where in southern Ohio. But when Haas’
mom emailed looking for her son in mid-
September, Fieri became alarmed and con-
tacted the police.
The third key person Peters and
Hounshell interviewed in the Columbus area
was Charles Ford, the mechanic who had
introduced Fieri to Haas. A garrulous and
slightly pudgy man who keeps his patchy
gray hair pulled into a ponytail, Ford was
also the last person known to have seen
Haas alive.
Ford got to know Haas through a mutual
friend—a woman Haas was having a fling
with. When that relationship went sour in
early 2018, Ford invited Haas to stay at his
condo. The programmer ended up living at
Ford’s place until he moved in with Fieri in
late winter. The two men grew close enough
to travel together to a nutritional confer-
ence in Indianapolis. (Haas was a devotee
of herbal supplements sold by LifeVantage,
the company for which Ford is an indepen-
dent distributor.) Ford also invested a mod-
est sum in Tessr, on the chance that such a
bet would allow him to join the burgeon-
ing ranks of blockchain millionaires; the
startup, in turn, named Ford’s wife, who lives
in Florida, to its board of advisers.
Haas, who didn’t have a car or a driver’s
license, called Ford on the evening of August
30 to ask for a ride to the Tessr board meeting.
Their agreed-upon rendezvous point was a
park across from a shopping mall; when Fordarrived in his Saturn, Haas emerged from the
bushes as if he’d been hiding. Getting into the
car, Haas said that people were attempting to
steal his money and that they were willing to
“OD” him to get it.
After melting down on the sidewalk after
the board meeting, Haas went to Ford’s
condo instead of returning to the hotel suite
he shared with Fieri. He never slept, spend-
ing the whole night pecking away at his lap-
top. One of the emails he sent that night was
addressed to a company he did freelance
work for. It contained a request to mail him
paper checks instead of depositing his pay-
ments into his joint account with Fieri.
The next morning, Haas asked Ford to
drive him south toward Cincinnati; he did
not give any reason for the trip, and Ford
did not inquire. The pair tooled down I-71
for a ways before Haas insisted they switch
over to I-75, once again providing no expla-
nation for his request. Ford pulled off at an
exit in sparsely populated Clinton County
and decided to refuel at a BP station before
heading west to I-75.
After refueling, Ford went into the sta-
tion’s convenience store to buy water and
snacks, while Haas stayed outside to smoke
a cigarette. Ford told the police that the
store’s credit card system was on the fritz,
delaying his checkout by 30 to 45 minutes.
When he finally emerged from the store
with his purchases in hand, Haas and his
backpack were gone.
Ford said he went looking for Haas in the
soybean field across from the gas station and
then all along the country roads that snake
off the state route leading to I-75. He also said
he stopped at a Burger King during his search
and bought a double cheeseburger for the
clerk at the BP station, since he’d heard her
mention that she was famished.
Detectives felt there were several things
amiss with Ford’s account, police records
show, starting with his manner of deliver-
ing it: In response to brief and direct ques-
tions, Ford tended to speak in meandering
10-minute chunks filled with obfuscation.
More important, the detectives couldn’t
fathom how it could have taken 45 minutes
for the BP station to fix a credit card snafu, or
why Ford hadn’t bothered to call Haas’ cell
phone even once after the day Haas disap-
peared. The investigators’ instincts told them
that, at the very least, Ford knew how Tessr’s
master coder had died.While struggling to get clean after years of drug abuse, Haas—right, in a photo taken when
he was 15 or 16—lived in a camper parked at the home of his mother, Judith Wallace Huff, left.
Not long after that he ended up in a homeless shelter, above, in Columbus, Ohio.