Search Grows for Missing Computer Executive : Thousand Oaks: Philip Taylor Kramer, former bassist for the pop group Iron Butterfly, was last heard from 11 days ago.

Private airplanes and a sheriff’s helicopter joined the search Wednesday for Iron Butterfly’s former bassist, a Thousand Oaks computer executive who has been missing now for 11 days.

Philip Taylor Kramer was last heard from Feb. 12 as he drove north on the Ventura Freeway between Agoura Hills and his home in the Wildwood area of Thousand Oaks, police said.

A business partner said that Kramer, 42, sounded distraught in his last phone call, when he dialed a 911 emergency operator from a cellular phone in his car.

“It sounded suicidal,” said Dan Shields, chief technology officer for Total Multimedia Inc., the company he and Kramer founded in 1990.

Shields and police refused to discuss the content of the phone call, but Kramer had never sounded that way before, said Shields: “Depressed, yes. Suicidal, no.”

“He was very distraught, and did not stay on the line long enough” for anyone to learn what his problems were, Shields said. “There were no comments specifically about his personal life or his business life.”

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The company recently emerged from bankruptcy and had grown from its original three partners to employ a staff of 35 in helping software companies develop CD-ROM projects for computer users, Shields said.

Police have examined the possibility that Kramer’s disappearance might be linked to industrial espionage--and rejected it, said Sheriff’s Detective Tom Bennett. “Just talking to different representatives in the company, they do not feel it’s a possibility,” Bennett said.

Detectives have been busy retracing the calls Kramer made from his cellular phone and flying over the Santa Monica Mountains by helicopter to search for his van, Bennett said.

Shields said that Kramer was to pick up someone at Los Angeles International Airport that morning, but the visitor was stranded because Kramer never arrived.

Records of the cellular phone calls that Kramer made showed that he drove from Thousand Oaks down the Ventura Freeway to the San Diego Freeway, turned around near the airport and drove back up the Ventura Freeway toward Thousand Oaks, Shields said.

The last call--to police 911 emergency lines--was made at 11:58 a.m. near Calabasas or Agoura Hills, he said.

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Shields said that he joined a friend in a search for Kramer’s van by airplane, buzzing 400 to 800 feet above the ridges of the Santa Monica Mountains. But if the 1993 hunter-green Ford Aerostar van is down there, it will be difficult to spot among lush green brush that grew in the heavy winter rains, he said.

When the partners last spoke on Feb. 12, Kramer sounded excited about Total Multimedia’s new ventures, Shields said.

The company helped develop two eagerly awaited CD-ROMs--a just-released flight simulator called Falcon Gold and a game based on the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Fields said.

“I talked to him Saturday and Sunday,” Feb. 11 and 12, Shields said. “He sounded lucid, he seemed almost euphoric. He was excited about the applications, some of the things we’d been working on.”