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Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Search for Body
By Jeff Proctor
Journal Staff Writer
Twelve inches of concrete and several feet of dirt are separating Albuquerque police from possibly solving an eight-year-old mystery.
Acting on a tip that master mechanic Michael Snyder's remains are buried beneath a garage at Snyder's former home in the far Northeast Heights, investigators brought in jack hammers and a small front-end loader to start digging.
By nightfall, authorities had not yet recovered a body, partly because the equipment they had to use to get through the thick, concrete, steel-reinforced garage floor had broken down.
Police Chief Ray Schultz said detectives were confident Snyder's body was buried on the property in the 11000 block of Anaheim NE. He said there are suspects in the case but declined to name them.
The chief said no one had confessed to killing or burying Snyder as of late Tuesday, "but there have been suspects since the very beginning."
In January 2002, Snyder, a lifelong Albuquerque resident, walked away from a Phoenix restaurant after arguing with his wife.
He hasn't been seen since.
His mother reported him missing five months later in May 2002.
His wife filed for divorce in April 2002, three months after Snyder's disappearance. She has since remarried.
Four years later, in 2006, APD cold case detectives and the FBI reviewed the file on Snyder's disappearance.
Snyder had left behind a 6-year-old daughter, a six-figure income and the home on Anaheim NE, in North Albuquerque Acres near Paseo del Norte and Lowell, which he had built himself. It was valued at $400,000.
Since he was last seen, Snyder hasn't called anyone or shown up in law enforcement databases — not even for a speeding ticket. In 2005, he missed his father's funeral.
None of it added up for APD's cold case unit. Detectives have long believed Snyder may have been the victim of foul play.
When detectives first took the case, they went to the Anaheim NE home in search of information on Snyder's whereabouts and have returned in the years since. They have always come up empty-handed.
Earlier this week, detectives got a solid tip from a confidential informant that Snyder's body was buried beneath the garage, which was built by a subsequent homeowner around 2006, Schultz said. The home has had multiple owners, and police aren't sure which one built the garage.
The detectives got a judge to sign a warrant and began to excavate what Schultz described as a "very specific" area of the garage on Tuesday morning. He expected the dig to continue today.
At the time he disappeared, Snyder was regarded as one of the best mechanics in the city. He had worked at Casa Chrysler Jeep for more than eight years, had reached the title of master mechanic and was earning more than $100,000 a year.
His tools, valued at more than $40,000, were left at the dealership, police say.
"He was a top-notch mechanic and a top-notch man. He was one of the best mechanics," Monty Roach, a manager at Casa, told the Journal in 2006. "To me, it doesn't sound like he just walked away."
Snyder's sister, Teri Johnson, said in 2006 that her brother had built the house on Anaheim NE "with his own blood, sweat and tears."
Family members say Snyder was close to his daughter and had taken time off to be with her before his disappearance.
Few law enforcement agencies took Snyder's disappearance seriously when he was first reported missing, family members said. Police assumed he would show up. In 2003, his case was removed from the National Crime Information Center's database.
Schultz said the Anaheim NE home is now owned by a private investment company and is rented to a woman.
He said neither the owners nor the tenant had any idea Snyder's body may be under the garage.
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