Steven snedger.
There are so many twists and turns in this case that volumes of books would have to be written to jot down everything that either went wrong or evidence that turned up. This case reads like a script for a Hollywood movie.
Some examples of unanswered questions that still resinate with this case even today include:
What happened to the $1 million tucked into the trunk of Steven snedgers Mercedes?
The mysterious map marked with an “X”?
a two-timing hit man hired from Soldier of Fortune magazine?
a plastic-wrapped body dumped in the Ocklawaha River?
lots and lots of cash, some in a suitcase and some in paper grocery bags.
This whole bizarre tale started with Steven snedger himself and the murder of his daughter lora Morris. Now Steve Snedegar’s background is hard to pin down. I couldn’t tell you exactly what is truth and what isnt. What I do know is His past is murky—there are rumors of drug running and work as an FBI informant.
He'd made enemies in the early 1970s when he was on the lam from the FBI, then again during his quick rise in the waste-oil business and a third time running some cloak-and-dagger venture with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that he never discussed much.
For a two-year period, the family lived in hotels in the Southwest under fake names so Steve wouldn't have to face charges involving a tractor theft ring and the death of a deputy sheriff in Port Clinton, Ohio. Sadly there is very little information in regards to these matters. So I can’t elaborate any further on these incidents.
After Steve was finally caught in Houston, the FBI dropped its charges against him. No one could explain why. Sergeant Munden who investigated this case and who I will speak about later stated that he thought based on records he’d seen that a deal was cut between snedger and the FBI Munden also never got a straight answer from the FBI.
To me It's weird that they all of a sudden dropped the very serious charges against snedger. No law enforcement agency I know of would drop charges of being involved in the death of a police officer. Unless there was a very good reason for doing so.
In 1978, Steve landed penniless in Indiana. By the time Lora vanished three years later, he was a millionaire several times over this is according to Indiana detectives, who obtained his bank records.
The source of his fortune is unclear and Steve dropped hints about its origins. Some of his relatives however were more blunt. His father-in-law, for example told Munden at one point that Steve, who was a pilot, frequently flew drugs out of Havana.
Steve would only say that he knew Castro "real well," and that his acquaintance was “business." Which to me indicates that he was doing so kind of shady business with Fidel. You don’t go from being penniless to becoming a multimillionaire overnight without some type of easy way to make cash, and drugs would easily make you rich overnight. If you were smart and knew what you were doing in that dangerous world.
Steve's oil recycling business named the J&S Oil Service Company began booming in 1979. Two businessmen - Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough - tried unsuccessfully to buy it from Steve just before Lora vanished. All three were bitter about this outcome. The reasons for which from my understanding was twofold one was that financing at the last minute fell thorough. The second is that Steve and his wife by that time had wanted to move to Florida and were trying to sell this business and move on in their lives.
Steve also suspected them in Lora's disappearance. As retaliation for their deal falling through. Steve's wife Trudy also suspected them of having something to do with it.
Sadly lora’s home life was far from what you would call the perfect home life. Lora had married a man her parents didn't like - an unthinkable act for the daughter of parents bent on running their children's lives.
The way munden explained it was that Steve and Trudy wanted complete control. They put the money up, but the kids had to give them the authority to dominate and do what they wanted. Which is An extremely toxic and abusive mindset.
What they wanted was for Lora to leave her husband, and high school classmate Bryce Morris which she did. Then they pressured her to move with them to Florida in 1981. This time, she said no.
Munden was quoted as saying that Lora was the black sheep - she spoke her piece and talked back And she paid for it. End quote. Now From what I know about Steve and trudy they were used to getting their way and weren’t used to being told no.
To give an example of how bad the abuse was, Just before the move, a neighbor reported seeing Steve waving his arms and screaming curses at Lora in the backyard. Then he stood on her toes and spit in her face. Not exactly what I would call a loving father and daughter dynamic. It's also very telling as to what kind of man Steven snedger was.
It would be the last time Steve Snedegar would see his daughter alive.But not the last time for Trudy. She had arrived from Florida - unannounced - on Aug. 10, 1981, at the Greenfield, Ind. home where Lora lived. The police at the time thought Trudy's visit was timed to head off Lora's reconciliation with her estranged husband.
At 11pm Trudy and Lora return home and shortly thereafter Trudy retires to the master bedroom of the family residence Trudy told police she had dinner with her daughter, then went to bed. When she awoke at 6 a.m., she found the lights and television on, the sliding glass door ajar and Lora's bed unslept in. No Lora. Trudy later told detectives that the last time she saw her daughter Lora she was wearing a long white tee-shirt and lounging on the sofa
Deputies called to the scene seven hours later found no evidence of foul play. Everything pointed to a young woman out having a fling.
Lora’s car is outside, her purse and belongings are present in the home and the patio door is ajar. Alarmed, Trudy contacts the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department and Sergeant John W. Munden is dispatched to the scene. He plays a major role in this whole bizarre case.
Mud said that "Then her mother said that Lora's pocketbook was still at home. A big red flag came up in my mind," Munden mud also said. "I made the remark to Trudy, 'I believe that a woman's pocketbook is like a minister's Bible - they don't go anyplace without it.'
Munden also made this very cryptic remark about how trudy looked at him funny and claimed he knew why when he thought about it later and that’s why he treated the case for what it was. A homicide.
A check of the family phone records revealed Lora spoke with her ex-husband Bryce Morris twice after Trudy had allegedly gone to bed—once just after 11pm and once shortly before midnight. Bryce’s account of the content of these conversations, for reasons I’m not to clear on, has never been publicized.
There were some strange goings on in the days leading up to and after lora’s strange and sinister disappearance:
• On August 12th, two days after Lora’s disappearance Trudy Snedegar received a phone call from an unknown man who vowed, “I’m going to get you, sucker.”
• The next day, August 13th Trudy received a phone call from a woman sobbing and making “sexual innuendos;” the call was taped—Trudy, Steve, and Bryce Morris all agree the sobbing woman is Lora. This has never been explained.
• there were several Psychics involved in this case however their information failed to impact the investigation
another interesting fact was that a former classmate of Lora and Bryce Morris was a rapist on the run from the FBI at the time named Ricky Dean Akers who would ultimately be eliminated from suspicion in Lora’s murder.
This whole bizarre tale started with Steven snedger himself and the murder of his daughter lora Morris. Now Steve Snedegar’s background is hard to pin down. I couldn’t tell you exactly what is truth and what isnt. What I do know is His past is murky—there are rumors of drug running and work as an FBI informant.
He'd made enemies in the early 1970s when he was on the lam from the FBI, then again during his quick rise in the waste-oil business and a third time running some cloak-and-dagger venture with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that he never discussed much.
For a two-year period, the family lived in hotels in the Southwest under fake names so Steve wouldn't have to face charges involving a tractor theft ring and the death of a deputy sheriff in Port Clinton, Ohio. Sadly there is very little information in regards to these matters. So I can’t elaborate any further on these incidents.
After Steve was finally caught in Houston, the FBI dropped its charges against him. No one could explain why. Sergeant Munden who investigated this case and who I will speak about later stated that he thought based on records he’d seen that a deal was cut between snedger and the FBI Munden also never got a straight answer from the FBI.
To me It's weird that they all of a sudden dropped the very serious charges against snedger. No law enforcement agency I know of would drop charges of being involved in the death of a police officer. Unless there was a very good reason for doing so.
In 1978, Steve landed penniless in Indiana. By the time Lora vanished three years later, he was a millionaire several times over this is according to Indiana detectives, who obtained his bank records.
The source of his fortune is unclear and Steve dropped hints about its origins. Some of his relatives however were more blunt. His father-in-law, for example told Munden at one point that Steve, who was a pilot, frequently flew drugs out of Havana.
Steve would only say that he knew Castro "real well," and that his acquaintance was “business." Which to me indicates that he was doing so kind of shady business with Fidel. You don’t go from being penniless to becoming a multimillionaire overnight without some type of easy way to make cash, and drugs would easily make you rich overnight. If you were smart and knew what you were doing in that dangerous world.
Steve's oil recycling business named the J&S Oil Service Company began booming in 1979. Two businessmen - Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough - tried unsuccessfully to buy it from Steve just before Lora vanished. All three were bitter about this outcome. The reasons for which from my understanding was twofold one was that financing at the last minute fell thorough. The second is that Steve and his wife by that time had wanted to move to Florida and were trying to sell this business and move on in their lives.
Steve also suspected them in Lora's disappearance. As retaliation for their deal falling through. Steve's wife Trudy also suspected them of having something to do with it.
Sadly lora’s home life was far from what you would call the perfect home life. Lora had married a man her parents didn't like - an unthinkable act for the daughter of parents bent on running their children's lives.
The way munden explained it was that Steve and Trudy wanted complete control. They put the money up, but the kids had to give them the authority to dominate and do what they wanted. Which is An extremely toxic and abusive mindset.
What they wanted was for Lora to leave her husband, and high school classmate Bryce Morris which she did. Then they pressured her to move with them to Florida in 1981. This time, she said no.
Munden was quoted as saying that Lora was the black sheep - she spoke her piece and talked back And she paid for it. End quote. Now From what I know about Steve and trudy they were used to getting their way and weren’t used to being told no.
To give an example of how bad the abuse was, Just before the move, a neighbor reported seeing Steve waving his arms and screaming curses at Lora in the backyard. Then he stood on her toes and spit in her face. Not exactly what I would call a loving father and daughter dynamic. It's also very telling as to what kind of man Steven snedger was.
It would be the last time Steve Snedegar would see his daughter alive.But not the last time for Trudy. She had arrived from Florida - unannounced - on Aug. 10, 1981, at the Greenfield, Ind. home where Lora lived. The police at the time thought Trudy's visit was timed to head off Lora's reconciliation with her estranged husband.
At 11pm Trudy and Lora return home and shortly thereafter Trudy retires to the master bedroom of the family residence Trudy told police she had dinner with her daughter, then went to bed. When she awoke at 6 a.m., she found the lights and television on, the sliding glass door ajar and Lora's bed unslept in. No Lora. Trudy later told detectives that the last time she saw her daughter Lora she was wearing a long white tee-shirt and lounging on the sofa
Deputies called to the scene seven hours later found no evidence of foul play. Everything pointed to a young woman out having a fling.
Lora’s car is outside, her purse and belongings are present in the home and the patio door is ajar. Alarmed, Trudy contacts the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department and Sergeant John W. Munden is dispatched to the scene. He plays a major role in this whole bizarre case.
Mud said that "Then her mother said that Lora's pocketbook was still at home. A big red flag came up in my mind," Munden mud also said. "I made the remark to Trudy, 'I believe that a woman's pocketbook is like a minister's Bible - they don't go anyplace without it.'
Munden also made this very cryptic remark about how trudy looked at him funny and claimed he knew why when he thought about it later and that’s why he treated the case for what it was. A homicide.
A check of the family phone records revealed Lora spoke with her ex-husband Bryce Morris twice after Trudy had allegedly gone to bed—once just after 11pm and once shortly before midnight. Bryce’s account of the content of these conversations, for reasons I’m not to clear on, has never been publicized.
There were some strange goings on in the days leading up to and after lora’s strange and sinister disappearance:
• On August 12th, two days after Lora’s disappearance Trudy Snedegar received a phone call from an unknown man who vowed, “I’m going to get you, sucker.”
• The next day, August 13th Trudy received a phone call from a woman sobbing and making “sexual innuendos;” the call was taped—Trudy, Steve, and Bryce Morris all agree the sobbing woman is Lora. This has never been explained.
• there were several Psychics involved in this case however their information failed to impact the investigation
another interesting fact was that a former classmate of Lora and Bryce Morris was a rapist on the run from the FBI at the time named Ricky Dean Akers who would ultimately be eliminated from suspicion in Lora’s murder.
As is common among the loved ones of missing persons the Snedegar clan took polygraphs to eliminate family members from suspicion—but they paid for their own lie detector tests instead of using a police polygrapher which to me seems a bit incongruous because if you pay for your own its like paying for someone to say nice things about you. The person is being paid by you so you can dictate the outcome and that person won’t say no because you won’t pay them otherwise.
Steve Snedegar gave the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department 10K cash to protect his family; according to Sergeant Munden’s Orlando Sentinel interview, “We used a lot of that money to watch Steve.” I will elaborate on this shortly.
A long-haul truck driver was certain he’d given a ride to a hitchhiking Lora Morris, a sighting discounted by her family. What was even more odd about this, was that Sergeant Munden traveled to Lake Charles, Louisiana on the Snedegar family’s dime to convince the trucker to withdraw the sighting (and threatened to charge the trucker with bigamy on an unrelated matter despite a blatant lack of jurisdiction) which to me is really weird and I have no idea why Munden did this. To my knowledge this was never investigated.
Now a few days after Lora who was 22 and the time she vanished from her rural Indiana home. Steven snedger walked into the sheriff's office and dumped $10,000 in cash from a brown grocery bag onto the desk of the astonished chief deputy.
Steve Snedegar knew Lora was dead the instant she disappeared. He told the cops so.He was convinced somebody grabbed his daughter to get back at him. He wanted dozens of people watched 24 hours a day. The Hancock County Sheriff's Office couldn't do it with a force of only 15 deputies. That's when Steve strode in with the money.and told the officer behind the desk to pay reserve officers to do it. Steve was acting so freaky that John Munden, then the chief deputy, just scooped up the cash and claimed that because of Steves behaviour that they used a lot of that 10 grand in cash to watch Steve himself.
Three weeks after Lora's disappearance, people started vanishing that her father suspected had killed her. The first to go was Tony Lambert, one of the pair who had tried to buy Steve's oil business. Steve hatched a scheme three weeks after Lora vanished to invite Lambert to an out-of-town business meeting and "work on him."The idea was for Steve to fly his plane to New Orleans, lure Lambert there on the pretext of making him manager of a new waste-oil business, then twist his arm for the truth about his involvement in Lora's death.
Steve would tell New Orleans authorities that he did, indeed, fly to New Orleans and meet for 30 minutes with Tony Lambert. He said Lambert denied having anything to do with Lora and left mad when he realized why he'd been snookered into coming.
See this is where things get weird though. Steve said he last saw Lambert speed away in a red Cadillac with a young blonde driver. Later, he would say it was a green with a blonde. Then it was a white one.
Much later, Munden would piece together another version from some of Steve's friends and relatives: The story is that Tony Lambert went for an airplane ride over the Gulf of Mexico with Steve and didn't return.
Then on April 15th, 1982 a farmhand tilling a cornfield approximately twelve miles from the Snedegar residence spotted something odd amid the stalks. At first glance he thought it was a deer carcass. however it turned out to be the Badly decomposed body of Lora Morris. She had been shot three times in the head with a .25 caliber revolver; her body— clad in a white tee-shirt and denim cutoff shorts—was found face up with her legs apart and her arms crossed.
Scattered shell casings were present at the scene leading Sergeant John Munden to tell the Greenfield Daily Reporter, “It’s my belief she was killed in the field.”
Although the medical examiner determined Lora had been killed shortly after her disappearance it’s not entirely certain her body was present in the cornfield the entire eight months she was missing. The landowner was adamant her body hadn’t been visible when the field was harvested in late October/early November, and there is also the matter of the sobbing “sexual innuendo” phone call placed—allegedly by Lora—three days after her disappearance.
It’s possible her parents and ex-husband misidentified her voice and the farmer and his thresher somehow managed to miss her body. However I’m not convinced that this is the case.
Things got worse however because Steve still suspected Lambert's partner, Tony McCullough. In having some type of involvement in his daughters death.One day in 1985 McCullough got a telephone call at his Indiana home from a man named Gary Stafford who advertised his services in Soldier of Fortune magazine.
Now solider of fortune was a monthly U.S. magazine published from 1975 to 2016. It is best described as a mercenary type magazine devoted to worldwide reporting of wars, including conventional warfare, low-intensity warfare, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism. It was published by Omega Group Ltd., based in Boulder, Colorado.Which became an extremely controversial magazine because many would be hitmen advertised their services in the ads section of this magazine and several high profile murders have been attributed to solider of fortune. Such as the case of the "Gun for Hire" lawsuits.
During the late 1980s, Soldier of Fortune was sued in civil court several times for having published classified advertisements of services by private mercenaries. In 1987, Norman Norwood, of Arkansas, sued SOF magazine, because of injuries he suffered during a murder attempt by two men hired via a "Gun for Hire" advertisement in the magazine. The US District Court denied the magazine's motion for summary judgment based upon the Constitutional right of free speech under the First Amendment. The Court said, "reasonable jurors could find that the advertisement posed a substantial risk of harm" and that "gun for hire" ads were not the type of speech intended for protection under the First Amendment. In the end, Norwood and Soldier of Fortune magazine settled his lawsuit out of court.
In February 1985, John Wayne Hearn, a Vietnam veteran, shot and killed Sandra Black for a $10,000 payment from her husband, Robert Black. Black communicated with Hearn through a classified advertisement published in Soldier of Fortune, wherein Hearn solicited "high-risk assignments. U.S. or overseas". In 1989, Sandra Black's son Gary and her mother Marjorie Eimann filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against SOF magazine and its parent publishing company Omega Group Ltd., seeking $21 million in redress of their grievance.
The jury found Soldier of Fortune grossly negligent in publishing Hearn's classified ad for implicit illegal activity (murder) and awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 million in damages. However, in 1990 the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the verdict, saying that the standard of conduct imposed upon the magazine was too high, because the advertisement was ambiguously worded.
In 1989, four men were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in the 1985 contract killing of Richard Braun, of Atlanta, Georgia. The killers were hired through a classified services advertisement published in SOF magazine that read: "GUN FOR HIRE". Braun's sons filed a civil lawsuit against the magazine and a jury found in their favor, awarding them $12.37 million in damages, which the judge later reduced to $4.37 million. Nonetheless, in 1992 the United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judgement of the jury, saying "the publisher could recognize the offer of criminal activity as readily as its readers, obviously, did". The Brauns and SOF magazine settled the wrongful-death lawsuit for $200,000. One consequence of the lost lawsuits was the magazine's suspension of publication of classified advertisements for mercenary work, either in the U.S. or overseas.
Tony said that the guy told him his name was Gary Stafford, and I've been hired to kill you.' McCullough says, 'Are you some nut?' And Stafford says, 'I'm quite serious. How would you like to continue to live?' "McCullough said he'd love to."Stafford then demanded $10,000. In order for him to remain alive. McCullough called the FBI. Stafford did two years in federal prison for extortion.
This is the story Stafford told FBI agents: He was hired by a guy from Florida to get rid of a man he felt was involved in the disappearance and death of his daughter four years earlier. For that, he got $5,000 in front money. He was to get another $20,000 after proving McCullough was dead.
The cops then honed in on Steven snedger and questioned him. He smiled and shrugged but was tight lipped about the whole incident.
The next Snedegar family associate to meet a mysterious end was Charles Darwin Smith.He was described as being in his early 20s at the time of his 1982 disappearance.Chuck Smith had once worked as a truck driver for J&S Oil, the Snedegar family business, but his employment had been terminated for reasons unknown.
Chuck—then employed at a Kocolene Service Station in Greenfield—told Trudy Snedegar he’d had an odd encounter with Lora the day before she vanished.
On the afternoon of August 9th, Chuck said,Lora, a frequent customer, stopped by to purchase gas in the company of a scraggly-haired, heavily-tattooed man—according to Chuck, she appeared terrified.
For reasons that remain unclear, Trudy allegedly suggested Smith keep this information hush-hush however word of the Kocolene encounter eventually leaked to law enforcement, however.
By the time the scraggly-haired stranger story reached the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department Chuck Smith was no longer employed at the Greenfield service station.
According to Sergeant Munden, at this juncture Trudy Snedegar became frantic to obtain Chuck’s unlisted phone number, claiming she had a job opportunity for him.
The second time Trudy stopped by the station to badger Munden for the information the sergeant acquiesced to her demands, sealing Chuck’s fate. Munden then made the now famous quote about how his dumb ass gave the number to trudy.
A few days later Chuck Smith received a phone call from a man who identified himself as John Rogers, owner of the John Rogers Trucking Company in Knoxville, Tennessee. Rogers said he’d received Chuck’s contact information from Steve Snedegar—he was calling to offer Chuck steady employment and a complimentary bus ticket to Tennessee, he claimed.
On March 28th Chuck’s father-in-law dropped him at the bus depot
en route to his new job at a company investigators learned did not exist.
Charles Darwin Smith was never seen again.
When detectives visited the bus station they learned the ticket seller’s name was John Rogers; the purchaser had likely noted the employee’s ID tag, investigators theorized, and repurposed the name for the nonexistent trucking company.
When questioned, Steve Snedegar denied he’d given Chuck Smith’s information to anyone, and apparently law enforcement attempts to tie the Snedegars to Chuck’s disappearance ended there. but detectives have never revealed the physical description of the person who purchased Chuck Smith’s ticket to nowhere, and Tony Lambert and Charles Darwin Smith have never been entered into NamUs,
the federal missing persons database.
There was another person connected with Steven snedger that also disappeared and was never found a guy by the name of James A. Wilkes, Steve’s right-hand man at J&S Oil. Wilkes hasn’t been seen since the mid-1980s, but no missing persons report has ever been filed and he too is absent from NamUs. The only publically-available information regarding James A. Wilkes —aside from the fact that he is missing—is his approximate birth year, 1952, and his last place of residence: Charlottesville, Indiana.
Trudy and Steve had divorced in 1983 but continued to live together in Astor, Florida. Sometime during the summer of 1986—the specific date is uncertain—Trudy told her daughter Brenda, Steve had awoken her the last five consecutive nights by jamming a gun against her head and threatening to pull the trigger. Brenda, visiting her parents in Florida, was apparently unfazed by this information; and so was Trudy, apparently, since after five nights of terror she and Steve hit the town for an evening of country-western dancing.Brenda sat with her as she dressed to go. As they left, Brenda reminded her mother to take her purse. Trudy said Steve had enough money.
Investigators believe the night of boot-scootin’ was Trudy’s last; although the genesis of this information is unclear, investigators would subsequently hear rumors Steve and an associate took a plastic-wrapped body for a one-way boat ride on the Ocklawaha River a few days later. The earthly remains of Trudy Snedegar, age forty-nine at the time of her disappearance, have never been located.
The day after Trudy’s disappearance Steve—after spending the morning sobbing in his office—led his visiting daughter Brenda to his Mercedes parked in his driveway. Later the same day, Steve opened the trunk of his Mercedes and showed Brenda a suitcase containing tall stacks of wrapped, large-denomination bills - $1 million. Steve told his daughter Brenda to retrieve the cash if he is arrested which never happened, and the cash, like Trudy, Tony Lambert, Chuck Smith and John A. Wilkes, is never seen again. No one knows where that money went or who took it. There was a rumour floating around that Steve's live-in girlfriend made off with it but this has never been substantiated.
The investigation into Trudy’s disappearance was stunted from the onset;
when queried regarding his wife’s whereabouts Steve alleges Trudy left him,
and for reasons I cannot fathom none of the couple’s three children—Brenda included—bothered to report their mother missing for nearly a year.
When now-Captain John Munden learns Trudy left behind her purse, however,
he was certain she is sending him a message—no woman voluntarily goes missing without taking her purse, he told Trudy when her daughter Lora vanished.
Both Lake and Indiana authorities knew Trudy was missing. They coaxed Brenda to make a report so they could begin probing her mother's disappearance. Finally - a year after she vanished - Brenda and her then-husband traveled to Indiana to report Trudy missing.
The investigators believe Trudy and her daughter fought over Lora's planned reconciliation with her husband, and Trudy accidentally killed her during the tussle.
Lora's truck was half-packed with her belongings. She was found with three .25-caliber slugs in her head. One very interesting facet was that Trudy had a .25-caliber gun although According to police it was discovered in 1994 that Trudy carried the same type of gun that was used to kill Lora in her purse. Soon after Lora’s disappearance, the gun disappeared. To my knowledge it was never located. So no forensic tests were able to be carried out to determine if that gun was used to kill lora. To me the timing of the gun going missing and the fact that lora was killed with the same calibre as the type trudy used to carry and the whole abusive family dynamic. Leads me to believe that trudy killed lora and covered it up.
It was rumoured that Trudy's father helped her dispose of the body. This is based on the fact that Munden traced a mysterious whirlwind trip by her father to the Howard Hughes Motel near Lora's Greenfield home after a 6 a.m. call from Trudy on the day Lora vanished. Why he took this trip on such short notice has never been explained.
Detectives thought at the time that that Trudy later engineered the disappearance of Chuck Smith, the truck driver who took the never-ending bus ride for a fictitious job. Munden thinks the man Smith saw with Lora before she vanished was threatening Lora.
Had Trudy disposed of Lora's purse, deputies would have written Lora's disappearance off as party-girl-looking-for-a-good-time.
That's why a little jolt went through Munden when he first saw the report about Trudy's disappearance. There it was - Trudy had left her purse.
"I think she deliberately left her pocketbook at home that night as a sign," Munden said. "She knew she made that mistake with Lora, and it alerted police. I think she did it on purpose that night because she knew she and Steve would argue."
But why would they argue? Munden thought that Steve somehow found out for sure on the night Trudy vanished. The use had killed lora and was responsible for everything that took place afterwards.
Now Steven snedger wasn’t the only one to have a watchful eye cast upon him. It seemed the police in this case weren’t immune from scandal and it gets really weird when you look deeper into it.
There was the five-way officer sex tape and the deputy murder-suicide that many residents felt was a (cleverly-staged) deputy murder-murder. Put simply a plague of scandals descended upon the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department and an investigation by the local prosecutor’s office followed.
Captain John Munden, as it happens got caught up in a big scandal himself.
He married the wife of a murder victim whose slaying he himself was investigating.
Now it turned out that his new wife Nieves Lindner Munden got busted selling cocaine at which point he opted to retire from the force. the subsequent investigation found no evidence Captain Munden was aware of or participated in his wife’s criminal activity, for which she served a brief prison sentence.
In 1989 a law enforcement official in the Snedegars’ adopted hometown of Astor, Florida learned Steve was dying of cancer. Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Lynn Wagner—tasked with the investigation into Trudy’s disappearance—arranged to meet with him for coffee.
Steve promised to leave a post-mortem confession tying up the loose ends in the assorted crimes after his death.
Malignant melanoma felled the Snedegar patriarch the following year—no written confession was ever located
but a large bonfire was spotted behind his home in the days after Steve’s death.
Many investigators believe the timing was not coincidental. No one has ever figured out who started the bonfire or why.
However Not every scrap of paper in the Snedegar home was incinerated in the post-funeral fire. while Steve’s children were packing up his belongings they discovered a map in Lora’s funeral guestbook—a large X marked a spot near the family’s Astor home. Certain they’d discovered the gravesite of Trudy Snedegar—or John A. Wilkes, or Tony Lambert, or hell, maybe even Chuck Smith—Lake County officials launched an intensive dig of the Snedegar property.nothing was found at the location.
The last gasp of the Lora Morris murder investigation transpired in August, 1994;
although the explanation for his tardy notification is unknown, William “Buck” Estes, a Snedegar family friend, informed investigators he’d concealed a note in Lora’s coffin at Trudy Snedegar’s behest. Hancock County detectives dug up Lora’s remains but have never revealed the contents of Trudy’s last note to her daughter.
And that is where the story ends. With no real clear answers to what happened to these people and we still have no clear idea who killed lora or why.
Source: https://ididitforjodie.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/hoosier-killer-lora-morris-an-indiana-murder-unsolved/
source: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1994-03-27-9403260241-story.html
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/i0yepf/after_steve_snedegars_daughter_lora_was_murdered/
Now a few days after Lora who was 22 and the time she vanished from her rural Indiana home. Steven snedger walked into the sheriff's office and dumped $10,000 in cash from a brown grocery bag onto the desk of the astonished chief deputy.
Steve Snedegar knew Lora was dead the instant she disappeared. He told the cops so.He was convinced somebody grabbed his daughter to get back at him. He wanted dozens of people watched 24 hours a day. The Hancock County Sheriff's Office couldn't do it with a force of only 15 deputies. That's when Steve strode in with the money.and told the officer behind the desk to pay reserve officers to do it. Steve was acting so freaky that John Munden, then the chief deputy, just scooped up the cash and claimed that because of Steves behaviour that they used a lot of that 10 grand in cash to watch Steve himself.
Three weeks after Lora's disappearance, people started vanishing that her father suspected had killed her. The first to go was Tony Lambert, one of the pair who had tried to buy Steve's oil business. Steve hatched a scheme three weeks after Lora vanished to invite Lambert to an out-of-town business meeting and "work on him."The idea was for Steve to fly his plane to New Orleans, lure Lambert there on the pretext of making him manager of a new waste-oil business, then twist his arm for the truth about his involvement in Lora's death.
Steve would tell New Orleans authorities that he did, indeed, fly to New Orleans and meet for 30 minutes with Tony Lambert. He said Lambert denied having anything to do with Lora and left mad when he realized why he'd been snookered into coming.
See this is where things get weird though. Steve said he last saw Lambert speed away in a red Cadillac with a young blonde driver. Later, he would say it was a green with a blonde. Then it was a white one.
Much later, Munden would piece together another version from some of Steve's friends and relatives: The story is that Tony Lambert went for an airplane ride over the Gulf of Mexico with Steve and didn't return.
Then on April 15th, 1982 a farmhand tilling a cornfield approximately twelve miles from the Snedegar residence spotted something odd amid the stalks. At first glance he thought it was a deer carcass. however it turned out to be the Badly decomposed body of Lora Morris. She had been shot three times in the head with a .25 caliber revolver; her body— clad in a white tee-shirt and denim cutoff shorts—was found face up with her legs apart and her arms crossed.
Scattered shell casings were present at the scene leading Sergeant John Munden to tell the Greenfield Daily Reporter, “It’s my belief she was killed in the field.”
Although the medical examiner determined Lora had been killed shortly after her disappearance it’s not entirely certain her body was present in the cornfield the entire eight months she was missing. The landowner was adamant her body hadn’t been visible when the field was harvested in late October/early November, and there is also the matter of the sobbing “sexual innuendo” phone call placed—allegedly by Lora—three days after her disappearance.
It’s possible her parents and ex-husband misidentified her voice and the farmer and his thresher somehow managed to miss her body. However I’m not convinced that this is the case.
Things got worse however because Steve still suspected Lambert's partner, Tony McCullough. In having some type of involvement in his daughters death.One day in 1985 McCullough got a telephone call at his Indiana home from a man named Gary Stafford who advertised his services in Soldier of Fortune magazine.
Now solider of fortune was a monthly U.S. magazine published from 1975 to 2016. It is best described as a mercenary type magazine devoted to worldwide reporting of wars, including conventional warfare, low-intensity warfare, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism. It was published by Omega Group Ltd., based in Boulder, Colorado.Which became an extremely controversial magazine because many would be hitmen advertised their services in the ads section of this magazine and several high profile murders have been attributed to solider of fortune. Such as the case of the "Gun for Hire" lawsuits.
During the late 1980s, Soldier of Fortune was sued in civil court several times for having published classified advertisements of services by private mercenaries. In 1987, Norman Norwood, of Arkansas, sued SOF magazine, because of injuries he suffered during a murder attempt by two men hired via a "Gun for Hire" advertisement in the magazine. The US District Court denied the magazine's motion for summary judgment based upon the Constitutional right of free speech under the First Amendment. The Court said, "reasonable jurors could find that the advertisement posed a substantial risk of harm" and that "gun for hire" ads were not the type of speech intended for protection under the First Amendment. In the end, Norwood and Soldier of Fortune magazine settled his lawsuit out of court.
In February 1985, John Wayne Hearn, a Vietnam veteran, shot and killed Sandra Black for a $10,000 payment from her husband, Robert Black. Black communicated with Hearn through a classified advertisement published in Soldier of Fortune, wherein Hearn solicited "high-risk assignments. U.S. or overseas". In 1989, Sandra Black's son Gary and her mother Marjorie Eimann filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against SOF magazine and its parent publishing company Omega Group Ltd., seeking $21 million in redress of their grievance.
The jury found Soldier of Fortune grossly negligent in publishing Hearn's classified ad for implicit illegal activity (murder) and awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 million in damages. However, in 1990 the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the verdict, saying that the standard of conduct imposed upon the magazine was too high, because the advertisement was ambiguously worded.
In 1989, four men were convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in the 1985 contract killing of Richard Braun, of Atlanta, Georgia. The killers were hired through a classified services advertisement published in SOF magazine that read: "GUN FOR HIRE". Braun's sons filed a civil lawsuit against the magazine and a jury found in their favor, awarding them $12.37 million in damages, which the judge later reduced to $4.37 million. Nonetheless, in 1992 the United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the judgement of the jury, saying "the publisher could recognize the offer of criminal activity as readily as its readers, obviously, did". The Brauns and SOF magazine settled the wrongful-death lawsuit for $200,000. One consequence of the lost lawsuits was the magazine's suspension of publication of classified advertisements for mercenary work, either in the U.S. or overseas.
Tony said that the guy told him his name was Gary Stafford, and I've been hired to kill you.' McCullough says, 'Are you some nut?' And Stafford says, 'I'm quite serious. How would you like to continue to live?' "McCullough said he'd love to."Stafford then demanded $10,000. In order for him to remain alive. McCullough called the FBI. Stafford did two years in federal prison for extortion.
This is the story Stafford told FBI agents: He was hired by a guy from Florida to get rid of a man he felt was involved in the disappearance and death of his daughter four years earlier. For that, he got $5,000 in front money. He was to get another $20,000 after proving McCullough was dead.
The cops then honed in on Steven snedger and questioned him. He smiled and shrugged but was tight lipped about the whole incident.
The next Snedegar family associate to meet a mysterious end was Charles Darwin Smith.He was described as being in his early 20s at the time of his 1982 disappearance.Chuck Smith had once worked as a truck driver for J&S Oil, the Snedegar family business, but his employment had been terminated for reasons unknown.
Chuck—then employed at a Kocolene Service Station in Greenfield—told Trudy Snedegar he’d had an odd encounter with Lora the day before she vanished.
On the afternoon of August 9th, Chuck said,Lora, a frequent customer, stopped by to purchase gas in the company of a scraggly-haired, heavily-tattooed man—according to Chuck, she appeared terrified.
For reasons that remain unclear, Trudy allegedly suggested Smith keep this information hush-hush however word of the Kocolene encounter eventually leaked to law enforcement, however.
By the time the scraggly-haired stranger story reached the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department Chuck Smith was no longer employed at the Greenfield service station.
According to Sergeant Munden, at this juncture Trudy Snedegar became frantic to obtain Chuck’s unlisted phone number, claiming she had a job opportunity for him.
The second time Trudy stopped by the station to badger Munden for the information the sergeant acquiesced to her demands, sealing Chuck’s fate. Munden then made the now famous quote about how his dumb ass gave the number to trudy.
A few days later Chuck Smith received a phone call from a man who identified himself as John Rogers, owner of the John Rogers Trucking Company in Knoxville, Tennessee. Rogers said he’d received Chuck’s contact information from Steve Snedegar—he was calling to offer Chuck steady employment and a complimentary bus ticket to Tennessee, he claimed.
On March 28th Chuck’s father-in-law dropped him at the bus depot
en route to his new job at a company investigators learned did not exist.
Charles Darwin Smith was never seen again.
When detectives visited the bus station they learned the ticket seller’s name was John Rogers; the purchaser had likely noted the employee’s ID tag, investigators theorized, and repurposed the name for the nonexistent trucking company.
When questioned, Steve Snedegar denied he’d given Chuck Smith’s information to anyone, and apparently law enforcement attempts to tie the Snedegars to Chuck’s disappearance ended there. but detectives have never revealed the physical description of the person who purchased Chuck Smith’s ticket to nowhere, and Tony Lambert and Charles Darwin Smith have never been entered into NamUs,
the federal missing persons database.
There was another person connected with Steven snedger that also disappeared and was never found a guy by the name of James A. Wilkes, Steve’s right-hand man at J&S Oil. Wilkes hasn’t been seen since the mid-1980s, but no missing persons report has ever been filed and he too is absent from NamUs. The only publically-available information regarding James A. Wilkes —aside from the fact that he is missing—is his approximate birth year, 1952, and his last place of residence: Charlottesville, Indiana.
Trudy and Steve had divorced in 1983 but continued to live together in Astor, Florida. Sometime during the summer of 1986—the specific date is uncertain—Trudy told her daughter Brenda, Steve had awoken her the last five consecutive nights by jamming a gun against her head and threatening to pull the trigger. Brenda, visiting her parents in Florida, was apparently unfazed by this information; and so was Trudy, apparently, since after five nights of terror she and Steve hit the town for an evening of country-western dancing.Brenda sat with her as she dressed to go. As they left, Brenda reminded her mother to take her purse. Trudy said Steve had enough money.
Investigators believe the night of boot-scootin’ was Trudy’s last; although the genesis of this information is unclear, investigators would subsequently hear rumors Steve and an associate took a plastic-wrapped body for a one-way boat ride on the Ocklawaha River a few days later. The earthly remains of Trudy Snedegar, age forty-nine at the time of her disappearance, have never been located.
The day after Trudy’s disappearance Steve—after spending the morning sobbing in his office—led his visiting daughter Brenda to his Mercedes parked in his driveway. Later the same day, Steve opened the trunk of his Mercedes and showed Brenda a suitcase containing tall stacks of wrapped, large-denomination bills - $1 million. Steve told his daughter Brenda to retrieve the cash if he is arrested which never happened, and the cash, like Trudy, Tony Lambert, Chuck Smith and John A. Wilkes, is never seen again. No one knows where that money went or who took it. There was a rumour floating around that Steve's live-in girlfriend made off with it but this has never been substantiated.
The investigation into Trudy’s disappearance was stunted from the onset;
when queried regarding his wife’s whereabouts Steve alleges Trudy left him,
and for reasons I cannot fathom none of the couple’s three children—Brenda included—bothered to report their mother missing for nearly a year.
When now-Captain John Munden learns Trudy left behind her purse, however,
he was certain she is sending him a message—no woman voluntarily goes missing without taking her purse, he told Trudy when her daughter Lora vanished.
Both Lake and Indiana authorities knew Trudy was missing. They coaxed Brenda to make a report so they could begin probing her mother's disappearance. Finally - a year after she vanished - Brenda and her then-husband traveled to Indiana to report Trudy missing.
The investigators believe Trudy and her daughter fought over Lora's planned reconciliation with her husband, and Trudy accidentally killed her during the tussle.
Lora's truck was half-packed with her belongings. She was found with three .25-caliber slugs in her head. One very interesting facet was that Trudy had a .25-caliber gun although According to police it was discovered in 1994 that Trudy carried the same type of gun that was used to kill Lora in her purse. Soon after Lora’s disappearance, the gun disappeared. To my knowledge it was never located. So no forensic tests were able to be carried out to determine if that gun was used to kill lora. To me the timing of the gun going missing and the fact that lora was killed with the same calibre as the type trudy used to carry and the whole abusive family dynamic. Leads me to believe that trudy killed lora and covered it up.
It was rumoured that Trudy's father helped her dispose of the body. This is based on the fact that Munden traced a mysterious whirlwind trip by her father to the Howard Hughes Motel near Lora's Greenfield home after a 6 a.m. call from Trudy on the day Lora vanished. Why he took this trip on such short notice has never been explained.
Detectives thought at the time that that Trudy later engineered the disappearance of Chuck Smith, the truck driver who took the never-ending bus ride for a fictitious job. Munden thinks the man Smith saw with Lora before she vanished was threatening Lora.
Had Trudy disposed of Lora's purse, deputies would have written Lora's disappearance off as party-girl-looking-for-a-good-time.
That's why a little jolt went through Munden when he first saw the report about Trudy's disappearance. There it was - Trudy had left her purse.
"I think she deliberately left her pocketbook at home that night as a sign," Munden said. "She knew she made that mistake with Lora, and it alerted police. I think she did it on purpose that night because she knew she and Steve would argue."
But why would they argue? Munden thought that Steve somehow found out for sure on the night Trudy vanished. The use had killed lora and was responsible for everything that took place afterwards.
Now Steven snedger wasn’t the only one to have a watchful eye cast upon him. It seemed the police in this case weren’t immune from scandal and it gets really weird when you look deeper into it.
There was the five-way officer sex tape and the deputy murder-suicide that many residents felt was a (cleverly-staged) deputy murder-murder. Put simply a plague of scandals descended upon the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department and an investigation by the local prosecutor’s office followed.
Captain John Munden, as it happens got caught up in a big scandal himself.
He married the wife of a murder victim whose slaying he himself was investigating.
Now it turned out that his new wife Nieves Lindner Munden got busted selling cocaine at which point he opted to retire from the force. the subsequent investigation found no evidence Captain Munden was aware of or participated in his wife’s criminal activity, for which she served a brief prison sentence.
In 1989 a law enforcement official in the Snedegars’ adopted hometown of Astor, Florida learned Steve was dying of cancer. Lake County Sheriff’s Detective Lynn Wagner—tasked with the investigation into Trudy’s disappearance—arranged to meet with him for coffee.
Steve promised to leave a post-mortem confession tying up the loose ends in the assorted crimes after his death.
Malignant melanoma felled the Snedegar patriarch the following year—no written confession was ever located
but a large bonfire was spotted behind his home in the days after Steve’s death.
Many investigators believe the timing was not coincidental. No one has ever figured out who started the bonfire or why.
However Not every scrap of paper in the Snedegar home was incinerated in the post-funeral fire. while Steve’s children were packing up his belongings they discovered a map in Lora’s funeral guestbook—a large X marked a spot near the family’s Astor home. Certain they’d discovered the gravesite of Trudy Snedegar—or John A. Wilkes, or Tony Lambert, or hell, maybe even Chuck Smith—Lake County officials launched an intensive dig of the Snedegar property.nothing was found at the location.
The last gasp of the Lora Morris murder investigation transpired in August, 1994;
although the explanation for his tardy notification is unknown, William “Buck” Estes, a Snedegar family friend, informed investigators he’d concealed a note in Lora’s coffin at Trudy Snedegar’s behest. Hancock County detectives dug up Lora’s remains but have never revealed the contents of Trudy’s last note to her daughter.
And that is where the story ends. With no real clear answers to what happened to these people and we still have no clear idea who killed lora or why.
Source: https://ididitforjodie.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/hoosier-killer-lora-morris-an-indiana-murder-unsolved/
source: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-1994-03-27-9403260241-story.html
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/i0yepf/after_steve_snedegars_daughter_lora_was_murdered/
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