Wife Fears Missing Wisconsin Man Has Amnesia

April 3, 2007 — -- Nearly everyone who knows Keith Gores is baffled. They say he's smart, successful, driven and a devoted husband. At 56, he is head of an investment bank and still runs marathons.

But the Wisconsin man has been missing for nearly two weeks.

"People with his personality and his character traits just don't disappear," said his wife, Sara Gores.

Sara said that the last time she saw her husband, he was late for work and seemed confused.

"He thought it was Saturday and it was Thursday," she said. "And he said, 'Are you sure it's Thursday?' I said, 'Yeah, I'm positive it's Thursday.'"

Keith never made it to work that day. Police say he was seen asking for directions to the health club he'd been a member of for 20 years.

He failed to recognize a friend in the gym parking lot, and was last spotted at a local marina, where investigators found his car.

Police say they don't suspect any foul play.

"There's no indication of any kind of criminal involvement at this time," said Brian Kaebisch, chief of the St. Francis Police Department in Wisconsin.

One possible theory is that Keith suffered a head injury weeks earlier, when he fell while walking his dog.

Friend Bill Florescu saw him the next day.

"I could tell he had banged himself up," Florescu said.

Keith was also under tremendous pressure at work. Days after he hit his head, seven of his employees at a Milwaukee bank quit to form a rival company.

"He was very stressed out, more than I've seen him," Sara said.

And his behavior seemed to grow more and more bizarre. The day before he disappeared, surveillance cameras outside the bank captured him pacing in the lobby for an hour.

Sara believes her husband may have a form of amnesia, a rare but real condition doctors call dissociative fugue.

"If this is a dissociative fugue state, then stress is probably the cause at some level," said Orrin Devinsky, a professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University.