STILL MISSING: The search for Travis Brown continues nearly five years later

Editor’s note: Missouri Governor Mike Parson has recognized June as the official Missing and Unidentified Persons Awareness month in Missouri by proclamation. The designation was made with the suggestion of Missouri Missing, a 501c3 organization that has worked with hundreds of families, agencies and organizations to bring awareness and educate the public about the devastation that families suffer when a loved one goes missing. Find out more by contacting Missouri Missing at info@missourimissing.org, by calling 573-550-4187, visiting www.MissouriMissing.org or via Facebook, www.facebook.com/MissouriMissing.

On Dec. 7, 2019, the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department dispatch office received a phone call from Gainesville resident Ralph Brown, who reported that his 51-year-old son, Travis Brown, had gone missing from their shared home on Highway 5, north of Gainesville.

That call kicked off a missing person investigation that continues to this day to be a high-priority case with the OCSD. But despite thousands of hours of investigation, hundreds of interviews, multiple cadaver dog searches and following up on endless leads, both locally and in other states, officers say they still have no idea where Travis is --- or what, if anything, might’ve happened to him. 

What they do know is that he is reported to have walked out the front door of his house that cold autumn night in 2019, and there has been no trace of him since.

Reported missing

Ozark County Sheriff’s Sgt. Seth Miller, who is now the lead investigator in the case, told the Times that in his call to the sheriff’s department on Dec. 7, 2019, Ralph said the last time he’d seen Travis was about a week before, on Nov. 30, 2019, when he left the house, headed toward Highway 5 in a northern direction. 

While some might question the week it took his family to report Travis as missing, Sgt. Miller says it wasn’t really a red flag for law enforcement because Travis was known to go off on his own for days at a time without connecting with family or friends. In fact, the OCSD  had investigated him as a missing person multiple times prior to that date, only to find that he’d left of his own accord and was safe but not making contact with the concerned friends or family members.

In 2019, when the call came in reporting Travis missing, Ozark County Sheriff Darrin Reed was in office. Three former OCSD deputies: Chief Deputy Winston Collins, Cpl. Curtis Dobbs and Deputy Justin Urich, were assigned to the case. Today, all three officers still live in Ozark County and are currently employed with the Christian County Sheriff’s Department. They continue to help and consult in the case on their own time, Miller says, something he is grateful for. 

In 2019, Miller was also working for the OCSD and was aware of the reported disappearance, keeping an eye out for any information that would be helpful. Although he was not one of the main officers assigned to the case at the time, Miller said he has always had an interest in the case, as he has had several interactions with Travis personally and through his work at the OCSD. 

“It wasn’t unlike him to go run off like that for a couple of days or even upwards of a week. He’d done that in the past. So it wasn’t anything out of the ordinary,” Miller said. “...It was kind of the assumption at that point that this was the same thing again. We went out and looked for him, but we all figured ‘It’s Travis. He’s not going to go a week or so without some type of law enforcement contact or someone  calling him in or whatever.’”

Looking for clues

After it was apparent that the situation was different than the other times he’d went missing, officers applied for a search warrant and obtained Travis’s cell phone records. 

They’d hoped that the log would show any incoming or outgoing calls that might give them a clue as to who he was in contact with on his cell phone, and if he might have called someone to pick him up.

Miller says the cell phone records show that there have been no calls made from Travis’s phone since the time and date he was reported to have been last seen by his family. 

There were also no incoming phone calls  from anyone who would fit the description of someone who might have picked Travis up, Miller said. 

The officers attempted a cell phone “ping,” a process that sends a signal to the phone, which is then reciprocated through the nearest cell phone tower. When the “ping” is returned, it shows law enforcement what tower is closest to the phone, which allows law enforcement to get a respective radius of where the device is; however, in this instance the ping came back unsuccessful because the phone had been turned off, Miller said.

“The last time that we could see that the phone had been used was the day he disappeared, and it gives us a radius of where it was used at. So we know it was used at his residence, and there wasn’t a lot of movement made when he was on the phone,” he said. 

Officers have not yet found Travis’s phone, Miller says.

Travis’s banking records also have went dead, meaning there has been no activity with his checking account or debit card since that Nov. 30, 2019, date he is reported to have left his house. 

Cadaver dogs and lots of interviews

About a month after the disappearance, officers asked the Brown family for permission to bring cadaver dogs onto the property to see if the dogs could detect any scent of human remains that might lead officers to a body, human remain evidence (such as bone fragments, bodily fluids or clothing with human remain odor on them) or any other clues that might help direct them in their investigation.

“We said, ‘Hey, we’d like to go out there and take a look... and search the property for him. This is serious. He’s been gone for a month,” Miller said. “The whole family was very cooperative.” But the search didn’t turn up anything promising. Miller said that officers did find a shoe in the woods, but they were unable to determine how long it’d been there or trace it back to Travis at all. “For all we know, it could just have been trash,” he said. 

The day after the cadaver dog-search of the Brown property was completed, officers obtained and executed a search warrant for Travis’s Facebook messenger to see if he might’ve contacted someone that way. But there had been no messages asking anyone to pick him up - or any messages at all sent from Travis after he went missing. 

Officers interviewed eight to 10 of Travis’s known contacts in those first few weeks, which led to several follow-up interviews. They also brainstormed ideas of people outside of Travis’s immediate circle in Ozark County who might know something. Then they tracked those individuals down and interviewed them. “For instance, we wondered who he’d befriended when he was in rehab. So, we called up the rehab facility and asked ‘Who was he friends with? Who did he hang out with?’ And still nothing turned up,” Miller said. 

Miller says the work Collins, Dobbs and Urich did during their time with the case was admirable, and they worked the case hard. Despite interviewing people and following up with leads, there was no solid information that provided any clue to what had happened to Travis.

“Then, it just went cold,” he said. “No leads. Nothing.”

A change in sheriff and investigator

Miller said that at that time, the sheriff’s department was understaffed and oversaturated with crime. 

“We had a lot going on...a lot kicking up. There was a murder or two at that time, and we had several sexual assaults. Things that kind of take precedence and have to be dealt with right then and there. We’d be working on [the Travis Brown case], and then there would be a dog call or call about cattle in the road or a wreck,” he said. “So, we had to kind of put it on the back burner while we worked those cases and revisit it when we could. And at that point, we didn’t have any evidence. We didn’t really have anything to grasp onto and run with.”

Then in 2020, Reed announced that he planned to retire and would not file for re-election for the upcoming term. Cass Martin ran for his first term as sheriff and secured the position. He took office in January 2021. 

In the change over, the three officers assigned to the Travis Brown case left the department, along with some other OCSD employees. The new sheriff came into office with only three remaining deputies on staff who had worked under Reed. He worked to fill the other positions, train everyone and get things moving smoothly again, a process that took a few weeks. 

“Things were pretty hectic at first... That’s when Cass looked at me and said, ‘Your new role is investigations. You’re going to start digging into stuff because you’re somebody who’s dedicated to these things.’” 

“Cass’s mission, and of course mine too - we’re both on the same page with it - is to see this through. He said, ‘Find Travis Brown. Whatever you need, whatever you want, whatever resources I can get you. Go find him.’ So, that’s what has led us to all of this...” Miller said, pointing to the 6-inch wide manila envelope that holds the case file on Travis’s disappearance. 

Miller says that the sheriff makes his work on the Travis Brown case a priority and reassigns some of Miller’s cases to other officers if he’s in the process of investigating the missing person case. 

Miller estimates that he spends hundreds of hours a year, equivalent to probably four to six weeks, solely dedicated to the Travis Brown case. 

“I have people out in the community come up to me and ask, ‘Where’s Travis Brown? Why aren’t you guys out there looking for him? Let me assure you, we are and always have been. It’s never stopped,” Miller said. 

He’s quick to say he’s not the only face working hard behind the scenes to find Travis. He says his fellow Ozark County Sheriff’s Department Deputies Ves Phelan, Jeffrey Lane and Reserve Deputy Dan Israel have been an enormous help. He says the three original officers on the case, Winston Collins, Curtis Dobbs and Justin Urich, are also in contact, sharing information and ideas for different ways to investigate.

“Those guys don’t even work for our department anymore, but they do all they can to help us,” he said. 

Fresh eyes and a lot of dead ends

Miller said when he took over the case, sometime in early 2021, he wanted to go back and see it all with fresh eyes. That way maybe he could pick up on anything he could see differently than the prior assigned officers. 

“I wanted to go back to square one. I decided I wasn’t going to necessarily start with [the previous officer’s] report, because there might have been something that was missed. Not that they had intentionally missed it or they weren’t doing their job right, but enough time had passed that people have had been able to sit back and think more about it,” Miller said. “So, I decided I was going to start with interviewing the people that were there, the people that last saw him. I also wanted to build a back story. I wanted to figure out what he was doing the last six months to a year of his life.”

Miller said he immediately dug in and began tracking down people to talk to - and he hasn’t stopped yet.

“Throughout my time in this investigation, I’ll bet I’ve personally sat down and interviewed 100 people or more. I’ve lost count to be perfectly honest. And these aren’t just me stopping in and talking to people on the square asking, ‘Hey, have you seen Travis Brown?’ If it was that, it would probably be closer to 500 people - or maybe even more,” he said. 

Miller said if he hears any type of rumor, tip or “jailhouse chatter” from inmates in the Ozark County Jail who say they know where Travis is, he follows up with it. 

“I go after every single one of them,” he said. “Because at this point, I don’t know. And frankly, neither does anybody else.”

Searches in lakes and on land

Miller said that one of the tips they’ve received was from someone who said they’d heard Travis had been killed, and his body had been dumped in the lake. 

“I like Travis a lot, but he did have an addiction issue. So, I thought it’s a possibility that his addiction issue got him around some unsavory characters who would have harmed him - or someone might’ve hit him on the highway and decided to get rid of the body,” Miller said. 

So, as always, he decided to follow up to see if there was anything to the tip.

“We have two very big lakes. So, we had two sheriffs come down from Camden in the Lake of the Ozarks area. They have some really good equipment and good boats. I went with them and searched all of the areas that had been reported that he might be in. We spent two or three days out there on the lakes with sonar equipment and imaging. And nothing. It turned up nothing,” he said.

Miller also decided to widen the land search area from the Brown residence and nearby property to accommodate more neighboring and nearby properties. 

“One thing I took into account is that Travis had hardly any clothes on that night. He was wearing very light, kind of pajama-type of clothing when he was last seen walking out the door. Then I looked at weather reports from that night,” he said, referencing the Nov. 20, 2019, fall evening. “So, from there, I saw that there was a good chance that he might’ve had some type of exposure to the elements or could have been attacked by some animal. You just have to think of all the possibilities.”

So with that in mind, Miller began visiting and talking with several landowners along the Highway 5 corridor and got permission to search for him on their properties.

“Everybody was very open and willing to help as soon as I mentioned what I was doing. I’d say, ‘Hey, I’d like to go take cadaver dogs out on your property. Is it OK if I do that?’ And every single person that I’ve come across absolutely was in favor of us going to find him. I’ve never come across anyone so far that wasn’t cooperative with us going out to try and find him,” Miller said. 

“And every person had their own Travis Brown story too. Several said they’d come across Travis before on their property, just walking around, which kind of led me to think [these neighboring properties] were a good thing for us to check into,” he said. 

In his file, Miller has a plat map of Highway 5 North with a large star on the Brown property and several of the surrounding properties highlighted in bright yellow, signaling parcels of land he’s searched. 

“He was last seen kind of headed northbound, from the house at least. So, I thought, ‘Well, he knows everybody in this area. He might’ve walked through the woods to try to get to their house to get some help. So, I included everything [north] and slightly south as well,” he said.

Miller says they’ve also utilized drone cameras to take “drone-scapes” of the land, getting an aerial view of the properties. There was nothing found out of the ordinary.

He’s also conducted three additional land searches with cadaver dogs that include hundreds of acres of land in the broader search area along Highway 5. The searches have been a joint effort with the OCSD and the K-9 Region G Search and Rescue team, an organization of trained cadaver dog owners who volunteer their time and dogs’ abilities to search for human remains at crime scenes in southwestern Missouri counties. 

Miller said his first extensive encounter with the group was during the murder investigation of 16-year-old Savannah Leckie in 2017. In that case, a dog on the K-9 Region G team did alert to a brush pile on the property where officers found bone fragments, bond dust and bodily fluid-soaked dirt. Leckie’s mother, Rebecca Ruud, later admitted on tape to burning the girl’s body in the location where the dog alerted. 

“I knew it was the same people that found Savannah Leckie. And I thought, ‘This is what I need. This is a tool that I need in this investigation,’” Miller said. 

The first two cadaver dog searches did not turn up anything new. The last search did provide a potential clue.

Geo-fence warrant and another lead

Miller said that about three or four years ago, when chatting with other investigators in other jurisdictions, he heard about “geo-fence” search warrants, “which are hard to get and take a long time,” he said. Since that time, the OCSD has used them in burglary cases or other cases where there is no evidence available.

Miller said that type of warrant allows law enforcement officers to create a “geo-fence,” or a territory of area in a specified square, rectangle or other shape with defined outer points. That location paired with specific time and date parameters is run through a system that shows officers how many cell phones were within the area during that time-frame. The data also includes the cell phone ID numbers (an identifying device number, which is different than a person’s actual phone number). But at that stage, officers don’t know who the phones belong to.

They then have to apply for another search warrant, identifying the specific cell phone ID numbers in question, and stating why they want the information. If that warrant is granted by a judge, the names of the owners of those cell phones is provided to officers, essentially showing them whose phones were within the defined area during the specific time they’re interested in. 

Miller said more recently he found out that the geo-fence search warrants could be geared toward obtaining historical data that has been stored in reference to the defined area, which he thought might prove helpful in this investigation. He applied for and was granted a geo-fence search warrant of the Brown property and found that there was a cell phone within the designated area in the time-frame that Travis had went missing that led off in a different direction onto neighboring property.

The officers conducted a search of that neighboring property on Jan. 5, 2024, with the permission of the landowner. 

“So, we went in that direction and did another cadaver dog search, and the dog hit. [The handlers] came back and said there was a possibility of human remains,” Miller said. “I called in some investigators with some specialized training in body recovery and used them to pretty much help me dig and sift through [the dirt]. We worked over the course of three days total digging and processing.”

Miller said they didn’t find any bones or obvious human remains, but they did find “interesting samples,” he says. 

“The issue is that is that so much time has passed, and it wasn’t a skeleton. It wasn’t an inch-long piece of bone. It was literally just dirt, but the dogs will pick up on bodily fluids and stuff like that in dirt,” he said. “I’m trying to find a lab to process those samples to see if there were bodily fluids or anything else in the dirt. It’s kind of a long shot. I personally don’t think that we’re going to find anything from that, but I’m not a lab tech.” 

He said he’s hoping to find a lab that specializes in mitochondrial DNA so that the samples will have the best shot at being analyzed to the fullest extent.

Miller said the landowner of the property where the search was conducted has been very cooperative throughout the whole process. 

“He is not a suspect. We have no suspects at this time. I want to make that very clear,” he said. “But it kind of intrigued our interest as it was the first promising information in awhile.” 

Share a tip

Miller says he continues to interview people and talk with others to try and come up with other leads. At this point, he is asking for the public’s help for the next chapter of the investigation. What information is he interested in?

“Anything or everything. In my line of work, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire or at least an ember... If you hear something, I need to now about it. Even if it’s a rumor, it’s something I would like to hear and entertain, because if I corroborate it with four or five other people, it could be more than a rumor. At this point in the investigation, I’m taking anything and everything,” he said. 

Miller says he has traveled to different jurisdictions and even different states tracking down leads. He takes them all seriously, and he wants any information you might have.

“This is one of these cases where we are not going to leave any stone unturned.”

To share information about the Travis Brown disappearance, call Sgt. Seth Miller at the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department at 417-679-4633. Miller said tips can be left anonymously, and he is willing to meet people at undisclosed locations if that makes them more comfortable.