Confidential File

Disappearance Without Reason

I'm going to tell you the story of a missing person. His name is Robert Corbell. His disappearance just doesn't add up.

He doesn't fit in the statistical picture of a man who disappears from sight.

His life hasn't been exciting. At least, not abnormally so.

He's traveled a lot. During his nine years in the Air Force he's seen duty on Guam and in England and in Puerto Rico.

He's a good man. He's got an excellent record in the service.

I can give you a physical description of him:

He's
27. He's 6 ft. 1 in. tall, weighing about 210 pounds. His eyesight
isn't good; he wears very thick glasses. He's got brown hair and hazel
eyes.

And a tattoo, a black panther on his upper right arm. He got it in Guam.

He
loves his parents and his wife, and he likes his kids, dogs, gardening
and people — but that's not very interesting reading. Nor is it
significant.

And there's the trouble. Nothing about him or his past actions is especially significant.

Yesterday, I talked at length with his wife — hoping for some bit of information.

Her name is Barbara. She's 27, too.

"He was stationed about 10 miles from Slough — that's a town in England about the size of Riverside.

"Seven
days after we met he asked me to marry him and I said yes. But we
waited eight months. We became engaged in August of 1957 and were
married in October."

Barbara Corbell smiled fondly. "If you only
knew him," she said, "he's such a wonderful man. He's forever buying me
little things. Not very expensive, but I like them so."

On April 21 of this year Bob and Barbara flew to the United States. His transfer to March Air Force Base had come through.

They spent the first week with Bob's parents in El Monte. Then they found an apartment in Riverside.

"Everywhere
he'd go he'd always insist that I go along," Barbara told me. "I used
to say to him, 'Why don't you go out for a drink with the boys?' But he
wouldn't."

A week ago Monday, Bob, an airman, first class, was
up at 5:30, his usual hour. His wife yawned and he said, "You go back
to sleep. I'll get my breakfast."

He did. He kissed her when he
left. Then he caught the local bus to the Greyhound Depot in downtown
Riverside, to await another bus to take him to the base.

He
bought a newspaper and read it over a cup of coffee in the lunchroom.
This, he did every morning. When the bus arrived the cashier said:
"Time for you to go, Bob."

Casually, he got up and walked out of the door toward the bus and vanished.

The cop on the case told me: "Nothing about it makes sense."

His father told me: "If he could, I know he'd contact me or Barbara."

His wife said: "Something must have happened to him, but what?"

Confidential File

Moms-to-Moscow Movement Churning

WASHINGTON,
May 14 — EXCHANGING MOMS WITH RUSS URGED. Congress was asked today to
authorize a cultural exchange of mothers between the United States and
the Soviet Union as an approach to peace.

Nominees from every state would participate in the program.

Confidential File

More Letters From a Badly Warped Mind

The hard way, Jet Simrell got what he wanted this week:

Headlines.

By
threatening to kill six superior judges and three other court
officials, he got his name and picture plastered on the front page of
every paper in town.

But the stories weren't written the way Jet Simrell wanted them to be.

I know, they weren't, because I know Jet Simrell.

Fifteen months ago, he came to my office and told me his "plan."

He was going to dedicate the rest of his life, he said, to curing what he considered the biggest ill of our nation.

He
was going to put us — the men — back in the driver's seat. And he was
going to depose the "un-female" American woman from what he considered
her position of power and authority in American society.

 Exactly how he'd conduct his one-man crusade he wasn't too sure, then. But publicity definitely would play a key part in it.

It
never occurred to me at the time to classify Simrell as a dangerous
fanatic. Much of his criticism, many of his arguments made a lot of
sense.

He was a man who obviously was deeply hurt when his wife
divorced him. He couldn't comprehend that the fault for failure of his
marriage had to be in some part his own.

"The more freedoms and privileges I gave my wife," he said, "the more she took."

Simrell
blamed his personal troubles on his wife, existing social conditions,
neighbors — but most of all the divorce courts of our state.

Only
a few weeks after I'd met him, Simrell pulled off his infamous "I
killed three kids and their mother" stunt, which sent police racing to
his home to find three kid goats and their nanny spread across a bed,
their throats slit.

He was picked up and put in the psychiatric ward at General Hospital for observation.

While there, he wrote me an apologetic letter about his "unusual caper," as he described it.

"I
need to attract public attention," he wrote. "I wanted to shock the
public into thinking strongly about the seriousness of our national
problem of divorce and its tremendously numerous devastating effects.

"The scheme backfired partly when the police confiscated the papers on the table that explained my reason for doing what I did.

"I must also make it clear that I expected only the more intelligent people to fully understand my bizarre action.

"I
did expect the press to headline the fact that a man, known to be
unorthodox but intelligent, had the guts to pull such a stunt for the
sake of a cause in which he sincerely believed…"

'I Must Injure No One'

The
10-page letter went on: "One paper called me a woman-hater. This, of
course, isn't true. I love woman, as nature intended her to be, with
all my heart."

Simrell said that his greatest concern was the
embarrassment which his actions caused his three daughters. "But I
know," he wrote, "that during their lifetime they will come to know
that I was in the right."

But most prophetic, I hope, are the words he used in describing his plan to "shock" the public into listening to him:

"I must injure no one, physically, and must stay within the law, or reasonably so."