A Rooster That Was Never Bought: The Disappearance of Gary McCullough and the Stepdaughter Who Vanished After Talking

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

June 5, 2026

Gary G. McCullough was thirty four years old in the spring of 1999, a big man standing six foot three and weighing around two hundred forty pounds, working at a chicken processing plant while helping run a small farm with cattle and horses outside Cassville, Missouri. His wife, Sandra, known to most people as Sandy, had previously been married to Gary's own brother Albert before the two of them became a couple, a family arrangement that had already made their relationship a source of some tension long before it ever turned dangerous. By the spring of 1999, that marriage was falling apart in a way that Gary had started quietly preparing for. He had confided in his supervisor that he wanted a divorce and was already planning to relocate, and he had begun secretly moving his belongings out of the house piece by piece. He also knew, and had told people, that Sandy was having an affair with a man named Kristopher Klemp, and that she had forged checks in Gary's name, an act of fraud that had actually led to his own arrest.

A Bullet That Misfired

Eleven days before he disappeared entirely, on April 30, 1999, Sandy allegedly pointed a gun at Gary and pulled the trigger. The bullet misfired, and Gary, for reasons that have never been fully explained, chose not to report the incident to police. He continued living in the same house with a woman who had just attempted to shoot him, working his job at the chicken plant and managing the farm, apparently trying to quietly extract himself from the marriage without triggering another confrontation. On May 11, 1999, Gary told people around him that he was heading to Diamond, Missouri, to purchase a fighting rooster, and left in his own unlicensed flatbed pickup truck. He never returned. Sandy did not report him missing for two full days. When his truck was finally located on May 14, it was sitting abandoned on a dead end road in Pulaskifield, nowhere near where a trip to buy a rooster should have taken him.

Kristopher Klemp moved into the home Gary had shared with Sandy within roughly a week of his disappearance. Sandy and Klemp were investigated almost immediately, and in June 1999 Klemp was formally charged with conspiracy to commit murder in connection with Gary's disappearance. Those charges were dropped two months later, in August 1999, when prosecutors determined they didn't have sufficient evidence to proceed. Sandy obtained her divorce from Gary in April 2000, and she and Klemp married the following month, becoming Sandy and Kris Klemp with almost no delay between the end of one marriage and the beginning of the next.

A Recorded Confession From a Thirteen Year Old

The case sat cold for years afterward, until 2003, when Sandy's daughter from an earlier relationship, Liehnia "Lena" Chapin, then a teenager, told her uncle, Gary's brother Albert McCullough, what she said had actually happened to her stepfather. According to the account Lena gave him, which Albert recorded, Sandy had shot Gary two or three times in the head, and had then made Lena help her deal with what came afterward, describing the body ultimately being burned and disposed of. Lena told her uncle she had gone along with helping partly out of fear of what would happen to her and her sisters if her mother went to prison and left them without a guardian. When investigators eventually contacted Lena directly about the recording, she exercised her right to remain silent, appearing with an attorney that her own mother had arranged for her, and never gave a formal statement to police, though she also never recanted what she had told Albert.

A Civil Verdict Without a Criminal Case

With no body and no confession that investigators could use directly in a criminal prosecution, Gary's case never resulted in murder charges against anyone. His daughters instead pursued a wrongful death lawsuit in civil court, initially filed in 2006 and naming Sandy, Kristopher Klemp, Lena Chapin herself, and Klemp's former wife Jennifer Brattin as parties connected to a conspiracy behind Gary's death. Gary was formally declared legally dead in 2005, clearing the way for that civil litigation to move forward in earnest. The case finally went before a jury in the summer of 2013, fourteen years after Gary vanished, and the jury did not take long to reach its conclusion. They unanimously found Sandy and Kris Klemp liable for knowingly causing Gary's death and awarded his daughters seven million dollars in damages, a judgment that, by most accounts, has gone largely unpaid in the years since. Sandy and Kris Klemp themselves divorced in 2014, and Sandy went on to marry a fifth husband, continuing to live in Mount Vernon, Missouri.

The Witness Who Never Made It to Court

The single most important witness to what actually happened to Gary McCullough never had the chance to testify in that civil trial or in any criminal proceeding, because by the time lawyers were preparing their case, Lena Chapin herself had already disappeared. On February 14, 2006, Lena vanished from her apartment near Steelville in Dent County, Missouri. Her fiancé told investigators she had said goodbye to him that morning as he left for work, seemingly an ordinary day, and that when he returned home that evening she was gone, with her own mother, Sandy, in the process of emptying out the apartment.

The explanation Sandy offered for her daughter's absence closely echoed, in its vagueness, the kind of story Gary's own disappearance had produced years earlier. According to Sandy, Lena had left for Florida with another man in a black 2000 Chevrolet Cavalier, and had never been in contact again. Remarkably, nobody formally reported Lena missing until November 2008, nearly three years after she vanished, and an actual formal investigation into her disappearance didn't begin until 2012, more than six years after anyone had last confirmed seeing her. Lena had left behind a young son, whose care she had specifically fought to keep out of her mother's hands, reportedly telling people that Sandy would gain legal guardianship of the boy only over my dead body.

When the building's owner eventually cleaned out Lena's abandoned apartment, he found a broken window and a large, dark colored stain on the carpet that could not be removed no matter how thoroughly it was shampooed. The carpet itself was discarded before any formal investigation ever began, and the unit later burned in what was recorded as an accidental fire, destroying whatever physical evidence might otherwise have remained inside it. No activity has ever been recorded on Lena's Social Security number since the day she disappeared.

Two Disappearances, One Unfinished Story

Gary McCullough and Liehnia Chapin never overlapped in age or circumstance in any way that would normally connect two missing persons cases, a grown man vanishing from a Missouri farm in 1999, and, seven years later, his own stepdaughter, barely into her twenties, vanishing from an apartment more than a hundred miles away. What connects them entirely is the account Lena gave her uncle in 2003, a recorded description of watching her mother kill Gary McCullough that could have, had she ever been made to repeat it in a criminal courtroom, potentially changed the entire outcome of both cases. Instead, Lena disappeared before that could happen, taking with her the only firsthand account of Gary's final moments that has ever surfaced, and leaving behind a case of her own that remains just as unsolved and just as unexplained as the one she once tried to describe to her uncle on tape.

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