He vanished just before Christmas, and now here it is beyond Easter, and Steven Koecher has still not been heard from.
The 30-year-old man was last seen walking away from his parked Chevrolet Cavalier in a residential neighborhood in Henderson, Nev., on Sunday, Dec. 13.
The conjecture as to why he had driven to the Las Vegas area from his home in St. George, about 120 miles away, was to look for a job.
But it's as if he walked into thin air.
Ever since, family members, friends, police detectives, psychologists, church leaders, community search teams and the media have been in search mode, pawing through Steven's past in an attempt to determine his present.
So far, nothing.
In all the annals of searches for missing people, there may have never been a search with less good news and yet so much good news.
Steve Koecher left behind a trail of good deeds.
For nearly four months now, the life he lived before his disappearance has been torn up, ripped apart, dissected, analyzed and scrutinized.
Trained police dogs sniffed his car for drugs. Nothing. Detectives went through his laptop to look for pornography, for visits to bomb-making sites, for other nefarious activity. Nothing.
They went to the library. They found he'd checked out a biography of basketball legend Pete Maravich, a history book of early southern Utah settlers he was related to and a DVD of "The Lord of the Rings."
Those with experience in such matters said Steven exhibited no signs of being suicidal. People who study the homeless said he definitely did not fit the profile of someone who chooses to get lost on purpose and become homeless.
His personal diary was searched for clues. In his private moments he confessed to having two problems: no full-time job and no wife. And he was hard at work on both.
In his free time he was a mentor in the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program, he coached a Junior Jazz basketball team and other youth sports teams and he was an active member of the Bloomington Hills 7th Ward, a congregation of young single adults who belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"Every assignment he did was 100 percent," said Don Lyman, president of the Bloomington Hills Stake that oversees the singles ward. "You could always count on him for everything."
Greg Webb, who served with Steven in the 7th Ward's elders quorum, remembered searching Steve's apartment after he'd gone missing and finding notebooks full of plans to reorganize their home teaching visits.
"He took it upon himself to revamp the home teaching," he said. "That's how he was. You never had to ask. He just did it. He was just good; one of those guys that it seemed like he had it all figured out."
The cleanliness of the search only heightens the mystery.
A $10,000 reward offered by the family has so far produced no credible new leads or juicy tidbits to feed the newspapers.
As editor of the Davis County Clipper in Bountiful, Steven's father, Rolf Koecher, knows as well as anyone the value of the media in getting out information about his son and keeping the story alive.
But he also knows the value of having something substantive to drive the news.
"We have a hundred things of what the situation is not, but not one clear clue as to what it might be," he said ruefully.
The family would like to organize another search, said Koecher. "But where would we search? We don't want to turn it into a circus."
Steven's dad remembered searching Steven's apartment to look for clues. ... In a corner he found a set of rubber bases and a whistle — gear his son was using to coach a kids baseball team.
"Every time we find some new thing, it's something nice he did," he said.
It's the kind of news every parent dreams of getting — but under the circumstances it only serves to underscore the misery of not knowing the whereabouts of the perpetrator of all those good deeds.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.