Welcome to this month's bonus Patreon minisote for the Path Went Chili. Today, it's just going to be Jewels and I doing the episode because at the time of this recording, Ashley is only a few weeks away from giving birth, so she's quite busy right now. So we're gonna follow the standard formula when it's just the two of us, where I share the details of a case with Jewels that she does not know, and she will give off
her reactions. So I guess I'll start off by asking you right away, have you ever heard of the case of the unexplained disappearance and death of Tim Molnar.
I've never heard of this case. I'm always really when we have a case where I'm not familiar with it in the least. And when you wrote me the message saying that's the case we're going to cover and there isn't all that much information, I purposefully don't google it because I don't want to know anything and I want to be completely surprised by everything that you tell me.
That's excellent, Yeah, because this is a very weird case. I saw it on Unsolved Mysteries many years ago, but because the segment was only five minutes long, and there's such a limited amount of information, I thought it would be an appropriate topic for a minisode. I did talk about it on The Trail Went Cold several years ago, but it wasn't the subject of the main subject of the episode because of the lack of information there was. It was just I talked spent a few minutes talking
about it in conjunction with another case. But I think now it's a good opportunity to discuss it as the main topic. And I'm sure you know that I have a particular fascination for cases where people go missing and are found dead under strange circumstances and a location they
have no reason to be at. We've done a few episodes like the disappearance of Blas Adams, who disappeared from British Columbia and was found dead in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Judy Smith, who went missing on a business trip to Philadelphia and was found in the mountains of North Carolina, and the disappearance of David Lewis, who went missing from Amarillo, Texas and then was found on a freeway in Washington State. And the Tim Malnar case is going to be along those lines.
Those are some of my favorite cases. Blair Adams is one of our early cases that we covered on The Path Went Chile, and it's been one that's fascinated me for so many years, and it's really sad with the mental health angle, but it's a very real scenario where he was murdered and we just don't have the answers as to what happened, and there's so many strange clues. Same with Judy Smith. That case is like a real life Gone Girl type of a scenario. And the other one from Amarillo.
David Lewis, I think we did that one before, like he went missing from his home at Amarillo, and then about twenty four hours later he was found wandering on a freeway outside an airport in Yakima, Washington, and he was hit by a car. So it might not have been foul play, but the big mystery is how did he decide to travel from Texas to Washington in such
a short amount of time. But this will be along the same lines where its essentially two mysteries rolled up in one like how did the person wind up at that location and how did they die? Was their foul play involved? So the tim Malnar case. He lived in Daytona Beach, Florida at the time he went missing in nineteen eighty four. His parents were Michael and Helen Molnar. They were originally from Canada but then moved to California, and Tim was born in Los Angeles County. The family
had a total of four children. Tim had a younger brother and a sister, and he also had tragically an infant brother who died at a very young age, so at this particular point, there were only three children in the Molnar family. They eventually moved from California to Daytona Beach, Florida. At this particular point, Tim was nineteen years old and he was an aeronautical mechanics student at embry Riddle Aeronautical University.
And on the morning of January twenty fourth, nineteen eighty four, Tim climbed into his nineteen sixty nine Dodge Dart to drive his fourteen year old brother Frank, to drop him off at school. And as far as I know, everything seemed completely normal. There was nothing out of the ordinary. But Tim was planning to go to class that day at embry Riddle Aeronautical University and as far as anyone can tell. He didn't show up, and he never returned home that night, and his car was not found either.
So and when he didn't turn up, his parents eventually called the police to report a missing.
So he successfully dropped Frank off, and then after that happened, we just have no idea where he went, who he saw, and what became of him.
Yeah, we're going to talk about how they found his car at a later time, but we don't know like where he went and why he decided to take off. And another weird detail is that they discovered that Tim's ten speed bicycle was missing from the house, and as far as Frank could tell, the bike was not in the car when Tim dropped him off at school, So it seemed likely that for whatever reason, Tim decided to drive home pick up the bike, and then he went missing.
And they would also discover that he withdrew all the money in his bank account except ten dollars. He left ten dollars behind, so there was a lot of evidence at first to suggest that he had decided to take off voluntarily.
It almost looks like you're trying to stage a disappearance. If you go home, get your bike and you're bringing it with you, meaning that you likely want to dump your car at a certain location and then take off on your bike. That could be how it could be interpreted. And then if you're taking out all that money, maybe it's nineteen eighty four not being so sure about how bank records are going to be interpreted by investigators. Tim might not have known that this would be very obvious
that he took out all of this money. So, I mean, forensic countermeasures weren't known in nineteen eighty four like they're known today. So it's an interesting first way to interpret the information.
Exactly, Like a lot of people have found it weird that if you wanted to go off somewhere and start a new life, why did he not completely empty his bank account? Like why did he leave behind the ten dollars? It would be one thing if it was maybe like fifty cents, something you could withdraw, But the fact that
it was a round number. People have taken it as a symbol that maybe he felt, if this doesn't work out, I'm going to return home, and if I do, at least I'll still have some money in my account waiting for me.
Do you know if it's possible that he had to have like a minimum amount in there to keep the account active.
I'm not entirely sure, and I don't have that information about whether he took it from an ATM or had to go into the bank. I don't know if ATMs were prevalent in Daytona Beach back in nineteen eighty four, but I haven't heard of anything about having him having any specific interactions at the bank to withdraw the money from any tellers. So I don't know if he was told you have to leave ten dollars in.
There were ATMs even a thing in nineteen eighty four.
They might have been. I grew up in the eighties and I seem to remember them from the late eighties.
I'm going to google this. Yeah, oh my god, it says June of nineteen sixty seven.
Oh wow, I didn't.
Yeah, okay. So, according to Wikipedia, a cash machine was put into use by Barclays Bank and Field North London in the United Kingdom on the twenty seventh of June nineteen sixty seven, which is recognized as the world's first ATM. This machine was inaugurated by English actor Reg Varney. Whoever that is.
Okay, I didn't know that I didn't know they were that old, but I couldn't say for certain if they were implemented in the United States by nineteen eighty four, and if they were, I can't say for certain if they were in Daytona Beach.
They became common by the nineteen eighties. They were introduced in Canada in nineteen sixty nine, but the widespread use was in the nineteen eighties. So it's entirely possible that he used in ATM.
I'm thinking that because otherwise I think someone from the bank might have remembered him if he had to go in and do a manual withdrawal.
So just one more thing regarding the ATM. Do you think that if he did use it, that it's possible that he left ten dollars in his account because you could only take out multiples of twenty.
That is true. Yes, I never thought about that. That maybe they just told him you can't take out twenty and it was impossible to get it out in ten dollars bills, and that's the only reason it was left there. So three weeks later, Tim's parents received a credit card statement in the mail which showed that their card, which they had given to Tim was used to purchase gas at a service station in Lake City, Florida, on the same day ten disappeared, even though it was located one
hundred and fifty miles northwest from Daytona Beach. So Helen Malnar traveled all the way to the service station to speak with the attacks and showed him his photograph, and the attendant seemed to remember him because he recalled that Tim had been driving a nineteen sixty nine Dodge Dart, which was a classic so and when they showed a photograph of the car, he said, yet, that might have
been the car I saw. So this added further evidence to the possibility that Tim, for whatever reason, decided to take off on his own.
Okay, so he cleans out his bank account less ten dollars, and he has the credit card from his parents that he's using. So if we were going to operate originally under the presupposition that he's disappearing voluntarily, he takes out his money, he gets his bike, he has his car. If he wasn't wanting to be traced, one would think that at this point he would be paying for his gas with cash, not using the credit card his parents
gave him. So this totally is contrary to the theory that he's disappearing of his own volition or free will. Maybe he's just has a set objective and he's he wasn't thinking like what if they trace this, because it was never his intention to be disappearing.
Yeah, it's also possible that he was planning to go elsewhere that day for some unscheduled road trip and was planning to go back, but then something went horribly wrong, and of course when the credit card arrived three weeks later, that's how they were able to tell that Tim used it. And another odd detail is that they discovered that none of his clothing or personal possessions appear to have been
missing from the house. The only thing that was gone was the ten speed bicycle, So that once again goes against the idea that he was planning to disappear permanently, And like.
What scenario can you think of that, say, he was going to meet somebody where It's clear, just based on what we know now, that he wasn't planning on leaving for any period of time. But what he was doing required that he had money, because he took that cash with him. So if he's going to meet somebody. Is it that he's going somewhere where you can only drive so far by car, so he needs to go the rest of the distance on a bike or why else do you think the bike would factor in?
Yeah, I don't know about that, as if possibly maybe he was going to a rural area or something like that that he knew that he couldn't drive on the road so he had to take the bike with him. But as we're going to talk about momentarily, the car is eventually found and that only adds more unanswered questions to the whole thing. So let me tell you about
this part, because it gets even weirder. It was not until four months after Tim went missing when the Mallners received a letter in the mail from a towing company in Atlanta, Georgia, which stated that Tim's abandoned Dodge Dart had been found in a parking lot on January the thirtieth, six days hey after he originally went missing, and had been in an impound yard ever since. And of course this made things even weirder because Atlanta was four hundred
and thirty miles north of Daytona Beach. And then when his parents went to Atlanta to pick up the car. They discovered that his wallet was still inside, and even though all the money had been emptied out, Tim's identification, including his driver's license and his credit card, were still there.
But to make things even weirder, his bicycle was not in the car, and some items that you or nearly kept in there, such as a tool set and a stereo system that he had received for Christmas and personally installed, were missing. So people have wondered were these robbed, were they stolen? Or did Tim take these out himself because
he wanted to steal them? And they discovered that the vehicle was parked only a block away from a Greyhound bus station, so they wondered, maybe he parked the car here because he was planning to take a bus trip somewhere. But if that's the case, why did he take the bicycle out of the car? So this only brought up more questions than they answered.
And we know that he didn't have like a backpack or a suitcase, so how is he going to transport these items? Say he did take he wanted to take the Greyhound bus. Okay, maybe if you're just taking your bike, but how are you going to carry a car, stereo? And all of these other things. If you don't have a bag in which to carry these items, and we can't assume. I don't think at this point in the story that he's the one that dumped the vehicle there.
Obviously it's possible that somebody dumped it there and then they just took those items because they wanted to rob him. I mean, I think it's interesting that if that was the case, that they would leave the wallet. You said the identification was in there still right.
Yeah, though, the identification and the credit card was in there, but all the money was gone.
That seems odd. If you were to rob him, wouldn't you not want the vehicle to be identified with like who owns it right away? It would give you a little bit more time if his identification wasn't in there, to just get rid of that so that you would kind of distance him from that vehicle, and then to
leave the credit card there. If you robbed it, you'd think you'd at least try that credit card, so maybe you one could assume that it was indeed Tim who took it, because Tim knew wherever I'm going, I can't use this credit card. I don't know. It's just a big question mark. It's so strange because I just don't see how he could get from point A his car, with his bike, the car, stereo, all of these things to point B. Maybe a greyhound bus, maybe somewhere else. This is a really strange case.
It certainly is. Yeah, and you're right, we can't be one hundred percent certain that Tim was the one who left the car there. As far as I know, there were no signs of any break in, so they don't believe someone broke in and stole the stereo. But if it was someone else who left the car there, maybe
they personally took the items. And a theory which has been pushed forward that perhaps the reason that he took out the stereo and the tool set is that maybe he was planning to sell them or pawn them if he was planning to disappear and needed money for say bus fare, And it could also explain why the bicycle was missing. Maybe he decided to sell it off or
pawn it himself. It's never been conclusively proven. They found no evidence that he ever attempted to sell these items anywhere in Atlanta, and it also brings up the question if you wanted to disappear permanently. Why did he not sell the car as well? Because he could probably make a lot of money from that too.
And I think both things can be true. Tim could have left the car, and he could have taken the money out of the wallet and just left the wallet, and then somebody could have come upon the Dodge Dart and opportunistically been like, oh cool, there's a stereo, I'm going to take that. There's a bike, I'm going to take that. So if that was the case, we can't
know what Tim took and what the person. If this scenario did indeed happen and there was like an opportunistic robber who came up after the fact, we can't know what each one.
Took exactly, like we don't know who took the items out of the car or if Tim himself abandoned the car. And even though there are as signs of any break in, for all we know, maybe Tim just left it there unlocked, and that someone opportunistic could have gone there and stolen these items without having to break into it. So Tim's family said that they could not understand why he would have chosen to run away. We don't know all that
much about his personality. They just said that he was kind of a quiet, reserved guy who'd never caused any trouble, So we don't have any information if he might have been suffering from many mental health issues or depression at that time. But the case pretty much faded from the spotlight for an entire decade. There were no leads that I know of, but in November of nineteen ninety five,
UNSAW Mysteries decided to profile it on the show. But they had a very interesting angle to it because there were technically no signs of foul play or any evidence that Tim was in any danger, and the evidence made it look like he could have taken away voluntarily, so they decided to make a public announcement that only a few days after Tim went missing, a relative of his had passed away and made Tim the heir to an
estate worth fifty thousand dollars. So they pretty much put all the emphasis on that, saying that Tim, if you're still alive and you're out there watching, please know that even if you don't want to contact your family, you still have fifty thousand dollars waiting for you, So if you come back and claim it, you don't necessarily have to stay with your family, but at least you can let them know you're alive or okay, and they thought that might be a motivation for him to come forward
if he happened to be watching and Unsaw Mysteries actually did that a few years earlier on another missing person's case, where a man named Scott hill A gone missing, but it turned out that he likely took off voluntarily because he made a lot of bad financial decisions which left his family bankrupt, so he might have taken off because
he was ashamed. But it turned out that his mother passed away and left him, made Scott the heir to his seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars estate, So they mentioned that on Unsolved Mysteries and lo and behold, they still they found Scott alive somewhere and he did come forward to claim the estate, but it was a very bittersweet, awkward reunion with his family because they're like, well, we're happy you're alive, but now we know you abandoned us
and that the only reason you're coming back is because you want the money. So I think they were hoping maybe that the same thing would happen with Tim.
Yeah, it's sort of like, I'm glad that you're alive, and we kind of hate you now because we've been worried about all the worst things that could have happened to you. And you left your family like up you know, whatever creek without a paddle, and then you return only when there's money involved, saying that you were putting people secondary to money, and so yeah, I can imagine that was bittersweet. But with Tim, I mean, fifty thousand dollars
and he's not coming forward. It seems like if you were living under a different identity or that type of a scenario where you had to forge this whole new life, it would be difficult because I mean, unless you fake a social Security number. And I don't know how adept he was with these type of things. I'm sure he was fairly smart. Being like that type of mechanic is a really difficult type of career to embark upon. So
I'm sure he was above average intelligence. So I just can't see any underlying motivation that would cause want him to leave this life that he had at this age, like he's just coming into adulthood. I just don't see what factors would motivate him to want to leave his life behind and not contact anybody.
Yeah, with the Scott Hill case, it was obvious why he would have wanted to take off, because he made a bunch of bad financial decisions and he put his family in dire straits. But with Tim, he didn't seem to have anything bad going on for his life because he's taking a course in aeronautical engineering, so he's obviously a smart guy and he's got plans for the future.
So that's the key difference between these two cases is that with Scott Hill's case, they knew why he would have taken off, but with Tim, his family was completely clueless.
Do we know at all anything about his romantic life.
We don't know anything. I have no idea if he ever had any girlfriends or boyfriends or any relationships at all. We just don't know anything about his personality other th that he was a quiet kid who didn't cause any trouble.
It's so hard when we don't have that type of information because then we also likely don't have information on if he partied, if he had any kind of secret life, if there was something that he was ashamed of. There's just so many things where there's hidden variables. And it absolutely could be nothing. There might be nothing that he felt shame about. There might be no secret life, there might be no abuse of any substances. But at the end of the day, we just don't.
Know exactly, just because we have no information about his background. But the Unsoawd Mystery segment would lead to one of the more shocking updates in the history of the show. They didn't get any leads after the first airing in November of nineteen ninety five, but they re ran the segment in January of nineteen ninety six, and that's when they got a call to the unsaw Mysteries telecenter from a guy named Stephen Call who had just watched the show.
And at the end of the segment they had described the clothing that Tim was wearing when he was last and Stephen Call said, I found a dead body about ten years ago and I vividly remember it, and I'm pretty sure the victim was wearing the same clothes that
you described that Tim was wearing. And it turned out that this story did check out, because it turned out that on March the twenty third, nineteen eighty six, an unidentified dead body for a young man was found frozen in a block of ice in a secluded pine plantation in Wakisha County, Wisconsin, and because he could not be identified, he had been kept there as a John Doe for
about a decade. And here's the shocking part. Wakisha County, Wisconsin is twelve hundred miles away from Daytona Beach, and they did do DNA testing and it turned out that the victim was Tim Molnar.
Wow, what the actual f I'm my mind is seriously blown because I thought, Okay, it's far enough where we've got the vehicle four hundred miles away, and now it Wisconsin, Like, how did he get it up there? Did he ride his bike there? How did he end up in this pine plantation? I have so many questions?
Oh so do I, and unfortunately a lot of them were resolved. Some people have had some suspicion about Stephen Kohl, where they're thinking, how did you remember the clothing that a dead body was wearing like ten years earlier, But some people have said, well, if you experienced the trauma finding a dead body, you might remember all the details.
And they never found any indication that he was a suspect, and he just said that when he was watching the Unsaw Mystery segment and they described the clothing, he just had immediate flashbacks and was like, the guy that they found was about the same age range. I think it's probably a long shot because this was Wisconsin, but I'll phone in the tip anyway. And I'm sure glad he did because it turned out his hunch was correct and it was Tim.
I'm glad that he was finally discovered because that gives his family those answers. As difficult as it is to accept that he's just seized and they have no idea how he got there and why, it at least gives them the body. And I know that having your loved one brought home and having the ability to be able to go and visit them or you know, have whatever type of funeral you would have, I think gives parents
some just some answers. I mean, there's a lot of question marks here, and I can't imagine what they're dealing with in the aftermath, because it's like, great, we know part of this, but it's an enduring mystery.
Oh exactly, yeah, because that only brought up so many
more unanswered questions inside their own mind. But there were so many details that left even more unanswered questions because back in nineteen ninety six, DNA testing was not as common as it is today, so they wanted to double check it first to see is there a good chance this might be Tim Before they took the DNA from his family members, and when the John Doe had been found, he was carrying a set of rusted keys on them that they still had his evidence, and they asked them, all, nars,
have you changed your locks at all since Tim went missing in nineteen eighty four, and they said no. So they made a copy of their house key, sent it up to Wisconsin, and it turned out to be an exact match to the rusted key that the John Doe had been carrying, so that was their first hint that
this might be Tim. And he had also been found carrying a rusted key for a Dodge Dart, which turned out to be a match for Tim's car, And that just makes things more confusing because if he wanted to take off voluntarily, why did he still carry around his car key and his house key, Like, if he's abandoning the car, he's not going to need the key, and if he has no intention of coming back, He's not going to need his house key either, So why would he leave his wallet behind in the car with his
ID and credit card but still hold on to these keys and take them all the way to Wisconsin.
Like what if he was meeting somebody and he didn't want them to see his vehicle or was that another location? So he've thought, Okay, well, I'll park my car here in Atlanta and we're going to meet at location you know X or whatever. And then he gets there, gets in the vehicle of the person, and then they're going to drive to location A say, for example. And that's what he's what's understood. But then something changes, something happens. Did they give cause of death when they found that
he was frozen? Did they give any insight there?
No, they were not able to determine the exact cause of death. Like I said, he was not found until March of nineteen eighty six, but he had originally gone missing in January of nineteen eighty four, and no one can be certain how long he had been dead at that point because he was heavily decomposed. We don't know if his body was there for two whole years before he was found. So that doesn't add much insight on how exactly he died, if it was foul play, or
if he crossed paths with someone who killed him. And it's certainly possible that he could have like climbed on the Greyhound bus in Atlanta and traveled all the way to us, but we still have no idea.
Why do we know that there was buses that went like directly to Wisconsin. I guess he could have taken the connecting buses along the way, doesn't matter if they had a direct line to Wisconsin from Atlanta. There's a myriad of ways he could have got there, taken a bus partway, hitchhike the rest.
Unfortunately, we don't have that information because they didn't find the car in Atlanta until four months after he went missing. I don't think they checked bus records back then, but by nineteen ninety six, there's no way they're going to have records about which buses would have been leaving Atlanta at that particular day. But this area was pretty remote though, so say if he took a bus till Milwaukee or something, that doesn't explain how he wound up in this very remote area.
It seems like he must have been meeting somebody, like, what else would he be doing If you were going to stage your own disappearance, why would you take all of your money out less than ten dollars? If you were planning on using your parents' credit card part way through to get gas, you'd think, well, if I'm planning to end my own life, why do I need more money?
And like, why would you go so far away? People who end their own lives typically, obviously, I know you always give a really big example for somebody who ends their own life far away, and what casees that that you always use?
The Gail Delano one. Yeah, he was going to bring it up momentarily, but people have looked at that possibility that because he left his wallet behind, he may have
been planning suicide. And while it makes no logical sense for him to travel twelve hundred miles in order to do so, I always cite the Gail Delano case as an example of someone doing that because she went missing from the town of wo Of, like a small town in Maine, in nineteen eighty six, and after she was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, they had a medical examiner come forward and says, I recognize that woman as as a Jane Doe, who had checked into a hotel in Mobile, Alabama,
which was nearly two thousand miles away, and they positively identified her because she had overdosed. So, for whatever reason, she decided to travel all the way from Maine to Alabama, check into a hotel under a fake name, and overdose in order to take her own life. And well, it makes no logical sense. We do know that Gail Delano had a severe history of depression and may have just felt it's better off not to let my family know
I completed suicide. So I'm just going to take off to this far away location and no one will find me. And because we couldn't determine Tim's cause of death, I guess we can't completely rule out that his death was a suicide either.
Yeah, that is incredibly atypical, but obviously it does happen, so we can't rule that out. It just seems so odd that, like you're going to travel a distance, Why not Atlanta? That's pretty far away. Why continue on to Wisconsin. It feels like it would have just been far away where you are. Why exert that extra effort to go that extra distance. It's just confounding this whole case is I'm totally torn because we don't know what mental health issues,
if any Tim was struggling with. I mean, mental health wasn't talked about the same way in nineteen eighty four, So even if he was suffering, he may not have told anybody.
Yeah, that's what I'm thinking as well, is like I said that there's no information about his background, but if he was suffering from depression or anything like that, or anxiety, he may just not have told anyone and kept it bottle up inside and that they never sense that anything was wrong. So that's why it took them completely out of the blue when he decided to travel to another
location in order to take his own life. I mean, with the Gail Delano case, we had a documented history of mental health issues, so no one was overly surprised that she elected suicide. But with Tim, we just don't know. And even if it was a suicide, of how did he do it? I mean, at least with the Gail Delano's, they know that she overdosed on pills. But because we couldn't determine Tim's cause of death, it's unclear if he could have had any p hills or anything in a system for suicide.
Refreshed my memory. In the guil Delano case, did she have any connection to the area that she decided to complete suicide.
I don't think so. No, and they've never been able to determine if she flew down there or if she hitchhiked down there. I think she just settled on maybe just a faraway location where her family never would have found her. And as far as I know, Tim didn't have any connection to Wisconsin because he grew up in California before he moved to Florida. But he may have just selected it at random if it was suicide, thinking this is the farthest place away that my family will
never find out what happened to me. And he probably never dreamed that I'm going to be featured on national television a decade later and the guy who found my body is going to phone in the tip. So yeah. Sadly, there weren't any further developments in the case even after it was featured on Unsolved Mysteries, and his parents have
both since passed away. I believe his brother, Frank and his sister are still al but I've never seen them speak publicly about the case, so I don't know about their thoughts and if they're still actively trying to figure
out what happened to them. But the story is not over because the most recent leads I have found out are on Reddit, because there is this one person who has relatives who live in the area of Wisconsin where Tim was found, and over the past couple of years, they have made multiple posts on a whole bunch of different subreddits saying that they have information about Tim's disappearance and they have a suspect that they want people to
look into, and it's all over the place. It's been shared multiple times, and they have claimed that they have shared this information with the authorities but never heard back from them, And in a lot of subreddits, like the Unresolved Mystery subreddit, whenever this person has posted it, it's
been taken down. And I think the main reason for that is that they specifically name a suspect that they believe might have killed Tim, which you're not supposed to do on most subreddits of so that's probably why it's been pulled. But if you search hard enough, you can still find it in places.
That is really interesting. I wonder what this person was attached to, like, do you know if there's any other crimes and what specifically it was that made them believe that this person was responsible for Tim's death.
Well, they write a full backstory on the Reddit post, and I'm going to share it now. I'm not going to say the suspects name. I'll just say that his name is Richard. That's what I'll call him, and it's an unusual last name. So I did a Google search on it, and this poster said that this guy Richard went to prison eventually for sexually assaulting a child, and I looked up his name and he is on the
sex offenders registry. So this does check out. So I do believe that this person is real and that there's maybe a possibility he did something to Tim, but because law enforcement has never said his name, I'm not going to share it. So the story goes is that the person who left this had an uncle who lived in a remote area of Wisconsin far from where Tim's body was found. And apparently Stephen Kull, the person that found Tim's body, lived directly across the street from this person's uncle,
so that's already an interesting connection. And the story goes is that this guy, Richard, lived nearby and was considered to be a pretty weird dude who would stop by the uncle and aunt's property uninvited just to hang out and just give them a very creepy vibe. And the story goes is that he kind of had a survivalist mentality, like they don't even know if he had a job. He kind of lived in a cabin in the woods.
It would often poach animals, and they think that that was his source of food, that he would just go hunting and kill animals rather than buying it. But what's interesting is that there were always rumors throughout the area that he had a shack and that if any drifters came by, any young drifters, mail drifters, he would let
them stay there. And some people think that this is kind of an interesting coincidence that Tim would wind up dead in the same area where this guy lived, and that this guy had a shack where he would have young men stay, and then many years later he would go to prison for sexually assaulting a young boy.
So this is interesting. So are they positing that Richard knew to Tim and lured him to Wisconsin, or that he just kind of opportunistically met Tim when he was in Wisconsin, which still begs the question why was he in Wisconsin.
Well, here's the interesting part is the poster says that Richard was a pilot who had his own small plane, and apparently in the winter he would fly down to Florida whenever he went on vacation. I think that's kind of a weird detail because he's supposedly a survivalist living off the land who kills animals, yet he's got his own plane that he uses to travel to a different state.
And because Tim was going to school to be an aeronautical engineer, this sounds like the type of guy he could have befriended that Tim went missing in the winter. He went missing in January. So theoretically, if Richard flew down to Florida cross paths with Tim, he could have said something to them saying that, Hey, I know you're interested in aeronautical engineering. I'm a pilot. If you want to join me in Wisconsin or something, I can show you some things. I could teach you how to fly
or something. And that could provide an explanation for how Tim was lured to Wisconsin.
If only we had phone records or something to tie them together a way that they were corresponding. Did they write letters if they were indeed familiar with each other, Because for Tim to go there, it would have had to have been for if he was lured for a pretty profound reason, because obviously his career was important to him in what he was studying, and he had to miss school in order to take this trip.
Right Oh yeah, Like he was supposed to go to class on the very same day he went missing, and it might seem out of character for him to just take off like that and not tell his parents about it. But I'm sure like if he told them that story, they say, you've got this strange guy from Wisconsin who wants to fly you back there, and stuff like, no, you're not doing this. How do you even know this guy? So he probably thought, well, they're going to disapprove, so
I'm just gonna go on my own anyway. And he was nineteen at the time, he technically was i legal adult, so he could have used that as an argument. But I think the big hole in the theory is that if Tim cross passed with Richard and Florida, why did his car wind up in Atlanta, because if he caught a plane flight with him, why would he drive the car like four hundred and fifty miles away to a different state.
It doesn't make sense why you would abandon your car, and it also doesn't make sense why you would need a bike. I don't get the story with regards to that. The connection is enticing when you have the fact that he's a pilot, he's a creep, and he's on the
sex offender registry. It's plausible that he could have somehow kept in contact with him, But I just can't understand what would be the impetus for him to so impulsively act and go, I'm going to drive to Atlanta, dump my car there, and then go to Wisconsin and meet him. Like you would have to miss a lot of school, And I don't know what the program was like, but I can imagine that if you were to miss multiple days, you're going to be very, very behind, and you would
need some sort of letter to excuse your absence. You don't get to just miss a chunk of days when you're in any type of schooling. And if that was important to him, like like you said, he's nineteen, he's an adult, he could have justified it with that, But I also think he's nineteen. He's kind of a kid. He's going to be more impulsive, and his frontal lobe isn't developed yet, so the type of behavior that we
are seeing here isn't necessarily adult behavior. If he just acted impulsively, I could see a nineteen year old doing that. But he seemed responsible from what we know, But we know very little.
Yeah, I mean, the one thing we do know is that his parents said that he never caused any trouble, though I'll use the disclaimer that family is a missing and murdered victims try to paint their loved ones in the best possible light, So maybe if he did get into trouble in the past, they downplayed it a little bit. But the thing about the bicycle is that theoretically, maybe if like Richard landed his plane in a remote area without any roads, like Tim could have used the bicycle
to go there. But that doesn't explain like why he would take the stereo out of his car and the tools out of his car, or why he would even drive to Atlanta to begin with, or why he would even need to drive anywhere, Like all he could do is just go to an airfield or something and then hitch a ride on the plane. So the theory is intriguing, but there's still a number of holes in it and stuff.
And like you said, if you really wanted a career in aeronautical engineering, it's not very wise to just miss a whole bunch of classes unexcused just to travel to another state. No matter if this guy is going to give you some pointers. I mean, you still need that degree, you still need that education if you're hoping to have a career in that field.
Yeah, I find it very odd, Like you said that he owns this plane, but he's like living off the land. Where does one get the money to fuel a plane which is very very expensive, And where did they procure this plane in this and with what money? It seems really odd.
Yeah, I mean, I'll add the disclaimer that I don't know how much this information is true. The only part of the story which has checked out is that Richard is on a sex offender list. But I don't know if this person who left this post like met Richard personally. It sounds like they're getting all this information like third hand from their uncle and aunt who lived in the
areas are saying all these bad things about him. But it does see if the story is correct that the uncle and Richard and Stephen call all happened to live in the same area where Tim's body was found. That is a pretty intriguing coincidence. And they even theorized that maybe one of the reasons that Richard would just show up on the uncle's property uninvited is that maybe he was scouting looking for a good place to dump a
dead body if he ever killed anyone. But because they could not determine Tim's exact cause of death, we still can't even be one hundred percent certain that he was murdered to begin with.
Beginning it totally reminded me by listening to this girl talk on this podcast and she grew up with Ted Kaczinski being their neighbor. He sounded like the exact same thing, like he would like creep onto the property and just like pop by make everybody feel uncomfortable and just like super awkward. Sounds like the same type of a vibe. Although Ted Kaczinsky wasn't letting mail drifters stay with him.
Yeah, because I know that he liked to live a life of solitude. I mean, I guess it's possible that Tim could have traveled to Wisconsin on his own and then just by pure coincidence, cross paths with Richard, who lured him into a shack or something and murdered him and disposed of his body. But we just don't have
any evidence pointing in that direction. Like, in order to pin this crime on Richard, we just need evidence of how Tim got from point A to point Z, and so there are just too many pieces of the puzzle missing in order to say with any certainty that Richard murdered Tim.
We just don't have a definite connection there. We know that, like vaguely, according to the source on Reddit, that Richard had a plane and would fly down to Florida, so like maybe they met, but the connection seems pretty tenuous at best, and it seems like they may be extrapolating from the fact that they know that Richard's this creep who's on the sex offender registry and probably weirds everybody out of the area, that Tim's body was found close
and Hall lives close by, and it's all just seems interconnected. So I can see how somebody could wholeheartedly believe that Richard was involved, even though there really is nothing to go off of here except some like vague things like, oh, he's a pilot and has a plane. Maybe they met in Florida exactly.
I mean, the person writing these posts does seem genuinely passionate about it, and I think they're doing it out of frustration because they tried to send it into the authorities many years ago and get the sense that no
one is listening to them. So I do wish that the authorities would at least look into this at the very least, and if they, if Richard was not responsible, they could at least rule it out, because according to the Sex Offender Registry, he's no longer living in Wisconsin, He's living in another state and is currently in his eighties. So if he was the killer at the time, is running out to try to pin the crime on him?
And I'm guessing from the investigator's perspective is I don't know if his death was ruled undetermined, but if it's not ruled a homicide, allocating resources to look into it when there's really no case to close. If it's the kind of undetermined, I doubt they put any emphasis on needing to resolve that. It's sort of like a limbo designation when you say undetermined, because if it's not a homicide,
how do you put homicide investigators on the case. How do you tell them to then go investigate this when you aren't clear what the cause of death is and if he was murdered, if it was suicide, if it was natural causes. It's I think it must have been difficult, but I'm with you. I think that they should have at least just had some But he looked into it just really quickly, just to see if there was any sort of connection there exactly.
And then we've talked about this that there are a lot of unexplained death cases that are in limbo where even though it's considered to be undetermined and the case isn't technically closed, that only means that no one is going to actively investigate it unless someone puts a good lead or tip that way that they can look at. I mean, another alternate possibility is that Tim could have
simply died of exposure. And I do find it interesting that he was found wearing the same clothes he had on on the day he disappeared, which seems to indicate that he died a short time after he originally went missing. And let's not forget that no other clothing was found missing from his house, so he didn't take it with him, So it could be a case where he decided he wanted to go off on a trip and decided to
go from Florida to Wisconsin. But after spending all these years living in California and Florida in this sunny climate, he greatly underestimated how cold it would be in no Wisconsin in January, so he wandered out into the remote area and died of exposure, and then they found him a few years later.
I guess it's also possible that he ran into somebody in Atlanta and they killed him there and then drove to Wisconsin to dispose of the body, thinking nobody would make the connection. We just have like a myriad of possibilities here.
Exactly no evidence pointing towards any of them. But it is possible that someone could have dumped his body there just to throw the investigation off the track, because it technically worked because no one when they found this John Doe thought it was a missing young man from Florida, and it was only by pure luck of it being featured on Unsolved Mysteries and Stephen call Watching that they
managed to conclusively identify him. But of course this oply opens up the dilemma that if it wasn't Richer, then what actually did happen to Tim? And this is one of those cases where no matter how hard I try, I cannot come up with an explanation that makes one hundred percent complete sense.
I'm with you, I honestly have no idea, and I think it's just comes down to the fact that there's way too many missing variables here to be able to, like venture an educated guess on what happened, Like, we don't know if there was mental health issues, if he had any substance use disorder, if he had any situations, any traumas, relationships that were very difficult or complex, any shame attached to anything, if there was any underlying motivations that might have had him might have had Tim leave
his life in order to either start a new one or to end it somewhere else, maybe because he didn't want his family to have the pain of knowing that he ended his own life. He wanted them to hold on to the hope that he could be out there, or if he planned to meet somebody and they harmed him, or if he just planned to go to a certain location and somebody opportunistically harmed him. There's just so many different scenarios and I can't stick to one. It just
seems so strange. And even if he did go to Wisconsin it ended up there, I can't decide if it was suicide or just exposure and he missed Judge the weather. Like you said, I'm very confused by this case exactly.
I wish we knew more about Tim's background because in the Blair Adams case, which we talked about, we knew he was clearly having mental health issues when he left British Columbia, and he was obviously paranoid and thought that someone was trying to kill him. And that may have only been in his own mind. He may have been hallucinating and fabricating all these ideas that his life was
in danger. But the fact of the matter is is he did cross paths with someone in Knoxville who killed him, but it may have had nothing to do with the reason he left. But with Tim's case, we can't even speculate on that at all because we don't know what his behavior was like before he disappeared.
All we can do is throw out theories, but like, there's really nothing to connect any of them to the case. We could just throw out what could have happened, but we can't even speculate on like, oh, I think that this is likely what happened. Nothing is given in this case, and it just comes down to how little we know about Tim and how little we know about his life. Like you said, if we knew more like we did with Blair, we had some deep insights due to his mother.
We knew about him having issues with his sexuality and issues with mental health, and how these things could have played into his decision, whether he was having a manic episode when he decided to make that drive. It seems like these things factored it in a way that made it easier for us to understand the why, whereas in this case, the why is completely unclear exactly.
It's two mysteries rolled into one. Why did him wind up in Wisconsin? Why did he leave Florida to begin with? And how did he wind up dead? And like I said, this is probably the cases that I'm one of the cases I'm most fascinated with that has a limited amount of information, which is why I wanted to talk about it here, and totefully, one of these days maybe someone will follow up on this Reddit poster's tip and maybe figure out if Tim was the victim of foul play.
I'm really glad you shared this with me because I never of this case before, and the details are mind boggling. I also don't understand the how he got from Atlanta to Wisconsin, like maybe he took a bus, but maybe he didn't. There's just no guarantees here. Everything is tenuous
at best. We've got no firm connections. His parents are now deceased, so we basically have his siblings left alive, Frank and what was his sister's name, I'm Michelle, Michelle, But they aren't speaking publicly about the case, so there's just so little we know about Tim. I just want so badly to know more.
Me too, and hopefully we'll get a resolution to this case someday. But I did like seeing the look on your face when I mentioned that Tim was found in Wisconsin, because you were legitimately shocked by that one.
Yeah, I was very shocked, like I expected, like Atlanta, maybe it's going to be somewhere close by, maybe in Georgia, that his body would be found. I did not expect Wisconsin. That totally blew my mind.
Yeah, definitely, So that's why wanted to discuss this one. So before we wrap things up any more thoughts on Tim Malnar's case.
No, I think we covered it all, and I'm with you. I just truly hope that Frankie Michelle get a resolution to this case because I can't imagine what it would be like knowing that your parents died without finding out what happened to your brother, and to know that they had another sibling that died very young, died what was the scenario He was an infant.
I don't know any details, but he died when he was a baby.
Yeah. To lose two siblings, right, that's got to be a lot for both Frank and Michelle. So I truly hope that in their lifetime they get the answers that they so deserve.
Yeah, me too, So I really hope to find out the answers what happened somedays. So if anyone out there has information, please try to contact the authorities. And if anyone working in law enforcement is listening, Please try to check out this reddit poster's tip and see if there's a connection between Tim and Richard. So that about brings an end to this month's bonus Patreon minisode. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll be back again next month for another Bonus minnesot