May 14, 2008 3:56 pm US/Pacific
Man To Be Quizzed About Disappearance Of Friend
ORANGE COUNTY
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Robert Vendrick has been missing since mid-February. Police want to question his business partner, Gary Shawkey, who was missing since Sunday as a "person of interest."
CBS
Gary Shawkey was missing. And Orange County police announced that they were interested in finding Shawkey as a "person of interest" in the investigation into the disappearance of his business partner who has been missing since mid-February.
But the plot thickens. Shawkey was recently seen in Mexico.
And now he is on his way back to the O.C. to be interviewed by sheriff's homicide investigators. Shawkey himself had been listed as a missing person for a few days, after checking into a Santa Ana motel and then vanishing after contacting a sheriff's investigator.
Shawkey, who is believed to be the last person to see former business associate Robert Vendrick alive, was stopped in Nogales, Mexico, and brought to Arizona for an interview with law enforcement officers in that state, says Jim Amormino of the Orange County Sheriff's Department.
Arizona authorities put Shawkey on a bus to Orange County, and he is expected to arrive within several hours, Amormino says.
Shawkey vanished after checking into a Santa Ana motel room on Sunday and leaving a message with homicide detectives, saying he had come to Orange County by bus from his Virginia home to pick up Vendrick in Mexico, Amormino said.
Despite Shawkey's claims that he recently ran into Vendrick in Florida, Vendrick has not surfaced and Shawkey cannot explain why, Amormino said.
Vendrick arrived in the Southland on Feb. 15, rented a car at the Long Beach Airport and was reported missing by his wife when he failed to return home days later.
He had come to the Southland to meet with Shawkey and what he thought were "highly placed government officials" to receive a $1.2 million return on an investment in software programming, according to investigators.
Vendrick and Shawkey were last seen together on a sailboat at Dana Point Harbor, sheriff's officials said. The small boat that Vendrick bought -- ostensibly to sail with Shawkey to San Clemente Island, which is controlled by the U.S. military -- turned up several days later in Long Beach.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)
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