Luther Boyt loved life.
Luther Boyt loved his family and friends.
Luther Boyt loved his money.
So when the midtown Kansas City man went missing the morning of Nov. 26, 2000, his friends knew the party-throwing, piano-playing, antique-collecting man hadn’t just skipped town.
They knew something bad must have happened.
But they have never found his body.
So the mystery of what happened to Boyt still swirls today, seven years after the 59-year-old failed to show up one morning to help his friends finish moving his stuff from his Janssen Place mansion into an apartment.
“It’s very sad,” said Leron Hill, a close friend of Boyt who traveled the world with him. “We can’t rest until …” His voice trailed off, and tears filled his eyes.
Boyt was last seen leaving Buddies, a bar on Main Street, alone in his dark green 1998 Infiniti about 2:30 a.m.
Friends later found his car near the Liberty Memorial in Penn Valley Park. It was locked, and there was cash under the floor mat that he had planned to give his friends for helping move his stuff.
Hill said that although Boyt was gay, he would not have gone to the park area to meet other men. That wasn’t his scene, Hill said.
Searches of the park with dogs turned up nothing.
Now, Hill said a private investigator’s research into the case has turned up leads, and Boyt’s friends hope the Kansas City Police Department will be able to solve the mystery.
The private investigator, Jeff Wishard, thinks that Kansas City police are not following up on leads he has passed along to them.
“If this was a family member (of mine), I’d be livid,” Wishard said. “No one’s giving Luther the common courtesy. … I don’t think anything is being done, period.”
But the police defend their work, saying Wishard has not given them the information he says he has. A homicide detective recently took a new interest in the case, and it has been assigned as a “cold case” to a homicide squad, rather than remaining part of the Missing Persons unit’s duties.
“We have to figure out how he died before we classify it as a homicide,” said Kansas City police spokesman Capt. Rich Lockhart. “That will not happen until we find his body or we find enough evidence to say he was killed.”
Anyone with information is asked to call the TIPS Hotline at 816-474-TIPS (474-8477).
