MISSING: Logan Schiendelman

May 20, 2016 63 degrees under mostly clear skies in Tumwater, Washington, just south of the state capital, Olympia. Around 3 p..m. that Friday, traffic on Interstate 5 was zipping along at 70 miles an hour. That's when something alarming came into focus a black convertible top-up was definitely not following the rules of the road.

It was almost like he was afraid to talk about it.

It's also about the people who loved him fiercely.

Sometimes I'll hear music that'll make me think about him, and, you know, the tears just flow. I really miss him.

I want him to still be alive.

I know you do. Please listen closely, because you or someone you know might have information that could help solve this mystery. And maybe give Logan's family the answers they've been waiting for. One of the questions they have is who or what was on Logan's mind the week he disappeared, and whether he felt he was in danger.

He told his grandmother I'm not going to make it.

Ginny Schindelman is Logan's grandmother, but that title doesn't tell the whole story. You're really his mom in terms of his life and raising him.

Yeah, it wasn't a grandmother-type relationship, I mean, he lived with me his whole life.

Fresh from the hospital, newborn Logan came home to Ginny's house, where he lived with his sister Chloe and his single mom, Hannah. Logan's dad wasn't in the picture, and then Hannah moved about 40 minutes away, closer to Seattle, without her children. Logan was two. His mom left him behind.

Yeah, yeah, she went up and lived with her boyfriend up there, and it was also she was working up there.

Logan saw his mom from time to time, but it was Ginny who did the 24-7 parenting. She says. Logan was a bright little boy full of surprises.

When he was really little and learning to talk, I was trying to get him to say cinnamon. And he tried a couple times. And then he quit. And then about three weeks later, he came back and he said, cinnamon, totally out of the blue. And I thought he's been working on this, he was just a smart, funny person.

The cute kid grew into a handsome teenager with an engaging smile. At Tumwater High School, he made good grades and was on the varsity football team. He played defensive back for the Thunderbirds jersey number 29 and he was popular. Logan liked to turn his camera on his friends, sometimes when they weren't expecting it.

You're videotaping it, aren't you? no?

Do a different face, Do a whole bunch of different faces.

I don't know anybody that did not like Logan.

That's Mary Ware, Jenny's sister and Logan's great aunt. She and her husband, Mike, that retired sheriff's deputy, have a small farm about 20 minutes from Jenny's house.

I'd have him mowing the fields or cleaning the barns. He was always ready and willing.

If we went to his house, he would open the door and say, Come on in, how are you guys?

Well, he's like the rotary club, compared to a lot of other kids that age he was. Friends and family were equally surprised. When Logan enrolled at Washington State University after high school. It was more than a five-hour drive from Tumwater, and none of Logan's friends were going to be there.

You know, he'd shrug Yeah, I'll do better next semester.

Spoiler alert He didn't, and by the end of the academic year, Logan had flunked out.

The school won't let him back because he didn't go to class. They, basically, they've done this before, said, you're not ready for college.

Sounds like they were right.

Yeah, they were right.

So Logan came back to Tumwater, moved back in with Jenny and his step-grandfather, Bill, to regroup and figure out his next steps. He found work, mostly a series of low-skill jobs.

Fast foods, you know, laundry that did laundry for hospitals and nursing homes.

What was filling up his life?

There was always some video games, some pot, some alcohol.

Doesn't sound like you were worried, though.

I wasn't, no, I wasn't laying at night worrying about it.

It's not uncommon, at Logan's age, to stumble on your first steps into adulthood. Nineteen is a time for self-discovery, sometimes with a dash of melodrama. On Wednesday, May 18th, two days before Logan's car disrupted traffic on the freeway, he walked into Jenny and Bill's kitchen and told Jenny he had something to tell her.

He came in and sat down and said I might be gone for the weekend. I said, What are you going to do? He said, Well, I had an epiphany. I said, Okay, what was your epiphany? and he said, Well, I can't really explain it.

Except when Jenny got home from work that Wednesday around 5.

Sometimes, sometimes not, so I didn't worry about it.

He wasn't home the next day, either. So Jenny checked a tracking app she had on her phone that told her Logan's phone was in Olympia, Washington, close to where his mom lived.

I thought, Well, maybe he went over and stayed with his mom. That happened once in a while.

Then, the next day, Friday, Jenny still hadn't heard from Logan, so she asked Logan's sister to call their mom to see if he was there. And your granddaughter said, he's not with mom.

Right?

So where did you think he was?

I had no clue.

Jenny wasn't exactly panicking. Logan had told her he'd be gone for the weekend. Even so, on Saturday, she gave the Thurston County Sheriff's Office a quick call to see what they could tell her. The office was closed, so she and Bill drove over to Olympia to look for Logan themselves.

We drove all over near where his car, you know, his phone had been.

That sounds to me like you're getting worried.

Yeah.

Jenny and Bill didn't find Logan or his car, and by Sunday night, when there was still no word from Logan, Jenny's worry was now bordering on panic. She didn't know it then, but police had been getting calls about Logan's car and people who'd been seen near it. Some of them were acting very strangely.

They called reporting that they had seen a man wearing no pants.

This is the secret story of a young Russian oligarch who hacked his way to a $93 million fortune. I'm CNBC's senior Washington correspondent Eamon Javers. In our new podcast, The Crimes of Putin's Traitor, I'll take you inside a shocking Russian crime targeting the American financial system. Attacks that sources tell me were welcomed by Vladimir Putin's government. Follow and listen to the crimes of Putin's traitor wherever you get your podcasts.

The air hung heavy in the courtroom, the people pressed shoulder to shoulder. They'd heard the gossip and the whispers about a family teeming with passion and hate, about a mysterious disappearance and a pile of bones found burning in a lime pit.

For true crime fans, nothing is more chilling than watching Dateline.

Have you ever seen such a thing before?

For podcast fans, nothing is more chilling than listening.

What goes through your mind when you make a discovery like that?

And when you subscribe to Dateline Premium, it gets even better. Excuse me if I sound a little skeptical. Every episode is ad-free.

Oh, wow.

So this could be your ace in the hole.

And not just ad-free, you also get early access to new intriguing mysteries and exclusive bonus content.

So what were you afraid of?

Dateline Premium Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or datelinepremium.com.

You ready for what's coming?

Well, you know, he's over 18, and people are allowed to leave if they want to.

And so this isn't necessarily a crime or anything we have to really worry about.

Right?

That is something families of the missing hear from police all the time, and they tell us it's maddening. Jenny's gut was telling her she should be worried, and she knew Logan better than anyone. It's also true there hadn't been any evidence Logan had run into trouble.

So the vehicle was found on Interstate 5.

That is, Lt. Cameron Semper of the Thurston County Sheriff's Office, the original detective on the case, has retired and Semper agreed to review the case file. For us. Remember, Logan's Chrysler? Sebring caused quite a commotion on the freeway?

All of them described the vehicle basically as rolling across all lanes of travel before impacting the cement barrier.

As if there was no one in it, or whoever was in it was incapacitated. That's correct. And one of the 9-1-1 callers said he'd caught a glimpse of something else.

We did have one of those callers that indicated they saw somebody in that vehicle. On the shoulder of the freeway, on the passenger side of the vehicle, before it started rolling unoccupied across the freeway.

As if they got out and then the vehicle started to move.

That's correct.

According to the 9-1-1 caller, that person had run into the woods next to the freeway. And when state troopers went to check out the car, no one was inside.

His wallet and the registration in the glove box, and his ID in there, and his debit card and his phone on the car seat.

Was there money in the wallet?

No, no. There was a bag on the floor with some leftover sandwich wrapper, and there was like $15, $20 in the bag.

Loose bills, an ID card, a wallet, those didn't strike Jenny as the kind of things. A random carjacker or thief would leave behind. Anything else unusual about the car when you found it?

He had stuff in the trunk, like a blanket and some clothes and some DVDs, just kind of weird movies.

Jenny had no idea where Logan had been headed. The sheriff's office checked Logan's cell phone data, and it revealed something intriguing. In the hours before his car was ditched, Logan's phone had gone on a road trip. Cell tower. Logs showed the phone traveled about 100 miles south on i-5, from Olympia down to Vancouver, Washington. Then it turned around and headed back to the Olympia area, where at around 3 p..m. it rolled into the median at mile marker 92..

Right, we know that the phone was recovered in the car, so we have every reason to believe that that vehicle traveled with the phone. From Olympia down to Vancouver and then back up to Olympia.

But who was at the wheel and who else was in the car, you don't know, right? Lieutenant Semper says the detective checked with hospitals and spoke with law enforcement. In the counties where Logan's phone connected with cell towers, there were no sightings of Logan in any of those places. The phone did reveal something else.

Speaking with her, she hadn't met up with him.

And she says she didn't see him that day or any other correct. The sheriff's office learned something else about the woman. Logan might not have seen her, but he did communicate with her right before he disappeared by text. And the text he sent her was reminiscent of something he'd said to Ginny in their last conversation.

I hope to survive this week.

I've certainly said things like that when I've had a tough, difficult week.

It's hard to know exactly what he was referring to.

Investigators wondered what exactly had been going on in Logan's mind before he went missing, because there was another bizarre thing that happened. Just hours after. Logan's car was ditched on the i-5 at 1.05 a.m, about 10 hours after the car hit the median. A 911 caller reported seeing a man walking along a road close to that same stretch of freeway near the woods. Someone was seen heading into, and that man didn't have any pants on. The caller, did not get a good look at him.

I cannot confirm that that was Logan.

Still, hard to ignore. The sheriff's office sent out search teams.

And there was no indication of anyone being there.

Not a single trace of Logan, just a puzzling string of clues, a man with no pants on close to where Logan's car was found. Logan's troubling conversation with Jenny and that strange text was all of it pointing to a breakdown of some kind.

Logan's grandmother reported that Logan did have some mental health struggles, that he had been battling depression, that he struggled with his identity.

Recently, the genealogical intricacies of Logan's life had become an issue. While Jenny is white, Logan's grandfather was African-American, and his dad, whom he'd never met, is from Saudi Arabia. And when he was growing up, Tumwater was more than 80 white.

Yeah, but he wasn't really. He wasn't worried about it that he told me at all. And he had a lot of friends, so I don't think that was a problem for him.

That was true until something happened toward the end of Logan's senior year at high school, something that clearly was a problem.

He'd been to a party and things hadn't gotten well, and he was upset about it because somebody was making remarks to him and his friends didn't stand up for him.

Logan told Jenny a girl at the party had made racist remarks about him. He was so upset he called Jenny to pick him up.

Which is not normal for him to call me, to come get him from someplace.

And that's when, without a word, Logan cut off all his friends, ghosted the whole group. That was the reason he'd sent a last-minute application to Washington State University instead of going to college, closer to home with his old friends. This is about how many people he's turning his back on after that one incident.

Probably about six really close friends and then the whole group that they all hung out with.

That's a lot of people to cut loose because of one thing.

Yeah, it is.

You talk to him about the wisdom of doing that, about whether or not that maybe was too rash.

Yeah, we did talk about that, but it wasn't going to go anywhere.

He'd made up his mind.

He'd made up his mind and he was really, really hurt.

Suddenly, Logan Shindleman was a young man reeling unmoored. And that's when Jenny's mother, his great-grandmother, introduced him to a complete stranger, someone Logan had never met before, someone who was also strangely familiar.

It was love at first sight to see him because he looks just like my brother at that age.

Her name is Tina Roberts Crary, and she's Logan's great-aunt on the African-American side of his family. Jenny and Tina disagree about the reasons why, but there's no denying this. Logan didn't meet Tina or any of his Black relatives until he was 18, and when he did, it clearly made an impression.

He saw it immediately, he was just in awe, He was just amazed. He goes. It feels so good to see someone that looks like me.

Tina pulled out her photo albums and gave Logan a crash course in her family's history. She says he soaked it up.

You can tell he's listening to every word you're saying.

Was he struggling with some kind of racial identity?

I know that before he left, he was questioning, You know, who am I? You know, what's my next step? what do I do?

Tina says she stayed in touch with Logan through Facebook when he was in college. She sensed he might be struggling and sent him encouraging messages. Then, after he flunked out and came back to Tumwater, Tina says she didn't hear from him again.

No responses from his, from texts or Facebook. I know I invited him for Thanksgiving, I didn't hear back from him.

And so Christmas New Year's nothing.

Nothing.

The detective investigating Logan's disappearance wondered if Logan had now cut off the rest of his family, too. No question Logan had a lot to sort out. Maybe. At 19, he felt under pressure over his confusion about his identity, the break with his friends, his failure at college. Maybe it was all too much for him. And he'd walked away from his old life in Tumwater to start over somewhere new, or worse, maybe he'd gone somewhere to end it.

I don't think he was in crisis, he didn't come across as angry, but as really in thinking about what he wanted to do.

I felt he was depressed, not in the sense where.

Logan's great-aunts Tina, the one he'd just met, and Mary, whom he'd known forever, had a theory of their own about what happened. It involved someone very close to home.

They didn't get along at all. I think he felt unsafe.

Join Hoda Kotb for a brand-new season of her podcast Making Space.

For season 5, I am making space to talk to people who are providing a sense of hope and inspiration when life changes course.

Uplifting conversations with inspiring individuals like NFL legend Drew Brees, singer-songwriter Ziggy Marley and Today Show co-anchor Savannah Guthrie. As you have never heard her before. I found faith more viscerally, not because the bad thing didn't happen, but because it did. I promise you like me.

We'll leave these conversations with some wisdom for your own journey, empowered and inspired to make space in your own life.

All episodes of season 5 of Making Space with Hoda Kotb are available now. Wherever you get your podcasts, listen now.

Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers, creator and host of the number one true crime podcast, Crime Junkie. Every Monday, me and my best friend Brit break down a new case, but not in the way you've heard before, and not the cases you've heard before. You'll hear stories on Crime Junkie that haven't been told anywhere else. I'll tell you what you can do to help victims and their families get justice. Join us for new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday already waiting for you by searching for Crime Junkie wherever you listen to podcasts.

Sometimes a sunny day triggers a memory of her missing nephew, one that Mary Ware treasures.

It's like there's a movie running in the back of my head 24 hours a day. Of Logan and him being here and all the things that have happened. It just runs in my back of my head.

Mary says she couldn't believe it when Ginny texted her to say Logan was missing.

I woke up Mike and had him read the text, and I just looked at Mike and said, He's gone, he's gone.

Mike, the retired sheriff's deputy and Logan's doting uncle, was sure of one thing about his nephew.

There's just no question in my mind he would not disappear on his own without letting somebody know.

You have to have developed some police instincts over those years. Alarm bells start going off in your head a little bit.

Well, when we found out the circumstance of how the car was discovered was abandoned, yes, there were some questions pretty immediately.

The obvious question was, why would Logan leave his car on the freeway with all his stuff in it?

My own personal feeling is that he came into conflict with somebody, I don't think he left on his own.

Which is why Mike and sheriff's detectives, too, were interested in one more thing that someone had seen driving by Logan's car that Friday afternoon. Remember there had been three 911 calls? One of the callers had seen someone run into the woods. I asked Lieutenant Semper about that, and does the description of that person match Logan?

No, it doesn't.

What was that description?

They described that person as a white male, and we know that Logan is mixed race.

Did somebody ever show them a photograph of Logan and say, Is this the guy you saw?

Yes, and he indicated that it was not the person he saw in the vehicle.

A couple of things you should know about that 911 caller. He was a truck driver sitting high up in a semi, traveling north on I-5 toward the Sebring, which was in the southbound lanes. He only saw the guy for a couple of seconds, but the truck driver seemed convinced that Logan had not been in the car.

Based on that single report, if it was not Logan in the vehicle, then that would lend to there being foul play involved in this incident.

If only Logan's Chrysler Sebring could talk and tell investigators who was driving it that day.

Anything that might be in the car could be disturbed or misplaced when it goes through several hands, which it did in this case. Fingerprint evidence, anything relating to DNA, all of those things could be affected.

I asked the sheriff's office about the delay, Lieutenant Simper says. They didn't learn about the tips that suggested possible foul play until after. Jenny had retrieved Logan's car, and when a detective went to Jenny and Bill's place and dusted the sebring.

No prints were discovered as the vehicle was dirty and there were very few smooth surfaces.

Any signs of blood inside the car or any other kind of struggle?

There was something that was noted by the grandfather of a seat that had been damaged that he believed was new damage.

The detective turned his attention to Logan's personal life, his family and friends, and any possible enemies. And Mary had something to say about that. Because one of those movies she played back in her head now included one that troubled her. The memory of a phone conversation she had with Logan months before he disappeared, turns out.

And I said, Is that a problem? and he goes well? Yeah, I said, Well, is it the kids coming there to visit? is that the problem? He said, Yeah.

What was the issue there?

Logan never said it was almost like he was afraid to talk about it.

Of course, five adults living under the same roof are bound to get on each other's nerves occasionally. Even if two of them aren't half-siblings who don't always see eye to eye, Logan is Chloe's slightly younger brother. In a lot of families, that's a formula for the two of them to battle. You have some sense that this is worse.

No, no, I don't think that does, I just think that. I think it was the fact that her boyfriend was also trying to live in that house and I think that he had something to do with this. I mean, I'll just be frank.

Chloe's boyfriend was 26, and he had a rap sheet, including convictions for domestic violence and assault.

We looked into that.

And.

Spoke to him at length multiple times.

Lieutenant Semper told us. The lead detective zeroed in on the tensions between Logan and his sister's boyfriend early on, according to the case file. When questioned, the boyfriend denied he and Logan had issues. He also denied having anything to do with Logan's disappearance, but his story was inconsistent about where he was on the day Logan went missing.

He was cooperative with us and he could have very easily said, No, I'm not taking a polygraph. And we'd have been left at that, but he willingly did that. And.

According to our.

Polygrapher's opinion he was not being deceptive.

The detective ruled out Chloe's boyfriend as a suspect in Logan's disappearance.

We need some tips that can help us break this.

Lieutenant Simper says in the seven years since Logan Schindelman disappeared, tips have come in from across the country, but none has led them to Logan. The case is open but cold.

Own. I even checked UFO conferences that were going on in Nevada to see if maybe his epiphany had taken him down to that sort of a road. But I haven't ever found anything. I feel like it's more likely his epiphany took him to somebody who killed him.

I hope you're wrong about that. Ginny still lives in the house in Tumwater, where Logan spent much of his childhood, and where he returned after college to figure out where his life was headed. When I'm.

Driving home from town and go past this one stretch of the road to get home. And I don't know why that particular stretch causes me to come apart, it seems, but that one does.

You associate that with Logan in some way, some.

Way, yeah, but I haven't figured out why I just do.

Logan's aunt Tina, who waited so long to meet him, struggles with losing the chance to get to know Logan better and to see where his searching would take him.

I felt cheated.

I felt very wrong.

That finally I met this beautiful young man.

Mike and Mary Ware say the unsolved mystery of what happened to the nephew they still adore is something that hangs over them every day.

It's a constant source of stress, it doesn't go away and will not go away, I think it's called.

Ambiguous?

Because you don't know whether they're missing or they're dead, yeah.

You can't grieve them because you don't know if they're dead, but you know they're dead.

Here's where you can help. Logan Shindleman was 5'11 and 160 pounds when he was last seen at his home in Tumwater, Washington. He has black hair and brown eyes. If you saw something or if you know anything, call the Thurston County Sheriff's Office at 360-786-5500..