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Three Missing Arizona Women All Met The Same Man Online

By Donna Brown
Published on: 13:33 PST, Jun 25, 2016

Three missing Arizona women all met the same man online prior to going missing, police say. The first, Nancy Rae Hartz, 72, had sold her home and packed her belongings. Divorced, then widowed, Hartz was ready to spend the rest of her days traveling in an RV with her newly found love, a man she met online on a dating website. The morning she left Kingman, Arizona, on June 2, 2015, she had a moment alone with her daughter, Denise Baggs.

“Don’t worry, baby,” she told her, “we’ll keep in touch.” Three days later, she again spoke with her mother, who’s been missing ever since.

Verna Clayton, who would now be 73, was last seen Dolan Springs, a small town in Arizona, in June of 2008. Then Neva Jane Lindley, who would now be 77, was seen last in Las Vegas in November of 2011. Both women had recently cashed out their financial assets just before going missing. And both, according to a report by Fox News, had begun a relationship with a man they met on the internet. Police are now trying to figure out if Nancy Rae Hartz was the victim of a serial predator because her disappearance is eerily similar to the other two woman. All three missing women lived within a 100-mile radius of each other and were roughly the same age.

Robert Lawson Carnochan was the man all three women had met, say Mohave County sheriff’s detectives. While investigating Hartz’s disappearance, they learned the man she left with in the RV was not who she thought. He was going by an alias and using a stolen identity. They finally found him in April, living in Yucca, which was about 20 miles south of Kingman, Arizona. He was living with another woman, says a report from ABC News. He had several other aliases and firearms in his possession. Deputy Rodney Head, with the Mohave County Sheriff’s Department, said the man was definitely Robert Carnochan, even identifying him with fingerprints. Carnochan was a Canadian citizen who had fled to the U.S. illegally more than 20 years ago.

Carnochan is currently in jail in Kingman, Arizona, on unrelated identity theft, forgery, and weapons violations charges. He claims Hartz was alive when he dropped her off at a local business in Kingman in March. Deputy Head wouldn’t identify the woman they found Carnochan living with, but did she she was unharmed. Authorities searching his home say they found evidence that’s sufficient to make him a person of interest in the disappearance all three missing women. Deputy Head says he is determined to find the three women and solve the case.

“Until we can come up with some more evidence, we’re just going to keep doing everything we possibly can to find these women and find out any information we can about that and Mr. Carnochan.”

Carnochan’s public defender, Ting-Wei Chiang, refused to comment on his client being a person of interest in the disappearance of the three women, according to a report from Yahoo! News. He says he will “not make any comment about missing women,” only to say that “so far, he has three open cases in Mohave County.”

While Hartz’s daughter, Denise Baggs, has been outspoken about the cases, the families of both the other two women have declined to comment. Baggs said her mother started dating only a few years ago for the first time since her second husband died in 2001. She introduced her daughters to Carnochan in June of 2014, and Baggs immediately took a disliking to him. Then only a few months later, in March of 2015, her mother had put her house on the market and was closing her bank account. She told her family that Carnochan wanted to live “out in the middle of nowhere,” Baggs said.

“All of us kids kept trying to tell Mom, ‘Don’t go.'”

But Hartz replied that she was in love with him and was going to go. Baggs ended up reporting her mother missing in July of 2015. She told police friends and family members were concerned when they received emails that didn’t sound like her mother. They also got several phone calls, but said that the voice sounded nothing like Hartz. At one point, investigators even had a scheduled meeting with a woman claiming to be Hartz, but she failed to show up. Detective Scot Durst said they had placed calls to Hartz’s phone but they were never answered. Detectives have served search warrants and subpoenas on financial institutions and online social networks, determined to find answers in the search for the three women. As for Baggs, she refuses to give up, and attends all of Carnochan’s court appearances.

“I want him to tell me where he left my mother, and I know she’s not alive.”

The three missing Arizona women all met the same man online before disappearing, and investigators show no signs of giving up without an answer. If you have any information on the three women or the man suspected of their disappearances, please contact authorities.

[Photo by sakhorn/Shutterstock Images]

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