From 2016
Cover-up, confession and what remains of Lena Chapin
(Click on image to enlarge. Everyone mentiond in this case is pictured here)
Albert was Lena Chapin’s stepfather from 1992 to 1996 before his wife Sandy left him for his brother, Gary.
“I loved those girls like they were my own,” Albert says. “Growing up, Lena was always loyal to Sandy, and Sandy rewarded her for that.
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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.
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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.
“She (Sandy) was crying and all she wanted to say was ‘I can’t believe this happened, I can’t believe this happened,’” Lena said in the recording. “And that’s all she’d say, the whole time when she was freaking out and telling me she was bawling and saying, ‘I can’t believe this happened.’ And I asked her, I’m like, ‘I want to see.’ I didn’t believe it. You know when you think to yourself, okay there’s a dead person in your house, you know, you’re not thinking, okay, come on now, whatever, it’s just like, I want to see. She wouldn’t let me see. She had her door locked. I said ‘I wanna see. I wanna see it right now.’ I know if I had’a seen the whole thing, I woulda flipped out. I woulda flipped out. But there was a crack in the door and I looked and I saw it and I completely went crazy. I started spazzing out on her and I went ‘What the hell happened, what happened,’ you know.”
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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Lena’s older sister, Brandi Petersen, remembers being skeptical of the Florida story from the first time she heard it.
“There’s no way Lena would have left Colter behind,” Petersen says. “Lena loved Colter more than anything. There is scrapbook after scrapbook which proves it. She also wouldn’t have given mom the satisfaction of getting Colter. Mom and Lena were always fighting over him. Mom would go to Country Mart (in Salem) and show him off and say he was hers, and Lena would be like, stop saying that mom, he’s mine. One time Lena and I were going to take Colter to see his father in Arkansas, and mom called us flipping out saying ‘You bring him home, you bring him home right now or I am going to kill myself.’”
Petersen further says that Sandy and Lena were feuding over legal guardianship over Colter, which Chapin would not concede. Throughout this time, Petersen says Sandy also insisted Colter call her “mom,” much to Lena’s frustration.
Cover-up, confession and what remains of Lena Chapin
