, because he
clearly goes around blabbing about it. He got away with it because he's imposing
and intimidating, and even the whole vending Machine theft plan, like theoretically,
if nothing had happened to Curtis and they got away with the theft, how
long did they expect to get away with it? Because if you do a
theft like that on a shift when there are only twelve people present. There
are only a certain amount of suspects that you can interrogate and figure out who
did it. So I've been curious to see if he managed to get away
with it, if the theft had gone off without a hitch. You're right,
it's like a real who done it? When there was like a total
of thirteen people there, one of them you end up eliminating. So it's
like, Okay, well they're going to question all of you and someone might
crack. I mean maybe not if they're going to cover up a murder.
Maybe there was this real Seabrook code of silence. But it seems like a
pretty stupid crime. It feels like the game of Clue, Like you're watching
the movie Clue, which one of you was? It way too small of
a group, right, one's gone and all of you are a suspects.
It's funny talking about it now, but it's maddening when you go back and
you're like, oh my gosh, we just had a different lens on when
we looked at this case. Would it have turned out differently? Very very
little of me believes that Curtis took his own life, So it leaves people
that had a reason to be angry with him, and that's the people that
were working there and were being held accountable for misdeeds. And on a side
note, how much money would a vending machine and a change machine have.
It sounds like it's hardly worth your while to try to steal from there,
like cost benefit analysis, What is the type of trouble that you could get
into for breaking into a vending machine? You could lose your job, you
could have criminal charges. And what are you splitting the what you get from
this between twelve people or at least between a few people. It seems like
it's a conspiracy of at least a few and maybe you'd have to pay hush
twenty So what do you making a couple hundred bucks each? If that,
I'd say it's McDonald's And that's about it, which is about what forty bucks
know. During the earliest media coverage of this case, it was reported that
all the factory workers who were working the graveyard shift that night were accounted for,
but the statement is a bit vague. One of the anonymous tipsters who
called the Pishon Family's tip line said that the perpetrators hid his body inside a
union office ordinarily used for storage, which might explain why its door was found
kicked in. But when exactly did they remove his body? Once the morning
shift arrived, I'm sure there would have been a lot more people at the
factory, making it difficult to smuggle Curtis off the premises undetected. Well,
Curtis was discovered to be missing from the guard shack at three forty five,
it sounds like the police were not actually notified until his relief showed up at
five point thirty. Theoretically, if the two cars seen speeding out of the
parking lot belonged to April and his accomplice, then they may have used this
opportunity to dispose of Curtis's body and then made it back to the factory before
the police arrived, and they could have claimed that they were working the entire
time. If this is what happened, then you have to wonder how many
of their coworkers noticed their absence. Did any of them have an inkling that
they might have killed someone even if they had no direct involvement. It's possible
that at least some of the coworkers who were there that night might know more
than they're letting on, But they're either too afraid to say anything or following
the aforementioned code of silence. As of right now, it seems like this
has become one of those missing person's cases which has pretty much been solved in
the minds of law enforcement and the victim's family, but they just lacked the
body or enough definitive evidence to arrest anyone and for the crime. The disappearance
seemed truly baffling and perplexing at the time but originally happened. But the more
you put the pieces of the puzzle together, the more likely it seems that
this case has a pretty simple solution involving foul play. Even though the phrase
quote they stumbled upon something they weren't supposed to has always become a cliched in
true crime circles during the analysis of cold cases, I do think that it
applies to this case. I do too. I think that he was in
a position of vulnerability and a company that had its own issues going on,
and that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, even though
he was just doing his job. This is one of those cases where the
only benefit is the passage of time. How scary is April the older,
the older and older he gets right once he becomes an elderly man, if
he were to pass away like he's no longer a threat. I wonder if
the passage of time at this point point becomes a pro in this case and
allows law enforcement to go back and re examine relationships and ask questions and pray
that somebody has a conscience that wants to get things off their chest. Yeah,
I think there is a chance that something like this could happen, because
I remember Lieutenant Gallagher even made a statement that his prime suspect pretty much never
leaves his trailer and that it almost has his own self imposed prison sentence because
he can't go out anywhere and he kind of has to hide because of all
the suspicion underneath them. But there will become a point maybe where he might
die of old age or something like that, or even get arrested for another
crime. And who knows, maybe someone with inside knowledge about what happened will
finally feel comfortable coming forward and providing the necessary information, which, even if
it does not lead to an arrest, could possibly lead to the recovery of
Curtis's remains. So prior to his disappearance, Curtis expressed his fear that he
did not have any backup on this particular shift in case something went wrong,
and sadly, it sounds like his fears were not unfounded. Even though investigators
do not believe the perpetrators intended to kill Curtis, it sounds like they still
made the conscious choice to violently attack a person who was suffering from multiple sclerosis
and could not defend himself, and this is truly despicable. If the theory
presented by the police is true, and they are correct about the identity of
the primary person of interest, then this definitely seems like one of the more
solvable cases we've ever covered. Twenty four years is way too long for Curtis's
family to have gone without recovering his remains, so all they might need is
for the right person to come forward. So if you happen to have any
information about the unsolved disappearance of Curtis Pashan, please contact the New Hampshire Cold
Case Unit at six to zero three two seven one two six sixty three at
six h three two seven to one two six sixty three Jules Ashley any final
thoughts on this case. One of the really tragic things about this case,
in particular is Curtis's life and the way that it got examined when he passed
away. By going into this scene and assuming that it must have been a
suicide and that because of his struggles, that that was the most logical answer,
is really heavy on the family and the people that loved Curtis. Curtis
was also a man who gave most of his life to serving his community.
It's someone who loved his job so much as a police officer. He voluntarily
said, I have a problem with alcohol. I need your help to get
healthy so I can keep this job. And the job likely contributed to that
addiction with alcohol, right the stress and trauma there. But he loved it
and it got taken away when he got diagnosed with MS and his body started
to fail him. But his family was faced with this idea that everyone assumed
their son took his own life, and that's very difficult to wrap your head
around. There's questions for them, well did he take his own life?
It doesn't make any sense. There's judgment from the community. There's judgment from
people when they balance how much you should be grieving when someone quote chose to
take their life. It's so devastating when a family experiences a suicide or there's
a suspected suicide, because they're not given the same compassion and they're not given
the same permission to grieve the loss itself. Add a cold case onto it
where there's pretty much a definite that Curtis eventually is declared to have been murdered.
But what we've heard so far is reasons why he would have taken his
own life. Pornography, alcohol, addiction, right, all of these habits
that paint Curtis in this light of kind of less sympathetic right to mourn is
tragic. This is someone who was really fighting a demon a diagnosis, and
yet was still showing up. He was still in connection with his family.
He was telling them he felt fearful and that he needed help. I just
see so much bravery and strength than Curtis, and so many beautiful qualities that
don't seem to be discussed. It was an assumption that he hurt himself,
and there was a push to understand why, and I think that was such
a disservice, even just emotionally for the family, much less what I created
in this case. So my prayer is that Curtis's family continues to tell who
he truly was, how much they truly lost that day that he went quote
missing, and obviously we now suspect that he was murdered and that hopefully there's
some resolution here so that Curtis's stories were rewritten to be a murder victim and
nothing more than that. I truly feel for his family. You summed it
up perfectly, ash The theory was put forward in the beginning. I mean,
it took many, many years to get to where they are are now,
where it's widely believed that foul play was involved. But to have that
guilt and that shame piled on, especially in two thousand, our understanding of
mental health and suicide is not what it is today, and I think that
a family would still feel the weighty implications that their loved one decided to walk
away from their life, decided to end their own life, even though he
was grappling with MS and Ashley mentioned those extra things that are added along the
alcohol abuse and the compulse of watching a pornography. I'm not going to say
addiction because I don't truly know. Those to me make him almost more sympathetic.
It just says to me that he's looking for some kind of connection,
but he's not able to really reach out for that, and so instead reaching
for alcohol and reaching for pornography becomes easier, and it just becomes really isolating.
Even though you're interacting with all of these different people, it can be
easy for a lot of enforcement to go okay. Well, because of these
reasons, it looks like it's suicide, even though when you look a little
bit closer, how would he have left the facility? There's really no other
way besides hitchhiking, and nobody has come forward. The body has never been
discovered. I just don't think that there is any real possibility. The probability
is extremely low that Curtis ended his own life. I think foul play and
April and whomever else was on shift are allegedly the most likely suspects in my
opinion, because who else would it be. It's just like when we're looking
at the vending machine theft, who else would it be? And I just
wonder what the real question is is how many people were really and truly involved
and how many others are just staying silent out of fear of retribution from April
or one or any number of the other people who could have been involved.
It's just really too bad that after all of these years then nobody has come
forward, because it seems very clear, and I think most people listening will
likely agree, as does the family in law enforcement, that we kind of
know what happened here. You know, it's been twenty four years. Does
nobody feel guilt, does nobody feel like their opinion has changed, or maybe
their sense of fear isn't there anymore. I'm just baffled by the fact that
this hasn't been solved. Later, Oh yeah, Like I mentioned earlier that
this is probably one of the more solvable cases that we've ever covered on this
podcast. I do acknowledge that when I first became familiar with it on Unsolved
Mysteries in the early two thousands, I was more baffled by it because they
didn't present any suspects. They just said that Kurtis disappeared in a shift his
car caught on fire. They presented the theory of him walking somewhere and dying
by suicide, but it didn't seem believable. But Robert April's name just did
not come up in this investigation at all. Till around I think like two
thousand and eight. And then when you look up the circumstances and you find
out that he was working there that night, and he had a history of
bragging about killing Curtis, and that he has a history of criminal activity,
the solution does seem obvious here, but because so much time has passed,
we just don't have any evidence to make an arrest, and that's why this
has been unsolved for twenty four years. And it's definitely one of the more
heartbreaking cases we've ever covered, because Curtis already had a tragic backstory before this
even happened because of his multiple sclerosis, but he was still trying to live
his life as best as he could, and it was probably it's likely he
was killed because he was doing his due diligence. That he took his job
as a security guard seriously enough that he tried to intervene and stop a theft
and then wound up being murdered. And it just makes the act all the
more despicable because he was such a vulnerable victim and probably could not put up
much of a fight to defend himself. I just wanted to give a shout
out that this case has also been featured on our friend and Kristen Sevie's podcast
Murder She Told, which covers a lot of unsolved cold cases from the Northeast
United States, and she interviewed a number of members of Curtis's family, including
his brothers and his father, and says they are the nicest people and that
they deserve justice, they deserve answers, and that even if nobody ever goes
to prison for this crime, that at the very least they deserve to recover
Curtis's remains and give them a proper burial. And like we mentioned, this
case has been hampered by the code of silence. That there are probably other
people out there who know the whole truth but have kept their mouth shut after
all this time, and hopefully, just maybe one of these days, someone
will finally come forward that key piece of information and this case will get a
long overdue resolution. Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit
about the Trail like Cold Patreon. Yes, the Trail Cold Patreon has been
around for three years now, and we offer these standard bonus features like early
ad free episodes, and I also send out us and sign thank you cards
to anyone who signs up with us on Patreon. If you join our five
dollars tier Tier two, we also offer monthly bonus episodes in which I talk
about cases which are not featured on The Trail Went Cold's original feed, so
they're exclusive to Patreon and if you join our highest tier tier three, the
ten dollars tier. One of the features we offer is a audio commentary track
over classic episodes of Unsolved Mysteries, where you can download an audio file and
then boot up the original Unsolved Mysteries episode on Amazon Prime or YouTube and play
it with my audio commentary playing in the background, where I just provide trivia
and factoids about the cases featured in this episode. And incidentally, the very
first episode that I did a commentary track over was the episode featuring this case.
So if you want to download a commentary track in which I make more
smart ass remarks about Jewel Kaylor, then be sure to join Tier three.
So I want to let you know a little bit about the Jeweles and Nashty
Patreon, so there's early add free episodes of The Path Went Chili. We've
got our Pathwent Chili mini's which are always over an hour, so they're not
very mini, but they're just too short to turn into a series, and
we're really enjoying doing those, so we hope you'll check out those patreons.
We'll link them in the show notes. So I want to thank you all
for listening, and any chance you have to share us on social media with
a friend or to rate and review is greatly appreciate it. You can email
us at the Pathwentchili at gmail dot com. You can reach us on Twitter
at the Pathwin. So until next time, be sure to bundle up because
cold trails and chili pass call for warm clothing. Music by Paul Rich from
the podcast Cold Callers Comedy