Disappearance of Robert Hoagland

Robert Hoagland (June 9, 1963 – December 5, 2022) was a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, United States, who disappeared in 2013.

His whereabouts were unknown, with some investigators fearing he had met with foul play.

In fact, he had actually resettled in Rock Hill, New York, under an assumed name, Richard King, which was not discovered until after his death in late 2022.

On the morning of July 28, 2013, security footage at a Mobil gas station in Newtown captured Hoagland, a local chef and property appraiser, buying a map along with fuel for his wife's car.

He was last seen by anyone who knew him later that morning, when his son bid goodbye as Hoagland was mowing the lawn of the family home, a conversation also witnessed by a neighbor.

Hoagland failed to show up for work the next morning or pick up his wife when she returned home from an overseas trip that afternoon.

He was reported missing.

Police investigated several sightings of Hoagland over the next year, mostly nearby.

Tips also placed him in southern California and South Carolina; neither they nor the alleged sightings yielded any trace of him.

Theories about his disappearance ranged from foul play possibly connected to his son's drug problems to an attempt to start a new life.

The case was featured on an episode of the Investigation Discovery series Disappeared.

Hoagland's disappearance was resolved almost a decade later when his body was found by a roommate in a Rock Hill, New York, apartment on December 5, 2022, where he had been living under the name Richard King.

Deputies from the Sullivan County Sheriff's Office found paperwork with his real name on it, and notified Newtown police.

Robert Hoagland and his wife Lori, a culinary arts teacher at Newtown High School, lived on Glen Road in the Sandy Hook neighborhood of Newtown, Connecticut, where they had raised their three sons to young adulthood.

The couple had at one point separated for two years, but later reconciled.

Lori stated they had begun planning their retirements.

Robert and Lori's 24-year-old son, Max Hoagland, had a history of problems with drug addiction and had been in rehab earlier in 2013.

Robert left his restaurant job for a position in a friend's law firm to better help his son with his recovery; he also worked as a real estate appraiser.

Robert and Lori had talked about going on a hiking trip with Max on the Appalachian Trail that summer as part of that effort.

In July, Lori went on a two-week trip to Turkey with some friends; she and Robert regularly exchanged email messages while she was away.

In the week before Lori's return, two of the family's laptop computers were stolen.

Robert came to believe that Max had taken them to either sell or exchange in order to obtain drugs, and sent an email to Lori apologizing for having let it happen.

Investigators later learned that Robert had traveled to an abandoned industrial building in Bridgeport to confront some men they described as Max's "associates" over the theft, which Max had said they were responsible for.

On July 25, $600 was withdrawn from one of the family's bank accounts.

Robert and Lori spoke briefly by phone on the evening of July 27, confirming his plan to pick her up upon her return from Turkey at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City two days later.

Early the next morning, he went out in his wife's Volkswagen Golf to buy bagels for breakfast at a local bakery, then stopped at a Mobil station on Church Hill Road (U.S. Route 6 and Connecticut Route 34) near Interstate 84 to get gas.

Security cameras inside recorded him paying for the fuel and also buying a map of the eastern United States at 6:45 a.m. It would be his last documented public sighting as Robert Hoagland.

Upon Robert's return home, he and Max had breakfast.

After the meal, Max said later, his father paid some bills and played Scrabble online for a while.

Around 10 or 11 a.m., Robert went out to mow the lawn.

While he was doing so, Max went out in the Volkswagen, telling his father he expected to be back a few hours later.

A neighbor also told police he saw the two talking on the lawn.

The next day, Robert was not at the airport when Lori arrived around 4 p.m. She tried calling both their home and his cell phone, but got no answer at either.

She assumed that he was in traffic on his way there and his phone's battery was dead.

"This happens with him frequently," she later said.

Lori did not initially return to Newtown, instead going to a relative's home nearby.

She learned from another phone call, to Robert's boss's wife, that he had not shown up for work that morning.

When Lori finally arrived home on July 30, Robert was not in the house.

Instead she found his phone, keys, passport and prescription high blood pressure medications, as well as his dirty clothes in the laundry.

The mower Robert had been using had been returned to its usual storage location, and the loafers he had been wearing when he went on his morning shopping trip – his preferred summertime footwear – were also in the house, as was his other pair.