00:00:00
Speaker 1: There’s been an update in the Bob Christian case we covered last season and I have all the details, But first, if you missed it, here’s a quick recap. Bob Christian was an eighteen year old bowhunter from Wisconsin. On the eve of the opening day of deer season in nineteen seventy seven, Bob drove from his home in Madison to his buddy’s house in Barriboo, or at least he was supposed to. When he didn’t show up, his family, friends, and local law enforcement launched a search effort to try to find him, but all they really found were more questions. His car had been abandoned and stripped of its wheels and tires. A nun who lived nearby said her home had been burglarized, and a friend of that nun said she talked to a man driving Bob’s car who said he was looking for his friend. In some tellings of this encounter, he said his friend’s name was Bob. Authorities found the hub caps from Bob’s car at a nearby cory, and another witness said he saw a car with stacked headlights parked next to Bob’s car the night he went missing, but none of these clues led them to the missing teenager, and the case went icebox cold until just a few years ago Detective Tyler Poyton with the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office reopened the investigation, and he made a startling and disturbing discovery. John Wayne Gacy, the famous Chicago Land serial killer, had worked near bear Aboo just a few months before Bob went missing.
00:01:32
Speaker 2: We had information that he had been in our County doing pharmacy for model jobs. Basically, his trade was he would go around to pharmacies and update them to more modern look. And a city in our county Reidsburg, which is about twenty minutes from Barboo. They had had him at their pharmacy in Reedsburg in July of seventy seven. Found a news article that he was in Boston, which is to the next county north of US, about forty forty five minutes from barbou doing a pharmacy job there.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: If a serial killer who targeted young men was in the area around the same time a young man inexplicably went missing, it made sense to follow that lead as far as it went. Several of Gaysey’s victims found in the basement of a Chicago home have yet to be identified, so Detective Point requested that the DNA from those victims be compared to the DNA from Bob’s relatives. When we released this episode back in November, the detective was still waiting for those results. Now we have them, so.
00:02:44
Speaker 2: I requested they do a direct side by side comparison with the remains from the Gaycy case and then Amy and her father’s profile, and unfortunately, they did not find a match with the with the remains from Gacy’s house did not match the DNA profiles of the Christian family.
00:03:07
Speaker 1: Of course, this doesn’t mean that Gaysey wasn’t involved in Bob’s disappearance. That’s because to this day, no one knows exactly how many people Gaysey killed. We also know that he didn’t bring all of his victims back to his home.
00:03:21
Speaker 2: You know, he may have committed more down there that they don’t know about. He wasn’t very forthcoming and cooperative when they questioned him. And some of the Gaysey victims I know were disposed of and the Displain’s river in Illinois, but they’re also too is suspicion. He didn’t give up all of his victims, so I mean still a possibility again, but not one of them that was in the house.
00:03:49
Speaker 1: I asked Detective Point and whether Gasey could have abducted Bob and then, like some of his other victims, dumped him in one of the rivers or lakes in the area. The detective said, it’s possible, but without any specific information about where to look, it would be incredibly difficult to find him.
00:04:06
Speaker 2: Devil’s Lake was at the time and still is to this day, a pretty heavily dove lake, lots of divers, It’s very clear water. Given its popularity as a tourist destination, there’s a lot of divers out there. There was actually a diving school that was out there for many years.
00:04:24
Speaker 1: With so many people in the water, you’d think someone would have found something by now if Bob was there. But that’s not the case. With the other water bodies in the area.
00:04:34
Speaker 2: The Wisconsin River Lake Wisconsin very dark stained water. You know, it’d be about like diving and coffee, you know, it’s that color. So yeah, without really any information that he’d been disposed in a body of water, it’d just be really hard to like where do you start at?
00:04:54
Speaker 1: You know, Detective Point is following other leads, which we’ll get to in a minute. But at the end of the day, the Gaysey theory was always going to be a bit of a long shot. Gaysey wasn’t known to kill people outside the Chicago area, and while Bob was in the right age bracket, he didn’t fit other aspects of Gaysey’s mo O.
00:05:13
Speaker 2: He didn’t fit like the socio econonomic or the type of kid that Gaysey was after, like disadvantage kids he’d find, you know, basically on the streets or at bus depots or train stations in the Chicago Land area. And clearly this was up here and was kind of outside of that m a.
00:05:36
Speaker 1: When Detective Point emailed me with this update, the first person I wanted to talk to was Amy, Bob’s sister. In our previous interview, she told me she’d had some mixed feelings about the results of that DNA test, and I was curious to hear what she thought and felt when she got this latest update.
00:05:53
Speaker 3: Well, some of it was relief that well, in a way, at least he wasn’t that a victim of that situation.
00:06:02
Speaker 4: But then there’s again the disappointment of.
00:06:04
Speaker 3: Not knowing and the reality is that it doesn’t mean John Wayne Gacy wasn’t involved. It just means it wasn’t one of the four victims that were found in Illinois. So it doesn’t really discount him completely, but it doesn’t point rate at him either. And you know, I just feel like, Okay, it’s back to square one again.
00:06:31
Speaker 1: Gacy was never very forthcoming to law enforcement. But Amy wonders if time would have eventually cracked that shell.
00:06:38
Speaker 3: And unfortunately, there’s no way of confirming any of his activities in Wisconsin.
00:06:44
Speaker 4: They don’t know if he.
00:06:46
Speaker 3: Had committed murders or not because he’s he was executed, so there’s no way even if he was alive, would he answer it.
00:06:53
Speaker 4: Who knows.
00:06:55
Speaker 3: But the bottom line is, since they executed him, there’s no way of ever getting any more information from him again. You know, I’m not saying that he didn’t deserve what he got, but you know, it was the investigation full. You know, he wasn’t really disclosing much more. I don’t think maybe time would have made him want to spill the beans more too, you know what I mean, maybe after sitting in jail for how many people do we have sitting in jail for how many years, you know, with somebody like him, it might have been worth keeping him around a little longer.
00:07:29
Speaker 4: I don’t know.
00:07:31
Speaker 1: Thinking about what happened to Bob at the hands of a man like Gacy is extremely difficult, but finding Bob’s remains would have provided some closure and allowed Amy to put her brother to rest.
00:07:42
Speaker 3: If John Wayne Gacy did have something to do with it, and he disposed of his body, there’s probably never going to be any kind of recovery.
00:07:50
Speaker 4: That was the only thing.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: If it had been one of the four, there was a chance to get part of his remains put to rest, so to speak. But again, my faith in God is he took care of them, you know, I have to believe that.
00:08:03
Speaker 1: As this case has attracted more and more attention, Amy and her family have been forced to confront realities that had been smoothed over by the passage of time.
00:08:12
Speaker 3: You know, I think I described it before as like having a band aid ripped off. You know, you’ve had a wound that’s been covered and healed over, and you’ve have it ripped back again, not necessarily as raw as it was before, but it opens it opens other.
00:08:29
Speaker 4: Things back up again.
00:08:30
Speaker 3: You know, I think my brother, Mike and I both feel kind of like it’s opened some of that up.
00:08:37
Speaker 1: One of those band aids has been the fact that the investigation into Bob’s disappearance should have been handled much differently.
00:08:43
Speaker 3: It’s the shoulda Kulda would haves kind of back then, and they didn’t do the things that you know now it would be just standard procedure. So it’s a little disappointing when you go back and know that certain people that were right in that area never were interviewed. They never really look into these people and really tried to find out. So it’s, like I said, kind of reinforces what we felt before that it wasn’t investigated and handled well. They really thought he just took off. I think that’s what they wanted to believe, and our family was adamant that that’s not what happened. That wasn’t the type of person he was.
00:09:22
Speaker 1: It hasn’t been all bad, though, Amy said, remembering Bob has given her a different perspective on her other brother, Mike. She’s learned more about how difficult it was for Mike when Bob went missing, and heard stories about Bob that were new to her.
00:09:35
Speaker 3: You know, Mike shared his experience of him getting his first buck and Bob never getting a buck and being so excited for my brother, you know, and just that was the kind of person my brother, Bob was. He wasn’t jealous or mad or anything like that. He was happy for Mike, but he’s like, man, are you lucky, you know, to Ben’s as young as he was to get his first buck.
00:10:00
Speaker 4: So, I mean, he Mike.
00:10:01
Speaker 3: Shared that with me, and it just it just re reiterated the way I felt about my brother, you know, being eleven and a half. He was one of my first heroes.
00:10:11
Speaker 1: You know.
00:10:11
Speaker 4: He was somebody that I looked up to.
00:10:18
Speaker 1: Time has made solving Bob’s case exponentially more difficult, but Detective point and told me he recently caught a break since our last episode aired. He’s made contact with someone else from the area who was previously unknown to law enforcement.
00:10:32
Speaker 2: A person who we hadn’t really known about before was living up there at the time, and was able to track that person down and talk to them and got some more information of other people that were kind of hanging around that area up there at the time, and got more of a better picture, I would say, into the goings on up there, not necessarily anything you know, suspicious or illegal, but just kind of the people that were hanging out up there in that neck of the woods. So I got a bunch of names, so people I’m trying to run down to talk to from that time period.
00:11:07
Speaker 1: This person had been living in a house close to where Bob’s car was found, but they didn’t own it. Detective Point told me that several people had rented that property over the years, but he was finally able to track down the resident at the time of Bob’s disappearance.
00:11:21
Speaker 2: They weren’t living there very long, only a couple of years around that time, and it was kind of a common name. So then that kind of threw a wrench into things trying to figure out who exactly this person was that The other problems were like addresses have changed, Like that road was all Brecked Road at the time. Now it’s Tower Road. So it took a little sifting through and finding out this person lived there, okay, who lived there before you, who lived there before them, who lived there before them, and finally narrowing down who was there at the time and track that person down.
00:11:55
Speaker 1: This person now lives out of state, so Detective Point and flew out to meet them rather than have a phone conversation.
00:12:02
Speaker 2: This person I went and talked to knew that it had happened, but just had never had contact with law enforcement about it. And so they had a whole lot of good information that we didn’t know about before. Good info about the goings on up there at the time, and again other names of people who were up there and would have been in that area at the time.
00:12:24
Speaker 1: None of this information was the proverbial smoking gun the detective is looking for, but it will allow him to expand the web of possible witnesses, people who may have seen or heard that small detail that will blow the case wide open. Amy said she’s appreciated the way detective Point has taken on this case, and they both know that time may be running out.
00:12:45
Speaker 2: Times of killer for this stuff. I mean, like I said, everybody, you know a lot of people are deceased or like you said, memories fade. It’s fifty years ago, next year or so. Even that were you know, in their thirties. You know they’re their eighty, in their eighties now, and so yeah, it’s getting harder and harder. But that’s the reason I want to try and like in another ten years. Good luck trying to get anybody you know who was alive at that time.
00:13:21
Speaker 1: If you think you know something about Bob’s disappearance, no matter how minor, get in touch with Detective Pointing at six oh eight three five five three two zero five. You can also reach out anonymously to the Sauk County Crime Stoppers at one eight eight eight eight four seven seven two eight five. You don’t need to have seen Bob’s abduction to have important information. If you saw something a little out of the ordinary, hurd a rumor from a neighbor, or just had a bad feeling about a stranger walking down the road, get in touch with Detective Pointing. Bob disappeared on September sixteenth, nineteen seventy seven, just south of Barriboo, Wisconsin, off of Tower Road near Derward’s Glint.
00:14:01
Speaker 3: If anybody remembers anything or any kind of information that would be useful to detect a point and to certainly call sac County. You know, that’s the only thing we can count on, is if somebody that knew something back then and still alive can can share that. You know, it’s the only hope we really have anymore. Is anybody that might have been involved or saw or knew somebody involved with it or heard about it, then they should give them a call.
00:14:39
Speaker 1: We’ll let you know if there are any updates in Bob’s story or any of the other cases we’ve covered so far. To make sure you don’t miss one of these special episodes, be sure to follow Blood Trails on iHeart Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. As always, if you have a tip about another case or a theory about this one, shoot me an email at blood Trails at the meat eater dot org. See you next time, and stay safe out there.
00:15:05
Speaker 3: Mhmhm
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