station sister terry filed a missing person s report. she had a feeling something happened. it was one thing to leave a bad marriage but quite another to end contact with the daughter mike loved. i know my brother remained steadfast in his love for his daughter. she was the joy of my brother s life. i believe he fell victim to foul play. i really did not have a concrete explanation besides that s just how i felt. that was my gut. but terry wasn t too pleased with the response the officer gave them. the officer that took our report was a little arrogant and said, you know, that he s a grown adult and that he can come and go as he pleases. so he really at that time didn t even want to write our report. the police were essentially making the same argument ellen was making. right. mike snyder s name was entered into a national missing person s database, but there wasn t much else the police could do or frankly would do.
just you and the kids now. just me and the kids. ellen says she tried to reach him but couldn t, and neither could mike s family. he wasn t returning their calls either. mike s sister terry. your mother calls and says i haven t heard from michael in a couple of weeks. right. we were concerned. terry says she knew mike was planning on leaving ellen soon. the whole family knew that much or assumed it. but he wasn t supposed to leave everyone. he would have never have done that to his mother. he would have at least given her, look, i don t want to be contacted, please give me my space, but i am okay. at work a mechanic noticed his boss ellen seemed more relax as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulder. she seemed happier. she seemed more content, more at ease. and unbeknownst to ellen, her collapsing marriage was the
maybe not angry, but you were talking in a sort of nonangry way about the kids. i think he was still angry. i think i told him we were still angry. but that he was gone and he wasn t coming back. right. mike s sister terry hadn t yet learned about mike s relationship with the mysterious dave simmons or about the accusations that her brother was secretly gay. ellen didn t share any of that with terry until a few years after mike had disappeared. she told other people about it at the time. not us. she didn t seem to throw that out to us at first. any of that make any sense to you? oh, goodness, no. i don t believe for one minute my brother is gay. that was only one of the components to the story that detective wilson wanted to check out. he says he asked ellen to come down to the police department to meet with him in person. only she wouldn t. she said he s not missing. we said well, we want to find him. and even asking her to come in
eight years in a marriage that was neither equal or loving. you were afraid to step up to him? absolutely. eight years of living a lie to the outside world in that big home that she and her husband mike had worked so hard to build. but ellen wouldn t leave. determined to make her marriage work. i wasn t going to be a failure at another marriage. mike hung on as well, but his sister terry says mike was thinking of ending it. ible he was in the process of trying to leave her. he was moving belongings to my mother s house. mike and ellen s daughter elizabeth was now 6 years old and very much daddy s little girl and michael, his son from her first marriage, was 17. she got sick and life inside that home grew much worse for
uncontrollably. at that point my sister and i are just looking at each other and poking at etach other thinking what. michael cried so hysterically that his mother ellen had to escort the 20-year-old out of the room. were he and your father close? not close per se. i mean, he was no closer to my father than he was my mother. so it was a very odd occurrence that we all just took note of. and there was something else terry remembers about that day. something that enraged her. ellen at some point comes up to my sister and asks about my father s will and wanted to know if there was anything in the will provision for his daughter, for mike s daughter. and she s asking about money. she s asking about money. and the more she thought about it, the more terry had a sinking feeling that ellen knew something about mike s disappearance. she certainly wasn t acting