Joshua Farmer, a leader of the local tiny-house movement, vanished two weeks ago. Who was he?

Joshua Farmer, the diligent and enthusiastic president of the Tiny House Collective Kansas City, sold a composting toilet for $200 to a fellow member of the collective Monday evening, September 14. Nobody has seen him since.

Farmer stopped returning messages from friends and posting to Facebook Tuesday. He missed an interview with a local TV station Wednesday. That Friday, Farmer failed to show up for his shift at the LGBT community-resource organization LIKEME Lighthouse, where he was a volunteer.

Adding to the concern over Farmer’s silence was an uncharacteristically dark post that he made on his personal Facebook page September 13: “Bizarre time. Many years ago my family was involved in a tragedy. A double homicide. The perpetrator is being released very soon. Strange time. I don’t like it.”

In the comments section of that post, he went on to say the perpetrator was also a relative and added, “We spent years living in fear of this person, then the murders. It tore us up as a family.”

Wednesday, September 16, members of THCKC met and began calling local hospitals and anybody who might have a clue about Farmer’s whereabouts or what had happened to him. They filed a missing-persons report with the Kansas City Police Department Thursday. Other members of the collective’s Facebook group discussed pooling money to hire a private investigator to search for their friend and leader.

But then some strange information came to light. It turned out that Joshua Farmer’s given name was not Joshua Farmer. It’s Kirk Loe. Jackson County records show that he changed his name in May of this year — around the time that local media began reporting on THCKC.

In the petition, Farmer checked “yes” on a box asking whether he was a victim of child abuse. Explaining that choice on the form, he wrote, “My childhood abuser was incarcerated in 1987, he is scheduled for release in 2016. I would like to change my name to avoid his being able to find me.”

Farmer told people — and The Pitch — that he had come to Kansas City from upstate New York in 2012. A search on LinkedIn for Loe turned up a profile page with a grainy photo of a younger-looking Farmer. His listed jobs include working at an organic vegetable company and an espresso bar in the Albany area.

Farmer’s sister, Karlene Doupe, is a retired sheriff’s captain in Sacramento County, California. Reached by The Pitch, she said she hasn’t spoken to her brother in four years. “I have never known him [Kirk] as Josh or Joshua Farmer,” Doupe wrote in an e-mail. She added, “We have never had a family member(s) murdered, nor has Kirk ever testified in court regarding one. We are a concerned family regarding the well-being of Kirk’s obviously confused mental state and the people he has impacted.”

Megan Covert, treasurer of THCKC, now believes that an incident which occurred a week prior to Farmer’s vanishing may have precipitated his departure more than the supposed release of a former tormentor. Covert says Farmer recently inquired about being added as a signatory on the collective’s bank account. “Josh was really active with getting stuff done with the collective, and it’s never a good idea in any organization to have only one signatory for a bank account, so I filled out the paperwork, and we went to Missouri Bank to have him added,” she says.

Farmer, though, was denied by the bank and told that his name had been flagged. He seemed embarrassed, Covert says. “He told me that his ex-husband bought a condo in his name while he [Farmer] was supposedly in a yearlong diabetic coma,” she says. (Banks do not disclose such confidential information, but in his name-change petition, Farmer listed pending cases against him regarding a home foreclosure and a car repossession in 2009.)

“After that, he pretty much backed away from me and stopped responding to messages I sent him about upcoming meetings and events,” Covert says. “Then, a few days later, he was gone.”

Having spoken in the past few weeks to several people from various parts of Farmer’s life — former roommates, family, friends and other members of THCKC — Covert has concluded that Farmer is “a con artist and a professional liar.” She adds, “Everybody got a different story from Josh.”

Jana Loflin recently bought a $6,000 trailer for a tiny house under the assumption that Farmer would assist her with its construction and local government compliance. “He really lit a fire and pushed me in the direction of this thing I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” Loflin says. “But now he’s MIA, and I’m not even sure if some of the things he told me about building it [a tiny house] are accurate.”

In a post to THCKC last Friday regarding the future of the nonprofit, Jeremy Luther (also The Pitch‘s art director) wrote that, according to the detective and Farmer’s family members, “Joshua’s disappearance was in all likelihood intentional … [and] he is not and never has been threatened with any immediate danger, and that it could have been expected. It has been implied by the detective that this is not the first time something similar has happened. … We’ve become increasingly aware that while there’s no proof to imply a deceptive intention from the beginning, we as a group have been deceived.”

THCKC will live on in some capacity, though whether it remains a nonprofit or will continue with Farmer’s plans to establish a tiny-house village within city limits is up in the air. A discussion about what shape the collective will take, and who will step up to lead it, is ongoing at the group’s Facebook page.