Some of these career financial sociopaths.
They will take every dime from somebody with no compunction whatsoever.
Basically, this case was a giant senior financial fraud case with a dead body at the end of it.
I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff.
I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation.
Discovery's True Conviction.
And this is Anatomy of Murmur.
So if you're a consistent listener, you've probably heard us use the term sociopath to describe someone incapable of empathy or remorse.
Someone with utter disregard for society's rules and who manipulates others for personal gain.
Today's case has to do with a scammer who had no remorse about siphoning away the life savings of his victim.
Someone we might call a financial sociopath.
It's a label coined by today's guest, former homicide detective Mike Thompson.
Mike spent more than 28 years at the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California.
The Sheriff's Department in Orange County provides police services to to almost every city south of Irvine, and then all of the pockets of unincorporated area.
And we also provide Harbor Patrol services at three different marinas in the county.
For the Orange County Sheriff's Department.
The Homicide Unit handles any missing person case that's viewed as suspicious.
Mike first heard about this case from a colleague in the homicide unit on the Tuesday after a long President's Day weekend in February of 2008.
Mary was assigned to the homicide unit.
She would review most of our missing persons cases.
And so she came into the investigators and said, hey, this came in last night.
This looks really suspicious to us.
The sheriff's department had gotten a call from a woman in Phoenix, Arizona.
She said that her 71-year-old husband, Robert Ventrick, who she called Bob, had flown up to Long Beach three days ago to meet up with a business partner in the seaside town of Dana Point, California.
But she hadn't heard from him since he had checked into his hotel at about 330 pm on the day he'd arrived.
He was supposed to fly home on the 18th and he did not arrive home and he had been not answering his cell phone.
The sheriff's department sent two deputies to the hotel and, as far as the staff knew, Bob was still there and had never checked out.
But no one had seen him since early Saturday morning and they agreed to let the officers into his room to do a welfare check.
Inside, deputies found Bob's laptop on the table, open and still running.
His suitcase was still on a stand with folded clothes inside.
In the refrigerator, they also found insulin, medication that Bob, who had diabetes, took daily.
There was concern that without his medication, a diabetic without insulin can become a life-threatening event very quickly.
Outside, parked in the marina's docks, the officer spotted Bob's rental car, a PT Cruiser.
Another indication that Bob had not left town.
Well, at least not voluntarily.
There was no indication that Bob had done anything after Saturday morning.
And the abandonment of the rental car.
Failure to check out of the hotel room, leaving his personal belongings behind, not returning on his flight home.
All of that led to concern that Bob was missing and that there was a strong belief that foul play had taken place.
Mike and his partner reached out to the missing man's wife and his brother back in Phoenix, who assured police that, while in his 70s, Bob was of sound mind and body and not prone to getting lost or wandering off.
But they did share some information about Bob's planned trip to California.
That immediately raised concerns.
We called and spoke to Carol Bob's wife and we spoke to his brother Fred, who gave us the circumstances.
And it immediately just rang of something very, very suspicious.
But before we learn all of those details of Bob's trip, it's important to know a little bit more about him.
71-year-old Bob Ventrick was a retired software systems analyst with a long and successful career in a booming computer business of the 1980s and 1990s.
He'd been involved in the early computer industry, living in San Jose.
And when he retired in the early 2000s, that's when he and his wife had sold their house in San Jose and moved to Phoenix.
But even in retirement, Bob was always on the lookout for the next big thing.
There were fortunes being made in Silicon Valley, and Bob's wife said that he spent a lot of time online chasing down investment opportunities.
Seniors are always worried about outliving their money or hoping to have something to leave behind.
So they're always looking for ways to grow whatever nest egg they have.
And I never met him.
But Bob struck me as kind of the type of senior who was just trying to grow his money, hopefully to leave some to his children and grandchildren.
Of course, this was during the height of the first dot-com boom and lots of money was flowing into startups in Southern California.
And, like the gold rush of the previous century, there was also plenty of speculators looking to cash in, including Bob.
There was just an explosion in Internet companies making money, some just ridiculous money.
And he was dabbling, trying to make money in various Internet opportunities.
Now.
Bob's expertise in computer software made him a pretty savvy judge of the market, but his family also described the salt of the earth Bob as sometimes being a bit too trusting, which they attributed to his upbringing on a farm in Indiana.
And recently, they said he'd fallen victim to a few multi-level marketing schemes.
Most of these speculative investments had gone to one person in particular, a large man with a larger-than-life personality named Gary Shockey.
If you're sitting at a bar traveling and you just want to watch the game and have a drink, Gary's the guy who comes up and just starts talking to you.
According to Bob's wife, her husband had first met Gary Shockey online about five years ago and he was promising big returns on tech investments.
If you go back to the early 2000s, there was a lot of money to be made on the internet and Gary was meeting people and proposing various schemes.
Bob had met Gary on the internet and had started giving money to Gary to forward various business ventures.
But according to Bob's wife, most of those investments had not paid off and Bob had already squandered a lot of their nest egg on Gary's schemes.
She tried to get him to stop, but he just couldn't.
It was like he was addicted.
In fact, she'd even gotten Bob to enroll with Gamblers Anonymous for a while.
But then, several weeks before his disappearance, she'd found out that he'd opened up a PO box to communicate with Gary behind her back —.
Gary had apparently talked Bob into setting up a company bank account for some new scheme of his one that would require Bob to meet up with Gary in person in the seaside town of Dana Point.
I don't think the family knew any real details on what the business was supposed to accomplish.
Bob told his family that Gary had a computer program that the US government wanted, but it was a clandestine agency.
That's why they had to go to San Clemente Island.
San Clemente Island is about an hour and a half southwest of Dana Point by boat.
It's owned by the U.S.
Navy used for training exercises and bombing tests for all sorts of top-secret government activities.
You can't just step foot onto San Clemente Island.
It's a Navy base.
They needed to go out to San Clemente Island to sign off this contract because this government agency is super top-secret clandestine, etc etc.
Bob's wife was skeptical, and she insisted that Bob hire an attorney to advise him.
Maybe he needs to hear it from somebody else to stop.
How can we protect this investment going forward?
And the attorney tried to talk Bob out of participating in it.
The attorney didn't think that there was any legitimacy to the investment.
In fact, the lawyer even sent Gary a strongly worded letter asking for documentation of his various business ventures or face legal consequences.
But he never got a reply.
Bob, against all advice, decided to go through with Gary's plan anyway.
So he packed a bag, hired a rental car and checked in to the Dana Point Hotel.
He just had a belief in Gary.
He couldn't shake.
But then also just the fear that if I walk away from Gary, all the money I've ever given is forever going to be gone.
And maybe, maybe this one time Gary's telling me the truth and this is going to work.
Instead, Bob Vendrick had simply vanished.
Had he fallen victim to foul play, an unlucky accident?
It was still a mystery.
And there was always the possibility that Bob's disappearance was entirely of his own making.
If you're over 18 years old, you're not under any obligation to report to anybody.
I mean, you could take off and start a new life if that's something you want to do.
People might go missing because they're being investigated for a criminal case or they have other issues.
But in Bob's case, that seemed pretty unlikely.
He was a man of routine with strong family and community ties.
He's a 71-year-old man.
He had a very predictable pattern to him.
He was very well established in his community.
As a retiree he was delivering meals on wheels and doing other things for homebound seniors and things like that.
And if he had decided to run off, he would have left some kind of digital trail.
We had checked his credit cards, his checking account, and after Friday night there was zero activity on any of his financial accounts.
We wrote a search, wanted to do an emergency ping on Robert's phone.
I mean, granted, this is 2008, but still people carry their phones everywhere with them.
And if you find their phone, oftentimes you find them.
There was no response on his phone and there was no result on the ping, meaning that the phone was completely off the network.
Contrary to what people often think, it's actually really hard to go off the grid.
Obviously, that takes resources to do that.
999 of the population doesn't have the sophistication to completely go off the grid and start a new identity or anything like that.
But that's certainly a possibility.
So in a law enforcement sense, let's talk about what this really means here.
Most missing persons reports turn out to be cases of individuals who are seeking some solitude or dealing with a personal crisis.
But a significant minority hide darker truths.
It's taking those early steps.
Usually Anasig, as you know.
The first sign comes in the form of an unusual lack of contact or communication, such as a sudden shutdown of the victim's phone, social media, credit card use that deviates from the norm.
And for all you keeping a score at home, in law enforcement terms, we call that a pattern of life.
Unexplained gaps in digital or financial footprints suggest that the person may have not left voluntarily.
But again, it's hard for people to just go as it's been termed here, like go off the grid, right?
Because we use credit cards, we use cell phones, we use computers.
And here we knew that Bob had used a credit card to rent the car that was still at his hotel.
There was nothing to indicate that Bob was voluntarily missing on his own.
But given Bob's string of recent financial losses, there was another, grimmer possibility.
The idea that Bob may have committed suicide was something that we had considered, but people can't secrete their bodies when they commit suicide.
You know, there's a body somewhere that is usually discovered.
The fact that it wasn't in his hotel room, his rental car was still there.
Yeah, he could have walked in the marina and dived into the ocean, but that just seemed a remote possibility.
And his profile did not suggest any other kind of risky or violent behavior.
In the homicide unit.
Hey, somebody was going to go meet somebody for a drug deal and they never returned.
You know, somebody was going to go meet an escort services and something happens to them.
Bob was not engaged in any other high risk behavior that would lead us to believe that something happened to him.
Police were convinced that Bob was not lost.
He had not run away or gone to California to take his own life.
They believed his disappearance did have something to do with the man he had planned to meet, Gary Shockey.
According to the plan he had shared with his wife, Bob was supposed to join Gary on his boat and sail to San Clemente Island to finalize whatever deal Gary had cooked up.
A trip that, according to surveillance cameras at the Dana Point Marina, started off exactly as planned.
We had gone down to the marina and obtained surveillance video of Bob going to the marina and getting on the boat.
The video showed someone on the boat turning on the light at about 558 am that Saturday morning, so it was early.
And then about a minute later, Bob's rental car pulls up right into a spot.
And at about 7.04 a.m., another camera shows that same boat pulling away from the dock.
And here's a place that canvassing actually really works out for investigators.
Mike and his partner located a fuel dock attendant who had seen a man matching Bob's description on board when it stopped for gas before motoring out into the bay.
And it was the last time anyone ever reported seeing Bob Vendrick.
Investigators hoped that Bob's hotel room might hold more clues.
And while there were no immediate signs that there was anything amiss, a forensic analysis of Bob's laptop revealed a series of disturbing emails that revealed just how much Bob had been victimized by Gary's schemes over the years.
But the most telling was a recent email from Gary detailing how they were going to recoup all of Bob's losses.
Gary supposedly had this software that the US government, that the CIA or the NSA or some clandestine agency wanted for their purposes.
But according to Gary, there was just one catch.
He needed $100,000 to show the government that they were a legitimate company.
It almost struck me as like a drug deal where you do flash money, right?
You got to show the person you're buying dope from that you've got money.
To finalize the deal, Bob would have to fly to Long Beach and join him on the trip to San Clemente Island.
They were supposed to go out to this Navy base and sign this contract.
And once this contract was signed, they're almost immediately going to get 12 million and then some type of royalty payments or annual payments.
So Anna Singer, just you know, reading this now, I can't help but think it sounds too good to be true.
And as you know, easy money usually is.
So, why do you think Bob believed him, especially after this string of previous losses?
Well, I think some of the info we're getting leads us to think that maybe it's similar to a phenomenon that's familiar to some people who have kind of fallen prey, at least, to a certain type of gambling, whether it be compulsive gambling or just lost more than they'd planned.
You know, the more you lose, the more frantic you are to get back to even.
Seniors who are victims of a financial abuse kind of reminded me of the person who goes to Vegas and loses a bunch of money.
And then they start on this cycle of taking money out of the ATM and they just want to get back to even
And they throw good money after bad, just trying to get back to even.
And that seemed to be the cycle that Bob was stuck in. just trying to get his money back.
Once he got his money back, he was going to kick Gary to the curb and be done with him forever.
And so according to emails, Bob agreed to fund this one last deal.
They drafted an LLC and a strict payment schedule that Gary was supposed to adhere to.
And they drafted all this in the week prior to Bob leaving.
They opened up this Wells Fargo account.
But now Bob was missing, and so was his partner, Gary Shockey.
So Gary became a person of interest very quickly.
Investigators assumed that Shockey was the second man spotted with Bob on the boat.
That left data point, which meant that there was a good reason to believe that he had firsthand knowledge of Bob's whereabouts.
But given his background, tracking him down would not be easy.
We had contacted Gary's wife and she had not heard from him in some time.
He was quite the elusive character.
I mean, he was living in Virginia.
He'd been in Florida.
He had been in Ohio.
I started looking at this case and Just some preliminary internet searches of Gary.
He was fascinated with Tony Robbins as a motivational speaker and he repeatedly tried to launch himself as a motivational speaker.
One of the telemarketing companies that he tried to launch.
There was a video floating around on the internet where he's driving around in Beverly Hills in a limousine with Some people throwing 100 bills around drinking Dom Perignon champagne.
There was a video floating around on the internet where he held the world record in firewalking.
There was also plenty of evidence indicating that Gary's reputation as a con man had been well-established.
Back then, there was one website called the Ripoff Report.
If you go to ripoffreportcom you look at Gary Shockey.
There's reports that go back to him on the early 2000s.
Ripoffreportcom is a site that hosts unfiltered, anonymous complaints about allegedly fraudulent businesses or individuals.
None of it is verifiable, but in Mike's experience on sites like this, where there's smoke, there's usually fire.
He supposedly had a camp in Ohio that was going to be for handicapped and special needs kids that burned down suspiciously in a fire.
There was reports of him taking 500000 from a doctor's wife who had taken her life when Gary didn't pay back.
There was another business of his, supposedly in Florida, where he was going to be like Make-A-Wish Foundation, where kids suffering terminal diseases could get free trips to Disney World.
And he solicited investments there.
So all of those were coming up as we were looking into Gary.
And it just set up all kinds of red flags in my mind.
And Mike would know.
So I'd come to the homicide unit from working economic crimes.
We did a lot of identity theft cases but I really gravitated to.
I called them financial sociopaths, the career fraudsters who would persuade people on various business schemes to invest money with them.
And literally squandered the money.
Some of these career financial sociopaths, they're more sociopathic than some murderers.
They will take every dime from somebody, turn them out cold, naked and hungry on the street and with no compunction whatsoever.
To Mike.
Gary's secret government software deal clearly sounded like just one more way for Gary to take Bob's money.
I've never signed a government contract for a clandestine government agency, but I'm pretty sure they're signed in GSA buildings and metropolitan areas all over the United States every day.
You don't need to go to San Clemente Island to sign a contract. government contract.
So the story itself just on its face seemed very suspicious.
Gary's criminal background didn't suggest he was dangerous or violent, but Mike had learned enough to know that anything was possible.
And desperate people can resort to desperate measures.
I was convinced fairly early on that Gary had murdered Bob.
Basically, this case was a giant senior financial fraud case with a dead body at the end of it.
Which is why he was shocked when, not long after he had developed that theory, he received a phone call from out of the blue, from Gary Shockey himself.
Shockey said he'd just gotten back to Dana Point on his boat and he wanted to talk.
The last time anyone saw a retiree, Bob Vendrick was Saturday morning setting sail in a boat with his business partner and serial scammer, Gary Shockey.
Three days later, to everyone's surprise, Gary reached out to Detective Mike Thompson of the Orange County Sheriff's Department.
That one interview outside of the aquarium.
That was the very first interview on February 19th and that was in person.
Gary expressed surprise and concern about his missing business partner and gave his version of the events to detectives, events that, according to Gary, had nothing to do with an impending business deal.
Gary had come out a couple days earlier and he had purchased this 1969 sailboat that was not in the best of shape.
It was 25, 30 feet.
It was just a boat like I would buy if I wanted to go take it out for a weekend.
Gary claimed that he and Bob were not going to a secret base on San Clemente, but had planned to take a leisurely sail to Catalina Island, a well-known tourist destination.
What's more, it wasn't just going to be the two of them.
According to Gary, Bob was planning to bring his mistress.
We're going to use the name Cindy to protect your identity.
One of the kinks that did come up was that Bob had a mistress that he had drive down and spend the night with him.
That was a wrinkle that we had to nail down.
That Friday evening, Gary claimed that he rented a slip and slept on the boat, while Bob and Cindy stayed in the hotel room.
The plan was for him and Bob to take the boat over to Catalina and meet up with Cindy there.
There's large passenger boats that ferry 100 people at a time out to Catalina, called the Catalina Express.
And so Bob's mistress was going to take the Catalina Express out and Gary was going to pilot Bob and his mistress around on kind of a romantic weekend on this beat up 1969 sailboat.
But Gary claimed that once they got the small boat out on the big waves, Bob had a change of heart.
Gary claimed that they went out.
Bob got scared and he dropped them off at another place in the marina.
And unfortunately, there is no video there.
So we can never prove that Gary did or did not drop him off.
He said Bob had told him he was going to get Cindy check out of the hotel and meet him on Catalina.
So Gary went ahead and made the voyage, and that's where he'd been for the past three days.
And according to him, Bob and his so-called mistress just never showed up.
There was video obtained from the doc showing the two men leaving together, seeming to verify at least the beginning of his story.
But beyond that, what Gary said sounded pretty far-fetched.
If you want to come out with your partner and have a romantic sailing trip around Catalina, there are some very nice sailboats that people will charter.
You're not going to do that in a 1969 sailboat that has seen much, much better days.
Every story he told was just absolutely preposterous.
Gary Shockey went on to tell detectives that Bob had been talking about leaving his wife.
So when he spotted a large duffel bag in Bob's hotel room containing several hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, he figured Bob was setting that plan in motion.
According to Gary Shockey, after their sale to Catalina, Bob and Cindy the woman he said was his mistress were heading first to Daytona Florida for bike week and then for a longer trip through Mexico and South America.
And the cash was supposed to be a nest egg for their new life together.
But when Bob and Cindy didn't show up on Catalina, he assumed they'd taken the cash and gone ahead without him.
It's plausible, especially without evidence to contradict anything Gary Shockey was saying.
But the more he spoke, the more detectives noticed something interesting.
There are multiple times where he referred to Bob in the past tense.
Bob was a friend of mine.
Bob was my best friend.
To detectives.
It was an ominous slip that Shockey knew more about Bob's fate than he was letting on.
After hearing Gary Shockey's story, detectives immediately reached out to the supposed mistress of Bob's.
But to their surprise, it turned out that Gary was, at least in part, telling the truth.
She lived in a community in Northern California.
I had a patrol officer go and make contact with her.
And she admitted that they had had a relationship in the past and now they were just friends.
And she had come down to meet him.
So, in addition to Gary Shockey, there was now a second person who had been with Bob in the hours before he disappeared.
As you can imagine, detectives were eager to see if her version of events matched up with Gary Shockey's.
And according to this woman, who we've said we're gonna call Cindy, she had in fact spent Friday night at the Marina Inn with Bob, but that there'd been no plan for a romantic sale in Catalina.
Instead she said that Bob had told her he was headed off with Gary to go clear some big money-making deal.
She did validate the story that Bob was going to get on a boat with Gary to go sign this contract.
And she pleaded with Bob not to get on this boat, but that Bob was scared that if he didn't get on the boat that all his money would forever be gone forever.
Also, according to Cindy, Bob assured her that he'd be back later, although he couldn't say exactly when.
He never invited her along, nor did he mention anything about running off together anywhere.
He just took his wallet and his cell phone and left.
So you have these two versions of events.
But in both cases, Bob has a large bag of cash.
Whether that was for this supposed business deal or for running off with this woman, that's still unknown.
Which meant that investigators had two viable suspects with at least some motive to part Bob with his money.
And continuing to dig into Cindy's story.
She told investigators she stayed in the hotel room all day on Saturday.
But Bob never returned.
So on Sunday morning, she had left.
Her fear and concern that something bad had happened to him seemed really genuine.
And she had no love for Gary Shockey, someone she clearly didn't trust, her being a source for the disappearance, either Bob hiding out with her or her facilitating his disappearance was pretty quickly eliminated.
But police still didn't have any evidence to prove that Gary Shockey was lying about the last time he had seen Bob Vendrick.
So they turned out to the phone company in hopes that a log of all Bob's incoming and outgoing cell calls might shed some light on his disappearance.
The cellular provider was able at that time, at least to provide us the content of the voicemails.
He's getting these voicemails from family members and loved ones, and he's not calling back anybody.
I think it was Friday night.
There had been no outgoing activity on Robert's phone, which again seemed very suspicious.
But there were plenty of incoming calls that Saturday and voicemails all left by the same person Gary Shockey.
And there was 13 or so voicemails from Gary on Saturday morning that he had left on Bob's phone.
At 1106 am, Gary had left a message saying he was halfway to Catalina and that he hoped Bob had made it on the Catalina Express Ferry.
Then he left several more messages updating his progress.
By 4 pm that same day, Gary's messages started sounding concerned, asking why Bob hadn't called him back.
On the face of them, the messages did seem to support what Gary Shockey had told detectives.
But it also could indicate a careful plot to establish some kind of alibi.
So the next day, detectives brought Gary back in for more questioning and also to collect evidence.
I got a court order that Gary submit to what we call major case prints and photos, where we basically take all kinds of pictures of somebody to see if they have scratch marks cuts, any indication of a fight.
We'll take DNA samples and all of that stuff.
The result of those samples?
There were no signs that Gary had gotten to any kind of physical struggle.
Over the next 48 hours.
The detectives set out seeking other evidence that could either prove or disprove Gary's version of events.
We talked to the people who sold him the boat and they said yeah, that he had no interest in really learning how to sail.
Gary didn't know anything about sailing.
Which is probably why Gary then headed to a local marine and hardware store where he was seen buying an outboard motor for the boat.
According to one witness at the store, Gary also purchased a handheld depth finder, a paint tray and roller and one item that struck detectives.
Kind of odd –.
An $18 river anchor meant to secure a small craft in shallow waters.
And it's for holding your boat on the shore if you're lake fishing and you roll up on a lake and it's just to keep your boat from floating out there.
Now, I'm no boating expert, but from the sound of this it kind of sounds like this anchor would be absolutely inappropriate for use in the ocean.
Definitely would not work in deep water on a seagull.
You're totally right.
And what's more, his boat already came with one of those deep ocean anchors.
Previous boat owners said the boat had already come equipped with two called Danforth anchors.
There was no purpose for this river anchor that Gary had purchased.
Unless, of course, he intended to weigh something down other than his boat.
So detectives decided to execute a search warrant on Gary's sailboat in hopes of uncovering more clues.
But it was what they didn't find that got their attention.
That river anchor was missing.
There was no blood.
There was no evidence that there was a violent struggle, but the only thing missing was a 71-year-old man, a river anchor and a length of rope.
It was all Gary would have needed to commit a murder at sea.
Bob was a somewhat frail 71-year-old man and Gary was a big 42, 43-year-old guy and Gary would have had no problems doing Bob.
Witnesses corroborated Gary's story that when he showed up with his boat on Catalina he was alone and that he stayed on the island until Monday before motoring his sailboat back to Dana Point.
And it turned out that his first stop back on the mainland was at a bank to make a sizable withdrawal from an account he shared with Bob.
Gary had gone to Wells Fargo the day after President's Day and he wanted to take out the whole 100000.
But by then Bob had been reported missing and the account had been frozen, not by the police but by Bob's brother, Fred.
Unbeknownst to Gary, Bob's brother had contributed $40,000 to that $100,000.
When Bob came up missing, Fred had initiated a freeze on the 40000, which caused Wells Fargo to put a freeze on the remaining amount, And it fell in my wheelhouse because I'd come from fraud.
I was able to get a court order freezing the entire amount.
And Gary only was able to get a limited amount of money out of that account.
Detectives brought Gary Shockey back again for another interview.
Investigators asked him the obvious questions.
If there was no business deal, then why the need to withdraw $100,000 from the bank account?
Gary's answer.
It was a gift from Bob to cover Gary's day-to-day expenses and their business ventures.
Gary claimed that part of Bob's investment was to convert this 1969 sailboat into a commercial lobster fishing vessel.
Marine experts are like, no, it's a pleasure craft.
It's not a commercial fishing vessel.
But in case that was hard to swallow.
Gary also said the money was to pay for their planned meetup in Florida later that month at Daytona Bike Week.
That part of the money was to buy Harley Davidson motorcycles for them to ride around in Bike Week in Daytona.
The practiced alleged con man seemed to have an answer for everything.
But his fast talking would also prove to be his undoing.
Gary claimed that part of the money that Bob gave him was to go to fund a security venture for this Chilean abalone farmer, which we thought was a preposterous lie.
But then we found the hotel in Huntington Beach where Gary had stayed.
And it turned out they had hosted an international fish suppliers conference.
And we found Carlos, who was in fact a Chilean abalone farmer.
And so the guy came up and he was just polite with Gary talking about yeah, I'm a Chilean abalone farmer.
But he says, no, I don't have any security problems with my underwater abalone farm.
Gary's stories kept shifting, but one thing stayed remarkably consistent.
He insisted that Bob had been intending to leave his wife forever, flee the country and disappear without a trace.
Gary's claims kept spinning the more he spoke.
Bob hated his wife, hated his family, and this 71-year-old Caucasian man, who didn't speak any Spanish, was going to flee to Mexico and live out the remainder of his life in Mexico off of this duffel bag full of cash.
That was Gary's defense that Bob had left on his own and went south of the border.
When the detectives asked why he bought that extra river anchor, Gary was also ready with an answer.
He claimed that the Danforth anchors, he had tried them and he wasn't satisfied with them.
So he purchased this river anchor to test it to see if it would be better.
Once he realized it was useless, Gary said he dropped the river anchor overboard into the bay.
But detectives couldn't help but wonder if it had served a more nefarious purpose.
I was convinced that he had tied it to Bob and thrown him overboard.
If that was the case, it presented yet another hurdle for detectives, because it would mean that Bob's body may likely never be found.
The ocean shelf off the coast of California drops off to thousands of feet very, very quickly, within a quarter mile.
So anything dropped down there, you're never, ever, ever going to find it.
Mike was fairly sure that Gary Shockey had murdered Bob Vendrick.
But with little evidence, and more importantly, no body, they couldn't yet prove it.
And they had to let him walk.
To make their case, the detectives would need either a body or a confession.
But at this point, neither was looking likely.
That was the dilemma where we were at.
In Orange County, California.
The more Detective Mike Thompson and his partner looked into the disappearance of 71-year-old Bob Vendrick, the more convinced they were that A he was dead and that B his one-time business partner and alleged scam artist, Gary Shockey, was responsible.
But Shockey disagreed, and he told them so when he unexpectedly phoned the detectives a few weeks later, on March 5th.
He said he was calling from Daytona, Florida, and that, yeah, he had just heard from Bob.
Gary had called us after he had left because Bob was supposed to meet him at Bike Week.
He insisted that he was in Daytona Beach.
There's a popular bar there.
And the bartender's like, yeah, Bob was just here.
And Bob said he has significant illness, that he's going to die, and you're never going to find him.
According to Gary, this bartender said that Bob had developed dementia and didn't want to be contacted by police.
He said he was headed off to Mexico and wanted everyone to stop looking for him.
To the detectives, the whole thing sounded absurd.
It was clear that this 71-year-old man, he didn't have the resources to go live in Mexico.
And we reached out to the bar and the guy says, no, I don't have male bartenders during bike week.
It sounded like yet another tale being spun by an expert con man.
But investigators hoped that with enough persistence they would eventually find the evidence to expose all his lies.
In May, we flew out to Virginia.
Gary was not at home.
He was driving a cab in Florida, but we'd executed a search warrant at Gary's residence.
We had seized computers, documents, and things.
We were trying to put together a financial picture.
For the next three months.
Detectives conducted a detailed investigation of Gary Shockey's finances, which is a specialty of Mike's.
All the financial records show that Gary just squandered the money on buying cars and all kinds of stuff.
He loved high-end dining and Dom Perignon champagne.
The amount of money Gary just burned through and just squandered is just shocking.
On May 8th Shockey once again called the Orange County Sheriff's Department to say he'd heard from Bob.
And this time, the story got even more convoluted.
Gary had left a voicemail that he was at a state park in Florida, because Bob told him if I'm ever looking for you, go to the state parks and I'll find you in a state park.
And while he's camping in the state park, the bartender that we didn't believe existed rode up to him on a Harley, handed him a cell phone and said Bob, we'll call you, and rode away.
And lo and behold, no sooner had he ridden away that the cell phone called and it was Bob.
And Bob wanted Gary to meet him at Matamoros across from Brownsville, Texas.
According to Shockey, even though Bob had left his passport back home in Phoenix, somehow he managed to walk across the border from Brownsville Texas, over to Matamoros, Mexico.
And so following Bob's instructions...
Gary Shockey went to the U.S.-Mexico border.
He claimed that Bob was staying in a hotel in Matamoros and then told to meet him in Juarez, across from El Paso.
And Gary rode there and met him there.
The story was getting just stranger and stranger.
So why was Gary Shockey trying so hard to convince detectives that Bob was still alive?
Well, it seems the answer really comes down to one of the oldest motives in the book money, the cash that was tied up in that Wells Fargo joint bank account.
I really do think the fact that this money was frozen was what motivated Gary.
Gary kept wanting us to go to the judge and get the 100000 released to him, because it was being held by court order.
I said hey Gary, if you want this 100000, give us a picture of Bob with you and a copy of the local day's paper, like you're seeing, with Osama bin Laden.
And Gary says, I will get Bob.
But that photo never materialized.
And Shockey's lies, as usual, were easy to disprove.
We sent a consulate official to this hotel where Bob was supposedly staying at.
And of course, there was no record of Bob staying there.
The next time Shockey called them, the detectives were ready for him.
My partner had one of the best questions.
He summarized the whole story.
And he says, if we put this before 12 jurors, what are they going to say?
And Gary finally says, well, the jurors would vote that Bob is dead, that I killed him.
And then we asked him, is that what happened?
And Gary said no.
And that kind of ended the interview.
It was amazing to me how you know if I catch you in a lie.
I would think you would learn that.
Hey, Mike's paying attention.
I'm not going to lie again.
You know, I'll be a little more obtuse or, you know, whatever.
But Gary would tell very specific things and just outlandish lies.
I don't think Gary was used to people calling him on his lies.
Still, Shockey had to somehow convince police that Bob was still alive in order to get his hands on the rest of the money in that bank account.
And he really, really needed that money.
By this time in Gary's life he was such a character on the internet he couldn't scam people anymore.
Nobody was giving Gary any more money.
We talked to him repeatedly in interviews.
Why is that money yours?
Why should it not go back to the brother and his wife?
And he said, well, Bob said it's my money.
And it's my money.
Gary would not sign a release to any claim on that money.
He desperately wanted that $100,000.
But all the wild stories Shockey told just gave investigators more ways to undermine his credibility.
Eventually they hoped that a jury might wonder why Shockey kept lying, unless he was the one responsible for Bob's disappearance.
And you know Scott, it does come down to those things that we talk about, which is it's anything but a confession.
It's almost like the opposite that you're disproving, like all the nonsense that he's saying, which really can prove to be an investigator's hoped it would be as powerful as they broke it down bit by bit.
Yeah, clearly Shockey.
Anasika was a snake oil salesman who really had the gift of gab and was able to convince relatively intelligent people to give him boatloads of money.
But when it came to convincing the investigators that his story made sense, since this is a criminal investigation where the facts and evidence you know let's also not forget common sense are so critical.
He didn't have a trusting audience in that interrogation room with those investigators.
It took a little bit over a year for getting the information and the facts that gave us the probable cause to believe that we could prevail before a jury.
As much as I would like to stand on a table and beat my chest to talk about a great homicide investigator I was.
It was truly a team effort.
There were 10 investigators assigned to the homicide unit.
So it was just a long, long grind.
I think we had over 26 hours of interviews with Gary. over the course of a year.
But would it be enough to convince a jury that Gary Shockey had, in fact, murdered Bob Vendrick?
When I turned in my case to the prosecutor, I had 15 five-inch three-ring binders.
When I finally gave him everything, it was just yeah, we didn't have a body and we didn't have a confession.
I don't think there was just one thing wrong.
I think just cumulatively, everything was what was ultimately persuasive.
By this time, Shockey wasn't hard to find.
He was in jail in Virginia on unrelated charges for writing bad checks.
So the detectives flew out to talk to him one last time.
We had flown back with the intent on clarifying something.
And as soon as that interview was over, one of my partners here in Orange County walked an arrest warrant through.
Gary Shockey was extradited to Orange County and formally charged with first-degree murder for financial gain, grand theft and a special circumstance enhancement for theft exceeding 200000.
Murder for financial gain is a special circumstance that, if the jury finds true, makes your sentence life without the possibility of parole.
Mike believes it was when Bob's attorney threatened legal action that Gary Shockey decided to cross the line from financial fraud to murder.
Gary's first stint in jail in his life was less than 30 days.
And he hated it.
He absolutely hated jail.
And I think Gary was terrified that if Bob turned him into the police, that he would go to jail.
And there was no more money to get from Bob.
So I think Gary knew Bob was out of money.
He had squeezed every last drop that he was going to get out of Bob.
Based on the evidence, Mike believes that Shockey saw only one way out.
Pull off one last scam, take his mark for a hundred grand and then get rid of him.
And he already knew how he was going to do it.
We interviewed one business partner who said that Gary was complaining about one of his business partners.
And Gary said, yeah, you take him out of boat and no body, no crime.
At trial, prosecutors presented a timeline of Shockey's manipulative emails, the suspicious circumstances of that boat trip and the huge inconsistencies in Shockey's accounts.
As for how exactly he killed Bob Vendrick well, investigators and prosecutors could only speculate based on what they knew.
That is somewhat of a mystery.
We just believe at some point Gary overpowered Bob.
And either tied him to the anchor and threw him overboard where he was drowned, or he suffocated him, strangled him.
We don't know.
We just don't know.
The defense argued that Bob could have simply chosen to disappear.
And without a body, it was impossible to know if he was actually dead.
The jurors get the case and it's like, all right, smoke him if you got him.
I mean, is it going to be days, weeks?
How long is it going to be?
As it turned out, not very long at all. closed in the morning.
And my prosecutor calls me like in the afternoon because they've got a verdict.
They got a verdict.
I barely had lunch.
On June 21 2011, 41-year-old Gary Shockey was convicted of first-degree murder with special circumstances of murder for financial gain, and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
Ironically, it was Shockey's never-ending litany of lies that ended up working against him.
Had he stayed quiet, he may have gotten away with it.
He thought if he could just convince us, we'd release this money.
So I think that's the only reason why.
If Gary would have just walked away from this money, we probably wouldn't have had a case.
At the trial's end, the judge signed an order seizing 79000 from Shockey and turned it over to the Vendrick family.
And he ordered Shockey to pay them an additional $200,000.
But that mattered little given the enormity of what Bob Vendrick's family had lost.
I always hate that when I hear people talk about this murder victim's family is going to have closure, because I don't think that ever happens.
Perhaps they receive a measure of justice that hopefully gives them some peace about what happened.
But I don't think there's ever closure, particularly when somebody's loved one has been murdered.
At least there's some accountability that somebody is going to be held to.
Gary was one of the few financial sociopaths who made that leap from not just taking somebody's money but then taking their life.
And Gary took somebody who was contributing to their society with the same sociopathology that Gary took their money.
For Mike, the case went down as one of the most challenging of his career.
There was times where I didn't think we were ever going to get this case filed, let alone get a conviction.
And I'm grateful to the Sheriff's Department giving us the resources to spend the time working on this case.
I don't know how many investigative hours forensic accountant and computer forensic examiners and marine experts.
And I mean, it was just...
A ton of work.
This story is a painful reminder of how money can warp integrity into violence.
When someone stakes their entire life on illusion, stealing millions from unsuspecting investors, and then resorts to murder to protect that facade, it shows just how far desperation can drive someone.
People and money in the wrong hands become a combustible mix.
The richer the lie, the more dangerous the fallout.
That desperation doesn't just shatter bank accounts.
It destroys lives.
When financial gain eclipses conscious, even the most calculated criminals could cross the line into unspeakable violence.
And that is the true cost of unchecked greed.
Bob Bendrick had worked hard, retired and was enjoying life with his wife and friends, but also still wanted to keep providing and being successful for himself and for his family.
Every time he trusted and gave to Shockey he lost but wanted to believe that with just one more deal he'd get it all back and hopefully, make money at the same time.
Shockey took advantage of Bob's trusting nature.
Bob's family lost a lot of money to Shockey's uncaring scams but, most importantly, also lost their ultimate jewel, Bob Vendrick.
Something, someone, that can never be replaced.
Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder.
Anatomy of Murder is an AudioChuck original.
Produced and created by Weinberger Media and Fresetti Media.
Ashley Flowers is executive producer.
This episode was written and produced by Bruce Kennedy.
Researched by Kate Cooper.
Edited by Ali Sirwa and Philjean Grande.
So, what do you think, Chuck?
Do you approve?
I approve!
