Larry Marvin Morris was just wrapping up a temporary stint as a seismograph worker in Riverton, Wyoming, when he mysteriously disappeared.
The 24-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma, college student had planned a stop in Yellowstone National Park before heading home. Morris never made it to either destination and was reported missing April 24, 1974.
Since the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation started tracking missing persons cases, the disappearance of Morris remains the oldest and coldest of those in the agency’s missing person database.
Although it’s been 50 years, it’s a case that former Riverton Police Department detective and Fremont County Coroner Ed McAuslan knows well and continues to ponder well into retirement.
In fact, it had been McAuslan’s first missing person investigation as rookie detective.
He’d joined the department in 1973, and two years later was also hired as deputy coroner. In 1998, he was elected coroner and held the post for 16 years. McAuslan retired in 2014 after nearly 28 years with the police and 40 as coroner.
Over the course of his career, McAuslan never stopped thinking about Morris or trying to solve what he firmly believes was a homicide.
He’s also stayed in contact with Morris’ sister, who did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request for an interview.
Unfortunately, McAuslan said, the two men who were likely responsible for Morris’ murder have also long since died despite his repeated attempts to get them prosecuted.
“Every time we’d get a new county attorney in office, I would present the case to them,” he said. “Nobody would take it and prosecute it.”
Assumed Identity
After failing to show up at work the following Monday, Morris was reported missing by his boss.
A search of Morris’ Riverton apartment showed no signs of foul play, suggesting that he met with foul play somewhere between Riverton and Jackson.
“At that particular point, we didn’t have a whole lot to go on,” McAuslan said.
He sent out inquiries with Morris’ description and that of his car to police agencies in surrounding states, McAuslan recalled, and within a couple of weeks received a call from the sheriff’s office in Twin Falls, Idaho.
The sheriff had detained a man identifying as Larry Marvin Morris, McAuslan was told, who was being held on suspicion of armed burglary.
McAuslan immediately headed to Twin Falls, where he and the FBI interviewed a man who was determined not to be Morris. Instead, he was 36-year-old Jack Raymond Lincoln, who turned out to be an escapee from the Colorado State Penitentiary’s pre-parole center.
According to reporting by the Fort Collins Coloradoan, Lincoln had just completed an 11- to 18-year sentence for receiving stolen goods and larceny. At the time he escaped, he’d been serving an additional three to seven years for conspiring to escape from the Camp George West honor farm near Golden.
Lincoln was arrested with another ex-felon, James Franklin Jagers, 26, who had been Lincoln’s cellmate in the Colorado penitentiary.
Overdue Rental Car
The men had Morris’ driver’s license and credit cards, where McAuslen had traced them from Wyoming, Utah and Nevada to California, Oregon and Idaho, where they’d been arrested for breaking into a country store.
At the time of their arrest, Jagers and Lincoln were driving an overdue rental car from San Francisco that had been reserved under Morris’ name.
In the car, police found “guns and frozen meat” that likely tied them to an additional burglary at a rural home, according to a May 9, 1974, story in the Twin Falls Times-News.
The men had been arrested the same night robbing a country store in Hollister, Idaho. The store owner had caught them in the act after a woman saw the men entering the closed store, according to reporting by the Twin Falls Times-News.
Both were sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in the Idaho State Penitentiary.
Uncooperative
When questioned by McAuslan, both denied having anything to do with Morris’ disappearance and were uncooperative, he said.
“Their basic attitude was, ‘That’s a damn lie and that’s all I’m going to tell you,’” McAuslan said. “We didn’t get anywhere in our interviews, even though when they were arrested, they had all of Larry’s identification.”
Days after their arrest, Morris’ 1966 Ford car with Oklahoma license plates was found abandoned at a car repair shop in San Francisco, where they had rented a car using Morris’ credit card and personal information.
To McAuslan’s knowledge, Morris’ family paid for the repairs and took his vehicle back with them to Oklahoma.
No Trace
McAuslan is convinced that the men, both of whom have since died, were responsible for Morris’ death and suspects they dumped his body somewhere off the highway between Riverton and Dubois.
The area had been hit with heavy spring snow at the time Morris disappeared, which would have limited how far they could have gotten off the road to ditch the body, he said.
“We did a lot of groundwork,” McAuslan said, including searches with Morris’ family. Over the years, he speculates they’ve searched the entire terrain between the two cities.
“He [Morris] never did turn up,” McAuslan said, “so when they disposed of the body, they did a good job of it.”
McAuslan speculated that Morris may have seen the two hitchhiking along the highway and picked them up or ran into them at a gas station or other location in town because they had just ditched the car they’d stolen out of Colorado.
This was the early 1970s, McAuslan noted, where it would have been normal to give a person a lift.
No DNA was taken from the car because it wasn’t introduced as evidence in a court until 1986, according to the National Institute for Justice.
McAuslan is under no misconception that Morris is still alive.
“My perspective was, well, they’ve got everything else and he’s [Morris] never been seen again,” McAuslan said. “You can make an assumption that he has to be dead.”
Deal, No Deal
McAuslan kept close tabs on the men over the decade-plus that he worked the case and stayed in constant contact with Morris’ family.
Anytime an unidentified body was found close to Morris’ description, McAuslan would investigate it further.
“We looked at a lot of dead bodies,” he said.
And despite the relatively strong tangential evidence of being caught with Morris’ identification, credit cards and other possessions, neither man was ever arrested in connection with the disappearance.
Jagers, however, came close to a confession in 1983, when he attempted to negotiate a move from the Idaho penitentiary to a Wyoming prison in exchange for information.
Jagers allegedly told authorities that Morris was indeed dead and he knew where the body was.
The deal never went anywhere, McAuslan said.
Ryan Cox, DCI commander and head of cold cases, confirmed a deal had been discussed, though in the end, the “inmate did not agree to cooperate with Wyoming law enforcement.”
Jagers died in 2014 at age 68, according to his obituary in the Tribune Chronicle. Lincoln died years earlier, McAuslan said, though Cowboy State Daily could not locate his obituary.
As such, they took their secrets to the grave, McAuslan said.
No other suspects apart from the two men were identified, McAuslan said, despite extensive interviews and groundwork.
To date, the case remains unsolved pending new information or the discovery of Morris’ body. Despite the odds of actually finding answers, McAuslan refuses to write it off.
“You never want to say something's unsolvable, because sometimes something can turn up,” he said.
Anyone with any information is asked to contact the Riverton Police Department at 307-856-4891 or the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation at 307-777-7181.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
