Con man lures mother on dating app before her disappearance

In this episode of Crime Watch Daily Updates: Nancy Hartz was a 71-year-old widow living in Arizona. She turned to a dating website in hopes of meeting someone special, and she started chatting with a man named Ray Carnochan.

Nancy and Ray messaged several times per day and formed a connection, but location seemed to be an issue with her living in Arizona and Ray in Utah. One day, she emailed Ray and said she wanted to finally meet him in person.

Ray ventured to Arizona to visit her, and within a few months, he convinced her to sell her home and car and to leave with him. The two drove off into the sunset together, but Nancy and Ray would hardly live happily ever after.

Nancy’s kids became concerned after they received emails apparently from Nancy, but the wording and tone didn’t feel like their mom. They hired a private investigator, who then took his findings to the local sheriff’s department in Arizona. Then, detectives learned Ray stole someone else’s identity. That was enough to book him.

Ray was arrested April 13, 2016, in Yucca, Arizona, on fraud-related charges, but Nancy was nowhere to be seen. It turns out “Ray” was actually a man named Robert Carnochan who went by 18 different aliases.

He might have had a pattern, too. Two other elderly women were reported missing out of Las Vegas and Arizona, and they hadn’t been seen since 2011 and 2008, and he later became the main suspect in their disappearances, too.

Carnochan was found guilty of forgery, identity theft, and misconduct involving weapons in 2017 and sentenced to 16 years in prison.

But what about Nancy?

On May 1, 2019, Mohave County Sheriff’s Office detectives received a call about the discovery of skeletal remains in a remote area of the desert near Topock, Arizona. Investigators collected the remains and sent them to a lab for testing. On December 1, 2020, the remains were positively identified as Nancy Hartz. The autopsy conducted in February 2021 determined she died of gunshot wounds, and her manner of death was homicide.

The sheriff’s office had said that while Robert Carnochan was the main suspect in Nancy’s disappearance, there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him without finding her body. Unfortunately, Robert would never be indicted on charges relating to her murder.

He died in prison on September 17, 2020.

Let’s look back at the case of a woman who only wanted to find love, but who ended up with a con man who likely cheated her out of her last days.