Mystery death, lies and uranium
Disappearance at workplace unresolved
Harry Easterling was getting impatient.
It was the end of his midnight shift, and he had an appointment scheduled before he could head home. That wouldn’t have been a problem, but Easterling carpooled to work and his co-rider was late.
The date was June 20, 1984. Easterling stood near the time clock at his rural Ohio job and waited.
Easterling was patient, but no one likes to miss appointments. He’d planned to check out a house for sale nearby and hated the thought of the real estate agent sitting there, annoyed.
Easterling decided to leave buddy David Bocks a note:
Dave: I’ll be back after I go look at the house in Ross. – Harry
When Easterling returned, his note appeared untouched.
He waited some more, then scratched out his first note and wrote a new one:
Dave: Waited till 10:45, finally went home, sorry. - Harry
Easterling went home. As odd as the situation felt, he wasn’t worried. The place that employed Easterling and Bocks was a sprawling, 1,050-acre site, and the two worked the graveyard shift. Bocks was probably immersed in a fix-it project somewhere, Easterling figured.
The truth, he would soon learn, was more bizarre and gruesome than anything he could have imagined.
Driving through the stretches of green fields in rural Ohio, the sudden emergence of an ugly cluster of industrial factories that composed the colloquially called Fernald plant was jarring.
A lot of the neighbors didn’t know much about the plant. They saw the redand-white checkerboard pattern adorning a water tower that loomed over the property and equated it with the nearly identical logo for Purina, a pet food brand. That the complex name was the Fernald Feed Materials Productions Center, and their impressions were solidified: They made dog chow.
But they didn’t.
A few residents remembered the headlines from the 1950s when the plant was built, but those headlines had been vaguely about atomic power and fighting Russians. Those who did remember seemed to take pride in the notion that their biggest employer was key to protecting the country.
Some 1,000 people worked at that plant, and it was known to pay well. Families depended on it.
One of the workers was Bocks, a quiet man born in Staten Island, New York, in 1944 to devout Catholic parents. He was the middle of three children, all boys.
When the kids were still young, the Bocks moved from New York to Ohio, where David married Carline Noggler when he was around 20. The couple had three children. Tony was the oldest, born in 1966. Casey came next in 1968. Last came Matt three years later.
Bocks liked to work with his hands. In 1981, he was hired on as a pipefitter at Fernald. He was responsible for installing and maintaining pipe systems within the plant. The factories were 30 years old by then, so pipes were constantly cracked and leaking.
The work suited Bocks, who stood about 6-foot-1 and weighed about 200 pounds. He took his job seriously. As Bocks and his co-workers well knew – but were ordered not to discuss – the “feed” in Fernald’s title referenced uranium, which they processed further into weapons-grade uranium, one crucial step in the government’s creation of nuclear weapons.
Bocks worked from midnight to 8 a.m. The biggest downside to the job was its location, some 30 miles west of his home in Loveland.
While Easterling was wondering where Bocks had gone, Fernald employees were arriving for their shifts in Plant 6 to ready a gnarly hunk of equipment called a NUSAL Vat.
The vat was about 4 feet wide and more than 10 feet long. It was filled with a slurry of sodium chloride and potassium chloride kept at a sweltering 1,350 degrees Fahrenheit.
The slurry’s job was to shape and mold chunks of uranium called ingots. Typically, a heavy concrete lid more than 3 inches thick covered the vat unless it was in use. Even when not in use, a small opening remained, measuring 221⁄4 by 9 inches – essentially the size of two sheets of notebook paper taped together lengthwise.
That opening was largely useless, save for employees playfully tossing in apple cores and watermelon rind to watch the fruit explode in the lava-like temperature. To either add salt to the slurry or to drop in the ingots, a hoist had to lift off the hefty lid.
Around 8 a.m. that June morning, worker Bill Welch peeked into the vat and noticed that the slurry inside was covered in a sooty crust. He spotted some odd, light-colored flotsam in the mix, too, but thought his eyes were playing tricks on him.
Pretty soon, though, the word was out. Bocks had not clocked out. He wasn’t at home. He could not be found. Oh God, what about the sludge? Hamilton County Sheriff ’s investigators ordered the NUSAL vat to be cooled and drained. On June 23 – three full days after Bocks disappeared – investigators were lowered into the furnace, where they inspected hardened slag that was 2 to 4 inches thick.
Officers used chisels to break up the slag. As they carved and chipped away at the material, they amassed a list of unsettling finds: Pieces of a walkie-talkie radio. Wire from a pair of safety glasses. An alligator clip from a nametag. Steel toes and eyelets from work shoes. All were items with a higher melting point than, say, a human body.
And, lest anyone think that maybe Bocks’ belongings landed in the vat but not Bocks himself, investigators chronicled one more disturbing discovery: multiple chunks of fragmented bone.
Fernald had just one customer for the uranium it processed: the U.S. government. The plant itself was run by a private company called National Lead of Ohio that everybody referred to as NLO. That company, in turn, was contracted by the Department of Energy.
The NUSAL vat was kept at a constant 1,350 degrees and rarely varied by more than a degree. (To put that in perspective: When it hits 130 degrees outside, a human is likely to get heatstroke.)
The vat stood about 4 feet tall in the middle of a grime-and-rust covered factory floor. On one end of the vat – the same end as the small opening – was a ladder that served as the only means of reaching the vat’s top, though there rarely was reason to do so. There was no plausible way for a worker to accidentally fall into the vat.
Easterling, Bocks’ car pool buddy, remembered the vat well: “If you were to look down at hell and there was a big hole in the ground, that’s what it looked like – a big, open, red hole in the ground. Like a volcano.”
Hamilton County Sheriff ’s Detective Pete Alderucci arrived before the vat was cooled. He remembers being struck by how hot it was to even stand near.
“You couldn’t get within 10 feet of it,” he said. “It’d be so hot it would – you would just burn to death.”
Longtime employees dispute this memory. It was hot like a sauna, they said, but not unbearable.
Alderucci remembers differently, and his impression swayed his theory in Bocks’ death. Because it wouldn’t have been possible for Bocks to accidentally fall into the vat, that left two possibilities: that Bocks was put there by someone else or that he chose to enter the vat to end his life.
“Nobody could have killed him, carried him up,” Alderucci said. “What we determined was that he wanted to commit suicide. He had to get back, run up those steps and either jump or dive in that small opening.”
Despite Bocks’ size, he explained, it was a simple matter of process of elimination. Homicide was never considered.
But if suicide was the going theory, the evidence proved a bit problematic.
To ensure the temperature inside the vat stayed constant, it was regularly monitored. In the early morning hours of Bocks’ disappearance, investigators discovered there had been a dramatic anomaly.
The temperature in the vat had dipped twice in a 15-minute span. The first dip, recorded about 5 a.m., was 28 degrees, lowering the slurry temp to 1,322 degrees. The temperature recovered slightly before dipping again to 1,324 degrees. After that, it crept back to normal and stayed put.
No one had ever fallen into the vat before, so workers could only theorize how the slurry would react to a human body entering it. As disturbing as the thought was, they also didn’t know what trauma that body would endure.
It’s tough to find an analogous scenario on which you can base an educated answer. Especially one that involved two separate temperature drops.
Alderucci said his suicide theory was bolstered by something important: “We knew that he was having psychological problems.”
It’d been a rocky few years for Bocks. On the surface, things seemed solid: He and Carline had three children and Bocks had a steady job.
But then Bocks started drinking. It caused strife in his marriage. Carline tolerated it until she couldn’t anymore. Then she asked for a divorce.
While Bocks hadn’t been able to enjoy a picture-perfect marriage, he got as close to a picture-perfect divorce as he could. He and Carline didn’t fight. He saw the kids regularly, moved in with his parents and sobered up, too.
To get sober, he stopped cold turkey. That sent him into detox, which, his adult kids now say, caused hallucinations. In the late 1970s and early ’80s, Bocks was hospitalized three times, each stint shorter than the one before it.
Like 1 in 6 adult Americans today, Bocks was on medication to treat his mental health. Once, in early 1980, Bocks took way too much of his antipsychotic medication. He spent about a month in the hospital, after which he continued seeing a psychiatrist.
The 1980 hospital stint was Bocks’ last known breakdown.
Still, people with schizophrenia have higher rates of suicide than those without psychotic disorders. A study published in 2015 suggested that half of schizophrenics attempt suicide at some point in their lives, while 5% to 10% of schizophrenics will die by suicide.
About 10 years after Bocks disappeared, his case was featured in a segment of the TV’s “Unsolved Mysteries,” prompting a crush of tips. Most were bogus, but the police file indicates Alderucci circled back to one employee who said he knew that Bocks’ death was murder, and he even knew the killer.
“Talk to that manager. He knows a lot more than what he’s saying,” the informant said.
Bocks’ manager at Fernald was a man named Charles Shouse. He happened to be the last man to have reportedly seen Bocks alive. Even he said so. Alderucci never did talk to him. Investigators, in fact, didn’t even compile a timeline of Bocks’ last shift, but according to the myriad law enforcement documents, the undisputed parts went like this:
Bocks met Easterling at about 10:50 p.m. and the two drove to Fernald. They clocked in, changed from their street clothes to their work clothes, stepped through a sanitizing shower and attended a meeting, during which they were handed their assignments for the night.
Bocks finished his jobs, and then met back up with Easterling and their boss, Shouse, for a meal break at 4 a.m. After he ate, Bocks clocked back in at 4:46 a.m. and disappeared soon after. (The first temperature drop in the vat occurred about 15 minutes later.)
A closer reading of Easterling and Shouse’s statements highlight some key discrepancies. Easterling said Bocks was quiet, but no more than usual, and seemed to be in a fine mood. Shouse, meanwhile, said Bocks seemed despondent. He said he and Easterling even talked about how mopey Bocks had been. Easterling never said this to police, and when interviewed this year, again disputed Shouse’s account. Bocks did not seem depressed, he insisted.
Shouse also told investigators that he’d spent about 10 minutes trying to get Bocks to “open up” through conversation, but his efforts failed.
With the 4:46 a.m. clock-in documented on Bocks’ time sheet, that would have meant Shouse was talking to Bocks around 5 a.m. – the same time the NUSAL vat readout began its spike.
No one else in the files – not Bocks’ family or his friends or even his psychiatrist – believed Bocks was suicidal. Shouse was never questioned for motive or asked to prove his whereabouts.
Another apparent lead was put on the back burner. Shouse told investigators that Bocks’ by-the-book personality led him to complain about a worker named Earnie Gipson who he found sleeping on the job. Gipson was suspended for that and remained so when Bocks disappeared. A co-worker thought he saw Gipson’s motorcycle around midnight of the night in question, so police went to Gipson’s house, saw that his motorcycle was inoperable and dismissed the lead altogether. They never asked for an alibi, checked to see if he had access to other transportation or questioned him regarding motive.
Gipson did not return phone calls for this project. Shouse didn’t respond to phone messages, mailed letters or a message left with a woman who answered his door.
The unfollowed leads could, of course, be red herrings, as is true with all leads in any investigation. But to Bocks’ children, they serve as a clear contradiction to investigators’ insistence that there was no reason to even consider that Bocks was murdered.
As the years passed, Bocks’ story was reduced to folklore. The land on which the plant stood, after years of governmental cleanup, is now a nature reserve upon which no residential homes should ever be built.
The first in-depth reinvestigation of Bocks’ case was through the “Accused” podcast, which is part of the USA TODAY Network.
Alderucci, now retired, recently maintained that he still “100%” believes that Bocks killed himself. No one who knew Bocks believes that’s the case, and several workers – as well as a Cincinnati Enquirer experiment involving a replica of the vat – suggest that someone Bocks’ size would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to force himself into the vat’s slim opening.
To most who knew Bocks, that leaves murder.
Tony Bocks is careful to say he doesn’t think what really happened is a JFK-level conspiracy, but how could it be a coincidence that so soon after his dad disappeared in such a mind-bogglingly mysterious way that the company’s secrets are revealed?
How could a man go to work and never be seen again?
David Bocks’ case is technically unsolved, despite investigators’ insistence he killed himself. With only bones to examine, the cause of death was never clear, much less the method.
Technology’s come a long way, of course, and the family would love to have the evidence reexamined, but that’s not likely to happen for a simple reason: They don’t know where it is.
The keys and metal and bits of bone were never returned to the family. While no one has been able to say for sure, the belief is the items were sealed in a drum and shipped to Nevada along with other radioactive materials.
There, the remains were buried so that the radioactivity they emit cannot escape and harm others.
Bocks’ children feel the disposal was designed to ensure the truth about his death stayed buried, too.