The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

Part 6: No Quarrel

It’s been a while!

If you’re new, we strongly suggest starting at the beginning, right here.

Agatha Christie’s abandoned car, H. F. Davis/Topical Press Agency, via Getty Images

On December 12, 1926, hired banjo player Bob Tappin was performing “Yes We Have No Bananas” in a ballroom of the Swan Hydro Hotel in Harrogate when a woman dancing the Charleston caught his eye. She was dressed smartly and looked to be having a blast, apparently unaware or unconcerned that she was the subject of a large-scale manhunt that began over a week before, when her abandoned car was found dangling over a ditch near a pond called “The Silent Pool,” where two children were rumored to have drowned mysteriously. The woman was Agatha Christie, the prolific author of popular and occasionally scandalous murder mysteries, having the time of her life—while much of Britain feared she was dead.

Agatha Christie had last been seen leaving her home, Styles, in Sunningdale on December 3. The discovery of her beloved Morris Cowley roadster led to the massive police and volunteer civilian search along with intense speculation about her disappearance. Her husband, Colonol Sir Archibald Christie, was the subject of much of this scrutiny, and some suspicion, but insisted that Agatha had been happy at home and that he and his wife “had no quarrel.”

This was a lie. The couple had indeed quarreled, most recently about Archie’s stated ambition to leave his wife and marry his mistress, his young secretary and fellow golf enthusiast Nancy Neele. This name is an important detail that to my eye challenges one leading theory that Agatha was in a stress-fueled fugue state at the time of her disappearance, and didn’t know what she was doing. When she checked into the high-end hotel, she said she was visiting from South Africa (perhaps to avoid having to give a local address) and that her name was Teresa Neele. This seems an unlikely coincidence. Because Agatha Christie’s name and face were on the front pages of newspapers distributed at the hotel, there seems to be one of only two possibilities: Agatha truly didn’t know who she was, or didn’t want anyone else to know.

But as with everything connected to this enduring mystery, nothing lines up neatly. If Agatha really was herself, why wasn’t she more discreet in attempting to conceal her identity? Why was she dancing the Charleston at a spa hotel when nearly all of England was searching for her, by air and land? Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who Agatha deeply respected, joined in the hunt – bringing a glove left in the Morris Cowley to a medium, who said, correctly, that the missing author was still alive.

Agatha never gave anything close to a complete account of her disappearance, and skipped right over those weeks in her memoir. In almost every phase of the story there is disagreement and inconsistency, including about who first clocked Agatha. It wasn’t Bob Tappin, but rather a hotel chambermaid, Rosie Asher, who initially suspected Agatha Christie might be staying at the hotel. Agatha had a taste for high fashion that she did not pause during her vanishing. Rosie had noticed the guest’s buckled shoes and a zipper on her purse, the latter rarely seen elsewhere besides magazines at the time, Jared Cade wrote in Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, a well-sourced account that posits Agatha’s disapperance was driven by the bitter betrayal of her husband, not a psychogenic trance (the thesis of Andrew Norman’s more recent book.) Rosie Asher didn’t go to the police, later saying the trouble wasn’t worth her job, so Tappin got the credit for ‘finding’ Christie. It remains unclear if he ever collected the reward.

The Northcastle News, December 16, 1926

Agatha Christie had no shortage of existential grievances, and was given to crying jags and at least one nervous breakdown in the months preceding her disappearance, when she was grieving the loss of her mother to bronchitis. Colonel Christie, who was by all accounts a right cad, had no patience for his wife’s grief or her mother’s previous illness, and his emotional abandoment long preceded his decision to leave her for good. Her mother Clara had warned her not to marry Archie, but Agatha was smitten, and remained so even as the marriage became irrevocably broken. They had a daughter, Rosalie, who was closer to her father than her mother —to Agatha’s chagrin— and was left in the care of hired help when Agatha drove off on December 3, 1926. Rosalie was 7 at the time.  

Before and after Agatha was found, her husband had an interest in controlling the narrative; and by all indications she let him. This is curious. Perhaps Agatha preferred the nervous breakdown explanation Archie offered, and enjoyed a rare event of solidarity —presenting a story that both knew to be false— with the man who had cast her away and cruelly dismissed her pleas for reconciliation. Or maybe she chose not to suffer further humiliation by exposing her husband’s affair; something Archie Christie was quite keen on keeping a secret himself, so as not to embroil his future wife in a scandal. One wonders if Agatha enjoyed watching him squirm. As Cade wrote, Agatha —who insisted on changing into an evening gown when Archie came to fetch her at the hotel, press cameras waiting— seemed intent on making sure her husband “knew what he was missing.”

When Steven Kubacki reappeared after going missing during a cross-country skiing trip 14 months earlier, he made a point to tell reporters that he had “no trouble with girls.” His only trouble, apparently, was having more than one of them. (All overseas; it remains unclear how Kubacki kept up these romances.) He insisted that he was in a perfectly healthy state of mind, despite suffering from apparent amnesia, and would not be seeking any psychiatric help.

Steven Kubacki/LinkedIn

Today, Kubacki is a Seattle-based psychotherapist, and he has ignored my requests to speak with him for nearly three years. As I wrote before, there is good reason to believe Kubacki was not in a so-called psychogenic trance —a stress-induced dissociative state marked by memory lapse— when he was missing between February 1978 and May 1979. What I don’t know is whether Kubacki at any time believed that he had been. It seems clear that with his insiders, he changed his story over time, but I don’t know why, or exactly how.

I’ve been conflicted about the intrusiveness of reporting on a newsworthy event involving someone who, unlike Agatha Christie, is far from a public figure. Naively, when I first came across Kubacki’s story, I believed he would be happy to talk about it; maybe it’s just that no one had asked him about in in four decades. I was very wrong. And I can now think of more scenarios that would make someone in his position reluctant to talk, rather than eager to. 

Many of the people I have contacted or tried to contact have been unreachable or flatly refused to speak to me (including Kubacki’s ex-wife). The Dean of Students at Hope College at the time of Kubacki’s disappearance, who appeared to believe it was some kind of stunt, died before I began researching this project. I feel confident that Kubacki’s roommate at the time knows something, but he hasn’t responded to multiple requests for an interview. And sometimes I have to ask myself: Why would he? As a journalist, I’m still occassionally amazed when people volunteer information under no obligation, with no motive other than getting the truth out. There are often more downsides than upsides. But I supppose that depends on what the truth is.

Besides the roommate and the Dean of Students, I’ve been particularly eager to speak to the people who first encountered Kubacki when he ‘woke up’ in a grassy field in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on May 5, 1979, after he had long been feared dead. As the story goes, Kubacki remembered some of himself and hitchicked to his Aunt June’s home in Great Barrington. The theology student who picked him up later told the Associated Press that Kubacki gave him a different name than Steven. But this person has since been involved in a rather scandalous situation of his own, and did not return any of my inquiries.

After several unsuccessful attempts to reach Kubacki’s aunt by phone, I knocked on her door this fall during a visit to Great Barrington. Dressed in a Saturday morning housecoat, she closed the door in my face, not impolitely. What I saw in her eyes was not anger, but fear. Was it me she was afraid of, or something else?

This chapter closes, for now, with the defeated journalist cliche: I’m left with more questions than answers. And not just about what Steven Kubacki was doing for those untraceable 14 months. What do we have a right to know, and when do we have a right to know it? Is it resources spent, people hurt, the possibility of a government-concealed alien abduction? I’m disappointed with how little I have been able to determine. But I won’t stop asking Kubacki to let me tell his story. 

The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

Part 5: To Teach Her a Lesson

If you’re just arriving, we suggest starting with Part 1, right here.

**CW: This story includes descriptions of graphic violence and trauma.

Steven Kubacki wasn’t the only Hope College student who went missing in the late 1970s. On January 31, 1979, just short of a year after Kubacki vanished during a cross-country skiing trip at the edge of Lake Michigan, Janet Chandler didn’t make it home from her job working the night shift at the Blue Mill Inn in Holland. 

Chandler, 22, was a classical music student at Hope College who, like Kubacki, lived off campus. She had an electric smile and a voice that is said to have brought an audience of enraptured neighbors to her window when she practiced singing at her parent’s home in Muskegon. She came from a deeply religious family, and remained “in the Word,” as her mother described it, right up until her disappearance. 

Just after 2 a.m. on January 31, a hotel guest called police to report a robbery underway at the Blue Mill Inn. On the phone, Robert Lynch said he’d heard from another guest that a man with a deep voice had held up the hotel and demanded money from Chandler, who was working at the front desk. When police arrived, Janet was gone; she’d left behind her coat and a lit cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. Strangely, her purse was later found at her apartment in Briarwood. Her abductor had taken $500 cash from the hotel.

In the parking lot, police saw two sets of footprints in the snow, leading from the hotel to a vehicle that had since driven away with Chandler. 

Lynch was among several dozen visiting guards from the Detroit-based Wackenhut security firm that had been hired by the Chemetron paint plant during a contentious union strike. The guards worked 12-hour-shifts ensuring the strikebreakers could safely enter and exit the plant through the picket line. The picketers and the Wackenhut strike detail, who had essentially taken over the Blue Mill Inn, did not get along. 

The search for Chandler was brief and ended badly. Less than a day after she disappeared, at around 1 a.m. on February 1, a snowplow operator found Chandler’s body—face-up, naked, and partially covered in snow—in a wooded area off Interstate 96 outside of South Haven. A medical examiner determined that she died of strangulation. There was indication of sexual assault, but in 1979, there was no way to connect outside DNA found on her body to an assailant. The clothes she was wearing have never been found. 

Janet Chandler’s story is a winding and dark one, best told in Shaun Assael’s 2007 Glamour magazine feature. 

As the story notes, Chandler’s case may have stayed forever cold if it were not for the work of a former Hope College professor and a group of students who made a documentary about her murder in 2003. “Who Killed Janet Chandler?” includes extended, sometimes probing interviews with Chandler’s parents, former professors, school administrators; along with a number of law enforcement officers who seem perplexed by their own ineptitude. One says Chandler was a victim of a serial killer; another thinks he knows who did it but didn’t have a case that would stick. Some of the interviews are rather focused on Chandler’s perceived social and academic failings. The former Hope College president urges Chandler’s parents towards forgiveness, before they knew who it was they might forgive. 

The documentary, which is available for digital purchase, brought renewed interest in the case, and prompted members of the Holland police force, with the help of the Michigan State Police, to revisit it.

MSP Detective David Van Lopik led the renewed investigation, and flew to Pennsylvania to interview Laurie Ann Swank, Chandler’s roommate and her manager at the Blue Mill Inn. By that time, the investigators had begun to develop a picture of Chandler’s relationships with the Wackenhut guards living at the hotel, who Swank admitted to police were a “wild” bunch. Perhaps in part because of something Swank had told him, Van Lopik became focused on Robert Lynch, who had made the initial 911 call about a purported holdup the morning Chandler was taken. 

Over the course of several months and dozens of difficult interviews, Lynch eventually admitted that the robbery-kidnap story was a lie. The truth was more sinister: Lynch had agreed to make the false 911 report as cover for his fellow Wackenhut guards who were organizing a “surprise party” for Janet. She was blindfolded as she was taken out of the hotel that morning. It’s been said she left willingly, believing she was headed to a celebration in her honor. It’s certain she was unaware of the horror that awaited her.

As the story goes, Swank learned that Chandler had been fooling around with the head guard Arthur Paiva, who was the object of Swank’s attention. Jealous and betrayed, Swank let Paiva know that Chandler had been involved with other guards. His response, apparently without hesitation, was to orchestrate a gang rape that would “teach [Chandler] a lesson.”

What happened next, in Paiva’s guest house on the grounds of the Chemetron plant, is unspeakable and unfathomable in its violence, its spite, its duration. Chandler may have been held there for up to 17 hours, as she was repeatedly, mercilessly violated, with a belt around her neck. Swank admitted to cheering the rapists on, screaming “You bitch!” She wasn’t alone.

A final scribble in Chandler’s notebook was an incisive philosophical question about Biblical salvation, a question she had discussed with her mother during one of their last phone conversations. She had been struggling with notions of faith and judgment in the months leading up to her torture and death. It’s excruciating to imagine what must have been going through her mind as the belt tightened, over and over again. 

Lynch had spent the decades before his confession drinking himself to the edge of oblivion; he could never move on from what he had done. Both he and Swank took a plea deal; Lynch admitted to disposing of Chandler’s body.

In court, Lynch said that he couldn’t tell fiction from reality. 

Swank testified at the trial for the four Wackenhut guards charged in Chandler’s murder; all were convicted, but only Paiva, considered the ringleader, was found guilty of murder in the first degree. He died in prison in 2013, having maintained until his death that he had no involvement, that this sinister ‘surprise party’ didn’t happen at his place or on his watch. 

Swank has since been paroled, and appears to work for a faith-based nonprofit that provides food, housing, and legal services to those in need. She did not respond to a request for comment.

In a press conference following the convictions, Ottawa County Prosecuting Attorney Ronald Frantz said he believed there may have been several more people present at the party where the gang rape and murder took place, but that his office was unlikely to pursue further prosecutions, as additional testimony ran the risk of challenging the convictions. 

“We believe that that the key people have in fact been convicted,” Frantz said.

There has never been an explanation for why no one at the party intervened on Chandler’s behalf when it must have been obvious that her life was in grave danger. Why did anyone believe that she deserved to die for engaging in the same kind of behavior that others were?  And why would Chandler just leave the hotel in the middle of her shift if not by force or threat?

The brutal killing seems to have been driven by exceptionally low stakes. The guards were from out of town and would leave Holland as soon as the strike was over; the women were young students working to make some extra money while they finished their degrees. From start to finish, it’s hard to make sense of why Chandler was killed and why it took so long for police to connect her murder to the guards living at the Blue Mill Inn; some who were interviewed and polygraphed. Did police ever search Paiva’s guest house? Did they even know about it? 

The director of “Who Killed Janet Chandler?,” who I may have inadvertently offended by characterizing the documentary as a student film, declined to participate in this project. He said I had no story if I didn’t have an interview with Kubacki himself, and also that I was a “holy fool” for pursuing Kubacki’s story independently, without a paid contract from a publication. I had no argument. 

He also said that anyone who attempts to go cross-country skiing in the area where Kubacki vanished in February 1978 is “asking for death.” 

Bob Namar, a 1978 graduate of Hope College who didn’t know Kubacki personally but has keen recollections of rumors about his disappearance, says he heard that was exactly what Kubacki was doing.

“At some point he had either been dared or asserted that he could disappear and have nobody know where he was,” Namar said, referring to purported discussions among Kubacki’s crew of fellow Dungeons and Dragons enthusiasts.

“He wanted to be declared officially dead.”

Namar said he heard that Kubacki had retraced his footsteps in the snow to make it appear as though the prints went in only one direction; out towards the icy like.

Kubacki was never declared dead, but Tom Renner, who was a public relations officer at the time, said he and other administrators feared he had drowned under the ice. Kubacki was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in absentia at the 1978 commencement, just under a year after he re-appeared in Massachusetts. Chandler was given no such honor, perhaps because she was more credit hours shy of her degree than Kubacki was at the time of his disappearance.

In contrast to many other U.S. college campuses in the 1970s, Hope College was a place where overprotective parents could send their children with the expectation they might continue to remain shielded from the complicated realities of the outside world. The student population, which hovered around 2,300 in 1979, was overwhelmingly conservative, white, Christian. Acts of civil disobedience were limited to sneaking in bottles of beer or liquor to the dry campus, making sure to avoid some of the more devout students who might snitch.

“At the height of the Vietnam War, the student protest was a candlelight ceremony in the open park,” Namar says. “That was about as radical as it got.”

No one I’ve reached from Hope College has been eager to discuss Chandler’s murder; some said they had never heard about it. Still, at the time, it wasn’t entirely swept under the rug. An article in The Anchor, the school newspaper, detailed the early stages of the investigation, its tone vaguely critical of police. The school held a memorial service for Chandler. And female students interviewed by local media indicated they were nervous about the possibility of a killer on the loose.

A reporter asked Renner if the school planned to tighten security on campus to address the students’ fears. The answer was no. 

“It didn’t happen on campus,” Renner said at the time. “It happened three miles away.”

The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

Part 4: Fireball

If you’re new here, we suggest starting with Part 1.

The men in the House of David grew their hair and beards everlong, in order to look more like Jesus. Their leader, Benjamin Purnell, claimed he was the Seventh Messenger foretold in the Book of Revelations to herald the coming end of days. He and his wife Mary first tried to establish themselves in Ohio in the late 1800s, but were driven out after their teenage daughter died in an explosion at a fireworks factory and the couple refused to attend her funeral. Nonetheless, after Mary and Benjamin re-settled in Benton Harbor, Michigan, in 1903, the House of David easily recruited new members, including two wealthy businessmen who donated acres of land and the equivalent of millions of dollars. 

A simple transaction afforded entry into the commune: Adherents would hand over all their worldly goods to Benjamin, in exchange for the promise of eternal life when Jesus returned to restore the Garden of Eden along Lake Michigan. According to Benjamin, this was imminent. 

The members of the House of David didn’t drink, use tobacco, or have sex – even married couples. But apparently, they were loads of fun, and remarkably self-sufficient. With ample expendable energy, they built a hotel, a zoo, an amusement park with a train running through it;  formed a jazz band, and ran a farmer’s market. Tourists found it all irresistible; no doubt Jesus would feel the same. 

House of David’s most famous export was its baseball team, barnstormers who sold out stadiums throughout North America, in part because of their curious presentation and crowdpleasing hijinks: choreographed dances; disappearing acts with balls that would then magically emerge from their beards. But they were exceptionally good players, with an overall winning average of .750. Disqualified from the major league because of their facial hair, the House of David team was often invited to play major league teams in exhibition games, and sometimes, they won. 

The House of David also operated a lumber outfit on remote High Island, at the very northern point of Lake Michigan. In late October 1921, a crew of 10 or 11 men set out for Benton Harbor, carrying a large shipment of lumber on the Rosabelle. But they never made it. On October 29, 1921, a ferry found the capsized boat some miles from the Wisconsin coast.

All signs pointed to a crash, and the damage suggested the Rosabelle was rammed by a freight steamer. Initially, the local Coast Guard unit hoped the crew had been carried off by the larger boat, as there was no sign of the men even though the wreck was likely discovered fairly soon after whatever disaster befell it. 

But the crew was never found, and neither was any other vessel that might have been involved in a purported collision, which tore the stern out of the schooner. And this was the second unsolved mystery involving the Rosabelle: The ship wrecked in 1921 had been rebuilt and took its name from a vessel that met a similar fate in 1875, near Grand Haven: Capsized boat, looked like a crash, no cause was ever found, and all of the crew was lost. 

Of course, none of this necessarily means that the House of David crew was raptured or carried off through an inter-dimensional portal. In 1921, a bootlegger would have cause to limp away from a crash without reporting it (though a rumrunner probably would have been no bigger than the Rosabelle, and unlikely to cause such extensive damage). Like some of the mysterious vanishings in and around Lake Michigan, there *could* be a practical explanation. It’s just that no one has ever found one. For this, and for the many more unexplained sightings, disasters, and disappearances; the most famous among them the Northwest Orient Flight 2501 tragedy of 1950, which killed 58 people and was at the time the deadliest commercial aircraft disaster in the country. 

Traveling from New York’s LaGuardia airport to Seattle on June 23, the Douglas DC-4 made its last radio contact at 11:13 p.m. while flying over Lake Michigan. The next morning, search crews set out to find the aircraft near the location of its final radio transmission, and found no sign of the plane itself. Later the same day, the Coast Guard discovered an oil slick near Benton Harbor, where they recovered items that could have fallen freely from the plane: Luggage, cushions, blankets, pillows. Eventually, shredded body parts began to wash up on the shore of Lake Michigan. The state of the human remains suggested a mid-air explosion, but the items recovered showed no signs of fire damage. The aircraft has never been found, despite annual searches, and there’s never been any explanation for the disaster. But two police officers reported seeing a strange red light over Lake Michigan about two hours after the plane’s last radio communication. The light hovered in the sky for ten minutes before it abruptly disappeared. 

Years later, on March 8, 1994, hundreds of Michigan residents reported seeing clusters of five or six unusual, cylindrically-shaped objects in the sky, some with colored lights. One observer likened the objects to a string of floating Christmas lights, another described a “fireball with red and green lights falling to Earth.”

A National Weather Service radar operator was among the witnesses. 

"I've never seen anything like this, not even when I'm doing storms," the operator said in a 911 call with a police officer. "These aren't storms." 

The officer on the line was from the police force in Holland, where many of the sightings were concentrated, and where Steven Kubacki was a student at Hope College when he disappeared in February 1978.

The sightings have never been explained.

There are so many of these stories that I can’t get into all of them here, but Cold Dead Hands highly recommends the Lake Michigan Triangle episode of the “Strange Sessions” podcast if you want to know more (you do!)

It’s in that episode that I first heard perhaps the strangest Lake Michigan story of all. This one never made the news. According to an account she published in a blog post, Kathy Doore was part of a competitive sailing crew that had gone for a practice run on Lake Michigan on a hot summer evening, three groups of them in wooden sailboats. In her own words:

Not an hour out of port and quite unexpectedly, a dense fog rapidly descended upon us … The winds were erratic, filling the mainsail from two opposing directions … I leaned over the rail and looked at the surface of the lake. It was calm with little movement. Strangely, a few seconds later as I righted myself, I found I was extremely cold.

I turned toward the helm to ask my crew mates if they too were cold and to my utter astonishment they were no longer standing next to me … Dumfounded, I called out and located them standing up on the aft deck, where it was several degrees warmer. They seemed perplexed, and urged me to join them. That’s when I noticed that no one was steering the boat.

The Captain raised his arms high over his head, gleefully wiggling his hands and fingers in the air, and stated he hadn’t been steering for the past ten minutes. Yet, not one minute before, I was certain he had been standing next to me at the helm.

Draped in dense fog, the vessel began a curious aquatic dance. Slowly, but deliberately, she turned on her axis completing three perfect 360-degree pirouettes, without ever crossing the wind. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the fog vanished. To our utter astonishment, we saw the other two boats all within a few hundred yards of each other, rotating in exactly the same manner.

Kathy goes on to describe feeling the tangible presence of her dead father, and not being able to account for hours of time once the boats returned to port. Stranger still, she says that none of the other sailors would ever acknowledge what happened.

“To my utter astonishment no one would talk about it. Worse yet, they behaved as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The vortical winds alone would have given them fodder for years. It became evident that I was the only one in remembrance.”

This was in early summer 1978, a few months after Kubacki vanished from a cross-country skiing area along the lake, and nearly a year before he would appear again miles away in Massachusetts.

As we mentioned before, the story of Kubacki’s mysterious disappearance and re-appearance lives primarily in the paranormal corners of the internet. A Google search of Kubacki’s name will bring up a number of blog posts, message boards, and podcasts concerned with things like UFO sightings and alien abductions. To my knowledge, Kubacki has never reached out to any of these bloggers or podcasters to ask for any kind of correction or revision. But a reference to his case as an illustration of amnesia in an academic textbook published in the 1980s was removed from future editions, and not arbitrarily.

For a while, I believed that Kubacki had chosen to divorce himself from the experience altogether; perhaps it represented something troubling or traumatic, or maybe he simply didn’t want his life to be defined by something that happened to him when he was barely into his adulthood. But I now have reason to believe that Kubacki is invested in how his story is being told, even if he’s not telling it himself.

I hope to be able to talk more about that soon. Until next time…

“Strange Sessions” co-host Kurt Konecny donated his time and his excellent research notes to help make this chapter possible. Thank you Kurt!

The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

Part 3: News of a mutual acquaintance

For those just tuning in, we highly recommend starting at the beginning.

In May 1979, after Steven Kubacki “woke up” in some kind of greenery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, claiming to have no memory of the past 14 ½ months, he told reporters that he had found with him several items of clothing and personal effects he didn’t recognize as his own. Among those items was a T-shirt from a marathon in Wisconsin.

Having that T-shirt could mean almost anything: Kubacki could have borrowed it, bought it, found it, stolen it, or run the Paavo Nurmi Marathon in August 1978 while in the throes of a profound, sustained episode of amnesia. Running itself demands only muscle memory, but running a marathon requires some form of registration if you’re going to get a T-shirt. The Paavo Nurmi Marathon in Iron County was the only marathon in Wisconsin at the time; the current organizer generously tracked down the race results from 1978 and sent them my way.

Of course I wouldn’t find Steven Kubacki listed, even if he’d run the marathon. If he had amnesia, he wouldn’t have known his own name; and if he was pretending to be forever lost in Lake Michigan, he wouldn’t have used it. I found one runner with the surname Kubacki, a handful of Stevens, and a few names that sounded as though they could have been made up (including one Edward Hopper II), but they are all pretty much accounted for. 

There was another name I was looking for. After Kubacki’s re-appearance made national headlines, a divinity student at Berkshire Christian College in Lenox contacted the Associated Press. He said he picked up a hitchhiker with a “remarkable resemblance” to Kubacki on May 5, 1979, the same day Kubacki re-appeared. The student, Ron Curtis, said this hitchhiker told him he had flown from San Francisco to Boston and taken a bus to Pittsfield. And he called himself Nathan.

“He never said anything to me about waking up on a grassy hill,” Curtis said. 

Curtis said he drove “Nathan” to a house in Great Barrington. It was the home of Kubacki’s aunt, but the hitchhiker told Curtis she was a “friend” he was visiting “with news of a mutual acquaintance who has been missing for some time.”

From his aunt’s house, Kubacki reunited with his family in South Deerfield. His mother told reporters at the time that she hadn’t gotten an explanation for her son’s long absence, and didn’t need one. 

“It’s really just grand,” she said. “The world is a great place again.”

Kubacki’s parents, who were divorced by that time, have both since died. According to his mother’s obituary, she had remarried in 1979. She had her second husband’s name by the time Kubacki re-emerged that year, which means she must have gotten remarried while her son was still missing. In one interview, Kubacki marveled at the amount of money his parents spent on a private investigator to look for him. He said he would try and retrace his steps to figure out where he had been. 

I didn’t find any Nathans in the Wisconsin marathon results, but I did find a “Nat.” This person was listed as several years younger than Kubacki would have been, and from Tokyo. That was curious, as the vast majority of runners were local. Still, if Kubacki were to create an international alias, I figured he’d be from Germany. Kubacki had oft made reference to a girlfriend there. His brother urged police to check flights to Germany after his disappearance. And in an interview with detectives, Kubacki’s roommate said Steven had taken off to Europe for two weeks the year before, and that the roommate had paid for the trip. (The roommate hasn’t yet responded to requests for an interview.)

Tom Renner, who was a public relations officer at Hope College at the time of Kubacki’s vansishing, believes Kubacki owes an explanation to his former classmates and others at Hope College who were shaken up by Kubacki’s disappearance.

“People were worried for his well-being,” Renner said. Eventually, Renner and fellow Hope College staff came to conclude that Kubacki must have drowned. As he was just a few credits away from graduating when he went missing, Kubacki was awarded a Bachelor’s degree in absentia.

“The [1978] commencement was mournful because of Kubacki,” Renner said.

“I would hope a person of conscience would by this point in time come forward to say what happened.”

I’ve been told that Kubacki contacted the school after he reappeared and asked to have a degree reissued, minus the “in absentia.” But those who are in a position to confirm the details of any resulting arrangement have been unable or unwilling to speak about it.

A former member of the administrative staff declined to discuss anything involving Kubacki’s academic or enrollment record, citing FERPA laws. Only Kubacki himself can grant permission to release any records, the source said.

“I hate to leave you in the dark, but he’s left us in the dark for years.”

Photo credit:

Pittsfield, MA, 1977; Jim Joseph video screenshot

The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

Part 2: Dashing through the snow

None of this will make sense without the earlier chapter, right here. 

When I first started digging around into Steven Kubacki’s story, I worried I’d never get a good sense about his initial disappearance on the shore of Lake Michigan in February 1978. There was very little news coverage, the Holland police said they didn’t have any records, and multiple people who were at Hope College with Kubacki said they had never heard anything about it. Even those former students who do remember, like Bob Namar, said Kubacki’s disappearance didn’t have much of an impact at the school: There were no missing persons flyers, no candlelight vigils.  

But after looking over the incident reports from the Michigan State Police (granted via a FOIA request), it’s clear that authorities and Hope College administrators were rather alarmed, and perplexed, when Kubacki went missing. News stories at the time said that officials presumed Kubacki had fallen through the ice and drowned. Now it seems that few were really convinced of that.

The report confirms that it was a group of snowboarders who contacted police to say they had found an abandoned pair of skis on the shore of Lake Michigan, along a trail that began at the St. Augustine Seminary in Saugatuck. Past the skis was a path of footprints in the snow, heading out over the lake, that ended abruptly.

Responding officers found the property left in a “neat orderly manner: The skis were side by side, facing the lake, about eight inches apart. The ski poles were stuck in the snow upright on the outside of the skis. The backpack was sitting on top of the skis,” fully packed.

I don’t know how to consider this image without thinking about the ways that serial killers and hunters truss up their trophies. I’m also reminded of the opening credits of the second season of The Leftovers.

I’d been particularly interested in the positioning of the backpack because of an oft-repeated story among those who believe Kubacki’s disappearance was the result of something paranormal. As that story goes, the backpack wasn’t with Kubacki’s skis during the first search, but showed up in a subsequent search in the same area that had already been thoroughly gone over. I hadn’t been able to find the origin of this theory, and I’m now inclined to believe it was bad information that got stuck in the re-telling. But it will remain in the back of my mind.

I had earlier presumed police had found a driver’s license or some other ID showing these were Kubacki’s belongings; turns out, it was a dentist bill. Michigan State Police arranged for an air search right away, called in the Coast Guard, and interviewed Kubacki’s roommate at the time, who said Kubacki had told him two days earlier that he was going cross-country skiing, as he had many times before. The report suggests that certain people at Hope College believed that Kubacki had engineered the whole thing; some still do. But Kubacki’s roommate told police that he was sure Kubacki met a bad and unexpected fate. If Kubacki had been planning something, he would have let his roommate in on it. In other words: Kubacki wasn’t above faking his own disappearance; he just didn’t, this time. 

Another student said she saw Kubacki the night before he left, and that he was in good spirits, enthusiastically sharing his plans for the upcoming week. She was certain that whatever happened to him was a terrible accident.

On February 19, 1978, the day before the snowboarders found Kubacki’s skis, a couple had seen a young man in the same area, climbing atop piles of jagged ice near the shore. He roughly fit the description of the missing student, but he wasn’t alone: The couple said that a young, petite female with long dark hair was taking pictures of him. When police asked Kubacki’s roommate and the other friend who this girl could be, if she was in fact Kubacki’s companion, they both had no idea. They said Kubacki didn’t have any girlfriends locally; they were all overseas.

There’s an entry in the report about a female student whose name is redacted. It’s not clear if she is the friend police interviewed, the girl he may have been with at the lakeshore, or someone else. But this person stopped going to classes around the time Kubacki vanished; within two or three weeks, she had left campus and gone to live with an aunt in Grand Rapids. She had been deeply distraught when he went missing, and had threatened take her own life, leaving a suicide note for her roommate. I hadn’t heard even a hint of this person before reading the report. 

In the first week of March 1978, Kubacki’s mother called the state police to say that a friend of the family had been getting phone calls directing them to make phone calls of their own, in connection to Kubacki’s disappearance. The names and/or numbers given to the family friend by the anonymous callers are redacted in the report. In one case, the person who called the family friend gave them a number and said they could reach Kubacki there. But when they called, the number was disconnected.

Kuback’s mother went through old phone bills and found that she had gotten a call from her son at that same number in early September 1977, six months before. She said she didn’t know at the time where he was calling from, when she had spoken to him for 15 minutes. Police confirmed that the number had been disconnected later that same month, and tracked down the previous owner of the phone number with the help of Michigan Bell. The name of that person or business is redacted, and it doesn’t come up again in the report. 

The Michigan Bell associate who had been working with the Michigan State Police either refused or was unable to help detectives track down the person or people who had been calling the Kubacki family friend. The police then turned to the Hope College Dean of Students, asking if he had any guesses about who had been making the calls. The dean told them that Kubacki ran with a crowd of about 20 people who were “weird.” He said it could be any of them. 

Kubacki’s brother hired a private investigator with the Fatman Detective Service in Grand Rapids to try and track him down. His brother told police that he didn’t believe Steven had drowned, and thought he might have gone to Germany, where Kubacki’s classmates had told police he had two girlfriends (and another one in France). His brother said that Steven would have definitely flown Icelandic Air out of Chicago if he had gone to Germany. Police requested the flight manifests from the airline, which found no record of any Steven Kubacki on their flights between February 17 and February 21, 1978. 

The police documents show that the search for Steven Kubacki was more intensive and exhaustive than news reports from the time had indicated. Far from writing him off, investigators made repeated searches of the area where he went missing, and stayed in regular contact with people in his circle, probing for more leads. This was a very active missing persons investigation for nearly a year. How did he stay hidden for so long?