In the summer of 1988, a 37-year-old man named Jarvis LeRoy Sayler moved from his home state of Missouri to Vancouver, Washington. Born with partial blindness and considered mentally handicapped, Jarvis had been receiving Social Security disability benefits since 1977. He initially stayed with family for a short time before getting his own apartment in the Hazel Dell area of Vancouver.
He had plans to eventually return to Missouri, where he had purchased property with the intention of building a house. However, on an evening in October 1988, Jarvis told his family he was traveling to Wichita, Kansas, to handle a personal matter. After that declaration, Jarvis Sayler was never seen or heard from again. He was a man who wore thick prescription glasses due to his visual impairment and primarily traveled by bus.
Concern for Jarvis's welfare grew, and by March of 1989, a brother still living in Missouri officially reported him as a missing person. This report was prompted after the family discovered that the property Jarvis owned back home had been repossessed and was up for auction because he had failed to make payments. When authorities from the Clark County Sheriff's Office questioned his brother in Washington, Chris Harvey Sayler, he claimed that Jarvis had moved out of his own home after the two had an argument. Chris Sayler stated that was the last time he saw his brother. This lack of contact was deeply concerning to other family members, with another brother stating it was highly uncharacteristic of Jarvis to fall out of touch with his loved ones. Between June and September of 1988, Jarvis had sent a few letters back home to Missouri, but those communications abruptly stopped, marking the last time anyone in his family heard from him.
For decades, the case remained cold, with no new leads on Jarvis's whereabouts. A shocking development, however, began to unfold in 2013. A person attempting to get a Washington state identification card in Jarvis Sayler's name was flagged by facial recognition software. The system indicated that the photo of the person claiming to be Jarvis was a match to the driver's license photo of his brother, Chris Sayler. When confronted with this discrepancy, Chris claimed that he and Jarvis were twins, which was why their photos matched. When a Department of Licensing clerk pointed out that their birthdates were four years apart, Chris insisted it was a 'rare twin situation' that can occur. Further investigation revealed that not only were they not twins, but Chris was adopted and not biologically related to Jarvis at all. This discovery launched a federal investigation which uncovered that Chris had been fraudulently collecting his missing brother's Social Security benefits for years, accumulating between $388,000 and $500,000. In 2019, Chris Sayler was arrested and later pleaded guilty to wire fraud and aggravated identity theft, receiving a two-year prison sentence in 2021. Despite the conviction for identity theft, the fundamental question of what happened to Jarvis LeRoy Sayler remains unanswered. His brother Chris was the last known person to have seen him, but he has not been named a suspect in the disappearance itself. The Clark County Sheriff's Office continues to ask for public assistance, hoping for any information that might finally bring closure to the long and sorrowful mystery of where Jarvis is.Last Seen: Oct 1, 1988
