In March 1990 a commuter driving Highway E near Silex, in rural Lincoln County, Missouri, saw two mattresses at the side of the road, wired together. Between them was the body of Robyn Mihan, who had been taken from a street in south St. Louis four days earlier. Over the next nineteen months three more women were found in the St. Louis area, each inside some kind of container. Investigators came to call the cases the "package" murders, and they stayed unsolved for more than thirty years.
The man who killed them had been in prison for almost all of that time, for a different murder. His name was Gary Muehlberg, and in 2022 his DNA was matched to evidence from Robyn Mihan's body.
Robyn Mihan was 18 (one report gives 19) and a young mother. According to KSDK, she had given birth to her second child two weeks before she was found. She was abducted on March 22, 1990, from the area of south St. Louis known as the Southside or Cherokee Street stroll, and her body was found on March 26. Her mother, Saundra Kuehnle, remembered a daughter with three dimples and a smile that lit up a room.
Donna Reitmeyer was 40 and the mother of three daughters. Her body was found on June 11, 1990, in a trash can on a sidewalk in the city of St. Louis.
Brenda Pruitt was 27 and had a young child. Her family reported her missing on May 9, 1990. Her body was not found until October 1991, in a plastic trash can at the side of a busy road in St. Louis County. Authorities said she had been smothered or strangled.
Sandy Little was 21 and also had a young child. For a time she had lived with her stepsister, Barb Studt. Her body was found on February 17, 1991, inside a dresser left along a highway in O'Fallon, in St. Charles County.
According to the Riverfront Times, many of the women had been bound and gagged, with ligatures around their necks. St. Charles County's prosecutor later said all the killings connected to the same part of south St. Louis, then known for prostitution, and the women were described in news reports as sex workers. Four of the five women Muehlberg would admit killing were mothers.
In 1993 Muehlberg, then living in Bel-Ridge in north St. Louis County, lured Kenneth "Doc" Atchison, 57, to his house on the pretense of selling him a car. He killed him, took about $6,000 in cash and Atchison's car, and hid the body in a homemade box in his basement, where police found it weeks later. Before his arrest, the Riverfront Times reported, Muehlberg fled to a motel in Illinois and telephoned acquaintances, trying to find someone to move the box.
At trial his lawyer argued that he had been framed: the murder weapon had turned up at the home of a known drug dealer, whose daughter had been driving Atchison's car. The prosecutor, Doug Sidel, told the jury it was robbery and called the killing "an execution." Muehlberg was convicted in September 1995 and sentenced to life in prison two months later. Because of that conviction his DNA went into Missouri's offender database.
Nobody connected him to the women at the time. Years later Sidel said that whatever else happened, Muehlberg would have stopped only if law enforcement had stopped him. "Who knows how many lives were saved by him not being left out there," he said.
Jodi Weber, a detective with the O'Fallon Police Department, began working the unsolved murders in 2008. She kept at them for about fourteen years. Improvements in DNA testing allowed laboratories to work with material other than blood or bodily fluids, and in early 2022 tests on four items from the Mihan scene, including a T-shirt wrapped around her head, tape across her chest and a condom wrapper, produced a match to Muehlberg.
Weber went to see him at Potosi Correctional Center. In that first interview he denied the killings and asked for a lawyer. Prosecutors in the three counties where the bodies had been found then agreed not to seek the death penalty in exchange for his cooperation, and when Weber returned he confessed. In the course of several recorded interviews in the summer of 2022 he admitted all four murders. He said he picked the women up for sex in south St. Louis, took them to his house in Bel-Ridge and killed them there. In August he wrote to Weber: "No more running."
On September 19, 2022, the prosecuting attorneys of St. Charles, St. Louis and Lincoln counties, Tim Lohmar, Wesley Bell and Mike Wood, announced four counts of first-degree murder. "It may have taken a while, but your family member was not forgotten," Lohmar told the families. Lohmar said no motive had been determined. Bell said investigators were still looking at whether Muehlberg had committed other crimes, and Wood said there was "at least some indication out there to suggest that."
Saundra Kuehnle, then 75, said she had "hounded the police and detectives forever." Dawn McIntosh, Donna Reitmeyer's daughter, said she was glad he had been caught, "because I don't think she rested in peace knowing that he was still out there."
Muehlberg pleaded guilty to all four murders in March 2023, appearing by video from prison. On March 6 he admitted killing Sandy Little in St. Charles County. On March 21, in St. Louis County, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Brenda Pruitt and Donna Reitmeyer and received two life sentences. On March 31, in Lincoln County, he pleaded guilty to Robyn Mihan's murder, and Judge Milan Berry sentenced him to life.
Families had objected to the video arrangement. "I think meeting all of us face to face is the least he should have to do," Saundra Kuehnle said before the hearings. At the last of them she told him, "The murders weren't done by Zoom call." She said her faith required her to forgive him, and added: "The hell for our children is over. Now is the beginning of your hell."
During his interviews Muehlberg also confessed to killing a fifth woman, whose name he said he never knew. According to court documents cited by CBS News, he said he killed her at his home and left her body in a metal barrel near a self-service car wash. He told the Riverfront Times he left it at the Ram Jet car wash and described her as white, with shoulder-length dark brown hair, and said he may have picked her up at a bar in Carondelet. Her remains have never been found, and investigators have not been able to match the account to any known death. O'Fallon police have asked for the public's help in identifying her.
Muehlberg has never explained the killings. In a letter to the victims' families he called the period a "dark time," and he told the Riverfront Times that "somethings cannot be explained as a why." He has often said he does not remember details, which he described as having "blacked out." A memory researcher consulted by the paper, Sandra Langeslag, said that kind of repressed memory rarely happens.
Weber has said she doubts the memory loss and does not know whether his count is complete. "We really don't know if we know all of what Gary has done," she told the Riverfront Times. She has also raised the possibility that he had help: a witness in 1990 reported seeing two men throwing out mattresses on a Lincoln County highway the morning Robyn Mihan was found. No one else has been charged.
Some families asked why a match took so long when his DNA had been on file for decades. Speaking in 2022, Weber said she could not imagine what it had been like for relatives to wait "32 years for answers."
In 2023, the Riverfront Times reported, Muehlberg was 74, in poor health and held at Potosi Correctional Center. No later change in his status was found in October 2026.