Branson Kayne Perry was born on February 24, 1981, in the small town of Skidmore (with less than 300 inhabitants) in the state of Missouri (USA). He grew up there too. The teenager's parents divorced and Branson moved to live with his father, Bob, at 304 West Oak Street in Skidmore. In 1999, the boy graduated from Nodaway-Holt High School in nearby Graham.
Then he worked part-time in the local traveling zoo or as a roofer. Despite the fact that Perry suffered from tachycardia, a disease involving a rapid heartbeat, he was active and liked to play sports. As a child, he trained in the eastern martial art called Hapkido. He obtained a black belt in it. He also practiced weightlifting.
Interestingly, Branson's disappearance was not the only tragedy that affected his family and the town where she lived. Perry's cousin, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, was murdered on December 16, 2004, at her home in Skidmore. The perpetrator was Lisa Marie Montgomery, who strangled Bobbie, who was eight months pregnant and removed the unborn baby from her belly. Fortunately, the newborn was taken away from Montgomery and handed over to the father. The perpetrator of this gruesome crime was sentenced to death, which was carried out on January 13, 2021. Montgomery was the fourth woman in US history to die in this way.
On April 7, 2001, Branson Perry visited his neighbor, Jason Biermann (according to some Bierman sources), who was supposed to give him an unidentified drug. Following ingestion of an undefined drug, Perry reportedly stripped naked and began dancing at his neighbor's house. He then shaved his pubic hair and "participated in sexual activity" with Biermann.
The next day, already sober and humiliated, Perry told his father about the whole situation, who was furious. While he had always suspected his son was gay, Bob reportedly got very upset with Biermann for giving him drugs and then sexually abusing his son. He also allegedly wanted to "teach" Jason. However, a confrontation never took place. As far as we know, Biermann has never been officially recognized as a suspect in the case. It is also unclear how he reacted to Branson's disappearance.
On the afternoon of April 11, 2001, Perry invited his friend Jena Crawford to his home. The girl was asked to help clean the interior because Branson's father, who had recently been hospitalized, was due to return home. At the same time, two mechanics, whose identities had not been revealed to the public, were outside tinkering with Bob's car. The car needed a new alternator.
Suddenly the 20-year-old went to one of the rooms, took something from it (I don't know what it was), and went outside, and after a while, he came back. After cleaning, Crawford took a shower. As she left the bathroom, she saw one of the mechanics rummaging through the kitchen cupboard. When she asked what she was looking for, the man dodged the answer and went outside.
Around 3 p.m. the girl looked out the window. She saw her friend leave the house then, so she shouted at him, "Branson, what are you doing?" Perry replied, "I'm going to put down the jumper cables and then I want to run a little." I'll be back in a few minutes. " Then he went towards the shed next to the house. It was the last time the 20-year-old was seen.
The next day, April 12, Perry's grandmother Jo Ann Stinnett decided to visit Bob at the hospital. At one point, she asked the man if Branson had come to visit the previous evening. The boy's father denied it. This was somewhat disturbing as Branson visited his father every night while he was in the hospital.
Jo Ann then went to her granddaughter's house. To her surprise, she found no one inside and the door had not been closed. The woman was seriously upset because she thought it was an unusual situation. Stinnett returned to her home and for the next several days she tried to telephone her grandson. Her efforts proved unsuccessful. So the boy's grandmother called Branson's mother, Rebecca Klino. It turned out then that the woman had no contact with her son for several days. Bob, on the other hand, was discharged from the hospital a few days later than planned. Upon his return, his parents and grandmother reported Branson missing. This happened (according to various sources) on April 16 or 17, which is a few days after he was last seen. The search operation was conducted by the Nodaway County Police. The area was checked within a radius of about 24 km from the place where the 20-year-old lived. Fields, farms, and abandoned buildings were searched, but their efforts proved fruitless. Police were unable to locate Perry's jumper cables while searching the property. Interestingly, two weeks later they were found.
Over a hundred people were questioned over the disappearance of Branson over the next month and a half. Jena, the last person to see him, told law enforcement that Perry had recently experimented with marijuana and amphetamines. A family member told police that Perry was in a Valium pack. The law enforcement agencies, therefore, paid special attention to the 20-year-old's friends who were associated with drugs. Everyone stated that they had not seen the missing person, and everyone also had a positive polygraph test. Despite rumors that Perry owed the local dealers money, no evidence of this has been found. Bob initially suspected that his son had gone to visit friends in Kansas City. Since Branson's car was broken down at the time, the father assumed that the 20-year-old might have hitchhiked.
On April 10, 2003, nearly twelve years after his disappearance, law enforcement arrested Jack Wayne Rogers, a 59-year-old Presbyterian pastor and scout leader. Rogers was arrested on suspicion of first-degree assault and practicing medicine without a license. The man tried to remove the genitals of a transgender woman during an amateur sex-reassignment surgery, which was to take place in a hotel in Colombia.
While examining Rogers' personal effects, detectives discovered child pornography on his computer and the fact that he had been active on several online message boards. He used the nicknames "BuggerButt", "hail satan" and "extreme body mods". In his posts, he described the drastic torture and assaults on men. In the comments, Rogers also talked about eating the genitals of men he castrated. Among these entries, there was also a story according to which Rogers picked up a blonde hitchhiker, then raped, tortured, mutilated, and finally murdered him. According to this account, the man's body was buried in a remote area of the Ozark Mountains. Law enforcement suspected Perry was the man in question. Rogers, however, denied having ever seen or known Branson. He claimed that fasting was merely a fantasy of his own. During subsequent searches of the suspect's mansion, a turtle claw necklace was discovered in one of his vehicles. It was like the one Perry owned. It was not, however, irrefutable evidence.
In April 2004, Rogers was sentenced to seventeen years' imprisonment for assault and seven years for illegal surgery (twenty-four years in total), and thirty years for child pornography charges. Both these terms were to run independently of each other - the penalties were not added up. At the hearing, Perry's mother pleaded with Rogers to reveal her son's whereabouts, but Jack again denied that he was involved in his disappearance. Following the sentencing, Rebecca concluded that the convict was probably not responsible for Branson's disappearance.
Perry's father died in 2004. In June 2009, law enforcement revealed that they were completing excavations in Quitman, Missouri, after receiving "credible clues" that Perry's remains may have been there. Within two days, the excavators dug a 7-meter-deep hole with an area of approximately 6 x 12 meters. At the time, another local farmer, who lived about 1.5 miles east of Quitman, admitted that law enforcement had searched his property several years earlier, but to no avail. In 2010, Klino offered a $ 20,000 reward for information that would lead to her son's whereabouts.
In February 2011, Klino died after fighting melanoma for many years. Jo Ann Stinnett, the missing man's grandmother, said after the boy's mother died: “We searched every oil well, every external toilet all over town. We looked wherever we could when we thought there might be something there. " Rebecca was buried next to the empty space she had reserved for Perry. There, she erected a symbolic tombstone with the date of death of the missing person on April 11, 2001, the day of his disappearance. To this day, unfortunately, Branson has not been found or found any evidence or circumstantial evidence that would facilitate the elucidation of this mysterious story.
Finally, I would like to add that although Skidmore is a small town, there is a certain fate behind it. In the 1960s and 1970s, the town's inhabitants were terrorized by Ken McElroy. The man considered himself above the law. He has committed numerous rapes, child molestation, theft of cattle, burglaries, and assaults. He had a good lawyer to help him get over any accusation. However, threats were even more severe to those wishing to report to the police. The man followed such people, killed their pets or set fire to their homes. Even the police were afraid of McElroy, so he felt unpunished.
But everything has an end ... In 1980, McElroy shot a salesman Bo Bowenkamp in the neck. The man survived, and Ken was arrested and charged with attempted murder. He was then convicted in an assault trial but released on bail pending appeal. Immediately after his return, McElroy went to a local bar, bayonet mounted an M1 Garand rifle, and threatened Bo Bowenkamp with it.
McElroy's appeal hearing was postponed again. Residents, who feared for their safety, united and decided to take the matter into their own hands. When McElroy left a local bar in the town center and got into his car, he was shot several times and died as a result. The most significant thing is that the whole situation was seen by several dozen witnesses. But no one named the killer. The exception was Ken's wife, Trena, who sat in the passenger seat and charged Del Clement, who, however, was not convicted. It was one of the loudest cases of lynching in the United States.
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