The Baffling Missing Persons Case Of Branson Perry That Implicated A Cannibalistic Minister
Public DomainYoung Branson Perry helped out at a traveling petting zoo in his spare time.
Branson Perry disappeared from his father’s Skidmore, Missouri home on April 11, 2001. But the 20-year-old wasn’t alone when it happened. His friend, Jena Crawford, had visited to help him clean the house before Perry’s father returned from a stay at the hospital.
Crawford claimed that Perry walked outside and shouted up to her through the window that he was just returning some jumper cables to the shed by the house. Two men, meanwhile, were working within eyesight on fixing his father’s car. Despite these numerous witnesses, Perry still vanished moments later.
The Nodaway-Holt High School graduate’s missing person case has ebbed and flowed over the years. From mundane leads that quickly turned to dead-ends to some harrowing and bizarre developments, Branson Perry’s disappearance remains one of the most maddening in recent history.
Perry was working with a traveling petting zoo at the time of his mysterious disappearance and suffered from tachycardia, a condition that made his heart race. He was living at home with his father.
On April 7, a few days before he vanished, Perry visited his neighbor Jason Biermann, who purportedly dosed him with an unidentified drug. According to true-crime expert Diane Fanning, Perry then stripped naked and danced before shaving off his pubic hair and engaging “in sexual activity” with Biermann.
Once Perry sobered up, he became humiliated and told his father everything. The father became enraged with Biermann, but no confrontation occurred and Biermann was never officially named as a suspect in Perry’s unsolved disappearance.
On the day he vanished, Jena Crawford simply assumed that Perry had gone elsewhere and went home herself without another thought. Then, Perry’s grandmother dropped by the following day to an empty home. Thinking Perry had stepped out, she returned the next day too, but to another empty home.
She and Perry’s parents filed a missing person’s report on April 16, 2001. All of Perry’s belongings had been left behind, and foul play was suspected.
Public DomainThe home of Perry’s father and site of the 20-year-old’s disappearance.
In 2003, the missing person case of Branson Perry took a bizarre turn when a Presbyterian minister and Boy Scouts leader named Jack Wayne Rogers was arrested for unrelated charges. After attempting to perform sex reassignment surgery on a trans woman and failing to stop the bleeding, Rogers was charged with first-degree assault and practicing medicine without a license.
But when authorities searched his belongings, they discovered evidence of even more disturbing crimes on his computer, including child pornography and distressing online posts that described the rape, torture, and murder of multiple men. Rogers even described cannibalizing the severed genitals of some.
One of his posts described killing a blond hitchhiker and burying him in the Ozarks. The description matched Perry’s, but Rogers maintained that these posts were simply fictional writing exercises. With a lack of direct evidence, Rogers was cleared as a suspect in Perry’s missing persons case.
“In my heart, I don’t believe this suspect is responsible,” said Rebecca Klino, Perry’s mother.
As it stands, investigators are convinced Perry was murdered. Whether local drug gangs or a cannibalistic Boy Scouts leader were involved in this unsolved disappearance remains unclear, and Perry is considered a missing person to this day.
