Michael Taus Vanished After an Online Date — Six Days Later, His Car Was Found Running, but He and His Dog Were Gone
On June 18, 2010, 25-year-old Michael Russel Taus left his home in West Islip, New York, for what sounded like an ordinary event in the life of a young man: a date.
He had met a woman online.
Michael apparently had no reason to believe that the evening would become anything other than another first meeting with someone he had gotten to know through the internet. His family knew he was going out. His beloved pit bull, Romeo, was also associated with his disappearance.
Michael never came home.
Neither did Romeo.
Six days later, investigators found Michael's black 2004 Volkswagen Jetta roughly 30 miles from his home, in Elmont, New York.
The car was still running.
Michael was nowhere to be found.
Romeo was nowhere to be found.
Police said there was nothing about the vehicle suggesting that it had been the scene of violence.
More than sixteen years after Michael disappeared, publicly available missing-person records still offer no confirmed explanation for what happened to him.
It is a case defined not by a wealth of evidence, but by what seems to be missing from the story: a young man, his dog, and the explanation that could connect the last ordinary afternoon of his life to an abandoned running car six days later.
The Last Day
Michael Taus lived in West Islip on Long Island and was 25 years old when he disappeared.
According to reporting by CBS New York at the time, Michael's family said he had recently been using social networking and online dating services. Before disappearing, he told his family that he planned to meet a woman he had encountered online.
His father, Russel Taus, later recalled that Michael seemed happy.
There was no publicly reported indication that Michael was preparing to disappear voluntarily or cut contact with the people close to him.
In fact, the circumstances described by his family suggested something much more routine.
A young man was getting ready for a date.
His father had seen him earlier. Michael appeared upbeat. According to contemporary accounts, he was showing his father new clothes and mentioned that he was going out with a woman he had met through his computer.
It was June 18, the Friday before Father's Day.
Michael's father remembered cautioning his son about meeting someone he had first encountered online.
"He seemed happy," Russel later told CBS New York while remembering their conversation.
The concern was understandable.
By 2010, internet dating had already become common, but it still carried a sense of uncertainty for many families. Meeting someone online meant that friends and relatives might know little about the person on the other side of the screen.
Michael's mother, Barbara, later recalled that she used to joke with him about online dates, telling him that he should let her know where he was going in case someone kidnapped him.
Michael would laugh.
At the time, it was simply the kind of nervous joke a parent might make.
After June 18, it no longer felt funny.
Michael and Romeo Disappear
Michael did not return to his West Islip home.
There was no reassuring phone call.
There was no message explaining a sudden change of plans.
His family did not hear from him.
And Michael was not the only one missing.
Romeo, Michael's pit bull, had disappeared as well.
The Charley Project, which maintains detailed profiles of long-term missing-person cases and cites sources including NamUs and contemporary news reporting, states that Romeo's food and water bowls were missing too.
That detail makes the case particularly difficult to interpret.
It indicates that Michael's dog was not simply left behind at home when Michael vanished. Yet publicly available information does not establish precisely why the bowls were taken, where Michael intended to go with Romeo, or how long he expected to be away.
Those unknowns matter.
But they should remain unknowns rather than being filled with speculation.
What is documented is that Michael disappeared, Romeo disappeared with him, and the people who knew Michael considered his prolonged silence unusual.