MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Texas – Nearly 28 years ago, George "Bud" Sager Jr. vanished after withdrawing money from a bank in the Houston area.
Five years later, a skull was found in the woods in Walker County.
And now, Montgomery County investigators have connected the remains with the missing man, thanks to DNA.
Sager, who was 30 when he disappeared, lived on Sweetwater Lane in Houston and worked for Harris County.
On Thursday, June 7, 1984, he withdrew money from his bank at I-45 and Spring Cypress Road to pay closing costs for a home he was buying.
But that purchase was never closed. No one ever heard from Sager again after that transaction.
On Tuesday, July 3, 1984, Sager’s black Ford F-150 was found abandoned in the parking lot of the Crossroads Shopping Center at I-45 and Highway 105 in Conroe.
Police inspected the truck, but were unable to develop any leads.
Based on the criteria for entering missing persons into the national database at the time, Sager was never officially listed as missing.
Decades passed, and all the while Sager’s family never knew his fate.
But then, in January of 2010, Sager’s sister in Arkansas contacted Montgomery County cold-case investigators.
They opened a new investigation and entered George Sager into the national missing person’s database. They also collected DNA from Sager’s family members, and entered that information into CODIS.
In October of 2011, investigators got a hit on that DNA. According to CODIS, it matched samples taken from a skull that was found in Walker County in 1989.
Cold-case investigators learned that on Monday, December 18, 1989, someone picking up aluminum cans along FM 1375 found the skull on the side of the road.
Attached to the skull was a short, handwritten note from an unidentified person, saying they found the skull in the woods but could not become involved with the investigation. Apparently, the author of the note moved the skull from the woods to the roadside, so someone else would find it.
After the skull was found, investigators took it to the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office, but they were unable to determine a cause of death.
The skull was stored away.
Once DNA technology became available that could help investigators identify remains, a sample was taken from the skull and entered into CODIS.
Only then, after years of unanswered questions, did investigators finally have answers. George Sager was dead.
Cold case investigators believe Sager may have been the victim of a robbery after he withdrew the money from the bank that day in 1984.
Now, investigators are seeking new information on the Sager case, and are particularly hopeful that the person who found the skull in the woods will contact them at 281-297-6510.
Detectives are also urging anyone with a family member who’s been missing for a long time to contact the investigating law enforcement agency and confirm that the person was, in fact, entered into the national database. Family members can then inquire about DNA collection for CODIS.
Montgomery County investigators said they’ve seen cases, like Sager’s, in which missing persons were never entered into the database or were removed for some reason. DNA could be the only way to link a missing person to unidentified remains in nearby counties or across the nation.
