Missing man doesn't want to be found

On April 3, 2002, Claude Van Tassel took his wife, Beatrice, shopping. They browsed the aisles at an Ames store in Dover, N.H., 25 miles from their home in Lyman, Maine. Van Tassel told his wife of 33 years he was going for a cup of coffee.

Then he vanished.

Police searched the shopping center, then the woods nearby, then called in bloodhounds and a helicopter. But there were no signs of the stout, balding 65-year-old with faded blue jeans and beige jacket.

Last week, out of the blue, the FBI called his family. Van Tassel was alive, he was healthy, he was living in Allentown, Pa. But, no, he did not want them to call or come see him. The 71-year-old father of 12 requested that his family not be given his phone number or his exact address, the FBI said.

Now, the family is trying to come to grips with the reappearance of a family patriarch that is as mysterious as his disappearance five years ago.

"They won't tell us nothing," Tim Pryor, 20, one of 17 grandchildren, said yesterday. "All we want is proof he's alive -- call, speak to us -- and me, I'd like to see him in person and ask him why he left -- but that's between him and us and the rest of the family that are here."

He added, "The only thing I heard is he has a new job, a new lifestyle."

Authorities say they must respect Van Tassel's wishes.

Detective Sergeant Jeff Mutter of the Dover Police Department , which led the search for Van Tassel, said the department considers the case closed.

"If it was under suspicious circumstances, we would have sent a detective down there to talk to him, but that isn't the case," Mutter said yesterday. "He did not want to be contacted by any family. He went on his own volition and decided to relocate and probably start a new life."

In his old life, Van Tassel was a well-known auctioneer. He hawked toy trains, binoculars, lanterns, and fishing rods from an old barn in Standish, Maine. A 1998 story in the Portland Press Herald, before his disappearance, noted his spitfire voice -- "I've got 50. Who'll go 60?" -- and his penchant for folksy humor: "C'mon folks," he would cajole buyers, "this would go for $400 in New York."

"He's a very nice guy," Pryor said. "Anybody who's seen him, done business with him, knows he was a good man. He was a loving guy to be around."

He was also, perhaps, troubled. In 2001, before his most recent disappearance, he went missing for two months. On that occasion, he also told his wife he was going for a cup of coffee. But then he took his pickup truck and drove off. He was spotted at a casino in Connecticut, before slipping away from authorities. Police eventually found his truck in Ohio and then found him, living in a homeless shelter in Iowa.

A break in his second disappearance came recently, when Van Tassel submitted a rental application in Allentown, and a credit check showed his name on a database of missing persons. An FBI agent visited, verified it was him, and contacted the family.

Beatrice Van Tassel, now 68, is bewildered.

"We were very close, and we did everything together, every day," she told Foster's Daily Democrat, which first reported Van Tassel's reappearance. "I don't know what to think. I still feel something happened to him. Why would he be in Pennsylvania and not call us? I mean that's not that far away."

Michael Levenson can be reached at mlevenson@globe.com.