Man seeks help from hunters to find wife

Kerry Messer has spent years lobbying politicians on behalf of the pro-life movement.

Now he is lobbying hunters to help search for his missing wife.

The Ste. Genevieve County, Missouri, man told police he went to bed about midnight July 8. Four hours later, he woke to find his wife of nearly 35 years, Lynn Messer, gone without a trace.

Since then, law enforcement agencies, volunteer search-and-rescue organizations and friends have searched more than 5,000 acres, including the entirety of the Messers' roughly 300-acre property near Festus, Missouri, said Detective Austin Clark of the Ste. Genevieve County Sheriff's Department.

Humans, horses, dogs and even a fixed-wing aircraft from the Missouri State Highway Patrol have been involved in the search for Lynn Messer, Clark and Kerry Messer said.

"We did over 100 searches, but we had to stop when deer season started," Kerry Messer said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

Now Messer is trying to enlist hunters to keep an eye out for his wife -- or anything that might belong to her -- as they head into the woods for deer season.

"Every deer season, every year, there's always a national news story about hunters finding somebody's remains," he said. "... For every one that finds a person, there's got to be dozens that are walking past a shoe or a pair of glasses or a piece of clothing."

Messer said he hopes to use his political connections to create a campaign to educate hunters about what to do if they see something unexpected.

"We're just shooting in the dark. ... It'd be better if we could come up with a way to build a partnership with the hundreds of thousands of people that are going to be out in the woods," he said.

For now, he is asking anyone who sees anything out of the ordinary to call the sheriff's department.

"It may not be my wife. It may be a child's shoe. But there's a difference between an article of clothing that clearly doesn't belong in that location ... and a 30-year-old beer can," Messer said.

While Messer appeals to hunters for help, authorities continue to investigate.

"We are still actively involved in it," Clark said.

That involvement includes administering lie-detector tests to some members of the Messer family, he said.

"I will say that some family members did" submit to the tests, Clark said. "I'm not going to comment on what the outcome was."

Kerry Messer didn't comment, either, citing concerns about interfering with the investigation.

"We're not commenting on anything law enforcement's doing, because we don't want to do anything to impede them," he said. "They need to do their job, and I support whatever they need to do," he said.

Clark said lie-detector tests are common in cases like Messer's.

"In any kind of investigation like this, we always focus the most attention on the people that were with her last, but we're not ruling anything out," he said. "Nothing has been ruled out at this time."

That includes the possibility that Lynn Messer could be found alive and well.

"Right now, I can't say there's foul play involved," Clark said.

Kerry Messer said he suspects a recently prescribed pain medication might have affected his wife mentally.

The night before she vanished, Lynn Messer had a perfectly normal evening, teaching a children's vacation Bible school class before coming home to work on craft projects and make plans for a couple of fairs and an upcoming church picnic, her husband said.

"The only thing she did differently, she took some of her newer pain pills she had gotten from the pharmacy," he said.

Then, sometime between midnight and 4 a.m., she vanished into a dark, wet night.

"It was a light rain, but it was a steady light rain with complete cloud cover," Messer said. "There was no stars or moon, and it was pitch-dark, but she walked away. ... I just do not believe she was in her right mind."

A few weeks before she disappeared, Lynn Messer broke her little toe, and while the injury was healing well enough for her to walk on it -- albeit with a limp -- she wore a protective boot to Bible school to keep small children from stepping on it, her husband said.

The injury, which "never slowed her down," would not have been enough to keep her from walking the six and a half miles from the couple's farm to Interstate 55, he said.

From there, she could have caught a ride with someone and left the area, Messer said.

Shortly after her disappearance, a friend set up a "Find Lynn Messer" Facebook page to coordinate volunteer efforts. The page, which by Wednesday had 6,584 likes, has turned into something akin to a blog where Kerry Messer posts photographs and personal anecdotes about his wife as a means of keeping people's attention on her, he said.

One post recounts the couple's "mini-debates" over who loved whom more; another shows "my first photo of my bride-to-be," a shot of her running in a cross-country meet at age 15.

From the posts emerges a picture of a quirky but practical woman who married her high-school sweetheart and never looked back.

In one post, Kerry Messer described his wife's standoff with an indignant owl for possession of a duck the raptor apparently had just decapitated.

"What an opportunity! Kerry has not come up with a duck. No one else has offered her a duck. Obviously the Lord has just laid this fresh-killed duck right in front of her, so she can take it home and cook it! Just as she has been talking about wanting the last few weeks," he wrote.

Another post recounted the couple's first argument, about a week into their marriage, which centered on the proper technique for preparing a box of macaroni and cheese. Lynn Messer settled the matter by taking charge of the cooking, with the understanding that her husband would keep his culinary advice to himself -- an agreement that continued until the night she disappeared, Kerry Messer wrote.

"We've had a very unusual life. We've had a very fun life, and she loves it," he said Wednesday. "She loves the farm. She loves everything."

epriddy@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

Ste. Genevieve County, MO