Chapter Ten:Kathy Kohm: A Break

 



Chapter 10

 

    Leo Snyder remembered something in late May.  He kept going over everything in his mind searching for something that could help find Kathy.  In those confusing first hours that Kathy had gone missing someone had called him about a man stuck in the mud.  Who was that?  He searched through his notes. Everything had happened so fast at first. He had been busy then calling around and getting searchers together.  So many people called with tips about seeing a little girl and they had been chasing those leads down. He read back through everything and then the name jumped out at him. It was Jack Harry. Mr. Harry had pulled a man’s car out of the mud in the evening on April 5th.  That was the same day that Kathy went missing.

    He called Lt. George Lewallen to inform him.  In a few hours Lewallen was at Jack Harry’s farm taking an official statement.  They looked over the spot where the car had gotten stuck.  The floor mats were still there.  They wrenched them out of the now dry mud and kept them as evidence. They made a cursory search of the area but found nothing.  Maybe this tip was completely unrelated.  Maybe it was just some guy who got stuck in the mud. But, maybe it was something.

    Mr. Harry had provided the make and model of the car.  A late model light blue Mazda 626.  He said he had remembered it because he had been looking at cars lately and was considering buying one like it.  Lt. George Lewallen would follow up on the lead as it was really the only one they had. They couldn’t afford to dismiss anything at this point.

    State police investigators combed through vehicle registrations and found a few Mazda 626 owners in the area and one in particular that belonged to a resident of Christmas Lake Village.  Lewallen immediately went to the surveys that had been filled out by each resident.  He wanted to see how this Mazda driving homeowner had answered the questions about their whereabouts on April 5th.  The driver’s name was Stanton Gash. He had answered the survey and wrote that he and his wife had arrived at their family vacation home in Santa Claus around 10 a.m. and had left around 5 p.m.  Lt. Lewallen contacted Gash and calmly asked if he could come in for an interview.  Gash agreed to come to the State Police Post in Jasper for an informal interview and they made an appointment for June 2nd.  

   They knew that Kathy had to have been taken by someone with access to Christmas Lake Village.  Mr. Gash had access.  



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