by Rick Stack
Having also grown up in the Midwest (Cedar Rapids, Iowa), Jared Keever’s excellent post, The Secret at Fox Hollow Farm: Herb Baumeister Murdered and Buried 11 Gay Men on His Indiana Country Estate, reminds me of the mysterious disappearance of Lynn Schuller, a wife and mother of a three-year old son only 2 blocks from my childhood home on August 6, 1972. The inset of the map in the Cedar Rapids Gazette article showing where Lynn disappeared even shows the street on which I lived — Orrian Drive. See http://iowacoldcases.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/1992-3-19-MMU-2pgs.pdf. That home also had dense woods behind it.
The sheriff didn’t believe the story of her husband (Keith Schuller), a somewhat creepy guy, that Lynn was sleeping when he and his son had left home at 7:30 a.m. on August 6. When they returned home 5 hours later, Lynn and her bicycle were missing. Keith claims that he left a note for his wife and went swimming with his son at a local public pool. According to Keith, when they came back one hour later, Lynn’s bicycle was back in the garage but she was nowhere to be found. Nothing was missing from the house or otherwise disturbed.
Later that day, Keith called Lynn’s parents and others to report her disappearance. A few searches of the area by Keith turned up nothing. The following day, Keith called the Sheriff’s Department to report the disappearance of his wife. A more extensive search of the woods was conducted with dozens of volunteers. Keith declined to join in that search, ostensibly because he had conducted his own searches and found nothing.
Keith owned a 6-foot long pet alligator named Pogo (John Gacy’s clown phoning in from the crypt?) and several snakes. A rumor started that Keith had cut up his wife 
into pieces and fed it to his alligator and snakes. The police discounted that possibility, however, because the reptiles were too small to devour a human body. They instead focused their efforts on searching the woods behind the house and the house, after obtaining a search warrant to do so. Authorities even took aerial photos of the woods behind the Schuller home in an attempt to identify recently dug-up ground. However, no trace of Lynn was ever found.
Without a body and no visible signs of any violent struggle, the sheriff never charged Mr. Schuller with any crime. He continued to live in the house with his son for the next several years, which we assiduously avoided when trick-or-treating at my parents’ insistence. Keith eventually moved away from the neighborhood, possibly because people in the area innately knew what law enforcement could never prove (that he was a killer), and he may have gotten away with murder. According to the linked article (now some 23 years old), Keith lived in Fruitland, Idaho where he was a 6th grade teacher.
Another somewhat unusual aspect of this crime story is that shortly after Lynn disappeared, Keith filed for divorce in Linn County on the grounds that she had deserted him. When Lynn’s parents hired an attorney to represent her in that case, Keith dropped the case. Lynn’s parents claim that Keith filed for divorce in Linn County a total of seven times and that he dropped the case each time, after they had entered the case on Lynn’s behalf. Lynn’s parents had sought to compel Keith to testify under oath about the circumstances of his wife’s disappearance. Keith finally obtained a divorce from Lynn in July 1976, only by filing his case some 100 miles away, in Dubuque County, without the knowledge of Lynn’s parents. In March 1978, a Dubuque County judge granted Keith’s request to have Lynn declared legally dead, with their son as the sole heir of her life insurance policy and Keith as the conservator. Keith later married a woman who he met in Cedar Rapids BEFORE Lynn’s disappearance. That marriage eventually ended in divorce.
As a practicing attorney in the Golden State, I wonder why Lynn Schuller’s parents didn’t file a wrongful death action against Keith, if nothing else, to at least compel him to testify about his wife’s disappearance. Alternatively, her parents might have been able to petition for a coroner’s inquest and/or declaration of Lynn’s death, at which percipient witnesses could also have been subpoenaed to testify, especially Keith. However, I’m unfamiliar with the idiosyncracies of wrongful death or inquest law in Iowa, so there may have been a sound reason why Lynn’s lawyers did not pursue such a strategy action. In any event, instituting such proceedings may have suffered from the same infirmity as a criminal case against Keith: no dead body, no signs of a violent struggle, no apparent crime scene, and thus, no crime.
As with Jared Keever’s story, this goes to show you that living in a small town is no guarantee of safety. 
No one is completely immune from crime, even in Americana. 