Our card this week is Darwin Vest, the King of Hearts from Idaho.

On a summer night in 1999, Darwin, a quirky intellectual

who was obsessed with studying spiders,

decided to go out to the bars with some friends

because he had just gotten some amazing news.

But after his final nightcap, Darwin wandered out the side door of a bar

and into a dark alley, triggering a mystery

that no one in 23 years has been able to solve.

I’m Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck.

It was late on Friday, June 4th, 1999,

and Eric Seneff had just gotten back to his house in Idaho Falls, Idaho,

when he saw a red light blinking,

indicating a new message on his answering machine.

Eric had been gone all day because he and his wife

had went to Salt Lake City, Utah,

to see The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway,

and instead of staying overnight in the city,

they drove the three hours back home to Idaho after the performance.

They hadn’t been expecting any calls that day,

so even though it was late, Eric went ahead and played the message,

which was from his friend Darwin’s mom, Margaret Vest.

She was frantic, and so, you know,

she was hoping that Darwin was with us, you know,

because he’d oftentimes go with us on different outings and things, you know.

So I did call her back and said, no, he was, he’s not with us.

Margaret told Eric that her 48-year-old son, Darwin,

had not been home in nearly two days, and she was sick with worry.

You see, Darwin still lived at home,

so he saw his mother nearly every day.

This whole time, she’d been holding out hope

that Darwin had gone to Utah with Eric

and had just forgotten to mention it to her,

but Eric told Margaret that he hadn’t seen Darwin since Wednesday night,

when they had played trivia together at a local bar called The Frosty Gator.

The Frosty Gator was their usual weekly meetup spot for trivia,

and Eric said nothing weird happened.

I don’t know, it just seemed like an ordinary night.

It was, you know, it wasn’t that busy in there.

I mean, there were probably 20, 30 people in there, you know.

It was a Wednesday night, and that night,

we had, you know, just a fun evening with playing trivia.

On the phone, Eric explained to Margaret

that when he left The Frosty Gator Wednesday night at around 11.30,

he’d offered Darwin a ride home because it was raining outside,

but that Darwin had declined

and said he was gonna hang out a little while longer.

From what he knew, Darwin had stayed behind

for another round of drinks with their other friend,

this guy named Lee Curtis, and that was that.

Margaret told Eric that Darwin’s car was home,

which made her even more concerned

because she was sure he hadn’t gone far,

and she knew his regular routine.

Nothing local would keep him away from the house for days at a time.

Before hanging up, Eric told Margaret he would call around

and see if anyone had seen Darwin,

and if not, he would start looking for him first thing the next day.

The first person Eric tried to get in touch with was Lee Curtis,

but he wasn’t having any luck reaching him.

And so, immediately, the next morning, I went looking,

and I drove downtown, and I was looking around the back alleys.

I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t know what else to do.

By 1999, Darwin and Eric had been best friends for almost a decade,

so Eric knew this was out of character for his friend.

Darwin was smart and independent, but also really social.

He would never skip town without telling people.

As Eric searched the streets, riverbanks,

and back alleys of Idaho Falls, a pit grew in his stomach.

His mind kept wandering to worst-case scenarios,

and he would try to force them out of his head,

convincing himself that Darwin would show up at home

and explain where he’d been.

Now, Eric knew Darwin had walked to the bar Wednesday night for trivia,

leaving his car at his mom’s house,

but that wasn’t unusual for him.

Eric told our reporting team during an interview

that Darwin preferred to walk everywhere.

I mean, I was always kind of concerned that,

you know, Darwin would walk around.

I mean, it’s a safe town, but, you know, still, you know,

that late at night, you never know.

He would insist on walking.

Of course, he’d been doing this for years.

But on trivia night, it had been storming,

and Eric remembered being concerned for his friend

walking home in the rain after declining his offer for a ride.

They had been drinking during trivia.

They weren’t, like, downing shots or anything,

but they were sharing pictures of beer.

So when Eric left, Darwin was definitely buzzed.

But he wasn’t too drunk to walk or anything like that.

Eric was coming up with nothing in his search for Darwin.

The panic really settled in when Eric went to Margaret’s house

and saw what Darwin had left in his car.

He always kept his snakes in the trunk of his car.

He wouldn’t have left without doing something with them,

and we knew that immediately

that there was something terribly wrong.

Yeah, no need to rewind.

You heard the man.

He kept those mother-f***** snakes in his mother-f***** trunk,

which was a total what-the-f***** moment for me

when I heard it, but Darwin was a scientist.

And it was explained to us that he studied snakes and spiders,

so it actually was totally normal for him

to have creepy critters in cages in his bedroom

and in his car.

People around town even called him the Spider-Man.

He just loved talking about all his toxinology,

his experiences with snakes, scorpions,

and other poisonous critters.

People were always fascinated with him.

Margaret couldn’t shake the feeling

that something was wrong,

so she decided to go ahead and report Darwin missing

to the Idaho Falls Police Department.

When our team was in Idaho

doing the reporting for this episode,

they met with IFPD Captain Jeremy Galbraith

and Public Information Officer Jessica Clements

to discuss Darwin’s case.

They said Margaret Vest showed up in person

to report her son missing.

She was very concerned because this was so,

so far out of Darwin’s usual behavior.

Darwin’s routine was that he would go home.

They lived together and they had a pretty,

pretty solid relationship,

so this was just way out of character.

She knew that Darwin was leaving that night

to go to trivia with Eric,

and she referenced that.

She made a comment, we’ve got a note in here

that she talked about Darwin knew that she worried,

so he would come home and actually wake her up

and say, Mom, I’m home, and that didn’t happen.

Captain Galbraith oversees investigations

for Idaho Falls PD today,

but back in 1999, he was a brand new patrol officer.

At the time, I didn’t think much of it.

I didn’t know Darwin Vest better than anybody else,

but I just figured he was around somewhere

and he’d show back up.

Darwin was never in trouble with the law,

so officers had no reason to think he’d gotten mixed up

with the wrong crowd or would be targeted

by anyone in that way.

So the beginning of the investigation

into his whereabouts focused on interviews.

Bartenders, patrons inside the bar,

good close friends, family, that sort of thing.

It jumped almost immediately

to the detective division from patrol.

Detectives immediately started getting statements

from people while also trying to retrace Darwin’s steps

on the route that he most likely would have walked

from his house to the Frosty Gator.

Through interviews with Darwin’s sister, Rebecca,

and his business manager,

detectives learned that the day Darwin went missing,

before he went out to the bar,

he had just gotten news that he’d been awarded a contract

for a spider trap that he invented.

He designed these traps and they were,

there was different companies

that were bringing them on board to sell.

And he’d signed a contract with Anderson Lumber

and they were going to carry them in his stores.

And it was, I wanted to say it was a $6,000 contract

that he was going to receive $6,000 of profit,

which was awesome.

And then there was another potential contract

in the works with Fred Meyer

and a couple other things that they had working.

But it was the Anderson contract that was signed that day,

according to the business manager.

Darwin had been working on this trap for a long time.

So it was a big deal

that he’d struck a lucrative deal to sell them.

They were a trap for the hobo spider,

a variant of the brown recluse spider

that’s prone to getting in people’s houses.

Darwin was a national expert on the hobo spider.

And he was so excited about the contract

that he shared the news with his sister via a fax message

that he sent around 3.30 PM on June 2nd.

According to Darwin’s mom, he was ecstatic about the deal.

And while going out to trivia

was part of his weekly routine,

that night was also a celebration of sorts.

Bartenders who’d been working that night told police

Darwin was his normal self at the Frosty Gator.

He’d been wearing his usual outfit,

Levi’s, a black leather jacket,

a belt with a buckle that had a snake design

and a watch that had a spiderweb design on its face.

Everyone they’d talked to so far

made it seem like it was a normal night for Darwin.

But there was one person they hadn’t talked to yet

and he could be their most important witness.

And that was Lee Curtis,

the other man Eric and Darwin had been with

at the Frosty Gator.

But again, Lee was kind of hard to get in touch with.

Pretty soon, officers found out

that Lee had actually gone home

to his permanent residence in Utah.

Turns out he was just in Idaho Falls visiting his dad.

Finding out that Lee left town soon after Darwin went missing

made Eric suspicious.

He was an interesting character too,

but I didn’t know him real well,

but Darwin always kind of seemed,

you know, leery of Lee, I don’t know.

Darwin never would speak negatively about anybody,

you know, but I had the impression that, you know,

I don’t know, I just kind of had a feeling

that, you know, somehow Darwin and him

had some sort of issue or something.

Police did eventually get in touch with Lee

who said that he wasn’t avoiding police,

but he had a military assignment

that he had to get back for.

Lee agreed to be interviewed

and said that that night when he was out with Darwin,

after Eric left, he and Darwin had one more round of drinks

and then walked a few blocks to another bar

called the Golden Crown for a nightcap.

It would have been around 1 a.m. on June 3rd by this point

because the bar was about to have last call.

But Lee said they each ordered a beer there

and he said that he actually ordered a coffee for Darwin too

so he could sober up a little before his walk home,

but Darwin had rejected the coffee.

According to Lee’s statement in police reports,

Lee went to the ATM to get some cash

in order to take a cab home.

And he says when he came back, Darwin was just gone.

Detectives interviewed a bartender at the Golden Crown

who filled in some of the gaps in Lee’s story.

You see, he said that before Lee went to the ATM,

Darwin had gotten up to use the restroom.

So when he came back and didn’t see Lee,

Darwin walked towards the exit.

The bartender said that when Lee came back,

he asked where Darwin had gone

and the bartender told him it looked like he’d gone home.

So Lee said he got a taxi and went to his dad’s house.

So Lee left in a cab, is that confirmed?

Yes, yep, we interviewed the cab driver

and there was another female in the cab as well.

According to police, Lee was also seen arriving home

by roommates who were still awake when he got there.

But there was one major discrepancy with Lee’s alibi.

According to Idaho Falls Police,

when officers went to the taxi companies

to confirm Lee’s ride home, there was no log of it.

I’m not sure if it’s still like this today

since we have all these ride share apps,

but back then, if you hailed a cab,

the driver was supposed to make a log of the ride,

basically the time, the destination, and cost

because the cab company took a percentage of the fare.

So obviously not being able to corroborate this

made police pause because either Lee was lying

or the cab driver was.

So they re-interviewed the cab driver

who finally admitted that he didn’t log the ride

because he wanted to keep all the money from the fare.

Despite that discrepancy

and Lee having been the last known person to see Darwin,

he was pretty much cleared of any wrongdoing.

Aside from having an alibi,

detectives couldn’t find any motive

for why Lee would have wanted to do something to Darwin.

But some people, like Eric, remained suspicious of Lee,

still to this day.

By June 6th, four days since Darwin disappeared,

police were starting to wonder

if something sinister had happened to Darwin

because there was still no sign of him.

So they decided to put out a press bulletin

for the news stations to share his photo

and clothing description on TV.

They also entered his information into NCIC,

the National Crime Information Center,

in case he turned up somewhere else.

And that’s when police realized

that a strange call had been made to 911 back on June 3rd.

And they started to wonder

if it could have been about Darwin.

On Thursday afternoon, June 3rd,

a local woman named Dolores called police

and said she’d been driving across a bridge

just south of Idaho Falls

when she saw someone in the Snake River.

She said she saw a body floating face down through the river.

The Bingham County Sheriff’s Office went out there

and they found a 55-gallon drum, but no body.

They recontacted her and she was adamant.

It was not a 55-gallon drum.

I saw a body.

Where Dolores reportedly saw the body

was near the Shelley Bridge,

which is just downstream from Idaho Falls.

But the thing is, when Dolores made that phone call,

Darwin had not been reported missing yet.

So when there wasn’t a body recovered,

police didn’t think much of Dolores’s report.

The Snake River runs right through downtown Idaho Falls.

Captain Galbraith took our reporting team to the riverbank.

So you can actually see photos of the area

on our website, thedeckpodcast.com,

and on our Instagram, which I’ll link to in the show notes.

There’s a walkway downtown that hugs the riverbank

and a steep grass hill on either side

without any safety railings.

And the water is within just a few blocks

of the Frosty Gator and the Golden Crown,

which, by the way, both bars are still open today.

So we also have photos of where Darwin spent his last night.

But long story short, the Sheriff’s Office

went out in boats to retrieve the drum from the water

and they still didn’t see a body.

But at some point after days of Darwin not showing up,

they started to wonder if what Dolores saw

could have been him.

They even followed up with her

and she was just as certain as the day she reported it.

What she’d seen was a body,

a man’s body with dark hair and a plaid shirt.

Now, Darwin did have brown hair,

but he had not been wearing a plaid shirt

the night he vanished.

But here’s the thing, if that was Darwin,

Eric said there’s zero chance he fell into the water.

Darwin wouldn’t have fallen into the river.

I can tell you that.

I mean, he was around that river his entire life, you know?

But Eric can’t say for sure that someone didn’t hurt Darwin

and dispose of him in the river or push him in on purpose.

And he felt suspicious of one person in particular

and it was a name that police had heard too.

After the news reports, police had gotten some tips

and one of them was about how Darwin had been the victim

of a brutal assault several years prior.

Darwin Vest had been the victim of a robbery

a couple of years before.

He had been out drinking that night,

was robbed and thrown in a dumpster.

Captain Galbraith asked us to censor the man’s name,

so we’ll call him Dane.

According to Eric, back in 1996,

Dane and some other guys had been driving around

and saw Darwin walking home.

They tried to take Darwin’s money,

but Darwin stood up for himself.

So they beat him unconscious and stole his money

before throwing him in a dumpster.

Darwin was seriously hurt and ended up pressing charges

and Dane was convicted and went to prison

for the robbery and assault.

So that was one of the theories was that

he had come after Darwin again.

By 1999, Dane had long been out of jail.

So detectives set out to find out where he’d been

on June 2nd and 3rd.

Turns out, Dane was living

at the Idaho Falls Community Work Center.

So he was in town,

but the work center was like a halfway house.

He wasn’t technically locked up,

so he could leave during the day for work,

but he had to return at night

and there were bed check logs that confirmed

Dane had been at the work center late on June 2nd.

It was a structured thing.

Windows were locked and bolted shut,

the front door alarmed, there were regular bed checks,

and he was accounted for all night.

There was no sign he’d left his room,

no sign that the window had been hampered with.

Jessica pulled the reports for us

that detailed Dane’s alibi,

which were those bed check logs from the work center.

And she said that Dane was accounted for

in bed on June 2nd at 9.45 p.m.,

then 2.15 a.m. and 4.15 a.m.

So if Darwin was last seen leaving the Golden Crown

at 1 a.m. and Dane was accounted for in bed at 2.15 a.m.,

it left a pretty small window

for the two to have crossed paths,

even if Dane had successfully snuck out of the center

in the middle of the night.

Detectives had to move on.

And when they did, they explored the theory

that someone could have targeted Darwin

if they found out that he had just landed

a lucrative deal with his spider trap kits.

The issue with that theory, though,

is Darwin hadn’t actually gotten his payout yet,

so it didn’t make much sense.

It’s not like he was walking around town

with the six grand on him.

As tips stopped coming in,

police dug more into Darwin’s background.

They learned that he’d gone off to college

and lived in Washington for about a decade

before returning to Idaho Falls to be close to his family

and focus on his spider work, which wasn’t just a hobby.

Darwin was an expert on spiders,

snakes, and poisonous plants.

And he was often called upon to testify in court

about spider and scorpion bites.

According to reporting in the Lewiston Tribune,

Darwin worked at a local movie theater to make income.

In all his spare time, he’d be out looking for spiderwebs

or out in the forest or desert

looking for snakes or scorpions.

Here’s Eric Seneff again.

Every year, he would set up a booth

at the Idaho State Fair.

You could always tell where his booth was

because there’d be a huge crowd of people there.

He’d have specimens, he’d have scorpions.

Of course, he was always trying to inform people

about the hobo spider and the dangers

of being bitten by them.

Because a lot of people didn’t know that much

about the hobo spider.

It was an introduced species

and it was relatively new to the area.

He was an amazing man.

He really was.

And he was extremely knowledgeable.

We would go on field trips and we’d go out in the desert

and we’d turn over like a piece of plywood

and then there’d be like a scorpion in there

or a centipede.

And he would rattle off the Latin names for these.

He knew a lot of Latin and he would…

So he was a fascinating guy to be around.

He was really just a very rare individual,

very much one of a kind.

The more police learned about Darwin,

the less they could find that would make him

the target of a violent crime.

Everyone said he was amazing.

Wonderfully weird was a term people like to use

to describe him.

Darwin’s case went nowhere for the rest of the year.

And in June, 2000,

the one year anniversary of his disappearance,

his friends and family held a candlelight vigil.

The lack of new leads made police consider

that maybe Darwin just drank too much

and accidentally fell into the river.

A detective tracked down what the water levels were

the night Darwin vanished.

And it was swollen, nearly at flood stage.

And that matters because when the Snake River

is that high near Idaho Falls,

grates are removed in order to avoid flooding.

In the past, people had fallen in the river

and tragically wound up in those grates.

But they wouldn’t have been in place

the night that Darwin went missing.

The Snake River ends up dumping out into the Columbia,

which ends up dumping out into the Pacific Ocean.

I mean, the Snake River goes along Southeast Idaho

over to Boise, and then crosses into Oregon

and Washington via the Columbia.

With the water level being that high,

I mean, it’s kind of hard to tell exactly

where that could have gone.

If that theory is correct,

where he would have ended up is hard to say.

In 2001, a detective re-interviewed Dolores

about what she saw floating in the river.

Even two years later, she was adamant

that what she saw was a body with dark matted hair

wearing a plaid shirt.

But police weren’t able to make any determinations

from her fresh statement.

And Darwin’s body hadn’t turned up downstream.

So Darwin’s case went cold,

and barely any new information came in

over the next few years.

In 2004, Darwin was declared legally dead

with his date of death listed as June 2nd, 1999.

By then, his family had lost most hope

that he was still alive.

But that didn’t make it any easier.

They still missed him,

and they still wanted to know what happened.

In 2005, through family members’ swabs,

Darwin’s DNA was put into CODIS,

just in case his body ever turned up somewhere.

A big feature ran in the Times News in July 2006.

The headline read,

Idaho’s Spider-Man Still Missing Seven Years After Last Seen.

In that story, police called Darwin’s case inactive.

A lieutenant was quoted saying,

until they have reason to believe otherwise,

they lean toward the theory that he fell in the river.

Two more years went by without much talk of Darwin.

But then, out of nowhere in 2008,

police got a strange letter from an inmate

who said that Darwin had been killed.

And he not only knew who did it,

but he knew why, too.

Detectives immediately packed up

and drove the four hours from Idaho Falls to Boise, Idaho,

where the state prison is to interview the inmate.

And he told police another prisoner he knew,

named Todd Briggs,

claimed that Darwin once grabbed his genitals,

and Todd was offended by it

and wanted Darwin dead.

So detectives interviewed this Todd Briggs guy,

who was incarcerated at the same prison.

And here’s the thing.

Todd didn’t exactly have an alibi.

Did Briggs offer up his whereabouts for June 99?

I don’t know about June 99 exactly,

but he lived in the area, right?

And he’d mentioned Darwin.

He said that he met Darwin one time in a bar.

It was, you know, Darwin was a fixture.

People knew Darwin.

So he said, yeah, I knew of Darwin,

but I spoke with him for 10 minutes one time,

and that was the only time we ever talked.

It was end of 97, somewhere in 98.

And other people that knew Briggs

and knew them at the time kind of, you know, confirmed that.

Yeah, I remember him mentioning this,

or I remember being around that conversation,

but no, they didn’t hang out together.

No, they didn’t spend time together.

So Todd basically said the other informant was full of BS

and just wanted time shaved off his sentence,

and he was lying in order to do it.

Todd denied ever hurting Darwin

and said he knew nothing about what happened to him.

Then Todd kind of pointed the finger

back at the other inmate saying,

oh, well, that guy talked about Darwin all the time.

Maybe you should see why he’s so obsessed with the case.

By the way, while Todd Briggs

wasn’t exactly ruled out in Darwin’s case,

he’s never been considered a suspect.

But according to court records,

he is in prison for first-degree murder,

two counts of aggravated battery,

attempted escape, and aggravated assault.

And get this, the murder happened in Idaho Falls.

According to a 2002 Time News article,

Todd Briggs was convicted in the murder of Melissa Garcia,

a 25-year-old mother of four.

That article says that he killed Melissa

after she broke off their engagement.

He’s actually eligible for parole in 2035.

The other inmate,

who was the original letter-writing informant,

is in prison for attempted strangulation,

escape, aggravated assault, and attempted murder.

But police said his statements were all over the place

and didn’t really make any sense.

Plus, his crimes took place much further north in Idaho,

and he didn’t have any real ties to Idaho Falls,

so they moved on.

Coincidentally, later that same year, this is 2008,

Dane’s name came back up on police’s radar.

A woman told police that one of Dane’s relatives

had one of Darwin’s rings,

and that one time the man had gotten drunk

and said that he and Dane killed Darwin.

Police put both Dane and his relative

through polygraph tests, and they both passed.

But then, around the same exact time,

Eric had someone contact him,

saying something similar about Dane.

I also had some gal in my store.

This has been quite a few years later.

She told me that she had been talking to,

you know, somebody that knew,

but that she had heard from firsthand, you know,

that friends of hers had kidnapped Darwin,

killed him, and buried him out by Caps Crossing, you know?

And, of course, I reported this to police,

and they said, oh, no, she’s not credible.

So, I mean, there was all, you know,

there was all kinds of speculations.

Eric was familiar with the area she mentioned,

Caps Crossing, which is just southeast of Idaho Falls,

way out in the sticks.

So, he decided to go look for Darwin’s body himself.

I actually went and drove out to Caps Crossing

and kind of just looked around.

I don’t know.

Of course, this was, like I say,

this was a decade later, you know,

but I actually did drive out there

and just kind of, you know, poke around.

Did you see anything suspicious?

No, no.

I mean, I don’t know.

It’s kind of, you know, sort of a wide-open area there.

You know, there’s a creek, and I don’t know.

I just was looking around.

Of course, I don’t likely see any bones or anything,

but, I mean, there’s deer bones and cow bones,

but I didn’t see anything that seemed, you know, relevant.

Speculations quieted down after that,

and a few more years went by without any real developments,

except for one wild rumor

that Darwin had packed up and moved to Mexico,

but there was nothing to back that up.

In summer 2011,

Idaho Falls police got another letter about Darwin,

this time from a different inmate

claiming to have information,

but Jessica and Captain Galbraith said

detectives tried to set up an interview with the inmate,

and he never responded after that.

They aren’t sure if he changed his mind

about giving a statement,

but all efforts to talk to him since have been unsuccessful.

At the end of 2017, a new police chief in Idaho Falls

assigned Darwin’s case to a new detective,

Rome Stifler, and he wanted him to give it a fresh look.

Detective Stifler re-interviewed Dane

and other people who’d been possible witnesses.

One interesting thing Detective Stifler discovered

was that on June 3rd, 1999,

an inmate at the work center where Dane was living

actually had escaped the facility

and wasn’t found until a year later,

but as far as we know,

nothing ever came of that really in relation to Darwin’s case,

so I’m not sure if police couldn’t track him down

for an interview,

or again, if he just didn’t have any ties to Darwin or what,

but either way, it proved to police

that it was in fact possible to escape

from the so-called secure facility

where Dane had been staying,

but it still didn’t prove anything about Dane specifically.

There have been some theories in other media

that Dane and Lee Curtis and the other escaped inmate

worked together to set Darwin up for some reason,

but police said that they have no information whatsoever

to back up that rumor.

Police truly have no idea what happened to Darwin,

and they’ll admit that they’re not really any closer

to solving the case today as they were decades ago,

but they have worked to rule out a lot of different theories,

which sometimes, until the right person comes forward,

is all they can do.

These missing person cases are especially difficult

because if you have a homicide cold case,

you have a crime scene,

you know that they met a tragic end,

a criminal end, right?

It’s some kind of nefarious ending that is heartbreaking,

but there’s answers there.

You have something to go back to

to try and connect something to,

and there’s answers in a crime scene, right?

As technology develops,

there’s something more you can do.

With a missing person, you know, it is entirely possible

that nothing nefarious happened,

that it was a tragic accident,

but that doesn’t give you real closure,

doesn’t give you answers,

and that’s so you can’t just say,

well, it’s likely, so we’ll sign off on that.

You have to entertain every possibility,

and when you get tips

that maybe something nefarious happened,

you have to look into that.

Family wants answers, life wants answers,

like anyone would.

If it was my brother, if it was my son, my dad,

I would want answers as well,

and we, as a police department,

I look to these families to, you know,

keep it open and follow up on everything we can.

It’s one of those tough ones,

especially where, you know, 1951 was when Darwin was born,

so you think about people in that timeframe.

I mean, we’re starting to lose people

that were his peers.

His mother’s passed.

It’s getting tougher and tougher

to find people who were around at that time

who may have remembered Darwin, who may have seen him.

We sure hope that there’s answers in this lifetime.

Eric lost hope years ago of ever seeing Darwin again.

It was a big loss.

He was such an exceptional and, you know,

one-of-a-kind person.

I mean, nobody would ever, would be like him again,

you know, so he was, it was a great loss, you know.

I think his devotion to his research

and his love of people and, you know,

just, you know, he touched a lot of lives.

If you know anything about the June 1999 disappearance

of Darwin Vest, aka Spider-Man,

from Idaho Falls, Idaho,

please contact the Idaho Falls Police Department

at 208-529-1200,

or you can call the Idaho cold case tip line

at 1-844-TIP-4040.

We have pictures of what he looked like on our website,

plus photos of his unique belt buckle

and watch face on our website as well.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production

with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work,

visit thedeckpodcast.com.

So what do you think, Chuck?

Do you approve?