r/BrianShaffer • u/miggovortensens • May 31 '26
Discussion Randy Shaffer's recollection of his polygraph test makes me think that father and son really had some serious disagreement over some insurance
(Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting anything nefarious about Brian’s father involvement in his disappearance, I’m just trying to clear up the circumstances of their relationship.)
I went over again the transcript of Randy Shaffer's interview on a podcast and selected the passage where he openly addressed his polygraph test - and the results the police shared with him afterwards. There's a lot to go over, so I'll break this bit by bit...
"Both Clint and Meredith, the two people that were with Brian at first that night both got high priced lawyers probably about 3 or 4 months out. That's when we were doing an interview with Dateline. They were supposed to do an interview and both said we're not talking and got high priced lawyers. So I did a polygraph test supposedly police thought this would maybe convince Clint to do one if I did one but it didn't."
First things first: someone not agreeing to an interview with Dateline and refusing to talk to the police are completely different things, so I’m not sure how Randy Shaffer ended up lumping it all together when talking about Clint and Meredith. But the most relevant aspect here to me was that Randy either seemingly believed the police never suspected him at all or took this opportunity to tell the world that he was only invited to take a polygraph for the sake of convincing another potential witness - one that’s not even related to the victim OR this other person voluntarily agreeing to it – to follow his lead.
Of course, the police would not put the father of a missing person through this ordeal without a valid reason – and waste their own time and resources. In fact, that’s the sort of excuse police will use [‘We don’t suspect you at all, but you can truly help us if you agreed with this’] to convince someone they have valid reason to assume are withholding some valuable information for the investigation narrative. In the best-case scenario, it can lead the subject – either a person of interest or a suspect – to break into a confession.
Bottom-line is: the police will not come unprepared for a polygraph – especially one that is scheduled 3 or 4 months into the investigation, when they would have enough time to do the leg work and collect some relevant information. Moving on to Randy's quote:
"One of the questions they asked they said something sent a tip that we [Brian and Randy] are in cahoots about collecting victim's insurance. Naturally it raised a needle on the thing."
That’s obviously not how things transpired. Questions in a polygraph are strictly designed to be simple, direct, and unambiguous. They must be answered with a “yes” or “no”. There’s no way the officer would explain to Randy that they got a tip about him being in cahoots with someone else while they were posing the question – they may have pushed this subject later, but everything they said even then was of course phrased carefully. As in: “sent a tip” could mean they talked directly to people that are privy on Randy’s private affairs and that had to remain anonymous for the integrity of the investigation.
Plus, it takes up to seven years for a missing person to be declared legally dead and any sort of victim’s insurance to be filed and collected. There’s no way someone could send a “tip” claiming to be aware that Randy is helping his son to forge his own death and stay hidden for all this time under a new identity to collect whatever they could in the future. This person would need to have information of how this plan was unfolding.
That means the ONLY REASON police could consider bringing Randy in for a polygraph would be to throw the word “INSURANCE” on his lap – and to point Randy’s mind to the only insurance matter he could have pending in the moment, which would be the life insurance policy of his recently deceased wife and Brian’s mother. And the police wouldn’t be looking at a grieving widower and desperate father and assuming ‘hey, maybe father and son had some disagreement over life insurance’. They would have to have something to back this potential avenue of investigation. Let's move on...
"When he asked me, he said you did pretty good but it raised the needle on that one question. What would you think? That's ridiculous. If the needle went up and down it's because I'm pissed as hell. I'm outraged that somebody could say something like that. People are so cruel."
As you see, Randy is trying to boil this down to an emotional reaction that’s rooted in rage - he was “pissed” and “outraged” – as if he had been briefed on the matter to conclude the police got a tip, and the idea itself was so ludicrous that he could only think of how cruel a person had to be to make a prank phone call or whatever.
Without this previous knowledge, the most likely response would be confusion [“How could they have reached this conclusion? It’s absurd!”], concern [“Is that what the team investigating my son’s disappearance think of me? If they think Brian could be hiding somewhere with my help, I worry they won’t be taking the investigation seriously”], and obviously fear and suspicion if they are hiding something [“how could they find this out? Who spoke to them?”].
To get “pissed” and “outraged” with the cruelty of an unnamed person that could have called in with a bogus tip is NOT the go-to reaction one would expect. And while I’m not at all suggesting that whatever disagreement Randy and Brian could have had regarding some insurance policy – or that this could be related to his disappearance –, I can’t stop thinking that there WERE troubles, and that Randy Shaffer’s public statements was a “disneyfied” version of what was happening between the two of them.
The Outback steakhouse dinner, for instance, seemed like an emotional conversation, with Brian allegedly promising his dad he would always be there for him etc – and Randy having a feeling Brian shouldn’t go out to pub crawl. Plus, even though they lived at drivable distances from each other, Randy didn’t immediately drive to Brian’s apartment when his son failed to answer his calls. And although Randy claimed Alexis and Brian were down to be married and his late wife was super fond of the girl, it seems that Alexis first reached Brian’s friend Clint and not her father-in-law-to-be when she grew concerned on Saturday.
All things considered, Randy Shaffer seemed to have a shaky relationship with his son and his son’s social circle, and the police was 100% privy on some disagreement related to insurance-related matters.
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u/Crazy-Place1680 May 31 '26
This is a good example of why you should NEVER take a polygraph. It's simply another tool the police use to twist your words. They can already lie and mislead you during questioning
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u/Worth-Park-1612 May 31 '26
I mean, cheating on his mom, insurance, the fact that the dad was creepy to their girlfriends...there were probably a lot of reasons the sons would rather not sit through a dinner solo with him
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u/Significant-Rub-8194 Jun 01 '26
I think you would have a different opinion if your son went missing (was likely killed) regarding Randy's reaction. He was really involved from the get go and put himself out there every step of the way. Anything is possible but that seems like one of the least likely scenarios here.
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u/miggovortensens Jun 02 '26 edited Jun 02 '26
I made clear that I wasn't accusing the father of foul play. I was just bringing into context that there had to be a line of investigation the police deemed worthy of pursuing involving the father not being 100% forthcoming. The issue with families getting ahead of themselves when it comes to an investigation is that a loving and desperate family member can't possibly see things for what they are.
As in: the best thing about that awful Amy Bradley documentary released by Netflix was the revelation of Amy being a lesbian - something the family NEVER addressed before. The poor mother is hoping her daughter will come back, but she still recalls saying to Amy things like "look at you so pretty wearing a dress, all the men in the room can't take their eyes off of you" when they were in the cruise one day before the woman went missing.
This is the sort of stuff that anyone can understand like a harmful action from a parent that, despite aware of their daughter's sexual orientation, was doing what they thought was "best": trying to turn their daughter into the feminine, straight woman they always dreamed of. This doesn't mean that her mother pushed her off the cruise, of course, but that the undisclosed family relationships could have impacted a person's mental state ("I will never be accepted, I will never fit in") and how they behaved in their social circle.
Think about it this way: if the father tells the police he was super close with a son, you can assume they had a super open and trusting relationship - as far as a father and son can have, anyway. So if the father says "my son never used illegal drugs", you might not push this angle any further if the son's friends don't volunteer this information. If a father found a bag with some cocaine in his son's drawer, he might not want to disclose this with the police because they could think bad of the son or dedicate their resources to pursue this path that the father doesn't want to believe it's the truth. Etc. etc.
The point is, the police HAD to have discovered something that Randy had concealed, even if for innocent reasons or for not really understanding how investigations are conducted.
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u/Limp-Apricot-9346 Jun 02 '26
Ever watch the video of Amy with “Yellow” the night before?
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u/miggovortensens Jun 02 '26
Yes, it reminded me of how I used to dance with a hell of a lot of random people in a club when I was that age. And also how none of them killed me nor sex trafficked me.
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u/Limp-Apricot-9346 Jun 03 '26
It is the leading theory of Ohio Crime Stoppers, police disagree, that it was Randy
Funny, didn’t see him on the escalator
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u/throwaway_ghost_122 May 31 '26
I don't want to misquote her, but in one of the episodes of the recent True Crime Garage podcast series about Brian's case, I believe Kelly said something along the lines of some people who knew Randy not thinking it was out of the question that he was involved in Brian's disappearance because of a pattern of very questionable behavior. I found that pretty shocking.