Home
cover of episode Lynn Messer

Lynn Messer

2023/2/6
logo of podcast Forensic Tales

Forensic Tales

Chapters

Lynn Messer, a 52-year-old woman from Bloomsdale, Missouri, mysteriously disappeared from her family's farm in July 2014. Her husband, Kerry, woke up to find her gone, and despite an extensive search, her whereabouts remained unknown for two years.

Shownotes Transcript

Do you know what I don't miss at all? That vicious week before my period each month. If you're anything like me, that week is a complete nightmare. I'm craving the worst kind of food, like fast food and candy, and I just feel off. I don't feel like myself. But now, it's so much easier to manage my PMS with Estro Control. Happy Mammoth, the company that created Hormone Harmony, is dedicated to making women's lives easier.

And that means using only science-backed ingredients that have been proven to work for women. They make no compromise when it comes to quality. And it shows. And the biggest benefit? Feeling like myself again. That's what women mention over and over in their reviews. And there are over 17,000 reviews for Hormone Harmony.

For a limited time, you can get 15% off your entire first order at HappyMammoth.com. Just use the code TAILS at checkout. That's HappyMammoth.com and use code TAILS for 15% off today. To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales.

Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. The Messer family was a well-known, close-knit family from Bloonsdale, Missouri. The religious family owned and operated a large farm. But in July 2014, the farm became the epicenter of a massive search. One summer morning, Cary woke up and his wife was gone.

Lynn Messer mysteriously disappeared without a trace. The search for her lasted for months, until one day when her body was found in a very unlikely place. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 162, The Lynn Messer Story.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth, fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. As a thank you for supporting the show, you'll get early ad-free access to weekly episodes, shout-outs and episodes, priority on case suggestions, and access to weekly bonus episodes.

Before we get into this week's episode, we've got two new supporters that I want to thank. Thank you so much to Gary and Brian for becoming the show's newest patrons. To support Forensic Tales, please visit patreon.com slash Forensic Tales or simply click the link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive rating with a review. Now, let's get to this week's episode.

In July 2014, 52-year-old Lynn Marie Messer lived on a 260-acre farm in Missouri with her husband, Kerry Messer, and their two adult sons, Aaron and Abram. The family owned and operated a farm near Route DD and Dry Fork Road in Bloomsdale. The Messer family was a well-known, close-knit family in Bloomsdale, Missouri.

Lynn's husband, Kerry, had founded the Missouri Family Network and worked as a lobbyist at the Missouri State Capitol on behalf of several conservative organizations, including the Missouri Baptist Convention. So the family was well known in this part of Missouri for being religious and holding very conservative and right-wing values. Kerry's work as a lobbyist for several conservative organizations gave off a certain perspective about the Messers.

Throughout this part of Missouri, they were seen as a highly religious family who lived almost the perfect, wholesome American life. They owned and operated a large farm. They all went to church every Sunday morning. When the boys got older, Aaron and Abram, they stayed on the farm to help their parents run it. Carrie was the face of the Missouri Family Network.

an organization whose mission is to defend traditional families in America. And Lynn Messer taught vacation Bible school classes at the First Baptist Church in the area. Lynn and Carrie had met when they were just teenagers. They both grew up in similar families. And when Lynn turned 16, she dropped out of high school so that they could get married and start a family.

Under Missouri law, 16 and 17-year-olds are allowed to get married, but only with written consent from their parents. And in Lynn's case, both of her parents were happy to consent. Carrie had a similar family background who shared very similar views, and they had the same traditional values. So they knew that he was the one. From the outside looking in, they were the personification of this perfect traditional and conservative family.

But keeping up with an ideal family image can be exhausting. Some might even say it's impossible. And in July 2014, it all came crashing down for the Messer family. Around 4 o'clock a.m. on July 8, 2014, Carrie woke up to thunderstorm sounds. The rain and loud bangs of thunder had woken him up. But when he turned around in bed to check on his wife Lynn, he noticed she wasn't next to him.

He thought it was strange that she wasn't there because they had gone to bed together the night before. And she didn't mention anything about waking up extra early that morning. Initially, he thought maybe she had gotten out of bed to use the restroom or get a glass of water. So he laid there awake for a minute, thinking that she would return to bed any second. But several minutes went by and Lynn never came back. After a while, Carrie thought maybe his wife had gone for a walk.

Now, it sounds a little strange to go out for a walk in the middle of a thunderstorm at 4 o'clock in the morning, but he knew his wife had a lot going on, and it wasn't entirely out of character for her to go out and take long walks to clear her mind. Her dad had just recently passed away a few months earlier, and she had been recently diagnosed with a medical condition that caused severe hip pain.

The pain in her hips had gotten so bad that it made it difficult for her to get any work done on the farm. But something about this situation just didn't feel right. So after waiting in bed for several minutes, Carrie decided to get up and start looking for Lynn. He looked in every room of the house but didn't see anything. She wasn't in any of the bathrooms or the kitchen. Lynn was nowhere to be found.

So he decided to go outside and check in the barn. He knew the farm was having major issues with its septic tank system. So he thought she might have gone out to the barn to use the restroom there. But when he got to the barn, she wasn't there either. As he went from the barn back to the main house, he noticed that one of their cars was missing. It wasn't parked where it usually was.

By that point, Carrie started to panic and thought Lynn could have taken the car somewhere and was now in trouble. So he decided to go back inside the main house to see if Lynn might have taken anything with her. But she didn't. Inside the house, he found her car keys, wallet, purse, and ID. She had a broken toe at the time, so even her walking boot was still in the living room where she had left it.

So if she left, she didn't take anything with her. And if she was still on the 260-acre farm, where was she? Karen got on one of his four-wheelers and drove up to the house where his son Abram and his wife Elizabeth lived. They lived in a separate house located on the farm. He thought Lynn might have gone up to their house to use the restroom. So he headed to the front door and started pounding on it to wake Abram and Elizabeth up.

When Abram opened the door, he saw his dad standing there without a shirt on in the pouring rain. Carrie asked him about the missing car, and Abram told him he had borrowed it earlier that day after work. But Abram knew this wasn't about the car. Why would his dad come pounding on the door in the middle of the night just to ask him about a silly car? Carrie then told him that he didn't know where his mother was.

He said he woke up about an hour ago and she wasn't in bed. And he didn't know where she was. Abram's first thought was his dad's first thought. He knew about the broken septic tank, so she probably went somewhere on the property to use the restroom. There was another apartment on the farm that she could have gone to. And maybe once she got to that apartment and used the restroom, she fell asleep.

but there was something else that Abram remembered about his mom. And this particular memory was why he wasn't too concerned about finding her right away. According to Abram, when he was about 10 years old, he woke up to his mom crying in the living room. When he went over to see what was wrong, she said she was crying because she was lost and she didn't know how to get back to the bedroom. Now, even if

10 years old, he knew that this was weird. His mom was in the living room, so how did she not know how to get back to her bedroom? So this incident really stuck with Abram, even as an adult. So his first thought was that something similar had happened to his mom. She got confused and was lost on the farm somewhere. We're

Now, to be very clear though, Lynn Messer was never diagnosed with anything that would cause this type of major confusion. And according to Abram, this was an isolated incident that happened decades ago when he was 10 and it never happened again. But maybe it did happen again. So Abram and his wife Elizabeth went to bed thinking that Lynn would just show up later that morning, but she didn't.

Later that morning, Abram and Elizabeth woke up thinking everything was fine. He assumed his mom was already back in the main house with his dad, and his dad could finally stop worrying. So after he woke up, he went to work on the farm and didn't think anything about his mom until his brother Aaron showed up. When Aaron got to the farm with his kids, he was surprised to find out his mom wasn't home.

Aaron had some work to get done out of town that afternoon, and his mom was going to watch his kids. But she wasn't there when he arrived to drop them off. A few minutes later, he saw his dad riding down the hill toward him on a four-wheeler. He asked him where his mom was because she was supposed to watch the kids, and Carrie said he didn't know. She had been missing since about 4 o'clock in the morning. Carrie also said she left behind a strange note.

According to Carey, not long after he realized Lynn was missing, he found a note. Although the entire note has never been released, some of it sounded like a suicide or a goodbye letter. Part of it read, I am sorry, Pa, to put you through this. I love you with all my heart. End quote. As soon as Aaron heard this from his dad, he instantly worried his mom might have killed herself.

Because that's exactly what the letter sounded like, a suicide note. After Carrie told Aaron about the note, he told his son to take the kids and go back home. But Aaron didn't want to leave. He wanted to help look for his mom. If she had killed herself somewhere on the farm, they needed to find her. Aaron began searching everywhere on the farm. He looked in places he thought she could have gone to kill herself.

As awful as it sounds, he even opened barrels on the property to see if his mom was inside one of them. But after searching for a few hours, he decided to drive home. But on his way home, he knew something was terribly wrong, so he called 911. He told the 911 dispatchers that his mom had been missing for hours and left behind a bizarre note.

The 911 dispatchers told him they would send a police car to the farm to check things out, but he needed to stay by the phone so the officer could call him once he got there. So Aaron called his brother Abram, who lived on the property, and told him to wait by the phone so that he could talk to the police. Abram told his brother he was working on the farm and that dad had asked him to move the cows to a different pasture earlier that morning.

Now, normally that was Lynn's job on the farm. But according to Abram, his dad had asked him to move the cows that day. But why was Abram moving the cows when their mom was still missing? Couldn't that wait until they found her? That's when Aaron asked his brother if he knew what was happening. Their mom was still missing and left a bizarre note behind.

But according to Abram, he didn't know anything about the note. When his dad came knocking on the door earlier that morning, he didn't mention anything about a weird note. He only said that he couldn't find mom. Then a few hours later, he asked him to move the cows to a different field on the property. If Carrie had told him about the note, he would have been a lot more worried about his mom.

But his dad seemed to leave that detail out and had him move the cows, which was usually Lynn's job. Both Abram and Aaron decided to go to the main house and wait for the cops together. But when they got to the house, they saw their dad standing there. And he was absolutely furious when he found out that they had called the cops. A few minutes later, a patrol car pulled up to the farm. Carrie told the officers everything he knew.

The cop asked him if his wife was depressed or maybe even suicidal. But Carrie said no. He was adamant that Lynn was wonderful and happy. She had never considered suicide before. She was a devout Christian, so suicide would have gone against everything she believed in. But Lynn's sons, Abram and Aaron, seemed to have a different opinion about their mom.

According to them, Lynn was depressed, and they're not sure why their dad lied about that. She had been on antidepressants for the past 10 years. There was even an incident about six months earlier where Lynn went to the barn with a gun and contemplated shooting herself. Fortunately, she reconsidered before pulling the trigger and shot a cat instead.

But there was no question that Lynn was dealing with some very serious mental health issues before she went missing. So why did Carrie lie about that? Well, there's a lot of possible explanations. Sometimes we want to ignore certain issues in our lives. We know they're there, but we choose to ignore them or push them to the side. Maybe he knew about Lynn's depression, but decided to downplay it in front of the cops.

Or he did know the full extent of his wife's depression, but intentionally lied. Using Carrie's own words against him, Lynn and their family were extremely religious. They were the personification of a family with traditional values. And committing suicide would have gone entirely against these values.

So was it possible he lied about it because he didn't want the cops to think negatively about his wife or his family? Maybe he felt the pressure to maintain his family's perfect and conservative image in town. Or maybe he was hiding something. The sheriff's department immediately began searching around the farm for any sign of Lynn. If she had killed herself, they could easily find her body. Once she's dead, she can't hide her own body.

But we're talking about a 260-acre farm. So the detectives had a lot of land to search. But after an exhaustive search, nothing turned up. They didn't find any evidence of foul play or suicide. They didn't find anything to believe Lynn had been abducted or that she killed herself.

And if she decided to run away, she didn't bring anything with her. Her ID, wallet, and purse were all left on the farm. It was like she simply vanished from a 260-acre farm. Lynn was quickly labeled as an endangered person, meaning that dozens of investigators from local and federal agencies were called over the next few days to help with the search. She was considered quote-unquote endangered for a couple of reasons.

Number one, her history of depression and the note she left behind. But then there was the fact that at the time she went missing, she had a broken toe. And the boot she used to walk around in was left inside the house. She also didn't bring anything with her. So the police feared she might have gotten stuck somewhere and was physically unable to get back to the house.

The search for Lynn became an all-hands-on-deck type of investigation for law enforcement. Within days of her disappearance, canine search and rescue dogs were brought to the farm to see if they could pick up on her scent. Within moments of being on the property, some of the dogs traced Lynn's scent. The trail led the dogs to the cow field, but the scent was lost there.

The dogs couldn't tell in which direction she went after the cow field. This was the same cow field Carrie had his son Abram move the cows to the morning Lynn disappeared. As law enforcement continued the search on the farm, they wanted to speak with Carrie, Aaron, and Abram to learn more about what could have happened.

The first person they spoke to was Abram. They wanted to find out why he moved all of the cows to the field where the canine dogs lost Linsent on the morning she went missing. Abram told the officers that his dad had asked him to do it and he didn't think anything of it. They regularly rotated the cows to different fields on the property, so he figured it was just something that needed to be done that day.

It wasn't unusual for his dad to have him do different things around the farm. But the officers kept pushing him about this. He knew his mom was missing, so why did they move the cows and not look for Lynn instead? But Abrams stuck to his story. He said he did it because his dad told him to do it, and by that point, he didn't think his mom was missing was anything serious.

He didn't know about the note, and she had only been gone for a couple of hours. That's when the officers told him about the scent dogs. They said that when the dogs were brought to the farm, they found and traced Lynn's scent, but they lost it as soon as they got to the field where he had moved the cows.

Abram realized his dad knew much more than he was willing to tell him or the cops about Lynn's disappearance. The officers continued questioning Abram for the next nine hours, but they didn't seem to get anywhere. They still didn't know where Lynn was, and it didn't seem like Abram knew anything either. So they moved on to questioning Aaron and Carrie. When they sat down with Carrie, they also questioned him about the cows.

According to Carey, the cows were overdue for moving, so he had asked his son to do it. It was usually Lynn's job on the farm, but it needed to be done that day. He said he didn't think much about it because he thought his wife would show up any minute, and he wanted to get a head start on moving the cows that day. While the officers continued questioning him, investigators at the farm discovered some unusual things.

Number one, they found several bottles of bleach on the floor in one of the bathrooms. They thought it was suspicious to find several bottles of bleach after someone had gone missing. When the officers asked Kerry about him, he said that they made their own bleach to save a little bit of money. And that's why they were on the bathroom floor because they had just made a fresh batch.

2. The police noticed that one of the family's pickup trucks had recently been washed. According to Carey, he was the one who washed it because he used the bed of the truck to give one of the dogs a bath. The officers tested the bed of the pickup truck for any evidence, including blood, but nothing came back. They didn't find any traces of blood or anything else connected to a crime. It just seemed unusual.

Investigators continued to search for Lynn for the next four days, but nothing turned up. Local search teams, rescue dogs, highway patrol, and the FBI also joined the search. The only lead they had was the note that she left behind. So after four days of intensely searching for Lynn, the local sheriff officially called off the search. They had become convinced she wasn't on the farm.

They didn't find any evidence she was either abducted or killed on the farm, and they didn't find anything to suggest Carrie or anyone else had anything to do with her disappearance. Although all of her personal items were still on the farm, the sheriff was convinced she had left on her own. But wherever she was, she wasn't on the farm because they had searched it for four full days.

After the sheriff called off the official search, Lynn's two sons, Aaron and Abram, continued the search on their own. They enlisted the help of hundreds of local volunteers to help look for Lynn over the next 125 days. Their search expanded over 5,000 acres across this part of Missouri. They also put up hundreds of missing person posters around the area. They set up a Facebook group dedicated to the search.

But after thousands of hours of searching, they still couldn't find her. Over the next several months, Lynn's family kept going back to the notes she left. According to Aaron and Abram, something about it just seemed off. The first thing they pointed out was the handwriting. In almost every letter Lynn wrote, she wrote in cursive. But the note she left that morning was written in plain handwriting, not cursive.

So although it looked like Lynn's writing, why did she suddenly decide to write in plain writing and not cursive? Could this just be a red herring? Or was there a reason Lynn didn't write in cursive that day? About eight weeks after Lynn's disappearance, Carrie began dating a family friend, a woman named Spring Thomas. Spring had been friends with the Messer family for over 20 years and lived on a nearby farm.

This relationship came as a major shock to Lynn's sons and family. Lynn had only been missing for a couple of months, but Carrie seemed to have already moved on and was dating someone else, a friend of Lynn's. Shortly after it was announced that Carrie and Spring Thomas were dating, the family dropped a bombshell.

According to them, Lynn had made a bizarre comment sometime before her disappearance. She allegedly said something like, Not only is this a bizarre comment, but the timing is also strange.

It's not common for a wife to comment about who her husband should marry if something happens to her. And the timing is also weird. According to her family, her sons, she made this comment not long before she disappeared. So did Lynn know something was going to happen to her? And if she did, did she really want her husband to marry their friend Spring Thomas?

When the family confronted Carrie about his relationship with Spring, he insisted it started after Lynn's disappearance. He said he had never cheated on Lynn and only started dating her after believing Lynn was gone for good. It had been a couple of months of searching and he had become convinced that she was gone, that she was likely dead.

He even said he and Lynn had conversations about this when she was still alive. They both said that if something happened to one of them, they wouldn't want the other one to be alone or to be lonely. So Carrie insisted that if Lynn knew he was dating Spring, she would be okay with it.

Between 2014 and 2016, investigators continued to receive tips about possible sightings of Lynn, but none of them panned out. A tip would come in, they would investigate it, and it would turn out not to be Lynn. They were simply cases of mistaken identity.

It was also reported that between 2014 and 2016, Carey and his new girlfriend, Spring Thomas, stopped cooperating with investigators. They wanted nothing to do with the continued search for Lynn. He stopped updating the Find Lynn Messer Facebook group and appeared to have moved on with his life. The case remained that way for two years until they made a big discovery in 2016.

On November 1st, 2016, Lynn's son Aaron was on the family farm looking for a good hunting spot. He was about a mile away from the main house when he saw something on the ground that caught his attention. Bones. Initially, he thought the bones were animals. He was on the part of the farm that he and his brother would usually go hunting, so it wasn't unusual to find animal remains out there.

but there was something different about these bones. They looked human. Aaron immediately called 911, and when investigators arrived, they instantly recognized the remains as human. It was an almost perfectly intact human skull with the teeth still present. Additional investigators were brought in, and they searched the surrounding area where they recovered several other human remains. They also found Lynn's eyeglasses.

The remains were sent to the lab for testing and identification. Through a forensic dental examination, they identified the remains as belonging to Lynn Messer. After two long years, they had finally found her. Her remains were discovered on the farm directly below the field where the cows were moved to the day she disappeared.

Dr. Mary Case, the chief medical examiner in charge of examining Lynn's remains, was able to determine some critical forensic details about the case. The first was that Lynn had been lying where she was discovered for the last two years. In other words, the medical examiner doesn't believe her body was ever moved. Despite the thousands of hours spent searching on the farm for her, she was there the entire time.

She also didn't find any evidence suggesting she was ever buried. Instead, her body was likely lying in plain sight the entire time. The medical examiner also tested a few strands of Lynn's hair found near the remains. A toxicology report was done on the hair, but the results were inconclusive. The testing didn't reveal anything else about how she died or anything unusual in her system.

Despite all of the forensic testing, Dr. Mary Case couldn't determine one key detail, how Lynn died. After a complete autopsy and forensic examination, she couldn't figure out exactly what her cause of death was. She also couldn't say whether her death was a suicide, accident, or something else.

Almost all of her body had decomposed when her remains were discovered. They were only skeletal remains. So the medical examiner had no way of determining what her cause or manner of death was. She could only conclude that her body had been there from the time she disappeared until the time she was discovered. But if that's true, how did they miss her?

Lynn's body was found on the family farm directly below the field where her son moved the cows to the day she went missing. The local sheriff, volunteers, rescue dogs, and the FBI searched the farm for four straight days, but they couldn't find her. Her body wasn't buried. She was lying in plain sight. So, again, how did they miss her?

One likely explanation is the cows. When the investigators brought scent dogs to the farm, they immediately found her scent. They were able to track her scent all the way to the field, but lost it after that. So one theory is that by moving the cows, the cows masked Lynn's scent, and that's why the dogs lost it.

It also means that valuable forensic evidence connected to Lynn's death might also have been destroyed. So the question becomes, why were the cows moved that morning? According to Abram, his father, Cary, insisted that the cows be moved. Rotating cows from pasture to pasture was always Lynn's responsibility. But on that particular morning, Cary was adamant the cows had to be moved regardless of where Lynn was.

Even if she was still missing, the farm still had to operate. Another explanation is they simply missed her. Although hundreds of people searched the farm during the two years before her body was discovered, no one found her. So this could have simply been an area of the farm that wasn't searched or it wasn't searched closely enough and it was merely a mistake that no one found her body.

Because according to the medical examiner, Lynn likely died on the day she went missing and her body hadn't been moved or touched in over two years. But there's another possible theory, a theory that seems to go against what the medical examiner reported. And that is Lynn died somewhere else and her remains were placed there months or even years later.

But to be clear, this particular theory isn't what the medical examiner or the sheriff's department believes. Based on the forensic evidence, they believe Lynn's body was on the farm the entire time. They just missed her during the searches. The biggest question in this entire case is what happened to Lynn Messer? Did she commit suicide?

Sometime during the night or early morning hours of July 8th, 2014, she could have gotten out of bed, the bed she shared with her husband, Carrie. She then wrote the suicide letter, although it's still unclear whether it really is a suicide note because we don't know what the entire letter says. That's because either Carrie hasn't disclosed what it says in its entirety or the sheriff's department hasn't disclosed it.

All we know, or all that's what's been made public, is that part of it talked about Lynn being sorry and suggested that she was about to kill herself. After she wrote the note, she could have walked about one mile away from the house where she eventually took her own life. But we don't know how she did it because her remains were so badly decomposed and no weapon was found near her body.

Later that morning, her son moved the cows to the field in front of her body so the rescue dogs couldn't track her scent past the field. Then for the next two years, her body sat on the farm where no one could find her. The next question becomes, if Lynn did commit suicide, did her husband carry no?

Remember, when the sheriff's department first arrived at the farm, Carrie denied that Lynn had any suicidal thoughts and she wasn't depressed. But some people, including his sons, speculate that he wasn't telling the truth. He didn't mention the note to investigators for several months and lied about her taking antidepressants. He also never said anything about a previous suicide attempt just about six months earlier.

So why did Carrie lie about Lynn's depression or mental state at the time of her disappearance? We might not ever find out the true answer to that question. Still, some people speculate that it's because Carrie wanted to maintain the family image. The Messers were good Christian people.

Suicide would have gone against everything they believed in. It would have been a sin for Lynn to kill herself. So some people speculate or think that maybe Carrie just didn't want anyone to know his family wasn't quote-unquote perfect. Besides rumors of depression, Lynn was reportedly in a lot of physical pain around the time of her death. She had suffered severe hip pain for over a decade.

She had developed a condition that could only be fixed with hip replacement surgery, a procedure that doctors put off for several years until Lynn got a little bit older. She eventually did have the hip replacement surgery, which meant that she spent months in physical rehabilitation and therapy. She had also recently been involved in a car accident that badly damaged her shoulder.

So between her hips and her shoulder, she was in constant pain. She regularly took medication to deal with the pain. But if Lynn didn't commit suicide, what else could have happened to her? Was her death somehow connected to her memory issues? Now, again, to be clear, Lynn was never officially diagnosed with any memory issues, at least not anything that I could find during my research.

But if you recall what her son said happened when he was about 10 or 11, he said that one night his mom was crying in the living room because she said that she was lost and couldn't find her way back to the bedroom. Although this was reportedly an isolated incident, what if it happened again on July 8th, 2014? It's possible Lynn could have woken up in the middle of the night and somehow got lost on the farm that night.

But if that theory is true, what about the note? Well, some people in Lynn's family have doubts about whether she actually wrote the note. Some of her family don't think that she did because it was written in block letters. Everyone knew she always wrote in cursive. Now, this is just speculation. There is no evidence suggesting Lynn didn't write the note.

But if you think Lynn's disappearance had something to do with her memory issues, then how do you explain the note? Then there's the evidence from the medical examiner. Based on what she uncovered during the autopsy, she reported Lynn died the day she went missing on July 8th. So if her disappearance was linked to some memory issue or simply getting lost, how did she die so quickly?

Finally, there's the theory of foul play. Could Lynn Messer have been murdered? According to the St. Genevieve County Sheriff's Department and the medical examiner, Lynn's death is considered undetermined and her case is still considered open.

This leads many people to speculate whether there's evidence the sheriff's department is holding onto that leads them to believe this isn't an open and shut suicide, maybe foul play or someone else is involved with her death. But to be clear again, no one has been arrested or charged with any crime involving Lynn's death, not her husband, Carrie, or anyone else.

And in the original police reports, the investigators reported that they didn't find any evidence of foul play anywhere on the farm. Sometime after Lynn's body was found, Carrie and Spring Thomas got married. Although there's been no evidence to suggest they were having an affair while Lynn was still alive, they got together shortly after she went missing. And today, they're married.

In March of 2017, the Sheriff's Department turned Lynn's remains over to her family, and she was buried in a private funeral in Greene County, Arkansas. And that is where her remains are today. As of the time of this recording, the cause of Lynn's death remains undetermined, and her family and investigators still don't have answers as to what happened to her.

The only insight the forensic evidence tells us is that she died on the day she went missing, July 8, 2014. But why her body wasn't discovered earlier or how she died remains a mystery. Those questions haven't been able to be answered by forensics.

Anyone with information about the death of Lynn Marie Messer is asked to contact the Sheriff's Department at 573-883-5850. As of today, her cause of death remains undetermined, and the investigation into her mysterious death remains open. To share your thoughts on this story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook.

To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case. You'll want to check this one out because I'm going to share with you what I think happened to Lynn Messer. Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday.

If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us. You can also help support the show through Patreon. Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please join me next week. We'll have a brand new case and a brand new story to talk about. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.

Thank you.

To learn about how you can support the show, head over to our Patreon page, patreon.com slash Forensic Tales, or simply click the support link in the show notes. You can also support the show by leaving a positive review or telling friends and family about us. Forensic Tales is a podcast made possible by our Patreon producers, Tony A., Nicole L., David B.,

Paula G, Nicole G, Christine B, Karen D, Sherry A, Elizabeth M, Lisa S, Nicola, Maura, Roberto R, Jerry, Gary M, and Brian W. If you'd like to become a producer of this show, head over to our Patreon page or send me an email at...

at ForensicTales.com to find out how you can become involved. For a complete list of sources used in this episode, please visit ForensicTales.com. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, remember, not all stories have happy endings.