MO MO - Gary McCullough, 34, Barry County, 11 May 1999

LadyL said:

intersting comment at that link about another family member named Rocky Allen in Arkansas who was apparently also murdered ...

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Seven years before Lena Chapin’s disappearance, her then stepfather Gary McCullough went missing from his ranch outside Cassville in Barry County. Gary had married Lena’s mother, Sandy, a few years prior.

“We first heard Gary was missing when a couple deputies went to respond to a cattle call,” says Barry County Sheriff Mick Epperly. “A couple of cows got loose out where the McCullough family lived. While the two deputies were there, his wife Sandy came up and said, ‘Well, I guess while you’re here I should go ahead and report Gary missing.”

Epperly says Sandy told law enforcement at the time that Gary left home two days earlier on May 11, 1999, to go buy a fighting rooster from a Mexican in the nearby town of Diamond, but never came back.

“The further we got into that, the more we didn’t believe it,” Epperly says. “I think that was a made up story.”

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On a summer night in June 2003, Gary McCullough’s brother, Albert, says Lena Chapin arrived at his home outside of Carr Lane just south of Table Rock Lake. He had not seen Lena since she was a preteen, but now 17, Lena was grown, and under incredible stress.

That night Chapin told Albert she knew the truth of what happened to his brother four years previous, on May 11, 1999, when Lena was 13. Knowing the significance of the conversation, Albert recorded it without Lena’s knowledge, and today a copy still exists at the Barry County Sheriff’s Office, according to sheriff Mick Epperly.

“I asked her straight out, Lena I want to know who killed my brother,” Albert says. “Her answer was one word, ‘mom.’”

An official transcript of the tape obtained from the Barry County Sheriff’s Office by The Salem News confirms Albert’s claim.

Albert: “Well who… who killed Gary?”

Lena: “Mom.”

On tape, Chapin claims she and her sisters arrived home from school May 11, 1999, to find their mother waiting for them at the bus stop. Lena says Sandy sent her sisters to do chores at the family’s barn and brought her inside where Gary’s body was sprawled out on a bedroom floor.

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Lena told Albert she believed Sandy shot Gary while he sat on their living room couch eating a plate of scrambled eggs. Lena went on to say she then helped her mother methodically clean up the murder scene over the course of two days while her sisters went to school. Chapin said they pulled up carpets, bleached the floors and that Gary’s body was burned on top of a brush pile.

School records obtained by law enforcement indicate Chapin was not in school May 12 and left school early on May 13, Epperly confirms.

“If you want something of Gary’s to stick in the ground there is nothing left,” Chapin was recorded to have said. “He was burned, completely burned and everything. Everything that was, you know, left at the burn pile was put in buckets and spread all over. So I don’t remember where they’re at… I was there, I am the only one that knows. I am the only one that knows exactly what happened, but there is nothing left… there is nothing left. I burned my fingers… I burned a few of my fingers picking up ashes and bones.”

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At some point in the relationship, Sandy began an affair with Kristopher Klemp, who was nearly a decade younger than herself.

Tensions continued to escalate in the home, with Sandy's children resentful of being made to work the farm and Sandy allegedly plotting to kill Gary.

"Gary found out Sandy was not making the house payments and they were on the brink of losing the house," Martin said. "Gary had also caught her in a parked pickup truck with Klemp, and was planning to divorce her. He started moving things out of the house and told his supervisor at George's not to give her his paycheck, because even if she had a note, it would be forged.

"We found out by talking to her co-workers that she had been planning on killing Gary for about six months before he went missing. She talked about various ways to dispose of the body. When a co-worker told her to just divorce him, she said Sandy's response was 'she wasn't going to give him a dime.' She planned this for a long time."

That plan allegedly came to violent fruition May 11, 1999, when, according to investigator's notes, Sandy is believed to have shot Gary three times in the head as he sat on the couch eating scrambled eggs.

"She met the kids at the door when they got home from school and sent the younger ones out to do chores," Martin said. "She had Lena come in and help dispose of the body."

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It was in June of 2006 that April Chandler and Joy McCullough, Gary McCullough's children from a previous marriage, filed a civil lawsuit against Sandy and Kris Klemp and Lena Chapin, alleging Sandy and Kris "knowingly took the life of their father," and named Lena as a co-conspirator.

On July 25, 2013, a Stone County jury took less than an hour to determine that Sandy and Kris Klemp knowingly took the life of Gary McCullough. The plaintiffs were awarded $7 million in damages due to the outrageous nature of the crime.

The McCullough family is offering a reward for information leading to the arrest for the murder of Gary McCullough.

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Luckyzmom said:

Welcome to WS Lester Moran. Do you have any updates on this case ? Did you know Gary and family ?
I have checked local media a few times and haven't been able to find anything that would help us in Gary's murder .
It's an awful gruesome crime, and involving a child is just wicked. MOO

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