NY NY - Jonathan Schaff, 23, Granville, 18 Jan 2014

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Missing man's family raising money to pay private eye
DON LEHMAN dlehman@poststar.com Mar 8, 2016

The family of a man who has been missing for more than two years after leaving a Granville bar has organized a fundraiser to pay for a private investigator to look into the disappearance.

..................

His father, John Schaff of Cambridge, said the hope is that a private investigator can dig up some new leads and rejuvenate a police investigation that seems stalled. Vermont State Police announced in January they were assigning a new investigator to the case to review it for new leads, but Schaff said he has heard nothing from the agency since early last year.

more....

http://poststar.com/news/blotter/mi...cle_efa92211-d1ac-5c26-b715-e1eb6cb5a2c3.html
 
Search for missing Granville man continues
June 29, 2016

Vermont State Police have been busy questioning potential witnesses in a local missing person case.

snip

“We’re shaking the bushes,” said Vermont State Police Detective Sgt. Todd L. Wilkins.
Wilkins said police completed more than 30 interviews in connection with the case last week, many of which resulted in polygraph tests.

“We do not polygraph everybody,” he said. “We asked some people to take them and they have. Nobody has refused.”
More interviews are scheduled for this week, Wilkins said.
People being questioned include witnesses who were at the Main Street bar at which Schaff was seen drinking that night; people who saw him last; and people he had contact with on Facebook and via text.
“All of these people have some connection to Schaff or that night,” Wilkins said.

snip

“This is the culmination of the last couple of months looking into this case and finding people,” Wilkins said. “We started with a big pool of people and we’re trying to narrow everything down to one possibility …. and walk down that path.”
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http://manchesternewspapers.com/2016/06/29/search-missing-granville-man-continues/


Glad to see that. They seem to be thorough. Hopefully they'll find Jonathan.
 
Three years later, still no answers for family of Jon Schaff

http://poststar.com/news/local/three-years-later-still-no-answers-for-family-of-jon/article_a98a716e-0d0d-528b-afa5-f9f678bc46e3.html

May Winchell still has hope, a belief that her son, missing for three years as of Jan. 18, could walk through the door of her home someday, safe and sound.

“I haven’t given up hope that he is still alive,” the Fair Haven, Vermont resident said last week.

Despite thousands of hours of investigation and searching by police, volunteers and family members, Jonathan Schaff’s disappearance remains a sad mystery.

Winchell and many of Schaff’s loved ones have theorized the 23-year-old Fair Haven resident was abducted and killed by someone he came across in the hours before he was reported missing, after he spent a night at a Granville bar that was then known as Riverside Pub.
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Three years later, search continues for missing man

One of the leads police are currently working on in the disappearance of Jonathan Schaff, relates to results gathered from the questioning in the summer of 2016.

“We are looking for a specific individual that has kind of taken off from us at this moment in time … that we really want to speak to,” said Detective Sgt. Todd Wilkins, mentioning that he’s “pretty positive” the gentleman knows police are looking for him.

“We can’t locate him yet, but we will, very soon I have a feeling,” he said.

Wilkins said the biggest source of information police have is people.

“I need people to talk,” he said. “We will come talk to them quietly or privately, but we need people to talk because right now, after three years, there really isn’t forensic evidence out there that is going to solve this. It’s literally information from people that is going to help bring Jonathan Schaff home.”

(...)

Even though the Schaff case is approaching the three-year mark, Wilkins said police are not giving up on trying to find him.

Wilkins said, “It all depends on where the case is at. Sometimes cases go cold within the first month and sometimes cases don’t go cold for years and years.”
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Info Leads to Search in Missing Man Case

Poultney, Vermont - Vermont State Police searched a quarry off York Street in Poultney, Vermont Wednesday.

The search occurred after police after received information there was potential evidence related to the Jonathan Schaff case.

http://www.mychamplainvalley.com/news/info-leads-to-search-in-missing-man-case/775509855
 
Father continues digging as son's disappearance hits six years

5e21b4827e2b6.image.jpg



"John Schaff is not giving up.
Six years after his 23-year-old son, Jonathan Schaff, disappeared after a night out in the village of Granville, the elder Schaff continues to hope that the next tip is the one that breaks the case open."
 
Jonathan M. Schaff – The Charley Project

  • jonathan_schaff_7.jpg

Schaff, circa 2014; Tattoo on Schaff's hand; "SCHAFF" tattoo on Schaff's back

  • Missing Since01/18/2014
  • Missing FromGranville, New York
  • ClassificationEndangered Missing
  • SexMale
  • RaceWhite
  • Date of Birth01/22/1991 (29)
  • Age23 years old
  • Height and Weight6'0, 170 pounds
  • Clothing/Jewelry DescriptionA gray or light blue hooded sweatshirt, a dark brown or black Carhartt jacket, dark blue jeans and brown work boots.
  • Distinguishing CharacteristicsCaucasian male. Brown hair, blue eyes. Schaff wears eyeglasses, but they were broken at the time of his disappearance. His nickname is Jon. Schaff has four tattoos: an eagle on his right calf or on his chest, a spiderweb between the fingers of his left hand, a Grim Reaper on the left side of his ribcage, and his last name "SCHAFF" in stylized lettering on his back. Photos of some of his tattoos are posted with this case summary.
Details of Disappearance
Schaff was last seen near the New York/Vermont state border after he got into a fight at the Riverside Pub on west Main Street in Granville, New York at approximately 5:00 a.m. on January 18, 2014. He sustained scalp lacerations during the fight, and his glasses were broken.

Two people offered Schaff a ride and they were going to their car when Schaff walked ahead of them and vanished. He has never been heard from again and an extensive search of the area turned up no sign of him. His cellular phone was found a few days later in the cab of a tractor-trailer parked at Loomis Trucking on Route 149 in Pawlet, Vermont, next to the Mettawee River. The lot is near where Schaff was last seen.

If Schaff was outdoors in the cold weather without shelter, he would not have survived long. Police believed he had fallen in the river and searched it several times up until November 2015. The river was unusually low over the summer months that year. Nothing was ever found, however. The patron he fought with on the night of his disappearance has been investigated and has not been named as a suspect.

It's uncharacteristic of Schaff to leave without warning. He lived in Fair Haven, Vermont at the time of his disappearance, just across the state line from Granville. His case remains unsolved.
 
Who offered to give him a ride? And why would he walk ahead of them? It’s been so long now that I cannot remember what the details of this man’s night were. I’m going to have to go back and read.
 
A couple of items I want to red flag that stood out to me:

- Jon got into a fight with Clarence Gould.

Something that is glazed over that is worth mentioning, locally, the Gould family has a very “they are white trash, don’t mess with them reputation.” Sherwood Gould and Clarence Gould (the one who got into the fight with Jon) are involved in the murder of two local people from 1981. Sherwood Gould shot a man named Edward Hawthorne with a shotgun in a field, and Clarence Gould pinned down a man named George Bassler (a former constable from the neighboring town of Wells) while he was shot by Sherwood Gould. This murder wasn't accidental - the Goulds waited in the bushes to "create a confrontation."

In one of the comments of the Post Star article, a woman notes that after Jon left the bar, Gould made threatening remarks.

Clarence Gould also owns a well drilling company in the neighboring Vermont town of Pawlet, which is about 8 miles from the bar where Jon was last seen.

The rumor of Schaff being put through a wood chipper and disposed of on a pig farm, directly relates to a tip the police received from a member of the Gould family. The Gould family owned a wood chipper at the time of Jon’s death but because the Vermont state police didn’t have probable cause to search their property, the wood chipper was subsequently sold by the Gould family and never inspected.


- Jon is not seen on the bank security camera footage across from the Loomis trucking lot, but the couple is.

This is really important - one of the articles posted earlier mentions that Jon is seen leaving Riverside bar with the two people, then Jon and the couple are clocked on the security footage from the Happy Daze bar (down the street heading east) but the bank camera only clocks the couple, NOT Jon. This means that after Jon left the bar, he never walked back to Loomis trucking. Yet, Jon's phone was found inside a truck/rig at Loomis Trucking.

This to me is the most damning evidence.

If you re-read the articles, they make a note to say “the phone was found 4 days” after he was reported missing. I’m not one to speculate but how could his phone end up there, if he never made it back to the lot?


- Jon’s cellphone pings

Based on the security camera footage, Jon goes missing somewhere geographically east of the Happy Daze bar. But his cellphone pings put him on Route 25/31 which is a road that basically runs adjacent to where Happy Daze is, quite a ways North of the Riverside Pub. That seems very very odd to me.


- People keep asking why the couple parked at Loomis Trucking

It seems really odd they would park a mile away but as a local, there are a couple of completely valid reasons for this

1) The Granville police hang out in the parking lot across the street from Riverside Pub and will quite literally pull people over as they leave the bar and hop in their cars to go home - therefore parking at Loomis trucking is desirable because it’s over the NY border into VT and Granville police can’t pull you over to give you a DUI.
2) Some people have lost the right to drive in NY so if you park on the border and walk over, the police can’t do anything about it.

- The dip in the road

Something that I'd like to point out to anyone who isn't familiar with the area, is the "dip in the road" that the couple mentions.
The first dip in the road heading east, pops up around the Trinity Episocal Church and the second dip happens around the "Welcome to Vermont" sign on Route 149 right before you descend to the Loomis trucking lot. This helps narrow down the window geographically of where Jon could've gone missing (assuming the couple is being truthful in their statement).
 
BrodyJohnson802 said:
Jon got into a fight with Clarence Gould.

Something that is glazed over that is worth mentioning, locally, the Gould family has a very “they are white trash, don’t mess with them reputation.” Sherwood Gould and Clarence Gould (the one who got into the fight with Jon) are involved in the murder of two local people from 1981. Sherwood Gould shot a man named Edward Hawthorne with a shotgun in a field, and Clarence Gould pinned down a man named George Bassler (a former constable from the neighboring town of Wells) while he was shot by Sherwood Gould. This murder wasn't accidental - the Goulds waited in the bushes to "create a confrontation."

In one of the comments of the Post Star article, a woman notes that after Jon left the bar, Gould made threatening remarks.

Clarence Gould also owns a well drilling company in the neighboring Vermont town of Pawlet, which is about 8 miles from the bar where Jon was last seen.

The rumor of Schaff being put through a wood chipper and disposed of on a pig farm, directly relates to a tip the police received from a member of the Gould family. The Gould family owned a wood chipper at the time of Jon’s death but because the Vermont state police didn’t have probable cause to search their property, the wood chipper was subsequently sold by the Gould family and never inspected.
Click to expand...
As you say it was glazed over and definitely worth mentioning. I think police should have looked deeper in the Gould's considering their past. They should be reinterviewed. Seems they quickly dismissed Clarence.
 
Seven-year search for missing man continues - NYVTmedia
This article from 2021 says 2 things I hadn't read or noticed before.
1. Schaff had reportedly been “sucker-punched” that night by a 50-year-old patron at the bar formerly known as the Riverside Pub on Main Street next to Edwards Market, breaking Schaff’s glasses but not causing significant damage.
2.Schaff received a text message from his biological mother, May Winchell, at around 2 a.m. while he was still at the Riverside Pub asking how his night was. Schaff responded “leave me alone,” to which Winchell was confused and skeptical if it was Schaff answering.
On 1. I didn't know that Clarence Gould was 50 years old. What is a 50 year old getting into a fight and sucker punching a 23 year old kid? In a previous article I read it said Clarence was kicked out of the bar after the fight. My gut says Clarence waited outside for him and has something to do with it. With his past he really should be looked into deeper and again.
On 2 I just thought was odd. Jonathan was at the bar past 2am so it must have been him who sent his mother the text.
I do find it strange that the facebook page for him has not been updated since 2014 despite on going searches and new article that have been published since 2014. Here are some links
Bring Jonathan Schaff Home.
Jonathan Schaff
his moms fb May Winchell
article about the Gould's crime in 1981 Country feud leads to double slaying
 
atombudd said:
As you say it was glazed over and definitely worth mentioning. I think police should have looked deeper in the Gould's considering their past. They should be reinterviewed. Seems they quickly dismissed Clarence.
Click to expand...

The Clarence Gould that was involved in 1981 murder is the father to the one involved with Jonathan Schaff. In 1981, Clarence Gould Jr was 16ish... his father was late 30s. There was 33 years between the incidences.
 
JaxonPI said:
The Clarence Gould that was involved in 1981 murder is the father to the one involved with Jonathan Schaff. In 1981, Clarence Gould Jr was 16ish... his father was late 30s. There was 33 years between the incidences.
Click to expand...

Sounds like Clarence Gould Jr never re-assessed his behavior from the time he was 16. I wonder where his relatives were the night Jonathan Schaff disappeared?
 
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