Police in Kansas have identified a man who was found dead in a freezer.
On Thursday, authorities announced that Lawrence P. Muirhead, a trucker who went missing Sept. 28, was the man found stuffed in a freezer inside a residential garage earlier this week. His death is being investigated as a homicide.
Kansas City Police are still trying to piece together what happened to the 53-year-old Muirhead, who was discovered on Sunday by a woman at the home that she is renting.
The woman, whose name is withheld, told police that her boyfriend warned her in October not to look in the locked freezer, according to KCTV5. Muirhead was considered missing after his tractor-trailer was found abandoned in the parking lot of a Merriam, Kan., K-Mart.
The boyfriend has been in the hospital since December, battling terminal cancer.
But on Sunday, curiosity got the best of the woman, who smashed the lock with a shovel and made the grisly discovery. Police said Muirhead had been shot in the head before being placed in the freezer.
The owners of the property said they had no idea about the freezer, which appears to have been placed in the garage by the renter's boyfriend.
Muirhead had been making a trip from Pennsylvania to Nogales, Ariz., when he disappeared. His family filed a missing person report after he didn't show up at his destination Oct. 1.
The trucker's 89-year-old mother told KCTV5 that she'd last spoken with her son on Sept. 27, and that his wife had talked with him on the phone the following day.
"He said on the phone, 'I'm around Kansas City in a heavy traffic situation, so I will call you later.' And that was the time she ever talked to him," Muirhead's mother, Alyke Muirhead told the station. "We know nobody who was threatening him. But obviously there was something, and we don't know, but we want to know. Somebody did him in, and we don't know why."
She said her son, a former body builder, had hoped to own his own trucking company.
"Now we at least know where he is. He's not just out there being held by someone or something awful," Alyke Muirhead told KSHB.
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