For a while, there was a trail to follow.
In the first several weeks after 29-year-old Claudia Lopez Escobar was killed on March 30, the man charged in her death left tracks throughout the Midwest, Columbus police said.
Sar I, who is a 41-year-old Cambodian and ex-boyfriend of Escobar's, had run from central Ohio, but police said they knew he was using contacts to leapfrog through Asian communities from Cleveland to South Bend, Ind.
Then, nothing.
"We haven't seen him surface since around May," detective Jay Fulton of the homicide squad said last week.
Now, eight months after officers believe that I killed Escobar, they still have no idea where her body is, what happened to her sport-utility vehicle or where I is hiding.
Escobar was last seen on March 30, when she told a friend she was going to meet a former boyfriend at his apartment. She later called the friend, saying she was there. That was the last anyone heard from her, police said. She was reported missing on April 5.
Police believe that Escobar visited I at his apartment at 1774 Pheasant Run W., a complex that abuts the southern edge of Big Run Park on the West Side. Evidence in the apartment, including blood, led police to believe that Escobar is dead.
I is wanted on charges of murder, kidnapping and abuse of a corpse. A federal warrant for unlawful flight to escape prosecution was issued after a request from Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien in May.
The federal affidavit for that warrant says I fled to northern Ohio and solicited a ride to West Virginia. Fulton said I apparently has stopped relying on his network of contacts in Midwestern Asian communities after continued pressure from law officers.
"The information we have indicates that he did not get out of the country," he said.
Fulton said police don't know who might be sheltering I or how he might be getting the money to stay on the run. He could be living under an alias.
Fulton said federal authorities have asked the cable-TV crime-fighting show America's Most Wanted to feature the case in the coming weeks. Representatives of the show did not respond to a request for comment.
Police have searched Franklin County's landfill and Big Run Park for Escobar's body but found nothing, Fulton said. I is an avid fisherman, and Fulton said he wonders whether I disposed of Escobar's body in water somewhere.
Fulton only guessed at what happened to her Jeep Cherokee. "It's unusual for us to lose a car like that," he said. "It's either sitting in a garage somewhere, which is unlikely, or it's been disposed of."
Escobar was from a remote area near Tapachula, Mexico, and regularly sent money to her family, including two young sons. Police have not heard directly from her family but have passed information on the case to U.S. officials in Mexico.
"They certainly know the money stopped coming from the United States," Fulton said of Escobar's family. "I believe there are still some people in central Ohio who still have knowledge about the case, even if it's secondhand."
Copyright 2012 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
