Inside a St. Clair home tucked into the countryside, miles of cornfields away from the nearest highway, is a turtle-shaped lamp Roy Lueth used to leave on when his daughter was coming home late and a cabinet she called the “smart cabinet,” stacked full of awards from his academic career and hers.
In the kitchen, there’s the table where he spent hours helping her through calculus and physics, before she became an MSU student. And hanging on the refrigerator are fading printouts of comics she gave him and photographs that face backward — the last ones taken of her, during an October stroll the two took through the woods behind the home.
The home is full of “Krista stuff,” as Roy Lueth calls it. But Krista Lueth, a brilliant horticulture student with a bright future and love of animated movies, has not been home in more than a year.
Today marks one year since the then-34-year-old MSU student’s Nov. 11, 2008, disappearance from her Lansing apartment. Although the case has been reclassified as a homicide and police say they’ve identified a person of interest, no one is in custody for Krista Lueth’s disappearance.
Out of the blue
On Tuesday, Nov. 11, 2008, Krista Lueth attended class with horticulture professor Art Cameron, with whom she planned to start an internship. The top student acted no differently than she would on a typical day, Cameron said.
“She was perky, always sitting in the front row, always full of questions,” he said.
Cameron said he might have been one of the last people to speak with Krista Lueth. He said he thinks whatever happened later that night happened unexpectedly.
Roy Lueth said Krista’s disappearance was “completely out of the blue.”
Bus records show she took the bus from campus to her apartment between 5 and 5:30 p.m., Roy Lueth said. Krista Lueth talked to her friend Rick Stilgenbauer, who leased the apartment below her, at about 6 p.m., before leaving the apartment.
“No one knows who she left with,” Roy Lueth said.
Roy Lueth said he called Krista at about 7:30 or 8 p.m. The call went straight to voicemail, although she always left her phone on.
The next day, he called again. On Thursday, he sent a friend to check on her. Krista Lueth’s cat was alone in the clean and orderly apartment and everything appeared to be “fine,” he said.
On Saturday, Roy Lueth reported his daughter missing to the Michigan State Police.
In the time following her disappearance, members of the Horticulture Club Krista Lueth was involved in posted flyers and held a candlelight vigil, said Tamara Keene, then club Web master and historian. Rumors circulated in the club about a boyfriend Krista had broken up with that week, Keene said.
Now, one year later, police have reclassified the case as a homicide. Roy Lueth said he now believes his daughter — whom he called his best friend — was dead by the night she went missing.
No other explanation
The case was reclassified partly because there is no other explanation for why Krista Lueth still would be missing, said Detective First Lt. Dan Pekrul, the lead investigator on the case.
“There’s just nothing that would lead us to think that she’s out and about somewhere, by any means,” he said.
Police have had a person of interest for “a while now,” Pekrul said. Krista Lueth and the person, whose location is known to police, knew each other, he said.
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“We don’t believe this was a random act of violence,” Pekrul said.
The person of interest is not in custody because police do not have enough information to execute an arrest warrant, Pekrul said. He would not elaborate further.
Investigators are looking for evidence and asking the public to be on the lookout in hopes of locating a body, which could lead to evidence and closure for the Lueth family, he said.
Anyone with information is asked to call the Michigan State Police public line at (517) 241-8000.
Krista Lueth’s sister, Elizabeth Crum, said in a statement to The State News she misses her sister “terribly” and cries every day.
“I hope her body is found and that her killer is arrested, convicted and locked away,” she said in the statement.
“Not because that will bring me any comfort, but so he doesn’t kill some other poor girl and cause another family this kind of grief.”
Crum said in a blog she knows her “beautiful, sweet, loving, silly, earthy” sister was killed.
“I trust she is now in charge of a large-ish plot somewhere on the west end of Heaven,” she said in the blog. “Angels are strolling by, nodding and whispering in admiration. She is too busy weeding to notice.”
Waves of grief
Roy Lueth e-mails police at least weekly with questions or information he thinks of, because he doesn’t want them to forget about Krista. He said he understands police can’t tell him much, because he doesn’t want to take a chance of jeopardizing the investigation.
“I tell them, ‘If it takes another year, it takes another year. If it takes five years it takes five years,’” he said. “‘Make sure that when you prosecute this guy, that you’ve got all your T’s crossed and I’s dotted.’”
Roy Lueth, who just wants to put his daughter to rest, says he could never get rid of any of her things.
He looks out the window of the home he chose so his three children could stretch their legs as they grew up and remembers how when they were kids, they would be out raking the leaves and jumping in the piles, feeding and riding the horses.
“It’s kind of almost better now,” he said. “(Grief) isn’t always there — it comes in waves. For the first six months or so, those waves were just debilitating. Now, you just live with them. They’re never going to go away for the rest of my life.”
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