The memory of Angela Hammond is often running in the background of Echo Divers founder James Hinkle’s mind as he combs through historical maps and runs drone flights for real estate agents.
Hinkle was 17 when Hammond went missing during an abruptly cut-off pay phone call to her fiancé near Clinton, Missouri’s downtown square. Though Hinkle was younger than the 20-year-old Hammond and didn’t really know her, everybody knew everybody in a small town like Clinton, he said.
Her kidnapping in 1991 stunned the entire town. The square — formerly a lively spot where teenagers hung out — became empty. Volunteer search parties became the town priority.
“It was just like overnight the entire life changed,” he recalled recently.
Hinkle knows firsthand how it affects people when someone goes missing and isn’t found.
“That case is why I search today,” he said.
So in an indirect way, Angela Hammond is the reason Hinkle and fellow Clinton firefighter Jordon Smith ended up at a Leawood neighborhood retention pond on September 12, calling Leawood police with the first solid evidence in a decade of a missing persons case.
Leawood man went missing in 2016
Jay Flekier and his car were reported missing on the day of Flekier’s mother’s funeral on June 7, 2016, according to a database of the National Institute of Justice. Flekier, 59, was reported to have been driving a black Cadillac.
Hinkle, meanwhile, had built a list of missing person cases he felt his volunteer diving outfit could be helpful on. He looks for cases close to Clinton in an area with bodies of shallow water that could be scouted with the drones and sonar equipment he uses.
The Flekier case was on that list.
There’s a procedure Hinkle generally uses in his searches. First, he checks whatever he can on the last known location of the missing person and anything about the way the person went missing.
He then makes use of online mapping sites that provide many layers of detail. In Flekier’s case, the Johnson County Geographic Information System was also useful for its historical mapping.
That’s how he started trying to find Flekier. Hinkle said he searched all the possible target search sites of about 16 ponds close to where Flekier was last known to be a decade ago.
After a painstaking search, he finally got a break.
A 2022 map showed an image of a retention pond in winter, when the water was mostly clear. Hinkle said he noticed an anomalous square shape in the water.
He thought it could be remnants of a fountain, but on further examination, the dimensions matched the Cadillac he’d been searching for.
It was time to break out the search equipment. After contacting the homeowners association, which he said was helpful and supportive, Hinkle, his Echo Divers partner Smith and Smith’s father, Chris Smith of Shawnee, drove to the 14700 block of Norwood Street and unloaded the kayak, he said.
Upon reaching the anomaly, sonar showed it was likely a car.
Matching the license plate number
The water was too murky for Hinkle to read the license tag during his dive, so he removed the plate and brought it to the surface.
It matched the license plate number of the car Flekier had been reported driving when he disappeared in 2016.
At that point, Echo Divers contacted law enforcement to continue the investigation, rather than risk disturbing evidence by checking for human remains, Hinkle said.
Leawood Police later confirmed that the car belonged to Flekier.
It was removed from the pond with the help of an Overland Park Police dive team, according to Leawood Police’s Facebook post. Skeletal remains were found in the car, and the process of identification is ongoing, a Leawood Police spokesperson said.
“It’s a passion of mine”
Learning to be a searcher has been a gradual process for Hinkle.
He says that as a licensed drone operator in Missouri, he would often be hired by real estate agents to take pictures of land and property. As he did, he started thinking about how water becomes clearer in winter, making it easier to see beneath the surface.
So he started checking ponds around Clinton. Then he bought sonar equipment and a kayak and trained himself on them.
In 2021, he came across a missing person case in Camdenton, Missouri, that involved a veteran. Hinkle’s step-grandfather was at Pearl Harbor, and his own son is now in the U.S. Marine Reserves.
“I’ve got a soft spot for the military and police,” he said.
In 2023, Hinkle found the remains of that missing veteran, Donnie Erwin, 59, who had been missing for 10 years. Those remains were also discovered in a submerged car.
Hinkle, a part-time Clinton firefighter, works on search cases as often as his time allows. Usually he’s on his own, he says, but he will sometimes find someone like full-time firefighter Smith to come along.
He chooses his cases based on how close they are to Clinton and whether it’s likely they involve water. Hinkle said he doesn’t usually get assigned cases by law enforcement, but sometimes families find him.
He is also a volunteer drone operator for Osage Beach Search and Rescue and a scuba diver for Lee’s Summit Underwater Rescue.
His operation is self-funded, he said.
“The majority of it is out of my own pocket. I buy the equipment. I save up and budget what I can,” he said.
He uploads videos to his YouTube channel and occasionally gets a payment. It’s “enough money to fill my gas tank,” he said.
Once in a while, someone sends a private donation.
“Am I making money at this? No. Will I ever make money at this? Probably not. But the satisfaction of helping families find their loved ones, it’s a passion of mine,” Hinkle says.
So he keeps a lookout over the cold ponds for the missing. Maybe one day he’ll come across some clue to what happened to Angela Hammond.
“Whenever I go and run sonar, especially in our local area close to where I live, there’s a part of me that always hopes to find a two-toned green and white Ford pickup with a fish emblem on the back,” he said, noting the description of the vehicle seen near where Hammond disappeared.
He thought he was close one time when he saw an old Ford pickup out in a field.
“My heart started beating,” he said. But it turned out to be the wrong make and year.
The search goes on.
