Disappearance of Brian Shaffer Compared to Solved Disappearance of Eduardo Sanchez

By: Shane Lambert

Published: December 4th, 2020

The case of Brian Shaffer remains a perplexing case when it comes to missing persons. It's a case that I read about recently and certain details of the case reminded me about another case of a missing person, one that disappeared under somewhat similar circumstances. In this article, I will compare the missing person case of Brian Shaffer to the solved case of Eduardo Sanchez as food for thought. My opinion is that Shaffer simply might have entered a crawl space somewhere in the Ugly Tuna Saloona, the business that he visited the night of his disappearance.

Shaffer disappeared in the wee hours of April 1st, 2006. He was last seen at the Ugly Tuna Saloona with surveillance video recording him speaking to two women sometime between 1am and 2am. He then re-entered the bar and, despite video surveillance monitoring the entrances, he has never been seen again. Importantly, the police paid a lot of attention to the surveillance videos on the exits and some attention to cameras in surrounding businesses. Shaffer, to date, has not been seen again. That suggests to me, quite simply, that he remained in the building and maybe even remains there.

Shaffer wasn't the type that could have ducked under a camera recording that easily. According to NamUs, he was 6'2" and about 165 pounds. That's not a heavy-set build for body fat but he was still a tall guy (imo: the weight estimate seems low for the height, age, and sex).

Can someone disappear within a building and remain there deceased for a long time even when efforts are made to find the person? It's here where I think many would say "no, if he was in the building then the police would have found him." However, the answer is yes and the case of Eduardo Sanchez is definitely worth examining.

Sanchez was a disc jockey in Winnipeg in the early years of this century. One night in 2002, he disappeared in the wee hours of the morning. He was found in late 2003 wedged behind a nightclub wall in the vicinity of where he was last seen. Importantly, police believe that he put himself there somehow and foul play was not really expected.

That he was wedged and decomposing in a tight space for over a year in a building is a little perplexing. You would think that the scent of his decomposing body would attract some attention. Even people who do not have sensitive noses can't stand putrefaction. However, in this case, it's believed that the foul scents in the neighborhood might have covered up the scent of Sanchez's decomposition.

Toronto's The Globe and Mail quoted a woman familiar with the area in Winnipeg back in December of 2003. She claimed that it was normal for the place to smell bad: "Sometimes it reeked of sewage when you came in in the morning," said Kerrie Drine, a business owner with familiarity with the area (Drine qtd. by The Globe and Mail). The same article suggested that a new ban on smoking cleared the air and allowed for the scent of the decomposition to become more noticeable in the time frame leading up to his discovery. Importantly, the same source says the following of Sanchez and the finding of his remains: "No drugs were found in his clothing or behind the wall, however it's believed he was using drugs before he went missing."

Could drugs make you crawl into a tight space? If they did, then you might get stuck and perish. Sanchez's cause of death was positional asphyxiation -- death caused when your positioning in a tight space prevents you from expanding your diaphragm and/or middle-body area enough to breathe.

How could drug use lead to such a predicament? Surely, we all agree that drugs can make you do strange things. They can make you paranoid and this might make you feel like you need to find a good hiding spot -- such as one in a crawl space. Additionally, drugs might make you feel like you need to be hugged (search Google keywords "ecstasy hug drug"). Perhaps, the confined space of two walls might satisfy this craving for someone that is under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

But two important points to take away from the Sanchez case is that he was under the influence of drugs/alcohol when he seemingly voluntarily entered a tight crawl space. Getting into that space and getting out of it are not the same matters. Additionally, there were conditions where the putrid scent of his decomposing body didn't register in people's nostrils. It sounds like the place where he died always smelled bad, whether due to smoking or due to sewage.

Those considerations bring up questions with Brian Shaffer. Both Shaffer and Sanchez disappeared in the wee hours of a morning after partaking in substance abuse. With Shaffer, he was bar-hopping and he was definitely drinking. Whether he was doing drugs or not is not clear by my research on the case but it should be questioned. Alcohol isn't good for clarity of mind but drugs are more likely to produce the kind of bizarre and unpredictable behavior that might make you do something incredibly strange.

If Shaffer was in a similar state of mind as Sanchez, then maybe the former also put himself somewhere confined in the building. If death ensued, then there's a question: would the microregion have scents that could cover up the smell of decomposition? Conversely, could you die somewhere in a building that just happened to be well ventilated?

That Shaffer was seen entering the Ugly Tuna Saloona and never seen leaving in person or on videotape might simply make you wonder if he is still in the building. I wonder that and others have wondered this aloud before.

According to an article at Fox8, "An entrance camera showed Shaffer entering the Ugly Tuna Saloona around 1:15am, but not leaving. Another camera showed he hadn’t slipped out an emergency exit, either" (November 8th, 2016). Their headline for the year-2016 article reveals a hypothesis that I agree with: "Man who disappeared 10 years ago might have never left bar."

You might think that Shaffer would have been found already if he did trap himself in the bar in a crawl space. However, that's why I brought up the case of Sanchez. He was found in the building that he was last seen in more than a year after his disappearance.

It has been a lot longer than that in the case of Shaffer but if something masked the scent of his decomposition until it completed, then who knows how long someone could stay undetected and deceased in a building for. Certainly, building walls have held their secrets -- even for gargantuanly long times. Offhand, the best example I can think of for dead bodies staying secret in a wall or enclosed space is nearly 200 years (read about The Princes in the Tower). 

Fourteen years and counting is nothing.