Lynn Schuller
Lynn Schuller
26 YOA
3100 30th St. Dr. SE
Cedar Rapids, IA
Linn County
August 6, 1972
When Keith Schuller reported his wife Lynn Schuller missing in August 1972, police suspected murder from the very beginning. Nearly four decades later, they still believe Schuller is responsible for her death, but don’t ever expect to find her body. Why? The suspicions surrounding her disappearance sounded so much like that of local folklore that even police were reluctant to acknowledge Keith Schuller could have committed such an abhorrent act.
Linn County in Iowa
The tale began in a Minneapolis suburb, where Lynn Tickner had been born and raised. Barely a teen, she met Keith Schuller — five years her senior — while the two families were vacationing in northern Minnesota. A long-distance relationship culminated in Lynn and Keith’s marriage in 1967.
The two made their home in Cedar Rapids, and Lynn gave birth the couple’s first and only child in 1969. By all outward appearances, they seemed like a happy couple until 1971, when Keith abruptly announced he wanted a divorce. Lynn, however, wasn’t ready to break up their new family and refused to grant the divorce.
“She always indicated to me that she was hopeful they would resolve it because of the child,” Lynn’s mother, Eloise Tickner, told the Cedar Rapids Gazette in a March 1992 interview.
Keith continued to press for a divorce, and in 1972, Lynn wrote a letter to her mother stating that Keith had threatened to kill her. Keith owned a 6-foot-long alligator, Pogo, and two pet snakes.
“You never believe anything like that is going to happen in your own family,” Eloise Tickner told the Gazette, “So I threw the letter away.”
A few months later, while vacationing at the same lake where their daughter and Keith had met, the Tickners received a call from their son-in-law. Lynn had disappeared, he told them, and he didn’t know where she was.
Harry and Eloise Tickner immediately headed south for Cedar Rapids, where Keith Schuller told them he’d last seen Lynn while she was sleeping. He said that around 7:30 a.m. on Saturday, Aug. 6, 1972 [sic- that date was a Sunday] that he and their 3-year-old son had left the home and returned about five hours later to discover both Lynn and her bicycle were gone.
These maps show where Lynn Schuller went missing in Aug. 1972, where Jane Wakefield disappeared in Sept. 1975 and where Denise Fraley vanished in Sept. 1982. All three women were in volatile marriages with divorce proceedings pending. Detectives are certain all three were murdered, and though they’ve long had a prime suspect in each case, have never been able to find enough evidence to convince a prosecutor to charge any of the suspects with murder. (Maps courtesy Cedar Rapids Gazette)Schuller said he’d decided then to take his son swimming at Bever Park. Before they’d gone, he said, he’d left a note for Lynn.
The “swim” was short-lived, and Schuller and his young son returned home about an hour later. This time, however, he said Lynn’s bicycle was there but that she was missing.
The home showed no signs of forced entry and nothing was disturbed. Lynn’s purse and all her belongings were still there.
Later that same day, Keith Schuller had contacted his wife’s parents — along with several others — to report his wife was missing. Those he’d called arrived at the couple’s home and helped conduct searches in and around the surrounding area.
The following afternoon — approx. 24 hours after Keith Schuller said he first realized something was wrong — he called the sheriff’s office to report Lynn missing. Dozens of volunteers helped conduct a more extensive search, while detectives got a search warrant and seized several items from the Schuller home. State investigators were also called in to help.
Keith Schuller was asked to assist in the investigation — particularly to help search the nearby woods for his wife’s body — but he refused to do so and was arrested for refusing to assist an officer. Schuller said he’d refused because he’d already checked out the woods himself. The charge was later dismissed for lack of evidence.
Infrared aerial photos were taken of the home’s surrounding areas to determine if the ground had recently been dug up, but they produced no positive results.
Lynn’s parents offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to Lynn’s body or her whereabouts, but no one came forward. Everyone seemed to hold the same option — that Keith Schuller had killed his wife, chopped up her body, and then fed the pieces to Pogo and the snakes.
Keith Schuller continued with efforts to obtain a divorce — this time on the grounds that his wife had deserted him. When Lynn’s parents hired an attorney to represent their daughter, Schuller dropped the case. He would file again and again — a total of seven times in Linn County District Court — but each time when it became apparent he’d have to testify about circumstances surrounding his wife’s disappearance, he would drop the case.
Without his in-laws’ knowledge, Keith Schuller finally went to Dubuque County District Court to file the papers, the divorce was granted in July 1976. Less than two years later on March 20, 1978, a Dubuque District Court judge granted Schuller’s request to have Lynn Schuller declared legally dead; the decree listed their son as the sole heir of Lynn’s life insurance benefits, with Keith the conservator.
Keith would later marry a woman he’d met in Cedar Rapids before his wife’s unexplained disappearance, but that relationship also ended in a divorce.
Schuller left Iowa — taking the 6-foot-long alligator with him — and moved to Fruitland, Idaho, where he taught sixth grade children for more than 10 years. A 1992 article in the Gazette stated that “Pogo” had become a favorite of Schuller’s students, and that Schuller also had recently been featured on a local television news program.
Anyone with information about Lynn Schuller’s unsolved disappearance/murder is asked to contact the Cedar Rapids Police Department at (319) 286-5375.
I find it very interesting that the main suspect for this murder in 1972 Keith Schuller is the Payette County Coroner. How is this possible? I was told that he murdered her, lined the basement of his home at the time with a plastic drop cloth, chopped her body up and fed it to the hogs that he owned or had access to. I was told he also boiled her skull for hours then threw her teeth in several creeks in the area. It is just tragic that her Family will never have closure. I have met Keith years ago and it would be just like him to work himself into a position of this kind to make sure he would always be privy to any incoming information of his crime. His ex-wife is much to frightened to ever testify.