The Family That Disappeared One at a Time: Paul Anthony Lambert and Gertrude Mary Snedegar

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

July 14, 2026

Some missing persons cases involve a single victim and a single unanswered question. The story connected to Stephen Cabe Snedegar involves four people across five years, spanning three states, and it has never been fully resolved despite investigators developing a working theory of almost everything that happened. Only one of the four people involved was ever found, and she was already dead. The other three, including a man who tried to buy a waste oil business and the ex-wife of the man at the center of it all, simply vanished, one after another, while the person investigators believe was responsible for at least some of it went to his grave in 1990 having promised, and never delivered, a written account of what he knew.

A Business Sold, a Daughter Left Behind

In June 1981, Stephen Cabe Snedegar and his wife, Gertrude, sold Stephen's waste oil business in Greenfield, Indiana, and relocated to Florida. Their 22-year-old daughter, Lora Lynn Morris, remained behind in the family's former Greenfield home rather than moving with them. Two months later, in August 1981, Lora Lynn Morris disappeared. Her body was soon discovered in a cornfield near Morristown, Indiana, shot three times in the head with a .25 caliber weapon. Investigators would eventually develop a theory that her own mother, Gertrude, may have been responsible, possibly stemming from conflict over Morris's reported plans to reconcile with an estranged husband, though this theory would only take shape years later, after several more people connected to the family had disappeared without explanation.

The Man Who Wanted to Buy the Business

Weeks after Morris's murder, in September 1981, a man named Paul Anthony Lambert, known to friends as Tony, traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana, to meet with Stephen Snedegar at the Maison Dupuy Hotel on Toulouse Street. Lambert and another man had reportedly attempted to purchase Snedegar's waste oil business shortly before Morris was killed, giving him a direct business connection to the family. According to Snedegar's own later account, the true purpose of the New Orleans meeting was not a job offer at all, despite what he had told others beforehand, but an opportunity for Snedegar to question Lambert directly about any involvement he might have had in Morris's death. Snedegar claimed Lambert denied any such involvement during their meeting.

What happened afterward depends entirely on Snedegar's own shifting later statements, since Lambert was never seen again after that meeting in New Orleans on September 8, 1981. Snedegar eventually told friends and relatives that he had taken Lambert on an airplane ride out over the Gulf of Mexico, and that Lambert simply did not return from that flight. No wreckage, no remains, and no independent confirmation of the flight itself has ever surfaced. Lambert vanished as completely as if the story were never told at all, leaving investigators with only Snedegar's own account of events that conveniently placed him alone with a man who never came back.

The Witness Who Boarded a Bus

The pattern repeated itself again roughly six months later, this time involving a man named Charles Darwin Smith, known as Chuck, a former employee of Snedegar's who had reportedly witnessed Lora Lynn Morris in the company of a suspicious, unidentified man sometime before her murder. Smith apparently reported what he had seen, but according to the case's records, he brought this information only to Gertrude Snedegar rather than to police, a choice that would later appear deeply significant once Gertrude herself became a suspect in her daughter's death.

After losing his job, Smith accepted what he was told was a trucking position, one that had supposedly been arranged for him through Stephen Snedegar's connections. On March 27, 1982, a bus ticket was purchased for Smith in Knoxville, Tennessee. He boarded that bus and was never seen again. When investigators later tried to verify the trucking company that had supposedly hired him, the John Rodgers Trucking Company, they discovered it did not exist anywhere. Smith had been sent off toward a job that had been fabricated specifically, investigators came to believe, to get him out of the way as a potential witness against whoever was responsible for Morris's murder.

The Ex-Wife Who Never Came Home From Dancing

The final disappearance connected to this story took over four years to occur, and it involved someone even closer to the center of it than Lambert or Smith had been. By 1986, Stephen and Gertrude Snedegar had divorced, in 1983, but continued living together in Astor, Florida. In late July 1986, the two of them went out country dancing together. Gertrude deliberately left her purse at home that evening, telling someone beforehand that Stephen had enough money to cover the night out for both of them. She never returned from that evening at all.

Stephen's initial explanation was that Gertrude had simply abandoned him and relocated to Tallahassee on her own, a story he would go on to tell in several different, conflicting versions to relatives and investigators over time. What made this disappearance especially chilling in hindsight was something Gertrude had confided to her own daughter, Brenda, shortly before she vanished: that Stephen had repeatedly held a gun to her head at night and threatened to kill her. Gertrude was known to carry a .25 caliber handgun in her purse, the same caliber weapon that had killed her daughter Lora Lynn Morris five years earlier, though her purse, containing that weapon, was left behind at home the night she disappeared rather than carried with her.

A report later surfaced describing Stephen and another man removing a plastic wrapped body from a fishing boat somewhere along the Ocklawaha River, a detail that, if accurate, would seem to directly describe the disposal of Gertrude's remains. Investigators searched based on that account and found nothing conclusive. When police searched a former Snedegar property in Astor in 1994, hoping to finally locate physical evidence connected to any of the disappearances, that search also turned up nothing.

A Deathbed That Kept Its Secrets

Stephen Cabe Snedegar died of terminal cancer in January 1990, having reportedly promised, before his death, to provide documentation clarifying details connected to the disappearances of Morris, Lambert, Smith, and Gertrude. Whatever those documents might have contained, they were never recovered or turned over to investigators. Witnesses reported seeing papers being burned behind Snedegar's house within hours of his death, an act that, whether or not it destroyed anything genuinely relevant to the cases, effectively ensured that whatever knowledge Snedegar carried about what had actually happened to four people connected to his own family died along with him.

A Theory, But Never a Resolution

Investigators eventually assembled a working theory that attempted to connect all four cases into a single coherent narrative. Under this theory, Gertrude Snedegar was responsible for murdering her own daughter, Lora Lynn Morris, in a conflict connected to Morris's plans to reconcile with an estranged husband. Chuck Smith, having witnessed something incriminating before Morris's death and having reported it directly to Gertrude rather than to authorities, was then dispatched under Gertrude's arrangement, via a fabricated trucking job, to remove him as a potential witness against her. Paul Lambert, meanwhile, may have been killed by Stephen, either because Stephen believed Lambert was somehow responsible for Morris's death, or because Lambert's own investigation into the matter, prompted by his prior business dealings with the family, made him a liability. And finally, once Stephen realized that his own ex-wife, not some outside party, had been responsible for their daughter's murder, he killed Gertrude as well, completing a cycle in which every person connected closely enough to know the truth about Lora Lynn Morris's death eventually disappeared themselves.

This theory has never been proven in any courtroom, and with Stephen Snedegar dead since 1990 and no other suspect ever charged, it likely never will be. No remains connected to Lambert, Smith, or Gertrude have ever been recovered. Only Lora Lynn Morris's body was ever found, in the cornfield near Morristown, Indiana, where it was discovered in 1981, and even her murder, the one case in this saga with an actual body and a confirmed cause of death, has never resulted in an arrest or a conviction.

Cases Still Open

The investigations into Paul Anthony Lambert's and Gertrude Mary Snedegar's disappearances remain officially open, handled jointly across jurisdictions that include the New Orleans Police Department, the Carmel Police Department in Indiana, and Florida authorities connected to Gertrude's case in Astor. With Stephen Snedegar dead and no other person ever charged in connection with any of the four cases, the investigation has effectively stalled, dependent on evidence, remains, or documentation that may simply no longer exist, having been destroyed, buried, or lost to the Gulf of Mexico decades ago.

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