Misplaced rumors swirl after death at lake
Staff writer
County lake residents spent Monday and Tuesday wary and wondering whether they were safe after an investigation into the death of a lake resident.
It turns out the sheriff’s office was chasing its tail trying to find items believed — but not — missing from the home.
A deputy, Hillsboro ambulance, and the ambulance director were summoned to Hill Rd. at the east end of the lake at 9:19 a.m. after Jim Wyatt was discovered dead.
Coroner Don Hodson said his preliminary finding was that Wyatt’s death was of natural causes. However, the longer investigators were there, the more things didn’t appear “normal.”
“There’s an investigation,” Hodson said. “They are looking into some things. The whole thing was strange.”
Undersheriff Larry Starkey said things in Wyatt’s house had been moved around.
“There were papers on the floor,” Starkey said. “As of right now, it’s an unattended death.”
Asked whether he thought the death might have been at the hands of someone else, Hodson said he didn’t think so.
“Not in my mind,” he said.
Wyatt’s body was sent to Topeka for an autopsy, and Hodson doesn’t expect to get results for two weeks or more.
If the sheriff’s office had any thoughts that the death was a murder, it would have called Kansas Bureau of Investigation for help, Starkey said.
Neighbors, meanwhile, said deputies were asking whether they saw anything out of the ordinary and were reviewing doorbell camera video more than a mile from Wyatt’s house.
County attorney Michelle Brown said the sheriff’s office was searching because a Walmart receipt was found in the house but items purchased at the store were not there.
As it turns out, Brown said, Hodson inadvertently had left the receipt in the house, which is why the items weren’t to be found.
Blood that neighbors had said was found in the house likely came from Wyatt’s bloodied knees, Brown said. It was found on papers that apparently fell to the floor as Wyatt struggled to get up after he fell.
Brown said that she also thought it was simply an unattended death.