Who Killed Joe Loehr? Searching for answers in a homeless camp homicide
Joe Loehr was killed somewhere out here. His killer has no name yet, and the scene of the crime has no address.
Beyond East Front Street where it crosses North Kansas Avenue, and across a levee that runs along the Missouri River, four deer bound through a clearing between two thickets. They are not the only ones who live here. A subtle footpath runs through the woods to the east. Follow the trail, and it takes you past the remains of abandoned homeless camps that called this flood plain home. The path ends at a hidden encampment of two tents surrounded by a sea of trash, old bottles and discarded newspapers.
The man who lives here won’t give his name. There’s a warrant out for him, for possession, and he says he doesn’t want the cops’ attention, or to get kicked out. But he knew Loehr. It’s a Thursday morning in mid-September, and he smells a little boozed up. “He’s been around here for a while,” the man says of Loehr. “He used to fly.”
Fly?
“Fly a sign to make his money,” he says, pantomiming holding one of those roadside brother-can-you-spare-a-buck signs. “I work,” he says. Odd jobs. He’s a little proud of that.
The man knows where Joe died but is afraid to lead a Pitch reporter there because the killer hasn’t been caught. But — aw, what the hell — he does anyway, crossing the clearing and heading back across to the opposite thicket. There’s another trail that starts just near the levee, and he points down to a clearing visible in the distance: “That’s where Joe died,” he says, and then points to the left. “There’s his tent.”
Joe Wesley Loehr, 52, was born in Kansas City in 1960 and died here Saturday night, September 8. He was likely beaten to death, given the severe injuries to his face. Down that path lives the man who found him dead — the man police still suspect may have killed him.
