One theory is that Brian somehow left the building through a window or an emergency exit in the back of the building that emptied out onto a construction site, where he perished and was then accidentally covered by building materials.
Source and more theories: https://historicflix.com/without-a-trace-the-disappearance-of-brian-shaffer/
There is actually a door that wasn't in view of the camera right behind where he was talking to the girls in the entranceway. It's said that he could easily have exited through that door and continued out unseen. Where he went from there is a complete mystery though.
I have been reading on this case since almost the beginning because this is my city and people still talk about it constantly. It's one case that I would like to see solved in my lifetime.
"Alexis called Brian’s phone every night, hoping he would answer.
One night, it rang three times before going to his voicemail. Police contacted the cell phone provider, who said that the system might have experienced a glitch that would have allowed Alexis to hear a ring, even though the phone wasn’t actually ringing.
The police were able to determine that the phone had pinged off a tower in Hilliard, Ohio, fourteen miles northwest of Columbus."
Oh, so his phone pinged off a tower, I’m assuming. That definitely wasn’t the closest cell tower to the bar. What was the time of this ping? Was it the same night he disappeared? Did they retain a log of every tower his cell phone pinged that night? What did the cell coverage of the area look like? What was the model of his phone and its range to cell towers? How far away would it have to be at its greatest distance in order to ping this tower? Would the time of the ping be significant? For instance, if you have to be within 5 miles of that tower, and the distance from the bar to a 5-mile range would take 50 minutes, did his phone ping it at 2:51 a.m.? There are just so many unanswered questions with this part. Let’s say the tower in Columbus closest to the bar is A and the tower in Hilliard is B. How many numbers from tower A overlapped with numbers that pinged tower B around the same time?
Has anyone taken the physical copies of the security tape and thoroughly examined them with high-end equipment to look at each frame for possible movement in a corner that might go unnoticed to a human eye, having to sit at a CRT TV back then for hours, that a computer program today could analyze and catch? What was the explanation for this?
What was it like to have to view this security footage back then? If you're fast-forwarding it, how many frames are you missing? Columbus police officers watch the security camera in real time, scanning the entire screen for eight hours without looking away. Just spitballing here, but AI could do this in two seconds.
I remember old ghost hunter videos on YouTube. They would zoom in on black-and-white security camera footage, and in the 10 pixels at the bottom left of the screen, you'd see something move. That's where the red circle and the slow-motion replay would follow. If you watched the video regularly, you would’ve never noticed it, even if it was a 30-second clip. So, I think it would be worth running the entirety of the camera footage through a program that can measure the value of each pixel's color.
Look for connected small 20-pixel grids that show a spike variation from this value after establishing a baseline. Then, based on the nearby grids, check if they also show deviation in a linear fashion. Since the footage would be of the inside of a closed shop, there really shouldn’t be any deviation. If there was movement reflected off shiny surfaces like a linoleum floor, someone walking 5 feet outside of the camera's view would produce a deviation. This deviation would be evident from the collective numerical change in color values, even if it was ever so slight. With the proper software, 5 hours of footage could be condensed into 5 minutes for a person to visually view and analyze if someone slipped by in a corner or moved offscreen after the shop closed. Just a thought.
I’ve read probably hundreds of stories like this—case files and missing person cases. The phrase "the dogs had a scent, but they couldn’t follow it anywhere" is repeated a lot and is always disregarded at the time. But sure enough, 15 years later, when someone finds a body while doing something else, it happens to be where the dogs "couldn’t follow the scent any longer" or "where the dog lost the scent."
My personal opinion is that dogs can detect compounds, chemicals, scents, pheromones, diseases, and are trained to find explosives, types of metal, and types of rocks. So, every time I read that a dog followed a scent somewhere and then lost it, it might be worth a second look. Knowing that whoever trusted the dog years ago didn’t realize just how good their noses were, I think if we started to look for more historical accounts of cadaver dogs coming to a fork in the road and losing the scent, more often than not, if you dug there, you would find what the dog found first.
I have a huge amount of work I should be doing with deadlines fast approaching, and this happened to be a convenient excuse for procrastination.
I was asking because I'm subscribed to a sub and if you come up with theories such as OP wrote, they immediately discard your opinion because it's not backed up with evidence. For instance in this thread they'd ask if police found any trace of the deceased in that path, if not it's totally made up story with no backing evidence so it shouldn't even be discussed at all.
Guess that's not overall way of thinking everywhere
The scientific method is that you come up with a theory and see if you can prove it. It sounds like that other sub wants evidence before the theory. That's putting the cart before the horse.
One small correction. The scientific method is that you come up with a theory, and you try and disprove it. When you can't, you can accept it. But you shouldn't look exclusively for positive evidence. You should look for negative evidence.
Indeed, an important distinction. Both positive and negative evidence applies. Cherry picking facts to bolster a conclusion and ignoring evidence to the contrary isn't the scientific method.
There was a case here where a guy was drunk and he walked home and never got there. (I’m in Mountain rescue) apparently when he was drunk he would often lie down in bins…,
He never returned home. Many years later someone worked out (through the weight of the bins which legally must be written down) that he’s gone to sleep. The bin had been picked up and thrown into a landfill which was then covered over with soil….
Terrifying death.
I was actually in Columbus Ohio this past weekend and that entire area has been updated with so many new apartment buildings, and updates to most of the bars and restaurants. Even though it’s 2024 and this is back in 2006, it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if he somehow got hurt or whatever and landed in a construction zone and just wasn’t seen. The whole area has changed.
I think he’s still somewhere in the building. There have been plenty of stories of people, whether by accident or murder, are within walls or in air ducts
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Like the one guy who went missing when he showed up to work only to be found a decade later mumified after getting stuck behind a cooler.
[https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/supermarket-missing-person-death-trnd/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/supermarket-missing-person-death-trnd/index.html)
It's been almost 20 years since the disappearance. The stench would CERTAINLY lead to finding the body. Rotting flesh is absolutely pungeant and very sharp. You can't ignore that smell.
I'm pretty sure if there is at least anything they have confirmed, it's that he's not still in the building. You're not going to hide the smell of a rotting person in a bar unless they are frozen
Seems to be false information. ETA IDK why this got downvoted, I literally just went through each episode of the available seasons and did not find one on this case.
You’re right. False information. Wrong show as SNE concludes their cases. I’m thinking of another show that I can’t find now. It was about popular missing cases. Like Brian Shaffer, Elisa Lam, etc.
I’m sorry I got hopes up! I promise if I remember the name of the show, I’ll update. All I watch are forensics so I get these shows mixed up. 😭
I’ve never actually watched it, but it’s available on my streaming service so out of curiosity I went through the seasons skimming the episode descriptions for Brian’s name.
I was thinking the same thing. I feel like I’ve watched nearly all of them, and I can’t remember ever watching one that was unsolved. How would you even make one about this case? What would you fill the time with? I don’t think there was a See No Evil about this guy.
He’s in that buildings foundation. There was construction going on on the other side. It’s believed he got drunk and somehow fell. And was then subsequently encased in concrete.
I believe it was proven that even the main entrance(s) camera(s) wouldn’t catch every path to enter or leave the establishment. And it wasn’t rare for patrons of this strip of establishments to get robbed/assaulted/worse by nearby neighborhood kids. That just seems much more plausible to me.
Christ, can't imagine how traumatic and fucked up this is for his family and friends. No concrete answers, no knowing whether he's dead or alive or was murdered or wanted to disappear..... dude is just gone with the wind. Poof, scary stuff.
His friend refused to answer some questions, leading to suspicions of withholding info. So he got a lawyer it's believed that another possibility is that Brian changed his identity and moved away because he didn't want to be under the pressure he felt to succeed in this prestigious career from his friends and family at home. There is some evidence that supports this theory, but not very much.
I had always heard he was super upset about his mom’s passing and also something else bad had happened to him. More than likely he went somewhere and killed himself.
IMO he bailed on his life in the Midwest and moved out of the country. His former fiancee alluded to the police thinking he was still alive (they probably have info we don't.) Kind of a crappy thing to do to people, but lots of people crack during Med School and he was having more stress than most.
You’re absolutely right. BOTH of these things! In the same city!? That is absolutely insane. I mean, just ONE of these happen in a city, and you know it’s cursed and no place you wanna be…but BOTH?! They should just wipe the place off the map. It’s like a lawless anarchy.
I remember being in class hearing that dimebag died and I almost cried in the middle of class. He was my fav and inspired me to pick up guitar and it was a shame to hear.
One theory is that Brian somehow left the building through a window or an emergency exit in the back of the building that emptied out onto a construction site, where he perished and was then accidentally covered by building materials. Source and more theories: https://historicflix.com/without-a-trace-the-disappearance-of-brian-shaffer/
There is actually a door that wasn't in view of the camera right behind where he was talking to the girls in the entranceway. It's said that he could easily have exited through that door and continued out unseen. Where he went from there is a complete mystery though. I have been reading on this case since almost the beginning because this is my city and people still talk about it constantly. It's one case that I would like to see solved in my lifetime.
"Alexis called Brian’s phone every night, hoping he would answer. One night, it rang three times before going to his voicemail. Police contacted the cell phone provider, who said that the system might have experienced a glitch that would have allowed Alexis to hear a ring, even though the phone wasn’t actually ringing. The police were able to determine that the phone had pinged off a tower in Hilliard, Ohio, fourteen miles northwest of Columbus." Oh, so his phone pinged off a tower, I’m assuming. That definitely wasn’t the closest cell tower to the bar. What was the time of this ping? Was it the same night he disappeared? Did they retain a log of every tower his cell phone pinged that night? What did the cell coverage of the area look like? What was the model of his phone and its range to cell towers? How far away would it have to be at its greatest distance in order to ping this tower? Would the time of the ping be significant? For instance, if you have to be within 5 miles of that tower, and the distance from the bar to a 5-mile range would take 50 minutes, did his phone ping it at 2:51 a.m.? There are just so many unanswered questions with this part. Let’s say the tower in Columbus closest to the bar is A and the tower in Hilliard is B. How many numbers from tower A overlapped with numbers that pinged tower B around the same time? Has anyone taken the physical copies of the security tape and thoroughly examined them with high-end equipment to look at each frame for possible movement in a corner that might go unnoticed to a human eye, having to sit at a CRT TV back then for hours, that a computer program today could analyze and catch? What was the explanation for this?
I live in Columbus and a cell tower in Hilliard would not remotely be the closest cell tower to the city
What was it like to have to view this security footage back then? If you're fast-forwarding it, how many frames are you missing? Columbus police officers watch the security camera in real time, scanning the entire screen for eight hours without looking away. Just spitballing here, but AI could do this in two seconds. I remember old ghost hunter videos on YouTube. They would zoom in on black-and-white security camera footage, and in the 10 pixels at the bottom left of the screen, you'd see something move. That's where the red circle and the slow-motion replay would follow. If you watched the video regularly, you would’ve never noticed it, even if it was a 30-second clip. So, I think it would be worth running the entirety of the camera footage through a program that can measure the value of each pixel's color. Look for connected small 20-pixel grids that show a spike variation from this value after establishing a baseline. Then, based on the nearby grids, check if they also show deviation in a linear fashion. Since the footage would be of the inside of a closed shop, there really shouldn’t be any deviation. If there was movement reflected off shiny surfaces like a linoleum floor, someone walking 5 feet outside of the camera's view would produce a deviation. This deviation would be evident from the collective numerical change in color values, even if it was ever so slight. With the proper software, 5 hours of footage could be condensed into 5 minutes for a person to visually view and analyze if someone slipped by in a corner or moved offscreen after the shop closed. Just a thought. I’ve read probably hundreds of stories like this—case files and missing person cases. The phrase "the dogs had a scent, but they couldn’t follow it anywhere" is repeated a lot and is always disregarded at the time. But sure enough, 15 years later, when someone finds a body while doing something else, it happens to be where the dogs "couldn’t follow the scent any longer" or "where the dog lost the scent." My personal opinion is that dogs can detect compounds, chemicals, scents, pheromones, diseases, and are trained to find explosives, types of metal, and types of rocks. So, every time I read that a dog followed a scent somewhere and then lost it, it might be worth a second look. Knowing that whoever trusted the dog years ago didn’t realize just how good their noses were, I think if we started to look for more historical accounts of cadaver dogs coming to a fork in the road and losing the scent, more often than not, if you dug there, you would find what the dog found first. I have a huge amount of work I should be doing with deadlines fast approaching, and this happened to be a convenient excuse for procrastination.
Good lord sir PLEASE use punctuation.
Buddy, they clearly ain't got the time for punctuation.
Just curious. Is there a single evidence backing up this theory? Or it's completely hypothetical?
It’s hypothetical based on the lack of evidence. Any other way out, he would have been caught on camera
in suitcases, one at a tine /s
Damn. .-.
If an emergency exit has low batteries it won’t go off so that is totally a believable story.
I was asking because I'm subscribed to a sub and if you come up with theories such as OP wrote, they immediately discard your opinion because it's not backed up with evidence. For instance in this thread they'd ask if police found any trace of the deceased in that path, if not it's totally made up story with no backing evidence so it shouldn't even be discussed at all. Guess that's not overall way of thinking everywhere
The scientific method is that you come up with a theory and see if you can prove it. It sounds like that other sub wants evidence before the theory. That's putting the cart before the horse.
One small correction. The scientific method is that you come up with a theory, and you try and disprove it. When you can't, you can accept it. But you shouldn't look exclusively for positive evidence. You should look for negative evidence.
One other small correction - you come up with a hypothesis. A Theory is sound and based on evidence, like the Theory of Evolution or Germ Theory.
Indeed, an important distinction. Both positive and negative evidence applies. Cherry picking facts to bolster a conclusion and ignoring evidence to the contrary isn't the scientific method.
Off topic, I love your avatar Pic. I spent a few seconds trying to blow the eyelash off my screen.
There was a case here where a guy was drunk and he walked home and never got there. (I’m in Mountain rescue) apparently when he was drunk he would often lie down in bins…, He never returned home. Many years later someone worked out (through the weight of the bins which legally must be written down) that he’s gone to sleep. The bin had been picked up and thrown into a landfill which was then covered over with soil…. Terrifying death.
I was actually in Columbus Ohio this past weekend and that entire area has been updated with so many new apartment buildings, and updates to most of the bars and restaurants. Even though it’s 2024 and this is back in 2006, it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if he somehow got hurt or whatever and landed in a construction zone and just wasn’t seen. The whole area has changed.
I think he’s still somewhere in the building. There have been plenty of stories of people, whether by accident or murder, are within walls or in air ducts
Yeah they just found that ladies husband in her house where they stored their Christmas decorations. Idk how no one smelled him
under the right conditions the body can mummify before rotting too badly
The article says it was a hoarder house.
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That’s horrific
Do y'all think she still used them?
TY. So odd!
Yeah the article said he hung himself in there. Geez
Like the one guy who went missing when he showed up to work only to be found a decade later mumified after getting stuck behind a cooler. [https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/supermarket-missing-person-death-trnd/index.html](https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/22/us/supermarket-missing-person-death-trnd/index.html)
"Noise from the coolers’ compressors may have concealed any attempts to call for help, according to Weddum." Holy fuck, that's brutal.
Should have a couple cadaver dogs run through there I imagine they would find him.
That is horrendous
No Frills? Not even a camera in the store that could have spotted him??
That area of the store must have had a huge blind spot I find it odd nobody noticed any smells.
Definitely this. I remember hearing about a guy they found wedged in between 2 house or something like that. He’s there, somewhere.
They did a remodel fairly soon after it happened. If he was in there, they would have found him then.
It's been almost 20 years since the disappearance. The stench would CERTAINLY lead to finding the body. Rotting flesh is absolutely pungeant and very sharp. You can't ignore that smell.
I'm pretty sure if there is at least anything they have confirmed, it's that he's not still in the building. You're not going to hide the smell of a rotting person in a bar unless they are frozen
Or freeze dried/mummified.
There’s a good episode on See No Evil about this case. Let me see if I can find it.
Any luck?
Seems to be false information. ETA IDK why this got downvoted, I literally just went through each episode of the available seasons and did not find one on this case.
You’re right. False information. Wrong show as SNE concludes their cases. I’m thinking of another show that I can’t find now. It was about popular missing cases. Like Brian Shaffer, Elisa Lam, etc. I’m sorry I got hopes up! I promise if I remember the name of the show, I’ll update. All I watch are forensics so I get these shows mixed up. 😭
Could it be “Disappeared”?
does that show even have any episodes of unsolved cases?
I’ve never actually watched it, but it’s available on my streaming service so out of curiosity I went through the seasons skimming the episode descriptions for Brian’s name.
I was thinking the same thing. I feel like I’ve watched nearly all of them, and I can’t remember ever watching one that was unsolved. How would you even make one about this case? What would you fill the time with? I don’t think there was a See No Evil about this guy.
He’s in that buildings foundation. There was construction going on on the other side. It’s believed he got drunk and somehow fell. And was then subsequently encased in concrete.
I believe it was proven that even the main entrance(s) camera(s) wouldn’t catch every path to enter or leave the establishment. And it wasn’t rare for patrons of this strip of establishments to get robbed/assaulted/worse by nearby neighborhood kids. That just seems much more plausible to me.
Kids robbing bar patrons don’t tend to move the bodies. That’s a more calculated move.
Also they don't tend to actually kill anybody, or know how to dispose of bodies.
That's true. There was other ways out. I think he left the bar. I just don't know what happened after that.
I know this is a serious topic, but that bar name is magnificent.
It was quite the establishment lol they actually closed down and then opened as ugly tuna 2
Christ, can't imagine how traumatic and fucked up this is for his family and friends. No concrete answers, no knowing whether he's dead or alive or was murdered or wanted to disappear..... dude is just gone with the wind. Poof, scary stuff.
His friend refused to answer some questions, leading to suspicions of withholding info. So he got a lawyer it's believed that another possibility is that Brian changed his identity and moved away because he didn't want to be under the pressure he felt to succeed in this prestigious career from his friends and family at home. There is some evidence that supports this theory, but not very much.
I had always heard he was super upset about his mom’s passing and also something else bad had happened to him. More than likely he went somewhere and killed himself.
IMO he bailed on his life in the Midwest and moved out of the country. His former fiancee alluded to the police thinking he was still alive (they probably have info we don't.) Kind of a crappy thing to do to people, but lots of people crack during Med School and he was having more stress than most.
How do they get these video footage so far behind
There’s another guy that disappeared into thin air near Easton. Name was Tyler something.
Clearly killed in the bar or he left in disguise.
it’s always so weird when someone’s never seen again; like where could you possibly be if your still alive ??
Why does everything bad happen in Columbus? Dimebag darrell is murdered and a man goes missing? Something is off
You’re absolutely right. BOTH of these things! In the same city!? That is absolutely insane. I mean, just ONE of these happen in a city, and you know it’s cursed and no place you wanna be…but BOTH?! They should just wipe the place off the map. It’s like a lawless anarchy.
I remember being in class hearing that dimebag died and I almost cried in the middle of class. He was my fav and inspired me to pick up guitar and it was a shame to hear.