Strange Water Deaths & the Missing

In Columbus Ohio, Joey LaBute had been missing for almost a month. He vanished on March 5th 2017. He’d been spending the evening with a cousin, Kyle Reigle and his cousin’s wife in the Union Cafe, in the Short North part of Columbus. He left the table they were sitting at, saying that he was going to the Bar to get a drink. He never came back to the table. When he disappeared, many people in the area were instantly reminded of Brian Shaffer, who also disappeared in the same way, in the same month, but almost ten years ago. He vanished while inside a Club/Bar, just like Joey LaBute did. He even looked quite like Joey. Though both the CCTV in the Bar Joey was drinking in, and in the Club where Brian was drinking were both scrutinized, neither man was seen leaving. Joey was 26 years old and held down a responsible job at Morgan Stanley. He was a graduate of Ohio State University. On the night he disappeared, he had parked his car nearby beside some residential apartments called Thruber Gate and walked with his cousin and cousin’s wife to the Bar. Just after midnight, his cousin Kyle decided they wanted to go home, but he couldn’t find Joey. They waited for ten minutes or so, then began to text him to find out where he was. Joey didn’t answer the texts and they didn’t hear back from him. H never returned to his table. His female cousin who was also there, called him after none of them could understand where he’d got to. He answered his phone and he told her he was driving. Perhaps that’s not so strange; maybe he had a disagreement with one of them, maybe he needed some air, or some space. The thing was, after he vanished into thin air, the police found his car still parked in the same spot he’d left it in when they he’d gone to the bar. If he was driving; he wasn’t in his own car. He’d also sent a text message to a member of his family, while also apparently in a car, but the message “didn’t make any sense,” said his cousin. Later, when it became abundantly clear that their cousin had vanished, the text message was released to the media. All it said was “Jnhstioj.” Nearly a month later, his body was found in a river search. This was after the police got hold of all of the available surveillance footage from the Bar. They went through 12 hours’ worth of footage, from 14 different cameras inside the Bar. It was not the best quality but, despite scrutinizing every person seen in the recordings, they could not find the moment that Joey left the Bar. They could see people coming and going all night, but they couldn’t spot him leave. It seemed impossible, but the exact time he left and whether he left on his own, or with anyone else, could not be determined. The police had nothing to go on from this evidence. His family spoke to the media, stressing how out of character it would be for Joey to just get up and leave and not come back. He held down a responsible job, was devoted to his family, and had shown no signs to any of them that there was anything whatsoever in his personal life that could have caused him to take such drastic steps as to walk out of a Bar, leave his life behind and never come back. He had his whole life in front of him. His family created fliers and along with friends and volunteers, everyone handed them out across town, desperate for any news on where he was. They couldn’t understand his text message, they couldn’t understand why he’d said he was driving, and they couldn’t understand where he was now. In hindsight, though many would not have openly said it, the most logical explanation was that he was in someone’s car and was being taken somewhere against his will. The person, or people who were taking him, most likely told him to answer his phone when it rang, to give them the time to do what they wanted to do to him without arousing any more suspicion. They probably wanted him to let his family know he was o.k., and yet, just by the fact that he hardly spoke and then sent a strange text message,