A Seattle coroner positively identified gay activist and radio host Mike Webb’s body. Webb’s landlord discovered the badly decomposed body stuffed n a crawl space. Webb, who first made a radio name for himself covering San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone’s 1978 assassinations, went missing back on April 13th. Some thought maybe Webb ran away.
His last years certainly weren’t his happiest. He reportedly never recovered from his lover’s death a decade ago, nor did he bounce back after being found guilty of insurance fraud, which led to his firing. Webb’s car, however, remained parked in his drive. Certainly suspicious.
A number of people had been in the house since Webb’s disappearance, including his brother and the police.
None of them, however, noticed the body in the basement.
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A family member tells BlatherWatch: “The police had cadaver dogs in there, it was either June 15 or 22nd. The police have done “thorough” searches at least twice, assuring us they went through the house several times on each visit.
The landlord told neighbors he had been in the house a couple of weeks before, and Mike’s brother Wayne had been up from California and had been in the house.
After Webb went missing, police boarded up the windows. Packing up the house yesterday, Property owner David Neth noticed something funny – and not ha-ha funny. Via Seattle Times:
As he was changing the locks on the doors, Neth noticed that the old plywood sign on the kitchen window was bent and the screws holding it in place were only partially screwed in. “… Obviously someone had removed the 3 screws and bent the board up to go into the house and upon leaving had only partially put it back,” Neth said.
At one point, Neth left the house for about three hours, leaving the worker to pack up and move boxes filled with Webb’s things. When Neth returned with new keys for the house’s owner, the Millionaire Club worker “had nearly emptied the basement and was removing two shelving units with books,” Neth wrote. The bookcases were partially blocking the opening to a crawl space, and piece of plywood had been wedged between one of the bookcases and the wall.
As Neth was upstairs saying goodbye to the house’s owner, the worker removed several boxes he found inside the crawl space.
When Neth returned to the basement and peeked inside the crawl space, he saw a blue tarp “neatly squared to the wall.” Underneath the tarp, Neth said, “was the absolutely clear outline of a body.”
Neth also found two other “strange” objects in the space, but refused to name them pending the police investigation. Additionally, someone removed the crawl space’s vapor barrier, a detail of which Neth notes,
…It is not easy or desirable thing to remove a plastic vapor barrier from an entire crawl space and given Michael’s lack of cleanliness as a tenant, I cannot fathom him having it removed. May be nothing at all but certainly odd.
“Odd”? Sounds like murder to us…
GAYBC.com radio will host a two-hour tribute to Webb this evening from 6-8 Eastern (3-5 Pacific).
