A Confession, a Burglary, and a Body That Was Never Found: The Disappearance of John Paul Parton Jr.

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

January 8, 2026

John Paul Parton Jr., known to the people who loved him as JP, was nineteen years old in May 2021, living in High Ridge, Missouri, a small community southwest of St. Louis in Jefferson County. He was a white man, six feet tall, a hundred seventy five pounds, with brown hair and brown eyes. On May 16, 2021, JP came home from work and told his parents he was heading out to go camping with some friends, promising he would be back the following day. That was the last time his family saw him in person. Later that same evening, JP called home, and what he told his parents over the phone had nothing to do with camping.

A Confession Over the Phone

According to what JP told his parents that night, he and three friends had broken into a home in Jefferson County earlier that evening, making off with roughly two thousand dollars in cash along with a quantity of drugs. JP told them he had stayed outside during the actual burglary rather than going in himself, but he was clearly shaken by what had happened and expressed real guilt over his role in it. He also mentioned, almost in passing, that there was tension building among the group over how to divide the stolen money and drugs, some of which had reportedly already been used to purchase firearms. It was an unsettling call for any parent to receive, a son confessing to a crime while still somewhere out in the world with the people he had just committed it alongside. It would also be the last time JP's parents ever heard his voice.

JP did not come home the next day, or the day after that. His family grew increasingly worried as the days passed without word from him, and on May 24, 2021, roughly a week after that final phone call, they reported him missing. Some accounts of the case list his grandmother as the one who ultimately filed the formal missing persons report, on May 28, nearly two weeks after he had last been seen. Whatever the exact date, what followed was nearly three years of uncertainty for a family who had at least some idea, from JP's own words, of the dangerous company he had been keeping in his final known hours, but no real answers about what had actually happened to him once that phone call ended.

In the months and years that followed, JP's disappearance drew ongoing attention from his community and online, with his family sharing updates on social media and describing what they called unusual circumstances surrounding his final days as they continued to press for information. Investigators reportedly developed Thomas Gamble as a suspect relatively early in the case, but for years lacked the corroborating evidence, particularly a cooperating witness, needed to move forward with charges.

A Killing Two Days Later

The investigation into JP's disappearance moved slowly for years, hampered by the same problem that defines so many cold cases, a lack of physical evidence and a lack of witnesses willing to talk. That changed in March 2024, when investigators with the Missouri State Highway Patrol and the St. Francois County Sheriff's Office obtained a recording in which a man named Thomas E. Gamble, who went by the nickname Tedo and was originally from Potosi, Missouri, appeared to confess to killing JP. According to what investigators pieced together from that recording and from witness accounts gathered around the same time, the burglary JP had confessed to his parents about had taken place on May 17, 2021, the day after he left home. Two days after that, on May 18, while traveling south on U.S. Highway 67 near the small community of Leadington in a black 2012 Toyota Camry, Gamble allegedly shot JP from behind.

A witness later told investigators that JP had been sitting in the vehicle's front passenger seat while Gamble sat directly behind him in the back seat. According to that account, Gamble fired a shot through the back of the seat, striking JP from behind without warning. Investigators eventually recovered the Camry itself, locating it in April 2024 in Maryland Heights, Missouri, nearly three years after the killing was alleged to have occurred. Inside, they found a bullet lodged in the vehicle's dashboard and blood evidence preserved in the foam of the front seat, physical confirmation consistent with the account investigators had been given of how JP died.

Burned in the Woods

What happened to JP's body afterward is, if anything, even harder to read than the shooting itself. According to witness statements gathered during the investigation, JP's body was initially left in a creek near Bismarck, Missouri, before later being wrapped in carpet and moved by truck. One witness described watching Gamble make repeated trips on an all terrain vehicle to a wooded area on rural property in St. Francois County, carrying a shovel and a rake, and reported seeing what appeared to be a fire burning in the woods during one of those trips. That same witness told investigators that when Gamble returned the following morning, he had visible soot on him. In the recorded confession investigators eventually obtained, Gamble himself allegedly said that he had burned JP's body, with one account describing the location as a bathtub and another describing it as the wooded area near where he had been seen with the shovel and rake. Despite everything investigators were able to piece together about where JP's remains might be, they have never actually been recovered.

An Arrest Nearly Three Years Later

Thomas Gamble was arrested on May 1, 2024, in Port Allen, Louisiana, taken into custody by local police there with assistance from the United States Marshals Service. He was extradited back to Missouri and held without bail in St. Francois County, where prosecutors charged him with first degree murder, armed criminal action, tampering with physical evidence, and abandonment of a corpse. The first degree murder charge alone carried a potential sentence ranging from ten to thirty years, or life in prison, reflecting the seriousness with which Missouri prosecutors pursued the case once they finally had enough evidence to bring it.

The nearly three year gap between JP's disappearance and Gamble's arrest illustrates just how much cases like this one depend on someone eventually being willing to talk. For years, investigators had a missing nineteen year old, a confession to a burglary made over the phone to his own parents, and little else connecting his disappearance to any specific person or place. It was only once a witness came forward with a firsthand account of the shooting itself, and once that recorded confession surfaced in March 2024, that the pieces of what had happened to JP on that stretch of Highway 67 finally came together into a case prosecutors felt they could bring to court.

JP Parton would be in his mid twenties today had he lived. His family spent years not knowing whether the son and grandson who called home that May evening in 2021, frightened and guilty about a burglary he had just taken part in, was still alive somewhere or already gone. The confession that eventually broke the case answered that question, even as it left the most basic, human piece of it unresolved. JP's body has never been found, and without it, his family has been left to grieve someone the state believes is dead without ever having anywhere to bring him home to.

Anyone with information related to John Paul Parton Jr.'s case is asked to contact Missouri State Highway Patrol Corporal Jason Ashby at 314-608-2764.

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