Son’s Mysterious Disappearance Haunts Father : Coping: The search for an Arizona man who vanished while attending a San Diego meeting has not been fruitful. Is he a crime victim, or did he stage his own disappearance?

By all accounts, Eric L. Myers was not the type to skip out on his family, even in hard times.

Married 13 years with five children--three of them Vietnamese refugees--Myers is in charge of marketing his father’s 300-acre residential development in Prescott, Ariz., about 100 miles north of Phoenix.

An “ardent Bible-thumping fundamentalist who has taken to every cause and crusade,” according to his father, the 34-year-old Myers flew from Arizona June 25 to attend a four-day real estate seminar at the U.S. Grant Hotel.

The evening of the 25th, he checked into the Rodeway Inn at 833 Ash St. in downtown San Diego and checked out the next day. He attended brokerage seminars on the 26th, 27th and 28th but did not show up on the final day of the seminar on the 29th. His family doesn’t know where he stayed the other nights.

Eric Myers has not been heard from again. He was reported missing to San Diego police July 2.

His father, Donald, a prominent Phoenix-area developer, has been investigating his son’s disappearance ever since, hiring a private detective and making hundreds of telephone calls of his own.

“I work on this all day, every day,” he said from his real estate office.

When he got a receipt of billings charged to his son’s telephone calling card, he noticed one was made to the San Diego Police Department. Detective Wayne McKinnon of the missing persons bureau got a tape recording of the call, but the caller, who said he was being hassled by someone on the street, was not Eric and did not give his name.

The call was made at 1:17 a.m. June 29, the last day of the seminar.

McKinnon traced the call to a telephone booth on Pacific Highway. But nobody in the area recognized Eric’s picture when McKinnon searched the area for clues.

What might have been a second break in the case came a few weeks ago, when three of Eric’s checks were returned to Arizona. They were made out to Daniel Langendorfer, who has since been contacted by police and Myers’ private investigator, Howard Rhoads.

Detective McKinnon said Langendorfer, who is living in a downtown hotel, said he received the checks from a man who bought several items from him at a swap meet. The three checks--all for less than $100 each--are made out to Langendorfer and signed with Eric’s name, police said.

Donald Myers said the signatures are forgeries.

Rhoads said he confronted Langendorfer and was “able to break his story,” getting him to admit that a friend found the checks, company checks and a picture ID in an area of downtown where car thieves dump everything from autos that is not cash. The area is 15 blocks from the Rodeway Inn where Eric was staying, Rhoads said.

McKinnon said that, although Langendorfer may be lying, he believes the man would not have put his name and driver’s license number on the checks “as a road map to himself” and is not connected to the disappearance. He said he was planning to talk to Langendorfer again today.

With few other leads, McKinnon spent much of Tuesday flashing Eric’s picture at gyms in Balboa Park and downtown because Eric, in superior shape at 6-foot-3 and 190 pounds, enjoyed exercising.

Someone thought they might have seen Eric recently at a 7-Eleven store, and McKinnon showed the grainy photo of a mustached, balding man with dark brown hair.

Street people, gym enthusiasts and convenience store clerks all were interviewed, but nobody said he had seen Eric.

If Eric was not the victim of foul play, there is at least a small bit of evidence to suggest that he simply may have been leaving home for good.

His divorce was to be made final sometime next month, his father said. The inevitability of a family breakup depressed Eric over the fate of his children--daughters ages 8 and 10, and his three Vietnamese children, 17, 21 and 24, who were smuggled out of the country and put on a boat bound for the United States.

“The boys are stoic about their father’s disappearance because they’ve been through tough times,” Donald Myers said. “They’ve lived on the streets and can take care of themselves. One of his daughters is quite upset and has been unruly. They all wonder, ‘Where’s daddy?’ ”

After the divorce, the couple decided, the boys would stay with Eric and the girls would split their time between their mother and father.

McKinnon said Eric made numerous telephone calls from a pay phone at the U.S. Grant Hotel, the details of which have not yet been fully determined. “He possibly had some business nobody knew about,” McKinnon said.

Private investigator Rhoads said he has accounted for all of the telephone calls, which he says were made to his office in Prescott and friends in the Phoenix area. The last call was made Friday, the final day Eric attended the conference.

“There’s more I need to do to find out if Eric is dead or alive,” Rhoads said. “There’s no use of credit cards that would make you think he’s not alive. Maybe he is alive, and he just ran away. Maybe he’s incommunicado because he’s being held by someone. He could be involved in anything you can imagine.”

In sorting out emotions about his son, Myers cannot bear to think that Eric is dead. Yet, he can’t imagine that his son, leading the “straightest, cleanest life” imaginable, and who does not drink or smoke and does not tolerate anyone who does, would walk away from his family forever.

“He has taken to every religious cause imaginable,” Donald Myers said. “He’s always got someone under his wing that he’s going to make a Christian out of. He belongs to every anti-abortion crusade. All (homosexuals) are sinners. If it’s in the Bible, it’s true.”

One such crusade may be linked to the trouble Eric Myers is in today, his father said.

According to a story Eric told his father several months ago, Eric picked up a battered female hitchhiker and three children in Arizona, who told him that they were trying to escape from “a surly mob of bikers and drug dealers.”

Eric hid the mother and children at several locations around the Phoenix area and, three days before he left for San Diego, got a death threat concerning the family’s location on his answering machine. Somehow, Eric believed the biker group was from somewhere in California.

Donald Myers acknowledges that the details are vague and although Eric apparently filed extensive police reports about the situation, Donald has not even finished reading the copy he has.

McKinnon, of the San Diego Police Department, said the information is so sketchy as to be almost worthless, and he has not been able to find a police report on the matter.

Private investigator Rhoads said Eric “seems to have had some contact with outlaw motorcycle types, but it would require a lot more investigation to determine what his brush with the group was.”

Until any new information is discovered, Donald Myers said he will just wait--and hope.

“I don’t know what happened, and I’m not going to guess,” he said. “The best thing for me to think is that he is still out there. I won’t think anything else. I’m better off thinking I’ll see him again.”