Murders, Disappearances, and Mystery: A Family Affair

Steve Snedegar, "Orlando Sentinel," March 27, 1994, via Newspapers.com

“These are not natural people.”

~Sheriff’s detective Lynn Wagner

On this blog I have covered many weird, dysfunctional, or even criminal families, but I don't think I have ever written about one where simple, straightforward evil so consistently lurked in the background.  This saga of murder and multiple disappearances may not be, strictly speaking, an unsolvable mystery--we have a pretty good guess what happened--but it is nonetheless a puzzle.  It stands as a perfect example of the unfathomable dark side of human nature.

One suspects that Steve Snedegar was rarely mistaken for an altar boy.  He first caught the attention of the authorities in the early 1970s, when he spent two years on the lam from the FBI.  (He was suspected of being involved in a tractor theft ring and the murder of a deputy sheriff in Ohio.)  After he was finally caught in Houston, the charges against him were mysteriously dropped.  It was believed that Snedegar cut some sort of deal with the FBI, but the details remain hidden from public view.

In 1978, Snedegar was penniless.  Three years later, he was a multi-millionaire.  The source of his sudden fortune is, like everything else in his life, both murky and deeply sinister.  Relatives believed that Steve, a licensed pilot, was making his money flying drugs out of Cuba.  Steve himself told people that he knew Fidel Castro “real well” and had “business” dealings with him.  By 1979, Snedegar also had a flourishing oil recycling business.  Two acquaintances, Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough tried to buy the business from him, but were rebuffed.  This was said to have led to bad feelings between the three men.

Snedegar had more personal disputes.  His 22-year-old daughter Lora had recently married.  Steve and his wife, Trudy, had bitterly opposed the match.  They had nothing in particular against Lora’s husband Bryce Morris--rather, they did not want Lora marrying or escaping their domination in any way.  Steve and Trudy were control freaks when it came to their children.  The offspring were given all the money they wanted, but in return, they were expected to submit to their parents’ domination.  (Considering all the skeletons in Steve’s closet, it’s not surprising that he did not want outsiders getting an intimate peek at his family.)

Lora, however, was the family rebel, the one with the spirit to talk back to her parents.  It’s clear that she married chiefly to escape her suffocating home life.  Unfortunately for her, it was an unsuccessful effort.  Soon after her marriage, Steve and Trudy had managed to pressure her into leaving her husband.  However, when in 1981, Lora’s parents ordered her to move to Florida with them, she refused.  She wanted to reconcile with her husband.  This led to bitter fights with her parents.  Just before Steve moved to Florida, a neighbor of Lora’s saw father and daughter arguing in the backyard.  Steve was screaming curses at Lora and finally spat in her face.

It was the last time Steve would see his daughter alive.

On August 10, 1981, Trudy made an unannounced visit to her daughter’s home in Greenfield, Indiana, apparently hoping to persuade Lora to end her marriage for good.  According to Trudy’s later account, she had dinner with her daughter, and went to bed.  When she woke up the next morning at 6 a.m., she found that the lights and television were still on, the sliding glass door was open, and Lora’s bed had not been slept in.  There was no sign of her daughter.  When the police arrived--seven hours later--they initially found nothing to suggest foul play.

Then, Trudy told them that Lora had left her purse behind.  John Munden, the chief deputy at the Hancock County Sheriff’s Office, immediately knew something was up.  He said, “I believe that a woman’s pocketbook is like a minister’s Bible--they don’t go anyplace without it.”  When he said as much to Trudy, she “looked at me funny.”  From then on, Munden was convinced he was dealing with a homicide.

So was Steve Snedegar.  As soon as he learned that Lora was missing, he walked into the sheriff’s office and dumped $10,000 in cash on Munden’s desk.  He told the deputy that he knew his daughter was dead.  One of his many enemies, he said, had kidnapped and murdered Lora in order to get back at him.  The money was to pay reserve officers to monitor a list of people he wanted watched 24 hours a day.

Munden was so unnerved that he silently accepted the money.  He wanted to use it to keep a close eye on Steve.

Steve told Munden that he and Trudy had two leading suspects in Lora’s disappearance--Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough.  He apparently made such a convincing case against the two men that Munden began to think the Snedegars might have been right.  However, before the sheriff’s office could launch any real investigation, it seems that Steve took matters into his own hands.  Three weeks after Lora vanished, he invited Tony Lambert to a business meeting in New Orleans.  He told Lambert he was interested in making him manager of Steve’s waste-oil business.  In truth, he told Munden he would use his private plane to fly Lambert out of town, where he would “get my answers” out of the man.

To date, Tony Lambert has never been seen again.  Steve told police that he did indeed meet with Lambert in New Orleans, but Tony denied having anything to do with Lora’s disappearance, and angrily left in a red Cadillac driven by a young blonde.  Or was it a green Cadillac?  Or a white one?  Whatever.  All Munden was ever able to learn is that Lambert’s last known whereabouts was when Steve flew him on a “sightseeing trip” over the Gulf of Mexico.

In April 1982, a farmhand discovered Lora’s badly decomposed body in a cornfield.  She had been shot in the head three times with a .25 caliber gun.  When Steve’s worst fears about his daughter were confirmed, he broke out sobbing and vowed that Lora’s murderer would pay.

One day in 1985, Tony McCullough received a phone call from a stranger named Gary Stafford, a mercenary who advertised his unusual services in “Soldier of Fortune” magazine.  Stafford informed him that someone had hired him to kill McCullough, and how much was McCullough willing to pay him to welsh on the bargain?  The two men settled on a payment of $10,000.  McCullough then called the FBI, with the result being that Stafford got two years in prison for extortion.

Stafford told the FBI that some guy in Florida hired him to eliminate a man he felt was involved in the murder of his daughter.  He got $5,000 up front, with the promise of another $20,000 when the deal was done.  When police questioned Steve about the matter, he merely shrugged and gave a smile that said, “Prove it.”

Chuck Smith, a former truck driver for Steve’s business in Indiana, had told police that the day before Lora vanished, he saw her with a “rough-looking character” who clearly frightened her.  When Smith told Trudy of this, she urged him not to go to the authorities, saying “We know who that is, and the police already know.”  

Trudy may have known who this man was, but the police certainly didn’t.  Trudy then went to Munden, trying to get Smith’s unlisted phone number from him.  She said she had a job offer for Smith.  “Dumb-ass me gives the number out,” Munden ruefully recalled.  “She looked at me with those cold glassy eyes and made the remark, ‘Steve does not have to know about this.’”

Smith subsequently got a phone call from a man who said he was with John Rogers Trucking in Knoxville Tennessee.  He said that Steve had recommended him for a job.  Smith, unemployed and desperate to find work, readily agreed.  The man sent him a bus ticket.  Smith boarded the bus…and was never seen again.  Police soon learned that there was no such company as “John Rogers Trucking.”

In the summer of 1986, Trudy confided to her other daughter, Brenda, that for the last five nights, she had awakened to find Steve holding a gun to her head.  “He’s going to kill me,” she said.  “I just don’t know when.”  Soon after that, Trudy and Steve left their house to go “country dancing.”  Only Steve returned.  The next morning, he told Brenda that Trudy had left him to go live in Tallahassee.  Later that day, Steve showed Brenda a suitcase containing $1 million dollars in large-denomination bills that he was hiding in the trunk of his Mercedes.  He told her to get the money if the police arrested him.  Brenda asked no questions.  She had clearly learned how to survive in the Snedegar family.  The following day, Steve and a never-identified man dumped a plastic-wrapped, human-body-sized object in the Ocklawaha River.  Although it is easy to guess what this “object” may have been, it has never been found.

Although no missing-persons report had been filed, authorities knew that Trudy had vanished, and they did not have to enlist Hercule Poirot to guess who was responsible.  It took police an entire year to persuade Brenda and her husband to report her mother’s disappearance, but they would only do so in Indiana.  “Fear,” said Detective Lynn Wagner, who had been investigating the complex Snedegar case since 1985.  “That’s the word they used.  They wouldn’t do it here because they were afraid Steve would kill their family.”

Over the next two years, Wagner repeatedly interrogated Steve about Trudy’s whereabouts, but all he got out of Snedegar were “head games.”  Then, Wagner heard that Steve was a dying man.  Assuming this was just another “head game,” Wagner did not believe it until he subpoenaed Steve’s medical records.  They confirmed that Snedegar had malignant melanoma.

Wagner last spoke to Steve in the late fall of 1989.  He begged Snedegar to spend what little time he had left clearing up the many dark mysteries surrounding him.  Steve refused.  He said he didn’t want to die in jail.  However, he told Wagner that he would be willing to write down everything he knew about all the deaths and disappearances.  The police could have this record once Steve was dead, allowing them to close the books on the cases.  Wagner believed that Steve kept that promise.  However, two hours after Steve died in January 1990, someone set a small bonfire of papers behind his house.  It’s a safe bet that the most reliable record we will ever get in this bizarre case was turned to ashes.

Although all these deaths and disappearances will never be judged in a court of law, Wagner and Munden were able to solve to their own satisfaction what had happened.  As for the death of Lora Snedegar, the tragedy that kicked off all the subsequent tragedies, they felt they knew who committed the murder: her own mother.  And if Trudy had lived, they believed they could have proved it.  

Their scenario was this:  Lora and Trudy fought over Lora’s marriage, and during the brawl, Trudy accidentally--or impulsively--shot her daughter.  (Trudy owned a .25 caliber gun, although investigators did not learn of this until after her disappearance.)  Wagner and Munden believed that Trudy’s father helped her dispose of the body.  (The father died not long after Lora vanished.)

It is believed that Trudy engineered Chuck Smith’s disappearance, because she feared that his story about the man who had frightened Lora might have somehow incriminated Trudy.  Trudy had probably also encouraged Steve to blame Tony Lambert and Tony McCullough for Lora’s murder, as a way of directing his suspicions away from herself.

Trudy’s fatal error was not disposing of Lora’s purse.  If she had thought to do that, the police may have well concluded that Lora had left voluntarily.  Munden noted that on the night that Trudy disappeared, she had left her own purse at home.  “I think she deliberately left her pocketbook at home that night as a sign,” said Munden.  “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.”

Munden believed that Steve had long suspected Trudy of murdering Lora, but he only knew for sure on the night Trudy disappeared.  Perhaps she finally confessed.  Perhaps she accidentally let something slip.  We will never know.  In any case, Steve finally got what he wanted.  He made his daughter’s killer pay.

In December 1993, Steve and Trudy’s son Joe was clearing out Steve’s house in Astor, Florida, when he found a paper tucked away in the guest book for Lora’s funeral.  It showed a map of Steve’s property with a mysterious “X” marked on one spot.  The area was excavated, but nothing was found.  Steve managed to continue his “head games” even from beyond the grave.  As for the million dollars in cash Steve hid in his Mercedes, that proved to be yet another unsolved disappearance.  It’s suspected that Steve’s girlfriend, who moved in with him after Trudy vanished, ran off with the loot.

As Wagner said, these were not natural people.