Steven Koecher was 30 in December 2009, a former newspaper stringer and online-advertising salesman from a Latter-day Saints family in Bountiful, Utah, who had moved to St. George in the warm southwest corner of the state. The recession had cost him his advertising job, and he was getting by on part-time work handing out flyers for a local window-washing firm while falling behind on his rent. His bishop had promised to help him find something by the new year, and he was planning to spend Christmas with his parents. On the morning of Sunday, December 13 he was 120 miles from home, in a retirement community on the edge of Las Vegas, and no one has ever established why.
What happened
The days before were strange in hindsight. Card and phone records later showed that on December 10 he drove from St. George to Salt Lake City, across the desert to a ranch in Nevada’s Ruby Valley where the family of a former girlfriend gave him lunch, and back again, nearly 1,100 miles in one day, without mentioning it to his mother when they spoke by phone. On December 12 his phone touched a tower near Overton, Nevada, he bought gas in Mesquite, and that evening he picked up small Christmas presents at a Kmart near St. George. A neighbor saw him come home around 10 pm and leave again half an hour later.
On the morning of the 13th two friends from church rang him about that day’s meetings. He told both he was in Las Vegas and might not make it back in time. At 11:54 am a homeowner’s security camera in Sun City Anthem, an over-55 community in the hills of southern Henderson, recorded his 2003 Chevrolet Cavalier pulling into the end of a quiet cul-de-sac. Six minutes later a young man in a white shirt and slacks, holding what looked like a folder or portfolio, walked away along the sidewalk, and a second camera caught his reflection heading north. That is the last image of Steven Koecher.
His phone stayed on. That evening it connected through towers several miles to the north, and the next morning through one near Russell Road, where it was used to check his voicemail. It lingered on that tower for about two more days and then went silent, probably when the battery ran out. Days later the community’s staff noticed the abandoned car, found the window-washing flyers inside and phoned the number on them. The calls reached his family, and on December 17 his mother, realizing no one had heard from him in a week, reported him missing.
The investigation
Police in Henderson and St. George both opened cases. Officers knocked on doors along the street where the car was parked and searched the surrounding desert with helicopters, all-terrain vehicles and dogs. The car itself held few clues: a half tank of gas, the wrapped Christmas gifts, job applications and his flyers. His apartment showed no sign that he had packed for a trip, his passport was still there, and a drug dog brought to the car did not react. A second vehicle seen cruising the street around the time he parked turned out to belong to a real estate agent showing a house nearby, the closest thing the footage offered to a lead. Police said there was no evidence of foul play.
His family checked jails, hospitals and the morgue, sat for nights in a pancake house where staff thought they had seen him, and paid for a private investigator. In April 2010 about 70 volunteers combed desert south of Henderson’s executive airport on a tip and found only animal bones. His father, Rolf Koecher, a newspaper editor who had led much of the searching, died suddenly in February 2011. In 2015 the volunteer group Red Rock Search and Rescue searched about 25 square miles of canyons and ridges around Anthem, working on the assumption that he had gone there to take his own life. They found nothing.
The explanations
The family’s view is that he went to Henderson expecting a job opportunity or appointment. On the video he is neatly dressed and walking with purpose, not wandering, and he had told his mother days earlier that he was hopeful about work. They do not believe he chose to vanish or harm himself. The long, unexplained drives have led others to suspect that a man short of money had taken on errands or courier work for someone, and private investigators who later worked with the family have argued he was doing something on another person’s behalf; police have not confirmed any of it. A claim made in 2010 by relatives of Joshua Powell, whose wife Susan had disappeared in Utah the week before, that she had run off with Koecher was investigated and found to have no basis; a family friend called it nonsense.
Where it stands
Both police departments have kept the case open, and no person of interest has ever been named. Television revisited it in 2011 and again in a recent streaming series, but the investigators involved have said they still cannot explain what brought him to that cul-de-sac. A St. George detective put it plainly in 2018: they know about as much as they did on the day he was found to be gone.