Murder of Jeanette Brunner

I rarely write about unsolved murder cases. I prefer cases that have a definite resolution. However, I'm going to make an exception for the case of Jeanette Brunner, a 17-year-old girl who was killed in Dade County (MO) 56 years ago. Hardly anyone else has written about it since the case went cold a few months after her body turned up in a pond near her home, and I figure this young woman's case deserves some attention, too, like so many of the other cold cases that seem to get a lot of attention. 

A recent graduate of Lockwood High School, Jeanette left her home on foot shortly after midnight on Saturday, September 19, 1970, following an argument with her parents. Early Sunday morning, barely more than 24 hours later, two young neighbor boys found her nude body floating in a pond on their land about a half mile from the Brunner home. Cause of death was unknown at first, and there was speculation that she had simply drowned.

A autopsy revealed a few days later, however, that she had been beaten on the head with a heavy object, such as a rock, and then thrown in the water. Reports conflicted as to whether she was already dead when placed in the water or she was unconscious when thrown in and died from drowning as result. In either case, a coroner's jury concluded that Jeanette had been killed by an assailant or assailants unknown. 

It was reported at the time that Jeanette had recently lost her job working in the SMSU (Southwest Missouri State University) cafeteria and that she was despondent over that turn of events, but there was no indication that her recent job loss factored into her death. It was also never intimated that the argument with her parents played any part in the tragedy other than being the impetus for her to leave home in the middle of the night.

The family offered $1,000 reward for information leading to Jeanette's killer, but two months after the murder, no arrests had been made, and the case quickly went cold. After November 1970, it was scarcely mentioned in area newspapers for the next fifty years. In 2020, John Hacker wrote a feature about Jeanette's case that appeared in the Joplin Globe, but that's the only extensive coverage I'm aware of that the case has gotten in the past 55 years. At the time of Hacker's story, no one had ever been arrested in the case, and I assume that's still true.