Mom’s body dumped by road, missing children found in another state, Missouri police say
A bicyclist traveling along a Missouri highway in late July found a woman’s body dumped on a steep hillside near a suitcase she’d likely been stuffed into, police said.
Now police are looking for a father of her children, who had been missing until Thursday, the Des Moines Register reports.
When deputies first found the mother’s body, she was unidentifiable because of how long the body was “out in the elements” in the middle of summer in southwestern Missouri, the McDonald County Sheriff’s Office wrote on Facebook. At the time, no one in the community had been reported missing, the sheriff’s office said.
Police immediately investigated the unknown woman’s death as a homicide.
“A lot of people travel up and down the highway,” Carson Adamson, the co-owner of a nearby campground, told KFSM. “It’s kind of an unsettling feeling.”
Ten days later, authorities identified the woman as Jessica McCormack, a 25-year-old mother of three from Noel, Missouri. Her friends said they hadn’t seen her since mid-July, police said.
As the sheriff’s detectives investigated McCormack’s death, they learned her kids were missing. One of the children’s father filed a missing and endangered child report, according to the sheriff’s office.
The missing children were 4 years old, 20 months old and 7 months old, police said. McCormack’s friends told investigators she last was seen with her children on July 3, more than three weeks before her body was found, the sheriff’s office said.
The sheriff’s office sent out a missing person’s alert Thursday, and the three children were found safe in Iowa the same day.
A father of the children had taken them to a relative’s home in Des Moines a few days before, the Des Moines Register reported. Des Moines police don’t believe the father is still in the city, but they’re trying to confirm that, the newspaper reported.
Police consider him to be a “person of interest,” the Des Moines Register reported.
This story was originally published August 9, 2019 at 1:08 PM with the headline "Mom’s body dumped by road, missing children found in another state, Missouri police say."