Denver Baffled as Policeman Vanishes on Duty : No Trace of Popular Officer; Mystery Grows as Days Pass

They found his squad car in a parking lot between some warehouses at 3:30 in the morning. Motor running, emergency flashers on, driver’s door open, radio still crackling.

But four days have passed now, and still there is no trace of Officer David Hayhurst, no clue about what happened to a routine cop on a routine night doing a routine job.

“This is just unheard of,” said his commander, Capt. Mike O’Neill.

Hayhurst had asked for a special assignment last Thursday when he reported for his 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. night shift. He wanted to shoot radar, go out and nab traffic offenders.

“That was his bag,” O’Neill remembers now with a smile. Hayhurst was good at it. During his 17 years as a cop, he’d spent plenty of time on traffic detail.

Old Radio

That night, free from having to answer the usual reports of domestic disputes, prowlers and rowdy drunks, 39-year-old Dave Hayhurst hit the streets of southwest Denver in Car 418. On his way out of the station house, he grabbed a radio. One of the older models. One without a panic button, which alerts the dispatcher that an officer needs help.

Hayhurst headed for the warehouse district alongside the narrow south fork of the Platte River, about two miles from the station house. He rounded a wide bend and pulled off the road to wait. In police jargon, a good hiding place to catch speeders is a fishin’ hole. Hayhurst had just found himself one.

A fellow officer remembers chatting with Hayhurst on the radio that evening. Hayhurst was gleeful. “God, I found a gold mine!” he boasted. Around 11 p.m., another buddy, Officer Jerry Parton, stopped to have coffee with Hayhurst at a nearby greasy spoon.

“He was his usual jolly self,” Parton recalled. “He kept pretending to hit my panic button. He was always joking around like that. He liked to sort of harass me.”

Hayhurst’s easy-going manner and sense of humor belied the special challenges he faced at home. The youngest of his two sons, 12-year-old Chad, had cerebral palsy. Hayhurst devoted himself not only to his own boy, but to all handicapped kids. His dogged work in putting together a special police fair for 300 handicapped children earned him a coveted Citizens’ Appreciation Award. He was supposed to collect his medal in a ceremony this week.

Radio Call

The last anyone heard from Dave Hayhurst was 1:07 a.m. Friday, when he radioed in to the dispatcher. He had just completed a minor traffic stop and was ready to resume patrol.

At 3:35 a.m., a citizen called in to report an abandoned police car idling behind some warehouses off Mississippi Avenue.

Word went out, and suddenly the eerie riverfront was alive with blue uniforms. Police sealed off the area, combed the car. Hayhurst’s clipboard and ticket book were on the dash. There were no signs of a struggle.

Fellow officers shook their heads in disbelief. No cop with any street smarts would have ever turned into the blind alley without radioing for back-up. “Dave would’ve never fallen for a trap like that,” said Parton.

Someone else must have driven the car there and left it. But who? And why?

Helicopters and bloodhounds joined the search. A couple of hours passed, and a sergeant was sent to tell Leilani Hayhurst that her husband was missing.

It was the start of an extraordinary search, and an agonizing vigil.

One by one, cops getting off duty at precincts all over Denver that day simply drove straight to the warehouses to join the search on their own time.

The area where they concentrated--a mile long and two miles deep--would prove to be an urban maze of warehouses, junkyards, rail yards, cheap apartments and overgrown fields surrounded by busy thoroughfares.

Over the weekend, divers groped along the muddy bottoms of the Platte as well as smaller ponds and lakes. News helicopters took police up for aerial searches. A special hot line was set up, and the calls began pouring in.

A mental patient led police down the railroad tracks, insisting he had discovered a battered, uniformed body beneath some boards. Nothing. A caller claimed Hayhurst’s body would be found in an abandoned car near a junkyard. Nothing. A woman telephoned to say her 10-year-old daughter had dreamed Dave Hayhurst had been killed behind a Safeway. Nothing.

Then an 11-year-old boy who lived in one of the apartments remembered glancing out his window around 1 a.m. and seeing a police car chasing a red sports car with gold wheels. Investigators speculate it may be the cherry-colored Datsun 280Z three murder suspects were last seen driving in the part of town where Hayhurst disappeared. The men--Donald Ferrado, 40; Michael Plunkett, 36, and Roger Don Hunter, 25--were wanted in connection with a slaying in Oroville, Calif., in a drug deal gone bad. It wasn’t much to go on, but for now, investigators say it is about all they have got.

On Monday, there was a brief surge of hope when detectives knocked on the door of an escaped rapist in the warehouse district. The man jumped out a window and fled. A description went out on the radio. “Possible involvement in missing officer,” the dispatcher said. Within seconds, a dozen police cars and motorcycles screeched into the neighborhood. People gathered on a corner to watch the chase.

“This is the field where that cop disappeared from,” offered a pregnant woman in a Pink Floyd T-shirt.

“What’s going on?”

“That missing cop.”

“Look, there come the TV guys!”

“Someone ought to tell them to check that tunnel where kids hide out there!”

“They say you should tie a yellow ribbon around your car antenna and your mailbox as a show of faith, and maybe if the ones who did it see enough yellow ribbons, they’ll know everybody is looking for that guy.”

“I’d tie one around my antenna if I had a car.”

The suspect is caught, but there is no known link to Hayhurst.

So far, everything is leading to the same dead-end.

To the same empty police car with its engine running.