Part 1Cold Open
Buckeye, Arizona. June twenty-third, twenty twenty-one.
A Wednesday. And it is raining.
I want you to hold onto that, because the rain is the only reason anybody knows anything at all about what happened next.
Out past the edge of the subdivisions, where Sun Valley Parkway runs north through open Sonoran desert and the cross streets stop meaning anything, there is a water well site. And there are two men standing at it that morning, waiting out a storm cell.
One of them is twenty-four years old. He's a geologist — a good one, a year or so into the job — and what he does is test the water that comes out of the ground out here, so that somebody can eventually build on it. He's wearing his safety vest. His shoes are untied.
The other man had met him for the first time about fifteen minutes earlier.
And in those fifteen minutes, the young man says a few things that don't make sense. He asks the stranger if he wants to go and rest. Then he asks him if he wants to drive to Phoenix and rest.
Then he stops talking, gets into his Jeep — a blue-grey Renegade, his, one he'd wanted for a long time — and he drives away south without another word.
Later that afternoon, when nobody can reach him, the man he'd just met goes out looking.
And because it has rained — because for the first time in a long while that ground is soft — he can see exactly where Daniel Robinson went.
The tracks run south to a T in the road. And then they turn west. Off the road entirely, out into open desert, where there is nothing. No route. No destination. No reason anybody has ever been able to name.
He follows them as far as he can and he does not find him.
Nobody has since.
His mother has not heard his voice in five years. His father has spent those five years in that desert on his hands and knees.
I have been following this case since the fall of twenty twenty-one. I wrote about it once, three and a half years ago, when he had been gone five hundred and sixty-three days.
Today it's one thousand, eight hundred and seventy-four.
Part 2Introduction
Welcome to Forgotten True Crime. I'm your host, Trevor Shelby.
Now — this is not the show I normally do. Almost everything we cover here is eighty, ninety, a hundred years old. Everyone involved is dead. Nobody's waiting on me.
This one is open. Right now. This morning.
And I want to tell you why I'm doing it anyway, because it's the same reason I do the old ones.
I have watched this case get quiet. I watched it get three months of national attention in the fall of twenty twenty-one for a reason that had almost nothing to do with Daniel. I watched that attention leave. I wrote about it in January of twenty twenty-three, and then I watched most of the country stop typing his name.
That is exactly what happens to the cases I cover. It just usually takes fifty years. This one did it in about ninety days.
So: everything you're going to hear comes from what has actually been released — police reports, the family's own investigator, on-the-record interviews. Where the record fights with itself, and on this one it fights constantly, I'll stop and tell you it's fighting. Where nobody knows, I'll say nobody knows.
And all of it is up at Section29.com. The full case file on this one — the police reports, the photographs of that scene, the search maps.
And a numbered source for every single quote in this episode. Every one. Every time you hear me say that somebody said something, there's a line on that page telling you exactly who said it, when they said it, who they said it to, and a link so you can go read the whole thing in context and decide for yourself whether I used it fairly.
I'd rather tell you the story than read you the footnotes. So go and look at it yourself.
Let's start with him.
Part 3Who He Was
Daniel Robinson was born on the fourteenth of January, nineteen ninety-seven, in South Carolina.
He was born without the lower part of his right arm. No forearm below a certain point, no right hand.
I want to be careful here, because of the way people talk about this when they write about him — like it's the headline. It wasn't. Ask his father what it meant and you get four words.
"It wasn't a handicap for him."
He played sports. He competed. He went out and did the things a kid does with two hands, with one, and by all accounts he did not spend a lot of time discussing it.
He went to the College of Charleston and in twenty seventeen he came out of there with a degree in geology.
And here I have to admit something, because I've been sitting with this case for years and this is the part that gets me every time.
He loved rocks.
That sounds like a small thing. It isn't. His father put it like this —
"He was very into science, and he loved rocks that came out of the earth."
That's a person who found the thing he wanted to do with his life at an age when most of us are still guessing. And then he did it. He took a job two thousand miles from everyone he knew, in Arizona, as a hydrogeologist — which means water. Where it is under the ground, how much of it there is, whether it's clean. He was out at well sites in the West Valley in the heat, doing the actual field work.
He drove for Instacart on the side, because he was twenty-four.
He hiked. He climbed. There's a photograph of him sitting on top of a mountain in the desert with the whole basin laid out behind him, and when I look at that picture I don't see a missing person. I see somebody who got exactly where he was trying to go.
His father said something else about him that I keep turning over. That Daniel wanted to expand his horizons. That he didn't want to be trapped in a box. That he was trying to see as much as he could while he was young, and get himself ready for whatever came after.
That is a twenty-four-year-old with a plan.
He talked to his family constantly. His dad said the calls ran two hours. Every time. Two hours, from Arizona to South Carolina, about nothing.
A friend he'd grown up with in South Carolina put it about as plainly as it can be put, at a gathering for Daniel's birthday the year after he vanished. He said Daniel was his rock. He said that even when Daniel wasn't there, he meant that much to him.
And the night before — his mother told this to a reporter, and I've never been able to shake it —
"Daniel called me again. And Daniel says, 'Hello, mom. I'm just checking on you.'"
That was the last thing he said to her.
He was checking on her.
Part 4The Morning, and the Two Hours
So: that Wednesday morning.
He gets to the site. It's the far edge of Buckeye, which is the far edge of the Phoenix metro — Sun Valley Parkway and Cactus Road, and past that it's just creosote and rock all the way to the horizon.
The coworker is new to him. First time they'd met.
And what that man described afterward is a young guy who seemed off. Not frightened. Not in trouble. Just — not right, somehow, in a way he struggled to put words to, and he'd known him for an hour, so what exactly is that worth?
I don't know. Nobody knows. That's going to be a recurring feature of this episode.
Quarter to ten. Jeep. South to the T in the road, and then west, off it entirely and into open ground.
Now here is where I want you to pay attention, because this is where a case gets made or lost, and this one got lost in the first forty-eight hours.
Daniel doesn't come home. He doesn't answer. And his father — two thousand miles away in South Carolina — calls the police in Buckeye to report his son missing.
And he is told to hang up the phone, wait two hours, and call back.
"When I first called in, they made me hang the phone up, wait two hours and call back."
Two hours. In June. In the Sonoran Desert, where the ground temperature in the sun will kill a healthy adult in an afternoon, for a young man last seen driving into open country away from every road.
And here I have to stop and be careful with you, because I have now read the police file on this, and the file does not show that.
What the file shows is a call logged at four minutes past seven that evening, and an officer who took it seriously from the first minute. He called Daniel's phone over and over. He called the company. He found the man who had last seen him and interviewed him by telephone. And then he and a second officer went out and spent hours in the dark driving the desert looking for a blue Jeep. Daniel was entered into the national missing persons system that night. The same officer tried his phone again at one in the morning.
Now — both of those things can be true at once. A log starts when a call is answered. It would not show a call that got turned away two hours earlier. I can't prove David Robinson's two hours happened, and I can't prove they didn't, and I'm not going to pick the version that makes the better story.
What I can tell you is that once Buckeye had it, that night, they did not sit on it.
And I can tell you that David Robinson didn't wait well. He says so himself.
"I kind of lost it. That prompted me to grab everything I could, throw it in my car and start driving to go find Daniel myself."
That's David Robinson the Second. Daniel's father. Retired United States Army — a combat engineer, medically retired out of Afghanistan.
He got in the car in South Carolina and he drove to Arizona.
And when he got there and law enforcement walked him through what they believed had happened out at that site, he had a two-word reaction that he has never taken back.
"It was unacceptable to me. It didn't make sense."
Part 5Twenty-Six Days
For twenty-six days there was nothing.
No Jeep. No Daniel. No trace of either.
I want you to sit in those twenty-six days for a second, because they get skipped in every version of this story I've ever read, and they are the worst part of it.
A missing man's car is the single easiest thing to find in a missing-person case. It's a two-thousand-pound object. It's painted. It has plates on it. In open desert with a plane up, a vehicle is not subtle.
And for twenty-six days, in country with almost nothing in it, nobody found a Jeep.
Then, on the nineteenth of July, on a rancher's land about three and a half miles from that well site, somebody found the Renegade.
It was in a ravine. It had rolled, and it was lying on its side.
And I want to walk you through what was in it, because this is the whole case. Everything anybody argues about for the next five years, they argue about starting from this list.
His cell phone was in it. Dead.
His keys were in it.
His backpack was in it, with his work laptop inside.
A hard hat was in it, sitting upside down, full of rainwater.
Every airbag in the vehicle had deployed. Front, sides — all of them.
The driver's seatbelt had been buckled when it rolled.
There was no blood. Not in the vehicle, not at the scene, not anywhere anybody looked, despite what the detective called substantial damage.
The Jeep was still in drive.
And there was no Daniel.
Now. His clothes.
I need to slow down here, because this is the part of the case I have spent five years reading conflicting accounts of, and I finally have the answer, and the answer is worse than either version I'd been told.
I had read that his clothes were found inside the vehicle. I had also read that they were in a neat pile a few feet away. Neither is right.
The detective who walked into that ravine wrote down what he saw. A pair of jeans, inside out. Two brown work boots. A faded orange safety vest with his company's logo on it. A tee shirt. And two socks, also inside out.
The accident reconstruction expert who came out later wrote it down too, and he was more specific about where.
Scattered up the western side of the hill.
Not in the car. Not folded. Scattered up a hillside, above a wrecked Jeep, in the open desert.
And in the pocket of those jeans, lying out there on the ground, was his wallet — with his driver's license in it, and his cards, and no cash.
I want to say the quiet part, because there's no way to tell this honestly and skip it. Clothing comes off inside out when it is pulled off in a hurry.
So the crash happened. Everybody agrees on that. The Jeep came down into that ravine, it rolled, the airbags went, the driver was belted in, and the engine was still in gear.
What nobody has ever produced — in five years, with everything that has been searched and dug and scoped and tested — is the man who was wearing that seatbelt, or an explanation for why his clothes were coming off as he went up that hill.
Part 6What the Desert Gave Up
Here's what a father does with that.
David Robinson stayed. He'd driven out for a weekend, essentially, and he did not go home. He rented an apartment in Arizona. He learned the desert the way you learn a job.
In those first weeks, by his own count, he ran seven weeks of searches without help from the Buckeye Police Department. Cadaver dogs. Drones. Fixed-wing aircraft, flying grids over open ground. He was paying for it.
And people came. That's the part I didn't expect when I started following this. Strangers kept showing up — weekend after weekend, into a desert that is genuinely dangerous for eight months of the year — to walk a line abreast across scrub and rock for a young man they had never met.
He has called those volunteers his extended family. I believe him.
The searches got numbered. That is a detail I find hard to get past. When you have done enough of them that you have to number them to keep track, something has happened to your life.
And here is the thing about that desert.
It gave up other people.
In January of twenty twenty-three, somebody riding out past Johnson Road found a skull, and other bones with it. For about two days there was a version of this story where it was over. Police worked the scene, the medical examiner took what was found, and the family waited.
It wasn't him. It was a thirty-five-year-old man named Juan Fierro, who had nothing to do with any of this, and who was also somebody's son.
Later that same month a tip came in that there were human remains in a well about half a mile north of where Daniel was last seen. Not a shallow well — a thousand feet deep.
They took that seriously. In February a contractor scoped it. Then a second contractor brought in heavy equipment and pulled the contents of the bottom of a thousand-foot well up into the daylight so they could be looked at.
Nothing.
That same week there was a full operation out near Sun Valley Parkway and Cactus Road — the sheriff's office in with the city police, sixty-some people, dog teams, riders on horseback, four ground crews, guys on ATVs, a drone up.
And the official word afterward was that the search did not reveal any additional evidence related to Daniel's case.
That's how it goes out there. The desert answers questions. Just never the one you asked.
Part 7Two Readings of the Same Jeep
Now we get to it.
There are two ways to read that Jeep, and five years later the people who love Daniel Robinson and the people investigating his disappearance have never once agreed on which is right.
And I have to tell you something before I lay them out, because it changed this episode while I was making it.
I wrote most of this from news coverage. Then I sat down with the actual police file — a hundred and twenty-eight pages of it — and I found that some of what I was about to tell you was wrong. Not wrong on purpose. Wrong the way things get wrong when they're repeated for five years without anybody going back to the paper.
So I'm going to give you what's actually in the file. Some of it helps this family's case. Quite a lot of it doesn't.
Let me start with the family's reading, because it's the one you've probably heard.
It rests on four things.
One. Every airbag in that Jeep fired — including the one on the passenger side. His father's position has always been that somebody was sitting in that seat.
Two. The Jeep's own crash computer recorded the ignition being pressed, over and over, after the wreck.
Three. There was red paint on a blue-grey car, which would mean it touched something else, somewhere.
And four, the odometer on the dash read eleven miles higher than the number the crash computer had stored.
That's the case. It has been in every article written about Daniel Robinson for four years. It was in my draft of this episode.
Here's what the file says. And I'm going to take them worst first, because two of these do not survive and two of them absolutely do.
The eleven miles is the one that comes apart — and it comes apart in the family's own hands.
The claim, as it reached the press, was that the Jeep drove eleven miles after the crash. What actually happened is that when the investigator's team took possession of the vehicle, they powered it up and saw that the dash odometer read eleven miles higher than the crash module's stored number. That is a gap between two readings. It is not eleven miles of driving.
And in September of twenty twenty-one the case detective got him on the phone and asked him two questions.
If the Jeep came to rest on its side, wheels off the ground, engine still turning — could those wheels have kept spinning and run the odometer up? He said that was possible.
If a tow truck dragged it up out of that ravine with its wheels down — could that do it? He said that was also possible.
That is the family's own expert, agreeing, on the record, in twenty twenty-one. I'm not going to stand here and pretend it says something else.
The red paint I can't resolve — and as far as I can tell, nobody can, because nobody ever tried.
The crash module logs an impact any time the car's speed drops five miles an hour in a fraction of a second, and it logged exactly one. The rollover. So there's no record of a second collision. But paint doesn't require a collision. A scrape doesn't wake that module up. And when the detective asked the investigator for more on the paint, the file says he didn't provide any.
Five years. Nobody has analysed that paint. Not the department, not the family. It is the easiest test in this entire case and it has never been run.
Now the two that are still standing. And these are the ones I would like somebody to answer.
The passenger airbag first — because I had this one wrong, and the file corrected me in the family's favour.
I was going to tell you that a passenger airbag will fire in a rollover with nobody in the seat. That's true. On its own it proves nothing, and I'd have moved on.
Then I read what the officer who pulled the data actually wrote down.
That Jeep was not configured to detect front-seat passengers.
I want to say that again. The department's position is that there is no evidence anybody was in that seat. And there isn't. There couldn't be. The car was not built to record it.
The one thing it did register is that the passenger seatbelt was unbuckled — which tells you nothing at all, because an empty seat and an unbelted passenger look exactly the same to a vehicle that cannot tell them apart.
So, no. Not proof. Not close to proof. But the question David Robinson has been asking for five years is a question that vehicle was never capable of answering — and "no evidence of a passenger" is doing a great deal of quiet work in that sentence.
And then there's the ignition.
The number is forty-four. Forty-four times, after those airbags fired, something pressed that start button.
The department's answer is that the count includes their own officer's press when he ran the download, and that it doesn't separate out a tow crew hauling a rolled Jeep up out of a ravine. Both of those are fair, and I'd want them said. The officer's own report says he pressed it twice — once to bring the power up, once to shut it off.
Which leaves about forty.
And here is the part I keep coming back to, because it took me three reads of the file to notice it.
That count was taken on the twenty-first of July, twenty twenty-one. Two days after the Jeep came up out of the desert. Two weeks before the family ever laid a hand on it.
So whatever ran that number up happened inside a window that starts at the bottom of a ravine and ends in a police impound lot. It is not four years of a father's people in a storage yard. It is those twenty-eight days.
The expert the department hired had a phrase for it. He called it an unanswered anomaly.
Five years later, that is still exactly what it is.
So — of the four, one collapses, one was never tested by anybody, and two of them are still sitting there.
Now here is the part where I have to be just as hard on the other side.
Because the police reading isn't only "he drove off and got lost." The file has a record of the days before, and it is not ambiguous, and if I gave you the family's evidence in detail and then summarized this in a sentence, I'd be doing exactly what I just accused the coverage of doing.
The day before he disappeared, Daniel texted his sister Davisha three words.
It's an emergency.
And then he didn't answer. Not her calls, not anyone's. Ten calls came in over the next two hours and he took none of them. She kept texting. Hey. I called. Are you okay. Then: Seriously are you okay. Then: I'm getting worried. I'm not mad, just confused. Then: Daniel, please be safe, I love you. Then: Please answer. And then, last: I'm sorry.
That night his brother wrote to him too. Asked him to call the next day. Told him he'd worried them. Said, and I'm quoting a brother here: I just want to see if I can help you in anyway. Love you.
That same afternoon Daniel sent a message to a young woman he'd recently met — someone who had, gently, asked him to stop coming by her place unannounced. It's the last message in that conversation, and he had put the conversation in his trash folder.
"The world can get better, but I'll have to take all the time I can or we can, whatever to name it. I'll either see you again or never see you again."
There's more in the file. I'm not going to read you a list of a man's private internet searches, and I'd ask you to think about how you'd feel about yours being read out at a moment like this. But I'm not going to pretend the list isn't there, either, or that it reads like nothing.
And the next morning he doesn't drive to work. He drives a route that takes him south, away from the site, and doubles back. He buys ten dollars of gas. He shows up late to a well pad in the rain and tells a man he has never met before that he should go and rest.
And then there is what the Jeep wrote down about the last five seconds of that drive.
The throttle moving the whole way — up to seventy-eight percent, down to twenty-two, and rising again right at the end. Thirty miles an hour, a tenth of a second before impact.
And the brakes never touched. Not once. Not in those last five seconds.
He went down into that ravine without ever reaching for them.
That's the police reading. Not a shrug. A record.
Their expert put it in one sentence, and I'm going to read it exactly as he wrote it, because this family has had to live with it.
"The driver of the Jeep drove it into the ravine, and having rolled and unable to proceed further, abandoned the Jeep as it lay."
And the department's public position, on the city's own website, right now, today:
"At this time, foul play is not suspected."
That's the title of this episode. That's the sentence this family has been living underneath for five years.
So — where does that leave us.
It leaves the family's investigator, who I should tell you found something nobody has explained away. Out in that desert, during a search, he picked up a sock. Sun-faded, out there a long time. It matched the socks lying by Daniel's car, and it matched the socks in Daniel's apartment. And it was nowhere near the Jeep.
"I can't rule out foul play, I don't know how Buckeye can."
And it leaves the thing on that hillside.
Because I've now read the police reading at full strength, and it explains the driving, and the crash, and the phone, and the timeline. It explains all of it.
It does not explain why his clothes were coming off as he went up that hill.
His mother said something about all of this that I think is the most useful sentence anybody has said in five years. It was about the police reading her son's state of mind off a telephone.
"You cannot speak for someone and say you know a person until you've been around them long enough to say they're having a problem."
Part 8The Month the Country Looked Away
I told you at the top that this case got about three months of national attention for a reason that had almost nothing to do with Daniel.
Here's what I meant.
By September of twenty twenty-one, Daniel Robinson had been missing since June. His Jeep had been found in a ravine with everything he owned in it. His father had quit his life and moved to a desert. And nationally — not locally, Phoenix stations covered it — nationally, it was close to silent.
That same month, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Gabby Petito disappeared, and the entire country stopped.
I'm not going to say a word against that family. They lost their daughter and I've got no quarrel with anybody who grieves out loud.
But somebody on the internet noticed that two young people had vanished that summer and only one of them was on television, and they posted about it, and it went around, and that is — genuinely, verifiably — how most of America first heard the name Daniel Robinson.
His father said it out loud in September of twenty twenty-one and I've never been able to forget the phrasing.
"It took an unfortunate missing person case that captured the nation's attention that my son had a shot at being seen and heard."
A shot. At being seen.
At the same time there was a young man named Jelani Day missing out of Illinois, and his mother was saying the same thing in harder words — that this young white girl was getting that attention and her young Black son was not. That he is not a nobody. That he is somebody.
And I want to give you one number, because it's the kind of thing that sounds like an opinion until you go and check.
In five years, this case has been covered by Phoenix television, by public radio, by a couple of national outlets, by a documentary series, by a Dateline podcast — that podcast made him its very first episode, which is to its credit.
The New York Times has not covered it. The Washington Post has not covered it. The Guardian has not covered it.
I went looking specifically. I wanted to be wrong about that.
Part 9The Fiftieth Search
April twelfth, twenty twenty-five.
Out past Sun Valley Parkway again, near Rosewood Avenue. Another Saturday, another line of people walking a grid across open desert.
This is search number fifty.
About a hundred volunteers turned out for that one. Somebody had reported seeing a man walking out of a ravine out there, and a report like that four years in is enough to put a hundred people in the dirt on a weekend.
And one of the men who showed up to walk that line was named Joseph Petito.
Gabby Petito's father.
The man whose daughter's disappearance took all the air in the country in the fall of twenty twenty-one — the case that David Robinson had to say out loud gave his son a shot at being seen — drove out into the Arizona desert to help look for Daniel Robinson.
Here's how he explained showing up.
"I had heard some stories about Daniel's case almost four years ago. I saw this one come up and I'm like, I'm gonna be there, David. No matter what."
No matter what.
And David said this about him.
"We didn't ask to be a part of the family, this thing happened to both our families."
That family. The one nobody applies to.
I have followed this case for a long time and that is the only genuinely good thing that has ever happened in it.
And I want to be clear about what actually closed there, because it's not sentiment. In September of twenty twenty-one, the Robinsons were on the outside of the biggest missing-person story in a generation, looking in, saying look at us too. Three and a half years later, the man at the center of that story put on boots and walked a grid in a hundred degrees for their son. Nobody made him. There was no camera crew that needed him there. He drove out to a ravine in Arizona because he is one of maybe a few hundred people in this country who understands exactly what David Robinson's mornings are like.
Petito has said something else about all of this that I think about a lot — that there is never going to be closure on the death of a child, but there is starting the grieving process properly.
That's the distinction this whole case turns on. David Robinson has not been allowed to start.
But I have to give you the rest of that day, because the rest of that day is hard.
Somewhere in there, a reporter asked David Robinson what they were looking for out there. Four years on. Fiftieth search.
And he answered it plainly.
"We're not looking for Daniel out here running around. We are looking for remains."
He also said, that same day, that he thought the fiftieth might be one of the last ones.
And he mentioned, almost in passing, that he had been at a storage unit that morning before he came out. Going through his son's things. Deciding what to keep.
"It's always that thing of not knowing what to keep and what to let go."
Part 10What a Father Built Instead
I want to tell you what David Robinson has done with five years, because I don't think there's another example of it quite like this.
He has not found his son. So he built the machinery for finding everybody else's.
There is a foundation now. A real one — registered, tax-exempt, named after Daniel. It publishes a family guide for people whose person has just gone missing, which is a document I hope you never need and which exists because somebody needed it and there wasn't one. It refers families out to search-and-rescue groups. It refers them to grief specialists who work specifically on what psychologists call ambiguous loss, which is the thing you have when there is no body and no answer and no funeral and no end.
Its motto is never leave an American behind.
Which brings me to the part of this man that explains the rest of him.
"I left the desert of Afghanistan and ended up in the desert of Arizona searching for my son, but I would've never thought it would've been the case where the training I had to never leave a fallen comrade would also mean not leaving my son behind."
He also wrote a law.
Remember the beginning of this — the phone call, the two hours. One of the things David Robinson ran into early was how hard it is for a parent to get their missing child's phone records. Not a court. Not a police department. A parent, on the account, paying the bill.
So he learned how legislation works and he wrote a bill that would fix it. It would require a wireless carrier to release a missing person's location data, call records and data usage to the account holder, within thirty days, with criminal penalties for anybody who abuses it and protection for carriers who comply in good faith.
It was introduced in the South Carolina Senate on the thirteenth of January, twenty twenty-six. It's called the Help Find Missing Americans Act. As I record this it is sitting in the Judiciary Committee, which is where most bills go to quietly die.
He ran for Congress in twenty twenty-four to push it. Won his primary with eighty-four percent and lost the general. He's running again this year.
And I'd be doing this badly if I left out that not everybody has stayed with him.
The private investigator who worked this case for the family — the man who found the paint transfer, who did the airbag analysis, a lot of what I told you in section seven — publicly broke with David in the summer of twenty twenty-five. He said he never took money from him, that when he came to him he was a desperate father. And then he said he thought David had lost focus, and that it was unfortunate.
I don't know who's right about that. I'm not sure it's the kind of thing anybody's right about. Five years is a long time to hold a rope, and people let go at different points, and I'm not going to sit here and grade a man on how he grieves.
Part 11The Workup
Now I want to come back to that fiftieth search, because something happened that day that I have been waiting on ever since.
On April eleventh and twelfth of twenty twenty-five, the physical evidence in this case changed hands. Everything the family had been holding and storing themselves for four years — the Jeep, the airbags out of it, the clothing recovered at that scene — went to the Buckeye Police Department.
David described it as a custody change. And he said the department was doing a full workup. Forensics. Testing. On the airbags, on the vehicle, on the clothes.
He said it like a man who had gotten something he'd been asking for for four years, which is what it was. And he named the question he wanted answered — whether Daniel was actually the one driving.
"We want to find out all that information, if Daniel was actually driving, so it's a lot of stuff that needs to be tested."
That was April of twenty twenty-five.
In June of twenty twenty-five, at the four-year mark, reporters asked. Testing was still pending.
In July of twenty twenty-five, national coverage ran on the premise that new forensics might finally reveal the truth. Nothing had been released.
I am recording this in August of twenty twenty-six.
Sixteen months. And to my knowledge — and I have looked, repeatedly, and I would love for somebody to write in and correct me — not one result from that workup has been made public.
And I want to be fair about what that does and doesn't mean, because "no results announced" is not the same as "nothing was done." Labs are backed up everywhere in this country. An open investigation is under no obligation to narrate itself to a podcaster. It is entirely possible that work has been done and is sitting in a file for good reasons.
But consider what those tests could actually settle. Whether there is anyone's DNA on that passenger airbag other than Daniel's. Whether the clothing recovered at that scene has anything on it at all. Whether the red paint on a blue-grey Jeep came off another vehicle or off a rock.
Those are not mysteries. Those are questions with answers, and the answers exist, and they have existed in a laboratory somewhere for sixteen months.
Meanwhile the city's own page about this investigation carries a timeline of what's been done on it.
The last entry on that timeline is from November of twenty twenty-one.
Part 12What I Think, and What I Want
So what do I think happened to Daniel Robinson.
I don't know. I want to be careful to actually say that instead of performing it, because five years of this has taught me that certainty is the cheapest thing on offer in a case like this and everybody's handing it out for free.
Here's what I'll say.
I came into this episode believing the family's version. I've followed this case since twenty twenty-one and I had absorbed, the way you do, the version where the evidence points somewhere ugly. Then I read the file, and most of that version did not survive contact with it.
So I'm not going to stand here and tell you a man did this to Daniel Robinson. I don't think the record supports it, and I'd be lying to you to keep it exciting.
But I'm also not going to tell you this case is closed, because there is one thing in it that nobody has ever explained. Not the department. Not their reconstruction expert. Not the family's investigator. Not me.
Six cadaver dogs worked that ground for five hours the night they found the Jeep. Fifty organized searches since. Aircraft. Drones. A police helicopter. A thousand-foot well pumped out and emptied onto the desert floor so somebody could look at the bottom of it.
And a young man's clothes, inside out, scattered up a hillside above a car that was still in drive.
I don't know what that is.
I know what it isn't. It isn't a man who crawled out of a wreck and walked away, because that man is dressed. And it isn't a staged scene, because you don't stage a thing you can't explain — you stage something that tells a story, and that hillside doesn't tell one.
That's what I've got. Five years of reading, and what it comes down to is a pile of clothes on a hill that nobody can account for, and a young man who is still out there somewhere.
But here's the thing, and it's the reason I did this episode instead of a nineteen thirty-one poisoning.
Daniel Robinson is a real person and he is missing right now, while you're listening to this. He turned twenty-nine this past January. He is five foot eight. He has black hair and brown eyes and he does not have his right hand, which means that if anybody ever finds anything out there, he is identifiable — which is more than most of the people I cover ever were.
Somebody knows something. In a case like this somebody always does. It may not be the somebody you're thinking of. It might be a person who saw a blue-grey Jeep somewhere it shouldn't have been in June of twenty twenty-one and has spent five years assuming it didn't matter.
If that's you: eight four four, six zero two, zero six six zero. You can text it. You do not have to give your name.
Say it again — eight four four, six zero two, zero six six zero. It's in the show notes. It's on the website. It goes to the people who are still looking for him.
His father has spent five years in that desert refusing to leave his son out there.
The very least the rest of us can do is refuse to forget his name.
Daniel Robinson.
Part 13Sign-off
Thank you for listening to Forgotten True Crime. I'm Trevor Shelby.
Just know you are unique, you are special and you are loved.
One more thing before you go, and then I'll let you get on with your day.
This show is one guy. I do the research, the writing, the recording, the editing and the promotion, and there is no network and no studio and no staff behind any of it. If this episode meant something to you, the best thing you can do is send it to one person. Post it somewhere. Leave a review — every little bit helps, and on this episode in particular, sharing it is the point. That's not me asking for a favor. That's the actual thing the family needs.
Everything I used is at Section29.com, including how to help and how to give.
Music by TrackTribe.
I'll see you next time.