Unsolved Mooseteries

 Title Card: MISSING PERSON

[Soul-piercing Synthesizer Music]

Host: In March of 2010. Clyde Pillows, a 27-year-old diving instructor living in Defuniak Springs, Florida, was nursing a broken heart after his girlfriend of three years ended things.

[Plaintive Piano Music]

Paula Pillows-Nelson, Clyde’s Sister:  Well, Clyde was such a great guy.  He was ready to settle down and start a family. We all thought Susan was going to be the one, and I know he’d been looking at rings, but it just didn’t work out.  He took it hard.

[Re-enactment: actor playing Clyde tells actor playing Paula he’s sad about break-up over the phone]

Praline Pillows, Clyde’s Mother: [crying] Clyde was just an angel.  I always told everyone I’d given birth to a little angel from heaven.  He had so much love inside, and he just wanted a family of his own to give all that love to.

Host: Clyde had recently decided to try online dating.  He made an account on a popular website called Life After Love.  The site specialized in people who’d recently split up from their partners. 

Zeke Casino, Clyde’s Best Friend and Coworker:  He’d been on a couple dates and he didn’t seem real enthusiastic about either of the girls.  But then one day he came to work all excited.  He said, ‘Zeke, I just met my wife last night.’  I laughed and said, ‘Oh, yeah?’  But he was serious.

[Re-enactment: actor playing Clyde tells actor playing Zeke he’s in love]

Host: Clyde gushed to his friends and family about a woman he’d met on the site named Alka.  The two went on a series of dates and quickly became smitten.  

Paula Pillows-Nelson: He kept talking about how pretty Alka was, how sweet she was.  How worldly.  He just thought she hung the moon.  And, y’know, it seemed awfully fast, but I was just glad he was getting back out there.

[Re-enactment: actor playing Clyde and actor playing Alka at dinner, deftly telegraphing infatuation via eye contact and wine-glass clinks]

Host: Alka told Clyde she was a philosophy professor at the University of Copenhagen.  She was taking a year-long sabbatical touring the southern United States.  Despite this, the two quickly began discussing long-term plans, with Alka looking into permanent resident requirements.  

Praline Pillows: [still crying] I told him ‘Baby, we gotta meet this girl if she’s so special,’ and he said he’d ask her when she could come for dinner.  He just seemed so happy and in love. [blows nose].  He called me up a few days later and asked if next Sunday would work, and I told him it would.

Host: That was the last time Praline would ever speak to her son.  Three days later, he was reported missing after failing to show up for two consecutive shifts at work.

Zeke Casino: Clyde was a real responsible guy, and he loved what he did.  It wasn’t like him to miss work like that.  

Detective Pete Fudgecliff, Walton County Sheriff’s Office.: Mr. Pillows’s family filed a missing person’s report with our office on March 18th.  They informed us that he’d been out of contact for over 48 hours.  They’d gone to his apartment and found his car in the parking lot, but Mr. Pillows was not in the residence.

[Re-enactment: Actor playing Praline wails Clyde’s name and dramatically collapses to the floor of his apartment.  Actors playing Paula and Clyde’s father wring their hands and look concerned.]

Det. Pete Fudgecliff: We interviewed the family, and they told us the only recent change in Mr. Pillows’s life was that he’d been seeing a woman.  Unfortunately, they did not know the woman’s last name or contact information.

Host: The detectives searched Clyde’s apartment and found Clyde’s passport and wallet with his driver’s license and credit cards.  This led them to believe he had not left willingly. 

Det. Pete Fudgecliff: The last confirmed sighting of Mr. Pillows was on a convenience store security camera near his home on the night of March 15th.  He purchased a candy bar and a case of Budweiser, which we’re told were normal purchases for him.  

[Re-enactment: Actor playing Clyde makes purchases at convenience store.]

Det Fudgecliff: He did not appear distressed in the footage, and we concluded he must have returned home since we did find his wallet and car back at his apartment complex.  None of his neighbors saw him leave the apartment that evening or in the following days.

Host: With no clear leads on Clyde’s whereabouts, the police began looking into his background.

Det. Fudgecliff: We couldn’t find a single reason why Clyde Pillows might want to disappear.  He wasn’t in debt or legal trouble, and he seemed very content in his life.  We also couldn’t find any person in his life who might want to harm him.  We looked into his coworkers, friends, family, and past girlfriends. [pauses] The one gap in our investigation was the woman he was seeing.  We couldn’t find any information on this woman.  

Host: Defuniak Springs is a small, close-knit community.  It should’ve been easy to locate an international visitor.  The police interviewed employees at local bars and restaurants, but none of them remembered a woman matching Alka’s description. 

[Re-enactment: Cops interview a bartender who shakes her head.]

Praline Pillows: [crying, bitterly] That’s when I knew that woman had done something to Clyde.  I should’ve known she was too good to be true.  

Host: Law enforcement turned to the website where Clyde had met Alka.  They made a profile on Life After Love but were unable to find Alka’s profile.  Finally, they decided they needed to access Clyde’s account.

Paula Pillows-Nelson: The Sheriff's office reached out to us to see if we might know Clyde’s password.  Well, I told them he really loved the band Vertical Horizon, and I guess they were able to get it from that.  

[Re-enactment: cops hack into Craig’s mainframe]

Det. Fudgecliff: With information we received from the family, we were able to determine Mr. Pillows’s password and access his account.  We found exchanges between him and two women whom we were able to locate and confirm were not Alka.  We did not find any additional messages.  

Paula Pillows-Nelson: Well, when the police told us that, my first thought was, he must have met her on another site.  But by then, they’d managed to figure out his laptop and phone passwords.  He hadn’t visited any other dating sites, and they couldn’t find any calls or messages with this woman on his phone.  So then I figured she must have gotten him to give her his password so she could erase the history.

Host: The sheriff’s office had Clyde’s devices tested for fingerprints but only found ones matching Clyde and his ex-girlfriend Susan.  They’d found no evidence of a break-in in his apartment.  

After all these dead ends, law enforcement found something perplexing in Clyde’s documents folder.  

Det. Fudgecliff: We found a document on Mr. Pillows’s laptop titled “Alka”.  We read through it and, uh…it appeared to be a one-sided exchange by Mr. Pillows, writing messages to this, uh, woman, as though she were responding to him.  

[Re-enactment: Actor playing Clyde typing alone on his laptop.  Close-up shots of document Clyde is typing into showing snippets of text: 

“It was really great seeing you again tonight.”

“So glad you feel the same way.”

“7 p.m. should work for me.  I can get off work a little early. ;)”]

Host: As the police read on, the messages got stranger.

[Close-up shots of document:

“I…uh…I guess my job has meaning?  I never really thought about it.”

“We didn’t really talk about stuff like that in church.”

    “I don’t know what made God.”]

Det. Fudgecliff: We uh…we really weren’t sure what to make of any of this.  

Host: The document was last saved the night of the 15th, the same night of Clyde’s last confirmed sighting.  The Sheriff's office inquired with the family about the document, but they couldn’t shed any light on it.

Paula Pillows-Nelson: I read through a copy of it, and I read through it again, and I had to just sit there for a bit.  It seemed like something…well, he was down after Susan left him, but it was all very normal for that kind of situation.  He was just going through a break-up like anybody would.  I don’t think he ever would’ve….it just didn’t sound like Clyde.  He wasn’t on drugs.  I know he wasn’t.  Clyde just wasn’t into that kind of stuff.

Praline Pillows: [crying, flailing, banshee noises]

Host: There was one final strange discovery in Clyde’s disappearance.  A few days after the document was discovered, police found a small package in Clyde’s mailbox.  The package had no postage or return address.  The police opened it and found a miniature set of wooden moose antlers.  No note was included in the package.  Clyde’s family have no idea who might have left this or what significance it may have held for Clyde.  

Despite a $10,000 reward offered by the family, there has been no further information about Clyde's disappearance or his current whereabouts.

Paula Pillows-Nelson: [looking into camera] Clyde, if you're out there, please, we just want to know that you're OK. You don't have to come home or even tell us where you are if you're not ready. Just send us some kind of message so we know you're out there.

Host: If you have any information about the disappearance of Clyde Pillows, please contact the Walton County Sheriff’s Office, or call us at the toll-free number below.  

[1-800-25237-64445-25237]

[Soul-piercing synthesizer music]