The Misappearance of Steven Kubacki

None of this will make sense without the earlier chapter, right here. 

When I first started digging around into Steven Kubacki’s story, I worried I’d never get a good sense about his initial disappearance on the shore of Lake Michigan in February 1978. There was very little news coverage, the Holland police said they didn’t have any records, and multiple people who were at Hope College with Kubacki said they had never heard anything about it. Even those former students who do remember, like Bob Namar, said Kubacki’s disappearance didn’t have much of an impact at the school: There were no missing persons flyers, no candlelight vigils.  

But after looking over the incident reports from the Michigan State Police (granted via a FOIA request), it’s clear that authorities and Hope College administrators were rather alarmed, and perplexed, when Kubacki went missing. News stories at the time said that officials presumed Kubacki had fallen through the ice and drowned. Now it seems that few were really convinced of that.

The report confirms that it was a group of snowboarders who contacted police to say they had found an abandoned pair of skis on the shore of Lake Michigan, along a trail that began at the St. Augustine Seminary in Saugatuck. Past the skis was a path of footprints in the snow, heading out over the lake, that ended abruptly.

Responding officers found the property left in a “neat orderly manner: The skis were side by side, facing the lake, about eight inches apart. The ski poles were stuck in the snow upright on the outside of the skis. The backpack was sitting on top of the skis,” fully packed.

I don’t know how to consider this image without thinking about the ways that serial killers and hunters truss up their trophies. I’m also reminded of the opening credits of the second season of The Leftovers.

I’d been particularly interested in the positioning of the backpack because of an oft-repeated story among those who believe Kubacki’s disappearance was the result of something paranormal. As that story goes, the backpack wasn’t with Kubacki’s skis during the first search, but showed up in a subsequent search in the same area that had already been thoroughly gone over. I hadn’t been able to find the origin of this theory, and I’m now inclined to believe it was bad information that got stuck in the re-telling. But it will remain in the back of my mind.

I had earlier presumed police had found a driver’s license or some other ID showing these were Kubacki’s belongings; turns out, it was a dentist bill. Michigan State Police arranged for an air search right away, called in the Coast Guard, and interviewed Kubacki’s roommate at the time, who said Kubacki had told him two days earlier that he was going cross-country skiing, as he had many times before. The report suggests that certain people at Hope College believed that Kubacki had engineered the whole thing; some still do. But Kubacki’s roommate told police that he was sure Kubacki met a bad and unexpected fate. If Kubacki had been planning something, he would have let his roommate in on it. In other words: Kubacki wasn’t above faking his own disappearance; he just didn’t, this time. 

Another student said she saw Kubacki the night before he left, and that he was in good spirits, enthusiastically sharing his plans for the upcoming week. She was certain that whatever happened to him was a terrible accident.

On February 19, 1978, the day before the snowboarders found Kubacki’s skis, a couple had seen a young man in the same area, climbing atop piles of jagged ice near the shore. He roughly fit the description of the missing student, but he wasn’t alone: The couple said that a young, petite female with long dark hair was taking pictures of him. When police asked Kubacki’s roommate and the other friend who this girl could be, if she was in fact Kubacki’s companion, they both had no idea. They said Kubacki didn’t have any girlfriends locally; they were all overseas.

There’s an entry in the report about a female student whose name is redacted. It’s not clear if she is the friend police interviewed, the girl he may have been with at the lakeshore, or someone else. But this person stopped going to classes around the time Kubacki vanished; within two or three weeks, she had left campus and gone to live with an aunt in Grand Rapids. She had been deeply distraught when he went missing, and had threatened take her own life, leaving a suicide note for her roommate. I hadn’t heard even a hint of this person before reading the report. 

In the first week of March 1978, Kubacki’s mother called the state police to say that a friend of the family had been getting phone calls directing them to make phone calls of their own, in connection to Kubacki’s disappearance. The names and/or numbers given to the family friend by the anonymous callers are redacted in the report. In one case, the person who called the family friend gave them a number and said they could reach Kubacki there. But when they called, the number was disconnected.

Kuback’s mother went through old phone bills and found that she had gotten a call from her son at that same number in early September 1977, six months before. She said she didn’t know at the time where he was calling from, when she had spoken to him for 15 minutes. Police confirmed that the number had been disconnected later that same month, and tracked down the previous owner of the phone number with the help of Michigan Bell. The name of that person or business is redacted, and it doesn’t come up again in the report. 

The Michigan Bell associate who had been working with the Michigan State Police either refused or was unable to help detectives track down the person or people who had been calling the Kubacki family friend. The police then turned to the Hope College Dean of Students, asking if he had any guesses about who had been making the calls. The dean told them that Kubacki ran with a crowd of about 20 people who were “weird.” He said it could be any of them. 

Kubacki’s brother hired a private investigator with the Fatman Detective Service in Grand Rapids to try and track him down. His brother told police that he didn’t believe Steven had drowned, and thought he might have gone to Germany, where Kubacki’s classmates had told police he had two girlfriends (and another one in France). His brother said that Steven would have definitely flown Icelandic Air out of Chicago if he had gone to Germany. Police requested the flight manifests from the airline, which found no record of any Steven Kubacki on their flights between February 17 and February 21, 1978. 

The police documents show that the search for Steven Kubacki was more intensive and exhaustive than news reports from the time had indicated. Far from writing him off, investigators made repeated searches of the area where he went missing, and stayed in regular contact with people in his circle, probing for more leads. This was a very active missing persons investigation for nearly a year. How did he stay hidden for so long? 

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