Brian Vargo

Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome back to Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. I already recorded right now in True Crime, and now I am re recording right now in True Crime because as of today Thursday, we have new breaking news in the Kansas City three case and lots to talk about there. I'm going to follow my original outline because I've already typed up the narrative for it, and then we're going to talk about Jordan and the Kansas City three because we got things to talk about in regards to that case. Okay, first things first, I already did an episode on it. But Elec Murdau was not granted any trial because they found that the call Itton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill, was not Jerry tampering. Therefore, there's no new trial that was granted. I do feel like there's going to be appeals on appeals on appeals, because Elick is that guy. He is a former lawyer. He is going to appeal until he cannot appeal anymore. I did happen across an article that was done with a former cellmate of his or somebody that was in prison when he was in prison. This was before the double murder trial. And he said that Elick was very much like the big man on campus. He would offer legal work to other prisoners and help them, but it was always in exchange for like wine, you know, prison wine, the kind that they like make in the toilet allegedly. You know, if you don't know about it, you have to listen to Pretty Lies and Alibi. She does a whole prison series and it's like so interesting. So he would offer legal services in exchange for like wine or who knows what else. And he definitely wasn't this person, said, wasn't the man that you saw solving snotty on TV all upset. He was not that person. He was very unbothered by everything. So Elec Murda is thriving in prison. I think honestly he is doing just fine. Obviously, he would probably rather be out so he can scam more people, but he is doing just fine behind bars. So we'll definitely keep you guys updated on that. Now we're gonna talk about the Dan Markel case. I am going to go into super super detail during my summer series. I am in the process of mapping that whole thing out. But there is a woman named Catherine Megdanawah who was part of the plot in the murder for Hire to kill Dan Markel. She is now in prison for life and Pretty Lies and Alibi as my favorite podcast posted that she was on meet and inmate dot com, which I didn't even know was a thing. And I don't know how I didn't know this, but meet it inmate dot com basically like social media for prisoners. They can go on there, set up a profile and talk about their interests and have people write to them like a pen pal situation. And there's also others that have tablets and they have like this way of getting messages and all that. So it's that I have never been on it. I was intrigued because I saw her profile and I wanted to see if there was any other like high profile people on there. Well, you could go on there forever and like look and look and look, and I was thinking, maybe Ele's on there. I didn't see him, but I just clicked on some random profiles and got sucked into this rabbit hole of like looking at the profile and on there it says like their earliest release date, and curiosity gets the best of me with all things, so of course I then google their name and their state and figure out like why they're in prison, and it just became the biggest rabbit hole of my life and I'm here for it. Honestly, it was the most interesting thing in the world. And there's all these other websites too, where you can, if you are in prison, sign up for these websites and then you can have people write you. Because I was always thinking like, who are these people that are like pen pals with like Scott Peterson or pen pals with Charles Manson, you know, back in the day when Charles Manson was still alive. It very much intrigued me. And this is how because the Internet is the Internet, and it's ever evolving and it's interesting and I definitely got sucked into a rabbit hole. So check it out. You do not have to do anything to go on there. You just go onto the website and you can just start clicking away on profiles. You don't have to have an account or anything like that. It's literally just the best rabbit hole. If you're intrigued switching gears to the alleged only Fans killer Courtney Clinney. She is allegedly accused of killing her boyfriend, Christian. I think his last name is mom Bosila, but I probably got that wrong. But she is accused of him last year, in twenty twenty three, and they have just arrested her parents for tampering with evidence because her parents allegedly broke into Christian's laptop and were tampering with evidence. Whatever the case may be, she has very much painted herself as a victim and she killed him in self defense. I personally don't believe that to be the case, because there is video. I think that they probably had a very toxic relationship. But regardless, she brutally murdered this man, Christian, and her parents are helping her cover it up or try to get rid of evidence or something like that, so they have also been arrested. It is a big thing. I don't know if you guys remember when I talked about the man Jeremy Best who is from Idaho and was found naked in the woods and had had what they said was a mental health breakdown. He had murdered his his wife, unborn child, and his son. So he what happened was he was picked up at a local grocery store. He had gone in there. He was incoherent, he was naggin. They picked him up. He ended up being hospitalized for a brief period of time, like super brief, like not even a day, and obviously he was having some type of mental health crisis. I don't know what the hospital found, but they discharged him and his wife, who he would kill a day later, and his son came to pick him up and then whatever happened happened and they ended up dead. So his lawyer is saying that he was suffering a mental health break and he never should have been let out of the hospital. And I will say the pictures of him with his family before and the mugshot of him after, we are looking at two very very different people. The overall demeanor, the just the look in his face, it is sad. You can kind of see the security video footage from the grocery store when he walked in naked. He just seems like he is not even fully present in life. And it's really sad that it happened this way and that he wasn't held because he obviously was a danger to others and a danger to himself. And this crime could have been prevented if whoever was responsible for assessing him for being mentally competent and able to function did what they were supposed to do. It's going to be an interesting case to see what happens. He has a status conference on March fourteenth, and if he is convicted, he could receive the death penalty, So will keep you updated on that. And now we're going to talk about the Kansas City three, the three men who were found dead in the backyard slash back porch of Jordan Willis in Kansas City. He's renting the house. He is a scientist. Yesterday when I recorded, they had not gotten anything back yet. The toxicology still wasn't back yet. They kept saying that these three guys froze to death. The families of these guys are obviously pushing back, thinking there's more to it than meets the eye. And today was the day that all of these other things started popping out and things started happening. So Jordan went to rehab earlier this week and basically said that the death of his friends made him realize that he is a real problem, and he decided to check himself into rehab. So Jordan has moved out of the house. He was a renter, so he's moved out of the house and he has now checked himself into rehab getting the help that he says he so desperately needs. So allegedly, the toxicology reports, our back results are back, and this is just what's being reported. This is not confirmed. This is take it with a grain of salt. I am hearing that there were multiple substances found in these men. I do not have any further information other than that, but I will tell you. They did an interview with a cousin of I believe it was Clayton, one of the victims, and his cousin said the three guys were really close. They were like brothers. They have been friends for a long long time. Jordan was kind of a newer friend to them. He was kind of like the outsider. But Jordan was a chemist, and he was a scientist, and he is the one that always had the drugs, and he was kind of like their quote unquote supplier. Allegedly, that's what this friend or not friend cousin is saying. Jordan was the scientist. And I said, in the very beginning of this to my friends, my two true crime besties, two of my true crime besties I have many, Katie and Natasha. I said, Jordan was cooking shit up in his basement, guarantee it, and he was experimenting on these three friends of his. Whatever they took caused them to die, unfortunately, super sadly. He was in the house apparently quote unquote sleeping it off for two days or whatever it was. It's going to be really interesting to see how this unravels and see it could have very well been an accident. I'm not saying that it couldn't have been an accident, but if he was experimenting, that is not good. And it is obviously even more so now that he's checked himself into rehab. There definitely was probably some experimenting with drugs that could have turned bad very quickly. Again, I don't want to speculate. These are just the different things that I have been hearing in regards to this scenario. In situation, I from the beginning thought that whatever happened inside of that house was definitely involving some type of substances or something being laced with something and then taking something and not realizing it. But for the three of them to have died and Jordan's still being alive and well is really really interesting to me. I don't think this one is going to go away quietly. I feel like there's going to be a lot more coming down the pipeline. I will be sure to keep you guys updated. I might even have to tack on a little more to write now in True Crime if more breaks this evening, I hope not, but I will keep you updated as it happens. All Right, last thing I'm gonna talk about and then we're gonna get into the episode. Chad Davell filed for a delay in his trial. We knew it was probably not going to be happening on April first, and then that whole thing happened with his lawyer and how his lawyer was going to no longer represent him, but he's now still representing him and he's not going to get paid. It's a whole thing. But he has asked for that to be delayed, and I think it's probably going to be delayed, so to be determined when that happens. I will keep you guys updated. But I have talked incredibly too long and we are going to go ahead and get in to today's episode. Okay, guys, jumping in to a brand new episode today. Today, we are going to be talking about a case from nineteen seventy six, and that is the disappearance of twenty year old college student named Brian Vargo. I knew this case, but I didn't really know details about this case. It was recommended to me by my friend Leslie, also probably my biggest podcast fan, So shout out, I know she's listening. Thank you for picking this case for me. And she also picked the one for Monday, Amy Mahalovik, So she was definitely my case picker this week because some days I need help narrowing it down and picking a case because there's literally so many to pick from. Well, today we're going to be talking about Brian's disappearance, the circumstances that led up to him disappearing, and we are going to go from there. So let's dive right in. Brian Thomas Viergo was born on September eighth of nineteen fifty five to his parents, Frank and Rita. He was the fourth of five children, and he and his family grew up in Houston, Texas. His parents owned a bar restaurant and they lived a comfortable middle class life. Brian was always very smart, very studious, and had a math geared type of brain, and this is the area that he excelled and shined in, and eventually it would lead him to want to pursue something of the sorts when he ended up going to college now. He ended up moving from Houston to Austin in nineteen seventy four, where he attended the University of Texas, and many of the people he went to high school with all so ended up attending UT with him as well. In college, Brian was studying architectural engineering and he was doing really well. He was thriving his freshman year. He was getting really good grades. His college roommate Tim Murphy had said that he remembers that he was real proud that he was getting good grades in his engineering calculus class, and overall it seemed that Brian had really transitioned really well into his college life. He had a good group of friends and seemed to be doing really well in all of his classes. Brian even made the Honor roll in the spring of nineteen seventy five, so that was his freshman year. He was really excelling. He was really doing well and kind of trying to find his place in college and figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. So between the freshman and sophomore year of college, Brian came home for the summer, and while he was home that summer, he had gotten pulled over by a pul He had been driving on the wrong side of the road and when they did a search of his car, they found marijuana in his car and he ended up being arrested. From there, things kind of started to go downhill for Brian. He had written letters in journals about how he was losing interest in everything. Obviously, hindsight is twenty twenty. Looking back at it now, you kind of see that maybe he was going through something. Maybe he was just being a dramatic teenager, because that's what teenagers do. And he's in college and he's trying to find his way and figure out, you know, what you want to do with the rest of your life. It's a hard time for kids to try to navigate that, especially when they're navigating it in a new city away from their family and it's hard, Like that's an age especially. I feel for guys because they have to kind of put on this persona that like they can handle everything and everything is fine, and sometimes it's not, and the feelings of being depressed or anxious or overwhelmed just kind of overtake you, and it can definitely mess with you and mess with your personality and your way of being. So Brian was struggling with something we don't exactly know what, and all of this has really come to light. His case has been reinvigorated because of his niece, Amanda, who learned about who Brian was when she was seven. She was over her grandparents' home looking at photos and saw pictures of Brian and started to ask questions, and that kind of is when she got it in her head that she was going to eventually do as much research as possible to help figure out what happened to Brian, going through all of his old journals and looking into evidence and really kind of reinvigorating the case in the grand scheme of things to figure out what happened to her uncle Brian. So I'll probably refer to Amanda a lot in this because a lot of this information is coming out years and years and years down the line because Amanda has done her research. So when I refer to Amanda, that is Brian's niece. She never knew him, but she is a big, big, big part of the story and probably the driving force behind why I am doing the story today because without her putting Brian's name out there, doing the research, creating the Facebook group that she's created, many people wouldn't even know about this case. There's another thing that was written in the journals that Brian makes references to different secrets and telling people the truth about something, but it's never really revealed what he is speaking of when he's writing about the stuff in his journal. So we're going to fast forward to the next year. It is nineteen seventy six. It is Brian's sophomore year at the University of Texas in Austin, and something has definitely shifted. Something has changed. Brian is not doing well in his classes, which, as we know, he was always a really good student, very studious, very math brain focused. Something had shifted between freshman year and the summer and his sophomore year, and by this point Brian was not doing well in school. His grades had fallen quite a bit, and it is now time for spring break. So we are coming up on spring break of nineteen seventy six and Brian tells his college friends that he is going to drive to Colorado and go on a self guided tour of Colorado. And some of his college friends were kind of confused by this because he was going by himself, and they had questions like, do you know anyone in Colorado? Have you ever been to Colorado? Why are you choosing to go to Colorado? But everyone that was around him said he was acting normal up until the time he left, So again, times are different. You don't really question people when they tell you stuff like that. You just kind of like go with the flow. And after all, Brian was twenty. He was an adult, so he could technically go where he wanted and do what he wanted to do for a spring break, and he was picking to go to Colorado. So Brian decides to leave. He gets into his white Mazda RX two and decides to hit the road to Colorado, but somewhere along the way, his car ended up breaking down, and of course his travel plans were halted. I have seen different things that say he broke down in Colorado. I've also seen other things that say he just broke down along the way to Colorado, So what really happened as far as that goes, I'm not super clear on. But either way, his car broke down and he decided that it really wasn't worth the money for him to try to fix the car. So Amanda learned that he left the car with the mechanic and decided to go back to Houston to get the title for the car so he could sell it. He decided that it wasn't worth it the trouble of fixing, so he was just going to therefore sell it and not even worry about the car now. Amanda said that her grandmother, Rita, who is Brian's mom, remembers him coming home shuffling through the papers looking for the title for the car. Doesn't really know if he ever founded or not. But with all of that, Amanda says that her great aunt and Brian's mother, Rita, went ahead and took Brian to the bus station and didn't really question anything, like his plan was to go back to Colorado. That's what they assumed. They didn't do anything other than drop him off at the bus station, so he could go back to Colorado. And also, Brian's family was supportive of him, and he was twenty. They weren't like over protective of him. They kind of let him do his thing. So they drove him to the bus station in Houston, dropped him off, and that was the last timebody ever saw or heard from Brian Vargo. So here we are again another person that literally just vanishes into thin air. And shortly after Brian disappeared, the family did find that Brian's wallet was still in his apartment that he lived in in Austin, and oddly enough, the car was never found. So that's a really interesting little tidbit of information that the car just completely vanished and disappeared right along with Brian. Even though Brian was left in Houston. Did he get on the bus, did he ever make it to Colorado. There are so many questions in this case that we do not have answers to. So once Brian went missing, Rita very much try to find Brian, but she faced all the roadblocks with police because they basically said, he is twenty years old, he's an adult, he probably took off and he doesn't want to be found. Rita said that she did file a missing person's report back in nineteen seventy six, but there was no record of a missing person report, so whoever she spoke to probably didn't actually make an official report and was just hearing her out just for the sake of hearing her out, which is really sad. I hear this still to this day with parents that try to report their adult children missing, where it's not taken seriously because they're technically an adult and they can go missing if they want. But what if something nefarious happened to them, What if they have been taken against their will, what if they are in trouble, what if they're hurt. There are so many other options other than they just left on their own and they're going to come back one day. That is kind of the impression that the Vargo family got when they were trying to navigate Brian being missing, and those are the roadblocks they faced. And unfortunately, all of that time, Rita thought that he was listed as a missing person while nothing was ever officially in the system and documented that he was met And it wasn't until Amanda started doing all the research that she had been doing and kind of digging into Brian's past and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance that she realized that he was not listed as a missing person. And also, brian disappearing was really really hard on his mother, Rita. She struggled a lot with it. The whole family, I think very much struggled with it, and it was just something that they had kind of learned to live with. And from what I've read too, it almost seems that they just thought he was going to come home one day. Maybe he did go off on his own, and he's just going to come home one day. He's going to walk through the door. So it wasn't a topic that they talked about, which is why Amanda didn't even know he existed until she was seven and was looking through pictures. And even then Amanda of course started asking questions, and it was very much a topic that they didn't want to talk about because they had already dealt with their grief and their pain surrounding Brian, and they didn't want to open up the fresh wounds and talk about it. But as Amanda got older and she was able to her curiosity got the best of her, and that's when she started to really dig in to find out what happened to Brian, And as time went Rita became more open to this because she said for so long she had kind of pushed those feelings aside just because she felt like something bad had happened to Brian and she didn't want to know. But as time went on and as Amanda did her research, Rita really became a champion for trying to find her son and trying to figure out what happened to her son. So, after Brian went missing, the semester is back in gear at U t Austin and his roommates are starting to grow concern because Brian has not come back and they think that something must be up with him. He hasn't written them any notes to say, hey, I'm not going to be here, but everything just kind of started going off for them and they kind of had some alarm bells in their heads saying like something's not right with Brian. His college roommate, Tim Murphy said that he felt that Brian could have been potentially dealing with some type of identity crisis and even had said, I wouldn't have been surprised if he had just gone off and kind of decided to strike a match and start a new life. So this is kind of what the college friends were thinking, that he just decided to go off on his own. And again that was being echoed by law enforcement. To Brian's family, he probably just went off on his own. Give him some time. So it wasn't until Amanda started doing her research that she discovered that right before Brian went missing, he had dropped out of college. So he was in his sophomore semester, he allegedly was not doing well as far as his grades went, and struggling with something, and in the midst of all that, before he went to leave for Colorado, he dropped out of school. Nobody knew. His college roommates didn't know anything, his family didn't know anything. It was just something that he did where he dropped out of school right before spring break of nineteen seventy six. Brian's youngest sibling, Venita, said that she remembers that he did really, really well in school his freshman year and then whatever happened changed and in his sophomore year he wasn't doing well. So she said, I just remember that he needed some time away from school. Now, Venita was pretty young at the time that Brian disappeared, and she only really knew about his disappearance in regards to him going to Colorado, and that was it. She does remember Brian being very introverted. He collected stamps, he also built model cars, But she said she grew up thinking that he was going to come home. And again, it's nineteen seventy six. There's no cell phones, there's no easy way to contact people when they're on the road. You don't have personal contact information for them if they are going out of state. So she said, all I remember is he just left, and I thought he was coming back, And that is how she lived her life growing up because Brian wasn't there. But Brian's coming back. Brian is going to be back. Venita said she also found a letter that Brian had written to Frank the father, and he said that in the letter that he just needed to get away and he needed to take some time. So everyone in the Vargo family was very much thinking that Brian just left and he just needed to take some time for himself and that he was going to come back. And Rita even kept his room exactly how it was when he initially left, and they were just keeping everything the same, so when he did come back, it would be exactly as how he left it. The family did end up hiring a private investigator to look into Brian's disappearance, and they did speak with Brian's roommate, Tim, and he says that he remembers that in the line of questioning that this private investigator did, they kind of approached it as they thought that his disappearance could have been drug related, and Tim said he didn't believe that, and he's still to this day doesn't think that that's the case. And Tim had said that he's been around attics drug addicts and Brian was not one of them. He said, Brian smoked weed and drank beer, but he wasn't that type of person that was greedy with drugs and it was just not in his nature to be like that. So he didn't believe for a minute that his disappearance was related to drugs in any way, shape or form. So Venita eventually said that she tried to file a missing person's report twenty years after Brian disappeared. She ended up getting the paperwork, but of course needed her mother Rita's help to fill it out. And this is where Vnita really realized that Rita was having a really hard time and almost didn't want to know what happened to Brian, and you know, just felt like something tragic happened to him, and ended up not doing anything with the paperwork, because in Rita's head, I filed a missing person's report for him in nineteen seventy six, they should still have it. Venita was, you know, trying to re up it and make sure that you know, everything was being followed through on and Rita just emotionally couldn't handle it. And I can't imagine having to navigate that back in nineteen seventy six, when you don't have the power of social media, when you don't have cell phones, when you don't have anything to go off of, and just thinking well, maybe Brian did leave on his own, and we're just going to leave it alone. We're not going to press the police. We're just going to file this report and go on with our life, expecting that Brian's going to walk in that door. I imagine Rita very much strugg with all of that, probably for the rest of her life after Brian disappeared. But finally in twenty twenty one, in February, the Vragra family decided to let Amanda, Brian's niece, file an official missing person's report. This was a whole forty six years after Brian's disappearance, and very much Rita decided that she wanted to know what happened to her son, even though she had been I guess kind of repressing it for such a long time. I think deep inside she really wanted to have closure and figure out what happened to him, and this was taking a step forward into figuring out what happened to Brian. So, currently the Austin Police Department is investigating Brian's case actively. New light has definitely been breathed into the case because of Amanda and her research and her just want to figure out what happened to her uncle Brian. So she Amanda is managing the Search for Brian Vargo facebook page. She also has a TikTok account and an Instagram account, and she's hoping that somebody somewhere knows something. She also says she's done her own interviews, reached out to some of his friends, roommates, girlfriends of friends, people he worked with, people he knew when he was in Houston. And she also says that if she finds somebody on social media named Brian Vargo, she reaches out to them sends them a postcard that has a little story about it with Brian's pictures. She is actively trying to find her uncle Brian and get his story out there. The more eyes on it, the better. There is an age progressed photo of Brian. I will post that there is a great possibility that Brian is still out there. He could be living under a different identity. He could have had a mental health crisis. Twenty years old is the age where all of that stuff starts to come out, and you just never know really what Brian was going through at the time. He could have been not thinking clearly. There's no telling what kind of stuff he got mixed up in when he went missing. We don't really know the circumstances of who he was with, if he came across somebody who had bad intentions, there's just really no telling. At the time of Brian's disappearance, he had dirty blonde hair and was about six feet tall. His family said that he walked with his feet in an outward position and he had a snake bite on one of his fingers. If Brian is still out there today, he would be turning sixty nine years old this year. So it is entirely possible that Brian has been living all of this time under a different identity or somewhere else and not even realizing that his family is searching for him in the way that they're searching for him. Unfortunately, Rita passed away last November twenty twenty three, at one hundred and one years old, And first of all, that is amazing that she lived to one hundred and one, and really really sad that the majority of her life she lived without knowing what happened to her son. And not even that, but the fact that she had to repress all of her feelings and all of her memories just to cope and just to live, because when Brian first went missing, the police department really did nothing for her. Took down a fake police report and that was that. And the resources weren't around back then like they are today to search for somebody. There wasn't any social media, and they basically said Brian left on his own, and that's what she chose to believe, I think, for herself, in order to cope. That's what she chose to BLI leave, and it's unfortunate that she passed away without knowing what happened to her son. Amanda has come across all sorts of notes that Rita made over the years, especially initially when Brian first disappeared, and one of the notes says missing persons report filed nine thirteen seventy six, and then there's a number two to two dash three eight eight zero. So in all of that time between everything kind of recoming to light when Amanda started asking questions and nineteen seventy six, Rita was sure that this missing person's had been filed, and all of that time had gone by, and it wasn't officially even there because whoever took her report didn't do what they were supposed to do. All of that time, people could have been aware of Brian's disappearance and looking for him. Time is of the essence and cases like this, so we really don't even know what impact could have been made if police had taken Rita and the family seriously initially and listed Brian as a missing person. So that is where we stand today. Brian is still missing. He would be sixty nine years old, turning sixty nine years old this year. I'm gonna link the Facebook page that Brian's niece Amanda runs. She is constantly posting things there. We should really all go there and support her and share Brian's photos, his age progress photos, and we really need to all come together and work to try to bring Brian home, try to get resolution for this family. And I really appreciate you guys listening. This one is a true mystery and I really don't know what to think about it. I hope that Brian is safe out there and that one day he will come home. Maybe he doesn't remember who he is, maybe he's kind of repressed his former life because he was struggling with something we don't really know anything about. And that he is out there and that we are able to bring him home for his family. So share, Share, Share, as always, and I appreciate each and every single one of you. If you listen on any of the podcasting apps, please be sure to rate the podcast. It really helps me grow and helps push me out to other people in the true crime community. And if you have friends that are into true crime, are into cold cases and the unsolved mysteries of it all, please share my podcast with them. The more people we get on these cases, the better And I appreciate you all and hope you all have a fantastic weekend and I will see you guys on Monday for a new episode. Bye.