On the morning of February 6, 2009, two men driving through the forest toward the small town of Corbett noticed a red pickup truck parked near a bridge. As they drew closer, one of them caught movement beyond the railing and realized it was a human hand. They stopped the car and ran to the slope leading down to the riverbank, where, hidden in the tall grass, they found a woman covered in bruises and scratches. She was conscious but clearly in desperate need of help.

When she saw them, she asked them to call the police. She and her husband, she said, had been attacked. The woman was Lynn Stomps, and the story she told over the following hours set off one of the most unsettling investigations the region had ever seen. Lynn was born in Oregon in 1953.

In high school she met a young man named Jerry, a couple of years older, serving in the military. Not long after they met, he was sent to Vietnam. They kept in touch through letters, and when he came home, they married. The couple settled in Corbett, not far from Portland, and lived a quiet, steady life.

Over the years they tried their hand at all kinds of work: landscaping, growing Christmas trees, whatever opportunity came their way to bring in money. In a rural area there weren’t many options for stable income, so they relied mostly on themselves. Jerry was an avid fisherman and hunter, which gave him ways to earn extra cash. For a time he even worked as a minister, giving sermons in nursing homes.

They raised two sons, and once those boys started families of their own, Jerry and Lynn became grandparents to four grandchildren. Around that point the couple began thinking seriously about retirement, hoping to spend more time with family. Their financial situation had changed dramatically when Lynn inherited nearly two million dollars from her father. They bought several rental properties in Portland and opened a farm where they raised animals.

They were getting ready to sell off the part of the farm work that demanded constant attention, hoping to finally slow down. Those plans were never going to happen. When paramedics and police arrived at the bridge that morning, they recognized Lynn right away. She couldn’t stand and was barely staying conscious, but before she was taken to the hospital she managed to tell them what had happened.

She and Jerry had been trying to sell their boat for several weeks, and that morning they were headed to meet a potential buyer named Dave, who had found their listing online. When they got to the meeting spot, Dave went down toward the river with Jerry, and that’s where he attacked him. When Lynn got out of the truck to see what was going on, another man ran at her, caught up to her, and threw her off the bridge. She slammed into a concrete support below and blacked out.

When she regained consciousness on the riverbank, she couldn’t stand. Jerry was gone, and so were the two men. Through the pain, Lynn started dragging herself toward the road. It took her about two hours to make it back to the guardrail.

Only then did the two passing men spot her. She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found fractures in her pelvis, ribs, and tailbone. While they treated her, police began searching for Jerry, combing through the woods. But the wet ground and rough terrain made it incredibly difficult.

They couldn’t find any useful tracks or evidence. Officers and search dogs kept working through the forest while detectives waited for Lynn to stabilize. She was transferred to a hospital in Portland, where doctors had her on heavy pain medication. Even though they didn’t want her taking visitors, Lynn insisted the police be let in.

Once they were, she gave them more details. In the weeks after they posted the boat for sale, they barely got any calls. Then a man named Dave got in touch, and right away he said he was ready to buy the boat as soon as possible. Since it was worth $40,000, and because of the way Dave was acting, Lynn and Jerry were cautious.

Instead of giving him their address or hauling the boat somewhere unfamiliar, Jerry decided to meet Dave near the river. Dave had mentioned he was an avid fisherman, so Jerry suggested they go over everything he wanted to know while doing some fishing. That morning, Lynn and Jerry left the bridge at around 6:30. Not long after they got there, Dave pulled up.

He and Jerry talked for a bit by the truck while Lynn stayed inside because it was raining. She couldn’t hear what her husband was saying. A few minutes later the two men headed down toward the river. Once they were out of sight, Lynn looked outside and realized the rain had almost stopped.

She decided to get out of the truck, but as soon as she opened the door, she heard Jerry scream at her to run. Before she could understand what was happening, a second man appeared, someone she hadn’t seen before. He had a gun in his hand. Lynn panicked and started running, but he was faster.

He caught up with her in the middle of the bridge and threw her over the railing, sending her down into the water after she struck part of the concrete structure on the way down. Lynn gave police descriptions of both men, but she could only remember their general features. As for the vehicle Dave arrived in, she hadn’t noticed the license plate. All she remembered was that it was a gold-colored pickup truck.

Police put together composite sketches of the two men and sent them out to nearby towns, but that didn’t lead anywhere. The search efforts weren’t producing results either, and detectives gradually started to wonder if the situation was more complicated than it seemed. They began to suspect that the whole boat sale had just been a pretext, and that someone may have had completely different motives for kidnapping Jerry. After speaking with his relatives and people who knew him, police learned that Jerry was a blunt, straightforward man who often said exactly what he thought.

That had led to arguments more than once, and detectives wondered if someone could have been holding a grudge against him. They also found out that back in the early ’70s, Jerry had been arrested after threatening President Nixon during a conversation with an acquaintance, around the time Nixon was planning to visit Portland. They considered the possibility that he owed someone money, but Lynn insisted Jerry never borrowed money and didn’t even use credit cards. Even so, before long investigators started leaning toward the idea that Jerry may have had secrets, and that his wife simply didn’t know the full picture.

That thought came after Lynn walked them through all of Jerry’s movements in the days leading up to the attack. She said he’d been doing normal everyday things: stopping by the bank to pay a bill, ordering supplies for the property, visiting his favorite cigar shop, and then heading out to the farm where they raised animals. According to Lynn, he stayed there overnight and came back home the next day. That last part caught the detectives’ attention.

The farm was in a neighboring state, and to get there Jerry would have had to cross the bridge connecting Oregon and Washington. But when police pulled surveillance footage from that bridge for the day in question, Jerry’s vehicle never appeared anywhere on it. That was a big red flag. It meant Jerry had lied to his wife and spent almost a full day somewhere else.

Detectives started wondering if Jerry had some kind of secret business, or maybe even a mistress. They went back to Lynn in the hospital, but she insisted Jerry would never cheat on her and said she had no idea where he’d really gone that day. Once again, investigators were left with nothing. Several days had already passed since Jerry was taken, and they still hadn’t found a single real lead.

The kidnappers hadn’t contacted anyone in Jerry’s family. No ransom demands, no threats, nothing. All of it felt deeply strange to police, and they couldn’t shake the feeling that they were looking at the whole thing from the completely wrong angle. They decided to take a much closer look at Jerry’s movements in the days leading up to the attack.

Detectives started interviewing people who knew him and pulling surveillance footage from the places he was supposedly visiting. To their surprise, they came to a disturbing conclusion: no one had seen or heard from Jerry at all in the five days before the kidnapping. Then they got the forensic report from the scene, and it only made things stranger. Investigators couldn’t find a single useful trace.

No footprints from the kidnappers, no tire tracks from their vehicle, nothing at all that suggested anyone else had been there. Another odd detail: the IT team couldn’t find any trace of this mysterious Dave. No messages, no phone calls, nothing. And yet, Jerry somehow had to have arranged that meeting with him.

All of that pushed detectives toward a very unsettling conclusion. Maybe there had never been any meeting with Dave in the first place. But they still couldn’t ignore one major fact: Lynn had suffered serious injuries after going over that bridge. So police decided to speak with the doctors who had treated her, and ask whether anything about her condition stood out.

To the investigators’ surprise, the doctor said her injuries didn’t really match her version of events. As Lynn had told it, an unknown attacker threw her off the bridge from near its highest point. But based on the injuries she actually had, the doctors believed she must have fallen from a much lower height. The detectives noticed something else.

Lynn had described Jerry’s movements in the days before the kidnapping, but just like with the farm story, police couldn’t find anything to back up what she said. After reviewing surveillance footage from several spots around town, they saw Lynn driving Jerry’s pickup herself. And Jerry wasn’t in the truck. After looking at all of that, detectives decided they needed to approach the case from a completely different angle.

They got a warrant to search Jerry and Lynn’s home. The first thing that stood out was the sharp contrast between different rooms. Some were in obvious disarray, while others had been cleaned almost to perfection, and judging by the look of them, very recently. The kitchen was the clearest example.

Chairs had been placed on top of the table, along with cleaning supplies. Next to the sink were a bunch of empty soda cans and several empty energy drink bottles. All of it suggested that someone had spent a very long time thoroughly cleaning the house, and that whoever had done it had needed energy drinks just to keep going. There were interesting finds outside, too.

All over the property, detectives found multiple burn piles, which in itself wasn’t unusual for a rural area. But in some of these piles, police spotted fragments of bone. Without testing, they couldn’t say for sure whether the bones belonged to a person or an animal. But what came next was even more chilling: in a metal trash container, they found a pile of ash that contained what looked like part of a human spine.

Another important piece of evidence turned up inside the house. Police found Jerry’s favorite revolver. To the people who knew him, that was incredibly strange. Every one of them said Jerry never left home without that gun.

He took it everywhere, whether he was just going to the store or heading out to church. And yet, somehow, he had supposedly left it behind that morning before going to meet some unknown man in the middle of the woods to sell a boat. There was something else that stood out about the revolver. Inside the cylinder were two spent shell casings.

Jerry’s relatives said that was just as strange. According to them, he never would have left empty casings sitting in the gun. The revolver was sent to the lab along with the other evidence, and experts found blood spatter on the barrel that matched Jerry. The pattern suggested he had been shot at point-blank range, most likely in the head.

As for the bones, experts confirmed they were human, and DNA testing showed they belonged to Jerry. At the same time, investigators found another lead. Surveillance footage from a local store showed Lynn buying bleach and cleaning products. That same bleach was later found inside the house, and it was obvious someone had already used it.

At that point, detectives were almost certain of two things. Jerry was dead, and he had been dead long before the so-called kidnapping. And second, his wife was directly involved in his murder. What police still couldn’t figure out was why she would want to kill the man she’d spent nearly 40 years of her life with.

Lynn was still in the hospital, and detectives came back to question her again. After carefully testing the waters, they finally dropped the act and told her outright that they didn’t believe her story. They pressed her to tell them what had really happened, but Lynn kept insisting that everything had happened exactly the way she said it had. Every attempt to get more out of her went nowhere.

But by then, police had enough evidence pointing to her involvement. Lynn was arrested right there in her hospital bed. When her sons and other relatives found out, they thought the detectives had lost their minds. None of them could believe Lynn would kill her husband.

As far as they knew, the two of them had never had any serious problems. But once the family learned what evidence police actually had, they started to change their minds, especially after detectives uncovered what looked like a motive. As they dug deeper into Lynn’s life, they suddenly found something major. She had racked up a serious amount of credit card debt, more than $55,000.

And Jerry hated borrowing money and refused to use credit cards on principle. Detectives came to believe Lynn had built up those debts behind his back. If Jerry ever found out, he would have been furious, which could easily have led to a massive fight. On top of that, investigators learned that Lynn had secretly been lending large amounts of money to their sons, which only made their financial situation worse.

Money may have been the reason Lynn decided to get rid of her husband. Either Jerry found out about the debt and she killed him during a confrontation, or she realized he was eventually going to discover the truth and decided to kill him before that happened. Based on all the evidence and witness statements, the murder must have happened on February 1st, five days before the incident on the bridge. Detectives believe that Lynn shot Jerry with his own revolver, then spent the next several days getting rid of the body by burning it in pieces on the property.

At the same time, she started cleaning the rooms where any evidence, like blood spatter, might still have been left behind. Since she was driving Jerry’s pickup around town after the murder, and even stopped at places like his favorite cigar shop, police believed Lynn was trying to create the illusion that Jerry was still alive. But surveillance footage and witness statements still showed that Jerry wasn’t actually with her, which badly undermined that plan. On February 6th, Lynn was supposed to carry out the final stage.

And that was the most confusing part of the entire case. Since she still refused to admit what she’d done, detectives laid out their own theory. In their view, Lynn intended to leave Jerry’s pickup near that bridge because it was a popular fishing spot. After that, she would report him missing, hoping police would conclude that Jerry had fallen into the river and drowned, or that some similar accident had happened.

But when she got out of the truck, detectives believed Lynn slipped on the wet embankment and fell down beneath the bridge, which was how she ended up with all those injuries. That meant she really couldn’t get back up or make it home. So all she could do was hope someone found her. But if that happened, people would immediately ask the obvious question: where was Jerry?

And what was she doing alone in his truck out in the middle of the woods? According to investigators, Lynn had to improvise. While dragging herself back up toward the road, she came up with the story about Dave and the boat sale. That part, at least, had some truth to it.

She and Jerry really had been trying to sell the boat for weeks, but there was simply no trace of Dave. No physical evidence. No digital trail. Nothing.

Still, lying there on the wet ground with multiple broken bones, Lynn apparently couldn’t come up with anything better. So she gave police the kidnapping story and stuck to it despite all the contradictions. In the end, even her own sons became convinced that she had killed their father. The trial began two years later, in 2011, and the defense couldn’t present any strong arguments for Lynn’s innocence.

The only thing her attorney really tried to do was point to the lack of direct evidence proving that Lynn herself had pulled the trigger. But to the jury, the answer was more than clear. They found her guilty. Before sentencing, her sons wanted to address their mother in court.

One of them couldn’t get a single word out as he looked at her sitting there at the defense table. The other said, “You are a monster. And I hope while you spend the rest of your miserable life rotting in jail, maybe sometime during that time, you’ll think about the pain and the suffering you have caused everybody else by your actions. And then I hope you burn in hell.

”

In the end, the judge sentenced her to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least 25 years, meaning she would be in her 70s before she could even apply. As of now, she is still serving that sentence. And to this day, she continues to insist she is innocent. But at this point, she has no real chance left to overturn the verdict.

As for Jerry, his remains were finally buried with military honors only two months after his wife was sentenced. That is more than two years after he was murdered.