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Friday, February 05, 2010
Remains Believed To Be Those of Missing Man
By Jeff Proctor
Journal Staff Writer
After 48 hours of digging and a few miscalculations, police Thursday found what they believe are the remains of Michael Snyder at the bottom of a 6- to 8-foot-deep hole on what used to be the master mechanic's property in North Albuquerque Acres.
Detectives expect to make an arrest in the case in the next 24 hours.
Police Chief Ray Schultz declined to say who will likely be arrested. But he said investigators have significant evidence and believe they have a strong case.
Snyder's former wife, Ellen Snyder, told detectives she last saw her husband in January 2002 when he left a Phoenix restaurant after the two argued. She filed for divorce in April 2002 and later remarried.
In 2003, Ellen Snyder told police she had spoken with Michael Snyder and he was fine. Yet Schultz said Thursday that investigators now believe Snyder was killed in 2002.
For two days this week, jackhammers and backhoes were used to tear up a garage floor under which investigators believed Snyder was buried. The search suffered delays when several pieces of equipment broke down trying to get through the thick concrete.
But late Wednesday, police reviewed aerial photographs of the property and recalculated some angles. They determined that, according to their tip, the body would lie west of the garage and that digging through the concrete was not necessary.
So Thursday morning, they started digging about three feet to the west of the garage. Once they reached 6 feet below ground about 1 p.m., police found exactly what they'd been looking for.
"Some of the original information we received was that (Snyder) had been buried in a waterproof tarp," Schultz said. "So when we found the tarp, we stopped digging and called in the Office of the Medical Investigator."
Investigators also found garbage in the hole, which further matched details the informant had provided.
Criminalists were confident the excavation would yield solid evidence, Schultz said, in part because the body had been wrapped in a tarp.
The final six to eight hours of the dig were expected to be of the tedious, painstaking variety, the chief said.
"It will be down to paint brushes and hand trowels," he said. "Based on past experience — and unfortunately, we have more experience with this than we'd like — we will be using a lot of the same methodologies we used at the 118th Street site to complete this phase of the investigation."
Schultz was referring to the excavation of what turned out to be the city's largest crime scene on the West Mesa. That investigation, which led authorities to the discovery of the remains of 11 missing women, began a year to the day before police began digging at the Anaheim NE address.
The chief said it will take the Office of the Medical Investigator as long as two weeks to positively identify Snyder's remains.
Whoever killed Snyder hired a backhoe operator under "false pretenses" to dig at the Anaheim property, police said. That's how Snyder's body got so deep into the ground.
The garage was built later, and police originally thought Snyder's body was under it.
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 mother first reported him missing in May 2002. The case wasn't investigated as a homicide until 2006 when APD cold case detectives reviewed the file and believed Snyder had been the victim of foul play.
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