Solved cold cases in Missouri
3 documented cases.
Kenneth Atchison
Kenneth Atchison, a 57-year-old man known to friends as Doc, was killed on February 8, 1993, after he went to the Bel-Ridge, Missouri, home of Gary Muehlberg in St. Louis County to complete a car deal, carrying several thousand dollars in cash. When Atchison disappeared, a tip about belongings being hauled to a landfill led investigators to search Muehlberg's property, where they discovered Atchison's body sealed inside a homemade plywood coffin in the basement. Muehlberg fled but was located and detained in Illinois, and in September 1995 a St. Louis County jury convicted him of first-degree murder and armed criminal action; he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Decades later, while Muehlberg was incarcerated for the Atchison killing, DNA evidence linked him to a separate string of early-1990s killings of women across the St. Louis area attributed to the so-called Package Killer, and he pleaded guilty to four of those murders.
Patricia Jones
Patricia Jones, a 23-year-old Internal Revenue Service file clerk and mother of two from the Kansas City area, was lured from her home near Independence, Missouri, in May 1960 and shot four times with a .22-caliber pistol; her body was found in a wooded area on May 27, 1960. Suspicion fell on Sharon Kinne, a young housewife who had been having an affair with Patricia's husband, but the pistol used in the killing could not be found, and a jury acquitted Kinne of the murder in 1961. The case appeared closed by that acquittal. The decisive break came years later and far away: after Kinne shot a man to death in a Mexico City hotel room in September 1964, police recovered a High Standard .22 pistol from her room. Kansas City police ballistics testing proved that this was the same gun that had fired the bullets that killed Patricia Jones, and the gun's serial number matched an empty gun box found in Kinne's home before her trial. Because Kinne had already been acquitted, double jeopardy barred her from ever being retried for the Jones murder. Kinne was convicted of the Mexico killing, escaped from prison in 1969, and vanished. In January 2025, Kansas City police and the Jackson County Sheriff's Office announced that Kinne had lived for decades under an alias in Canada and had died there in 2022, formally identifying her as the killer of Patricia Jones.
Ricky Ridings
Ricky Ridings, a 27-year-old man from St. Peters, Missouri, was reported missing on June 30, 1981, and was found dead on July 8, 1981 inside a vehicle parked alongside Little Tavern Creek outside Portland, in Callaway County, killed by a shotgun wound to the head. The case stayed cold for 36 years. The break did not come from DNA: in June 2017, Conrad Schmitt III, who was already serving a life sentence for an unrelated 1998 first-degree murder, was overheard on a recorded prison phone call admitting his involvement in the killing. Investigators reopened the file, exhumed Ridings' body in 2018 to reevaluate the evidence, and interviewed further witnesses. A Callaway County grand jury indicted Schmitt for capital murder in May 2018, and in 2023 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to an additional 10 years.