The Mills Police Department is asking the public’s help in solving a 15-year-old mystery involving a man who walked away during a church service on Easter in 2010 and seemingly disappeared.
Seth Allen Uptain, then 32, was attending church at Salt & Light in Casper on April 4, 2010, and went to get coffee but never returned.
Kate Acord, detective with the Mills Police Department, has since taken over the case and is eager to get Uptain’s story out there with the hopes of finally solving the mystery of what happened to him.
Acord said that Uptain’s mother reported him missing when he didn’t return. He left behind his wallet and all of his belongings.
Uptain’s mother told police that her son had seemed off that day and had been struggling with money issues. He spoke about possibly heading to Denver or Oregon for work. She told police she wasn’t sure if he may have been running away from pending legal issues.
Publicly available court documents indicate that Uptain failed to appear on a misdemeanor charge in Natrona County Circuit Court on Dec. 31, 2009, at which point a bench warrant was issued. No such warrant exists today.
His mother told police that it’s unlike Uptain to be out of touch with his family.
“He hasn’t contacted his mom or his family, so I think there’s a genuine cause for alarm,” Acord said.
No trace
Despite numerous searches for Uptain in the National Crime Information Center database and other background search databases over the years there have been no hits.
His dental records and DNA, uploaded to national databases, have yet to match with any human remains in the United States or Canada.
Members of Uptain’s family contacted by Cowboy State Daily did not respond to a request for interviews, but memories shared by his siblings on the Fondly Thinking of Seth Uptain – Missing Person Facebook page paint a vivid and loving portrait of a brother much loved and sorely missed.
Every year, there’s a post marking his birthday on Oct 2., dating back to 2015.
In the most recent post, a sibling writes: “You are not forgotten. I can’t picture your face or remember your voice like I used to. Your life is still worth celebrating. Miss you forever…”
Other posts through the years describe fun trips taken together, jokes played on each other and his skills on his mountain bike and his ever-present smile.
In an August 2020 post, Uptain’s sister, Anna Louise George, shared more about her brother’s state of mind at the time he left, saying that he was experiencing an undiagnosed mental health crisis when he disappeared.
She went on to say that he loved the outdoors having been raised in Wyoming and that he earned a bachelor’s degree and had been a small business owner.
Uptain graduated from Northland College, a now-defunct, private Bible college in Wisconsin. Two of his former college friends shared their recollections with Cowboy State Daily.
Potential sighting?
One former roommate even believes that he had lunch with Uptain in South Carolina after he was reported missing.
Jared Vanning, who lived with Uptain his sophomore and senior years in college, said that Uptain called him to get together for lunch in Greenville, South Carolina, where he was living at the time.
All these years later, Vanning still remembers getting together with Uptain that day in what he believes was 2010.
Vanning has since moved to Chiba, Japan, where he and his wife serve as missionaries.
In an early Friday morning Zoom call from Japan, Vanning recalled that Uptain called on a borrowed cellphone and said he was staying with a friend.
He showed up on a mountain bike, which was not unusual for Uptain, who was an avid athlete and mountain biker.
In fact, the details are fuzzy, but Vanning recalls Uptain saying he’d even ridden his bike from Wyoming to South Carolina and had some sponsorship from a mountain bike company.
“I just thought, ‘Well, it’s not what a usual person would do, but it was Seth-like,’” Vanning said.
At the time, it seemed like an ordinary lunch, but looking back now, Vanning sees a few red flags.
He remembered Uptain said he needed to apologize for something he’d said about Vanning at college that Vanning didn’t remember. Something about Uptain lying about him or spreading a rumor.
“I totally didn’t remember him even doing that, but I said, ‘Sure, you know, if it makes you feel better,’” Vanning said.
In need of preaching
Uptain also told Vanning that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble back home at some point, but that everything had cleared up.
He seemed to be in a good place, Vanning thought. He was talking about going to college for counseling, he recalled.
“It seemed to me that he was kind of having a revival of sorts and wanted to just be under some good preaching,” he said.
Uptain didn’t have money, so Vanning paid for his lunch. He told Vanning that he’d come to Greenville because he was a big fan of pastor Mark Minnick at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church.
That surprised Vanning because it was more conservative than the other churches Uptain typically attended, so Vanning invited Uptain to attend his church.
After lunch, the friends made tentative plans to meet again with Uptain promising to call him.
He never did.
The two never spoke again, though in the first few months after that meeting, Vanning remembers seeing Uptain at his church.
Vanning saw him from afar from his seat in the balcony where he sat with his wife and infant son. His son is 15 now, so he’s pretty sure on the timeline, he said.
Then Uptain just disappeared.
Gone
Vanning was shocked when he read the post that Uptain was missing on the Fondly Thinking of Seth Uptain Facebook page in October 2019.
He immediately posted his last recollection of that lunch date that he thinks happened after Uptain was reported missing.
It's unknown at this time whether the police saw Vanning's post and reached out to him or vetted it in any way.
Acord and Mills Police Chief Bryon Preciado were not available Friday to confirm.
Vanning said that someone did reach out to him, but he couldn’t remember whether it was police or one of Uptain’s family members. He thinks it was likely a family member from the Facebook page, but he can't remeber for certain.
The person in question asked Vanning to share Uptain’s photo with the pastors at the church where Vanning last saw Uptain to see if anyone recognized him. Vanning did as told but nobody knew him.
“It’s a big church, and they had no idea who I was talking about,” he said.
Staff at the Mount Calvary Baptist Church, the church that Uptain said he moved to South Carolina to attend, do remember him.
An office staff worker told Cowboy State Daily that she remembers Uptain because the church has records of his attendance in its files. The worker said Uptain didn’t attend the church for long or regularly, but she believes he last attended in 2008, but couldn’t say for certain.
Like two people
Another former college friend, Jamie Bickel, was equally shocked when he heard the news that Uptain was missing. Like Vanning, he saw it on a Facebook post.
Bickel, now a pastor living in Maine, remembers Uptain fondly. Along with being a happy-go-lucky guy who was always smiling, Uptain also stood out because he drove a little Toyota minivan, which was unusual for college kids back then.
“I remember he always had this smile, almost like a goofy grin and was easy going,” he said.
He thought of him as a western version of a “California surfer guy” who was always mountain biking and spending time outdoors. None of them were into drinking or drugs, he said, and were all strait-laced kids at a small Bible college with around 400 students.
Uptain was the last guy he ever imagined going missing.
“I was like, what in the world happened? I talked to him just a few years ago, and he was fine,” Bickel said.
And though it’s possible that Uptain may have gone off the radar or left to start a new life, Bickel doesn’t believe that’s the case given Uptain’s sociability.
“He was such a people person,” Bickel said. “It doesn’t make sense that he would just disconnect from people.”
Hoping for tips
Acord said the Mills Police Department is committed to finding Uptain and bringing him home. She’s hopeful that getting his name out in the media will elicit tips and jog memories.
No tip is too small, she said, and she encourages anyone with information to contact her department.
Tom Myers, a retired FBI special agent with a specialty in forensics, agrees. He believes this case is solvable and encourages those who knew Uptain to contact police.
“They can provide viable leads, contacts and information about his mental state, mindset and everything else," he said. “This police department and detective sounds committed to resolving this case, and people can be a big help."
Given Uptain’s outdoors skills, Myers said he thinks there's a chance that Uptain could still be alive and out there if he is savvy enough.
“It didn’t seem like he needed a lot of overhead to survive,” he said.
Uptain is described as 6-foot and around 200 pounds with blond hair and hazel eyes. He wears eyeglasses, but may not have any with him, and has a nervous habit of rubbing his eyes until they’re red and swollen. He was clean-shaven at the time of his disappearance but may have grown a beard.
He’s also missing the tips of his middle and ring fingers on his left hand due to a land-scaping accident.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Mills Police Department at 307-266-4796. Tips can also be submitted anonymously online at the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation’s tipline.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
