Missing or Murdered in Missouri: Unsolved and Solved Cases: Unsolved and Solved Cases

By Barbara Kemm-Highton

Like most other states, Missouri has a growing list of cold cases. Three women vanish from a home in Springfield in 1992 on high school graduation night. A young woman is abducted in Ava and murdered after mowing a church cemetery. A 9 year-old disappears and her body is found in 1975. A nurse and her children are killed in their home in a quiet new subdivision, and two mothers have vanished without a trace. An elderly woman who has been featured on the album cover of a popular band is murdered in her Aldrich home.

Just as solved cold cases have become popularized in a variety of television documentaries, Missouri cases are also becoming closed. DNA has been the smoking gun in one 25 year-old homicide and has sent a prominent businessman to prison. People are talking and in the case of a 15 year-old murdered in 1982, there have been convictions. Surveillance tapes and cell phones have been added to the arsenal of evidence. Files are being revised and the media is featuring their stories again.

These are some of the victims cases and their families who press on and the organizations, detectives, and experts who support them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465346230

Barbara Kemm-Highton

Barbara Kemm-Highton is a semi-retired teacher and this is her second true crime book. She has also written for The Forensics Examiner. At the request of families and friends, this anthology has been a tribute to the cold cases in and around the author’s home town of Springfield.

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Copyright © 2011 by Barbara Kemm-Highton.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011913777

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4653-4622-3

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4653-4621-6

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4653-4623-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

Unsolved

Hot or Cold

Story 1 ChristeneNickle Seal

Story 2 Angela Hammond

Story 3 Herbert Butch Masters

Story 4 Kelle Ann Workman

Story 5 Stacy McCall

Story 6 Shirley Jane Rose

Story 7 Lydia Bonham

Story 8 Carol Horton Blades

Story 9 The Feeney Family

A stacked deck Other homicides

Those Still Missing

Balancing the Scale

Arrests / Convictions

Story 1 Baby Lloyd Keet

Story 2 Johnny Kemm

Story 3 Jackie Johns

Story 4 Tammy Smith

Story 5 Rene Marie Williams

Story 6 Kelsey Smith

Story 7 Judy Spencer

In Memoriam

Hope

Other convictions or arrests

Crime is Personal

The Price of Innocence Lost

Relationship Murders

Headliners and Others

Searching For Evil/Why People Kill

Theologians, psychiatrists, criminologists and others weigh in.

Psychic Investigation

The Other Detectives

One Missing Link, Inc.

Saving Lives

For Gary, Craig, Grant, Emalye, Mark and Addison

For my family on the Other Side and my divine guides

Cover photographer, Danny Gilmartin, lost his beautiful 19 year-old daughter, Kathleen, in a tragic accident.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My heart-felt thanks to the families and friends of any victim in this book. Without your memories, scrapbooks, lunches, personal visits, phone calls, email contacts and positive support, none of this could have happened.

To any family that I missed that personal contact with, I hope that I have honored and respected your loss.

To author Lois Duncan, my personal thanks for your help along the way and for sharing your daughter’s story with all of us.

Thanks to all the professionals, Dr. Robi Ludwig, Marilee Strong, Dr. Roger Depue, Dr. Martin Blinder, Shirley MacLaine and Judy Price who graciously responded by email or phone to wish me success in this project or loaned me the benefit of their expertise.

The Springfield News-Leader newspaper, archives, online information, and all of the Springfield, Missouri television stations, online news sources in the state of Missouri, all of the national news sources, and many forensics documentaries were invaluable to this project.

Special thanks to the Clinton Police Department, the Missouri Highway patrol, the Greene County Archives, and the staff of the Greene County libraries.

And a final thanks to my publisher for the opportunity to honor these victims.

FOREWORD

The call from the emergency room of the University of New Mexico Hospital came just before midnight. The woman who called said our daughter, Kaitlyn Arquette, was there and had been injured, but would give out no further information over the telephone.

Kait’s father and I threw on our clothes and drove at break-neck speed to the hospital. The nurse who had called us was standing in wait in the doorway of the emergency room, and I knew that it had to be bad when she took me in her arms.

You’re sure it’s Kait? I whispered. There’s no chance it’s a mistake?

It’s Kait, the woman said. There was a picture ID in her wallet. She’s alive, but in critical condition. You need to prepare yourself for the fact that you may lose her.

A car wreck? I couldn’t conceive of any other possibility.

Your daughter’s been shot in the head, the nurse said quietly.

After twenty hours in a coma, Kait was pronounced brain dead. Her organs were harvested for transplant, and she was taken off life support.

She was eighteen years old and had just graduated from high school.

She had dreams of becoming a doctor.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The scene above is excerpted from the first chapter of Who Killed My Daughter?, a book I wrote to prevent the facts of Kait’s story from becoming buried when police dropped off her unsolved murder, shrugging it off as a random drive-by shooting despite overwhelming evidence that indicated otherwise. Through her boyfriend, with whom she was breaking up, Kait had learned about organized criminal activities that appear to have been protected by certain police officers.

That was our family’s introduction to a world of violence, corruption and cover-up that we’d never imagined existed except on television. It also brought us in contact with a number of people whom we otherwise never would have known. We—the families of murdered or missing loved ones—think of ourselves as The Club That Nobody Ever Expects To Join. The dues are high. The pain of belonging is excruciating. The fury and frustration that mount with each passing year as the cases that absorb every ounce of our beings are labeled cold and casually discarded by law enforcement are unbearable. Without closure, there is literally no chance for healing. It’s been over twenty years since Kait was murdered, and I still am jolted awake in the night by the sound of shots—(witnesses reported hearing four of them, although no bullets were found—not even the two in her head)—and my child screaming, Mother, help me! as I know in my heart she must have in those final moments when she looked at her killers and saw the upraised guns.

When Who Killed My Daughter? was published, I was sent on a national book tour, and our mail box was suddenly flooded with letters from hundreds of families in situations that mirrored ours. Exhausted from pounding their fists against an impenetrable Blue Wall; drained of their own retirement funds and/or their surviving children’s college funds by the cost of private investigation, which turned up information that police would not look at; physically and emotionally depleted, they were desperately reaching out for any help available.

We couldn’t bring them justice. We couldn’t do that for our own child! But the two things we did have to offer were the fact that I was a professional writer with 50 books to my credit and Kait’s father had technical abilities. So, with the help of a friend, Tom Arriola, we created the Real Crimes Web site at http://www.realcrimes.com to help keep those stories alive. We confine the cases we post to those that appear to involve malfeasance or misfeasance. I read the police reports and interview the families, helping them word their stories as concisely as possible. My husband links their allegations to documentation such as autopsy reports, excerpts from police reports, and scene photos. Over time, our Real Crimes site has become a respected resource for investigative reporters and true crime shows. When the media contacts us, we place them in touch with the families and hope that something will come of it.

For us, this is a way to give Kait’s short life meaning.

In Missing or Murdered in Missouri: Unsolved and Solved Cases, author Barbara Highton seeks to accomplish that same goal. If her book succeeds in getting even one of these heartbreaking cases solved or, at the very least, adequately investigated, it will have been worth all the time and effort she has invested in research and writing.

I wish her success in this endeavor.

And I send my love and sympathy to the desperate families in Missouri whose plights she describes in her book.

Lois Duncan (Arquette)

PREFACE

When I began researching for my first book, A Body on The Farm: The Disappearance and Murder of Carol Blades, I became haunted by this young woman’s cold case. Prior to my involvement in this mystery, I would pass over the newspaper articles about homicides, telling myself that the negativity was unhealthy and affected my belief in the innate goodness of man. I found myself deeply disturbed by the fate of these victims and often changed the channel when there was another missing mother, college student, or child being profiled on the national news or on Nancy Grace. But all of this avoidance was about to change for me.

These abductions and murders were happening in my own backyard.

I grew up in the heart of the Ozarks on a gently rolling plateau that attracts lakefront retirement communities. The weather is mostly ideal. The landscape is lush with wild strawberries, wild walnuts and acorns, and an assortment of colorful indigenous flowers. The forests are shaded by oak-hickory and juniper, and the lakes and rivers are covered with boaters, campers, canoeists, and kayakers. Hiking trails and greenways abound, and in the past few years tourism has ramped up in nearby Branson. We are neighbors to large cities with both eastern and western influence a few hours north, Kansas City and St. Louis. It is considered a great place to raise a family and it is.

But there is also an impressive list of unsolved murders and missing persons and not all the cases are hillbilly shoot-outs as the Show Me State is sometimes portrayed. There are banker’s and teacher’s wives dying mysteriously. There have been brutal family murders and drug executions, far too many domestic violence deaths, and the statistics of abused or murdered children is alarming. Meth has now become the drug of choice in the foothills, and where this menacing drug goes, so does the violence. The dichotomy is the breathtaking scenery of Missouri as a backdrop for many of these crimes.

Missouri is, of course, not unique. Most of the natives of any state or even any country are proud of their homeland, but ashamed of the criminal underbelly.

The following stories are a random collection of unsolved and solved cases of missing or murdered adults and children, and there are many more. Some of the rumors that bounce around are addressed in these cases and will be designated as rumors only and are not intended as accusations or defamations of character. The families are very aware that some of them are unfounded. Real names will not be used unless they have already been exposed in public documents. When family members or the police make a request for someone to remain anonymous this will be honored, and if any of my sources have provided me with erroneous information, I will apologize in advance. It is not the intention of this anthology to traumatize any family whether it is a victim’s or an alleged suspect’s.

I have visited with most of the parents or siblings of the victims, and what I have learned from them is that goodness always wins. I have been humbled by their dignity and their capacity to forgive. Kicking that door open again has renewed a lot of their pain, but they are able to live their lives with humor, courage and determination. And though their loved one is never far from their thoughts, many of them have not let this loss overshadow their daily lives, or define how they have raised their remaining children. But, several parents have shared that when no one is talking about their case, they believe these victims have been forgotten.

I am also in awe of the police forces, many strapped for finances and facing manpower and budget cuts, who have continued to follow the leads for the families of the missing or murdered. A few detectives have shared their own frustrations in this pursuit, but many cases are becoming shelved and inactive. As the years roll into each other and nothing new trickles in, it would be nice to know that a group of retired law enforcement veterans in boots and cowboy hats will swoop in and pull down the files, blow off the dust, and find that one clue that changes everything. At least that is what happens on television. There are mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters waiting for these heroes called cold case detectives, and there is a need for more of them.

Many of the following families have survived one of the greatest human tragedies on earth; the decision of another human being to kill. Others have remained in a torturous limbo.

We owe it to them never to forget what happened.

No one knows the lowly depths of grief until you’ve lost someone you’ve laughed and cried with and shared memories of past times.

The heart becomes fragile, the body trembles and all other things become insignificant.

The great question of why enters your thoughts.

God puts his hand on your shoulder and feels your pain and you are not alone.

Normally shared events become empty. There is a hole in the world.

Although we live on through this monstrous and terrible loss, life becomes a treasure, time together, a precious commodity, and smiles come to our hearts as remembrances of better times come to mind.

All will continue to go on, though diminished, and the great tragedy becomes part of what we are.

With Love,

Doug Hasch

(Brother and uncle of the murdered Feeney family)

Unsolved

 Hot or Cold

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Story 1

ChristeneNickle Seal

Many United States servicemen during World War II met their wives in the villages that were trapped between the loyalties of the allies’ and axis’ powers in the European conflict. Some of these women were anxious to leave the decimated homelands they could barely recognize.

Doyle Nickle from Butterfield, a tiny village a few miles from Cassville, was sent across the ocean as a Master Sergeant in the Army. He was a second generation military man—the son of a disabled WWI veteran, and he began his own Army career in the tumultuous collection of countries, Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic.

According to the historical information on this region, the Czech Lands, where Trudy Verderber was born in Muglitz in 1928, was a selected target of Hitlerism. About one third of the area had been ethnic German and they were expelled, assumed to be Nazi collaborators, and ended up in Western Germany. Trudy was sent to Vienna to live with her aunt and when she tried to return to her home was treated as a displaced person. She soon found that she had no home at all since her mother, Steffi, had lost everything they had once owned, and her father had passed away when she was only 14. She would remain in Vienna with relatives and meet her future husband, an American.

This tall, attractive, Austrian brunette was standing