The Fire
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Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the case I'm going to tell you about today is one of those obscure stories that many of you have probably never heard of. I first learned about it after reading my friend Laura Norton's nonfiction novel, Lay Them to Rest, which came out in October 2023. If you haven't gotten a copy yet, I highly recommend you go out and grab one. It's fantastic. And you should also check out Laura's podcast, The Fall Line. It's also fantastic.

Though her book only briefly touched on the case I'm going to discuss today, I knew when I read it that I had to do an episode of Park Predators about it. It's a story of betrayal, incomprehensible violence in a beautiful recreation space, and a victim who went far too long unidentified before justice was finally served. The events that unfolded at a picnic area along Lake Lou Yeager in Litchfield, Illinois in May 1993 are difficult to talk about.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Some of the descriptions in this story are graphic. I also want to mention that another great resource I used as source material for this episode was author William Stage's book titled Litchfield, A Strange and Twisted Saga of Murder in the Midwest, which was initially published in 1998. You can still order copies online, which is what I did.

The stark contrast between the brutality of this crime and the fact that the area where it happened is one of the most picturesque recreation areas in Illinois is truly chilling. Lake Lou Yeager is roughly 1,300 acres and is heralded as a popular fishing hole and boating area that offers several spots for visitors to camp, picnic, and explore.

All year long, you can fish and boat there, and if you're looking for a bit of an extra challenge, you can bike the infamous Route 66 trail, which offers exceptional views of the lake. But on prom night in May 1993, few people were at the lake, just a handful of folks who had no idea they would become witnesses to a terrible crime. This is Park Predators.

Around 10.30 p.m. on Saturday, May 8, 1993, a guy named Todd Burdell and his partner, Tammy Jett, were fishing on Lake Lou Jaeger when they noticed something concerning in the park. Near the main road that ran through the campground, in a section labeled Picnic Area No. 5, there was a large fire crackling on the ground. No one was around stoking the open flames or trying to put them out, which Todd and Tammy felt was kind of unusual.

Todd's biggest concern was that the glowing flames would grow out of control, spread into the woods beyond the campground, and start a wildfire. So he and Tammy went to the superintendent of the campground's quarters nearby to report what they'd found. When they got there, Todd alerted Paul Stevenson, the man who took care of the park's campgrounds, to the fire. As you'd expect, Paul was immediately alarmed by the news.

He'd literally just returned to his office 15 minutes earlier after securing the park's bathroom facilities, and when he'd been on his way home, he'd driven right past the area where Todd and Tammy said the fire was. At that time, he hadn't noticed any signs of a fire, let alone a large one on the ground out in the open.

So Paul decided to follow the couple back to where they said the fire was. And sure enough, when the group got to picnic area number five, the flames were still going strong. And even worse, the fire had grown bigger than when Todd and Tammy had first spotted it. Right away, Paul and Todd jumped into action and started trying to put out the flames with their shoes. They stomped at the ground and tried not to get burned in the process. As they worked, Todd caught sight of something sticking out from beneath the burning pile of debris.

It looked like a charred arm. He told the group he thought it had to belong to some kind of mannequin, but a few minutes later, they all realized the arm did not belong to a mannequin. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Todd grabbed the hand of the arm and bent one of the fingers. When he did that, he also saw some hair on the appendage, which immediately told him it was not made of plastic.

Once the fire died down some, Paul, who was still nearby, put on a pair of gloves from his pickup truck and got a closer look at what was underneath the smoldering mess. He tugged at the arm and discovered it was attached to a bicep and armpit, which had also been severely burned. A few seconds later, after removing some more burned brush and logs off the pile, the group uncovered the burned body of a naked woman and saw something else no one should have to see. Her head was missing.

And here's where I wince even more. Todd and Paul then moved the body to a gravel driveway about 15 feet away from where it had been burning. Now, obviously, they were just trying to help. But as you all know, moving anything at a scene like this, especially a body, is not the best thing to do. But the sad fact is, they did. Right after that, Paul drove to his boss's residence near the park's marina and reported what was going on.

As soon as his supervisor heard the words "woman" and "burned body," he called the Litchfield Police Department. And in short order, officers from that local agency arrived to assess the situation. Not long after that, evidence texts from the Illinois State Police, deputies from Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, and a homicide detective from the state showed up. Together with the local police officers, they began meticulously scouring the landscape around the picnic area for evidence.

The victim's head was nowhere to be found, which didn't come as a huge surprise to investigators because they figured whoever had done this horrible act likely kept it so that the woman would be harder to identify. Naturally though, authorities bagged and labeled everything else they could find near the crime scene. Things like a cup, a beer can, cigarette butts, trash, etc.

It was possible one or more of those items was connected to the killer, but then again, campgrounds like picnic area number five were popular with visitors. So those random items of garbage could have also been totally unrelated to the crime. There was no way to know. Just to be safe though, police collected all that stuff and two other things they felt were vitally important pieces of potential evidence.

The first was a cardboard-like substance that had been underneath the woman's body when she'd been set on fire. And the second was some melted black plastic that had essentially melted into her skin while she'd been burning. I imagine the cops figured those things likely came from the killer's home or whatever vehicle they'd used to transport the dead woman to the picnic area.

Other than those two things, though, and the miscellaneous items of trash I mentioned earlier, there wasn't much else in terms of physical evidence at the crime scene that was helpful to investigators. The authorities realized they were going to have to find and speak with people who were in the park between 10 p.m. and 10.30 p.m. on that Saturday night in order to help them build anything remotely close to a timeline.

They also had to wait for Jane Doe's autopsy results so they could learn more details about who she might be and why she'd ended up in the park. According to the Belleville News Democrat, the Montgomery County coroner removed the victim's body from the recreation area and sent her to a hospital in Springfield, Illinois for examination. While detectives waited on those results, they spoke with three people who'd been driving near the recreation area around the time the woman's body was discovered.

The source material I was able to find doesn't say specifically how authorities identified all these folks or when exactly they interviewed them. But according to author William Stage's book I mentioned earlier, the witnesses from the lake told law enforcement that they'd seen an orange or red-colored Ford Econoline van being driven away from or near picnic area number five between 10.15 p.m. and 10.50 p.m. on Saturday night.

None of the witnesses remembered seeing who was driving the van, but one witness did say he thought it was possibly a man behind the wheel. Unfortunately, none of the witnesses wrote down the license plate number either, but one witness did say he remembered the plate on the back appeared to be from Missouri, not Illinois.

The one thing two of the witnesses agreed upon was that the van was being driven erratically while it was in the park. Like it was swerving all over the road and whipping in front of other motorists trying to cut them off. At one point, one witness said one of the van's backdoor panels opened up while it was speeding ahead of him, and pieces of what looked like black plastic trash bags could be seen fluttering in the wind.

Another witness to the van's erratic driving said it even chased him and his girlfriend for a while before eventually backing off and leaving the area. Detectives wrote down all this information about the van and noted that it was potentially important to the case, but for the time being, they couldn't really do much with it other than create a general descriptive flyer about it. Until they gathered more information about their victim, most importantly, her name, the van wasn't the most pressing lead to follow.

The next day, May 9th, a pathologist at Springfield Memorial Medical Center conducted an autopsy on the unidentified woman. According to author William Stage, the doctor hit several snags, a big one being the fact that there were no obvious signs of trauma on the woman's body. No stab wounds, no bullet holes, no evidence of blunt force trauma, and without being able to examine the victim's head, it was impossible for the pathologist to determine her cause of death.

Most of what remained of her body had been so severely charred that the pathologist also couldn't determine things like rigor mortis or lividity. Essentially, her tissues and muscles had all been too cooked by the fire to determine how long she'd been in one position or if perhaps she'd been beaten prior to her death. All the doctor knew for sure was that she'd been murdered, decapitated, and set on fire.

There was no evidence of sperm in her vagina, which ruled out a sexual assault having taken place. And there were also no traces of drugs in her blood that he felt had contributed to her death. There was a small trace of alcohol in her system, but the pathologist noted that could have come from the decomposition process. All this information from the autopsy results was kept from the media at the time though. The only thing police investigators confirmed to the press was that they didn't think the victim had been killed at the picnic area in the park.

They wholeheartedly believed the campground area was just a dump site, not the actual scene of the murder and decapitation. On Monday, May 10th, the victim's hands were sent in a paper bag to the Illinois State Police forensic lab for further testing to try and get impressions of her fingerprints. A scientist at the lab carefully examined each of her fingers and was able to pull two partial latent prints from her left index finger and thumb.

Unfortunately, though, no matches for the prints came up in Illinois state databases or any state or federal database across the country. Court records cited by author William Stage explained that a crime scene technician named Mark Jonsi, who worked for Illinois State Police at the time, was brought in as an expert to work on classifying what race Jane Doe might be.

Johncy moonlighted as a forensic anthropologist for the state police, and after assessing the victim's pubic hair and measurements, he determined that the woman was likely a white female between 35 and 39 years old, who was maybe 5'4 or 5'6, weighed between 120 and 130 pounds, and was someone who bit her nails. The most unique observation Johncy noted was that Jane Doe had an enlarged uterus with a handful of non-cancerous tumors in it.

Investigators told reporter Patrick Gaughan with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the victim's general features and description did not match any known missing persons cases in central Illinois, which only made the task of identifying her that much harder. Investigators pushed out to the public the little bit of information they'd been able to determine about Jane Doe, but to their disappointment, no credible leads emerged.

Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, and still authorities were no closer to identifying their victim or any potential suspect. In late August 1993, almost three months after Jane Doe had been found, a funeral home and church in Litchfield, as well as several community members from a handful of nearby towns, came together to hold a memorial service and burial for the unknown woman.

Flowers, monetary donations, a casket, and a vault were all donated to make sure Jane Doe would be buried with dignity and respect. Staff from the coroner's office and investigators with the state police who'd been working on the case served as pallbearers for the funeral. Jane Doe was officially laid to rest on August 21, 1993, at Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Litchfield.

The coroner of Montgomery County told the Herald and Review, quote, "I just want her buried in a decent way. She had a hell of a death, so she deserves a decent burial," end quote. A year later, in August 1994, the case, which had all but gone cold, got the shot of adrenaline it so desperately needed. A determined detective with the Illinois State Police, who'd never given up on the case, made a huge discovery. He figured out Jane Doe's real name.

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For the rest of 1993, after Jane Doe's body was found, and for the first eight months of 1994, an Illinois state police detective named Mike Shealy was the main investigator working on the Lake Lou Yeager homicide case. For months, he'd scoured missing person databases across the U.S., trying to find a female who matched the known characteristics of the dead woman from the campground. But every time he thought he was getting close, he'd strike out. Turns out there was a reason for that.

All along, Detective Shealy and other investigators had been operating on the premise that Jane Doe was a white female. But according to multiple news reports and author William Stage's novel, the ISP forensic anthropologist who'd initially made that determination about her race had been wrong. And not just a little bit wrong, like totally wrong.

Detective Shealy realized this in July 1994, when by chance, he happened to meet up with a colleague from ISP who coincidentally worked in a police crime lab near St. Louis, Missouri.

When Detective Shealy casually mentioned how the Lake Lou Yeager case was frustrating him, the other detective realized there was a missing female from his region closer to St. Louis who matched the age range, physical measurements, and general description of Shealy's Jane Doe, with one exception. This other missing woman was a light-skinned Black woman who hadn't been seen since May 5th, 1993, three days before Shealy's victim turned up.

While the two detectives were kind of in the middle of their conversation, they unfortunately had to part ways to work on their other cases. But before they split up, Sheely gave this other investigator more information about his Jane Doe, including the unique detail about her having multiple tumors on her uterus. Sheely made sure to send the other guy off with a copy of the flyer that had been created regarding the mysterious orangish-red van that had been seen being driven erratically near the crime scene in 1993.

Within a week, the other detective got to work trying to help Shealy and decided to call Shirley Matcham, the mother of the woman who had been reported missing from St. Louis. Shirley was listed on the missing persons report for her daughter, 35-year-old Lynn Matcham Thomas, who disappeared after visiting her estranged husband on the evening of May 5th, 1993.

This ISP detective and Shirley spoke for several minutes on the phone, and he strategically asked her if Lynn had ever experienced any, quote, "female problems," end quote. After some back and forth, Shirley replied that Lynn had been seeing a gynecologist prior to her disappearance due to some tumors on her uterus. That was all the ISP detective needed to know. He immediately connected with Detective Shealy and told him that the Lake Loo Jaeger Jane Doe might in fact be Lynn Matcham Thomas.

The official ID was confirmed on August 4th, 1994, when Detective Shealy checked some of Lynn's previous employment records and discovered she had once been a security guard for a private company in St. Louis, a job that just so happened to require Lynn to provide impressions of her fingerprints to the St. Louis Police Department's latent print unit.

Thankfully, staff in that unit still had a card with Lynn's prints on it. And when Detective Shealy compared the impressions on that card to the partial prints that had been pulled from the dead woman at the lake's left thumb and index finger, they were a positive match. Jane Doe was no longer Jane Doe. She was officially Lynn Matcham Thomas.

Eight days later, on August 12th, 1994, Detective Shealy and a homicide investigator from St. Louis went to Lynn's estranged husband, Curtis Thomas' house to break the news. My source material doesn't say exactly when police told Shirley Matcham that the woman from Litchfield was her daughter, Lynn, but I imagine they notified her around the same time they notified Curtis.

But either way, when the detectives showed up to Curtis's house and told him that his estranged wife had been found and that she'd been brutally murdered and decapitated, Shealy noticed that Curtis didn't appear to get emotional or upset, like at all. After talking with Curtis, the detectives left, but that wouldn't be the last time they spoke with him. In fact, in the weeks after learning his wife had been beheaded and burned, Curtis regularly contacted the authorities.

He seemed eager to learn what they'd uncovered in their investigation. He even offered up information about a man named Martin Plummer, a man he said had started dating Lynn shortly before she vanished. Detective Shealy noted the information about Martin and kept in touch with Curtis. In fact, he frequently conversed with him about other potential leads in the case, but Shealy was careful not to reveal too much to Curtis.

For example, Shealy didn't tell Curtis that he'd already tracked down and interviewed Martin Plummer and cleared him as a suspect. In speaking with Lynn's mother and brother, Jerome, investigators learned that Lynn had last been seen alive on May 5th, 1993, three days before her body was found.

She'd attended an appointment with her psychiatrist in St. Louis, and after her session ended around 3 p.m., her brother was supposed to pick her up, but he was about 10 minutes late, so Lynn made her way to her estranged husband Curtis's house.

The source material isn't specific on how Lynn got to Curtis's home because no one really knows for sure, but I imagine she likely made the trek on foot. From the source material I read, it didn't seem like she had a vehicle at the time. So my best guess is that she either walked or took a bus or something to get to Curtis's house. Detectives obviously wanted to know more about what Lynn did when she got to Curtis's and more importantly, what time she got there.

So they read the missing persons report that had been filed for Lynn with the St. Louis Police Department. Turns out one report was filed by Shirley, her mother, on May 5th, 1993, and another had been filed by Curtis on May 6th. After reviewing those documents, homicide detectives learned that Lynn had shown up in front of Curtis's house by 6 p.m. on May 5th, just three days before her body was discovered.

A few minutes after arriving at Curtis's, another woman named Deborah Claybrook drove up. Turns out Curtis and Deborah were kind of an old fling from many years before Lynn and Curtis met and got married. While Lynn and Curtis had been separated working out their bitter divorce, Curtis had started seeing Deborah casually again.

When investigators tracked down and spoke with Debra, she confirmed that on May 5th, the day Lynn vanished, she'd stopped by Curtis's house sometime between 5:45 p.m. and 6:00 p.m., and she'd seen Lynn standing on Curtis's front porch. Apparently, Debra had not expected her new boyfriend's estranged wife to be there, so she promptly decided to leave after only exchanging a few words with Curtis.

Curtis's version of that interaction was mostly the same as Debra's. He told investigators that Lynn had stopped by to speak with him and Debra had shown up and then left without coming inside. Not long after Debra took off, Curtis said that Lynn also left, walking in the direction of her mother's house, where she was living at the time. Shirley's home was just a couple blocks away from Curtis's.

According to Curtis, about 20 minutes after that, he phoned Shirley to make sure Lynn had gotten home safe. But Shirley told him that Lynn hadn't shown up, which concerned both of them. On May 6th, after both missing persons reports for Lynn were filed, police detectives from St. Louis conducted interviews with Curtis's neighbors to find out if anyone had seen Lynn walking to her mom's house or perhaps witnessed her in any kind of distress. And the responses they got from folks were interesting.

According to author William Stage's novel, several neighbors told police they'd seen or heard Curtis and Lynn arguing in front of his house around 6 p.m. on May 5th. Now, when Curtis had first spoken with police, he didn't mention anything about having a fight with his estranged wife before she disappeared.

So, this kind of discrepancy with his story, plus the fact that authorities quickly learned he and Lynn had a lengthy history of domestic violence in their marriage, made detectives seriously side-eye him as a potential suspect. The problem was that investigators didn't have any concrete proof that Curtis had done something to his wife or been involved in her disappearance. But surely Lynn's mom wasn't going to sit by idly and just wait for more time to pass.

Around 10 o'clock at night on Friday, May 7th, she and her niece had shown up at Curtis's house unannounced with two St. Louis police officers in tow. Shirley claimed her daughter might be inside and in need of help. The officers asked Curtis if they could come in and check things out, and he agreed to let them in, but told them to make it quick as he had company. During police's visit, Deborah Claybrook was with Curtis and seemed surprised that police were there.

The officers didn't find anything suspicious in the main rooms of Curtis's house, but when they began to head toward the door that led to his basement, Curtis stopped them and told them it was time to go. He called up his attorney and that guy advised Curtis to order the police out of his house and tell them not to return until they had a legit search warrant for his property. Unfortunately, months went by and police were unable to get back inside Curtis's home to do further investigating.

After that, Lynn's disappearance sort of fell off everyone's radar, except her mom and Detective Mike Sheelys, of course. Shirley was still very much wanting to find answers about what happened to her daughter. Author William Stage wrote in his book that Shirley firmly believed Lynn was dead and that Curtis had something to do with it, but at the time, there was just no proof. As things dragged on, some folks who knew Lynn assumed she'd moved out of state, perhaps back to where she once lived in California.

Others thought she just left to get away from Curtis. No one really knew. The reality was though, Lynn was dead. She'd been decapitated, dumped at Lake Lou Jaeger and set on fire just days after she was reported missing from St. Louis. In the fall of 1994, with all this new information to work with, police began assessing everyone in Lynn's life around the time she disappeared.

Curtis was obviously at the top of their list of potential suspects because the closer investigators looked at his marriage with Lynn, the more they saw a disturbing pattern. He seemed to always be in control of what she did, who she saw, who she spoke with, and where she went. The couple had known one another for about a decade before getting married in St. Louis in October 1987, five and a half years before the crime.

From speaking with their friends, investigators learned the couple had a good relationship in the early days of their marriage. They hosted get-togethers and genuinely seemed to be in love. About two years in, though, the good times soured, and more and more people noticed they would fight and bicker with one another in public over random stuff and their finances. Sometimes their spats would turn physical, and by October 1990, Lynn had asked a judge for a restraining order against Curtis. In the request, Lynn wrote, quote,

She went on to say, quote,

He turned the water and the heat off, changed the phone number, and put restraints on the line so I could not utilize it. Listens to my phone conversations and takes my belongings whenever he wishes." So with that in mind, police were clearly very interested in finding out whether Curtis could have done something to Lynn since she'd sought legal injunctions against him in the past. But there were other leads the detectives needed to check on too.

For example, they really needed to identify the orangish-red colored van that witnesses had seen being driven near the area where Lynn's remains were dumped. Authorities wanted to know if Curtis could have ever had access to a vehicle like that. In August 1994, shortly after Lynn was ID'd, law enforcement told the Herald and Review that they'd located a van that matched the description witnesses from the lake provided.

Detectives wouldn't reveal who the van belonged to, though, or who they thought would have had access to it on May 8th, 1993. All they said was that they had located one similar to it that was of great interest to them. After that announcement, though, law enforcement went quiet. There were no real major updates in the case, and they remained working diligently behind the scenes. A few months later, in December 1994, investigators were devising a bombshell of a plan. They were going to make an arrest.

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It came about a year and a half after Lynn's brutal death. The next month, on Friday, January 27th, 1995, a grand jury in Illinois also indicted him. And a few days after that, homicide detectives from St. Louis arrested Curtis at his home. Immediately after taking him into custody, detectives searched his house top to bottom looking for any evidence that might tie him to the crime.

As thoroughly as they searched, though, they didn't find anything substantial. No blood, no murder weapon, nothing. The only things of interest were a few newspaper clippings tucked away in one of Curtis's side tables that detailed the early news coverage written about an unknown woman's body being found on fire near Lake Lou Yeager in central Illinois. At that point, Lynn's head was still missing. It was obviously a critical piece of evidence in the case, and investigators were convinced Curtis had done something with it.

The person who'd convinced them of this was Deborah Claybrook, Curtis's former lover. You see, by the time Curtis got arrested, he and Deborah's relationship had ended, and she'd become a critical source of information for homicide investigators. She told detectives that around the time Lynn disappeared, she'd noticed a woman's purse outside of his house near his porch, along with some cement mix and a gasoline container just sitting around his house.

She also claimed that Curtis had outright confessed to her while they'd been dating that he'd murdered his estranged wife, cut her head off, and disposed of the rest of her remains in Illinois. After Curtis's arrest, one St. Louis official told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, quote, we've been told that the suspect reportedly said he put the head in a bucket and filled the pail with concrete, end quote. Regarding which state Curtis would face justice in came down to which team of prosecutors wanted to take him to trial.

For about three months after his arrest, there was a bit of back and forth between officials in Missouri and Illinois over who would ultimately take the case to court. It was tricky because technically Lynn's body had been dumped in Illinois, but investigators wholeheartedly believed Curtis had carried out the murder at his home in Missouri, some 60 plus miles southwest of Lake Lou Yeager. Ultimately, the decision was made for Illinois prosecutors to take the case to trial.

Curtis was rebooked in a Montgomery County, Illinois jail cell and held with a $500,000 bond. He couldn't pay anything close to that, so he remained behind bars to await trial. Seven months after his arrest, homicide investigators once again returned to his house in St. Louis to look for potential evidence. This time they brought teams of evidence specialists who used ground-penetrating radar, thermal imaging devices, and magnetic technology to examine every inch of the property.

They learned during their investigation that Curtis had poured some fresh cement on his porch and in his basement. Authorities were eager to find out if he'd possibly hidden any evidence underneath that renovation work. To their surprise, when they dug it all up, they didn't find anything earth shattering, just a bunch of piping for his house, some dirt, and remains of a dead cat in his backyard. While that effort had been underway though, investigators had also been busy testing soil and debris found at the scene near Lynn's body in the park.

They wanted to know if any type of accelerant had been used to set her remains on fire. And since her body tissues were so scorched and essentially useless for chemical testing, Tex turned to the land and debris for answers since it had mostly been unscathed by the fire. Unfortunately though, despite the evidence team's best efforts to determine if accelerants had been used, no traces of accelerant-like substances were found. The authorities knew that was gonna be a tough detail to explain to a jury when it came to trial.

And speaking of going to trial, this one was a doozy. Author William Stage wrote in his book that as soon as things got underway in October 1995, prosecutors in Illinois were forced to drop the first-degree murder charges against Curtis and only move forward with concealing a homicide. Why? Well, because the way Illinois and federal law is written, in order to charge someone with murder in a specific state, you have to prove that the murder actually happened in that state.

It's an element of the crime that must be proven. And because only Lynn's body had been found in Illinois, state investigators and prosecutors had no way of proving if she'd actually been murdered there. I know it's kind of weird, but it falls into the category of a bizarre legal technicality. The hard truth was Lynn could have been killed in Missouri and then just transported to Illinois.

This snafu, which resulted in the state having to drop the most serious charges against Curtis, ruffled a lot of feathers, and for a second, the whole case looked like it might be on the brink of collapsing. But eventually things calmed down, and prosecutors in Illinois decided to forge ahead. The downside was if Curtis got convicted, he'd only be guilty of concealing a homicide, a Class 3 felony, which in Illinois came with a five-year maximum prison sentence.

The upside, though, was that St. Louis officials in Missouri would have a much stronger case to file murder charges against him for the actual slaying if an Illinois jury found him guilty of concealing Lynn's murder. And to be blunt, there were several things that made Curtis look really bad heading into his seven-day trial in the fall of 1995. The first was the fact that he had a criminal history for robbery and forgery, and Lynn had previously accused him of assaulting her in the past.

Some police reports about their physical and verbal fights had been taken just weeks before she vanished. These incidents involved shouting matches between the two of them, Curtis attacking Lynn and one of her sister-in-laws while she tried to move some of her stuff from Curtis's house, and one particularly scary situation where Curtis allegedly pushed Lynn out of a moving car and punched her in the face several times.

Similar to this aggressive behavior toward Lynn and her family members was the fact that immediately following her disappearance, Curtis had repeatedly threatened her current boyfriend, Martin Plummer. On one occasion, while police were at Martin's house questioning him about Lynn's disappearance, Curtis called and harassed him. When police officers overheard the exchange, they immediately left Martin's house to go arrest Curtis for harassment.

The second thing that looked really bad for Curtis was the fact that when Lynn disappeared, he worked for a conglomerate of adult psychiatric facilities in St. Louis called the Independence Center. And it just so happened that that company had a Ford van that looked a lot like the one seen driven near the crime scene on May 8th, 1993. Curtis's work logs, which were presented in court, showed that on May 8th, he was scheduled to be on duty at one of the Independence Center's campuses from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.,

That weekend, there was only one other employee working whose shift overlapped with his, and that other worker did not see exactly when Curtis clocked out or what vehicle he left in. Prosecutors alleged in court that Curtis had left his job driving one of the Independence Center's rust-orange-colored Ford Econoline vans and retrieved his wife's body from his home in St. Louis, then drove her up to the park near Litchfield to dump her and set her remains on fire.

Testimony that supported this scenario came from a supervisor of the Independence Center, who said she received a phone call from a concerned resident on the morning of Sunday, May 9th, the day after Lynn's remains were found. And this person was complaining that one of the center's vans was missing. On Monday morning, May 10th, this same supervisor and another center employee saw Curtis driving the missing van into a parking lot at one of the center's campuses.

They watched him park it and leave the keys inside, but it's unclear from the source material if anyone ever confronted him at the time about why he had the van or where it had been on May 9th and May 10th. Author William Stage wrote in his book that by the time investigators realized that an Independence Center van was the vehicle Curtis might have used, the business had cleaned and sold that van to a heating and cooling company. Even an FBI forensics team couldn't find anything in it that could be connected to the crime.

The third bad look for Curtis during his trial had to do with some seemingly innocuous materials that investigators determined Lynn had left at his house prior to her disappearance and murder. According to court documents cited by author William Stage, in early April 1993, when Lynn made the decision to leave Curtis and move into her mother's house, she went to a U-Haul store in St. Louis and bought a bunch of single-ply moving boxes and a container of black trash bags.

Well, when she vanished, she had a few of those boxes and bags at her mom's house, and some were still sitting inside Curtis's house. When ISB crime scene techs forensically examined the type of material those items were made of and compared that to the charred remains of the cardboard-like substance found beneath Lynn's body, along with the pieces of black plastic melted into her skin, the materials were determined to be extremely similar.

which begged the question, how did her moving materials end up with her remains in Lake Lou Jaeger? According to state investigators, the answer was simple. Curtis had used them since they'd been conveniently left at his place. When investigators searched Curtis's home right after his arrest, they'd been unable to find any of Lynn's moving materials. And when they later asked him where that stuff had gone, he said he'd given the boxes and trash bags away shortly after Lynn disappeared.

Investigators weren't able to corroborate that, of course, so they just had to take Curtis's word for it. The fourth bad look for him was the fact that he'd been extremely unwilling to let those two St. Louis police officers look in his basement when they'd come by on May 7th, 1993. Curtis's resistance to let those officers into his basement was highly suspicious to Lynn's family at the time, and also to police detectives who would eventually investigate her murder.

The prosecution alleged that the reason Curtis was so unwilling to show anyone his basement at the time was because Lynn's body was likely down there. The state star witness, Deborah Claybrook, Curtis's former lover, testified that following Lynn's disappearance, he told her that he'd killed Lynn and hidden her body in a box in his basement before dumping it.

The prosecution's main goal at trial was to systematically prove that Curtis was a liar, a manipulator, an abuser, and someone who was capable of such a heinous crime. The lead prosecutor pointed to the couple's history of domestic violence, repeated incidents of Curtis asserting control over Lynn, prying into her psychiatric treatment records, and refusing to accept that she decided to be with another man instead of him.

The state also detailed how Curtis had been fronting the cost of Lynn's health insurance premiums throughout their marriage, but he'd abruptly canceled her coverage sometime between May 6th and May 21st of 1993. The prosecution alleged that he did that because he knew Lynn was already dead and would not be needing the benefit. But Curtis's defense to the state's case was that it was all circumstantial. His lawyer said police's entire investigation from the start had been a, quote, rush to judgment, end quote.

He said that Deborah Claybrook's testimony could not be trusted due to the fact that her relationship with Curtis had seemingly fizzled out and they were no longer on good terms. He also argued how compelling it was that investigators had been unable to find any physical evidence connecting Curtis to the murder or the disposal of Lynn's remains. Well, except for those U-Haul moving boxes and black trash bags I mentioned earlier. But then again, those were circumstantial evidence too.

Curtis's defense attorney also really emphasized the fact that no traces of accelerant had been found on Lynn's remains or the materials found with her body. But an expert witness for the prosecution kind of trampled this point because the expert said the intensity of the flames that consumed most of Lynn's remains could have burned up all the accelerant that might have been used in the crime. So essentially his point was the fact that forensic techs hadn't found traces of an accelerant didn't mean none were ever there.

To counter this testimony, the defense decided to pivot and attack Lynn's character by scrutinizing her ongoing struggles with her mental health. On the witness stand, her psychiatrist testified that Lynn's phobias and anxiety had been exacerbated by changes in her medications and the stress of her life circumstances around the time of her disappearance. The defense alleged this theory,

Perhaps Lynn's mental health history, along with the fact that she'd had varying reactions to different antipsychotic medications, prompted her to go on a drinking bender or act impulsively with a stranger who took advantage of her and killed her. But this suggestion fell flat with jurors, as did Curtis's own testimony. Yeah, he took the stand in his own defense, which turned out to really backfire. For one thing, he claimed to have a rock-solid alibi for the night of May 8th after he got off work at 9 p.m.,

He said that a buddy of his had picked him up and they'd stopped for beers at a mini-mart, then his friend took him home. But when that friend testified under oath, Curtis's alibi fell apart. The guy told the court that he actually wasn't 100% sure he picked up Curtis on the night of May 8th. After deliberating, the jury found Curtis guilty of disposing of his wife's remains and attempting to conceal them.

In December 1995, a judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison, double the maximum amount of time he was eligible for. Before the sentencing hearing got underway, the prosecution had specifically asked the judge to dole out a harsher punishment because the crime had been so brutal, and the judge ruled in favor of that. After the verdict was read, Shirley, Lynn's mother, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "...she was very afraid of him. He wouldn't leave her alone. He just didn't want anybody else to have her."

Curtis continued to deny any involvement in Lynn's death, even after his conviction. At his sentencing, he told the court, quote, I didn't murder my wife. I didn't take her head off. I didn't hide her body. I didn't burn her body, end quote. In January 1997, St. Louis prosecutors decided to try Curtis for first-degree murder.

At that point, Lynn's head had still not been found, but the prosecution felt confident they could secure a conviction based on the evidence and testimony they did have, plus everything that had been presented at Curtis's first trial in Illinois in 1995. If he was found guilty of first-degree murder, he was facing life in prison without parole. And as fate would have it, that's exactly what he got.

In February 1997, a jury in Missouri found him guilty of first-degree murder, and he was eventually sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In a letter read in court by the judge, Shirley Matcham asked Curtis where her daughter's head was. He responded, quote, "'That's assuming that I have it. "'She should ask the murderer,' end quote." Today, Lynn's previously unmarked grave in Illinois has a headstone with her full name on it beneath an etching of a praying angel.

She is finally at peace, and her killer is serving the rest of his life in prison for her murder. If you or anyone you know is experiencing domestic violence, there is support available. Call or text the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE or by texting START to 88788. ♪

Park Predators is an AudioChuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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