More than a year after Tyler Goodrich stormed out of his Nebraska home following an argument with his husband, he has been found dead, according to his family and authorities.
Goodrich’s remains were found in a wooded area by a man walking his dog less than 1,000 yards from his home, Chief Deputy Ben Houchin with the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office confirmed on Monday.
Houchin said the area was searched in the first couple weeks that Goodrich was missing. He also said the body had been in that same location for over a year.
Goodrich was 35 years old when he vanished on November 3, 2023, from the Lincoln, Nebraska home he shared with his husband Marshall Vogel and their two sons.
Officials are treating the death as suspicious, but Houchin emphasized that preliminary results from their investigation have led them to believe this is not a homicide. The manner of death is still unclear, but an autopsy will be conducted Monday.
“No words will ease the grief of the loss of this for the family,” Houchin said. “I’m glad they get some closure. It was obvious that he was very loved and cared for.”
Goodrich’s family, who had been maintaining a “Let’s Find Tyler Goodrich” Facebook page, posted the heartbreaking update on Saturday, confirming that the body found was him.
“It’s Tyler. It’s Tyler. It’s Tyler,” his father Lonnie Goodrich told KETV. “They were all his tattoos. Hair color was the same. It’s Tyler. He has been found.”
“For sixteen and a half months I’ve prayed every night,” he added.
“I stood at my door, asking him to come up the driveway. I prayed that we would get information and, at least today, we got that one piece.”
The night Tyler Goodrich disappeared
Massive searches were conducted for Goodrich, but there were very few leads in the investigation, except for video footage from the night he went missing.
As previously reported by The Independent, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office released grainy home security video that shows a figure running from the house minutes before deputies responded to Vogel’s 911 call.
Goodrich’s husband, along with some of his family and friends spoke to Dateline NBC’s Josh Mankiewicz for episode three of the podcast series Dateline: Missing in America.
“This is a case that has really baffled investigators,” Mankiewicz previously told The Independent. “But it has also just fuelled a storm of rumors and theories among online armchair detectives.”
Many of those center around the last person to see Goodrich – his husband – who asked for a divorce the same night Goodrich disappeared.
“Tyler is very driven, I always admired that,” Vogel says about his husband. “We evened each other out.”
But things were not as they seemed, he said. The pair had been married for six and a half years and the relationship was breaking down.
“From the outside looking in, we were the perfect family,” he says. “But behind closed doors, some of the communication barriers or how we interacted with each other was hard to do. The big thing was how we parented our kids.”
That night, Tyler, who worked for the Nebraska Department of Corrections, picked up a pizza for dinner for the family after working in Omaha. But the fun family movie night took a turn when the couple began talking about their relationship.
“Things were tough. We both knew that we loved each other very much. It was just maybe our marriage wasn’t supposed to be forever,” he told Dateline.
There had been an ongoing discussion about divorce, something Vogel wanted but Tyler did not. That night, things got heated.
“He pushed me,” Vogel says. “Tyler pushed me in the face and the chest. It didn’t hurt, but it still happened, so I called 911.”
While he was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, Tyler left through the garage. Deputies arrived at the house just 10 minutes later but Tyler was gone. His car was still in the garage.
Vogel tells Dateline he figured Tyler would not come back with the deputies around, but even so, Vogel did not want to be there when his husband returned so he took the kids and went to a relative’s house.
Later that night, Vogel went back to the house to pick up his son’s laptop. But there was no sign he had been there. On Saturday morning, Vogel returned to the house to feed the pets. Again, there was no indication that Goodrich had been home.
“Now I’m worried,” Vogel recalls as he broke down in tears.
After checking in with their friends, Vogel filed a missing persons report.
By Sunday, Goodrich’s friends and family grew even more worried after the avid runner never showed up for a half-marathon that day.
Investigators say his phone went off the grid after he went missing and there had not been any activity on his credit cards or bank account.
