Retired Calif. Couple Vanishes

Tom Hawks, 57, and his wife Jackie, 47, had been enjoying an ideal retirement, living on their 55-foot cabin cruiser along the Southern California coast while keeping in close touch with friends and family on shore and making occasional trips to Mexico.

Now they have vanished under mysterious circumstances and police are trying to determine if the cabin cruiser, which the couple quickly sold last month after listing it for $400,000, is a crime scene.

"We're treating it as suspicious and we're very concerned about it," said Sgt. Steve Shulman of the Newport Beach Police Department. "The longer we go without any contact with the family, the more concerned everybody gets."

Investigators are holding the boat - which is moored in Newport Harbor - as evidence, though they have not yet established that there has been a crime, Shulman said.

Authorities have provided little information about the person who bought the vessel after taking a test cruise with the couple in mid-November, just before they disappeared.

In an appearance Monday on CBS News' Early Show, Shulman said the buyer told police he paid cash for the boat. He also noted the many of the buyer's claims could only be corroborated by the missing couple.

"We don't have the crime yet, so it's difficult to say anybody is a suspect," Shulman said.

Ryan Hawks, one of the couple's two sons, described the buyer as a wealthy young man, but investigators have asked him not to disclose what else he had learned.

"It's not good things," he said.

Ryan Hawks said on the Early Show that family members became deeply concerned about the couple's whereabouts on Thanksgiving.

"We thought maybe they did sell the boat and take a little get-away. But we know if we didn't hear from them on Thanksgiving, that something was wrong and that's when we got real suspicious," he said.

The couple bought the cabin cruiser after Tom Hawks retired from his job as a probation officer. They have been married for 17 years.

"The sea was calling us and we couldn't wait any longer," he told the yachting magazine Latitudes & Attitudes, which profiled the couple. "Life is just too short to put things off."

The cabin cruiser, named the "Well Deserved," turned out to be a lot of work for two people. They decided to sell it to buy a smaller vessel and a home near San Carlos, Mexico, relatively close to Arizona, where they still own investment property and have friends and family, Ryan Hawks said.

They put the boat on the market in October and told people they had found a good prospect the next month. Tom Hawks made plans with a friend to help move his fishing, scuba and windsurfing gear just before Thanksgiving, his son said.

But Tom never showed up to meet the friend, and the couple couldn't be reached on their two cell phones or satellite e-mail system.

Days went by and no one heard from them. Tom's brother, former Carlsbad police chief Jim Hawks, checked the boat, noticed their personal belongings were still on board and other items were out of place, and filed a missing persons report.

Ryan Hawks said it would be totally out of character for the couple to leave their belongings and disappear without talking to anyone in the family.

Before they vanished, they had been checking every other day with the couple's other son, a 26-year-old Phoenix firefighter, to hear about their first grandson.

"They couldn't get enough of that kid," said Ryan Hawks, 28, an account manager for a medical systems company, in San Diego. "We're very worried, very skeptical and very concerned."

Investigators are also suspicious, noting that the couple had not used their credit or bank cards since they disappeared. Their car, a 1998 silver Honda CRV with Arizona license plates, is also missing.

Newport Beach police have made the case a priority, Shulman said.

"This is not normal behavior from what is normally a very responsible couple," he said.