DATE OF LAST CONTACT: 16th April 1983
MISSING FROM: San Francisco, California
DATE OF BIRTH: 28th July 1947
HEIGHT: 5’10
WEIGHT: 150 lbs
DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: White male. Brown hair, Blue eyes. Wearing blue jeans and a watch on his left wrist.
INVESTIGATING AGENCY: San Francisco Police Department
BASIC CASE FACTS
- Saturday 16th April 1983 – John left home to meet an unknown person and was never seen again.
- July 1984 – John’s car was found parked in an underground car park with his possessions still inside.
- Ownership of the vehicle had been transferred in an extremely suspicious manner, but it doesn’t lead to John’s whereabouts.
On Saturday the 16th April John Dolan Phillips jr left his home in San Francisco driving his classic, highly collectible, 1967 Citroen DS. He didn’t tell anyone where he was going or who he was going to meet and he was never seen again. There was no trace of John until, over fifteen months later, his car was sold at auction in mysterious circumstances. Despite the investigation which ensued after the discovery of his car, John remains missing.
I was originally unsure about whether to feature John’s case here due to the serious lack of information on him and an apparent lack of investigation and media coverage – in fact John’s car got more media coverage than he did! However, since I managed to dig a little into his life I decided that I would tell his story in the hopes that someone might see it and shed a little light on this forgotten man’s case.
There are only three photos of John. Two of them are terrible quality and in the third John is in the middle of laughing and I don’t believe it is a good likeness. My best attempt to clear up two of John’s photos is below. I am not sure if this is an improvement or not:
JOHN’S STORY
John Dolan Phillips Jr was born on the 28th July 1948 in Oldenburg, Schleswig-Holstein in Germany. At the time the area was under British occupation and John’s parents, John Sr and Betsy, had remained in Germany to aid in the reconstruction of Europe after the war; in which John Sr had been a captain in the army. The family moved back to the USA in 1950 and settled in Omaha, Nebraska where John’s younger siblings, Dennis and Carolyn, were born. By 1964 the family had moved to Toledo, Ohio where John Sr founded a trucking company called “Dundee Truck Lines” in 1964. The Phillips family were Seventh Day Adventists.
John first attended the Macomber Vocational School before moving to Rogers High School in Toledo where he was the treasurer for his class in 1965 and in 1966 he was in the math and chess clubs, seemingly he was a talented student.
I couldn’t track John after High School and am not sure if he attended college or went straight into work but in 1976 his father sold his trucking firm and his parents moved to Fallbrook, California. John seems to have followed them to the West coast because the next time he pops up he is living in San Francisco.
In 1979 he married Rebecca Brackman in San Francisco, both were in their early thirties. By this point John was the owner of a company which imported Asian textiles, unfortunately I have been unable to trace the actual name of his firm. John and Rebecca lived at 2415 Larkin Street, located in the exclusive Russian Hill section of the city. Their apartment was a large and luxurious pad with breathtaking views of Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay and a large outdoor terrace. It is valued at well over a million today.
With the luxury apartment and John’s Vintage classic car the impression is that the Phillips’ had a good life and were financially secure. On the 6th March 1983 they welcomed a son into the world with the birth of Zachary. On the surface it looks like the ideal lifestyle, but all was not well in the Phillips’ household and it seems the marriage was on the rocks.
DISAPPEARANCE
On Saturday 16th April 1983 John left home in his car. He never returned. He was apparently going to meet someone but he never said who or where he was going. It’s not even known what he was wearing beyond blue jeans and a wristwatch. That’s all the information there is. John was reported missing but there were no leads, no trail to follow – nothing. Rebecca theorised that John had simply walked out on his life due to marital problems and the pressure of a month old baby in the house but, baffled and concerned, John’s family hired David Fechheimer; a private investigator.
Fechheimer also hit a brick wall. There was simply no trace of John anywhere. One thing he did do was place a trace on the car in the hopes that it would lead to John’s whereabouts, but again there was nothing. The case went deathly cold, Rebecca moved out of the home she had shared with John and nothing happened…until over a year after the disappearance, when John’s car suddenly reappeared!
THE CAR
Before I describe what happened next I want to explain a little about John’s car. John’s convertible Citroen DS wasn’t just rare – it was super rare! The car was handmade, hand painted and hand crafted in France and only 1200 were ever produced. This car was extremely unusual and highly noticeable and John’s was probably the only one in the city, if not the state. I am not sure about the colour of John’s car but it would have looked like this:
This is not a car that would be easily missed. It was estimated by experts to fetch $16,000 at auction in 1983 – that equates to over $60,000 in today’s money! (2025)
Imagine the private investigator’s surprise when, in July of 1984, he was notified by the DMV that John’s car had been registered to a new owner! Fechheimer went straight to the newly registered address in South San Francisco and spoke to the new owner, Walter Bastian, who said that the car was in the possession of his son, Frederick, and when asked to return the car Frederick refused point blank to give it up. The Bastians did say that that they had found a wallet and some baseball equipment in the trunk and they handed these over – they belonged to John. But as the Bastians began to tell the story of how they obtained John’s car, something smelled fishy.
It turned out that the car had been parked in the underground car park at Three Embarcadero Center for a long time, over eight months at least, and had accrued over $4000 in storage fees (that’s over $15 thousand in 2025!). It wasn’t clear whether the car had been there since April 1983, but it was known to have been parked at that location since at least November of 1983 when it began to accrue charges and i think it’s likely it had been there since the day in April that John vanished. Embarcadero Center is right in the heart of San Francisco’s business district and back in 1983 contained a shopping plaza, numerous coffee shops and restaurants as well as offices for numerous companies including many banks and lawyers. The Embarcadero center is only a few minutes drive from John’s home through busy city streets. Did John have a meeting here that day? Or did someone else leave his car in this location?
When the private investigator dug more into the details of the car, things just didn’t add up. It turns out that Walter Bastian, the new owner, was also the manager of the underground car park! The company who owned the car park had decided to sell the car at a lien sale – a perfectly legitimate way for them to attempt to recoup the fees accumulated, as long as certain procedures are followed. One such is to attempt to notify the owners. The Bastians claimed they sent a registered letter, but Rebecca Phillips never received it because she had moved out of the apartment she had shared with John not long after he disappeared.
Okay, fair enough you might say. But it transpires that the auction of the car was never publicized (legally, a notice of intent to sell must be placed in local newspapers) and not only that but there was only one bidder for the car – Walter Bastian. He paid $200! That’s right, he paid just $200 for a car worth $16,000. If the intent was to recoup some of the over $4000 in fines then it failed.
The entire story is bogus. Something funny was going on. Did the Bastians realise the car was incredibly valuable? Did they scheme to get possession of it? I think it’s obvious they did and were driven by greed. Did the Bastians murder John for his car…no, I don’t think so. John’s car sat in that underground car park for over a year with John’s possessions still inside. John wasn’t murdered for the car. The Bastians may have been guilty of an illegal transaction, but I think that’s all.
In the end John’s wife Rebecca hired an attorney and sued the Bastians and the parking garage for possession of the car and $500,000 in damages. She won. The car was eventually returned and looked at by criminologists for forensic evidence. Nothing was found to indicate any signs of foul play or that anyone except John had even been in the car. Despite finding the car, John’s whereabouts still remained a complete mystery.
WHAT HAPPENED TO JOHN?
Rebecca Phillips always believed that John simply walked away from his life because of the problems with the marriage and the stress of a newborn baby, but I am not so sure. If John was unhappy in his marriage then wouldn’t it have made more sense to simply get a divorce? If John decided for some reason to disappear, changing his identity, then wouldn’t he have first sold his valuable car for the money? It’s possible that he left the car to be found by his family so they could sell it, but in that case why not just leave it at home in the first place to be easily found. There are a number of other possibilities for what happened to John I’d like to explore:
SUICIDE
Although there was some personal strife in John’s life, there was never any mention of him being despondent or suicidal; but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t. John’s car was found nowhere near Golden Gate Bridge, but was not too far from the Bay Bridge. It is possible that he walked there and threw himself off but if so, his body never surfaced. One thing that does make me consider suicide is that he left his wallet and all of its contents in the trunk of his car. Men usually carry their wallet in a pocket – it looks like whatever John was doing he knew he wouldn’t need it. Suicide is a possibility, but there are other possibilities too.
ROBBERY AND MURDER
I am confident that John was not robbed. His car was discovered in pristine condition with no signs of violence and his wallet was found too. The Embarcadero Center is very busy and downtown, I doubt John would be robbed or murdered at this location.
DANGEROUS ASSOCIATES?
The private investigator made a comment in the San Francisco Examiner article in 1984 that intrigued me:
The private investigator “put out feelers into the drug underworld to determine if Phillips may have been involved in a drug deal turned sour”. I found this interesting, does it suggest that John was involved with drugs? What made the the PI look into this possibility? Let’s just go over John’s life once more.
John owned a car worth a fortune. He lived in a luxury apartment in the upscale and expensive part of town. It sounds like John was doing extremely well for himself. Now, John was in the import business; he imported Asian textiles. I have no idea how much income this kind of business would generate in 1983 but would it be enough to support such a lifestyle? Think about John’s business – imports from Asia. Is it possible that John was importing more than just textiles? Could this explain why his marriage was troubled? Was John involved in illegal drugs that got him involved with the wrong people; powerful underworld figures? Did it cost him his life?
John had a meeting with someone that day, someone he never named. It’s unknown whether John himself parked his car in the Embarcadero Center or if someone else abandoned it there, but that person didn’t take his wallet or his car – just John. That sounds like it was personal, if someone murdered John then it was for personal reasons.
Although it is all my own speculation, I am leaning to John having been involved in some illegal activity that cost him his life. Wherever he went that day, he was murdered and his body was concealed. This is something that underworld drug dealers usually do very well to those who have wronged them. We’ll never know who left his car in the garage, and in some ways, it doesn’t matter. The discovery of John’s car offered no clues to his whereabouts, and I don’t believe that the subsequent events with the Bastian family are related. I think it is unlikely that John will ever be found; my personal feeling is that his body was weighted down and dumped somewhere out at sea or in the Bay.
John’s wife, Rebecca, still lives in California where she has lived a happy and successful life. She never remarried. John’s son, Zachary, never knew his father; John disappeared when he was a little over a month old. Zach is now 44. He still resides in California and is in the music business. He is married with two sons, John’s grandsons.
I would be very interested in hearing from anyone who knows the name of John’s company or knew John. And in anyone who lived in San Francisco at this time and can shed light on the places mentioned. Reach out!
SOURCES
San Francisco Examiner article, 11th October 1984
Family Search
Rogers High school yearbooks 1965 & 1966
Never Seen Again 
An amazing case!
I think that something bad happened to John either at the meeting or place where he was supposed to meet someone. The meeting might have started out good and turned bad. Could have been over money, drugs, or a combination of both.
I don’t believe that there was a fight or conflict over the car, because there was no evidence found on or in the car that suggests foul play. I don’t think that John just decided to walk away because of stress in his marriage. I think the Bastian’s might have been involved in some shady business dealings, paying only $200 for a classic car worth over $16,000 at the time. But no evidence to direct them to the murder of John.
I see this as a personal vendetta against John over drugs or money. His body is buried either in the Bay or in the San Francisco landscape. Most likely the Bay.
Jack
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