Shelby Wright (2 of Clubs, Washington)

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Speaker 2 Our card this week is Shelby Wright, the two of clubs from Washington. What happened to Shelby in the summer of 2004 has been a mystery for more than two decades.

Speaker 2 The 14-year-old boy, described as a computer whiz, is said to have walked away in the middle of the night with only his laptop in hand, leaving behind his scooter, which was his only mode of transportation.

Speaker 2 Rumors have swirled for years that Shelby came across something he wasn't supposed to see or died in an accident that has since been covered up. But then the case takes some weird turns.

Speaker 2 Someone claims to have held on to a good buy note from Shelby and only turns it in weeks into the investigation.

Speaker 2 Stories from those who last saw Shelby in the middle of the night don't totally line up.

Speaker 2 And a parallel investigation makes a hard laugh and collides right in with Shelby's case in one of the strangest twists I have ever come across. Are the rumors that circulated true?

Speaker 2 Or could it be possible that Shelby's active online life put him in unknown danger? Or is someone very close to Shelby holding on to a secret? I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 2 It was the early hours of July 27th, 2004, when the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office received a 911 call from 14-year-old Shelby Wright, who said that he was having suicidal thoughts.

Speaker 2 So a deputy drove out to the tiny, unincorporated community of Machias, and that's where he found Shelby alone at the same pay phone he'd called from.

Speaker 2 But as they talked, the deputy realized that Shelby was looking for a different kind of help than he'd suggested in the call. Shelby was looking for a ride.

Speaker 2 Shelby told the deputy that he'd been staying with his great-grandmother who lived nearby, but he was trying to get to his mom's place 10 miles down the road.

Speaker 2 He explained that his great-grandmother, Nora, had dementia and they hadn't been getting along.

Speaker 4 You know, we're talking about a 14-year-old boy out in the middle of the night.

Speaker 4 I think any reasonable law enforcement officer would feel compelled to feel responsible for the safety of that child and deliver them to their parents.

Speaker 2 That's Detective Dave Billieu of the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office. He's on Shelby's case today.

Speaker 2 He was able to confirm to us that the responding deputy back in 2004 had indeed given Shelby a lift to his mom, Lisa Wright's house. He explained the situation to Lisa, who didn't appear to be upset.

Speaker 2 If anything, she was happy to see Shelby.

Speaker 2 Now, no one would have thought much of this call on its own, and I certainly wouldn't be talking about Shelby two decades later if that call was all there was. But it wasn't.

Speaker 2 A week later, on August 5th, the sheriff's office received another 911 call. Not from Shelby this time, but about Shelby.
His grandparents were calling to report him missing.

Speaker 2 Yvonne and Dennis Wright were Shelby's primary caregivers, so normally he stayed at their house.

Speaker 2 But over the last couple of weeks, they'd been out of town, and Shelby had been staying at his great-grandmother, Nora Rux's place, along with his great-uncle Robert Rux, who was Nora's full-time caregiver.

Speaker 2 Yvonne and Dennis had expected to see Shelby when they got back into town on July 28th.

Speaker 4 Shelby is not at their home like they assumed he would be. Lisa doesn't know

Speaker 4 where he is. You know, within a few days, you know, they can't find him.
They can't locate him. Nobody knows where he is.

Speaker 2 Shelby's family life was complicated. His father wasn't in the picture.
And while Shelby's mom was around, she wasn't super dependable. And she had a substance use disorder.

Speaker 2 That made her relationship with Shelby volatile. And though Shelby lived with his grandparents most of the time, he bounced between other relatives' houses too.

Speaker 4 You know, Shelby lived a bit of a nomad life.

Speaker 4 And if you consider his age, being a 14-year-old boy, it's pretty alarming, but that appeared to be the norm for Shelby and his family.

Speaker 2 When Yvonne and Dennis reported that Shelby was missing, they told law enforcement that there were other things that concerned them.

Speaker 2 His beloved laptop computer and motorized scooter were also gone, which to some might suggest that he intended to leave on his own but that is not what yvonne and dennis believed he would never be gone this long without contact

Speaker 5 well i would say that somebody took him that was my worst fear um i never he never

Speaker 5 he wasn't into running away

Speaker 5 he decided he was gonna go away and he actually i still have his letter And it said, dear grandma, I am hiding.

Speaker 5 Please leave food on the porch. And Shelby was the kind that no matter where he was, if he needed money, he would have called us and said, Grandma, I need money.
Or I'm hungry, or I'm here, I'm there.

Speaker 5 He was into his family.

Speaker 2 But authorities weren't so sure. They, of course, asked around, talked to family who'd seen him.
But it didn't seem like there was anything nefarious there to suss out.

Speaker 5 I seem to remember, I think they treated it kind of like a runaway.

Speaker 2 Now, part of the reason why the runaway theory may have taken a strong hold could have been partially due to the fact that the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office got pulled on to another crime just two weeks after Shelby had been reported missing.

Speaker 2 A local woman named Kelly Sarston had been found murdered near her home in the same small town.

Speaker 2 And though no one at the time thought that Shelby and Kelly's cases were connected, Kelly's case, where they had a body and more to go on, got more focus for a while.

Speaker 2 Law enforcement did keep asking around about Shelby though. They continued to check in with his mother Lisa and his grandparents too.

Speaker 2 But the more time that went on without any contact from him, the more the runaway theory looked less and less likely to law enforcement.

Speaker 2 So in September, more than a month after Shelby's grandparents reported him missing, That's when the case was handed off to investigators.

Speaker 2 Through interviews with family and friends and other community members, authorities were able to develop a rough idea of Shelby's last known movements.

Speaker 2 Shelby was in Lisa's care after the deputy dropped him off in the early morning hours of July 27th. He spent the latter part of that morning working on his scooter there.

Speaker 2 And at some point later in the day, he told his mother that he was going to go over to Robert Wolfe's house.

Speaker 4 So, mom, Lisa, you know, Rob Wolfe was her ex-boyfriend. She apparently trusted him enough to feel comfortable with Shelby going over there, you know, on a routine basis.

Speaker 4 I think we can probably say that.

Speaker 4 Maybe Rob Wolfe was a bit of a father figure for Shelby. He's a Matias as well.
Happens to live about a mile away from

Speaker 4 great-grandma Nora and great-uncle Robert Rupps.

Speaker 4 So Mom Lisa says, yeah, that's fine. You can go to Robert Wolfe's place.

Speaker 4 And so Shelby takes off sometime on the 27th of July from Lisa's custody and navigates his way to Robert Wolfe's place.

Speaker 2 It's confirmed he made it there because a guy named Fred Williams dropped by Rob's place that day at around 3 o'clock looking for Rob's girlfriend, who happened to be his ex-wife.

Speaker 2 They needed to discuss child support or something along those lines. But when he got there, the only person there was Shelby, who said that no one else was home, so Fred left shortly after that.

Speaker 2 Before the time he was there, Fred told investigators that he saw a suspicious man near Rob's property.

Speaker 2 Investigators later learned that this so-called suspicious man was most likely Rob's neighbor, who he shared a driveway with.

Speaker 2 Now, this neighbor couldn't remember seeing Fred's car there to corroborate his story, but he did tell investigators that there were often people coming and going on Rob's property at all hours.

Speaker 2 So at some point, it just stopped standing out.

Speaker 4 Well, I think that it was the neighbors that

Speaker 4 said, you know, they suspected, or at least one of the neighbors did, that there was some drug activity occurring at Rob Wolfe's property.

Speaker 2 It's unclear if investigators could ever confirm that the allegations of drug activity were true. Now, if Fred was there to see Rob's girlfriend, investigators wanted to talk to her next.

Speaker 2 Had she been there before Fred dropped by or after? Did she see Shelby when he was there? The The answer turned out to be maybe.

Speaker 2 Rob's girlfriend, Hoku Tavares, confirmed that Shelby was at Rob's place in late July, although she was fuzzy on the exact date.

Speaker 2 Whenever it was that she interacted with him, it definitely wasn't right before or after Fred came by at three in the afternoon, because she told investigators that she spoke to Shelby some night at around 1:30 in the morning.

Speaker 2 Rob was home too, but he was laying down in another room when the two spoke.

Speaker 4 Shelby is up, he's on his computer, and he tells Hoku that he's going to leave.

Speaker 4 She says, hey, but you know, I don't think it's safe for you to leave in the middle of the night. He says something to the effect of, oh, I'll be fine, and he departs.

Speaker 2 Hoku admitted that she didn't like the idea of Shelby just going off into the night.

Speaker 2 Notes from one interview said that she told investigators, quote, I didn't want to let him go, but he said he did it all the the time, end quote. And honestly, he might have, right?

Speaker 2 This is a kid who was calling 911 after midnight to get a ride. But some things about this story didn't totally line up.

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Speaker 2 While Hoku told investigators that she had no idea where Shelby was going when he headed out at 1.30 in the morning, Rob told investigators something different.

Speaker 2 According to him, Hoku told him at the time that Shelby was going back to his great-grandmother Nora's house, which was just about a mile away.

Speaker 2 Now, the most logical thing, at least in my mind, is that if he was going to make the one mile trip, he would have taken his motorized scooter since that was his main form of transportation.

Speaker 2 But that scooter was found parked behind an RV on Rob's property a few days after the last interaction Hoku had with him.

Speaker 2 Now, his computer was still nowhere to be found, but he did leave behind some other things. Hoku said that there was a computer mouse and a cell phone that she thought was his.

Speaker 2 But Shelby's grandparents told us that Shelby didn't have a cell phone, at least not that they were aware of. So maybe this wasn't his?

Speaker 2 Or maybe like many 14-year-olds, he was keeping something from the adults in his life.

Speaker 2 When we asked Detective Bill You about this, he said that he wasn't sure what to make of it, but he wouldn't expect Shelby to leave his cell phone behind if he was bringing his computer somewhere.

Speaker 2 Now, authorities weren't the one to get Shelby's scooter from Rob's place.

Speaker 2 His mom, Lisa, had actually picked it up in the days after he first disappeared, and she was the one who eventually turned it over to investigators to see if it held any clues.

Speaker 2 They did end up finding two prints on it, and those were compared to prints on file for a bunch of people, including Shelby's mom, his grandmother, Robert Wolfe, and Fred, but none of them was a match.

Speaker 2 Law enforcement records don't show if others, such as Shelby's grandfather, Dennis, or his great uncle, Robert Rux, or Hoku, were compared directly.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately, these prints were not suitable to enter into the APHIS database. It's also possible, by the way, that these prints just belonged to Shelby.

Speaker 2 Authorities don't have a copy of his prints on file for comparison. Now, the thing that kills me is that no one today seems to know whether Shelby's scooter was in working order when it was recovered.

Speaker 2 Reports say that when he was at his mom's house, remember, he'd been working on it. And when she woke up, both he and his scooter were gone.
So I think she assumed he'd ridden it to Rob's.

Speaker 2 So if it was working, I think him leaving it behind is weird. But if it had problems and crept out on him again, maybe it isn't so suspicious after all.

Speaker 2 Like I said, the walk to his great grandmother's is only a mile. If he really was going there, that's very doable for Shelby.
He also could have been picked up by someone.

Speaker 2 But who might be hard to pin down? Because one of the investigators' initial concerns was that it could have been a contact from Shelby's online life.

Speaker 4 Because Shelby was so so computer savvy, you know, did Shelby have some sort of online relationship with somebody that nobody knew about and in chat rooms that he reportedly would

Speaker 4 participate in. The school-age boys that knew Shelby said that he did not

Speaker 4 use chat rooms. but his grandpa Dennis said that he did.
So we have conflicting information whether Shelby actually did participate in any chat rooms.

Speaker 2 Other evidence in the law enforcement files suggests that Shelby was most likely in chat rooms.

Speaker 2 Shelby's grandmother Yvonne told investigators that she discovered that he had been in teen chat rooms and was describing where he lived with people in those chats.

Speaker 2 When our reporters asked Shelby's grandparents about his online activity, they said it was monitored pretty tightly.

Speaker 2 Which, knowing teenagers, still leaves for me a lot of gray area. I mean, I was Shelby's age in 2004, and I'm sure my parents thought I was super safe too.
I was not.

Speaker 2 I was a damn fool who had no clue about the real dangers of the internet. But without Shelby's actual computer, tracking down the chat room activity would be next to impossible.

Speaker 2 But there was a way to check some of his other online activity.

Speaker 4 Yvonne had the login information for both of Shelby's email addresses, and she would routinely check to see if there was any incoming, outgoing emails, any activity on Shelby's accounts that you might associate, you know, a daily use of an email address user, and there was nothing at all.

Speaker 4 So all of the evidence reference internet activity, email activity suggests that it absolutely ceased to exist after Shelby disappeared.

Speaker 2 For the people close to Shelby, this was especially troubling. He wasn't just a teen who liked going online.
He was really into computers.

Speaker 4 Shelby, by all accounts, was a young computer whiz.

Speaker 4 He would buy

Speaker 4 computer parts, either at computer stores or at secondhand stores, and then build computers.

Speaker 4 Everything I've read about him indicated that he was beyond his years as far as technology was concerned.

Speaker 2 Investigators did get warrants on Shelby's email accounts and found no activity.

Speaker 2 And there were no incoming or outgoing emails to suggest that Shelby had planned to run away or had plans to meet someone that he'd met online.

Speaker 2 But there was some weirdness around Shelby's computer and some mobile activity. In December 2004, some four months after he'd been reported missing, Yvonne contacted authorities with news.

Speaker 4 After Shelby had disappeared, they received an additional charge on their card, which alarmed them.

Speaker 4 The grandparents then contacted the sheriff's office and said, hey, you know, we realize there's been zero activity on his email accounts, but we did get this charge on our credit card.

Speaker 2 The charge was from months prior. It was connected with a T-Mobile hotspot that Shelby had used in the past.
So Yvonne and Dennis wondered if someone had been using it again.

Speaker 2 When investigators reached out to T-Mobile, they confirmed that the only activity they could see on their end occurred in April 2004, lining up with the last time Shelby was known to use the hotspot.

Speaker 4 It certainly caused some alarm when it occurred, but there's nothing in the file to indicate that the side investigation into that credit card charge resulted

Speaker 4 or opened up a can of worms or provided any additional information that led the investigation anywhere.

Speaker 2 So the hotspot appeared to be a dead end.

Speaker 2 In fact, most of what the investigators were running into over the course of 2004 were dead ends. And often they were left with more questions than answers.

Speaker 2 Some of the bigger questions investigators were still puzzling over revolved around Shelby's great uncle, Robert Rux, the one that he was staying with at his great grandmother's.

Speaker 2 And this is not to be confused with Rob Wolfe, the guy whose house Shelby was last seen at.

Speaker 2 When Shelby made his initial 911 call back in July, he'd he'd been trying to get away from the Rux house. And the more sheriff's deputies dug in, the more they understood why.

Speaker 4 By all accounts, from other witnesses and from Robert Rux himself, it appears that he is a very paranoid person or was a very paranoid person back then. Robert thought somebody was trying to kill him.

Speaker 4 So he would keep the curtains closed all the time, keep the doors locked, wouldn't open the door when people would knock.

Speaker 4 So I could see why, if I was a 14-year-old boy, why I would not want to be stuck inside this old house

Speaker 4 with the curtains drawn and the doors locked, you know, trying to take care of my great-grandmother who has dementia. So I could see why Shelby would want to leave.

Speaker 2 Weeks after Shelby had been reported missing, Robert Rux showed investigators a letter that he found the same day Shelby made the call to 911.

Speaker 2 And it painted a very bleak picture.

Speaker 4 I'll read it verbatim.

Speaker 6 Hi.

Speaker 4 I know I'm not supposed to leave. I can't take the stress and problems anymore.
I gotta get out of here or I'm gonna kill myself. I just have to leave.
I'm sorry. Goodbye.
Shelby Wright.

Speaker 2 Obviously, this note raises a lot of questions. The first being,

Speaker 2 what was Robert waiting for? Why did he hang on to the letter for several weeks before telling authorities about it? And there's something about the note that bugs Detective Biliou.

Speaker 4 Why would Shelby find the need to type out his entire name when the note is going to his uncle?

Speaker 4 I found the note to be very suspicious. So unfortunately, because it was computer generated and printed there at the house, supposedly,

Speaker 4 we can't compare, you know, Shelby's handwriting to that note.

Speaker 2 Shelby's mom, Lisa, had told law enforcement that her son actually mentioned leaving a letter behind when he left the Rux household.

Speaker 2 And this letter does line up with what Shelby himself said when he called 911.

Speaker 2 So maybe it's not much of a mystery at all. It does beg the question, though, was there more going on in the house that Shelby had to get away from?

Speaker 2 And in such a hurry that maybe he would have left something pretty important behind. Something Nora's church friends, of all people, believed they stumbled upon.

Speaker 4 And on one particular Sunday, roughly five to six months after Shelby's gone missing, these folks show up at the Rucks residence to pick up Nora to take her to church.

Speaker 4 And they discover in the car that Nora doesn't have her glasses. And so one of these folks, say walked back to the door and

Speaker 4 get Robert's attention and tell him, Hey, Nora doesn't have her glasses, she needs them.

Speaker 2 Robert shut the door and reappeared a moment later with a pair of glasses before closing the door again. But when the glasses were handed off to Nora, they all noticed something.

Speaker 2 They weren't her glasses. In fact, they didn't even look like glasses for an adult.

Speaker 4 And they appeared to be smaller, child-sized glasses. And they thought that to be, you know, to be odd.

Speaker 2 These glasses appeared to be similar to what Shelby wore, oval metal frames.

Speaker 4 People assumed

Speaker 4 those glasses to be Shelby's because the shape was consistent with what Shelby wore, and they were smaller in size.

Speaker 2 Investigators confirmed with Shelby's grandmother, Yvonne, and his mother, Lisa, that Shelby only had one pair of glasses and needed them to see. As in, in, he was almost always wearing them.

Speaker 2 This, of course, raised the interest of investigators. So on February 10th, 2005, warrant in hand, Robert's home was searched.

Speaker 2 During this, investigators realized that Robert was carrying a gun, so they had to disarm him. In addition to the house, Robert's property was searched using cadaver docks.

Speaker 4 So a number of glasses were located in the house, but none of them matched the presumed or suspected to be Shelby Wright glasses.

Speaker 4 And the canine operation outside of the house did not result in

Speaker 4 anything either.

Speaker 2 Like almost every clue in this case, this feels like it could mean everything

Speaker 2 or nothing.

Speaker 2 Because there's one answer that could put this whole thing to bed. Was Shelby wearing his glasses when that deputy interacted with him? Did his mom see him wearing them when he was dropped off?

Speaker 2 What about Hoku? But unfortunately today,

Speaker 2 no one knows the answer to that.

Speaker 2 A detail like that isn't mentioned in the case file, but there is something mentioned in the file that could suggest those glasses that were found might not have been his.

Speaker 2 Investigators had talked to Shelby's eye doctor who told them that his frames were gunmetal gray, not gold as Nora's church friends had described.

Speaker 2 Now, I'll say that in one of the only photos available of Shelby online when we first started reporting this case, he's wearing glasses and I would easily call them gold.

Speaker 2 So, what glasses people saw and if they were even Shelby's remain a mystery.

Speaker 2 And our attempts to reach Robert Rux to ask about this incident, the glasses, the letter he found, have so far been unsuccessful.

Speaker 2 For a while after this, nothing seemed to move the needle forward in Shelby's case. Did he walk away? Did he meet with foul play? Every possibility was still on the table.

Speaker 2 But in no world could I have predicted what came next. Because it's one of the weirdest twists I've ever come across in a true crime case.

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Speaker 2 In May of 2007, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reached out to the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office.

Speaker 2 They'd been involved in another investigation, and they believed that they may have located Shelby right. They even had a photo to pass on.
And the boy in the photo, you guys.

Speaker 2 I don't make bets unless I'm sure, and I would have gone all in on this one. He has the same round face, same short cropped hair, same ears, same nose.
the same damn glasses Shelby used to wear.

Speaker 2 Now, granted, the boy in the photo looks a little older, but some time had passed and kids at that age grow in spurts.

Speaker 2 Now, this picture they were given was from a photo ID card issued by the Department of Licensing, basically Washington State's version of the DMV. But the name on the ID wasn't Shelby, it was Lucas.

Speaker 2 And here's where things get weird. This came on Nickmix radar because an employee at this Department of Licensing thought that something fishy was up.

Speaker 2 This guy named Joseph had brought his son in because he needed to get a driver's license. Cool, no problem.

Speaker 2 They're going through the whole rigmarole, filling out the application for his son Lucas, taking the picture. But when the person went to go file it, they were like, hold up.

Speaker 2 There is already one filed. Joseph had come in the year before and done something similar for his son Lucas.
A Lucas who is definitely not the same kid that was with him then.

Speaker 2 The DOL employee confronted Joseph, but he denied that he had brought in two different young men, saying that Lucas had simply lost weight.

Speaker 2 And the DOL employee didn't buy this and escalated it to the state police for investigation. That's when the state police contacted Nick McC.

Speaker 2 And Shelby seemed a likely match.

Speaker 2 Investigators in Snohomish County immediately jumped in. They began surveilling Joseph's house.

Speaker 2 The Washington State Patrol had already confirmed that he did, after all, have a son named Lucas, and his real son was the second boy that he brought in to get the driver's license.

Speaker 2 But he was not the boy in the photo from the first ID that investigators were so interested in. It was that first boy that investigators wanted to talk to, the one that they thought could be Shelby.

Speaker 2 So during evening surveillance one night, share of deputies actually saw this mystery boy show up at Joseph's house. Investigators confronted him, and the boy identified himself as Jason.

Speaker 2 He gave investigators his birth date, his address, his phone number, and the only photo ID he had on him, which was an old high school one from 2005.

Speaker 2 But investigators were eventually able to pull Jason's driver's license, which said that the boy was four years older than Shelby Wright would have been.

Speaker 2 But if he had an ID,

Speaker 2 why get another?

Speaker 2 When asked, he said that it was all Joseph's idea, but he had no idea why he wanted him to do it. Now, this was hard for investigators to believe.

Speaker 2 Even after meeting him in person, they thought there was a possibility that he was Shelby.

Speaker 2 But through the DOL and speaking with a family member, investigators were able to confirm that Jason was in fact Jason.

Speaker 2 Now, it's unclear from the law enforcement files whether Joseph was ever questioned further about what was behind the duplicate IDs.

Speaker 2 We asked Detective Billieu about this and he said that once Snohomish County detectives determined the alleged licensing fraud case didn't involve Shelby, they didn't spend any additional time or thought on it.

Speaker 2 They left that to the DOL to sort out. And I'm still trying to follow up on this thread with DOL because my spidey senses do not like whatever was happening there.

Speaker 2 Although answers might be hard to get because Joseph has passed away, as did the real Lucas. And Jason has seemingly struggled a lot in his adult years.

Speaker 2 So I can't help but wonder what else was at play here. But I, like Snohomish detectives, have to focus on the task at hand for now.

Speaker 2 And there is plenty to do here, because with the whole Joseph, Jason, Lucas saga going nowhere, that left detectives back at square one.

Speaker 2 Though it wouldn't be long before another wild story about Shelby bubbled to the surface.

Speaker 2 Less than a year later, so in April of 2008, a woman named Cindy contacted investigators and told them that she knew what happened to Shelby.

Speaker 2 She said that back around February or March of 2007, she was visiting Rob Wolfe's place and hanging out there, the same Rob Wolfe whose house Shelby was last seen at.

Speaker 2 Cindy said that she had curled up on the couch and overheard a shocking conversation. Thinking that Cindy was asleep, Rob and another man, David, started talking about Shelby.

Speaker 2 They said that Shelby had stumbled across a meth lab in an abandoned house on a nearby property where where a guy named Joshua lived.

Speaker 2 Now, technically, this property was owned by Nora Rux and would have been across the street from where she lived with Robert Rux.

Speaker 2 According to Cindy, when Shelby threatened to tell about the meth lab, he was killed and his body was placed in a septic tank on the property.

Speaker 2 She said that the body was eventually moved after authorities had been looking around in that area. which could be in reference to when Robert Rux's property was searched back in February of 2005.

Speaker 2 Now, Cindy told investigators that Shelby's body was then buried under a shed on Rob Wolfe's property.

Speaker 4 You know, if you look at that story in the totality, you know, a body being placed into a septic tank, removed from a septic tank, transported to another location, and then buried underneath the shed, that logistically just doesn't make sense.

Speaker 2 And there was another problem with this story. At 14 years old, even being as smart as Shelby was, would he even know what a meth lab was?

Speaker 4 Well, yeah, you know, if you made me say yes or no, I would say no, that Shelby would not know what that is.

Speaker 2 But investigators, including Detective Bill Yew, who had just started working with the Major Crimes Unit at this point, couldn't ignore any tip.

Speaker 4 And that story actually led to the

Speaker 4 application and execution of some very labor-intensive search warrants.

Speaker 2 On April 13th, 2008, both Rob Wolfe's and Joshua's properties were searched with ground-penetrating radar and cadaver docks, although Joshua had moved off the property at this point.

Speaker 2 The septic tank on Joshua's former property was drained and searched, but nothing turned up.

Speaker 2 Rob's property, which consisted of several sheds and outbuildings and broken-down cars, offered up no evidence that Shelby was buried there either.

Speaker 2 Now, personally, I have a hard time buying Cindy's story because she also came forward with a tip in Kelly Sarston's case.

Speaker 2 Remember the woman who was murdered just a few weeks after Shelby went missing?

Speaker 2 I've been digging into Kelly's case for over a year, and based on what I know, the tip she gave in that case is pretty far off base. So her tip here could be off base as well.

Speaker 2 But that doesn't mean that there couldn't be a kernel of truth in it.

Speaker 2 Despite the extensive search of his property, Rob Wolf continued to be the subject of rumors and speculation, even after he moved to North Dakota and was killed in a car accident there in 2009.

Speaker 4 And another rumor that started up was that Shelby had died during an accident on Rob Wolfe's property, that Rob Wolfe had accidentally

Speaker 4 run Shelby over.

Speaker 2 According to an anonymous tip received by investigators, a woman named Kathleen had information about this accident. So they tried to track Kathleen down, but it took a minute.

Speaker 2 Now they discovered that she had moved to North Dakota with Rob Wolf before his death, and they were rumored to be dating.

Speaker 2 But even with the help of North Dakota authorities, they still could not pin down Kathleen for an interview.

Speaker 2 So it wasn't until 2013 when she returned to Snohomish County that they finally got a chance at her. But if they were expecting a significant breakthrough, it didn't materialize.

Speaker 2 Kathleen told investigators that she heard the same rumor, specifically that Rob had hit Shelby while driving a dune buggy, but that it wasn't true.

Speaker 2 She suspected it was a rumor started by Joshua, the guy who the meth lab rumor was about and whose property was searched. She said that he was always jealous of Rob and didn't like him.

Speaker 2 And she even offered up a rumor of her own that she had heard: that Rob shot Shelby 17 times, but again, it's not a rumor she believed. And it doesn't appear that investigators did either.

Speaker 4 Nothing came of that interview that changed the course of the investigation or provided any additional or new information that helped solve Shelby's disappearance or led the investigation in any other direction.

Speaker 2 Like many of the stories and rumors and tips surrounding Shelby, it was often a game of telephone with no real evidence to back up any of them.

Speaker 2 But investigators did everything they could to verify the information that they received. including a final lead.

Speaker 2 Just days after investigators interviewed Kathleen, they received a call from a man who had done the penetrating radar search of Rob's property back in 2008.

Speaker 2 He said that he had received a tip from a friend that Shelby was buried under a shed, which apparently they hadn't been able to check under at the time.

Speaker 2 Unclear exactly why, but again, Rob's property had multiple sheds and outbuildings.

Speaker 2 And this guy basically told investigators that he was so haunted by Shelby's case that he would search the property for free with new radar technology.

Speaker 2 So, investigators tracked down the source of this guy's information, but that source denied having any first-hand knowledge that Shelby was buried on Rob's property.

Speaker 2 This meant that investigators couldn't get a warrant to search there again. There was a plan B, though.

Speaker 2 Rob Wolfe's family still owned the property, and when investigators contacted them, they agreed to allow the property to be searched for a second time.

Speaker 2 And over the course of two days in April 2013, that property was searched again using new radar technology and dogs.

Speaker 2 But just like the first go-around, nothing was found, not under any shed or anywhere. And unfortunately, that was the last major push in Shelby's case.

Speaker 2 For Detective Bill Yu, the mystery of Shelby's disappearance is as baffling today as it was then.

Speaker 4 I don't know what happened to Shelby. but I am confident saying that it appears that something terrible happened happened to him.
It would be very odd for a boy to have gone missing in 2004

Speaker 4 and have zero evidence that he's still alive to suddenly have him resurface, which is why we're looking at this investigation as an unsolved homicide rather than just a missing person's investigation.

Speaker 2 No sign of Shelby or his computer has surfaced since 2004. Dental records and DNA samples are on file for comparison in the event that Shelby is ever found.

Speaker 2 Even the serial number of his computer is stored in NCIC in case it ever surfaces.

Speaker 2 But to date, no one has been arrested in connection with Shelby's disappearance, including any of the people that we've talked about.

Speaker 2 Shelby's mother, Lisa, died in January 2022, and she died never knowing what happened to her only son. That's not what his grandparents, Yvonne and Dennis, want.

Speaker 2 Shelby, after all, is their only grandchild.

Speaker 5 We're running out of time. We'd like to see something, some revolution.

Speaker 5 I started looking around and I have, let's see, I'm in the spare bedroom. There's two pieces of his artwork in here and there's one in the hallway, one in the kitchen, and one in the dining room.

Speaker 5 He's everywhere in our house. It's not like I, you know.
took him down and put him away.

Speaker 2 Detective Bill You has no intention of putting Shelby's case away either. If anything, he and other authorities are pushing harder.

Speaker 2 Recently, the Washington State Patrol has partnered with Camway Transportation to feature Shelby on the side of semi-truck trailers.

Speaker 2 It's part of a project called Homeward Bound, and the goal here is to promote more awareness of his case. And awareness is the key word here.
It's one of the reasons we wanted to tell Shelby's story.

Speaker 2 It's not a case that was heavily reported on when he first went missing. And Detective Bill You knows better than anyone that it's cases like these that need our attention.

Speaker 2 Telling these stories to as many people as possible might help get them solved.

Speaker 4 So a case like Shelby's, where there's little to no physical evidence, tips haven't come in for years, it takes an entity such as Audio Chuck and the deck to show some interest.

Speaker 4 And then we're able to open up the file, take a look, get get the word out on your

Speaker 4 global platform. And hopefully that will generate some information that will help us move this case forward.

Speaker 2 If you have any information about the disappearance of Shelby Wright in Snohomish County, Washington, please call 425-388-3845

Speaker 2 or submit a tip anonymously by visiting the link in our show notes.

Speaker 2 The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

Speaker 2 I think Chuck would approve.

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