west side of town. that is until detective mark wilson and three of his colleagues from the cold case team showed up. you wouldn t happen to have someplace we could sit down and talk would you, just have a chat with you. reporter: they were there to speak with 25-year-old mechanic michael sheffield, ellen snyder s son. mike snyder s stepson. he didn t seem to be surprised the police showed up in his work and he said sure. we have a break room we can go talk in. so he went to his break room and we conducted an interview with him there.
yes. reporter: so you re not some little shrinking violet who s home cowering under her husband s direction. but when it came to being home and opening that door, i was that shrinking violet. that you how things were. he ran the show. it was two different ellens, two dint lives. reporter: detective wilson interviewed ellen s old boss, a man named james cassell. he told the detective he remembered an incident when ellen came to work with bruises. she was wearing her sunglasses. i said why are you wearing sunglasses? so she finally took her sunglasses off and she had a nice, big old shiner. i asked her, i said what the heck happened to you? she stated to me supposedly mike and michael got into some big old battle and mike was beating the crap out of him so she jumped in the middle of it, and, of course, she took the brunt of it. reporter: was she giving the
then the fell down. elizabeth, mike and ellen s 6-year-old daughter was fast asleep in the bedroom. she didn t wake up. but ellen s son michael 17 was in his bedroom and he did. he was calling 911. i told him to hang it up, michael. and he hung up. and he hung up and i sat down on the step waiting for the police to come. but the police never did show. i covered him up. i told michael to get ready for school. i told him i shot mike. you need to just go to school. how is michael doing at this point? i thought he was doing okay. evidently michael was not okay. he skipped school that day, and he told his friend patrick about the horror he had gone through. did you talk to him about this? or from the first minute that this happened, did this sort of
investigator s office and he s not there. right. he s not there. then i started looking in to see if there might be any indication of financial records that might indicate he was working somewhere, and once again we came to a dead end there. but the detective did discover one very curious thing. it turns out mike snyder had filed state tax returns in 2004 and 2005. years after his disappearance. that doesn t sound like a missing person. no, it doesn t. what that sounds like to me off the top of my head is a guy who doesn t particularly want to be found. it suggests the possibility that he might be alive. is your brother the kind of person who would know how to or want to sort of live off the grid? he certainly had the financial means. did he have the know how? i wouldn t think so. i don t know what it takes to live underground, so to speak, and be a person of a different, you know, identity.
topic of gossip. she didn t want anybody to know what was going on in her life. she didn t talk about her marriage, but other people did? yeah. what they said was what? it wasn t working? no. they said mike was a hot head. mike had a reputation at work for having a hot temper, for to go intimidating. mechanic dave seiler worked with him for a decade. there was a lot of tension. you could just feel it from him. a lot of people were very careful around him, what they said, what they did. because mike s fuse could blow and when it did, you didn t want to be around. he did blowup at dispatchers and advisers. the dispatcher would be crying. so it didn t come as a big surprise when ellen announced that mike had left her. he packed up his stuff and moved to phoenix. he s probably going to end up living in phoenix. that marriage mean it s over.