This column was published September 7, 2024 in the Manhattan Mercury.
It’s a Saturday morning like any other in Jack Hazelwood’s south Wichita home, except this morning, November 1, 1969, Jack’s packed and leaving for a weekend road trip. He tells his wife and four children he’s bound for a coin and stamp show in Oklahoma City.
Jack closes the front door behind him at 8:30 a.m.
At 32, intent on becoming a millionaire by 34, Hazelwood owns the largest nationwide wholesale coin business in the country, with offices in Wichita, Salina, and Tulsa.
Police investigations reveal that after leaving home, Hazelwood goes to the Wichita airport and signs for a shipment of coins that have arrived via air freight. Later the same day, a man whose handwriting matches Hazelwood’s, but in photos is seen wearing a mustache, picks up a second coin shipment at the airport. An hour later, he enters the downtown Wichita post office, asking about a third coin shipment. This one has yet to arrive.
When Jack Hazelwood walks out of the post office, he will never be seen again. He has vanished, along with $100 thousand in gold and silver coins.
Sunday morning, Hazelwood’s wife learns Jack is a no-show in OKC. On a hunch, she goes to his coin shop and finds it ransacked. The cops find signs of foul play but no forced entry.
Investigators later determine Jack had borrowed large sums of money and engaged in some less-than-above-board business dealings. Leads span the globe. A couple of months after he disappeared, some checks written in the Philippines bear signatures similar to Hazelwood’s.
After that, nothing.
As young men, Jack Hazelwood’s eldest son, Mike, and I are best friends. We meet amid the T-squares and triangles in Drafting class as sophomores at Wichita Heights. Mike gets me a job bussing tables at Angelo’s Italian restaurant. I get him one bagging groceries at Mr. D’s IGA. He turns me on to Steely Dan, fast cars, and other assorted vices. I return the favor with the Alan Parsons Project and Olympia beer.
Sometimes Mike talks about his father’s disappearance. Sadness disguised as bravado in a manner common to teenage boys trying to come to grips with that which simply cannot be gripped. Mike was twelve when his father vanished.
After high school, we room together. He asks me to be his best man when he marries his childhood sweetheart. Mike moves to Colorado, and we drift apart but reconnect over spaghetti and meatballs at Angelo’s. I am eager to see my friend and catch up, but I also have an agenda.
Over the years, Mike came to believe his father got sideways with some shady characters south of the border, was dealt with accordingly and chucked in the Bahia de Campeche.
I want to write a book about Jack’s disappearance. Interview Mike, his mother, and siblings, dig up the known truth, construct a factual chronological framework and fill in the blanks with what I glean from the research.
Does time really heal all wounds? Is more than half a century sufficient to heal this one? I ask my friend to broach the subject with his mother. If there is the slightest crack in the door, agenda item #2 is me pitching her the notion. I’ve not seen the woman in decades. In my memories, she is stoic and sober, ferrying Mike and I to summer school drivers ed. Will she trust me to do the story justice? Mike is intrigued but doubts his mom will be.
His inklings prove true. She’s in her eighties and has zero interest in dredging up the painful past. Can’t really blame her, it must have been devastating and I certainly will respect her wishes.
Why would a 32-year-old family man just up and leave? If he skipped, how did he formulate his escape? Where did he go? If he did get sideways with outlaws, did he think he could outwit them? Is he still alive in Honduras or Fiji?
What was Jack like as a teenager and when he came of age? What forces weigh on a man’s psyche that lead to these heart-wrenching, life-changing, irreversible choices?
Coulda been a helluva book.
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