ARKANSAS 1996 Cold Case Solved After 3 Years — Jus…
ARKANSAS 1996 Cold Case Solved After 3 Years — Justice for William Mueller, Nancy Mueller & Powell
On January 11th, 1996, William Mueller, his wife Nancy, and her daughter from a previous relationship, Sarah Powell, who was only 8 years old, walked through the front door of their home near Tilly, Arkansas, after an ordinary day, preparing for a gun show trip the next day.
They did not know that two men dressed as federal law enforcement officers had broken in and been hiding inside for many hours.
William Mueller, 52 years old, was a federally licensed firearms dealer who owned a large collection of weapons along with about $50,000 in cash.
He never had a chance to react.
A blow from a rifle butt to the head knocked him down right at the door.
Then, the two attackers turned on Sarah, the 8-year-old girl, and used a cattle prod to shock her in order to force her to reveal where her parents’ money and guns were hidden.
Once they had taken everything, they pulled plastic bags over the heads of all three people, sealed them tightly with duct tape, and watched them suffocate.
Then, they tied rocks to the bodies and threw the entire family into the river.
>> >> Five months later, on June 28th, 1996, a fisherman discovered three bodies floating in a branch of the Illinois bayou near Russellville.
William Mueller’s military jacket was still on him.
Nancy’s feet were bound with plastic zip ties.
Sarah’s head was still wrapped in a plastic bag.
>> >> There were no witnesses.
There were no suspects.
Police began investigating but had nothing to go on.
The Ozarks region was too remote, too quiet, and the three people had been missing for too long.
>> >> But, the two killers had made one mistake.
They sold the Mueller family’s guns at gun shows across the country, and every one of those guns had a serial number that led straight back to the victims.
It took 3 years, a shootout on an Ohio highway, a younger brother who turned himself in and implicated his sibling, and a mother who betrayed her own son out of fear for her life before the case was finally solved.
This is the story of how two white supremacists murdered an entire family to finance their dream of building a pure white nation >> >> and how the killers own family ultimately brought them to light.
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To understand why the Mueller family was murdered, you have to understand where they lived and who they were.
Tilly, Arkansas is not a town in the ordinary sense.
It is an unincorporated community located in Smyrna Township, Pope County, deep in the Ozarks, where Arkansas Highway 16 meets Arkansas Highway 27.
The population is sparse.
>> >> Neighbors live miles apart.
The only grocery store has been open since 1939 by the Fountain family and inside it is a small post office branch.
It is the kind of place where everyone knows each other’s names, knows each other’s vehicles, knows when someone has been gone too long.
But it is also the kind of place where people do not ask too many questions.
Tilly sits at an elevation of nearly 600 m above sea level near the headwaters of the middle fork of the Little Red River.
The land is beautiful, quiet, and completely isolated.
William Frederick Mueller, 52 years old, lived here because it was the perfect place for his work.
>> >> He was a federal firearms licensee, a federally licensed gun dealer.
He bought, sold, traded, and collected weapons.
His collection included dozens of firearms of all types, from handguns to rifles, along with a large quantity of ammunition.
He also kept about $50,000 in cash and coins in the house.
In the world of gun dealing at rural Arkansas gun shows, cash was the most common form of transaction, and Mueller always had it on hand.
He was a military veteran.
>> >> The US Army jacket he wore every day was the same one still on his body when it was found 5 months after his death.
Mueller was not an easy man to intimidate.
He understood weapons.
He understood danger.
But, he also trusted his community, and that trust was the thing that ultimately killed him.
His wife, Nancy Ann Mueller, born Branch, was 28 years old, nearly a quarter century younger than her husband.
She was from the area with family roots deep in Pope County.
Her mother was Earline Branch Peterson.
Her sister was Kemah Gerrell.
Her niece was Monica Violette, who was then 19 years old.
These were names that would reappear decades later in courtrooms and on national news pages.
But, in 1996, they were simply an ordinary Ozarks family.
Nancy had a daughter from a relationship before her marriage to William.
Sara Elizabeth Powell was 8 years old.
William was her stepfather, and by every account, he loved her as his own child.
A family photograph taken in 1989 shows all three of them together, >> >> William, Nancy, and Sara.
An ordinary family.
Nothing in that photograph suggested that 7 years later all three would be found at the bottom of a river with plastic bags over their heads.
The Kehoe family lived in the area.
Kirby Kehoe, the father, knew William Mueller through the local gun dealing community.
On the surface, the relationship between the two families appeared normal.
But, beneath the surface, there was a history that Mueller did not fully grasp.
Kirby Kehoe had a son named Chevy O’Bryan Kehoe, born on January 29th, 1973 in Orange Park, Florida, Chevie was not an ordinary person.
He was an active member of the Aryan People’s Republic, a white supremacist organization.
He had big plans, and those plans required money >> >> and weapons.
Around February 12th, 1995, when Chevie came to visit the family in the Ozarks, he and his father, Kirby, broke into the Mueller home while the family was away at a gun show.
They took about $50,000 in coins and some firearms.
Chevie carried the loot back to Washington.
That was the first robbery.
William Mueller was not a man to sit still.
When he discovered the theft, he grew suspicious and confronted Kirby Kehoe directly.
That act, that courage, was what signed his death warrant.
Chevie Kehoe heard that Mueller had confronted his father and decided that Mueller had to die.
Not out of personal hatred, but because Mueller knew too much, and if he reported it to the police, Chevie’s entire network would collapse.
That was February 1995.
Mueller lived almost another 11 months.
In January 1996, the Mueller family disappeared.
They were preparing for a gun show trip, but never arrived.
In a small community like Tilly, a prolonged absence did not always raise immediate alarm.
People thought they might have gone far away.
Maybe they were selling in another state.
Gun dealers often traveled a lot, but the weeks turned into months, and no one heard any news from the Mueller family.
No phone calls, no letters, no new transactions appeared in William’s records.
The house near Tilly stood silent, doors closed, as if the owners might return at any moment.
They never returned.
On June 28th, 1996, nearly 6 months after the family vanished, a fisherman on a branch of the Illinois Bayou near Russellville discovered something he at first could not comprehend.
Three bodies in the water.
Lake Dardanelle and the surrounding river branches are quiet waters where local people fish and boat.
Not a place where one expects to find corpses.
Police arrived at the scene and recorded what they saw.
All three victims had plastic bags over their heads sealed tightly with duct tape.
Their hands were bound.
Rocks had been tied to the bodies to keep them submerged.
William Mueller was still wearing his military jacket.
Nancy’s feet were bound with plastic zip ties.
The head of Sarah, the 8-year-old girl, was wrapped in a separate plastic bag.
The bodies had been in the water for about five months.
Identification took time, but eventually the identities were confirmed.
William Mueller, Nancy Mueller, Sarah Powell, the missing family from Tilly.
Detectives began investigating, but the case immediately hit a dead end.
There were no witnesses who had seen anything unusual on the night the family disappeared.
There were no security cameras in this remote rural area.
There were no clear forensic traces at the house because nearly half a year had passed.
The bodies had decomposed too much in the water to provide detailed clues about the killers.
Police knew this was an organized planned murder, not a random act.
Someone knew about Mueller’s property.
Someone knew the family’s habits.
Someone had come, killed all three people, cleaned up the scene, and vanished without leaving a trace.
That was the summer of 1996.
Nancy Mueller’s family received a call from a detective.
Monica Vallette, Nancy’s niece, then 19 years old, remembered that moment for the rest of her life.
Arleen Branch Peterson, Nancy’s mother, and Kim Aguerelle, Nancy’s sister, received the news that their relatives had been found at the bottom of the river.
No longer missing, dead.
All three, including Sarah, only 8 years old, and no one knew who had done it.
In the weeks after the bodies were found, Pope County detectives did everything they could with what they had.
They interviewed neighbors within a radius of dozens of miles around Tilly.
No one had seen anything.
No one had heard anything.
In a community where the sound of gunfire was normal because everyone hunted, no one could distinguish the sound of a murder from the sound of hunting.
They checked William Mueller’s gun transaction records, looking for anyone who might have had a conflict with him, any deal that had gone bad, any dissatisfied customer.
The list was long, but led nowhere.
They dove the area around where the bodies were found, searching for additional evidence.
Nothing of value was recovered.
Local newspapers reported briefly.
On June 30th, 1996, 2 days after the bodies were discovered, a local paper ran a story with a headline about three people dead in a river branch.
On July 8th, 1996, another article reported that police had dived the water investigating the Mueller case, but obtained no results.
The case began to go cold.
Not because the police did not care, but because they had nothing to work with.
No murder weapon was found.
>> >> No fingerprints.
No usable DNA after 5 months in the water.
No witnesses.
The house near Tilly had been disturbed, but left no clear clues pointing to any specific individual.
This was the kind of case detectives knew had an answer, but that answer lay beyond their reach, at least for the time being.
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To truly understand this case, to understand why three people died and who killed them, we must go back in time.
Leave the River Branch and the quiet house in Tilly >> >> and look at two men whom no one had yet suspected.
Chevie O’Brien Kehoe was born on January 29th, 1973 in Orange Park, Florida.
His father was Kirby Kehoe.
His mother was Gloria Kehoe.
He had a younger brother named Shane.
>> >> The Kehoe family moved frequently, eventually settling in the Ozarks of Arkansas, then relocating to the Spokane area of Washington.
Chevie grew up in an environment where white supremacy was not an extreme viewpoint, but the daily dinner conversation.
He became an active member of the Aryan Peoples Republic, a self-proclaimed organization that wanted to establish a separate nation exclusively for white people in the Pacific Northwest.
This was not a group of people sitting in living rooms complaining about the government.
These were people who bought weapons, trained in combat, made concrete plans, and were willing to kill to achieve their goals.
Chevie Kehoe was a natural leader in the group.
He had charisma, the confidence of a man who believed absolutely in his mission, and the ability to persuade others to follow him down the darkest paths.
His criminal career spanned five states.
Together with his accomplices, he carried out multiple robberies, kidnappings, firearms violations, and violent shootouts with police.
He used the stolen money to buy real estate in Idaho as a training base for the organization.
On April 29th, 1996, only a few months after the Mueller family was murdered, Chevie Kehoe and an accomplice placed and detonated a pipe bomb in front of Spokane City Hall in Washington.
The bomb was one of three detonated in the Spokane area within a 1-month period, all linked to white supremacy.
This was not an amateur.
>> >> This was a systematic, organized domestic terrorist with no conscience whatsoever.
And he had a perfect accomplice.
Daniel Lewis Lee was born on January 31st, 1973 in Yukon, Oklahoma, only 2 days after Chevie Kehoe.
Two men of the same age, born in the same year, sharing the same ideology, but coming from completely different starting points.
Where Kehoe had family, structure, and purpose, even if that purpose was criminal, Lee had nothingness.
Lee’s biological father, James Lee, physically abused his son >> >> and then abandoned the family right after Lee was born.
Lee’s mother later alleged that a stepfather not only beat Lee, but also sexually abused the boy.
Lee grew up in the foster care system, escaped from facilities twice while still a minor, and was moved through multiple states from Oklahoma to Kentucky, and then Arkansas.
By the time he reached adulthood, he had already been charged with three second-degree burglaries and witness intimidation.
Lee was not a leader.
He was a follower.
He sought structure, a sense of belonging, someone to tell him who he was and what he should do.
White supremacy gave him all of that.
It gave him an identity, a community, an enemy on whom to blame every failure in his life.
And Chevie Kehoe gave him a leader to follow.
On July 24th, 1990, when Lee was only 17 years old, he participated with his cousin John David Patton in his first murder.
The victim was Joey Wavra, a young man in Oklahoma.
Lee was convicted and went to prison for the related robbery, but he did not stay in prison long.
When he got out, he found his way into the white supremacist movement and met Chevie Kehoe.
The two men found in each other exactly what they needed.
Kehoe needed a loyal subordinate willing to do anything asked without question.
Lee needed someone stronger than himself, someone with a plan, a vision, someone who made him feel important.
It was a symbiotic relationship between two dangerous men, and it would cost three innocent people their lives.
In late December 1995 or early January 1996, Kehoe and Lee left Washington.
They told friends they were going to Idaho.
Instead, they drove to Arizona, where they met Kehoe’s parents, then continued to Oklahoma before heading toward Arkansas.
Their final destination was the house near Tilly.
Kehoe knew exactly what Mueller had.
He knew about the gun collection.
He knew about the cash.
His father had already robbed this house once, and Chevie had carried the loot back to Washington.
This time, Kehoe was not coming to rob and leave.
This time, he was coming to take everything and leave no living witnesses.
The plan was simple.
Take Mueller’s guns and money.
Kill the entire family.
Use the proceeds to finance the building of a pure white nation in the Pacific Northwest.
>> >> Buy more weapons.
Buy more land.
Train more warriors.
That was Chevie Kehoe’s dream, and the Mueller family was the stepping stone to achieve it.
Three human lives, including an 8-year-old girl, had no value in that calculation.
They were merely obstacles to be removed.
January 11th, 1996.
Kehoe and Lee arrived at the house near Tilly in the morning or early afternoon.
The Mueller family was not home.
They were preparing for a gun show trip and may have been out shopping or running errands.
Kehoe and Lee did not wait passively.
They acted.
Both wore clothing designed to resemble federal law enforcement officers, the kind of raid gear used by SWAT teams.
In rural Arkansas, where federal agencies occasionally inspected licensed firearms dealers, this attire would not raise suspicion if anyone saw them from a distance.
They forced the lock, entered the house, and hid.
Then, they waited.
The house was quiet.
Mueller’s weapons hung on the walls and sat in display cabinets.
>> >> The cash was stored somewhere in the house.
Kehoe knew all of those things were there because his father had robbed the house 11 months earlier.
He simply did not know the exact hiding places, and that was why he needed the Mueller family to return.
Not to confront them, to exploit them.
Late in the day, Bill and Nancy Mueller and Sarah walked through the front door.
They did not know that two men were standing in the darkness inside their own home.
Bill Mueller, a military veteran who had spent his entire life around weapons, >> >> recognized the danger in an instant.
His survival instinct kicked in, but he never had a chance.
Kehoe appeared and struck Mueller full force in the head with a rifle butt, knocking him to the floor.
The blow was so hard that Mueller was unconscious or nearly unconscious immediately.
Nancy was subdued right afterward.
Both husband and wife were bound, helpless, lying on the floor of their own home.
And then, Kehoe turned to Sarah.
She was only 8 years old.
She had just spent the day with her parents.
She walked into the house expecting dinner, maybe cartoons on television, maybe an early bedtime so they could leave for the gun show the next morning.
Instead, she saw her stepfather lying on the floor, blood running from his head, and her mother bound.
Kehoe asked Sarah where the money and guns were kept.
She was 8 years old.
She was so terrified she could not speak, or perhaps she did not know, or perhaps she knew but did not want to say.
Whatever the reason, Kehoe had no patience.
He used a cattle prod, the kind used to control livestock on farms, and shocked Sarah to force her to talk.
An 8-year-old girl was tortured with a cattle prod in her own home in front of her bound parents lying on the floor.
Officials later believed she was also forced to watch her stepfather and mother being tortured before her eyes.
Think about that for 1 second.
Not in a horror movie, not in a novel, in a real house in rural Arkansas on a January evening.
Kehoe and Lee did not use the cattle prod only on Sarah.
All three victims were shocked with a cattle prod or stun gun.
They interrogated the entire family, searching every hiding place, every secret compartment, every last coin.
When they had taken everything of value, including weapons, ammunition, and cash, the only question left was what to do with the family.
For Chevy Kehoe, the answer had never been a question.
His plan from the beginning was to leave no one alive.
He wanted Mueller dead because Mueller had confronted his father after the 1995 robbery, and if Mueller remained alive, he would be a permanent threat.
But killing Mueller meant killing Nancy, and killing Nancy meant killing Sarah because an 8-year-old girl could describe the faces of the men who had murdered her parents.
Kehoe and Lee first pulled a plastic bag over William Mueller’s head, then Nancy’s.
They sealed the bags tightly with duct tape, the industrial silver kind that can form a complete seal.
Both husband and wife suffocated.
Then came Sarah.
And here a detail appears that would shape the entire legal debate for more than two decades afterward.
Daniel Lewis Lee refused to kill Sarah.
The man who had participated in murder since the age of 17, who had helped restrain and torture the entire family, who had stood and watched as the two adults were bagged and suffocated, that man looked at the 8-year-old girl and said, “No”.
He could not do it.
Chevie Kehoe had no problem with it.
His younger brother Shane later told authorities that Chevie had described the murders in detail and revealed that he himself had killed Sarah Powell because Lee was incapable of doing it.
Kehoe pulled a plastic bag over Sarah’s head and sealed it with duct tape, exactly as he had done with her parents.
She suffocated in the house where she had grown up.
She was 8 years old.
After all three victims were dead, Kehoe and Lee cleaned up the scene.
They tied rocks to the bodies, loaded them into a vehicle, and drove to the Lake Dardanelle area near Russellville, a few dozen miles from Tilly.
They threw the three bodies into a branch of the Illinois Bayou.
The rocks pulled the bodies under.
They expected that the water, time, and decomposition would erase every trace.
>> >> Later, in conversations recorded by authorities from people who knew them, Kehoe and Lee joked with each other that they had put the Mueller family on a liquid diet.
Court records document that remark.
A liquid diet.
That was how the two killers talked about throwing three bodies, including an 8-year-old girl, into the river.
>> >> With the loot in hand, Kehoe and Lee left Arkansas.
They returned to Spokane, Washington, where the Kehoe family brought the stolen property to a motel.
From there, they began selling Mueller’s guns at gun shows across multiple states.
>> >> They drove across the country from Washington to Idaho and to many other states, stopping at gun shows and selling the firearms one by one.
The proceeds went into the Aryan People’s Republic, buying more land, buying more weapons, financing the dream of a pure white nation.
Three months after the murders, on April 29th, 1996, Kehoe had Lee place and detonate a pipe bomb in front of Spokane City Hall in Washington.
The bomb damaged the building, but killed no one.
It was one of three bombs detonated in the Spokane area within a 1-month period, all linked to white supremacist groups, but belonging to two different groups.
Kehoe and Lee did not stop.
They continued their interstate criminal activities, robbing, trafficking illegal firearms, and building their network.
And throughout that entire time, no one connected them to the disappearance of the Mueller family in Tilly.
No one looked at the two men selling guns at shows and asked where those guns had come from.
>> >> No one checked the serial numbers.
No one connected the dots.
The summer of 1996 passed, then autumn, then winter.
Kehoe and Lee lived free, traveling the country, continuing their plans as if the three people dead in Tilly had never existed.
The thing that broke the silence was not a confession or an unexpected witness.
It was a gun.
