Chris Giauque left his home in Salmon Creek on August 9, 2003, to collect money he was owed from a meeting near Iron Peak Lookout on Spy Rock Road in Mendocino County, and he never came back. More than two decades later, his body has still never been found, and his 89-year-old father Bob Giauque has now locked nearly $400,000 into a trust to keep the search for his son's killer alive even after he himself is gone.
Chris had married his wife, Rebecca, on June 26, 2003, in Trinidad, California, just six weeks before he vanished, and the couple was preparing for a honeymoon trip to Maui, according to Redheaded Blackbelt. He left prison in June 2003 and got married shortly after, according to reporting from FOX40, which detailed how Chris had built a life as a successful cannabis grower and businessman in the years before his disappearance, cultivating the marijuana strain Big Bud and partnering to open hundreds of acres of growing operations in 2001.
Family members have long argued that Chris could not have simply wandered off into the wilderness. He carried surgical steel rods in his spine from a college injury and had undergone two childhood heart surgeries at Stanford, physical vulnerabilities that Cannabis News reported pushed authorities to treat his case as a foul-play investigation rather than a voluntary disappearance.
A Truck Abandoned, a Trailer Scrubbed Clean
Four days after Chris disappeared, his blue 1994 Toyota pickup was found abandoned along the Avenue of the Giants near Meyers Flat. Witnesses later reported seeing a 1975-1980s brown Ford pickup with red tape over a broken left brake light following his truck down Elk Creek Road the day after he went missing, per the same Redheaded Blackbelt account, with law enforcement believing another driver dumped the vehicle north of Chris's home.
His wife and his business associate, Ben Lomax, reported him missing to the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office on August 11, 2003, accompanied by a lawyer. Two days later, an associate who inspected Lomax's trailer at Spy Rock reported it smelled heavily of disinfectant — yet law enforcement did not search that trailer until 17 days after Chris disappeared, a delay that has fueled lasting frustration among family members, the outlet's reporting shows.
Chris was declared dead in 2010, seven years after he vanished. FOX40 reports that private investigator Dawn King, who has worked the case for the family, said there have been no real updates or new developments and that talks with law enforcement have been challenging.
Files From a Retiring Investigator
A break in access, if not in the case itself, came when the former Chief Investigator for the Mendocino County District Attorney's Office, before retiring in 2022, released a video copy of a three-hour 2007 Sheriff's interview with Lomax, along with cell phone records, to King, according to a chrisreward.org post. King is reportedly still combing through those cell records in an effort to identify potential witnesses.
Bob Giauque has spent 23 years pursuing justice for his son, FOX40 reports, hiring private investigators, papering U.S. 101 through Humboldt County with reward flyers, and describing Chris as exceedingly bright. Marking the 20th anniversary of the disappearance, a billboard advertising the $400,000 reward was installed along Highway 101 in Laytonville in August 2023 and stayed up for nearly a year, close to the remote area where Chris was last seen.
The reward itself was doubled to its current $400,000 total in 2020, split between $200,000 for information leading to the discovery of Chris's remains and $200,000 for the arrest and prosecution of his killer, per FOX40's account, building on an earlier $200,000 reward for his remains that had been established in 2012. Bob has said the money is now secured in a trust that will continue paying out even if he dies before 2030, ensuring the incentive for witnesses outlives him. His relative, Rob Giauque, has also contacted California Attorney General Rob Bonta about reviewing the case, FOX40 reported.
A Cannabis Activist Who Clashed With Police
Before he vanished, Chris had a public history of confrontation with law enforcement over marijuana enforcement. He led the UC Davis chapter of NORML, the group that has long advocated for cannabis regulation, and was arrested in 2001 for federal marijuana-related activity, ultimately serving 15 months in federal prison. He had also fought in court to force the Humboldt County Sheriff to return an ounce of seized cannabis, with the sheriff ordered to comply or face contempt of court, and he was known for stunts that provoked police, including smoking a joint on a patrol car and attempting a marijuana giveaway on the county courthouse steps, according to FOX40's reporting.
Investigators from the Humboldt County Sheriff's Office and the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office continue to jointly treat the case as an active cold-case homicide, tracked under case number 2003-05305 in Humboldt County and 03-3247 in Mendocino County, according to the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office. The California Department of Justice also maintains an active missing person profile for Chris, noting he was last seen wearing reddish-orange Carhartt pants and a Hawaiian print shirt and that he had previously used the alias James Anthony Beam.
Chris's case sits within a broader pattern of unresolved disappearances across the Emerald Triangle — the Northern California region spanning Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity counties known for its dense concentration of cannabis-producing land. The area has also seen the unsolved 2005 disappearance of Thomas Thurston and the 2018 disappearance of Khadijah Britton, cases where remote terrain and distrust of law enforcement have long complicated investigations, according to a regional report shared on Facebook.
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