SHELL KNOB, Mo. — The McCullough family came to these Ozark hills to farm back before the Civil War and has been fighting rocks ever since.
Today, the family name still dots many a mailbox around here. Five generations are buried in the McCullough Cemetery.
They are a patient bunch. When it comes to rocks.
Not so much when one of their own turns up missing.
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It’s been 13 years since Gary McCullough disappeared. People say he was a good dad, worked hard and loved to coon hunt. He was 34. A brother recalls him as a “big ol’ boy, 6-4, 250.”
A lawsuit filed by two of Gary McCullough’s daughters alleges his wife, Sandra, shot him three times and burned his body in a brush pile. Portions of McCullough’s body were fed to hogs, the suit contends, and shortly after he went missing the animals were seen eating large chunks of meat.
The suit also names Sandra Klemp’s current husband, Kristopher Klemp, alleging that the two had been romantically involved and conspired in McCullough’s death.
In written responses to the lawsuit, the Klemps more than 100 times denied different allegations and filed a motion to dismiss the case. A judge refused that request.
On Tuesday, Sandra Klemp’s attorney, John Dale Wiley, called the case a “witch hunt,” rife with wild tales and untruths.
“I have heard every rumor and innuendo imaginable,” Wiley said in an email.
The daughters’ attorney, Richard Lee Anderson, says alleged elements of the case — an affair, an attempt to hire a hit man, a misfired shotgun — all point to the Klemps.
“With all that’s known,” the lawyer said, “it’s hard to conclude anything else.”
A civil trial had been set to begin last week, but a judge granted a late request for a change of venue — for a case filed in 2006.
That delay infuriated Gary McCullough’s kin. They say they’ve put up with about all the waiting they can handle. On Father’s Day, they got together and talked about what they needed to do to get authorities finally to act.
“They’re never going to find a body. This case is as good as it’s ever going to get,” said Gary’s brother Larry. “The authorities need to step up and do something. How long are we supposed to wait?”
In arguing against the motion for change of venue, Anderson contended that the defendants’ request missed a deadline and “comes quickly upon the heels” of a plaintiffs’ subpoena of a man the suit says told law enforcement that Kristopher Klemp tried to hire him to kill Gary McCullough.
That man is now seriously ill and may not be available for a future trial, Anderson wrote.
The daughters’ lawsuit contends McCullough was killed for his horses, cattle, land and coon dogs. It seeks money for his daughters.
But the family says what it really wants are criminal charges.
Barry County Sheriff Mick Epperly says the case includes plenty of circumstantial evidence. But the lack of key physical evidence — no body, no murder weapon — has stymied any criminal case.
The best chance authorities may have had for that rested with one of Sandra Klemp’s daughters from a previous relationship. The sheriff and family members say they heard a tape recording in which the girl said her mother told her she had killed Gary McCullough and made her help clean up the mess.
But that daughter, Liehnia May Chapin, 12 years old at the time her stepfather disappeared, went missing soon after telling — and then recanting — that story. Like Gary McCullough, she hasn’t been seen since.
“I don’t think I’m going to find either body,” the sheriff said recently in his office in Cassville.
Epperly said that at one point in the investigation, Sandra Klemp told him that if he finds a body she’d take a polygraph.
“Yeah, she dared me,” the sheriff said. “She knew I wasn’t going to find anything.”
The case file, thick as a concrete block, sits open on a wooden stand in his office.
Barry County Prosecuting Attorney Johnnie Cox doesn’t reject the family’s accusations, but he believes that without physical evidence, criminal charges may never be filed.
“I don’t know if what we need is out there,” Cox said.
Klemp and her husband now live in Salem, Mo. Efforts to contact them for this story were not successful. Kristopher Klemp’s lawyer, John Lewright, didn’t return calls seeking comment.
The lawsuit says that when Gary McCullough went missing, Sandra denied any affair with Kristopher Klemp and said she was happily married. Sandra didn’t report her husband missing. His employer did that.
The daughters’ lawsuit says that when authorities asked Sandra about him, she said Gary left “to go buy a fighting rooster from a Mexican” and she hadn’t seen him since.
A few miles south of Shell Knob, a narrow blacktop takes off east from Missouri 39 to curve through rocky farmland toward Table Rock Lake.
That’s where you’ll find the McCullough clan. Ella and her husband, Wayne, raised five sons, and none got too far from home. Three of the surviving four still live on the farm, and the other one is just down the road.
“We own everything from here to them mountains,” Albert McCullough said recently in the barnyard as he pointed north.
But don’t confuse this bunch with land barons. They wear beat-up boots and sweat-stained caps. They get dirty. Milking cows, raising pigs, coon hunting. This is the kind of place with chickens out back, and where pigs and heifers share the same corral.
Larry, the oldest, is the only one to go to college. On a basketball scholarship. He now teaches school, but he and his wife, also a teacher, live on the property in a cabin that they built themselves with logs they hauled from Arkansas.
Albert, the second oldest, does the farming but says he’d make more money if rocks were worth something.
In addition to milking 60 or so cows, he runs a feed store on the property out of a 120-year-old white house near the road. A dozen brown eggs will set you back $1.50.
“I brought her here,” Albert said of Sandra Klemp.
The words came suddenly, like an admission of guilt. He’d married the woman first. Worst mistake he’d ever made, he said.
He swears he did his best to talk his brother out of getting involved with Sandra, telling him, “You’re making a hell of a mistake.”
Still, Gary and Sandra married in December 1996. They bought a place not too far away, near Butterfield in Barry County. Eighty acres, mostly scrub land. Gary cleaned it up. He bought cattle and horses, and he worked at a chicken-processing plant to make ends meet.
By spring 1999, the lawsuit claims, the marriage had soured.
According to the lawsuit, Sandra attempted to shoot Gary on April 30, 1999.
“The gun didn’t go off,” said Darrell Center, a friend of Gary’s. He said Gary told him about the incident, which is also referred to in the lawsuit.
Most people might have stayed away after that.
“He was too bull-headed,” Center said.
The suit, filed a year after Gary was declared dead in 2005, also lays out the beginning of an alleged affair between Sandra and Kristopher Klemp, who is 10 years younger than her. In a sheriff’s office report cited in the lawsuit, the recently subpoenaed man tells investigators that Kristopher Klemp approached him about killing someone.
Another sheriff’s report mentioned in the suit includes comments from a woman who told detectives that Klemp told her that he was involved with a married woman. That married woman, according to the report, had said she’d figure out a way to kill her husband and dispose of the body so no one would ever find it.
The wrongful-death suit also names Sandra’s missing daughter, Liehnia Chapin, and Klemp’s former wife, Jennifer Brattin, as defendants. It says Brattin knew of the affair between Sandra Klemp and her then-husband, and that she gave him a ride during the time of Gary McCullough’s disappearance.
Brattin could not be found for comment, and court officials say she has not filed a legal reply to the suit.
Her attorney did not return a phone call.
Within weeks of McCullough’s disappearance, then-Barry County Prosecutor Stephen Hemphill charged Kristopher Klemp with conspiracy to murder. That charge was dropped, however, later that summer. Hemphill, now living in Liberty, told The Star on Thursday he’d worried that laying out his case at a preliminary hearing could hinder the ongoing investigation.
After the civil suit was filed, the Klemps challenged the case on grounds of expired statute of limitations and argued it should be dismissed. That motion, since denied, contended the calendar on a civil case should have started with Gary McCullough’s disappearance in 1999.
The plaintiffs countered that statute of limitations relates to him being declared dead in 2005.
Ella McCullough, 75, last saw her son on Mother’s Day 1999 when he came over to borrow a male hog to breed his sows. She said he told her that day that he feared for his life.
She told him to stay there; just don’t go home anymore.
“I think he only went home because of his cows and dogs,” Larry McCullough said. “He was scared what she would do to them.”
For months after Gary disappeared, his father, Wayne McCullough, a big, strong, no-nonsense dairy farmer, couldn’t sleep or eat.
The lack of action in the case caused Wayne to get barred from the Barry County sheriff’s office. He might have ended up in jail that day if a relative hadn’t dragged him out.
Wayne, who would often go looking for Gary after milking, died of a heart attack while sitting on the front porch.
Now in that same house, Gary’s mother still cries for her son.
“I want my boy,” Ella McCullough said recently as Brown Swiss and Jersey cows grazed on her farm and green apples weighed down a tree just outside the kitchen door.
“It’s time to bring him home.”
Joy Backes, 28, one of Gary’s daughters who brought the lawsuit along with her sister, April, has no doubts her grandfather would be alive today if not for her father’s disappearance.
“I know this thing killed him,” said Backes, a trauma nurse in Sioux Falls, S.D. “My grandma is a strong lady. And my uncles have worked so hard to get something done for my dad. But this has just gone on long enough.”
Like others, Backes thinks Liehnia Chapin held a key to the case.
Albert McCullough, Gary’s brother, tells the following story: A few years after Gary’s disappearance, Liehnia, 16 or so at the time, went with a boy down to the river to drink some beer. After a few, she told the boy a story about what had happened with Gary.
The boy told her she needed to tell someone else. She chose Albert — her former stepfather. When she recounted what had happened, Albert McCullough told The Star, he secretly taped her.
The lawsuit doesn’t mention the 2003 recording, yet cites things that family members and the sheriff say come from the tape.
According to family members, their attorney and the sheriff, Liehnia can be heard on the recording saying that her mother told her she had shot Gary three times in the head while he sat on the couch eating scrambled eggs.
Liehnia said she helped her mother clean up blood from the floor, the suit claims. They wrapped the body in plastic and burned it in a brush pile, according to the suit. Later, she and her mother dug through the top six inches of the ground beneath the fire, looking for bone fragments that they then scattered, the lawsuit alleges.
Albert McCullough took the tape to authorities.
But Liehnia soon recanted, say the prosecutor and the sheriff, saying she had been mad at her mother and made the whole thing up.
Liehnia soon disappeared and has not been seen since. She is considered a “missing person” by law enforcement.
About a month ago, Epperly drove to Salem to talk to Sandra Klemp about Liehnia — her own daughter.
“She won’t talk to me,” he said. “I would love it if Liehnia would show up. But that girl’s not coming back.”
Wiley, Sandra Klemp’s attorney, said he has no idea what happened to Liehnia Chapin or Gary McCullough, and that he is ready to refute everything in the lawsuit.
“They will need more than rumors and innuendo when they get to court,” he said.
In granting the motion for a change of venue, Barry County Judge Carr L. Woods wrote that because of the “extraordinary nature and extent of the articles in local newspapers and social media, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to select a fair and unbiased jury.”
Unbelievable, said Backes, the daughter who brought the suit.
“There’s always been publicity around this case,” Backes said. “After all this time, they figured that out at the last minute?”
Very disappointing, said Richard Lee Anderson, the daughters’ Branson attorney, who was in Kansas City delivering subpoenas when he learned of the delay.
“We had worked very hard for this trial and we were ready,” said Anderson, a family friend who played basketball for Wayne McCullough at Blue Eye High School.
For now, the family waits. A couple of weeks ago, Albert and his brother Larry drove a pickup to the McCullough Cemetery just down the road from the farm. They visited the graves of their father, and that of the relative who pulled Wayne out of the sheriff’s office the time he ended up getting barred from the place.
It was a pretty day up on the cemetery hill. Sunshine, a light breeze, the water of Table Rock Lake off through the trees.
“Gary should be here, but he never will be,” Larry said in the shade.
“We’re going to get him a stone anyway,” Albert said. “That’s all we got.”
Then they headed back home. Cows waited. Milking time.
