Killing Mike News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

marriage to work, i did not give up. >> soon he was gone, vanished without a word or a trace. >> he left the young daughter behind. he left the house. >> was this a husband who did not want to be found? or could this be something else. >> detectives are not an undercover operation. that would lead to a long -- >> hard to say ready for that? i know that it has to happen. >> disappearance in the desert. could it be the perfect crime. i can only imagine what would be like to keep that. welcome to dateline. i'm lester holt. for eight years it was a mystery, a husband who had simply vanis...

School -- >> we didn't talk about it. >> reporter: later with michael and elizabeth at school, ellen planned to move the body into the garage. but there was a problem. >> trying to get him situated to where i could get him -- a board under him to move him to the garage. >> reporter: and you couldn't do it alone? >> i couldn't do it alone. >> reporter: so you asked your son. >> so i asked him, yep. >> reporter: you asked michael to help you move the body? >> yes. he didn't want to. i asked him, please. he said okay. >> reporter: 17-year-old michael reluctantly agreed. >> were you aware you were...

Albuquerque police chief ray shultz. >> it's not against the law to be a missing person unless there's suspicious circumstances. >> and chief shultz was right in saying mike was totally within his rights to walk out and cut off ties with everyone in his life, the people he loved, the people he no longer loved. and so the investigation was limited to that of a missing person. winter, 2002, turned to spring. no one heard from mike snyder. his expensive mechanics tools lay unused at work. ellen, now a single mom, filed for divorce. she was awarded the house, the money in their joint account, and ...

About it. the more terry thought about mike, the more she remembered his growing frustration with ellen in the months before he disappeared. >> he would intercede phone calls that collectors calling, you know, wanting to know why their credit cards passed due and all of these things he had no idea of. >> reporter: these are bills he thought ellen had run up, not some identity theft. >> right. >> reporter: not long after mike disappeared, ellen found herself in debt. she had 20 creditors and owed more than $120,000 on her credit cards. did mike know about the debt before he dropped by her work?...

There would be no way that my brother would have ever left his daughter. ever. >> at the jeep dealership where mike had worked for ten years, his name was rarely mentioned in conversation. >> after three or four years of mike being gone, he didn't come up too much anymore. >> we knew he was sick. we didn't really know if he was still in the hospital somewhere or if he had actually just passed away from his illness. >> his tools were no longer lying there unused. ellen's son michael was using them. he followed in mike's shoes and had become a mechanic as well. and on those rare occasions when e...