It’s been a month since Sarah Schultz last saw her truck driver husband, David Schultz, 53, of Wall Lake, Iowa, when he dropped by the home around 7 p.m. on Nov. 20, long enough to grab a change of garments before heading out to select up one other load of pigs.
“Dave called me and said, ‘Hey, could you set out a change of garments for me? I’m late,’” Sarah Schultz told FreightWaves.
She said her last conversation with Dave was concerning the indisputable fact that he didn’t just like the pants she had picked out for him since the pockets weren’t deep enough.
After running upstairs and grabbing a distinct pair, Dave gave her a kiss goodbye and headed out, Sarah said.
What happened next stays a mystery as local, county and state law enforcement agencies are still trying to find answers — and Dave.
Dave picked up a load of 120 pigs near Eagle Grove, Iowa, but authorities say he never arrived for his appointment time of midnight at the location where he was alleged to offload the pigs: Wiechman Pig Co. buying station in Sac City, Iowa. Wiechman’s home office is in Fremont, Nebraska, but it surely has 16 locations within the Midwest, including six pig-buying stations in Iowa.
Around 3 p.m. on Nov. 21, a Sac County secondary road worker reported seeing Dave Schultz’s red- and white-striped Peterbilt along with his loaded trailer of pigs parked in the midst of the northbound lane of County Road N-14, but no Dave. His rig was found facing the mistaken direction of the buying station where he was scheduled to reach along with his load of pigs.
Contained in the cab of Dave’s truck, investigators found his wallet, including his driver’s license, his cellphone and around $2,000 in money, which Sarah confirmed was still in his wallet. His coat was present in a close-by ditch.
Sac County Sheriff Ken McClure said his office is investigating all leads and is “waiting for subpoenas to come back back from different personal data [belonging to Dave].”
“I feel, today, any scenario you would run through your head might be a possibility,” McClure told FreightWaves.
After Dave’s rig was found, law enforcement searched the immediate area on foot and with a K-9, in keeping with a Dec. 9 press release by McClure.
“The Sac County Sheriff’s Office requested assistance from the Iowa State Patrol airwing unit,” McClure said. “An airplane was dispatched from Iowa City that was equipped with forward-looking infrared. A State Patrol pilot flew over the encircling area and didn’t detect a heat signature that might be consistent with an individual. For the subsequent two days, law enforcement, area firefighters and volunteers expanded the bottom search on foot and with the usage of drones. Nothing of great value was situated.”
The United Cajun Navy and volunteers searched over 100,000 acres in the world where Dave’s tractor-trailer was found.
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Investigators obtained video footage showing Dave at 11:15 p.m. on Nov. 21, 2023, on the Marker 126 Travel Center east of Fort Dodge, Iowa, on U.S. Highway 20. In accordance with the press release, Dave was there for 16 minutes before leaving the truck stop. He’s then seen on a Department of Transportation camera on Highway 20 west of the truck stop heading west.
“This was the last time David was seen,” McClure said. “Cellular phone data obtained from David Schultz’s phone corroborates this timeline.”
Investigators claim there was no usable video from the DOT camera. Cellular phone records show Dave’s phone arrived on the intersection of Highway 20 and U.S. 71 at around 12:18 a.m. The information shows the phone traveling north to where the truck was found and that it can have been there since 12:40 a.m., in keeping with McClure.
Over the past month, Sarah said she’s read hurtful comments on social media saying that perhaps Dave doesn’t need to be found and left the family to start out a brand new life.
Sarah said she is convinced that Dave was taken and that he wouldn’t have left his family, including the couple’s 10-year-old twin boys, Isaack and Joseph, for a brand new start.
“He would have never left our family. I do know some people say, ‘Well, perhaps this was his selection,’” she said. “This was not his selection. I guarantee you. He had nothing to do with this.”
“He wanted a wife and kids his whole life and he finally got it in his 40s. Our twins are his life and his little buddies.”
If Dave wanted to vanish, she added, why didn’t he take the money out of his wallet or drain their checking account? Sarah said Dave had purchased a brilliant yellow Peterbilt and was fixing it up. He planned to sell the red and white Pete, in keeping with Sarah.
“Now he doesn’t even, hasn’t even had a probability to drive it yet,” she said. “He had goals. … He didn’t, wasn’t just sitting there hating his life. All he needed was a headlight to get it up and running.”
More questions than answers
Sarah said the times before Dave mysteriously disappeared were busy. Her daughter, Sabrina, and grandson, Niko, were visiting from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While the family celebrated Thanksgiving just a few days early on Nov. 19, she said Dave was working and unable to attend the dinner.
“He had one other load before this one which made him late,” Sarah said. “I feel they were cleansing out those hog barns. I feel he said he’d already been there once and this was the second time.”
Dave leases a livestock trailer from Les Brown, owner of B Bar R Livestock out of Denison, Iowa, who also finds him loads. Brown told FreightWaves that Dave had already delivered a load to the Wiechman Pig Co.’s buying station in Sac City and was planning to repeat the identical route as before.
Investigators confirmed that Dave loaded the pigs and left the hog barn in Eagle Grove around 10:40 p.m. on Nov. 20. But after reviewing nearby businesses’ surveillance footage, they said he never arrived on the buying station.
Nonetheless, Brown said he’s convinced that Dave arrived on the pig-buying station and that “something happened” to him when he got out of his truck to unload the pigs. He claims that another person drove Dave’s custom-painted Peterbilt out of the station but that Dave wasn’t behind the wheel. He understands there’s no video evidence to back up his claim.
“There’s one thing about Dave is that if he had pigs on that needed to go somewhere, they got there,” Brown said. “If he had truck trouble, he made it work to get the pigs where they needed to be. All of our company drivers, everybody within the industry who hauls livestock that knows Dave are pretty confident that he made it right down to the place he was alleged to go and that things, whatever happened to Dave, went on there.”
Brown said Dave was acquainted with the buying station in Sac City and had hauled the identical load for him the night before.
“The identical route, the identical deal, the identical place, every part was the identical because the night before,” Brown told FreightWaves.
Sarah and Brown agree that Dave wouldn’t have left his rig in the midst of the road without turning his flashers on or finding a safer spot to tug over. In his latest update about Dave’s disappearance, McClure stated that Dave’s truck was shut off.
Kevin Sievers, assistant manager of Wiechman Pig Co., works out of the Sioux City, Iowa, facility but in addition oversees the Sac City site where Dave was scheduled to unload.
“We had a man are available in the subsequent morning to work up the hogs, and he noticed that there weren’t as many hogs as there have been alleged to be within the pens,” Sievers told FreightWaves. “We contacted where the hogs got here from and if something had gotten modified with their scheduling or something. They reached out to the trucking firm and the location where the hogs were loaded and said the hogs had been loaded but not delivered.”
Brown said he learned around 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 21 that Dave’s load of pigs hadn’t been delivered. Lower than an hour after not having the ability to reach Dave by phone, Brown went out on the lookout for him.
He also drove to Sarah’s house to let her know that Dave didn’t show as much as his delivery point. He remembers asking her if she had a GPS location-sharing app on her phone that might help locate Dave.
She didn’t.
Sarah later called the police in Lake View, Iowa, to report Dave missing with a possible medical emergency after she was unable to achieve him by phone or find him or his tractor-trailer.
Sievers said the location where Dave was to unload the pigs is a smaller facility and had a few semi-loads arrive earlier that night.
“We don’t buy plenty of hogs there,” Sievers said. “ It doesn’t have hogs in it on a regular basis — we just use it as vital. Lots of drivers will drop off their pigs they usually’ll drop off their load paperwork in a box and put them within the pens and leave.”
Sievers said Dave was alleged to be the last truck to unload that night.
Investigators said the farm where Dave picked up the pigs was searched and the manure pit within the barn was pumped and drained.
Lack of communication
Sarah said she’s frustrated that little or no information into Dave’s disappearance is being shared together with her by the Sac County Sheriff’s Office, adding that she wants the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into her husband’s case.
“I’m just frightened that law enforcement around here won’t ask for the FBI’s help,” she said.
Sievers said he has had little contact with law enforcement since Dave went missing 30 days ago.
“They [the Sac County Sheriff’s Office] called one in all our facilities close by and talked to the guy there and asked if we had cameras on the Sac City facilities, and I told him we didn’t,” Sievers said.
He said the corporate is considering installing cameras at the power that it has been overseeing for the past 10-15 years.
Sievers’ and Dave’s paths crossed over time on the pig-buying facilities.
“He’s a great trucker,” Sievers said. “I never had any problems with Dave.”
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