Portrait of a suicide cluster
A photo guide to my podcast The Peacemaker
During the 2016-2017 school year, three Truman State University students killed themselves.
Their names were Alex Mullins, Jake Hughes, and Josh Thomas. They were all members of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity, and are pictured above.
Their ties to another member of their fraternity, Brandon Grossheim, is the subject of my new podcast with Ryan Krull, called The Peacemaker.
Truman State University is located in Kirksville, a rural town in northern Missouri. The major employers are the Kraft-Heinz plant, which makes cold cuts, and Truman State.
It’s an academically rigorous school, known for heavy course loads, high rates of depression, and binge drinking.
The Greek system is robust. The fraternity where the suicides happened, AKL, is known for heavy drug use. One former Truman State student told me, “AKLs were the heaviest of the drug-using fraternities and they were doing drugs that weren’t just weed. A lot of psychedelics, but also lab-created ‘research chemicals.’”
The three victims all killed themselves the same way, by hanging themselves at the fraternity.
Brandon Grossheim had close ties to all of them, and is now being sued by some of the parents for allegedly encouraging their sons’ deaths.
Following Jake’s suicide, Brandon was kicked out of Alpha Kappa Lambda. He soon dropped out of Truman State. He moved into an off-campus apartment complex called the Journal Building.
Brandon moved in across the hall from a student from another nearby college, named Alex Vogt. (Not to be confused with the first victim, Alex Mullins.)
Brandon and Alex Vogt were tight; they worked together at a restaurant across the street owned by Alex’s father, called the Wooden Nickel.
The Wooden Nickel was where employees like Alex and Brandon worked, drank, and did drugs, sometimes simultaneously.
After hours they went back home across the street to the Journal Building, and the party continued. “A lot of weed,” said a friend of Alex’s named Terry Yardley. “A lot of liquor and every now and then, cocaine, but never anything more hardcore than that.”
Not long after Brandon moved into the building, Alex killed himself as well.
After Alex Vogt died, another Journal Building resident, named Cody Robin, moved into his old room.
Cody had been dating a woman who’d recently moved to Kirksville, named Glenna Haught.
Glenna and Cody soon broke up, and she began dating Terry Yardley, a mechanic and biker.
But Glenna and Terry’s relationship hit a snag too. Told by doctors she would die if continued drinking recklessly, she fell off the wagon. She and Terry argued; she left their home and went to Cody’s apartment in the Journal Building.
Cody wasn’t there at the time, but she let herself in, and then proceeded to more or less drink herself to death. The last person to see her before she died was Brandon Grossheim.
He lived across the hall. He claimed he’d heard a large “thump,” like she’d fallen out of the lofted bed, pictured above. He came over to investigate. And then, after talking to her — she said she was fine, he later told police — he left.
Glenna’s body was discovered by Cody when he got home. She was nearly naked, lying on the floor. Police questioned Brandon, who had scratches all over his arms. He said he got them from his cats.
He was never charged criminally. Terry Yardley remains furious with him, however. “That guy better hope I never run into him ever again, because I have a lot of questions that need to be answered, but I don’t know if I’ll let him get to the point to talk.”
New episodes of The Peacemaker drop every Tuesday. Find it anywhere you get podcasts. In the upcoming series finale, we review all of the evidence and decide if we think Brandon Grossheim was responsible for these deaths.
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