This story isn’t about me. It’s about a grieving family that has been waiting for answers for seventeen years. It’s about a man who in the small hours of the morning after a hard day of work and a good time with friends made one tiny mistake that cost him his life. All the same, this is my story too because like so many in the law enforcement world I don’t let unsolved cases go. I’ve been thinking about Robert Helphrey, who went missing on May 22, 2006, for a long time.
Seventeen years ago I was a deputy with the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. I was pregnant, and I was working the desk on light duty until I gave birth. The walk-ins and phone calls you get at the desk are usually simple and tend to blend together in my memory – lost property, found property, vehicle impound releases. Then I got a call from a mother.
She told me her adult son was missing. He hadn’t shown up for work. He hadn’t gone home to feed his dog. None of his friends or family knew where he was. Helphrey had finished his shift as manager of the Thirsty Marlin and then went to the nearby Peggy O’Neil’s Irish Pub with his coworkers. He left there around 2 a.m., calling up a friend and inviting him to come to his house and play video games. The friend later knocked at his door and heard Helphrey’s dog barking, but after calling him several times gave up and went home.
It's not like him to disappear, Helphrey’s mom and dad told me when they came in to the North District Station later that day. He loves his dog. He loves his kids. Something’s wrong. He’s in trouble, or he’s hurt somewhere. He wouldn’t just leave.
And I had the heartbreaking task of explaining to her that, at least for now, there wasn’t much that law enforcement could do. No matter how out of character it might be for your son, I had to tell her, the truth is that adults sometimes do things their family doesn’t expect. They might go on vacation without telling anyone. They might pack up and start a new life. Even though his mother knew in her heart that he would never do that, all we could do at the time was write an incident report to document the events. Later, he was entered in the National Crime Information Center as a missing person.
While the other deputy at the desk wrote the report, I talked more with Helphrey’s parents. As delicately as I could, I encouraged them to check all the roads that their son might have traveled between the pub and his home, or anywhere else he might have gone that night. Look for tire marks in the grass. Look for crushed foliage. Pay special attention to waterways. It happens all too often in Florida – a disoriented driver goes off the road and sinks beneath one of the many retention ponds or canals we have in our state.
Time passed, and there was no sign of Helphrey or – tellingly – his vehicle. Whether he had been the victim of a crime or had left on his own, his vehicle probably would have turned up eventually.
I left law enforcement soon after having my baby. I moved out of state, I became a novelist, I came back to Florida… and through it all, at least a couple of times a year, I would check out the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office missing persons page to see if he’d been found. His disappearance haunted me. With a new baby of my own – also named Robert – I couldn’t shake the thought of his mother’s grief. What would I do if my son ever went missing?
In 2022 I rejoined the PCSO as a civilian, putting my writing skills to use in the Public Relations Bureau. A big part of my job involves meeting members from around the agency, learning about what they’re working on, hearing their stories. One of the first people I met was Cold Case Detective Ron Chalmers when he was overseeing a massive excavation searching for a woman who had gone missing in 1982. Almost at once we started talking about Robert Helphrey. Over the last year I’ve followed developments in the search, and last week there was a break in the case.
As diligent as detectives may be, it is often a tip or dedicated help from the public that provides the crucial piece of information in unsolved cases. This time it was a team of civilian volunteers who devote their free time to investigating cases similar to this one – missing persons or victims of crime whose vehicles might be submerged somewhere in Florida. Ken Fleming of Recon Dive Recovery works with Mike Sullivan and John Martin of Sunshine State Sonar Search Team. “We’ve been working on this case for around two years,” said Sullivan. “We searched, I’m going to guess over 250 bodies of water for him and we came back to this one.” There had been a cell phone ping in the area, and the pond had been checked before without success, but they had a hunch and went back. This time, their sonar showed an image that they were sure was a submerged vehicle.
Residents don’t always understand what the volunteer investigators are doing and get suspicious. In this case, Mike said, a representative of the HOA thought they might be trying to steal the fountain and called law enforcement. It took a lot of explaining and a call to Detective Chalmers before they were allowed to dive in the pond. Residents were skeptical. Some who had lived there at the time said there had never been a crash, had never been tire tracks on the bank. Mike said that’s not unusual. The vehicle might leave minimal evidence of entering the water.
Fleming did an exploratory dive, and immediately identified a vehicle. The water was about seven feet deep there, with another nearly three feet of silt. Fleming, an experienced cave diver, is used to limited visibility and said that in this case even with an $800 underwater flashlight visibility was only a few inches at best. When he moved to check the license plate he had to read the tag by feel. It matched Helphrey’s vehicle. A deputy stood watch on the scene overnight, and the next morning at 7:00 a.m. detectives, forensic scientists, and the PCSO Dive Team gathered on the grassy bank as a tow truck hooked up to the vehicle and slowly pulled it from the murky water.
Sometimes law enforcement solves crimes; sometimes they give hope. But other times all they can do is provide answers… and those answers might not be happy ones. Helphrey’s father searched for his son until the day he died. Other family members came up with stories that gave his disappearance meaning, speculating that he might have returned to the military on a mission so vital, so secret, that he couldn’t even tell his family. They pictured him saving the world. But when I held his mother’s hand just before they pulled her son’s silver Mitsubishi Outlander from the water, I think we both knew in our hearts all along that this is what happened to her son.
The vehicle was transported to the Sheriff’s Administration Building where a team of detectives, forensic scientists, and members of the medical examiner’s office collected the human remains found inside. There were no obvious signs of a crime. It appeared to be what we thought – a tragic miscalculation by a tired driver. A few days later the Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed that the remains belonged to Robert Helphrey. His family has answers. I can only hope that they have peace.
There are deputies who get into law enforcement to arrest criminals. The best of them, though, do this job to help people. It’s what we all want – to stop crimes before they happen when we can, and to solve them when we can’t. But many people don’t realize that a significant portion of a deputy’s job isn’t about solving crimes, it’s about solving problems. Sometimes all we can do is simply never stop, never give up. Cold Case detectives Tom Lehn and Chalmers are testament to the persistence of the best detectives.
