UT Austin student has been missing since 1976
AUSTIN, Texas - This week marks 48 years since a UT Austin student disappeared.
Amanda Vargo Wattecamps has made it her mission to find out what happened to her uncle, then 20-year-old Brian Vargo, a UT student from Houston. March 9, 1976, was his last known contact.
Wattecamps never met her uncle, but she was always a source of questions growing up, seeing him in pictures.
"Who's that?" she recalls wondering. "I would usually get, 'that's Uncle Brian', you know, but then the elbow of, 'we'll talk about it later.'"
Vargo was an engineering major. During the spring semester of his second year at UT, he withdrew from class. He then said he was going to Colorado for spring break to possibly to work on a dude ranch.
"We've never heard from anybody. It'd be cool to know if he was supposed to go work on some dude ranch, and there was somebody waiting for him and expecting him to show up, and he never showed up," Wattecamps said.
He had car trouble, and supposedly left the car at a mechanic in Colorado and went back to Houston to try to find the title to sell it. It's not clear if he ever found it. The car was a Mazda with Texas plate AEG-81.
His mother dropped him off at a bus stop in Katy, and he was never seen again.
"I don't know if he got on the bus," Wattecamps said.
Later, the mechanic contacted Vargo's father and said he wanted to get rid of the vehicle because Vargo had returned, and it had been broken into.
It's not clear if he went back to Austin. He'd left all of his belongings there, including his wallet.
"Spring break ends. Classes resume. He doesn't come back," Wattecamps said.
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His roommates at an apartment in the Town Lake area called his parents.
Brian's mother passed away last year. She may have filed a missing person report with Houston police, but when Wattecamps checked, they said they didn't have anything. A report was filed with Austin police in 2021. The department says there have been no leads.
Wattecamps continues to collect records from her uncle's life, and she's looking for people from that time to talk to, so she can continue piecing things together.
"Having two boys and imagining that happening to me, I would want somebody to help. Anybody who knew anything, I would want them to speak up," she said.
Wattecamps has a Facebook page raising awareness about his case.