‘Empty Hole in Memory’ Haunts Lake Forest Man : Amnesia: Clifford Leighton has no memory of his whereabouts from Jan. 22 to last weekend. His fiancee says he’s a changed man.

A 42-year-old electronics consultant missing since Jan. 22, who was found unconscious beside a desert road last weekend, said Tuesday night that he has no memory of the past month.

“There’s a big, empty hole in my memory,” Clifford Leighton said at his Lake Forest apartment. “I still find it difficult to believe. For me, it was like the next day (after he disappeared) when I woke up as the paramedics were loading me onto the ambulance” in the desert town of Hemet.

Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies confirm that Leighton was dehydrated and had suffered several bruises and scratches when he was found by security guards working at a reservoir project along a two-lane road.

“He apparently had been there for just a few minutes, because the guards patrol that area every 15 minutes,” said Henry Sawicki, a Riverside sheriff’s spokesman. “He apparently was a little messed up, although he was treated and released the same day” from the Minifee Valley Regional Hospital in Sun City.

On Jan. 22, Leighton called his fiancee, Jennifer Bradford, from Southern California Edison Co. in Redondo Beach, where he had been working that day as a consultant for KVB Inc. of Irvine, his employer. He told her he was on his way home would be there in about an hour, Bradford said.

Leighton said that he pulled off somewhere along the San Diego Freeway in Orange County to use a gas station restroom. He remembers getting out of his car at a station.

His next memory, he says, is of his ride to the hospital on Sunday.

“I’m sure very few people ever experienced this kind of thing,” he said. “You feel that someone is lying to you when they say, ‘Hey, it’s three and a half weeks later.’ It’s been a great shock.”

Bradford, who reported him missing, said that she, family and friends distributed more than 5,000 flyers about the 6-foot-2, 155-pound Leighton from Santa Barbara to San Bernardino.

Until Sunday, there was no sign that he was alive--no phone calls from anyone asking for ransom, no bank or credit card activity, Bradford said.

Leighton said he has seen a doctor who told him the blackout was caused either by stress or physical trauma. Leighton speculated it could have been caused by job stress, and reminded him that “maybe you need to step back and spend a little more time with friends and family.”

Four days after his disappearance, Santa Ana police found Leighton’s car behind a photo store in that city. Bradford said that several valuable items were missing from the car, including a laptop computer.

For Bradford, 46, her fiance’s return “was the best Valentine’s gift in the world. I never believed he was dead, but there were nights when I thought I would never see him again.

“After he was found, all his friends and family told me that they had not wanted to say anything to me,” because they feared Leighton was dead.

The case was the second mysterious disappearance recently of an Orange County man. Rowland Snowdon, an aerospace executive, had been missing for four months when he was found in December living in a Las Vegas motel. Afterward, family members said Snowdon had been depressed about work problems.

Before Leighton’s disappearance, his fiancee said, he had been a calm, almost stoic man. “Now, he’s more emotional. He shows much more emotion than I’ve ever seen from him,” she added.

After Leighton undergoes neurological tests, the couple plans to retrace Leighton’s steps the night of Jan. 22. They hope to find the gas station that was Leighton’s last stop.

“It’s important to me that I remember what happened,” he said. “If there’s any way to find out, I need to know what happened.”