A troubled history
When police searched Joe Mueller’s storage shed, they found a blank tombstone. Joe, a suspect in the 1981 disappearance of 2 1⁄2-year-old Michelle Manders, admitted he’d stolen the grave marker.
He was saving money, he said, to have it engraved with the name of his dead baby.
Joseph Alan Mueller Jr. died in 1975, six years before Michelle vanished from her Watertown home in the middle of the night.
State and federal agents investigating Michelle’s case interviewed the baby’s mother, Joe’s ex-wife, Shirlene Campbell.
She told them her ex-husband was violent and abusive to her, but not to their son.
Joe Jr. was born with a cleft palate. It was hard for the baby to eat, and he cried a lot.
When Joe Jr. was about a month old, his father gave him a spanking, claiming he was getting spoiled, Shirlene said. Once, Joe left a space heater too close to the baby and he got burned, but she believed it was an accident.
After the baby had surgery to repair his mouth, he no longer went hungry and his disposition improved.
Then one morning, his father went to wake Joe Jr. and found him stiff and cold.
Shirlene remembers a police officer accusing
Joe that first morning of killing the child — an allegation he denied and she characterized as stupid.
Immediately, she said, the coroner set the cop straight, explaining that the baby, lying on his stomach, had spit up during the night and choked.
The state agents investigating Michelle’s disappearance followed up with police in Monroe, where the couple was living when their baby died. A captain there said he suspected Joe Jr.’s death may have involved abuse.
But when the coroner wouldn’t cooperate in an investigation, he said, the matter was dropped.
Jan Manders says she believed Joe may have had something to do with what happened to Michelle from the beginning, and she told police as much. According to Jan: When Joe dropped off his wife, Teri, at Jan’s house on the evening of Oct. 13, 1981, he asked Jan if he could borrow some money. Jan said no, and Joe seemed upset.
The next morning, Jan found a note from Teri saying Joe had picked her up around 12:15 a.m.
Before Jan realized Michelle was missing, Joe showed up again.
He’d never come over so early before.
As Jan frantically searched for her daughter, Joe didn’t help, didn’t react. He just sat calmly at the kitchen table.
When Jan called the police, Joe made a hasty exit, saying he had a job interview. Later that day, he called to tell her he’d been offered the position.
He didn’t ask about Michelle.
Joe later called a third time, and when Jan told him Michelle was still missing, he wondered aloud if she’d looked in the doghouse.
Jan rushed outside to check, but her daughter wasn’t there.
“I could speculate and say he wasn’t involved at all, or I could say he was involved 100% from the get go. Nothing he said ever made any sense.” ORVAL QUAMME WATERTOWN POLICE DETECTIVE TALKING ABOUT JOE MUELLER
When investigators questioned Joe about Michelle’s disappearance shortly after it occurred in October 1981, Joe gave this account:
He dropped off Teri at Jan’s house around 7 p.m.; he didn’t ask to borrow any money. He went to a bar. While there, he accidentally bumped into a guy shooting pool. The two had words and nearly came to blows.
Joe said he picked up his wife around 11:45 p.m. — half an hour earlier than the time in her note — and took her back to their apartment. From there, he walked to a second bar, bought a six-pack of beer, and spent an hour drinking it in the parking lot.
In a recent interview, Joe insisted his alibis checked out.
But in the next breath he said the bartender told police he didn’t remember a squabble over a pool game. In fact, the man said he couldn’t recall whether Joe was in the bar at all.
Joe went to Jan’s house the next morning because she wanted him to look after her children while she did laundry, he recalled.
He was sitting at the table drinking coffee when Jan asked him to go and wake Michelle.
Joe went to the little girl’s room, but found it empty.
“She’s not there,” he told Jan, back in the kitchen.
According to Joe, she’s the one who didn’t seem surprised.
Joe’s trouble with the law started when he was 14.
Police investigating Michelle’s disappearance discovered he had a lengthy juvenile record and his adult rap sheet included arrests for burglary, stealing cars, vandalism and trespassing. Joe wasn’t above pilfering from people he knew, once stealing some silver dollars and an engraved belt buckle from a family who’d hired him to work on their farm.
Joe, 28 when Michelle vanished, had served time in both jail and prison.
Although his background raised their suspicions, the authorities could not come up with any solid evidence connecting him to the little girl’s disappearance.
“I could speculate and say he wasn’t involved at all, or I could say he was involved 100% from the get go,” said Orval Quamme, who investigated the case for the Watertown police.
“Nothing he said ever made any sense,” Quamme said of Joe.
Frustrated because they thought Joe had tried to skew the results of lie detector tests, FBI agents drove him around Jefferson County in search of Michelle. At one point, they stopped at the culvert where bloodhounds had lost the little girl’s scent, leading to speculation
that she’d ended up inside.
“Go on down there, Joe, and take a look and see what you find in that culvert,” they prompted.
Joe did as they asked, then made his way back up to their car.
“There ain’t nobody down there,” he said.
All the while, he expected the cops to arrest him.
But they never did.