Flashback Friday: Barre Monigold

This week’s FF case is Barre Kallan Monigold, who may go by his middle name. He was 23 years old when he disappeared from Tyler, Texas on June 17, 1979. I don’t really have much info on this case; I just know he realized he’d left his car dome light on and, at 1:00 a.m., went outside to turn it off, and never came back. It’s like he vanished into thin air.

The first question that comes to my mind is: when they started looking for Barre, was his car still there, and if so, did was the dome turned light off, or still on? This could be an important clue. Also, if the car disappeared with him, was it ever found? If so, where, and in what condition, and was it found abandoned or was someone driving it?

If the car was parked on the street (and this also applies to parking lots etc., to a lesser extent) and Monigold opened the door and bent over and reached inside to turn the dome light off, that position would make him pretty vulnerable for a few seconds — his back turned, not able to use his hands and arms to defend himself since they were in the car, not able to really see what was going on outside the car. Any cries for help would be somewhat muffled since they’d be coming from inside the car.

In such a situation, Barre could have been attacked/kidnapped by someone and dragged into the suspect’s vehicle, or even into his own, and driven away. It would have taken only a few seconds, and given that it was late at night, it’s quite possible that no one else was in the vicinity at the time to see whatever it was that happened.

I wonder how long took for Monigold to be missed. Some person or persons besides the missing man must have been inside his house at the time, or maybe he was on the phone with someone just before he left, because otherwise the authorities wouldn’t have known why he’d gone outside in the first place.

That is, assuming the witness(es), whoever they were, were telling the truth about Monigold disappearing under those circumstances. That’s a wild card. I have to assume the account is truthful since I haven’t found anything to the contrary and because if I assume it is not, I pretty much have absolutely nothing to base any theories on.

(Michael and I, we have a kind of running joke between us. We get our mail through a mailbox that’s across the street and several doors down. Usually I’m the one who gets it. It takes like three minutes or so. But I occasionally tell Michael, “I’m going out to get the mail. If I’m not back in a couple of hours you should probably call the police.” Of course, if I told Michael that, and I DID get kidnapped while I was out getting the mail, Michael would have nothing other than his own statement as evidence I’d really said that and that it was only a joke and I hadn’t  actually felt unsafe and worried about being kidnapped. The police would think it all was really suspicious.)

I found an obituary for Monigold’s uncle, also called Barre Monigold, who died in 2014. The obit says his nephew survived him. I also found a Topix thread about Monigold. People were talking about various rumors they’d heard about his disappearance: that he’d met with foul play, that he was in Mexico working as a bartender, etc.

If he did disappear of his own volition, it seems like he chose an awfully risky and inconvenient way to drop out of sight. He went outside to do something that should have only taken a very short time, and so probably within a matter of minutes so the witness(es) began wondering what was holding him up. Especially if it was late at night. Maybe the police wouldn’t be notified right away (especially given it was the 1970s), but if it were me who had a friend or relative who’d stepped outside like that and was supposed to return in a few minutes and didn’t, I would give it half an hour, max, before I went outside to look for him and, failing that, started making calls to find out if anyone had seen him.

It seems like a person who has decided they wanted another life would chose a way that would keep people from realizing they were gone for as long as possible. For example, that person might call in sick to work, then leave home in the at the usual time he did on every workday. (There are a few MPs on my site that have done just that.)  Therefore the person’s absence probably wouldn’t be noticed until after he didn’t return home from work at the usual time. The MP would have a decent head start, several hours at minimum, maybe even like twelve hours or so.

If Monigold is still alive, he would be 61 in September. I’d love it if a relative or friend or someone else who knows more details about the case or Monigold himself would contact me, either by email or by commenting on this blog, so his casefile will no longer have the dreaded phrase “few details are available.”