UNSOLVED Case Of The Lawyer Who VANISHED into Thin Air and Turned Up DEAD 1,600 Miles Away

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Life, it can be unpredictable, unless much we know, somewhere in the back of our minds we all understand that fundamentally, but we never actually think that the unpredictability is going to show up at our own doorstep. And really, I mean, why would we? Most of the time, life is pretty mundane. You wake up, go to work, have dinner, repeat, I'm oversimplifying obviously, but you know the drill. Well, a lawyer out there named David Lewis, he probably felt exactly that same way, and then in the blink of an eye, his life turned into one of the stranger mysteries we've ever come across on the show. It's a case that has an answer in there somewhere, but it's not easy to find. His David was just living his life one day looking forward to watching some football, and next he was found 1,600 miles away dead, and to this day nobody knows how he got there or why. Hey guys, it's Andrew and welcome to every town we're today. We're starting in the Texas Panhandle, and by the end of this, we're going to end up somehow impossibly all the way up in the Pacific Northwest, so sit back and sink in, and this is the unexplained case of David Lewis. The whole reason this story gets our attention today is because of the huge gap between who David Lewis was and what happened to him, because this wasn't some drifter or guy with nothing going on. Now David was about his anchor to his life as a person can be, and so a little bit of background on him so you can understand exactly what I'm talking about before we get into it. A David was born back in 1953 in Borger, Texas, to Herschel and Esther Lewis. He grew up right at the edge of the Panhandle, small town type of living where your reputation is the most important currency. And David's was spotless. He studied polypsi at Texas Tech and graduated magna cum laude, so top 5% of his class. Though instead of taking that and running somewhere bigger, he went right back to Tech and picked up a law degree too. This was a very smart and motivated individual who wasn't going to skate through life on just the bare minimum. In 1982, he married Karen, and a year later they had a daughter named Lauren. They settled in Dumas, just north of Amarillo, and David built the kind of career that reads like a resume for pillar of the community. Private practice, assistant county attorney for two counties, in 1986, still in his early 30s, he was elected judge of the Moore County Court at Law, a judge in his 30s in the Texas Panhandle. Now that doesn't happen unless people trust you with everything they've got. He did lose a bid for a district court seat in 1990 and stepped back into private practice in Amarillo, and from there, he just kept piling it on. He taught government classes at Amarillo College in Todd's Sunday School, also sat as a district chairman for the Boy Scouts of America, and so on. He was a solid individual, calm, reliable, deeply religious, always a man who kept his word. As his daughter was nine years old, he was talking to friends about where his career was headed next. He had plans and clearly a life that on paper nobody just walks away from. Up in January of 1993, David Lewis locked out of it and nobody has ever been able to explain why. It was January 28th, a Thursday when things started to get unusual. David had left work at his law firm Buckner, Lara, and Swindle in Amarillo around midday, telling colleagues he wasn't feeling all that great and was heading home. His credit card backs that up to a certain extent, gasped that afternoon in the area between work and home, so normal enough, except that evening, Sikrnaud, David showed up and taught his government class straight through to 10 o'clock at night. Maybe he was feeling better, it's hard to know for sure, but either way, that classroom is the last confirmed sighting of David Lewis alive we know for sure, though a lot of people would say they saw him in the coming days. The next morning, Friday, his wife Karen and their daughter Lauren left for a weekend shopping trip in Dallas. They didn't see David before they left, and they didn't really think twice about it. He was planning on staying home. The Cowboys were in their first Super Bowl in 14 years that weekend. David had already set the BCR to record the whole thing, and Karen figured he'd be parked in front of the TV for most of the weekend, which was a safe bet for a fan like David. He didn't know it then, but his Cowboys were about to crush the Buffalo Bills 52 to 17. But here's where things start to go off the rails. Sometime on that Friday, during the day, a friend from the family's church in Dumas spots David at Amarillo International Airport. And he got noticed because he wasn't walking and he was rushing, cutting through the Southwest terminal with his head down, no luggage, nothing in his hands at all, moving like a man who was already late. Now, this witness didn't think it could have possibly been him. Now, they were certain it was David, the way you'd be certain if you saw your own friend in a random place. That same night, a patrol officer downtown clocks a red Ford Explorer. Same color, making models as David's parked outside the Potter County Courthouse. Now, this is a place David worked off in, and that was at about 10.30 p.m. And by morning, that Ford is gone. On Saturday, a neighbor in Dumas sees the Explorer sitting in David's own driveway, so it made it home somehow. And then Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday, January 31, a deputy spots the Explorer near the Courthouse once again. Across the street on the sidewalk, is a man matching David's description, just standing there, taking photographs of the building. Now, that's a Courthouse he'd worked in for years, and now he was almost acting like a tourist. If that was, in fact, David, nobody's ever been able to cleanly explain that one. And Karen and Lauren get home Sunday evening, the game's long over, and David's not there. But the VCR, that's still running, still recording a broadcast that ended hours ago. There's laundry sitting in the washer, mid-cycle, two turkey sandwiches in the fridge, made, wrapped, waiting. And on the kitchen counter, right where you couldn't miss them, is wedding ring, and is watch. And Karen figures he's watching the game at her friends, it's the only logical explanation. So she goes to bed, goes to work Monday, and then work comes back that David missed two appointments. Not one, but two. And David Lewis did not miss appointments. Remember, he was very liable, so it didn't make sense, and that's when she called the police. You know what nobody tells you about working for yourself? Does that nobody sets up your health care for you? There's no HR person handing you a packet, no coworker going "oh yeah everybody here sees doctor so and so" and you're just out here on your own and one day it hits you that you don't actually have a doctor. Well that was me not too long ago and this episode is sponsored by ZockDock which is honestly the only reason I finally dealt with it. Because here's what I don't want for you, the old way, randomly googling names, calling around and playing phone tag with a front desk just to hear the first opening is four months out. Well ZockDock kills all that. ZockDock lets you search and compare local in-network doctors so you're only looking at people who actually take your insurance. They've got more than 150,000 providers across 200 plus specialties in all 50 states and every profile is loaded with reviews from real patients so you get a feel for who someone is before you ever book. You see they're real open appointment times, click and you're on the calendar. Usually within 24 to 72 hours, sometimes same day and it's all completely free to use. More health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with ZockDock and head to ZockDock.com/everytown to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's zocdoc.com/everytown. What investigators put together over the following days and weeks didn't resolve anything really and just added more pieces to a picture that made less and less sense the more you looked at it. A Dallas taxi driver came forward and he remembered picking up a man who looked like David from a Dallas hotel on Monday, February 1st and driving him to Dallas Fort Worth International. Now what stuck with him was how nervous this guy seemed, he was anxious and jumpy, that and the fact that he paid the fare in cash, peeling it off a thick quad of $100 bills. That's when police went digging into David's finances and found something yet again that was hard to explain. On Saturday, January 30th, the same day the explorer resurfaced in the driveway back in Dumas, $5,000 had landed in his bank account, but there was no record of who deposited it, no record of where it came from, it was just simply there. On top of that, two plane tickets had been bought in David's name. The first purchased Sunday was for a flight from Dallas to Amarillo. The second bought Monday, the same day Karen reported him missing, was from Los Angeles to Dallas, and nobody could say for certain whether David bought either one himself or someone bought them for him using his name, and because this was 1993, years before airports required ID at the gate, there was no way it ever confirmed if a single one of those tickets even got used. His explorer, which was outside the Potter County Courthouse, was looked into, his keys were tucked under the floor mat there, and inside where his checkbook, his driver's license, two gas station credit cards, everyday stuff that a person usually doesn't just leave behind. The only thing missing from his closet at home was a pair of green sweatpants, what he was wearing when he died was a completely different story, and we'll get into that in a moment. Now, if this all sounds a bit confusing, it's because it is, and maybe that's by design. A June of 1993, police felt the same way, and were done pretending they had a direction to go in. They chased reported sightings in Tucson and Mexico when none of it held up, and from there the leads just slowly dried up and eventually blew away completely. And in 2002, almost a decade after David vanished, they officially closed the case. Their conclusion was, those plane tickets, meant to man and left on his own two feet. And why exactly who knows, when people do weird stuff, so there was no foul place suspected in the case got closed, except it wasn't closed at all, not even slightly. Now here's the part of this story that changes everything, because while all that was happening in Texas, something else entirely was already unfolding on the other side of the country. On the night of February 1st, 1993, the exact same night Karen Lewis was sitting down to file a missing person's report for her husband, back in Amarillo, motorists driving along State Route 24 near Moxie, Washington spotted a man out on the road. And Moxie sits just east of Yachima, out in the flat agricultural county of Central Washington State. And we're talking very rural, so a man walking down the middle of a highway at night doesn't just stand out, it's freaky, as he's the only thing on the road worth noticing. Now a driver slowed down when they saw him, and they had to, because he wasn't on the shoulder, he was in the road itself, moving erratically, looked disoriented, like a man who had absolutely no idea where he was, or how he even got there. The driver passed him, then turned around, planning to come back and flag down on coming traffic before somebody got hurt, and by the time they made it back, just a few moments later, the man was already on the ground. It was a hit-and-run, the man pronounced dead at the scene, and he had no forms of identification on him, no wallet with any card, so nothing I could put a name to him, and what he did have on was military style camouflage fatigues and a pair of heavy work boots. Witnesses would later remember a Camaro heading the opposite direction right around the time they found him, that car was never located and no driver ever came forward. So from there, this dead man became the John Doe of Yachima County, Washington, and for the next 11 years, that's all he was. He became a folder and a filing cabinet, a small tissue sample sitting in an evidence room. Back in Texas, Karen raised Lauren on her own, ever knowing if her husband was alive or dead somewhere, never having a grave to visit, and certainly never getting a single real answer. Life had just moved on. In early 2003, a Washington State Patrol detective named Pat Ditter was reading through a newspaper series called "Without a Trace", published by the Seattle Post Intelligence, and the series was digging into something that had been quietly broken for years. The systems meant to connect missing persons cases with unidentified remains, simply weren't talking to each other. So for example, a missing persons report filed in Texas could sit in one database for a decade while the matching John Doe said in a completely separate Washington system, and the two would never ever cross paths. That's not because nobody cared, but because the infrastructure was never built to find that link in the first place. The articles were focused mostly on Seattle area cases, but Ditter couldn't stop thinking about his own John Doe. That man from Moxie, dead from a hit-and-run and left on the side of a road going on 10 years with no name or family ever notified. He didn't have some sophisticated cross date database to work without the time, but it got him thinking, and so he opened up Google. He typed in the physical details of his John Doe, height, weight, approximate age, and started working through missing persons cases the fit. Within a week, it had a short list of about 12 candidates, and one of them was David Lewis. A photo of David had been posted on the Texas Department of Public Safety's Missing Persons page, and another on a site called the Doe Network. Ditter pulled that photo up next to the 1993 photographs of his John Doe, and it clicked. The only thing that gave him pause really was the glasses. David Lewis wore eyeglasses constantly, as eyesight was bad enough that he rarely ever took them off. A John Doe hadn't been wearing any when he was found, but Ditter went back into the evidence storage and pulled the clothing kept from 1993. It camouflage fatigues, the work boots, and he checked the pockets. Inside, he found the glasses folded up. They called Amarillo. That tissue sample that had sat in evidence for over a decade was compared against DNA from David's mother Esther. In October of 2004, the University of North Texas came back with a 99.91 percent probability of a match. John Doe was David Glen Lewis. He was 39 years old when he died on that road. 11 years after he walked out of his own life, they finally brought him home. He was then re-barried in a cemetery in Dumas, closer to the family left behind. You'd think identifying someone would be the turning point, the moment when the answer was just start flowing in, but as has been the trend with David Lewis, identifying him was the moment the real questions began. Solving who John Doe was answered two questions, who the John Doe was obviously and if David Lewis was alive or dead. But it cracked open a dozen more that nobody has ever come close to answering. The first is, well how did David actually get from Amarillo, Texas to Moxie, Washington? His explorer never left Amarillo. Police found it parked right back downtown. There's no direct flight between the two cities either. And there's no confirmed record that he ever boarded a plane at all. Those two tickets, bought in his name are the only paper trail. But as mentioned, nobody checked ID at the gate, so there's no way to prove either one was ever used by him or by anyone. So somehow, sometime after that Dallas cab ride to DFW on Monday, David covered 1600 miles and ended up dead on a rural Washington highway that same night. Now, it's not the trip itself that's impossible, and plenty of people fly coast to coast in a day, is that there's no confirmed method behind it at all. No ticket stub, no witness on a plane, no rental car, no driving companion. And on top of that, his family says he had no friends or colleagues, no connections of any kind out in Washington state, not one. Which brings us right to the second question, but what on earth was he doing there? I mean really, even if you wanted to suggest some sort of mental breakdown, why was David walking down the middle of a highway at night, where in camouflage fatigues his own wife had never seen before and couldn't explain. Also, without his glasses, the ones he needed badly, even though they were sitting right there in his pocket. All this happened 1,600 miles from everything and everyone he knew. So when you add it all up, it feels like someone else was somehow pulling the strings. Like David, wasn't out there alone, which, if that was the case, you have to wonder, was that hit and run really an accident at all? Now the police in Amarillo had already made up their minds longer go, he left voluntarily. They pointed to the plane tickets, a cash deposit, a wad of hundreds in that cab, and painted a picture of a man buckling under pressure, a failed judicial election, a law practice that was struggling. A civil lawsuit also hanging over his head, a theory was simple, he snapped and walked away from it all just like that, however that theory has some real problems. Karen had told investigators early on that before he disappeared, David looked at her in the eye and said his life, it was in danger. This wasn't big on ease. He was warning his wife directly that he wasn't in trouble. He didn't say who from or elaborate as to why, but he said it. And given what happened, it's a pretty big deal. It wasn't the first time something like this had happened. David had received death threats years earlier while he was on the bench, and more recently, he'd taken on a client who was being sued by his own son-in-law, a son-in-law sitting in prison for murder. Now, that client genuinely believed David had been killed because of the legal work he'd done for him, even though he doubted his son-in-law had the reach to arrange something like that from behind bars. And then, there was the lawsuit I mentioned. A wealthy former client had sued David's old law firm for $3 million, claiming a conflict of interest, and basically accusing the firm of representing interest that worked against him while he was their client. A day that was named as one of the defendants, alongside several other attorneys from the firm. And by the time he vanished, every other defendant in that case had already sat down and given their deposition, sworn on the record testimony about what had happened. David, he was the only one left. He was booked to flight at Dallas the following week to give his, and according to his father, David had already told people what he planned to say in that deposition. It was the truth, whoever it hurt, he wasn't going to cover for his former colleagues. And his case file, the ones with all his notes on that lawsuit, it disappeared. They vanished right along with him, and we're never seen again. Now, when you look at what happened with that information in hand, suddenly, it starts to make some semblance of sense. A carer never changed her story, not once in 30 years. He said he didn't run. He was a good man, a good father, and somebody did something to him. His friends backed her up entirely as well, and they pointed to a man who was excited about his career and looking forward to Lauren's upcoming birthday. They pointed to the VCR still recording, the sandwiches still in the fridge, the ring on the counter, and they asked the same question that never got a satisfying answer. If he was going to do something like this on his own, just disappear, why did it look like he'd been ripped away from a normal life he was enjoying? If it wasn't someone after him, there's really only one more logical explanation, and it is possible, however, not really all that likely. It's called Disassociative Fuge, a rare condition where someone under extreme psychological stress essentially loses themselves. They travel without explanation, and they forget who they are, and up somewhere they have no logical reason to be, with no memory of how they got there. On a surface level, it could account for the disorientation on that road, a lack of any clear plan, maybe even the clothes. But none of that explains who deposited $5,000 into his account. It doesn't explain a Camaro driving away into the dark after possibly killing a man, and it doesn't explain David telling his wife, or for any of this even started, that his life was in danger. In the end, we genuinely honestly do not know what really happened, or it makes this case so strange beyond all the details of it, is that even after 11 years of being a John Doe, finally coming to an end, the answer is still didn't come with it. Normally identification is the breakthrough, the moment everything else finally starts connecting. With David Lewis, it was the moment you realized just how much it never would. As obituary said it simply, "Your love and devotion have been missed so very much. You touched so many lives while you were here. Now sad that many year dreams were left unfulfilled. And all goes to show us that sometimes things happen in this world that just don't fit in any of the boxes we try to force them into. Not sinister enough to be a clean murder, not rational enough to be a man simply walking away from his life. I guess sometimes a man makes two sandwiches, sets the VCR, takes off his ring, and the next time anyone lays eyes on him. He's a John Doe, on a road in Washington State, wearing clothes that were never his. And no matter how frustrating, that's just the way it's going to be. That's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you want more true crime from us, then check out our Scary Mysteries podcast and YouTube channel, or just dig into another episode right here. We have a whole bunch waiting for you. Remember to come back next week for another episode of Every Town for Let's Scary Strange and Mysterious Stories, because you never know, maybe your town will be next. (upbeat music)