This week’s featured missing person is Elmer Edward Booth, an 81-year-old man last seen in Colfax, California on April 5, 1993. It was noted that he appeared “confused” that day, but I don’t know if he suffered from dementia or any other medical conditions.
Booth has no known relatives; it was his landlord who filed the missing persons report. He was last seen wearing a coat and boots, and he has a full set of dentures. His nickname is Boots. He has gray hair and gray eyes, and is 5’9 tall and 160 pounds.
Whatever caused his disappearance, he’d be 111 years old today so definitely not still alive. I wonder if, while on his daily walk to town, he might have had some kind of age-related medical event and collapsed. My guess is he’s not far from where he disappeared.
I hope all of you are well. I wrote a blog entry for last week’s missing person of the week but then it didn’t go up for some reason, entry disappeared. Last weekend I attended the annual Wisconsin missing persons awareness event as I do every year. It’s a very heartwarming event with lots of families coming together. They want me to be the keynote speaker next year.
The Charley Project Blog 
I grew up in Colfax and remember seeing Boots walking on Main Street as a kid. Our area is very mountainous and there are a lot of areas someone could disappear at. There are also several abandoned mines. Thank you for featuring him.
Hi Meaghan. I took a peek into the case of Marie Peter-Toltz, and it appears that this is quite a deep rabbit hole. Ms. Peter-Toltz’s boyfriend, Valentin Broeksmit, disappeared a year before Ms. Peter-Toltz did. Here’s a link to an article about that disappearance: https://beverlypress.com/2021/04/mans-disappearance-still-shrouded-in-mystery/
Mr. Broeksmit’s body was found a year later, on the grounds of a Los Angeles high school. His body, when found, apparently indicated that the unfortunate Mr. Broeksmit had been living on the street in the weeks or months prior to his death. Before he went missing, he was known to be a heavy drug user. He disappeared after dropping off his girlfriend (Marie Peter-Toltz) at her tennis club. He was a wealthy man, whose father, Bill Broeksmit, was a Deutsche Bank executive who committed suicide in 2014. Deutsche Bank was (and still is, apparently) under investigation for massive fraud. This seems to have been the motive for Bill Broeksmit’s suicide. Valentin, the opioid-addicted son, was supposedly working as an informant for the officials who were investigating Deutsche Bank.
Valentin’s body was found just a few days after Marie went missing. It seems possible that he disappeared, and was living on the streets, because he was frightened for his life (and because he was a drug addict), as a result of his work as an informant. There’s an article about the discovery of his body and his connections with Deutsche Bank here: https://www.breitbart.com/local/2022/04/28/missing-deutsche-bank-informant-found-dead-los-angeles-school/
It’s an article from the right-wing propaganda site Breitbart, so you have to take it with a grain of salt.
When I think about this case, I can’t help but wonder if Valentin Broeksmit was murdered because he knew too much about Deutsche Bank (and about rampant corruption at high levels of the US government). It would be fairly easy to murder a junkie like Broeksmit by injecting him with heroin and making it look like an overdose. Perhaps Marie Peter-Toltz had to be eliminated too, because Valentin had shared too much information with her.
The no-known family cases are always sad. It’s nice that Michael and probably others remember him. He might have suffered a stroke or dehydration, etc.