About 20 years ago, a mummified body was found about 6 miles from where we live. My daughter worked at the hospital at the time, and the x-ray tech told her it was the most bizarre thing he ever had to do. She was 15 years old, and finally tracked down by a very persistant investigator, Mike Sheeley. He was married to one of my best friends, and he couldn't let it rest when they classified it as a cold case. He got permission to reopen it, and he found her parents in Texas. She was a runaway, had left with a teenage boy, who was never found. Her murdered was a truck driver, there is a book out about it, called . . .Roadside Killer maybe. I have a copy, but its so horrible I could only read it once. He is in prison now, arrested him in Arizona where he had an apt. and a wife and was living like an every day Joe. He strangled her with wire he took off the fence where he stopped the truck on I-70, as he took her over the fence to the old barn. If the owner of the barn hadn't sold the land, and went to check to see if there was anything of his grandpa's he wanted to keep, she would have never been found, and if Mike hadn't insisted on looking, because "some parent somewhere is missing their little girl", she would have never been found for a long time. He solved another case in Litchfield, Il. where a headless body was found. Cops wanted to close it also, but he wouldn't let it rest. Ran it through the Missouri data base, as African American, as he had tried everything else (she was set on fire, burned beyond recognition as well, but were ablet to get some prints. Teens were partying in the park and saw the fire and found her!) and sure enough, she had been a state worker and her prints were on file. Her husband did it, told people he had killed her and cut her head off, and put it in a bucket of concrete and threw it in the mississippi river. Couldn't prosecute, as they had no real proof, but at least her family got to have closure. I think he did get charged with something, but not murder. It scared people in both counties for a long time. Things like the girl in the barn just doesn't happen where we live.
