Body found in truck in woods

A woman awaits an ID, worried that it is her ex-husband's burned body.

By ERIN SULLIVAN, Times Staff Writer
Published January 20, 2008

MOON LAKE - Near dusk on Friday, some teenagers hiking in the woods found a pickup. In the back was a body, which had been burned and left to decompose for several days.

Detectives secured the area and, Saturday morning, the medical examiner arrived to begin trying to identify the victim.

One woman, waiting at the edge of the scene, said she is afraid she knows who it is.

Lorraine Lohr worries the body is her ex-husband, Jesse Lohr, a 29-year-old who has been missing for a week.

The last time they talked was the Friday before last. Lorraine told him if he didn't change, he was going to end up dead, and now she can't get that conversation out of her mind, how angry she was with him, how angry he was with her.

Lorraine, 34, said Jesse had been battling drug addiction for years and no matter how she tried, Lorraine couldn't reach him.

She fell in love with the good Jesse, she said, the doting father, the man who sat with her as she vomited from chemotherapy when she battled cervical cancer, who still thought she was beautiful when she had to have her teeth pulled and get dentures.

The good Jesse was lost when it came to drugs and the temptation of easy money from crime, she said.

"You're already dead," she told him on the phone, and hung up.

Lorraine believes the body in the woods is Jesse's because the truck matches the description of the one he had been driving. She is holding out hope that it isn't him. Maybe he's hiding somewhere. Maybe he's holed up somewhere safe. But standing there by the crime scene tape in the woods, her gut told her that Jesse was dead.

They have three children together: Jesse, 8, Tristan, 4, and Joseph, 3.

They look just like him, the auburn hair and blue eyes. They've been asking to talk with their dad for days, and Lorraine doesn't know what to say.

Lorraine and Jesse married when they were young, in 1998, when Jesse already was a felon. Beginning in 1995, Jesse was in and out of jail, prison or court proceedings nearly every year until the present for an array of crimes - burglary, aggravated battery, dealing in stolen property, larceny no drug charges, though.

Jesse and Lorraine divorced in 2002. She said she took him back a few times, when he promised to find steady work and not run with the wrong crowd anymore, but she said he kept slipping back into his old ways.

So when he got out of prison this fall, she said she couldn't be with him again, but she wanted him to be there for the kids.

He was there on Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas. He bought the boys new bikes and picked them up from school.

"He's a wonderful father," Lorraine said Saturday, as she sat in her house in Spring Hill, crying. When she could no longer take being at the crime scene, she went home, but she didn't know what to do with herself there either. The waiting is unbearable.

She needs to know if it is him. But then again, she doesn't want to know.

If he's gone, so is the hope of what he could be.

Erin Sullivan can be reached at esullivan@sptimes.com or (813) 909-4609.

[Last modified January 19, 2008, 21:36:28]