Crime Junkie - MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF: Lynn Messer

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

In 2014 Lynn Messer went missing from her 260-acre farm in the middle of the night. When he remains are found on the far two years later, despite a thorough search, her family and investigators are left wondering if this was a terrible accident or foul play. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/mysterious-death-lynn-messer/   

Hi crime junkies, I'm your host Ashley flowers, and I'm Brett and before we jump into today's case I want to remind all of our junkies old and new that you can always get extra Crimejunkie episodes on Patreon those are cases that we have never covered in our main feed and a lot of people don't realize this But when you sign up you don't just get the episodes that were released that month You get all of the episodes that we've been releasing since we started in July. So yeah, how many is that now? It's like 23 episodes as of you know February 2019 So if you remember that feeling when you found a crime junkie and you binged all of it in like a week You can do that again for five dollars and it's a literally a no-brainer

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Let me give you your regular crime junkie fix right now when I tell you about the mysterious death of Lynn Messer At the time of our story in July of 2014 Lynn lived on a 260 acre farm in Missouri with her husband Carrie She and Carrie worked the farm with their two adult sons Aaron and Abram. Oh, those are really biblical names Well, they were a very religious family You see Carrie not only worked the farm But he was a lobbyist on behalf of the Missouri family network and so he was like very right very religious and would push causes

Related to anything involving family homeschooling right to life gun safety Christian biblical values like all of that stuff So they had like old-school Christian values like wives obey your husbands and listen like not knocking any faith like Brett you and I grew up in a church that we are no longer a part of but Really familiar. Yeah. Yeah, not not so much anymore But I totally support people having faith in God But what I don't support which I think we see a lot of in this Story is this idea of the perfect family. I think it creates a really unrealistic expectation for people And no matter what your faith were all human

but Carrie really believed in the idea of the perfect Christian family and it's gonna come into play later now though Carrie was probably the most invested in maintaining the look of that perfect Christian family He certainly was not the only one of faith Lynn herself was very invested in the church And one of the things that she was most passionate about was teaching a vacation Bible school class for young kids and actually on July 7th Lynn had even went to Walmart to buy a bunch of art supplies for her Bible class the next day on the 8th But Lynn would never be able to teach that class in the early morning hours of the 8th at like 4 a.m Carrie is startled awake from a thunderstorm and when his eyes are open and he's really alert He realizes that Lynn isn't in bed with him anymore, but she had been in bed with him earlier that night

So he lays awake for a while thinking maybe she just went downstairs to grab a drink or maybe she went to the bathroom Or maybe she went on a really long walk Lynn was known to do that if she couldn't sleep or if she was stressed or sad And she had a lot on her mind that July just four months earlier Her dad had passed away, and then she had found out she had a condition that caused her severe hip pain And this condition would make it difficult for her to keep up her busy life on the farm that she loved so much So a little time goes by but after Carrie is laying there for a while He realizes he isn't hearing anything not Lynn rustling around the kitchen not the flush of a toilet So he decides to go looking for her and he searches each room of their house, but she's nowhere to be found

He isn't worried right away. They had actually been having problems with their septic system So he thought maybe she'd gone outside and tried to use the bathroom in their barn So he goes out to look for her there and when he goes outside He realizes that one of the family vehicles is gone and this is what sparks concern in him Carrie decides he needs to go check with his son Abram and his wife Elizabeth. They lived on a house on the farm and Maybe for some unknown reason she went there It's now 4 15 in the morning and Abram and Elizabeth are woken up to pounding at their door Carrie had tried to push open the door

But he was surprised by a chain latch that he didn't know they had installed So Carrie starts pounding on the door over and over calling out his name Abram Abram and as Abram remembers it His dad was just going crazy trying to wake him up and Abram and Elizabeth are like freaking out is our house on fire What is happening? So Abram runs to the door and he finds his father there shirtless and scared behind him is his car still running with the headlights on Immediately when he unlocks the chain and opens the door all the way his dad asked that that four-wheeler over there Did you bring that up here and Abrams totally caught off guard? Like why is his dad at his door at 4 15 in the morning yelling about some four-wheeler and he's like yeah

Yeah, I brought it here after work the other day like that's what I rode home So in the midst of all this confusion Carrie just looks at his son and says I don't know where your mother is and then he leaves and Abram is left in this kind of weird whirlwind like what just happened But he isn't freaking out like his dad as he's recounting this story to his wife back inside He comes to kind of a similar conclusion that Carrie had come to earlier like oh I bet mom just went to find a better bathroom because of the septic problems They were having apparently they also had like an apartment on their property and Abram without skipping a beat is like I bet she went there. Maybe she fell asleep or maybe she got confused about where she was

What does that mean got confused as to where she was I grew up on a farm a pretty big one and We always knew where we were right so this actually stuck out to me as well And when he is asked about this later He said that his mom had just never been good with directions which like listen. Hi. That's me I don't even leave my house without turning on Google Maps, but hey like this is your property a really big property I'll give you that but she's lived there all of her life and Kind of like you said, but you're like my phone a friend friend with a giant farm like yeah, I mean the farm I grew up on is about 250 acres now and

My mom is very terrible with directions and we have a ton of outbuildings there What did property and I I would trust her to know where she was at any given time. Yeah So I think we all agree. It's strange that it seemed normal for her to just get lost on her property What's stranger is that Abram uses an example to like back up this story And he recalls one time from his childhood when he was like 10 or 11 he said that he woke up and he woke up to his mother crying and They go downstairs to find that she's crying in the dining room because she said she got lost and like disoriented and couldn't find Her way back to her room like from her dining room

So though it's not noted anywhere in anything. I've ever read about Lynn I think there could have been something bigger at play here along the lines of maybe Alzheimer's or dementia But it's just so striking to me that she would have had this one incident when they were so young and then no other symptoms throughout Her life other than oh, she kind of gets confused Yeah, that seems really bizarre But even you know with this confusion like none of this is odd enough to make Abram worry a ton So he ends up going back to bed assuming that she's gonna be found by his dad that night. She's probably just confused He's gonna find her, you know, you always assume that like nothing bad's gonna happen to you or your family

so the next morning Abram wakes up assuming everything's fine and this could be seen as strange but I've said this before like I just did like It's very natural to believe that some bad things don't happen and they happen to other people So and there's gonna be a logical explanation for this, right? So he just starts going to work and it's not until his brother Aaron arrives on the farm with his kids That the first signs of panic begin to swell up when Aaron arrives He sees his dad riding on the four-wheeler down this hill of their farm towards him and as their dad approaches Aaron He asks Aaron what his plan for the day is and Aaron tells him, you know, I'm you know, gonna work the stairs I've got some side work in this town just one town over so mom's gonna watch the kids for me

And that's when Carrie casually just mentions like well I can't find your mother and she left a note that has me concerned and wait a note exactly and this is the first we're hearing of a note and when Aaron hears this He gets immediately concerned because he has this thought what if Lynn might have killed herself and The note kind of plays into that. It has a very apologetic tone and the first lines of the note read I'm sorry Pa to put you through this I love you with all my heart and then it goes on but they've never released the full thing Now at this point Aaron starts to panic like have you checked the house?

Have you checked the barn and Carrie says he's been looking for her since four in the morning But says listen, I'll keep looking. Why don't you just take your kids home? Before he can even ask more questions of his dad like Carrie just rides off on the four-wheeler But Aaron was not gonna leave he searched Everywhere like basements addicts like even worst-case scenario. He was looking in the trunks of cars He looked in that apartment in the loft He even opened like grain barrels in the barn and checked there looking for his mother Aaron started to drive back eventually to his house when he couldn't find her but as he's driving

He begins to think and he decides that this is crazy If his dad has been looking since four in the morning and he's not able to find her they need help So he calls 911 from his house The operator said that she was going to have an officer call him back But Aaron doesn't have a home phone and his cell phone reception is pretty spotty So he gives the dispatcher his parents home phone on the farm But when he hangs up he realizes like shoot I don't know if dad is even gonna be back at the house

So he calls Abram who's been working on the farm who lives on the farm and Asked him to be there to answer the call But when he talks to his brother for the first time that morning he grows even more concerned So when Aaron calls Abram, he's like where are you at and Abram tells him listen I'm working on the farm and dad has me moving like all of the steers to a new pasture right now They needed to be moved and this was normally Lynn's job But Carrie insisted that morning that that be done He gave Abram that job and Aaron says well

Do you know what's going on like has dad called the police yet? And at this point Abram still didn't know that anything really serious was happening and Aaron asks Well, did dad tell you about the note and he's like what note? This was the first time he was hearing about any note if he would have known about that note Like earlier that morning when his dad came pounding at his door He would have been way more worried about his mom that could have changed everything for him Both men decide to go to the main farmhouse and wait for the police But their dad met them at the house before the sheriff did and when he found out that they called the police

He was furious They said you could almost see like the steam coming out of his ears and as the sheriff pulled up into the driveway Both Carrie's sons looked at him differently Wondering if he was telling them the whole truth When a sheriff's deputy arrived on scene the whole thing hit them wrong as well They lived in a town of like 18,000 people people don't just go missing in the middle of the night So when the sheriff learns about this apology note He starts to ask some probing questions. Did Lynn at any point in her life suffer from depression?

Immediately Carrie jumps in no never Okay, was Lynn ever on any antidepressants? Absolutely not and And Carrie's saying all this but Abram is stunned to hear his dad say all this because he knew As did the rest of the family as did anyone who was close with Lynn that Lynn had been on antidepressants for over a decade And at this point Abrams wife jumps in and says Abram. Did you tell them what happened in the barn? Abram proceeds to tell the sheriff about an incident that happened six months earlier Where Lynn had taken a gun into the barn and contemplated suicide She didn't end up going through with it and was able to fight another day

But both Abram and his wife thought it was important that the sheriff have a complete realistic picture of Lynn But right away Carrie flies off the handle that never happened stop making things up But Abrams wife Elizabeth would not back down She says stop yelling at me that did happen and I know it happened because she told me right away Carrie just like backs off and says well, I didn't know you knew about that and Abram is shocked his dad is so caught up in this charade of having a perfect family That would he really risk hindering the investigation Was it just that he didn't want people to know his wife had depression or was there something more sinister at play and to me

I'm not even sure one is worse than the other for like him to be ashamed of Lynn for being depressed or for Medicating to help is really gross to me like newsflash for everyone. There is no perfect family We are all wonderfully imperfect depression anxiety and like that's what's real and not to get like on a preachy side tangent about mental health But I just feel like it's an important issue No one talks about their depression because they feel very alone in it But it's so so much more common Regular and real than any fake picture of a perfect family that people want to put on totally But I do have to say I

I and I think you would agree like the the environment that you and I were raised in really echoes His sentiments and his actions in my opinion. Oh 100% like again I cannot like stress enough that we are no longer like in this weird culti church that we grew up in But that's exactly how we grew up like you weren't depressed because god loved you and you shouldn't be sad and You know mom and dad are perfect and nobody has any flaws And that has nothing to do with religion and like god makes everybody Exactly how they're supposed to be like whatever god you want to believe in I mean again

I feel like we're getting like weirdly preachy, but Well, I mean you you know me and you know how severe my anxiety can be sometimes And I didn't even realize that that's what it was till I was like a very grown adult Right because I mean it's something that like we weren't even allowed to talk about so I feel like we have a really good understanding of of the family that they were growing up in and though it's insane and I hate every bit of it like not like our Families are I want to point that out too. Yeah, I know we can't say it enough like no longer. Is this the case? But I I understand the mentality and like almost like the brainwashing that goes into like wanting this kind of family So off my soapbox all we know is that Carrie is covering up

Something whether that's him being ashamed of Lynn or Something more sinister and it's too soon for the sheriff to tell either way and the only way they're gonna know for sure Is if they find Lynn so they start searching They search the fields they search the woods they bring in dogs highway patrol They like grid off the whole property and have hundreds of people walking straight lines searching inch by inch The more they look the less probable the idea of suicide becomes you can't kill yourself and then hide your own body They would have found her by now or at least that's the thinking but they haven't found her now That's not to say that there were no leads because when they brought in the dogs

They were able to pick up Lynn's scent before they lost it It led the dogs directly to a pasture The same pasture that Abram had moved all of the cows to that very morning So police want to talk to Abram In fact, they want to talk to all of Lynn's family members So they were all brought in for questioning and the first thing they really want to drill in on Why did you move your entire herd of steer to that other pasture? What are you hiding and Abram says over and over listen?

I did it because that's what my dad told me to do and they probe him more and more like oh You didn't think it was weird like that's not normally your job Your mother is missing and he says no it it wasn't strange at the time when my dad asked me to do something Like you just do it. You don't ask questions. Well and like Again coming from my experience like just because the person who usually does it isn't there doesn't mean it doesn't still need to be done On a farm exactly, but it still seems fishy to investigators So that's when they tell Abram what they know. They say you moved the cattle Right to where your mother's centrail ended now police are thinking Abram looks fishy, but Abram is thinking oh my god

My dad told me to do that. What is he hiding? They keep grilling Abram for nine straight hours They learned that not only did he move the steer but a week before Lin went missing They had a huge blow-up argument where he even screamed at his mother But Abram Swears they had made amends just days after and he would never do anything to hurt his mother. He loved her After those nine hours, they don't get anything incriminating from Abram So they move on to questioning Aaron and Kerry. They drill in to Kerry about the cattle rotation as well

Why did you tell your son to move them on that morning of all days when your wife is missing? And Kerry says well Lin told me they were overdue for moving and Brent like I assume you have to do it It's like the grass is green like lay some farm knowledge on us Yeah, so assuming you have multiple pastors You want to move your herd from pasture to pasture so that they don't deplete the resource in one and also keep the others Kind of at bay. Okay, but like could it wait a day if if someone was missing can it wait a day? I would say yes, but I also don't know the soil conditions or the pasture conditions I'm gonna nerd out really quick. So please stop me. Yeah, I'm gonna stop you so and that's kind of like what Kerry is saying

He's like listen the farm still has to be maintained whether she's missing or not This is our livelihood So while the sheriff is interrogating the men the surge continues at the farmhouse and they find something odd in the bathroom They find several bottles of bleach like on the main floor in one bathroom And when they confront Kerry with this he says oh well that's just because we make our own bleach to save money and And apparently they were pretty big penny pinchers. So this wasn't anything that police really latched on to and personally I think that sounds crazy. So let me phone my farm friend again, Brett. Do you make your own bleach?

I don't even know How that would happen exactly I would say we use a lot of we would use some bleach on the farms occasionally to disinfect things But but that you would buy bleach is not that expensive like right like it's it's not like a really big ticket item so police aren't super concerned about this though like for whatever reason another strange thing the sheriff noticed is that the bed of Kerry's truck looked freshly washed and he says it's because he just washed their dog in the bed of his truck which like Again, who does seems inconvenient? I mean just yeah wash them on the ground like you're outside But police tested the bed of the truck they couldn't find any blood It's just another suspicious looking dead end and there are more and more of those really the only lead

They seemingly had to go off of was that note that Lynn had left But the more her family looked at that note The more they wondered was it really her who wrote it? The more Abram and Aaron looked at that note something felt really off. It seemed like their mother's handwriting But what was it about it that felt so different? It was the type of writing. Yes, that was it Almost always any time Lynn left a note it was in cursive Like here, but I am gonna send you a note that Lynn had recently left her daughter-in-law

Oh Yeah, that's that's really cursive. That's all cursive actually. Yeah, and it doesn't look anything like The I'm sorry. No, I guess that's what we're gonna call it that she supposedly left the day that she went missing Yeah, you send me a picture of that note too, and it's almost block letters Yeah, and the one that that we're comparing it to the one that she left her daughter-in-law This is how most of her handwriting looked. So why choose to write in block letters now? And it's because it's got you know, it's not even like you can't read the cursive She has very nice penmanship and there was something else

Something that actually Lynn's granddaughter was the first to notice Her granddaughter said grandma didn't write like that and when Aaron asked his daughter what she meant She said well grandma didn't call grandpa Pa Because if you remember in that note it read I'm sorry Pa to put you through this well her granddaughter even knew like she called him pop and Her grandpa would get actually really frustrated and he would correct her because he wanted to be called Pa But she called him pop

Everything seemed off, but no one can pinpoint what exactly happened or why? I mean if Lynn did something to herself. Where is she if Carrie did something to her? What was the motive will months go by? Eventually official searches are called off and only family and friends are left searching Then seven months after Lynn's disappearance. Carrie drops a bombshell on the family He has a girlfriend named Spring and Spring had been a family friend for over 20 years When Abrams wife Elizabeth hears about this She immediately recalls a weird conversation. She had with Lynn before she went missing

They were riding in the car one day and Lynn tells her you know if something happens to me I want Carrie to Mary spring and Elizabeth still to this day regrets not probing more. She didn't say if I die if If something happens to me, oh my god, what did she think was gonna happen to her? Both Lynn's sons find the relationship Incredibly suspicious Carrie insists that it started after Lynn's disappearance, but they wonder did it really just come out of nowhere and there's some Strangeness around spring as well conflicting stories about when the last time Lynn and Carrie actually saw her

Carrie said it had been months, but people who are close to Lynn knew that she'd gone to see spring in the week or so Before she disappeared Could spring be at the center of what happened to Lynn or is this just a crazy red herring? both spring and Carrie stopped cooperating with the investigation eventually and 2015 went by with no answers then most of 2016 until One day Aaron is walking their property looking for a good hunting spot and something on the ground catches his eye It was bones now in all of the searches for his mother

They had come across so many bones. It always ended up being animal, but this This was distinctly human It was a skull and Aaron knew because it was laying on its side and he could tell by looking at the teeth and He knew right away that he'd found his mother Aaron made his second call to 911 and they dispatched a team to check it out a Complete human skeleton was recovered from the area that area by the way Was directly below the pasture where the cows had been moved to the exact pasture that the dogs had tracked to Okay, so this is clearly foul play, right? Well, there is a reason I didn't call this episode murder

I called it mysterious death of because After testing was done on the remains. It was determined that it was in fact Lynn and she had in fact been there the full two Years she had likely been dead since the time she was missing but but Her body had never been buried So from the testing they were done. It had just been laying there the whole time Which again, this is where I'm like phoning my farm friend. I find this incredibly

Hard to believe but like all of the investigators say it was there the whole time Her family says it was there the whole time But in my mind if dogs led to that pasture And even if the cows were put there to like throw off their sentry because obviously they did get confused They kind of lost it But to me that's a perfect place to start when you talk about like doing grid searches I don't understand how she could be laying there in the open for two years And nobody finds her

I was thinking the exact same thing. How many cases have we covered where there are people like arm in arm Going across acres and acres of land just looking for anything a scrap of clothing hair Bones anything and finding things. How did this go unnoticed? How did this just appear like this? Oh, yeah, again I this is what baffles me more than anything and I don't see you know There's been a lot of interviews from her sons Aaron and Abram and I don't see any speculation from them at least that I've been able to find Um where they you know postulate that maybe she was moved after the searches

I if it were somewhere else on the farm again 260 acres that's a lot of land But for it to be near the exact area that everyone was so suspicious about and to not be found again So hard for me to wrap my brain around so After all the testing is done her cause of death is ruled undetermined They did run toxicology on strands of hair that they found with the remains But even those are inconclusive

Abram and Aaron are still convinced that their father isn't being honest I don't think they're a hundred percent convinced that he hurt Lynn but I think they believe that If she did take her own life or if her death was the result of her mental illness somehow in some way That he's covering that up because he thinks it makes him look bad so She either took her own life And for some reason went to that area and she was left there and somehow no one found her

Or it's possible that she had gotten confused, you know, there were actually stories people had told of her Every once in a while mixing up the drugs that she was supposed to take she had pain medication for her For her hip disorder. She had some other stuff and you know one time she got in a car accident. So Maybe she'd mixed something up or again, maybe there's bigger mental health issues at play I keep going back to that story of her getting lost in her own dining room Or there's a third option Maybe she was murdered and I will say The investigators who are looking at this case

For them to keep it open and rule it undetermined There's a quote. Let me just read it from one of the investigators. It's a quote There may be stuff that we're currently looking at that we can't talk about because it is an active investigation Our hope and our dream is to be able to determine what caused Lynn's death and to be able to give them some closure on that end quote, so I think the police have some suspicions about what might have happened and hopefully they're able to prove it one day If you guys want to see the side-by-side notes give us your opinion if you think she wrote it or not You can go to instagram at crimejunkie podcast or our website crimejunkiepodcast.com

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