Wallace Huff knew her son was deeply unhappy in the camper, so in December she helped him move to Columbus, the place in Ohio where he seemed likeliest to find work. She rented him a furnished apartment and stocked it with groceries. When January came, however, Haas had to move into a homeless shelter. But he was finally sober and, despite his dismal circumstances, clawing himself toward something better. He sold loose cigarettes to other shelter residents and used a public library to send his résumé far and wide.
Haas' luck began to change when he met a woman at a coffee shop who invited him to stay at her apartment. This was Charles Ford's friend. Soon enough he was crashing with Ford, who in turn connected him with Etienne Fieri. Within four months, he was a cofounder of one of the most promising blockchain startups in Columbus. When he spoke to old acquaintances about his meteoric rise from vagrant to entrepreneur, he radiated clarity and joy. “It was the first time he'd been totally coherent since he went off to Ohio University,” says Mike Czarnecki, a childhood friend. “I was so happy for him, so happy I could almost cry.”
She has pored over the file investigators assembled while looking into Haas' death.
Photograph: Hana MendelThat same day the detectives asked Ford to come to their headquarters in Lebanon, the seat of Warren County. They grilled him for hours about the oddities and inconsistencies in his statements, particularly the fact that he never once called Haas' cell phone after the day his friend vanished. The investigators told Ford they were certain this was because he knew Haas was already dead. But Ford countered that he'd seen Haas remove the batteries from his phone, as a way to avoid being tracked by satellites, so there would have been no point in calling him. (Haas used one phone for voice calls, one for the internet, and one as a PDA.)
The detectives tried to wheedle a confession from Ford by assuring him they'd understand if some calamity had occurred by accident—say, a heroin overdose that led to a hasty effort to dispose of Haas' body. “I think you're a good person, and I think you ended up in a really bad situation that there was no good answer to,” one of the interrogators said. “You tried to solve the situation as best you could, because you're a problem-solver, you're an entrepreneur.” But Ford could not be shaken from his denials, even when informed that a cadaver dog had perked up upon coming into contact with his Saturn.
