I t’s not hard to miss the small Arizona outpost of Seligman. It’s a dot on the map about an hour west of Flagstaff — technically not a town but a “census-designated place,” a more complicated way of saying, “This place exists.” Home to roughly 450 souls, its only claim to fame is that it sits on historic Route 66, though it clings to only one of that famous highway’s 2,448 miles. A passing motorist could inhale upon entering Seligman and not have to let out a breath before rolling out the other end. It’s also not hard to go missing in Seligman. That’s what happened to Phoenix native Keith King just more than 19 years ago. On May 7, 2006, according to one account, the 46-year-old walked away from his girlfriend’s house in a T-shirt and flip- flops. He plodded over the windswept rocky terrain, dotted with pinyon and juniper trees, for a hike. Then he was never seen again. It was as if he’d been beamed up by one of the extraterrestrials he believed in and sometimes believed himself to be. A missing person’s case was opened and inquiries were made, but the mystery of King’s disappearance has remained unsolved. But it certainly has not remained undis- cussed. Seligman has a population of a small high school and can be every bit as gossipy. Theories abounded. King’s girl- friend, Karen Wells, was hardly a monoga- mist, and King was not the only beau in her life. Some of Wells’ other suitors had wives. In a tiny town, one wouldn’t have to dig very deep to strike upon some lingering resentment. Perhaps someone got jealous and then got violent. Perhaps, instead of disappearing, King was disappeared. For much of the last two decades, theo- ries were all they were. Wells died in 2023, leaving only her official account with the Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office to go by. One popular suspect — another of Wells’ flames, a man whose wife had warned authorities about him — took whatever he knew to the grave earlier this year. The pool of suspects and potential witnesses was already small in Seligman. The passing years have drained it further. However, one person is not content to let King’s disappearance fade into the past. King’s youngest daughter, Lindsey King, has resolved to uncover her dad’s fate. In 2021, a private investigator named Kelley Waldrip began frequenting the bar at the Phoenix restaurant The Main Ingredient, where Lindsey worked at the time. He was simply seeking a watering hole, not a job. But King’s daughter convinced him to take up her father’s case. Waldrip began poking around, tugging on threads that had been untouched for years and unearthing new ones. Over a series of months, an alternate theory of what happened to Keith King began to form. Lindsey King and Waldrip now think that he’s solved the case. They believe Keith King was murdered, and they believe they know who killed him and why. And perhaps most importantly to proving all this, they believe they know where his body is — chopped into pieces and stuffed into a septic tank that’s buried on a prop- erty in Seligman. All they need, they say, is for the county sheriff’s office to dig it up. ‘Luminous beings’ Lindsey King was 18 when her father disappeared. Sitting in shorts and a T-shirt in her central Phoenix bungalow one recent spring day, her large brown eyes occasion- ally teared up while talking about her dad. More than half her life has passed since Keith King vanished — Lindsey is now 37 — but her mind turns often to her father. “There hasn’t been a day in my life that I haven’t thought about my dad,” she said. Lindsey’s parents divorced when she was six, but her memories of her father are largely positive. For her ninth birthday, he hired a limo to ferry her and her friends to the Great Skate roller rink in Glendale. That same year, she joined him for Bring Your Daughter to Work Day at Sands Chevrolet, where he was a sales manager. She got to drive a golf cart, almost crashing it into one of the cars on the lot. She remembers him as funny and cool and successful, living in a condo at the Pointe Hilton, driving a Corvette and riding a Harley. He listened to Jewel and Jimmy Buffett and boasted that he planned to be a millionaire by age 50. In a separate interview, Lindsey’s younger brother, Riley, described Keith as “spontaneous.” Keith had a pet sugar glider and lavished his youngest son with “all the good toys,” Riley said — a Nintendo 64, a dirt bike, a BB gun. “He was always fun to be around,” Riley recalled, “but unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to really understand who my dad was.” Keith disappeared when Riley was 14. Even before that, though, the dad he knew had begun to slip away. Years before his disappearance, Keith suffered a mental collapse, plagued by delusions and isolating himself from society. One Christmas Eve, Lindsey recalled, he showed up in a trench coat and dark glasses and “was obsessed with ‘The Matrix.’” He gave her a gift and told her it was from “The One to The One.” A psychiatric evaluation of Keith, performed by West Yavapai Guidance Clinic in 2003 and shared with Phoenix New Times by Lindsey, diagnosed him with psychosis and said Keith “would qualify for disability.” He’d moved to Prescott from Phoenix and became increasingly solitary, stating that he couldn’t “mix with people.” The psych evaluation was the first time he’d left home in a month. Keith told the evaluator that his life changed one day when he looked through binoculars and saw UFOs and “luminous beings” that were “transparent with a greenish color.” He was paranoid that people, including his second wife, were trying to poison him. To avoid illness, he’d drawn a Pac-Man on his hand — the ravenous video game character would “go through my arm and get all the negativity out of my body.” He admitted to abusing cocaine, meth and alcohol in the past, but told the doctor that he was sober. According to his chil- dren, Keith’s sobriety was less than constant. Lindsey said her father “dabbled with” meth all his life. Her aunt, Kelly King, called Keith a lifelong “fan of alcohol and drugs.” It was “through drugs,” Lindsey believes, that Keith met Karen Wells. They’d first met in Prescott, but eventually moved to Seligman in 2005, where Keith lived in an RV on a 40-acre property owned by Wells’ parents a few miles south of town. Then one day, Keith walked out of the RV and, underdressed for the terrain, supposedly lit out for a hike. He was never seen again. At least, that’s what Wells claimed. Love triangle Not long after Keith went missing, there were hints of a more nefarious fate. The next day, Wells filed a missing person report with the county sheriff’s office. She told deputies that she’d last seen Keith the previous morning in his RV in flip-flops, a T-shirt and gray pants. He was about 170 pounds and 5-foot-10 and wore a mustache. Keith was “psychotic” and had refused to take his meds, she told them. He also “believed he was an alien.” Keith had been reportedly spotted two other times before he vanished, according to the sheriff’s office report. At about 5:10 p.m. the day before Keith disappeared, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer spotted him in a parking lot near his truck, which had been towed after conking out on a railroad track west of town. A Seligman man named Bill Wilkins told deputies that he’d seen Keith roughly 11 hours later, walking near a Chevron station. Wilkins had given him a ride home. Then the investigation got weird.
