Ex-Navy Petty Officer Robert Nydegger Charged in 22-Year-Old Cold Case

Navy corpsman Crispino Buzon was supposed to fly to the Philippines to get his wife. He never showed.

​Navy corpsman Crispino Buzon, 25, was supposed to get on a plane at Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino on April 25, 1987 to fly to the Philippines to pick up his wife. When he failed to shop up in the Philippines, he was reported missing.

A few weeks after his disappearance, a bag containing Buzon's clothing, military identification and other belongings was found in a reservoir near Victorville. By then a full-blown missing person's investigation was underway, and it hadn't taken long for detectives to determine that the reservoir was near a home that Buzon's supervisor, Petty Officer First Class Robert Nydegger, 40, had rented for his wife...

Petty Officer Robert Nydegger was later convicted of killing his own roommate and stuffing him in a refrigerator

​Investigators determined that Buzon was last seen the evening before his scheduled trip. He had told family and friends that he was planning to have dinner with Nydegger, who had convinced the young corpsman that he had special connections that would make it easier for Buzon to get his wife into the U.S.

The cost for his special connections was $3,000, which Buzon borrowed from his grandfather and likely paid to Nydegger the night he disappeared. "It was clear that he was with Mr. Nydegger, that was his plans," prosecutor Robert Amador said.

Although there was little doubt that Buzon was dead and that Nydegger had killed him after taking the money, a lack of evidence and the fact that Buzon's body had not been found hindered the prosecution and the case eventually went cold.

The following year, Nydegger was under police scrutiny again, but for another murder. It was 1988, and Nydegger's roommate, Timothy Cudd, 39, had inexplicably vanished. Chillingly reminiscent of Buzon's disappearance, investigators determined that Nydegger was not going to slip through the cracks again. Nydegger and Cudd were renting a house together in San Diego, and having a house to search for clues meant more potential for finding the evidence they needed to build a strong case against their suspect.

As luck would have it, Nydegger had either neglected to dispose of Cudd's body or hadn't had time to get rid of it before the cops were onto him -- it was found stuffed inside a refrigerator in the backyard of their rental house, according to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). An autopsy and toxicology tests determined that Cudd had been poisoned, and investigators put together a case which showed that Nydegger had killed Cudd so that he could collect Cudd's money to pay off his own debts.

Convicted of murder in 1991, Nydegger was sentenced to a life term at Solano State Prison. Meanwhile, investigators with the National City Police Department, San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, NCIS, and the San Diego County District Attorney's Office reopened the Buzon case in 2005. At that time they used corpse-sniffing dogs to search the home that Nydegger had rented for his wife near Victorville, to no avail. Authorities also asked the public for help in solving the case, but it now seemed unsolvable.

Then, on May 14, 2008, the cops got the big break when skeletal remains were unearthed in a remote area of Johnson Valley. It took awhile, but when the remains were identified as those of Crispino Buzon, Nydegger, now 62, was charged last month with first-degree murder under special circumstance allegations of being previously convicted of murder and murder during a robbery.

"We've really been looking at this case and the final piece of the puzzle was finding the body of Crispino Buzon," Amador said. Nydegger has pleaded not guilty to the charges. If convicted, he faces another life prison sentence or the death penalty.

"I'm really glad that we're at this stage," Buzon's brother said after Nydegger's arraignment, which he attended. "I never thought it would come to here where I can see some closure to everything that's happened. I just wish the rest of my family were here, especially my parents, who were torn by this when Cris vanished over 20 years ago."