SurrealisticSlumbers
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George Marcel Lutas
Endangered Missing
Missing Since: November 20, 1991
Missing Age: 26 years old (would now be 55 years old)
Location Last Seen: Germantown, Montgomery County, Maryland
Aliases/Nicknames: N/A
Date of Birth: 1965
Race: White
Sex: Male
Height: 6'0"
Weight: 170 lbs.
Hair Color: Brown
Eye Color: Brown
Dentals: Available
DNA: Available
Fingerprints: N/A
Clothing/Jewelry: Unknown
Additional Personal Items: Unknown
Distinguishing Marks/Features: Scar on his upper lip, white spot of hair on lower right back of his head.
Circumstances of Disappearance: Lutas was last in contact with his family in November of 1991. He had been an aspiring entrepreneur at the time, having graduated from MIT in 1988. He'd resigned from a consulting job at a DC firm he'd gotten right out of college, striking out on his own. He was determined to focus all of his attention on building a software company from the ground up, which he named Renaissance Information Solutions.
However, Lutas would never see this dream fulfilled, as a mere three years later, the young businessman seemingly vanished without a trace while in the midst of trying to raise the capital to market a new computer program he'd thought up. Though he was heavily in debt from the very beginning and living off of six credit cards, his parents supported their son's endeavors. George Lutas, Sr. and Julia Lutas both worked as engineers themselves, having moved the family from their native Romania to the United States in 1971.
The ambitious young man worked two part-time jobs as a telephone marketer and water filter salesman to make ends meet during his company's first year. He got some attention from the local press, including the Washington Post, as he plunged himself into this new venture. "I want to build this to be a big company quickly," Lutas was quoted as saying. "I look at Lotus and Microsoft and say, 'I want to do that too.'"
He persuaded a college fraternity friend, Aaron Wang, to quit his job with Booz-Allen Hamilton and join the company in December 1989, tasking Wang with coding the software. Lutas's mother, Julia, believed that the two men worked well together. In a Nov. 1990 article in the Washington Post, the two men expressed confidence that they could raise $7.5 million in $100,000 blocks from investors.
Still, Lutas' finances remained tenuous, and around Christmastime of 1990 he asked his parents for help. His family paid off about $15,000 of his debts in exchange for a promise that he would abandon the business if it did not become profitable by September of 1991, Julia Lutas said. In the spring of 1991, Lutas had left his apartment in the Adams-Morgan neighborhood of DC and moved into Wang's town house in Germantown.
A few months later, Wang sold his town house and they moved into another Germantown town house, joined by two other men this time - Sonny Beck and Chris Kimmel - along with Kimmel's wife and two children, according to police. Beck then began working with Wang and Lutas. A rift may have begun at this point, as Julia Lutas remembered her son telling her in 1991 that his relationship with his partners had become strained.
Wang was upset, she said, because his name had been omitted from their software copyright. William D. Breneman, a District patent lawyer, said Lutas had been seeking a patent and a copyright for his "people management" software prototype, but he could not disclose the details because of confidentiality rules. This software was three years in the making, and he was in need of investors for it.
Det. Barry Collier, who was an 18-year veteran of the Montgomery County Police Department when he got to work on the case, said that one of Lutas's partners told him about a quarrel he'd had with Lutas over business matters shortly before he disappeared, and that Lutas owed his investors various sums of money. (It is unclear how much money he had raised or what became of it.) One investor, a college chum of Lutas's, said he sank $40,000 into the software venture.
However, for some unknown reason, Lutas ceased contact with his friend and investor after March 1991. "It had gotten weird," said Jon Lundberg, adding that Lutas had refused to see him when he visited from Philadelphia. "He was on this secrecy kick." Julia Lutas said she last saw her son in late August of 1991 when the family visited DC and had dinner with him and Wang.
In mid-November, she said, she tried to call her son at his new home and was told he had gone to Atlanta to meet with a potential investor. On December 2, she told police, a man identifying himself as Kimmel called her in New York to say that her son had just picked up a $10 million check from an investor in Atlanta, and was planning on flying home to New York in two days to meet the family at LaGuardia Airport.
However, Lutas didn't show up at the airport on December 4. When his mother checked with American Airlines, she discovered that someone had booked a flight from Atlanta to New York for her son, Wang, and Beck, she said. Police, however, said they have no evidence that the men boarded the plane or were even in Atlanta. Shortly after he failed to arrive at the airport, his parents decided to file a missing person report with the Montgomery County police.
They went so far as to hire a private investigator to locate him. After the Lutases filed their missing person report in December, police uncovered few clues until the Wang family received a tip that led police to Wang, Beck, and Kimmel, who were holed up at a Days Inn motel in Capitol Heights, MD. Det. Barry Collier and two FBI agents burst into the motel room in June of 1992, hoping to find Lutas there.
Although he wasn't in the room, his associates - the three other young men who had also been his roommates - were discovered living in the tiny room. Wang, Beck, and Kimmel had been staying there for about six months. They'd rigged the door lock so the motel staff couldn't get in, and only Kimmel registered, using an assumed name, police and hotel staff said. None had jobs, said Collier, and they'd been paying for the room in $100 bills. The three gave a bizarre reason for their lifestyle - they said they were hiding from a Romanian hit squad.
They insisted that Lutas left the town house of his own accord without telling them he was leaving or where he was going. They offered no clues as to his whereabouts. Collier said he never figured out exactly what the three men were doing at the motel. Collier said Wang told him that they had no choice but to go into hiding out of fear that Lutas had hired Romanian hitmen; he'd allegedly threatened to have them killed. However, Collier finds the idea absurd. "There is no such thing," Collier said.
During the four hours that Collier questioned the three in Room 203, Beck sat naked on the toilet and declined to give direct answers, the detective said. Collier's encounter with the men at the Days Inn was only one of many strange twists in his search for Lutas, a search that has turned up everything from copyright disputes and false identities to allegations of a secret government project. The three men have since left the motel and parted company.
Meanwhile, Montgomery County police have persisted in their search for Lutas. The FBI briefly opened a kidnapping investigation, but closed it for lack of evidence. Collier said police cannot treat Lutas's disappearance as a criminal case unless they find evidence that he was kidnapped or harmed. Initially, the detective said, he theorized that Lutas had skipped town because "he was a young man who had got in over his head. He was too embarrassed, ashamed to come home."
Still, Collier said he is baffled about why Lutas, the elder of two sons in a tight-knit family, would go so long without calling home. "What bothers me the most is his failure to contact his family," he said. Since the disappearance, Kimmel was arrested and charged with stealing a $22 wallet from a J.C. Penney's in Gaithersburg, MD. He was carrying no identification, and according to charging documents, he adopted the alias "Leonard Barber" and stated his address as being "outside Chicago."
Wang, in a telephone interview, declined to discuss his business dispute with Lutas and said he "wouldn't be particularly happy to see [Lutas] again." Wang said he had no reason to suspect foul play in the disappearance of Lutas. "Why would anyone want to do harm to George?" he asked. He called the computer program he and Lutas designed "wonderful," but said the project is in limbo "until George shows up."
He said that he wanted to pursue other interests and "forget all this stuff." The Lutas family, however, cannot forget. "I'm afraid to think the worst," said his father, George Lutas, Sr. "I've lost 25 pounds since this thing happened. My whole stomach is an open wound."
______________________________________________________________
If you know anything regarding Mr. Lutas' whereabouts, you are asked to contact the investigating agencies listed below:
Montgomery County Police Department
Det. Brian Stafford
(301) 279-8000
(301) 279-8000
UNT Center for Human Identification
Agency Case #91-258279
NamUs Case #19320
Source(s):
The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs)
4797DMMD - George Marcel Lutas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch...-puzzle/1dbec444-b990-4052-95bf-0748b5afdd00/
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