I am a new user here, but have been laserdisc collecting lightly since 2014. I've been a lurker on this forum for over a year just learning information and studying the format and all that, and have come across this thread several times and never bothered to pay any attention to it. Tonight I got curious as I seen how many pages long this topic was, and read through some parts of it and skimmed through most of it, and I noticed you guys were just chasing ghosts and names to dead ends. I was amazed that people from as far away as Australia have relied on his services and never got their player back after paying $500+ for shipping alone. I had the same thing happen to me with a personal friend I trusted and knew for 6 years. I sent my laptop to him after it got damaged and he said he could fix it and restore my lost data. Well weeks turned to months turned to 2 years that he strung me along on lies before he had had it with me and told me the truth out of anger with me and said he threw it to the recycler and that its gone, a $2,000 laptop and 8 years of my stuff just gone (it had HDD failure that was repairable with a 50/50 chance of success). He blocked me on gmail, deleted me off Skype, and made threats to me. I haven't spoken to him since last year so I just have moved on in my life. Well I'm rambling now but long story short I know how it feels to be ripped off by a person or a friend over services rendered and I thought I could help you guys out in some way.
Now I did not hire anyone to get the following information or pay out any money at all or do anything like that or anything illegal. This was done just by Google searching alone on public websites and following a digital paper trail of names and addresses and looking at different online directory websites. Please double check this information before using it, because it may not be correct, but based on all the information provided in this HUGE topic by you guys, a lot of the information I have seen here matches up. I did my own back-checking on each thing I found, so I'm confident this is the correct info, but again I'm just a 3rd party and a random guy and am not personally involved in this giant debacle or had any Laserdisc player serviced by him (I have my Pioneer CLV-2400 owned for 3 years and has never broken down).
First thing to tackle, is the house at 14930 Frenchie Ln. That home is listed as belonging to a Mary E. Berard (53) . She formerly had a PO box before moving to that address, how recent this was done is unknown. It would have been done sometime after 2003 because there is a zoning document here
http://www.co.thurston.wa.us/WL-DSPUBLI ... 165&dbid=0 that shows when the previous homeowners filed to have the road renamed and their house listed on that road. There is absolutely no records of a Duncan A. Hunter living at that address at all. It may just be a family member, coworker, girlfriend, or someone he knows from his business that lives there. I am pretty sure that he listed this address as just a decoy. I know if I was trying to hide from people I ripped off, I wouldn't want to make it easy for them to come to my residence and start beating up my door and harassing me.
According to this website here:
http://washington.intercreditreport.com ... -601023235 Bayview Electronics is still active and in business since 1987, as well as another business called "Nostalgia Corner" set up in 2010 which I cannot find any records for ever existing. It may not exist at a physical address (or he runs it from his home now) but it is still active and has not been filed for bankruptcy.
Through some additional Google searching for his name based in the cities he has done business in, I have found that he still lives in Olympia where his electronics store used to be. There is a Duncan A. Hunter that is listed as living at 7511 Mirimichi Dr. See here:
https://goo.gl/maps/dJJVZ1i5Qen It is listed as having a 3 car garage, but the driveway is only 2 cars wide. I think he listed the outbuilding behind the house as a garage and that's why it's listed as such.
I also found that from 1992(possibly 1987)-2006 Bayview Electronics was listed at 805 College St. SE Ste A (also Ste B too at one time), Lacey, WA, 98503 (this location is now a rare coins shop owned by unrelated people).
This website shows his current address and telephone:
https://www.beenverified.com/people/duncan-a-hunter/And another Yelp page with the same telephone number:
https://www.yelp.com/biz/hunter-d-olympiaNow I am not going to side with him or defend him or anything like that, but what could have happened was he got too swamped with repairs and was taking on more work than he could handle at his age and likely couldn't get all the parts or do the repair for the price quoted without eating money from his own pocket or raising the price after it was already invoiced (bad idea). Some of the models you guys lost are practically one of a kind or PAL models, not easy to source parts and sometimes it might have to be jury-rigged or modified to work again. I know this because I have one of the earliest and possibly first JVC U-Matic VCR models, and it took me several weeks and following a daisy chain of references from all these VCR repair businesses before I finally found a guy in some backwater town in the west that had a belt kit I needed to fix mine. The catch? The kit was so rare and so little needed that nobody has ever mass produced the belts other than a few people that did small batches. This attributes to a $65 price tag on those belts! (which look like car fan belts btw)
So anyways, Duncan has his business ethics and he has his pride and he likely didn't want to disappoint his customers by saying "sorry I cannot do this repair" and didn't have the money to mail all those players back out of his own pocket, but at the same time he might have been afraid of the backlash and bad reviews driving his business into the ground and just chose to hide away and hope it would all disappear. It doesn't necessarily mean he is a bad man, he could very well be one for all we know, but there certainly has been a severe lack of communication on his part.
But the one perplexing thing here is, if he really was conning people and waiting for it to blow over to strip them down and build a repair parts inventory to sell later on for his nest egg, why are they still in the same condition as they were shipped to him in, and why does he still spend all the effort moving several hundred lbs of these essentially junk obsolete video players from location to location that he leaves in damp non climate controlled environments to rust and mold, when he could sell them all at the scrapyard? It's just odd he still has them intact and in his possession like he's going to repair them, but yet he hasn't.
There has been one recent yelp review in 2016 by one person that shows that he fixed their player and got it mailed back in like new condition.
https://nz.yelp.com/biz/bayview-electro ... =date_desc This is the same Jennifer listed in Grasshopper's post here:
http://forum.lddb.com/viewtopic.php?p=67723#p67723 Whether this was a personal friend of his or a fake review, is unconfirmed.
So anyway that's all I came up with in an hour and a half search, not looking for anything, and am not here to draw attention, just wanted to offer my help. I don't know if the addresses should be listed here in my post but I seen you guys have already done it and went to these houses and all that so I guess it doesn't matter. Hope it works out for you guys.
PS: To all the people griping and making snarky comments about who would bother to send in so-and-so -model player, you need to understand that the important thing is to keep all Laserdisc players working no matter what. There are more laserdisc players out there than your $800 model and there are people like me who have no use for and do not want a fancy model that will break down every year. My player is an industrial Pioneer unit I got for $40 and it's never broken in the 3 years I've had it. It's the only one that survived USPS shipping from Oregon to where I live in the Midwest unscathed. Also there are people that don't have throwaway money and actually fix things rather than buying a new one, in addition to you not knowing if it has sentimental value if it was what they used as a kid or it belonged to a deceased family member or was an inheritance. Where I live you cannot find Laserdiscs or Laserdisc players anywhere. And I've been to yard sales, pawn shops with bars on the windows, thrift stores, and etc. So fixing those players is the only option they have if they cannot access eBay.