Wyoming
After 50 Years, Wyoming’s Oldest Missing Person Case May Never Be…
Larry Marvin Morris was just wrapping up a temporary stint as a seismograph worker in Riverton, Wyoming, when he mysteriously disappeared.
The 24-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma, college student had planned a stop in Yellowstone National Park before heading home. Morris never made it to either destination and was reported missing April 24, 1974.
Since the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation started tracking missing persons cases, the disappearance of Morris remains the oldest and coldest of those in the agency’s missing person database.
Although it’s been 50 years, it’s a case that former Riverton Police Department detective and Fremont County Coroner Ed McAuslan knows well and continues to ponder well into retirement.
In fact, it had been McAuslan’s first missing person investigation as rookie detective.
He’d joined the department in 1973, and two years later was also hired as deputy coroner. In 1998, he was elected coroner and held the post for 16 years. McAuslan retired in 2014 after nearly 28 years with the police and 40 as coroner.
Over the course of his career, McAuslan never stopped thinking about Morris or trying to solve what he firmly believes was a homicide.
He’s also stayed in contact with Morris’ sister, who did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request for an interview.
Unfortunately, McAuslan said, the two men who were likely responsible for Morris’ murder have also long since died despite his repeated attempts to get them prosecuted.
“Every time we’d get a new county attorney in office, I would present the case to them,” he said. “Nobody would take it and prosecute it.”
Assumed Identity
After failing to show up at work the following Monday, Morris was reported missing by his boss.
A search of Morris’ Riverton apartment showed no signs of foul play, suggesting that he met with foul play somewhere between Riverton and Jackson.
“At that particular point, we didn’t have a whole lot to go on,” McAuslan said.
He sent out inquiries with Morris’ description and that of his car to police agencies in surrounding states, McAuslan recalled, and within a couple of weeks received a call from the sheriff’s office in Twin Falls, Idaho.
The sheriff had detained a man identifying as Larry Marvin Morris, McAuslan was told, who was being held on suspicion of armed burglary.
McAuslan immediately headed to Twin Falls, where he and the FBI interviewed a man who was determined not to be Morris. Instead, he was 36-year-old Jack Raymond Lincoln, who turned out to be an escapee from the Colorado State Penitentiary’s pre-parole center.
According to reporting by the Fort Collins Coloradoan, Lincoln had just completed an 11- to 18-year sentence for receiving stolen goods and larceny. At the time he escaped, he’d been serving an additional three to seven years for conspiring to escape from the Camp George West honor farm near Golden.
Lincoln was arrested with another ex-felon, James Franklin Jagers, 26, who had been Lincoln’s cellmate in the Colorado penitentiary.
Overdue Rental Car
The men had Morris’ driver’s license and credit cards, where McAuslen had traced them from Wyoming, Utah and Nevada to California, Oregon and Idaho, where they’d been arrested for breaking into a country store.
At the time of their arrest, Jagers and Lincoln were driving an overdue rental car from San Francisco that had been reserved under Morris’ name.
In the car, police found “guns and frozen meat” that likely tied them to an additional burglary at a rural home, according to a May 9, 1974, story in the Twin Falls Times-News.
The men had been arrested the same night robbing a country store in Hollister, Idaho. The store owner had caught them in the act after a woman saw the men entering the closed store, according to reporting by the Twin Falls Times-News.
Both were sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in the Idaho State Penitentiary.
Uncooperative
When questioned by McAuslan, both denied having anything to do with Morris’ disappearance and were uncooperative, he said.
“Their basic attitude was, ‘That’s a damn lie and that’s all I’m going to tell you,’” McAuslan said. “We didn’t get anywhere in our interviews, even though when they were arrested, they had all of Larry’s identification.”
Days after their arrest, Morris’ 1966 Ford LTD pickup with Oklahoma license plates was found abandoned at a car repair shop in San Francisco, where they had rented a car using Morris’ credit card and personal information.
To McAuslan’s knowledge, Morris’ family paid for the repairs and took his pickup back with them to Oklahoma.
No Trace
McAuslan is convinced that the men, both of whom have since died, were responsible for Morris’ death and suspects they dumped his body somewhere off the highway between Riverton and Dubois.
The area had been hit with heavy spring snow at the time Morris disappeared, which would have limited how far they could have gotten off the road to ditch the body, he said.
“We did a lot of groundwork,” McAuslan said, including searches with Morris’ family. Over the years, he speculates they’ve searched the entire terrain between the two cities.
“He [Morris] never did turn up,” McAuslan said, “so when they disposed of the body, they did a good job of it.”
McAuslan speculated that Morris may have seen the two hitchhiking along the highway and picked them up or ran into them at a gas station or other location in town because they had just ditched the car they’d stolen out of Colorado.
This was the early 1970s, McAuslan noted, where it would have been normal to give a person a lift.
No DNA was taken from the car because it wasn’t introduced as evidence in a court until 1986, according to the National Institute for Justice.
McAuslan is under no misconception that Morris is still alive.
“My perspective was, well, they’ve got everything else and he’s [Morris] never been seen again,” McAuslan said. “You can make an assumption that he has to be dead.”
Deal, No Deal
McAuslan kept close tabs on the men over the decade-plus that he worked the case and stayed in constant contact with Morris’ family.
Anytime an unidentified body was found close to Morris’ description, McAuslan would investigate it further.
“We looked at a lot of dead bodies,” he said.
And despite the relatively strong tangential evidence of being caught with Morris’ identification, credit cards and other possessions, neither man was ever arrested in connection with the disappearance.
Jagers, however, came close to a confession in 1983, when he attempted to negotiate a move from the Idaho penitentiary to a Wyoming prison in exchange for information.
Jagers allegedly told authorities that Morris was indeed dead and he knew where the body was.
The deal never went anywhere, McAuslan said.
Ryan Cox, DCI commander and head of cold cases, confirmed a deal had been discussed, though in the end, the “inmate did not agree to cooperate with Wyoming law enforcement.”
Jagers died in 2014 at age 68, according to his obituary in the Tribune Chronicle. Lincoln died years earlier, McAuslan said, though Cowboy State Daily could not locate his obituary.
As such, they took their secrets to the grave, McAuslan said.
No other suspects apart from the two men were identified, McAuslan said, despite extensive interviews and groundwork.
To date, the case remains unsolved pending new information or the discovery of Morris’ body. Despite the odds of actually finding answers, McAuslan refuses to write it off.
“You never want to say something’s unsolvable, because sometimes something can turn up,” he said.
Anyone with any information is asked to contact the Riverton Police Department at 307-856-4891 or the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation at 307-777-7181.
Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.
It’s Week 11 in the 2026 Wyoming prep girls’ basketball season. That means it’s the end of the regular season. 3A and 4A schools have their final game or games to determine seeding before the regional tournament, or if a team is locked into a position, one last chance to fine-tune before the postseason. Games are spread across four days.
WYOPREPS WEEK 11 GIRLS BASKETBALL SCHEDULE 2026
Every game on the slate is a conference matchup. Several rivalry contests are part of this week’s schedule, such as East against Central, Cody at Powell, Lyman hosting Mountain View, and Rock Springs at Green River, just to name a few. Here is the Week 11 schedule of varsity games WyoPreps has. All schedules are subject to change. If you see a game missing, please email david@wyopreps.com.
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Laramie 68 Cheyenne South 27 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: Lyman 40 Mountain View 26 (conference game)
CLASS 4A
Final Score: Evanston 41 Riverton 39 (conference game)
Final Score: Natrona County 42 Kelly Walsh 38 (conference game) – Peach Basket Classic
Final Score: #4 Thunder Basin 64 Campbell County 32 (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Final Score: #1 Cody 77 Worland 33 (conference game) – 5 different Fillies with a 3, and Hays led the way with 34 points.
Final Score: #2 Lander 49 Lyman 34 (conference game)
Final Score: #4 Wheatland 51 Douglas 40 (conference game)
Final Score: #5 Powell 48 Lovell 42 (conference game)
Final Score: Burns 56 Torrington 43 (conference game)
Final Score: Glenrock 78 Newcastle 30 (conference game)
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CLASS 4A
Rock Springs at #2 Green River, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#4 Thunder Basin at #5 Sheridan, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cheyenne East at #3 Cheyenne Central, 6 p.m. (conference game)
Jackson at Star Valley, 6 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
#3 Pinedale at Mountain View, 4 p.m. (conference game)
#1 Cody at #5 Powell, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
Buffalo at Glenrock, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
CLASS 3A
Newcastle at Buffalo, 12:30 p.m. (conference game)
Glenrock at Rawlins, 3 p.m. (conference game)
Torrington at #4 Wheatland, 5:30 p.m. (conference game)
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Gallery Credit: David Settle, WyoPreps.com
Controversy has engulfed Wyoming’s state legislature after a conservative activist was photographed handing checks to Republican lawmakers on the state house floor, in an incident that has highlighted intra-conservative divisions and the role of money in the Cowboy state’s politics.
The political storm started on 9 February, when Karlee Provenza, a Democratic lawmaker, took a photo showing Rebecca Bextel, a conservative activist and committeewoman for the Teton county Republican party, handing a check to Darin McCann, a Republican representative, on the legislative floor. Marlene Brady, another Republican representative, stands in the photo’s background, a similar piece of paper pinched between her fingers.
“You have a person from the richest county in the country coming down to Cheyenne to hand out checks on the house floor,” Provenza said. “I have never seen something so egregious.”
Questions around the checks were soon swirling, and answers weren’t forthcoming. When asked what Bextel gave to her, Brady told a reporter for local outlet WyoFile: “I can’t remember.”
Then Bextel herself addressed the incident. “I raised $400,000 in the last election cycle for conservative candidates, and I will be doubling that amount this year,” Bextel wrote on Facebook on 11 February. “There’s nothing wrong with delivering lawful campaign checks from Teton county donors when I am in Cheyenne.”
Since then, it has emerged that the checks came from Don Grasso, a wealthy Teton county donor, who told the Jackson Hole News and Guide that he wrote the checks for Bextel to deliver to 10 Freedom caucus-aligned politicians. Grasso said the checks were intended as campaign contributions, and were not tied to specific legislation. It is unclear how many checks were ultimately delivered, but two of four confirmed recipients include the speaker of the house, Chip Neiman, and John Bear, the former head of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus.
The Wyoming house has formed a legislative investigative committee, and the Laramie county sheriff’s office said they’d open a criminal investigation.
Bextel declined to answer questions from the Guardian. Brady, McCann and Bear did not respond to requests for comment.
Neiman said he considered the criticism a “wraparound smear campaign”. He said: “It never once crossed my mind that this was bribery.
“These legislators, myself included, are now guilty until we can prove that we’re innocent. How is that right in this country? Isn’t that a little bit backwards?”
The scandal has highlighted long-standing divisions in Wyoming’s Republican party, which in recent years has seen a growing divide between old school, more moderate conservatives and a harder-right Freedom Caucus.
Several former Republican lawmakers forcefully condemned their colleagues for accepting the checks, and a local Republican party branch called for the lawmakers’ resignations.
Ogden Driskill, a Wyoming Republican senator, told the Guardian he does not consider Bextel’s actions to be illegal, but that “just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should”.
Bextel has spent years pushing against housing mitigation fees in Wyoming, and Driskill noted that she distributed the house floor checks just days before a bill she had publicly supported was set to be heard. Bextel was registered as a member of the press, not as a lobbyist when she delivered the checks.
“Ethically and morally, it’s bankrupt to a massive degree,” Driskill said.
Neiman said that he and other legislators who received checks have supported similar bills in the past: “Bribery is paying somebody to do something they would not otherwise do.”
Nationally, the 2024 election cycle saw record-spending from the mega-wealthy, as well as dark money groups. Wyoming followed the trend, in a tense red-on-red primary season.
For those gearing up to campaign this year, Teton county, the richest in the US, and Bextel’s picturesque home turf, is an essential stop. Its extreme wealth gives it a foothold on the national level as well. Palantir chief executive Alex Karp and Donald Trump attended an annual Republican leadership fundraiser at Jackson Hole in 2024, and JD Vance attended the same one in 2025.
Bextel pulls dollars from Teton county into the Freedom Caucus side of Wyoming’s conservative split. She hosted no-press-allowed meet and greets earlier this year benefitting leading candidates for Wyoming’s governor and open US House seat.
In an interview with the Open Range Record, a media network she co-founded, Bextel said controversy around the checks was solely because she was making “even playing field” in Wyoming against the state’s more moderate Republicans, who she calls “George Soros” candidates. She said that she will be sure to keep raising money – just away from the legislative floor.
“I guess I’m gonna ask all the gentlemen and gentleladies to step outside the Capitol while I hand them a check,” Bextel said. “Let me be clear: I’m doubling down.”
But it’s not just wealthy local donors putting their weight behind the factions. Last election cycle, out of state groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on anonymous and often inaccurate mailers.
“These actors, especially from the far right, they like to push the bounds of the norms,” said Rosa Reyna Pugh, an organizing and advocacy consultant at Western States Center, an Oregon-based non-profit focused on democracy in the western United States. “They like to see what policies they can kind of push, and see where they can play a piece,” Reyna Pugh said.
While Neiman and Driskill fight politically, they do agree on one thing: summer will bring an expensive and brutal campaign season.
“You’re going to see more dark money than you’ve ever seen. We’ve done absolutely nothing to enforce it. Our secretary of state has not even made a slight attempt to deal with it,” Driskill said. “You’re going to see lots and lots of outside money and I think you’re seeing it on both sides.”
As national questions swirl around pay-to-play politics and profiteering in the Trump administration, Provenza wants better for the Cowboy State.
“We should not be aligning ourselves with how the federal government is conducting itself or how federal elections conduct themselves,” Provenza said. “We owe something far better and more honest to the people of Wyoming than that.”
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