Arkansas - Digital Publishing

The last time Jan. 28 fell on
a Monday, the chief financial
officer of one of the state’s largest
construction companies left
home early in the morning and
vanished.
Five years later, the only
person who has ever publicly
claimed knowledge of John
Glasgow’s fate is working as a
prison barber and hoping for
early release for two unrelated
felonies.
Glasgow, 45 at the time he
went missing, was CFO of CDI
Contractors LLC of Little Rock,
which was then half-owned
and is now wholly owned by
Dillard’s Inc. He was legally
declared dead almost two years
ago, and his widow hopes to
find out what happened to him
but isn’t holding her breath.
“I have just resigned myself
that I may never know. I’ve
turned it over to the universe
and moved forward,” Melinda
Glasgow said last week.
She has thrown herself into
her work for the city of Little
Rock — first as recycling coordinator
and then, after a promotion
at the end of November, as
sustainability officer — which
feels like the work she was
meant to do.
She still lives in the house
in the Hillcrest neighborhood
that she shared with John, and
she remains close to his seven
siblings.
As the initial shock of her
husband’s disappearance wore
off, Melinda Glasgow said she
tried to make the kinds of decisions
that John would have
wanted her to make.
“I didn’t want to make bad
decisions because I was dealt
this unbelievable blow,” she
said. “He was smart and practical-minded.
It would have been
easy for me to spin out of control,
so I’ve done a lot of ‘what
would John do?’”
About three and a half years
after John vanished, in mid-
2011, a twice-convicted felon
named Jonathan Brawner told
his lawyer and the Little Rock
Police Department that he knew
where Glasgow’s body was buried.
He said he had been recruit-
ed by “thugs from Malvern” to
whom he owed money to help
bury Glasgow in a bean field
near England in Lonoke County.
That development would not
become public until January
2012, when reporter Lauren
Trager with KARK-TV, Channel
4, broke the story.
Trager’s scoop was immediately
followed up by other
new organizations, including
Arkansas Business. That
renewed attention to the case
just before the fourth anniversary
was hard, Melinda Glasgow
said, “because of law enforcement
being involved and more
publicity” — but also because it
came to naught.
The bean field Brawner
pinpointed as the burial site
yielded no remains, despite
time-consuming and expensive
searches using sophisticated
imaging equipment. And
Melinda doesn’t know exactly
what to think of Brawner’s tale,
but she suspects there was some
truth in it.
“I’m not so sure he didn’t
Arkansas Business January 28, 2013 9
Glasgow’s Disappearance Still Unexplained
By Gwen Moritz
GMoritz@ABPG.com
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GLASGOW CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
Glasgow enjoyed travel, including family ski trips and visits to Scotland,
Ireland and the Galapagos Islands. [PROVIDED PHOTO]
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