melvin and teresa decided they had made a mistake, and moved back home. gentlemen, change partners across from where you are. change partners and swing her. however, in this recent disappearance, neither teresa or her husband ron knew of melvin whereabouts. and the bank reported no activity on any of melvin s credit cards. he had a young son, he was early 20s, and this wasn t the kind of man that would run off and leave family obligations. which is why investigators began to suspect foul play.
alike. but the locals found the lives of melvin and joanne snyder for more interesting than those civil war battlefields. on sat may 25, 1985 joanne snyder left for work around 5:30 a.m. she baked pies for a local diner. when she returned home around noon, her 43-year-old husband melvin was gone. and so was his truck. she looked around for him, and observed some things that she felt were out of the ordinary, first of all, he left his tools out. melvin snyder was very meticulous about his things. he was very careful about his things. he would not have just left his tools laying about. joanne called some of her family to come over and help look for melvin. while searching the property a family member found a 25 caliber shell casing on the barn floor.
but there was no blood evidence anywhere nearby. a bullet like that, it will usually not travel through a human body, if it does not travel through, you usually do not get blood running anywhere. it s not like the typical tv shows, where you see blood flying everywhere. there were no eyewitnesses. unless maybe there were barn yard animals and of course they were not talking. joanne waited for two days before she filed a missing person s report. police found melvin s pickup truck about 60 miles away in reisterstown, maryland. it was in a grocery store parking lot. melvin s checkbook and .22 caliber rifle were still inside the truck. so the motive wasn t robbery. the truck was left windows partially down, keys in the
personally. and something just didn t add up. a .25-caliber shell casing was discovered in melvin s barn, and ron harshman purchased a .25-caliber handgun just a few weeks before melvin disappeared. but ron was never able to produce the weapon, saying it had been misplaced. there was a lot of information there, but nothing new was coming in to give you the opportunity to do anything more with it. nelson pored over the case file and discovered an interesting notation. ron harshman admitted test firing his new .25-caliber pistol in his backyard just after buying it. that gave nelson an idea. what about going out there and seeing if we can find a shell casing and then compare that to the one in the barn. when mr. nelson originally told me that and i just kind of gave him a look, this was 15 years to try to find a shell
he learned that mr. snyder was coming to his home to pick up his wife and he crashed his car into him. he had a gun with him at that point, shot at him. did not hit him. nothing happened. no one was hurt. melvin didn t want to pursue the matter, and no charges were filed. melvin had expressed a great deal of embarrassment about the whole incident and i think he sort of felt it was, in part, his own fault that it happened. and this was one more interesting twist in the case. melvin and joanne snyder had come to terms with the affair, but the harshmans had not. melvin was trying very hard to make the marriage work. mr. and mrs. harshman on the other hand had a rockier road. although they did attempt to patch things up, eventually in the following spring they separated and teresa filed for divorce.