Goodbye brings closure for family

LADDONIA — Roger Montague stood in the back of a small, red-brick church in the northeastern Missouri town of Laddonia on Sunday, wrestling with a button on his suit jacket that didn’t seem to want to fasten. He is understandably nervous; he has been waiting to say goodbye to his daughter, Sheri, for nearly six years.

“It feels right,” Montague says, his glasses quickly clouding over with tears. “It’s something we needed to do.”

Soft-spoken and reflective, Montague stands out in a room full of his daughter’s family and friends, many of whom seem attached at the hip, laughing and reminiscing about their relative and friend. Looking at plates of home-cooked food that dot a table near the church’s kitchen, he says he hopes Sunday’s memorial service will end the pain and heartache.

“Everyone talks about closure, and I hope for all that, but it hasn’t done very much for me so far,” he says.

Almost six years after Sheri Montague disappeared without a trace from her Columbia home, her family and friends are holding this service in her memory. Her family held her memorial service in Laddonia because that’s where the family burial plot is located.

The memorial comes less than six months after four men charged in connection with her murder, members of a Missouri crime syndicate known as the Rohrer Group, were sentenced to lengthy terms in federal prison.

Involved in extortion, robbery, arson, kidnapping, fraud and murder, the Rohrer Group used a number of “flim-flam operations” and investment scams to swindle people out of their money, a federal indictment states.

The group’s ringleader, Bobby Allen Rohrer, told Sheri Montague that he was a successful financial adviser and that an investment of $41,000 could be doubled in as little as three months, according to a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Sheri Montague’s mother, Alice Weeks. Federal prosecutors say Montague, 33, had threatened to expose Rohrer’s scam after he took her money.

She wouldn’t get the chance.

According to the indictment, Montague was driven to a turkey farm in Bonnots Mill on June 14, 1999, shot to death as she was getting out of the car, cut into pieces, which were placed in bags, and dumped into the Missouri River. Authorities tried to dredge the river to locate the bodies of Montague and another missing person the Rohrer Group has pleaded guilty to killing, 39-year-old Rick Simpson, but their bodies have not been found.

“For so long, I was focused on finding the people who did this,” Weeks says. “Now, it’s nice to just remember Sheri. She deserves it.”

Maj. Tom Reddin of the Boone County Sheriff’s Department attended Montague’s memorial service after he was invited by Weeks and says the investigation into the Rohrer Group was one of the longest ongoing investigations of his career. He says Rohrer, 40, was a skilled con man, selling people on far-fetched investment scams and using physical intimidation to get desired results.

“He’s intelligent, convincing and manipulative,” Reddin says.

Reddin says Sunday’s service wraps up one of his career’s most trying cases.

“It was probably one of the longest, most convoluted, turn-twisting cases I’ve ever been involved with,” he says. “But seeing it finally come to a resolution, both in the courts and personally, is a good thing.”

During his eulogy, Roger Montague pauses often, trying to catch his breath and remove a lump in his throat.

“I very much regret we have no physical presence to put to rest today,” Montague says, “but I hope her spirit is with us and would approve of our remembrance of her and our efforts through the last six years to bring these men to account for what they did.”

In January, Rohrer and Henry Rehmert Jr. were sentenced to 29 and 10 years in prison, respectively, for violating the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations statute. Two other co-defendants, Wayne J. Jaegers and Henry Rehmert Sr., were sentenced to 20 and 27 years in prison, respectively, after the four-man group struck a deal with federal prosecutors in 2003.

A jury trial in the wrongful-death lawsuit filed by Sheri Montague’s parents is scheduled for July 12 in Cape Girardeau. But to Roger Montague, the trial, and its outcome, is beside the point.

“It brings back the memories and the knowledge that nothing will ever be made right now,” he says.