Thirty Years of Uncashed Kindness: Marie and Theodore Jost

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

April 13, 2026

For more than thirty years, nobody outside a single Wisconsin family seemed to notice that Marie Jost and her son Theodore had vanished. Marie owned a three acre property at 3658 Alm Road in Amherst Junction, roughly fifteen miles east of Stevens Point, and both she and Theodore, an Army veteran known to family as Teddy, were last confirmed alive there sometime around 1980. The exact date has never been established with any precision, because nobody filed a missing persons report at the time, and nobody raised an alarm for the next three decades. Instead, life on paper continued as though both of them were simply still living quietly on the property, growing older, cashing checks, receiving birthday cards, answering none of it themselves.

A Funeral That May Have Been the Last Sighting

Marie had five children, Marie, Theodore, Patricia, Delores, and Charles. Patricia died of cancer in 1980, and her funeral appears, based on later interviews with relatives, to be the last confirmed occasion on which multiple family members actually saw Marie in person. One bank employee later told investigators she believed she had seen Marie sometime between 1988 and 1990, though a Portage County sheriff's lieutenant who worked the case decades later suspected that sighting more likely involved Marie's daughter Delores, who regularly accompanied her brother Charles to the bank to cash checks and may simply have been mistaken for their mother by someone who did not know the family well. Delores herself eventually told investigators she had not seen her mother since Patricia's funeral, and had not seen her brother Theodore in more than ten years.

When investigators finally asked the surviving family members directly what had happened to Marie and Theodore, the explanation they received strained credibility from the start. According to Charles, his mother and brother had left the property decades earlier on an extended cross country road trip in a motor home, a trip that had apparently stretched on for something like thirty years without either of them returning even briefly or making meaningful contact with anyone. Investigators quickly noted a fundamental problem with this story: neither Marie nor Theodore had ever held a driver's license, making the idea of a decades long, self directed motor home journey considerably harder to accept at face value.

A Welfare Check Three Decades Overdue

The case only came to light at all because of the Social Security Administration, not because of anything the family reported. By August 2012, Marie would have been one hundred years old, and the agency had made repeated attempts, three separate efforts according to later reporting, to verify she was actually still alive before continuing to process her benefit payments. Unable to confirm her status, the agency contacted the Portage County Sheriff's Office on August 30, 2012, and asked for a welfare check at the Alm Road property. When deputies arrived, they found Charles uncooperative, a response that only deepened investigators' concern and led directly to a far more thorough search of the property.

What they found once they gained full access became, in the words of Lieutenant Wayne Kropidlowski, who led the investigation, probably a once in a career case. The property itself had deteriorated into something resembling a dump site rather than a working homestead. Multiple sheds and vehicles, including an old bus, sat scattered across the three acres along with mounting accumulations of trash. Officers had to cut locks off outbuildings just to check whether anything, or anyone, might be inside them. Charles's own living quarters had no running water and no electricity. Loose containers of oil, sheets of tar paper, and unidentified substances lay scattered throughout the property. Kropidlowski later said the smell was the single most noticeable thing about the scene, describing it as horrific, and recalled that in some areas officers had to physically wade through waist high garbage just to search the ground beneath it.

Cash, a Cross, and No Human Remains

Investigators located nine thousand dollars in cash stuffed inside a fanny pack somewhere on the property, along with bone fragments that immediately raised the possibility that Marie or Theodore's remains might finally be close at hand after three decades of uncertainty. A white cross had been placed near the property's main living structure, marking what looked very much like a deliberate burial site, and crime scene technicians spent weeks excavating the area with cadaver dogs working the grounds as well. The bones recovered were sent to a lab in Texas for analysis. The results eventually came back inconclusive on some fragments, while other bones recovered elsewhere on the property turned out to belong to something else entirely: a complete cat skeleton, carefully wrapped and buried, rather than anything human. Despite the scale of the search, no confirmed human remains were ever recovered from the property.

A Fraud Scheme Built on Silence

While investigators worked to determine what had physically happened to Marie and Theodore, a separate and more easily provable crime came into focus. Family members, prosecutors alleged, had continued cashing Marie's Social Security checks for years after she was almost certainly no longer alive to have earned them, totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred seventy five thousand dollars in benefits collected under her name. In September 2012, Charles Jost, along with Marie's daughter Delores Disher and Delores's husband Ronald Disher, were formally charged with fraud, theft, and unauthorized access to Marie's accounts.

The legal outcomes that followed were almost as strange as the underlying case itself. Charles was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, with reporting at the time noting he had only a first grade level of education; Kropidlowski himself suggested Charles most likely followed instructions from other family members rather than having orchestrated the scheme independently, telling one reporter that while nobody's first impression of Charles would be that he was capable of masterminding a fraud, he was certainly capable of doing what he was told to do. Charges against Delores were eventually dismissed due to her own medical problems, while Ronald's fraud charges ended in a mistrial, though he was separately convicted on weapons related charges connected to the case. Both Delores and Ronald have since died, taking with them whatever fuller understanding they may have had of what actually happened to Marie and Theodore.

Thank You Notes From the Dead

Perhaps the most unsettling detail to emerge from the investigation had nothing to do with money at all. Investigators found evidence that friends and extended family had continued sending Marie cards, letters, and even small amounts of money for years, unaware she was gone, including a card marking what would have been her hundredth birthday. Stranger still, some of those well wishers had received thank you responses back, seemingly written and signed in Marie's name. Marie, however, had suffered a stroke in the late 1970s that left her able to sign documents only with an X, making it effectively impossible that she had personally written any coherent thank you note during the years those responses were dated. Someone in the household had apparently been maintaining the illusion of Marie's ongoing life in granular, personal detail, not just cashing her government checks but actively corresponding with people who cared about her, for years after she was gone.

Two Theories, No Resolution

More than a decade after the 2012 search, investigators remain without a confirmed answer for what happened to either Marie or Theodore. Kropidlowski has offered his own working theory for Marie, suggesting she most likely died of natural causes at some point and was either buried somewhere on or near the property that searches never located, or, in a considerably grimmer possibility, was disposed of through a nearby waste transfer facility where Ronald Disher had reportedly once worked, a facility Kropidlowski noted had been linked to more than one body disposal over the years in unrelated cases. Because that facility functioned as a transfer station rather than a permanent landfill, with material regularly moved on to other locations, Kropidlowski has been blunt about the odds of ever locating remains there, comparing the likelihood to winning the lottery.

Theodore's fate remains even murkier. Investigators have found no indication he ever accessed Social Security, Medicare, or veteran's benefits under his own name at any point after the early 1980s, a silence that would be unusual for someone simply living quietly elsewhere, though Kropidlowski has floated the possibility that Theodore left Wisconsin entirely, potentially settling somewhere like California sometime in the 1990s, either under his own name and simply never reconnecting with his family, or under some form of new identity. If he is alive today, Theodore would be well into his eighties.

Waiting on a Confession

Investigators have acknowledged the case sits in a genuinely difficult position, a thirty plus year gap between the presumed disappearances and the first real investigation having compromised nearly every kind of evidence that might otherwise have been available. Kropidlowski has expressed hope that Charles Jost, the one surviving family member with the most direct knowledge of what happened on that property, might eventually offer more complete information, whether through a change of heart or, more grimly, a deathbed statement, though as of recent reporting investigators had not had direct contact with Charles in several months. The case remains formally open with the Portage County Sheriff's Office, built now around physical evidence that mostly amounts to what was not found, no human remains despite extensive searching, no trace of either missing person under their own identity anywhere in the country, and a fanny pack of cash that raised more questions about the family's intentions than it ever answered about Marie and Theodore's fate.

Sources