Wife of Iowa trucker seeks answers a month after his disappearance

It’s been a month since Sarah Schultz last saw her truck driver husband, David Schultz, 53, of Wall Lake, Iowa, when he dropped by the house around 7 p.m. on Nov. 20, long enough to grab a change of clothes before heading out to pick up another load of pigs.

“Dave called me and said, ‘Hey, could you set out a change of clothes for me? I’m late,’” Sarah Schultz told FreightWaves. 

She said her last conversation with Dave was about the fact that he didn’t like the pants she had picked out for him because the pockets weren’t deep enough.

After running upstairs and grabbing a different pair, Dave gave her a kiss goodbye and headed out, Sarah said.

What happened next remains a mystery as local, county and state law enforcement agencies are still searching for answers — and Dave.

Dave picked up a load of 120 pigs near Eagle Grove, Iowa, but authorities say he never arrived for his appointment time of midnight at the site where he was supposed to offload the pigs: Wiechman Pig Co. buying station in Sac City, Iowa. Wiechman’s home office is in Fremont, Nebraska, but it has 16 locations in the Midwest, including six pig-buying stations in Iowa.

Around 3 p.m. on Nov. 21, a Sac County secondary road employee reported seeing Dave Schultz’s red- and white-striped Peterbilt with his loaded trailer of pigs parked in the middle of the northbound lane of County Road N-14, but no Dave. His rig was found facing the wrong direction of the buying station where he was scheduled to arrive with his load of pigs.

Inside the cab of Dave’s truck, investigators found his wallet, including his driver’s license, his cell phone and around $2,000 in cash, which Sarah confirmed was still in his wallet. His coat was found in a nearby ditch.

Sac County Sheriff Ken McClure said his office is investigating all leads and is “waiting for subpoenas to come back from different personal data [belonging to Dave].”

“I think, today, any scenario you could run through your head is probably a possibility,” McClure told FreightWaves.

After Dave’s rig was found, law enforcement searched the immediate area on foot and with a K-9, according to a Dec. 9 press release by McClure.

“The Sac County Sheriff’s Office requested assistance from the Iowa State Patrol airwing unit,” McClure said. “An airplane was dispatched from Iowa City that was equipped with forward-looking infrared. A State Patrol pilot flew over the surrounding area and did not detect a heat signature that would be consistent with a person. For the next two days, law enforcement, area firefighters and volunteers expanded the ground search on foot and with the use of drones.  Nothing of significant value was located.”

The United Cajun Navy and volunteers searched over 100,000 acres in the area where Dave’s tractor-trailer was found.

Investigators obtained video footage showing Dave at 11:15 p.m. on Nov. 21, 2023, at the Marker 126 Travel Center east of Fort Dodge, Iowa, on U.S. Highway 20. According to the press release, Dave was there for 16 minutes before leaving the truck stop. He is then seen on a Department of Transportation camera on Highway 20 west of the truck stop heading west.  

“This was the last time David was seen,” McClure said. “Cell phone data obtained from David Schultz’s phone corroborates this timeline.” 

Investigators claim there was no usable video from the DOT camera. Cell phone records show Dave’s phone arrived at the intersection of Highway 20 and U.S. 71 at around 12:18 a.m. The data shows the phone traveling north to where the truck was found and that it may have been there since 12:40 a.m., according to McClure.

Over the past month, Sarah said she’s read hurtful comments on social media saying that maybe Dave doesn’t want to be found and left the family to start a new life.

Sarah said she is convinced that Dave was taken and that he wouldn’t have left his family, including the couple’s 10-year-old twin boys, Isaack and Joseph, for a new start.

“He would have never left our family. I know some people say, ‘Well, maybe this was his choice,’” she said. “This was not his choice. I guarantee you. He had nothing to do with this.”

“He wanted a wife and children his whole life and he finally got it in his 40s. Our twins are his life and his little buddies.”

If Dave wanted to disappear, she added, why didn’t he take the cash out of his wallet or drain their bank account? Sarah said Dave had purchased a bright yellow Peterbilt and was fixing it up. He planned to sell the red and white Pete, according to Sarah.

“Now he doesn’t even, hasn’t even had a chance to drive it yet,” she said. “He had goals. … He didn’t, wasn’t just sitting there hating his life. All he needed was a headlight to get it up and running.”

More questions than answers 

Sarah said the days before Dave mysteriously disappeared were busy. Her daughter, Sabrina, and grandson, Niko, were visiting from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. While the family celebrated Thanksgiving a few days early on Nov. 19, she said Dave was working and unable to attend the dinner.

“He had another load before this one that made him late,” Sarah said. “I think they were cleaning out those hog barns. I think he said he’d already been there once and this was the second time.”

Dave leases a livestock trailer from Les Brown, owner of B Bar R Livestock out of Denison, Iowa, who also finds him loads. Brown told FreightWaves that Dave had already delivered a load to the Wiechman Pig Co.’s buying station in Sac City and was planning to repeat the same route as before.

Investigators confirmed that Dave loaded the pigs and left the hog barn in Eagle Grove around 10:40 p.m. on Nov. 20. But after reviewing nearby businesses’ surveillance footage, they said he never arrived at the buying station.

However, Brown said he’s convinced that Dave arrived at the pig-buying station and that “something happened” to him when he got out of his truck to unload the pigs. He claims that someone else drove Dave’s custom-painted Peterbilt out of the station but that Dave wasn’t behind the wheel. He understands there’s no video evidence to back up his claim.

“There’s one thing about Dave is that if he had pigs on that had to go somewhere, they got there,” Brown said. “If he had truck trouble, he made it work to get the pigs where they needed to be. All of our company drivers, everybody in the industry who hauls livestock that knows Dave are pretty confident that he made it down to the place he was supposed to go and that things, whatever happened to Dave, went on there.”

Brown said Dave was familiar with the buying station in Sac City and had hauled the same load for him the night before.

“The same route, the same deal, the same place, everything was the same as the night before,” Brown told FreightWaves.

Sarah and Brown agree that Dave wouldn’t have left his rig in the middle of the road without turning his flashers on or finding a safer spot to pull over. In his latest update about Dave’s disappearance, McClure stated that Dave’s truck was shut off.

Kevin Sievers, assistant manager of Wiechman Pig Co., works out of the Sioux City, Iowa, facility but also oversees the Sac City site where Dave was scheduled to unload.

“We had a guy come in the next morning to work up the hogs, and he noticed that there weren’t as many hogs as there were supposed to be in the pens,” Sievers told FreightWaves. “We contacted where the hogs came from and if something had gotten changed with their scheduling or something. They reached out to the trucking firm and the site where the hogs were loaded and said the hogs had been loaded but not delivered.”

Brown said he learned around 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 21 that Dave’s load of pigs hadn’t been delivered. Less than an hour after not being able to reach Dave by phone, Brown went out looking for him.

He also drove to Sarah’s house to let her know that Dave didn’t show up to his delivery point. He remembers asking her if she had a GPS location-sharing app on her phone that would help locate Dave.

She didn’t.

Sarah later called the police in Lake View, Iowa, to report Dave missing with a possible medical emergency after she was unable to reach him by phone or find him or his tractor-trailer.

Sievers said the site where Dave was to unload the pigs is a smaller facility and had a couple of semi-loads arrive earlier that night.

“We don’t buy a lot of hogs there,” Sievers said. “ It doesn’t have hogs in it all the time — we just use it as necessary. A lot of drivers will drop off their pigs and they’ll drop off their load paperwork in a box and put them in the pens and leave.”

Sievers said Dave was supposed to be the last truck to unload that night. 

Investigators said the farm where Dave picked up the pigs was searched and the manure pit in the barn was pumped and drained.

Lack of communication

Sarah said she’s frustrated that very little information into Dave’s disappearance is being shared with her by the Sac County Sheriff’s Office, adding that she wants the Federal Bureau of Investigation to look into her husband’s case.

“I’m just worried that law enforcement around here won’t ask for the FBI’s help,” she said.

Sievers said he has had little contact with law enforcement since Dave went missing 30 days ago.

“They [the Sac County Sheriff’s Office] called one of our facilities close by and talked to the guy there and asked if we had cameras at the Sac City facilities, and I told him we did not,” Sievers said.

He said the company is considering installing cameras at the facility that it has been overseeing for the past 10-15 years.

Sievers’ and Dave’s paths crossed over the years at the pig-buying facilities.

“He’s a good trucker,” Sievers said. “I never had any problems with Dave.”

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