Missouri Department of Corrections, Police Booking Photo
Gary Muehlberg, revealed to be the so-called Package Killer, in March 2020 and in 1993.
When St. Louis County prosecutor Doug Sidel took on the 1993 case against Gary Muehlberg, he immediately recognized Muehlberg as a sadist.
The 44-year-old Bel-Ridge man was on trial for the February 1993 killing of 57-year-old Kenneth “Doc” Atchison, whom Muehlberg lured over to his house on the pretense of selling him a car. Muehlberg killed Atchison, stealing $6,000 in cash and the car Atchison had driven over. Weeks later, police found Atchison's body stuffed in a homemade box in Muehlberg's basement.
"The way he killed him was so cruel," Sidel says. "With him being handcuffed and gagged…he could have been killed in a less cruel fashion. Clearly [Muehlberg] had a sadistic personality."
Muehlberg pleaded not guilty, and despite the body being found in his basement, Sidel says it was not an easy case to prosecute. The murder weapon had wound up in the house of a known drug dealer, where it was discovered by police. That drug dealer's daughter was also driving around in Atchison's car, which Muehlberg had allegedly stolen. Muehlberg's defense attorney swore his client was being framed.
Sidel told the jury Muehlberg's motive had been the robbery and that the murder was "a cold-blooded horrible killing. It was an execution."
Ultimately, Muehlberg’s lawyer couldn't explain why Atchison’s body was in a box in Muehlberg’s basement. Muehlberg was found guilty in September 1995 and sentenced to life in prison two months later.
"The facts of the case were so strange...I will never forget that," says Sidel, who started as a prosecutor in St. Louis County in 1981 and still works in the office today.
Recently, he was given more reason to remember them.
Last summer, O'Fallon Detective Jodi Weber came to the veteran prosecutor’s office asking if she could see the investigative file that the office had compiled on Muehlberg almost 30 years ago.
Weber was hoping to close a case she'd been working on for over a decade — the unsolved serial murders of Robyn Mihan, Brenda Pruitt and Sandy Little. The trio had been abducted from the city's red light district, and the killer had left their bodies in packages on the sides of roads throughout the region in 1990 and 1991. Weber had recovered DNA from Mihan’s remains and, using a new technology not available in the 1990s, matched it to Muehlberg, whose DNA was in a state database because he was in prison.
Beyond the DNA, there were immediate similarities between the women’s murders and the murder of Atchison. Like Atchison, many of the female victims had been bound and gagged, found with ligatures around their necks. All the victims had been found in some type of box or container.
Looking back, Sidel now suspects Muehlberg planned to get Atchison's body out of his home and dumped on the roadside in a fashion similar to his female victims. In the weeks after the killing but prior to his arrest, Muelhberg had fled to an Illinois motel and placed frantic phone calls to acquaintances trying to get someone to move the box out of his home.
"But he never got to do it. The police got him first," Sidel says.
Courtesy St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office
Evidence from Gary Muehlberg's 1995 trial.
In July, after Weber finally closed in on him, Muehlberg confessed to the three murders, as well as two others: that of Donna Reitmeyer and an unknown fifth victim police are still trying to identify. Muehlberg agreed to confess to the murders if the death penalty was taken off the table.
With Weber having secured Muehlberg's confession, the prosecutions against him in 2023 were much less of a lift than in 1995. After pleading guilty in court in St. Charles earlier this month to the murder of Sandy Little, Muehlberg pleaded guilty to the murders of Pruitt and Reitmeyer in court in St. Louis County on Tuesday. Sidel was there as the lead prosecutor.
"I don't think I'd ever prosecuted anyone twice for separate murders at separate times," Sidel says.
The revelation that Muehlberg was a cold-blooded serial killer made the 1995 conviction Sidel had secured against him all the more meaningful.
"I did not know he was a serial killer of women at the time, but there's nothing about his conduct that leaves me to believe he would have stopped doing what he did if he had not been stopped by law enforcement," says Sidel. "Had he been free, I shudder to think what would have gone on."
He adds, "Who knows how many lives were saved by him not being left out there."
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