00:00:00
Speaker 1: This episode contains discussion of crimes involving sexual violence and murder.
00:00:04
Speaker 2: Listener discretion is advised in a mystery that’s haunted Wisconsin for nearly fifty years, a young hunter left home for an opening day archery hunt and was never seen again. His car was found abandoned in the woods, stripped of its wheels and tires. But that wasn’t even the strangest part of this baffling and disturbing investigation that’s next on Blood Trails. The year was nineteen seventy seven. Opening day of Wisconsin’s archery deer season was set for September seventeenth, and Robert Christian was ready. The eighteen year old Badger State native had hunted most falls since he was a kid, but this year was going to be different. He and his childhood friend Randy Griffith, had both grown up hunting, but they’d never gone out together, so that year they planned to team up and hunt some family property north of Baraboo, Wisconsin, which is just outside of Madison. Randy was expecting his friend to arrive at his house at six pm on Friday, September sixteenth, the night before opening day. Robert, who went by Bob would sleep over at the Griffith house, and then the two would head out with their bows early the next morning. Across Wisconsin, hundreds, probably thousands of friends made the same simple plan. Most woke up to crisp air and hopefully the rustle of a deer walking through the forest. But Bob and Randy never got that chance. What started out as a plan for a hunting trip became one of the most disconcerting cold cases in Wisconsin history.
00:01:50
Speaker 1: Bob is always on time or a little early, and so it was like six thirty and you know, we’re there to have soup, were at six and mom and I were talking and my sister and I said, you know, this ain’t like him to be late. So my mom called his mom said, you know, Bob was going to be up here at six, and he’s not here.
00:02:15
Speaker 2: Randy waited the hours ticked by, the sun dipped lower, and still no Bob.
00:02:23
Speaker 1: You know, he’s still didn’t show up. And we called back down her around nine o’clock his mom’s and and said he’s still not here. And then at that time she contacted Dane County to report him as you know, not a wife.
00:02:41
Speaker 2: Amy Bob’s younger sister was only eleven years old at the time, but she still remembers getting that call.
00:02:48
Speaker 3: Valeria, Randy’s mom called again and said, Carolyn, you know, Bob isn’t here yet, and we all knew them and there something was wrong.
00:02:58
Speaker 2: Something was wrong wrong. But to this day, no one knows exactly what that’s because nearly five decades later, Bob is still missing. His body has never been found, his bow and hunting clothes have never been recovered, and his whereabouts remain at least publicly unknown. All Bob’s family and friends have is a baffling set of coincidences, contradictions, and strange interactions. Bob’s case intersects with a nun, the Ringling Brothers, circus clowns, the American Motors Corporation, and one of the world’s most famous serial killers. But the thing that makes the most sense of at least part of Bob’s story can really only be understood by hunters, and that is the desire to give himself the best shot at success. On opening day, Andrew and stillers, and this his blood trails an opening day disappearing Part one the Drive. The Christian family lived in a small two story home on the east side of Madison. Randy lived with his family in the town of Barriboo, which is about an hour’s drive northwest from Bob’s house. The property they planned to hunt was located about ten minutes north of Barriboo, so it made sense for Bob to spend the night at the Griffiths. It would have saved him about an hour of sleep and allowed the pair to set up well before shooting light. Bob could have taken a few different routes, but there are two main ones. The primary one, according to Amy, that the family took and that ch Beleze Bob probably took, was to go up Highway twelve straight up to Barriboo, around the west side of Lake Wisconsin. But Bob also could have hopped on Interstate ninety going north, which goes around the e east side of the lake, and then exited onto Highway thirty three going west. We don’t know which way Bob took, but we do know that he made two stops along the way, both of which were in Madison. The first is he stopped at a bank, and we know this because he bumped into his mother on the way. The circumstances of this meeting are a little unclear. The reports say she saw him as she was taking Amy and Bob’s brother to a local football game, but Amy thinks otherwise.
00:05:31
Speaker 3: My mom was on a walk or probably coming home from work, and they probably crossed each other. It was an anchor bank out on off where we lived.
00:05:41
Speaker 2: Detectives at the time confirmed that Bob withdrew twenty five dollars from the bank around five point fifteen pm, and then he made another stop to pick up a few things at a convenience store just down the street.
00:05:53
Speaker 3: Some Swiss or suites I think it was or something like that. He used to smoke cigars with his friends and have beer and play cards, so that was their big thing. You know.
00:06:03
Speaker 2: Whether he planned to smoke those cigars that night with Randy or was saving them as a celebration after a successful hunt, we’ll never know. What we do know is this somewhere between the convenience store and Madison and Randy’s home in bear Aboo, Bob vanished, and it’s haunted Bob’s family and friends ever since.
00:06:25
Speaker 1: You know, you just got an nempy feeling. What do you say he’s not had here with us and all that and all, it was pop.
00:06:37
Speaker 2: Part two the search. If Bob had gone missing in twenty twenty five instead of nineteen seventy seven, his case may have ended much differently. It’s hard to fault detectives back then for doing what they did, but in retrospect, they made several pretty serious errors. Because Bob was technically an adult eighteen years old, law enforcement didn’t consider him a missing person for the first twenty four hours. This is why, according to Detective Tyler Poynton of the Satt County Sheriff’s Office, the search took several days to begin in earnest.
00:07:12
Speaker 4: Back then, it was more like, well, he’s an adult. You hear it kind of cliche all the time. But there’s the twenty.
00:07:19
Speaker 1: Four hour rule.
00:07:20
Speaker 4: You hear all the time about people being missing and waiting a certain amount of time. I eat twenty four hours before you know, you really start looking into things. I’m just speculating, but I can only assume that was kind of the operating procedure back then.
00:07:33
Speaker 2: Detective point and assured me that that policy is long gone. But without much help from law enforcement, the Christians were kind of on their own. They started by calling everyone they knew who may have seen their son and brother.
00:07:46
Speaker 3: My mom called all the hospitals that night and called everywhere that she could think of to see if there was any accidents, if there was any reports of anything that went on between Madison and bear Boo, and nothing was showing.
00:08:00
Speaker 2: Randy knew something was wrong right away. It was unlike his friend to disappear without telling anyone, even in an era before cell phones and Google maps. Do you remember sort of what your thoughts and feelings were that night and into the next day. Were you extremely worried or were you kind of like, well, you know, I’m sure he’s okay, we’ll find him.
00:08:21
Speaker 1: No, it’s not. He’s okay. I’ve been own since we were a little kid, so he’s straight. You know, he’s never in trouble. You know, if he says he’s going to do something, he’s going to do it.
00:08:36
Speaker 2: Now, you might assume that the Christians and the Griffiths hopped in the car that Friday night and drove the various routes Bob may have taken, but according to Amy, they didn’t do that until Sunday. I asked Randy about this, and he explained that both routes Bob may have taken were along major highways, and so they figured somebody would have surely seen him if he’d been in an accident.
00:08:57
Speaker 1: There’s Tory Cowny. She went through and he went by maybe like five or six towns on them off ramps, you know. But he went through like dang Columbia and saw Colony and basically if you total that up, that’s like twenty seven and fifty square miles. I was like, okay, you know whoa you started walking.
00:09:23
Speaker 2: But when Bob still hadn’t turned up by Sunday, the family started the search. They were looking for a nineteen seventy seven AMC Hornet. Bob had a motorcycle, which he usually drove, but it had broken down, so Bob’s mom let him use her brand new car to drive up to Randy’s. It didn’t take the family long to find something. Here’s Amy.
00:09:44
Speaker 3: My brother was with my dad in the van and my cousin Jim, and my brother had they would gone up Tower Road and at that time it was a dirt road then, and he looked over to the right where there was a radio police radio tower and he saw my mom’s car and he’s like, Dad, that’s mom’s car.
00:10:04
Speaker 2: Tower Road is between Madison and Bearriboo, as the crow flies, but it’s not along either of the main roads. That’s because Lake Wisconsin is also in between Madison and Bearriboo, and you have to go around the lake on either side to get to either town. In other words, there’s almost no reason Bob would have driven down Tower Road under normal circumstances. But what they found wasn’t just strange, it quite literally defied explanation.
00:10:34
Speaker 3: My dad and the boys went to go walk up to the car and they saw that it was on the ground, no tires, no of them, and my dad said stop, you know, he said stop, We got to turn around. He had the boys go back into the van and he walked down to the closest farm to try to call, you know, the police. And by that time we had pulled up behind him, and you know, my uncle Glenn was like, oh man, there’s you know, it was like, what is going.
00:11:04
Speaker 2: On here, missus. Christian’s brand new AMC hornet wasn’t parked. It was discarded flat on the dirt, no wheels, no tires, and it wasn’t on blocks. It was just lying on the ground. Detective Point told me that the car’s battery was also missing, and the front license plate but not the back had been taken off and thrown into the grass.
00:11:28
Speaker 1: Here’s Randy, And when we were there that day, they said, well, they didn’t use a jack because there was no jack and Prussians in the sand, in the dirt. So flabbergasting. How you get wheel and a tire four of them off that vehicle and don’t have any marks on the ground.
00:11:48
Speaker 2: I’m sure Bob’s father looked through those car windows with some trepidation, but Bob was nowhere to be seen. His bare compound bow and hunting here were missing and have never been recovered. His letterman jacket was still in the front seat, along with his mom’s nursing.
00:12:04
Speaker 4: Kit, but not much else.
00:12:07
Speaker 2: Now, the Wisconsin State Crime Lab found Bob’s mom’s fingerprints, along with the print from someone they couldn’t identify. But Bob had never had his fingerprints taken and the print they found wasn’t matched to anyone else in any law enforcement databases, so we don’t know whether that print belonged to Bob, which would make sense, or to someone else. This was the first real indication that Bob was actually missing and probably in trouble. Law enforcement got involved and they did an extensive search of the area around where the car was found. Bob’s family and friends and other local volunteers scoured surrounding woods. They brought in bloodhounds, and the National Guard conducted an aerial search with a helicopter. But that area is what detective point and called bluff country, cut through with gullies and covered with trees and rushed. It’s the kind of place you might say is good for keeping secrets. Still, the detective is confident that Bob wasn’t in those woods.
00:13:10
Speaker 4: Confident they did a thorough search. Again, they did just about everything they could I think at the time. You know nowadays we have drones, but they brought an actual helicopter. They put bloodhounds, so they did try to do some tracking that way. People who were firefighters at the time, on the local volunteer fire department who were out and they did They did a pretty extensive search of the area. I know the family did that, plus a lot more.
00:13:42
Speaker 2: The search may well have been thorough, but it didn’t start until Monday, full two days after Bob had gone missing. By the time they figured out Bob wasn’t in those woods, you could have been halfway across the globe. Part three, Sister Genevieve. What investigators didn’t know until later is that just down the road from where Bob’s car was found, another crime had been committed. If you keep driving east down Tower Road about a mile and a half, you’ll find what today is called Durward’s Glen Retreat Center, But back in nineteen seventy seven, it was a convent for Roman Catholic nuns, and in a cabin on that property lived none named Sister Genevieve. Sister Genevieve had been away for about a week, but when she returned home that Friday, which remember, is the same day Bob disappeared, she found that someone had been living in her cabin. It hadn’t been ransacked, but someone had slept in her bed, prepared food in her kitchen, and left cigarette ashes in the ashtray. Sister Genevieve was pretty understandably upset. She was afraid the person would return, and so she called her friend, a woman named Mary. Mary drove over to the sister’s cabin. But when around eight thirty that evening she saw something no one in that situation would ever want to see.
00:15:07
Speaker 4: She pulls in in about halfway up the driveway. There’s a car parked in the driveway, running with the headlights pointed up the driveway towards the house. She has the wherewithal to jot down the license plate number, and then approaches the car and there’s a mail driver in the driver’s seat. She describes him as a white male, brown hair, light, facial hair, thicker, rim glasses and ask him what he’s doing. He says something to the effect of I’m looking for my friend Bob or I’m just looking for my friend. It’s quoted a couple different ways in the reports back then.
00:15:48
Speaker 2: He’s looking for his friend Bob. This is baffled investigators both then and now. If it was Bob driving the car, why would Bob be asking about himself? And if it wasn’t Bob in the car, how does that person know Bob’s name? And why would he pretend to be looking for him. Mary’s description of the driver matches Bob to a t, but when she was shown a picture of him, she said she couldn’t be sure it was him. Mary has unfortunately passed away, and so Detective Point is unable to ask her anything further about what she saw. All we have are the notes in the report. But we do know that the car parked in the driveway belonged to Bob’s mother. That’s because Mary recorded the license plate number, and so we can place the Christian car in the area around eight thirty pm Friday evening, two and a half hours after he was supposed.
00:16:44
Speaker 4: To have been at Randy’s.
00:16:46
Speaker 2: But whoever was driving that car, whether it was Bob or someone else, didn’t immediately go back to where it was eventually found. According to Mary’s account, the car took a left and headed even further east. This, Randy told me, makes zero sense.
00:17:04
Speaker 1: And then they said when he pulled a lot of there, he went towards your words line. So he keeps striving further and further away from my house, you know, to where I love right right? Does that make sense?
00:17:23
Speaker 2: As far as Randy knows, Bob would have no reason to go up the Nuns driveway and definitely no reason to drive towards the convent. While he admits it may have been Bob in the driver’s seat, he doesn’t think his friend was alone.
00:17:35
Speaker 1: I’m thinking somebody was in that kind of.
00:17:37
Speaker 2: Worked at that point.
00:17:39
Speaker 1: There’s no sense for him to be there.
00:17:41
Speaker 2: Mary said it was too dark to see whether anyone else was in the car, so Randy might be right. Amy also agrees that Bob’s strange comment about looking for himself may have been his attempt to signal for help or let investigators know that it was him.
00:17:57
Speaker 3: If he was being apper handed, that would be a smart thing to do. Send a clue to somebody, Hey, I’m Bob, you know, or something. You know. That’s the only thing I can think of.
00:18:08
Speaker 2: When Amy and her family heard about this, they went to sister Genevieve’s cabin themselves to take a look around. If Bob was signaling for help, maybe he left a clue as to his whereabouts. They didn’t find anything like that, but they did find something that today they have blown this case wide open.
00:18:25
Speaker 3: And I remember my uncle Jack finding a grocery bag, the old grocery bags, the paper bags, stuffed into a log, and they have had a receipt. It had cigarettes, it had raw bacon, it had different things and evidence that we thought pertained to that for sure for the robbery, because who’s going to be sticking that into a log.
00:18:52
Speaker 2: There, Amy says they gave this evidence to law enforcement a detective point and confirmed to me that it was in the case file. He also confirmed that the receipt was for a local butcher shop in town, But investigators at the time were unable to confirm who the bag belonged to, and while there’s a record of these items in the case file, none of the actual items were retained as evidence. We also don’t have any evidence from inside sister Genevieve’s cabin. This is due in part to the fact that forensic DNA testing hadn’t really been invented yet back then, a cigarette butt couldn’t tell you much besides the fact that the person smoked. But it’s also due to yet another unfortunate, infuriating coincidence about this case. Bob’s car was found in Sauk County, but Sister Genevieve’s cabin, only a mile and a half down the road, was in Columbia County, and Columbia County deputies investigated the break in as unrelated to Bob’s disappearance.
00:19:54
Speaker 3: At that time, they said, this has nothing to do with your brother’s case. So the two police apartments didn’t work well together there, so all of that evidence is gone. We have no idea where it went to, and at the time, it could have been really relevant for that case to find out and connect them. I don’t know why they couldn’t see the connection. To me, it’s as obvious as a sore thumb, you know, how can you not see the connection?
00:20:23
Speaker 1: There?
00:20:26
Speaker 4: Part four.
00:20:28
Speaker 2: Car parts. There is a quarry south of Baarboo that Bob would have passed on one of the routes up to Randy’s. This quarry became a popular target shooting spot, so there were people in and out, and about a week after Bob went missing, someone reported that they’d found a set of old wheels and tires along with hubcaps. These hubcaps came from an AMC Hornet, which is the same kind of car that Bob was driving.
00:20:56
Speaker 4: So the presumption was that whether it was the person involved with Robert’s disappearance or an opportunist, took the new wheels off the Hornet and then swapped them with their old wheels, and then left the old wheels with the hub.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: Caps at the quarry, much like finding the bag of groceries in the tree stump. This could have been a big break in the case if detectives could have matched those old wheels and tires with a specific vehicle. They could have at least had a make and model to look for. The problem was those wheels and tires were incredibly common. Detective point told me that the list of potential vehicles was so long that it would have been useless to go down that road. But tires weren’t the only car parks detectives looked into as part of their investigation. While canvassing the area around where Bob’s car was found, investigators spoke to a local farmer who had driven down Tower Road Saturday morning, right after Bob disappeared. He reported looking up a side road and seeing Bob’s car parked in the same location where it was found the next day. But Bob’s car wasn’t alone. A second vehicle, light colored with stacked headlights sat beside it in the shadowy morning light.
00:22:09
Speaker 4: He estimated it was around like six six thirty in the morning. It was still kind of dawn, darker out, but just beginning light. This car is backed up next to the Christian car and the dome light is on, and he specifically remembers it having stacked headlights. So one headlight on top of the other headlight, and he thought it was kind of like a lighter cream colored, But he didn’t think a lot too much of it because it wasn’t all that uncommon for people to park up in there, whether it be people servicing the tower or hunters or kids parking, you know, doing kid things.
00:22:51
Speaker 2: The farmer didn’t recall seeing anyone in either car, but it was dark just beginning to be light, so that’s not unusual. Those stacked headlights are more unique than the tires and could have belonged to a number of Plymouth models, but they weren’t unique enough for investigators to find the owner of that mysterious vehicle. Was it the abductor a curious resident, the tire thief, or just someone drawn to a still warm crime scene.
00:23:22
Speaker 1: No one knows.
00:23:23
Speaker 4: We don’t know if that’s somebody who was involved in the disappearance, or if that was somebody who was just capitalizing on the fact that there was this random car parked in kind of a obscured area somewhat and you know, I could really use those tires type thing.
00:23:44
Speaker 2: After the break, we investigate the ways some have tried to explain Bob Christian’s disappearance.
00:23:50
Speaker 1: Did you run away?
00:23:51
Speaker 2: Was he the victim of a drug deal gone wrong? Or was it something much much worse. That’s next Part five, Bob. Whenever someone disappears without a trace, there are a few theories that investigators almost always consider. The first is that the person simply ran away. Maybe Bob had a tough home life. Maybe he was an unhappy kid who wanted his freedom, or decided to pursue a career his parents wouldn’t approve of. But that didn’t really jive with Bob’s character. Everyone I spoke with about the eighteen year old described him as a straight laced kid who was excited to start his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin Madison as a computer science major.
00:24:42
Speaker 4: He was never as a youth, never talked about running away, had a bright future, just enrolled as a college student at a pretty good college, and you know, at that time would have been a pretty fast growing career.
00:24:59
Speaker 2: Amy that her brother would never have run away. She admits that her father was strict as the oldest of fourteen children, but she doesn’t think her brother was unhappy living in the Christian household.
00:25:10
Speaker 3: I thought we had a great family. I felt blessed to have my parents. So I can’t imagine Bob would have wanted to you know, why would he want to take off after he just started, you know, at the university.
00:25:23
Speaker 2: After Bob disappeared, investigators learned that he’d talked about going fishing in Canada. Maybe they guessed he decided to do just that on the spur of the moment. But when Randy heard about this theory, he went to one of the detectives to set him straight.
00:25:37
Speaker 1: A month or two later, you know, and there was rumors going around that back took off Canada. And when I came home, you know, that was getting for people that went to school from Barber Reedsburg, that was going to school in Old Claire, and they’d say, oh, yeah, there’s Shane. He ran off to Canada, and you know about it. And so I came one of the one of the next weekends, when I was coming home, I called the tective Borski and I said, I’d like to talk to you about it. I said, there’s no way he would have rang off to Canada. She got along great with his parents, siblings, She’s just started school. He was excited about that, and you know, he went to the bank and he only took out twenty five dollars out of his accounts.
00:26:31
Speaker 2: And you know, he wasn’t just going to.
00:26:33
Speaker 1: Run away and not tell Anyboddy. You know, he went to ran a white period.
00:26:40
Speaker 2: Detective point told me that years later someone claimed to have spotted Bob in Canada, but investigators ran that down and it turned out not to be him. If Bob didn’t run away, maybe he had a secret life that got him killed. Maybe investigators thought he went up to Tower Road because he was a drug user and had to meet someone to purchase drugs. That also may have explained his strange behavior when talking with Mary, sister, Genevieve’s friend, but according to Detective Pointing, this was also quickly ruled out. Bob was both literally and figuratively a boy scout. Amy says he enjoyed a cigar and a beer with his friends. Who doesn’t, but he never tried anything more adventurous.
00:27:24
Speaker 3: I know, people said, oh, was he You think he was going up there to get drugs? No, I mean, even back then, twenty five bucks isn’t gonna why would you He wouldn’t have done that. It just wasn’t him. If he was going to get drugs. Why wouldn’t you got him in the city and taken him to the small You know what, I I don’t who would he know in the rural area to get drugs. He didn’t know anybody up there.
00:27:46
Speaker 2: Bob also didn’t have any enemies or vengeful girlfriends, and he wasn’t the kind of guy to pick a.
00:27:51
Speaker 4: Fight, you know, no issues, relationship issues. He didn’t have any beasts with anyone. He was a real likable guy.
00:28:00
Speaker 3: Played a couple of years of football growing up. But he just didn’t have the tenacity. My dad was kind of disappointed, but he just didn’t have the tenacity. He didn’t want to hurt somebody else, and that’s how he always was.
00:28:12
Speaker 2: Detective Point is convinced that he would not have disappeared of his own volition, But much like the rest of this case, there’s a wrinkle in that theory too.
00:28:22
Speaker 3: My dad hunted with the boys from the day they were able to go hunting. He took them deer hunting and they did some squirrel hunting in the small game and a lot of fishing. We all went fishing, and the Griffith farm was right there by. That hunting land that was pretty much open to anybody. So my dad and his brothers and their kids all hunted up there.
00:28:49
Speaker 2: The Griffiths, remember, are Randy’s family, and the up there, Amy mentions, is the same area where Bob’s car was found. She says the car was parked just around the corner from where they usually parked to go hunting, and Bob had been up there many times. That’s part of the reason they were driving those roads in the first place on their search, even though it wasn’t on the way to Randy’s house. That’s too much of a coincidence for detected point.
00:29:14
Speaker 4: I mean, it would be a low probability that he would have ended up in that area just randomly without knowing it. But it’s very off the beaten path, very rule How he ended up in the same, you know, within a half mile or so of his childhood hunting grounds just by coincidence?
00:29:33
Speaker 1: I did.
00:29:33
Speaker 4: I don’t. I don’t think there’s that’s a coincidence. I think that that happened for a reason.
00:29:40
Speaker 2: In other words, while Bob didn’t disappear by choice, he almost certainly drove up to that area of his own volition. The question is why. Part six John Wayne Gacy. You may have your own theories about what Bob was doing near the convent that evening.
00:30:03
Speaker 1: I know I do.
00:30:04
Speaker 2: But before we get to that, we have one more piece to add to this puzzle. Bob disappeared in nineteen seventy seven. One year later, in nineteen seventy eight, Chicagoland police arrested one of the most vicious and notorious serial killers in American history, John Wayne Gasey. Gasey raped, tortured, and murdered at least thirty three young men and boys between nineteen seventy two and nineteen seventy eight. He would often lure young men back to his Chicago home, where he would violate them, kill them, and bury them in the crawl space of his house, or dump them in the Deplains River. He confessed to these murders, and, after a lengthy trial and appeal process, was executed in May of nineteen ninety four. Barriboo and Madison are only about two and a half hours from Chicago, which was close enough to stir dread in Bob’s mother, close enough to warrant sending his dental records to Chicago.
00:31:08
Speaker 3: I know when that whole case broke. I know, my mom asked for my brother’s dental records to be sent down there. So I mean, as far as I know, they did send his dental records, but they didn’t have DNA back then, you know, And so I don’t know if there was any more they could have done as far as that. But that’s how we found out about all this is they reopened the case again.
00:31:34
Speaker 2: Detective Points told me that Gaysey’s name does appear in the case file, but it doesn’t sound like he was ever considered very seriously. That’s because most of Gaysey’s known victims were from the Windy City, and law enforcement had no real reason to think that Gaysey.
00:31:51
Speaker 4: Had traveled up to Baraboo.
00:31:53
Speaker 2: But then not too long ago, Detective Pointing got a tip. Turns out Gasey was in the Barriboo area and at nearly the exact same time that Bob disappeared.
00:32:04
Speaker 4: John Wayne Gacy, at the time in nineteen seventy seven, was a contractor for a company that kind of specialized in updating or upgrading older pharmacies to more modern look or design, and he had been in Reidsburg in July seventy seven for a pharmacy job, and I was able to confirm that with one of the owners of the pharmacy at the time.
00:32:29
Speaker 2: Reidsburg is a thirty minute drive from where Bob’s car was found about twenty miles as the Crow flies, and that wasn’t Gaysey’s only trip to the area. Detective Point received another tip that Gaycy had also done some work in the town of Maston, which is about half an hour northwest of Reidsburg, and work wasn’t the only reason Gaysey may have been attracted to the Reedsburg Baraboo area. Gaysey was famously a clown, not like a class clown, but an actual clown. One of his nicknames was the Killer Clown because he joined a clown club in nineteen seventy five and performed as Pogo the Clown and Patches the clown. Gasey for you younger listeners is likely the inspiration for subsequent depictions of clowns as villains, especially Stephen King’s horror novel and the film It. Another weird coincidence is that in that novel, the clown claims that his name is Bob. Gasey’s interest in clowns may have drawn him to Baraboo because it turns out that Baraboo is a clown nuts dream vacation. It’s the site of the Ringling Brothers first circus and home to the Owl Ringling Mansion. Today, Baraboo has a Ringling Brewing company, a Ringling theater, and a Ringling bed and breakfast. It’s so well known for circuses and clowns that the International Clown Hall of Fame chose Baraboo as its headquarters in nineteen eighty six. All of that was enough to convince Detective Pointing to take a clube looser look at Gaysey as a potential suspect. Now, being in another town in July isn’t the same thing as abducting Bob in September. It’s also worth pointing out that even though Gaysey targeted young men much like Bob, many of them were homeless. He would often pretend to befriend his victims and then lure them into his home, not violently kidnap them on the street. Still, if Bob and Gacy had somehow met it’s possible the eighteen year old was another of Gaysey’s victims. To this day, investigators aren’t sure whether they’ve accounted for everyone Gasey killed. While he admitted to some of the killings, he was vague and evasive about everything he did. He was convicted of killing thirty three people. Twenty nine bodies were found in the crawl space of his home, and another four were pulled from the Deplains River, But five of those bodies still haven’t been identified, and Detective point In wonders whether one of them might be Bob. We don’t have any samples of Bob’s DNA, much like we don’t have any of his fingerprints. But back in twenty thirteen, Amy and her father submitted DNA samples to Cotis, which is a DNA database used by law enforcement. They did this so that if an unidentified body was found anywhere in the country, investigators might be able to match that body to Amy or her father. So far, they haven’t had any hits, but Detective Pointing isn’t taking any chances. He requested the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, which includes Chicago, to run a direct comparison between the unidentified gaycy victims and Amy and her father.
00:35:40
Speaker 4: My understanding is that a blood sibling and father should have a close enough profile to you know, if one of these victims, is Robert that it would match close enough that they’d be.
00:35:54
Speaker 1: Able to say that.
00:35:55
Speaker 2: Cook County officials agreed to conduct the testing, and Detective point In is waiting for results. There is no timeline for when those might be available, but he submitted the request months ago, so it could be any day. I asked Amy how she would feel if the DNA results came back positive.
00:36:14
Speaker 3: It’s not always great to know what happened if it ends up being this John Wayne Gacy. He probably didn’t have a very good ending, but at least it would be some resolution, you know, there would be some finality to it. If the DNA came back positive, then we would know for sure what happened to him.
00:36:35
Speaker 2: Part seven. Questions and Coincidences. The questions that surround Bob Christian’s disappearance are hard to wrap your head around. Was the person squatting at sister Genevieve’s house responsible for Bob’s disappearance or was that a coincidence? If a county line didn’t separate the sister’s house from where Bob’s car was found, would investigate have more quickly put two and two together? Did a murderer steal the tires from Bob’s car, or was it just an opportunistic tire thief? Why did the tire thief take the tires with him and not swap them out right there? Did the car the farmer saw, the one with the stacked headlights belong to a kidnapper or just a curious local. Was Bob’s car found near his childhood hunting ground because he drove it there? Or did the perpetrator just happen to park in that exact area. There are no clear answers to any of these questions, but if you’re a hunter, you may have already had some insight into that last one. Remember, Bob and Randy had planned to hunt some family property north of Barriboo. But what if Bob was worried about their prospects. What if as he was driving to Randy’s he figured he’d swing by his old hunting spots and just see what there.
00:37:54
Speaker 4: Was to see.
00:37:55
Speaker 2: The area was heavily wooded, so a scouting trip wasn’t the most practical, But the sun didn’t set until around seven pm that night, and he would have had plenty of time to take a quick look around. Here’s detective point.
00:38:08
Speaker 4: I’m a hunter as well, and that thought crossed my mind, like, well, if this place we don’t go to doesn’t pan out, you know, maybe in the afternoon, we’ll go try this other spot that I’ve been to before, and maybe I’ll just go check it out and see where we could park and go in or whatever. Maybe see if I can see something a scouting mission basically.
00:38:30
Speaker 2: Amy also thinks this could explain why Bob ended up so far off the route to Randy’s.
00:38:35
Speaker 3: He might have been just checking it out for gun season. You know, they hunted up there so long that it wouldn’t surprise me that he was just going to drive by and he would have just parked where they normally parked. I just wouldn’t be surprised at all if Bob just went up there to see his spots.
00:38:53
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, as with most things, in this case, there’s a convincing counter argument.
00:38:59
Speaker 4: Here’s where.
00:39:01
Speaker 1: It’s possible he went up there to the scalp, but it still sit there and going like, well, then why didn’t he call me and say that before he left Madison on Nerves, because then he would have been late. You know, he’s going to be late, He’s going to be later, you know, he keeps going in all that the direction.
00:39:20
Speaker 2: Bob was a responsible kid. Dinner started at six pm sharp, and he wasn’t raised to keep Missus Griffith or his friend waiting. If he left Madison at five point fifteen, he would have been to Randy’s house at least eighteen minutes late if he’d taken a detour to the bluffs, and that’s not even factoring in any time to do actual scouting. Of course, Bob could have misunderstood the time and assumed he had more of a window than he did, but the fact is that wasn’t much like Bob either. Whatever happened, whether Bob met the wrong person on the road or was kidnapped, or whether he was targeted by John Wayne Gacy, or he had some kind of accident that left his body hidden in the woods, Amy, their family, and Bob’s friends are still struggling. This isn’t the only tragedy to have struck the Christian family. In the spring of nineteen eighty three, one of Bob’s other sisters, Kathy, was found dead inside a burned out Wisconsin bar. Further investigation revealed that Kathy had been murdered by three members of a biker gang who then set the bar on fire to try to cover up their crimes. Detective Point is convinced that Kathy’s death has nothing to do with Bob’s disappearance. She was only fifteen years old when Bob died and didn’t start hanging around bikers until later, but to lose two children in six years was devastating to the Christian family. Amy remembers being there when they visited her father at his work to break the news about Kathy.
00:40:54
Speaker 3: I mean there was a few years I told my husband, I thought my parents were going to end up splitting up. I mean, that was pretty rough to have. My one memory of when the police came to our house with my sister is going with my mom to Oskar Myers and my dad coming down to the security shack and he was so happy he thought they finally found something out about my brother, only to find that his oldest daughter was killed. And I’ll never forget that, you know, look on his face and it’s like I remember myself thinking why what did we do?
00:41:33
Speaker 2: As Amy has looked back on these experiences, she’s realized that it’s helped her to be more understanding and compassionate. Towards others. Her faith has kept her tragedies in perspective, and she believes now that her parents have passed, they know what happened to Bob and that God has taken care of them. Still, she would like to be able to put her brother’s remains to rest beside her sister.
00:41:58
Speaker 3: It would be awesome if we could find any remains and put him to rest. That I know would mean a lot to my parents. I know God took care of them.
00:42:09
Speaker 2: She might get a chance. Detective point and told me that the Gacy lead isn’t the only one he’s been tracking down. Thanks to a few recent media articles, there’s been a renewed interest in Bob’s case.
00:42:21
Speaker 4: I’ve gotten a lot of good tips that have kept me moving forward. There’s a lot of people out there I’m finding that for one reason or another, didn’t say anything back then, But given the passage of time and stewing on it for a while, they’ve changed her mind. The hope is that there’s somebody out there who maybe wasn’t in a position to say something back then, or to a family member who they suspected were involved or told them they were involved, and now that person’s gone, or they’re in a different position now where they feel comfortable talking to law enforcement.
00:42:56
Speaker 2: If that’s you, Detective Pointon wants to speak with you. The Sack County Sheriff’s Office a call at six oh eight three five five three two zero five. You can also reach out anonymously to the Sack County Crime Stoppers at one eight eight eight eight four seven seven to two eighty five to those who might know something and are wondering whether they should pick up the phone and dial one of those numbers. Amy has this to say.
00:43:22
Speaker 3: It’s been very difficult all these years not knowing what happened to our brother. And you know, my parents never did have any resolution for that for themselves, and it would be an awesome thing for them to come forward if they know, you know, even if there’s that kind of resolution, at least to know something about what happened to him. I mean, just to have him go on a Friday night to meet somebody and then never show up, and it’s just it’s sad. It’s sad not to know, and I know there’s a lot of our family members that would like some kind of closure with it.
00:44:00
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. If you’d like to see images related to this case, including images of Bob and crime scene photos of his abandoned car, head over to the meeteater dot com slash blood Trails and click on the case file for this episode and be on the lookout for a special bonus drop when the DNA results come back from the unidentified gasey victims. We’ll be sure to keep you in the loop as soon as we know more. If you have a tip about this case or another case you think we should cover, send us an email at blood Trails at the meat eater dot com. That’s b l o O D t R A I L S at the meat eater dot com.
00:44:36
Speaker 1: See you next time.
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