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. They had not been there the day before. 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 eleven months two more women were found in the St. Louis area, each inside some kind of container, and a fourth woman found in a trash can that June would turn out, decades later, to belong to the same series. 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.
Very little about Gary Randall Muehlberg's early life has been made public. He was 73 when he was charged in September 2022 and 44 at the time of the 1993 killing that sent him to prison, which places his birth around 1948 or 1949. He told a detective that he had done a year of military service and never saw combat. Oxygen, in its 2022 report on the charges, described him as a former construction worker and said he had a 1972 conviction for rape and kidnapping and had served time for it before his release. That earlier conviction comes from Oxygen's report and has not been independently confirmed.
By 1990 he lived in Bel-Ridge, a small municipality in north St. Louis County, well away from the south city streets where he found his victims. He drove what he later described as a late-1980s Ford conversion van. He told investigators he barely drank in those years. His house had a basement divided into several rooms, some with thick concrete walls, and a 1993 police report, quoted by the Riverfront Times, described a "secret room" reached by pushing on a drywall panel near the basement door. The house was torn down in 2021, a year before anyone outside it knew what had happened there.
In 1990 the stretch of south St. Louis around Cherokee Street was known as the Southside Stroll, or the Cherokee Street stroll, and it was one of the city's red-light districts. The crack epidemic had reached St. Louis, and many of the women who worked there were poor, addicted or both. "These women were easy victims," one officer who worked the area told the Riverfront Times years later. All four women Muehlberg later admitted killing were connected to that part of the city, and St. Charles County's prosecutor said in 2022 that every one of the killings traced back to it. According to Muehlberg's own account, he picked each woman up there for paid sex, drove her north to his house and strangled her.
Robyn Mihan grew up in the Tower Grove East and Bevo neighborhoods of south St. Louis. Her mother, Saundra, worked in health care. Robyn went to Cleveland High School, took part in ROTC there, and later attended beauty school. In 1988 she had a daughter, whom she named Saundra after her mother. By early 1990 she and her brother Tom were using crack, and she was working for an escort service that operated out of a house in the Shaw neighborhood. In March 1990 she gave birth to a second daughter, who was placed for adoption. Her mother has said she regrets not going to the hospital that day.
On the night of Thursday, March 22, 1990, about two weeks after the birth, Robyn went to the stroll with a friend named Faye. Robyn walked onto Cherokee Street to meet a client while Faye waited in the car. Faye waited about two hours, then drove back to Shaw. Robyn was reported missing that day. Four days later, on Monday, March 26, the commuter on Highway E found the mattresses, about 60 miles northwest of the city (Oxygen put the distance at about 70). She had been bound and tied between them with Conex cable, the kind electricians use. She was 18, though early newspaper coverage got her age wrong, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described her simply as a prostitute.
The Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis, a pool of detectives from many departments that is called in on serious crimes, took up the case. Joe Burgoon, then a St. Louis police detective, later recalled signs of strangulation and of a struggle. Tom Mihan told the Riverfront Times that a squad officer once offered him a roll of cash and told him he could keep it if he named the killer. He said he did not know. It was the one part of a two-hour interview in which he cried.
Saundra, who appears in many reports as Saundra Kuehnle, spent the next three decades pressing detectives for news. She remembered a daughter with three dimples and a smile that lit up a room, and she wanted people to understand that "Robyn's life did mean something."
Donna Reitmeyer was 40 and the mother of three daughters. One of them, Juanita Zills, last saw her at dinner in April 1990, during a weeklong visit. Reitmeyer also worked the stroll. Before her death she had been assaulted by a client who refused to pay, and she had told people that another man was trying to kill her; that man was not Muehlberg. A friend last saw her on the stroll eight days before she was found.
On June 11, 1990, her nude body was found in a rubber trash can on the sidewalk along Gasconade Street near South Broadway, in the city of St. Louis. She was too badly decomposed for a cause of death to be determined. For thirty-two years her death was not linked to the other "package" cases; the Riverfront Times, writing before the 2022 charges, counted only three victims of the series. Her daughter Dawn McIntosh would stand at a news conference in 2022 and hug the detective who had finally connected her.
Brenda Jean Pruitt was 27 and had young children. She lived a few blocks from the Cherokee Street stroll. She was last seen on May 4, 1990, and on May 9 her family reported her missing to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
On the morning of October 4, 1990, a jogger on Basston Drive in Maryland Heights, in west St. Louis County near Page Avenue and Interstate 270, noticed a smell and alerted city workers who were cutting weeds and picking up trash nearby. They found a large plastic trash can lying in the grass. It was covered with trash bags tied down with wire and was too heavy to lift. Inside was the body of a woman whom no one could name. She had been bound, a man's shirt was wrapped around her head, and she had been strangled. The Major Case Squad was called in under Lieutenant Paul Banta of the Des Peres police. Investigators noted a Biener Hardware sticker on the can and cable at the scene, and someone had written "Sorry Kym" on a nearby concrete wall, which has never been explained.
For months she was listed as unidentified, and detectives at first wondered whether she might be Sandra Little, who had also gone missing. In March 1991 she was identified as Brenda Pruitt. (CBS News and KSDK later gave the year of the discovery as 1991; the Major Case Squad's own report, KMOV and Oxygen give October 4, 1990.)
Sandra Sue Little, called Sandy, was 21 and had a young child. For a time she had lived with her stepsister, Barb Studt, and she was close to a half-sister, Geneva, who appears in reports as Geneva Talbot and Geneva Valle. According to the Associated Press and Oxygen she disappeared in early September 1990; she was reported missing to St. Louis police on October 7.
At about 5 a.m. on February 17, 1991, a General Motors employee on his way to work saw a wooden box on the north shoulder of westbound Interstate 70 near mile marker 220, in O'Fallon in St. Charles County. Thinking it was a lost parcel, he put it in his truck and took it to the GM plant in Wentzville, where the body inside was discovered and police were called. Inside were the badly decomposed remains of a woman. She was identified through dental records and X-rays as Sandy Little. (The Riverfront Times account says a security guard found the box; CBS News called it a dresser. Most sources describe a homemade wooden box.)
Studt said later that for about ten years after, if she mentioned that her sister was "the one they found in the box on Highway 70," people knew what she meant. After that, they no longer did.
Detectives linked the Mihan, Pruitt and Little cases fairly early. All three women came from the same few blocks of south St. Louis. Mihan and Pruitt had their hands bound and shirts pulled tight over their heads, traces of dog hair were found on both of them, and all three were left along highways in different jurisdictions. Burgoon believed the killer spread the bodies across county lines "to make things harder." A detective told the Post-Dispatch at the time that the killer was "playing games with us," leaving bodies in the open. The Conex cable and the hardware sticker led some investigators to guess that he worked in construction or as a contractor.
Over the years cold-case detectives followed more than 450 leads, and more than 50 investigators worked on the cases. None of them ever looked at Gary Muehlberg. "He was never on any detectives' radar," Jodi Weber said in 2022. Criminologists who studied the cases suspected the killer had more victims than the three that were known.
On February 8, 1993, Kenneth "Doc" Atchison, 57, left his home with about $6,000 in cash to buy a car, reportedly a Cadillac, from Muehlberg. Oxygen described Atchison as a fellow construction worker who had argued with Muehlberg over work. At the house in Bel-Ridge, Muehlberg handcuffed and gagged him and killed him, took the money and Atchison's car, and hid the body in a homemade plywood box in the basement.
Atchison's family reported him missing. As police closed in, Muehlberg fled to a motel in Illinois and telephoned acquaintances, trying to find someone who would move the box out of his house. No one did. He was arrested in southern Illinois in March 1993, about five weeks after the killing, and police found the body in the basement.
He pleaded not guilty and went to trial in St. Louis County in 1995. His lawyer argued that he had been framed: the murder weapon had been found at the home of a known drug dealer, and the dealer's daughter had been driving Atchison's car. The defense could not explain why the body was in a box in Muehlberg's basement. The prosecutor, Doug Sidel, told the jury it was a robbery and "an execution." The jury found Muehlberg guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action in September 1995, and two months later he was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Because of that conviction his DNA eventually went into Missouri's offender database.
Sidel, who joined the St. Louis County prosecutor's office in 1981 and was still there in 2023, said he never forgot the case. "The way he killed him was so cruel," he said. He described Muehlberg as sadistic and saw nothing to suggest he would have stopped on his own. "Who knows how many lives were saved by him not being left out there," he said. Nobody at the time noticed that the handcuffs, the gag and the box in the basement echoed the bodies left along the highways three years before.
Jodi Weber, a detective sergeant with the O'Fallon Police Department, took up the unsolved murders in 2008 because Sandy Little's body had been found in her city. Over fourteen years, alongside her other assignments, she gathered and organized witness statements, police reports and physical evidence from three counties, sent items to laboratories for DNA testing, and kept calling the labs back. She drove Highway E for years, past the place where Robyn Mihan had been found.
Improvements in DNA testing allowed laboratories to work with material beyond blood or bodily fluids. In April 2022 technicians at the St. Charles County Crime Laboratory reported a confirmed match from a small amount of usable evidence. Tests on four items from the Mihan scene, including a T-shirt wrapped around her head, tape across her chest and a condom wrapper, pointed to Gary Muehlberg, inmate at Potosi Correctional Center. "Incredible!" Weber said when asked how she felt about the match.
Weber went to Potosi on June 30, 2022. Muehlberg, by then walking with a cane, denied everything and asked for a lawyer. "We left there on bad terms," she said. Weber later said he was surprised to see police after 32 years, and she told the NewsNation program "Banfield" that "the moment he walked through that door, I knew I had him."
Prosecutors in Lincoln, St. Charles and St. Louis counties then sent letters promising not to seek the death penalty if he cooperated. KSDK reported that he was in kidney failure and unlikely to live long enough for a death sentence to be carried out in any case. In August Weber returned with O'Fallon Detective Mike Harvey and Maryland Heights Detective Chris McNamara. In an interview of about three hours, Muehlberg admitted killing Robyn Mihan, Brenda Pruitt and Sandy Little. He said he had picked them up in south St. Louis, taken them to his house in Bel-Ridge and strangled them there. Asked whether there were others, he said no.
On August 5 Weber met the victims' families at the O'Fallon police station and told them the killer had been identified. Studt and her half-sister had not known the case was still being worked. About three weeks later Weber received a handwritten letter from Muehlberg saying he had not been fully honest and that there were two more women. He wrote that he had to live with his past, good and bad, and, in words the Post-Dispatch reported, "No more running." On a third visit he gave details of both. From them Weber identified one as Donna Reitmeyer, whose case had never been tied to the others. The other woman he could not name. Asked how many people he had killed in all, he said, "Just those six."
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 relatives in the room. He 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." The O'Fallon police chief, Frank Mininni, credited Weber's "relentless tenacity."
Saundra Kuehnle, then 75, said she had "hounded the police and detectives forever." Dawn McIntosh said she was glad he had been caught, "because I don't think she rested in peace knowing that he was still out there." Geneva Talbot said the only thing she had prayed for was that he was not dead.
The woman Muehlberg could not name is the least resolved part of the case. He described her as white, with shoulder-length dark brown hair, and said he may have picked her up at the Wedge, a bar at Bates Street and Virginia Avenue in the Carondelet neighborhood, possibly as early as 1989. He told detectives he kept her remains at his house longer than any of the others, first in a cardboard barrel and then in a steel barrel with a spring-loaded lid that he bought from a company in the St. John area. He said he left the barrel at a self-service Ram Jet car wash, and he thought it was winter because he remembered washing snow off his truck there. He placed it on Natural Bridge Road in Berkeley, a site that is now a vacant lot, and described a run-down, reddish building with three or four bays.
Detectives later learned that the family that owned the Ram Jet chain also ran one at Pennsylvania Avenue and Mallard Drive in Pagedale. The son of the owner told investigators his father had found a body at one of their locations in 1991. A former employee, Craig Lovings, recalled police gathering there in 1990 or 1991 after a woman's body was found in a dumpster. "It was all covered up by the time I got there," he told KSDK. Pagedale police said their old records had been destroyed, and the St. Louis County medical examiner found no matching death. "I don't believe he is lying," McNamara said. "He's been spot-on about everything else up until this point." Weber and the Maryland Heights and O'Fallon departments have asked anyone who knew of a woman who vanished from south St. Louis in 1990 or 1991 to come forward. No one has been identified, and no charge has been filed for her death.
Muehlberg told the Riverfront Times in November 2022 that he wanted to plead guilty quickly: "If you can arraign me, let me enter my plea and sentence me at the same time." His public defender, Stephen Reynolds, told St. Louis County Circuit Judge Brian May that his client was "pretty infirm" and that prosecutors in St. Charles and Lincoln counties favored a plea by video. The families objected. "I think meeting all of us face to face is the least he should have to do," Saundra Kuehnle said. Barb Studt said he should have to face them all, and Geneva Talbot said she wanted to "look him dead in the eyes."
He appeared by video from prison at all three hearings. On March 6, 2023, in St. Charles County, he pleaded guilty to Sandy Little's murder and was sentenced to life. Studt said that not being able to look him in the eye in person "had a little less impact," but that the identification had "lifted a weight off of my heart." Her half-sister said the sentence was a relief but she wished he faced more. On March 21, in St. Louis County, with Doug Sidel again leading the prosecution thirty years after the Atchison case, he pleaded guilty to the murders of Brenda Pruitt and Donna Reitmeyer and received two more life sentences, to run concurrently.
On March 31, in Lincoln County, he pleaded guilty to the murder of Robyn Mihan, his first known victim, and Judge Milan Berry sentenced him to life. Saundra Kuehnle had said she would have come to court "even if they had to bring me in on a gurney." 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."
Muehlberg has been held at Potosi Correctional Center, in southeastern Missouri, since the 1990s. By 2023 he was 74, used a wheelchair, had fallen repeatedly and was described as being in poor health. He has said his Christian faith was rekindled in prison. He wrote a letter of apology to the families in which he said he hoped his confession would bring them some closure. Nothing further about his condition or status was found in reporting from 2024 to October 2026.
Muehlberg has never explained the killings. In his letter to the 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 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis consulted by the paper, Sandra Langeslag, said that kind of repressed memory rarely happens, and called his clear recall of ordinary events from the same years a "red flag." Asked whether he dreamed about his victims, he said, "Not that I recall." He has declined to be interviewed in person and has wondered aloud whether he should "sugarcoat it" for the families.
Weber has said she does not believe the memory loss. "I don't buy the fact that he doesn't remember doing it," she said, and she 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. That is an investigator's theory, not a finding. No one else has been charged.
Some families also asked why the match took so long when his DNA had been on file for decades. Weber said the families were glad there had been no victims after Doc Atchison, but questioned why it had taken so long "with him being incarcerated and with the availability of his DNA." Speaking in 2022, she said she could not imagine what it had been like for relatives to wait "32 years for answers."
About 1948 or 1949: Gary Randall Muehlberg is born (inferred from reported ages).
1972: According to Oxygen, convicted of rape and kidnapping (not confirmed elsewhere).
1989 or 1990: Possible date he gave for killing the unidentified woman.
March 22, 1990: Robyn Mihan, 18, is abducted from the Cherokee Street stroll.
March 26, 1990: Mihan's body is found between two mattresses on Highway E near Silex.
May 4, 1990: Brenda Pruitt, 27, is last seen; reported missing May 9.
June 11, 1990: Donna Reitmeyer, 40, is found in a trash can on Gasconade Street near South Broadway.
September 1990: Sandy Little, 21, disappears; reported missing October 7.
October 4, 1990: An unidentified woman is found in a trash can on Basston Drive, Maryland Heights; identified as Pruitt in March 1991.
February 17, 1991: Little's body is found in a wooden box beside Interstate 70 in O'Fallon.
February 8, 1993: Kenneth "Doc" Atchison, 57, is killed at Muehlberg's house in Bel-Ridge.
March 1993: Muehlberg is arrested in southern Illinois; Atchison's body is found in his basement.
September 1995: Convicted of first-degree murder; sentenced to life two months later.
2008: O'Fallon Detective Sergeant Jodi Weber reopens the cold cases.
2021: His former house in Bel-Ridge is demolished.
April 2022: St. Charles County Crime Laboratory matches DNA from the Mihan evidence to Muehlberg.
June 30, 2022: First prison interview; he denies the killings.
August 2022: After the death penalty is taken off the table he confesses to Mihan, Pruitt and Little; a letter and third interview add Reitmeyer and an unidentified woman.
September 19, 2022: Four counts of first-degree murder are announced.
March 6, 2023: Pleads guilty to Little's murder; life sentence.
March 21, 2023: Pleads guilty to Pruitt's and Reitmeyer's murders; two life sentences.
March 31, 2023: Pleads guilty to Mihan's murder; life sentence.
October 2026: Still serving his sentences; the fifth woman remains unidentified.