The wife of a missing Iowa truck driver is desperately searching for answers about his disappearance as law enforcement’s efforts continue to unearth very few clues.
53-year-old trucker David Schultz was last seen in the Sac City, Iowa, area in the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 21, 2023. He was reported missing after he failed to deliver a load of baby pigs to Sac City and wasn’t answering the phone. His tractor trailer was found on the northbound side of rural U.S. Highway 71 with the load of pigs still inside. Authorities say his wallet, cell phone, and other belongings were still inside the truck, and that his jacket was found on the side of the highway, not far from the rig. Reports say Schultz would have been heading south on the highway if he had been heading to the delivery location.
Schultz’s wife, Sarah, says she last saw him at 7:30 p.m. on November 20th as he headed out the door for another shift after an already-full day of work.
“He had to do another Seaboard load from Eagle Grove to Sac City,” she said to The Gazette. “He just washed up and changed and gave me a kiss and ran out the door. He’s always in a hurry.”
Sarah says that Schultz was particularly eager to get back home after his last load because Sarah’s daughter and granddaughter were in town visiting from Florida. However, by 10 a.m. the next morning, the man who rents Schultz a trailer was on their front step.
“He said, ‘Have you spoken to Dave?'” she recalled. “I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘No one can get ahold of him and the pigs haven’t been dropped off yet.'”
After police found the truck, a police dog tracked Schultz’s scent, but the trail “wasn’t very long.”
Sac County Sheriff Ken McClure says that multiple agencies have searched the immediate area where Schultz’s truck was parked, but no sign of him has been found. Employees who loaded the truck full of pigs say that Schultz was late for the pickup, but did not mention anything else out of the ordinary.
McClure says that Schultz was last seen on an an Iowa Department of Transportation camera on Highway 20 was at 11:15 p.m. Nov. 20. Video footage near the Wiechman Pig Company buying station, where he was supposed to drop off the load, shows he never made it there that night.
Despite some theories positing that someone else may have been in the truck with Schultz leading up to the disappearance, McClure says that is unlikely.
“I think it’s very unlikely based on the video evidence that we have of him in Fort Dodge that somebody else was in the truck,” said McClure
McClure says investigators still “haven’t ruled anything out,” but is confident that the case will eventually be solved.
“We’re going to run this out until we just can’t run it anymore, until we can either find out what happened to David or where he’s at and bring him home and give some answers,” he said.
“I want my husband. It’s exhausting. It’s awful,” Sarah said.
Sarah says she has reached out to two psychics in her desperation, and both insinuated that something sinister has happened to her husband. The first said that her husband is being kept in the corner of a room and is weak. The second said that he was hit in the back of the head and then thrown into a body of moving water.
“There’s just a lot of things that just don’t quite line up right with the whole deal,” said truck driver Colin Gierstorf, who lives near where Schultz disappeared and has been trucking since 1994. He says that local truckers are curious about the case, but truckers’ wives are the most concerned.
Sarah says that her husband is “hardworking to a fault,” and that “he just loves it,” but that he was having some issues dealing with the stress before his disappearance.
He knows he’s good at it. One of the common things I hear more than one person say that he’s loaded for is, when they see Dave’s truck coming down the road, they know they’re going to have a good day.”
Sarah said Schultz started telling her he “can’t take this” in regards to the hard work, but would dismiss the idea of finding another job when she brought it up.
“It’s hard work doing livestock like that. He’s 53, but he’s spry. He can run. He can jump. He’s young at heart, you know,” she said of David, who takes pride in being able to transport five loads of hogs a day. “He can outwork a young man, and he’s proud of his work ethic.”
“He had goals. He was excited to drive this truck. He never would have left.”