More on Missing Dentist's Wife
Maggie
for Mrs. Mohn to seek a divorce. Another mystery--why the boyfriend had to
take *10* polygraphs. From the Philadelphia Daily News:
Missing woman's kin losing hope she'll be found
'We really miss her'
by Julie Knipe Brown
Daily News Staff Writer
It's been three months since Frank Maykut Jr. has heard from his sister,
Kathleen Mohn. Three long months of waiting and wondering.
Maykut and the rest of his family have begun to fear the worst - that Kathleen
Mohn won't be found alive. And that her body may not be found at all.
"She was involved so much in our lives," said Maykut, of New Castle, Del. "We
really, really miss her. We know something bad must have happened to her."
Cops appear to be making little progress in the puzzling disappearance of the
Main Line dentist's wife. The trail has grown bitterly cold. Investigators
admit they've hit dead ends on some of their most promising clues.
"We've exhausted just about all our leads. We have no more searches planned,"
said a frustrated Montgomery County District Attorney Bruce L. Castor.
So far, he said, Mohn's killer is "winning."
Detectives steadfastly believe that Mohn was murdered. They say they have been
thwarted by her dentist husband's unwillingness to cooperate in the
investigation.
Thomas Mohn continues to run his Main Line dental practice while his parents,
friends and associates have been questioned by a Montgomery County grand jury.
He insists he had nothing to do with his wife's disappearance.
One thing is certain, her family says.
Kathleen Mohn would never have vanished willingly without contacting those most
precious to her, especially her two nieces, whom she adored.
"We are a very, very close family," said Maykut, speaking publicly for the
first time since his sister disappeared on Dec. 3.
"Her missing is hard on all of us. It has really changed all of our lives."
Kathleen grew up in a suburb of Wilmington, attended St. Elizabeth's School and
dreamed of a medical career.
In 1979, she married. She moved to Pennsylvania with her new husband, a quiet,
pensive man whose father was a successful Ardmore businessman.
She was in love, her family recalled.
"I can't remember how she met him," her brother said. "But she was happy."
Kathleen, an X-ray technician, helped put her husband through dental school.
Eventually, he opened a practice in Ardmore.
To those who knew them, they lived as an ordinary husband and wife who worked
side by side. They were successful enough to cut back to a four-day work week.
They moved from a smaller home in Kingswood, near King of Prussia, to a large
house in Gulph Mills, Upper Merion Township.
Kathleen visited her family in Delaware almost weekly. She was almost always
alone.
"About the only time we ever saw him was at a funeral," said her aunt, Betty
Novak of Newark, Del.
"He was very reclusive. He would stay to himself. He would sit in another room
by himself. I never understood what they had in common."
Kathleen was an outgoing, bubbly person who loved to be around people. She
confided to her family that she was often frustrated by her husband's refusal
to participate in family gatherings.
Unable to have children of her own, Kathleen was extremely close to her
brother's two daughters, one of whom is named after her.
"She was a second mother to my kids," said Maykut, who is divorced from the
kids' mother.
"We would always be with her on weekends. She would spend the night with them
and take them to school on Monday and pick them up. They just loved her."
Novak recalled how the two girls would spend weekends at Kathleen and Tom's
home in Gulph Mills, spending summer days swimming in their in-ground pool. And
each year, Kathleen rented a beach house for them at the shore.
But Kathleen spent almost all her weekends apart from a husband who was often
on the golf course or with another woman, say friends and investigators probing
her disappearance.
"She wasn't a lonely woman. She always had us to fall back on. She was only
lonely when she was with him," her brother said.
In the beginning, Kathleen drank booze to dull the pain.
Then she got sober, began going to Alcholics Anonymous, and discovered a World
Wide Web of lonely people on her computer. She began spending hours chatting
with other lonely men and women on the Internet.
"She was addicted to the computer," said Robert Linder, who met Mohn through a
mutual friend in September.
Linder, who like Kathleen was a recovering alcoholic, was introduced to Mohn at
an AA support group meeting.
"We went out to dinner and it just escalated from there," said Linder, who said
the two began an affair, and spent almost every weekend together up until her
disappearance.
For Mohn, the relationship was different from her marriage in every way.
Linder, a union plasterer, opened up a new life for a woman who had trouble
persuading her husband to take her out on her own birthday.
"She was a Main Line chick and I was a union guy. I probably made half of what
he makes, but I took her dancing and made her feel alive again," said Linder,
44.
Thomas Mohn, contacted by the Daily News, declined comment on his wife's
disappearance. Repeated phone calls to his lawyer have gone unanswered.
Kathleen Mohn began confiding in Linder about her troubled marriage, telling
him that her husband was a golf fanatic who spent long weekends at tournaments,
and that he had had a longtime affair with another woman.
"She told me her husband had an affair for 14 years with the same woman," said
Linder, of Levittown, Bucks County.
"He didn't care what she did. He never made time for her, and he would just
disappear for days on end."
Cops have questioned Mohn's supposed girlfriend. The woman told investigators
she hadn't seen Mohn for nearly a decade.
By Thanksgiving, Kathleen began confiding in friends and relatives that she was
planning to divorce her husband.
Her ex-sister in-law, Deborah Pucci, told investigators that Kathleen had hired
a lawyer who told her she was entitled to 65 percent of her husband's dental
practice and she could receive $3,000 to $4,000 a month in support.
As the holidays approached, Kathleen continued to visit Linder nearly every
weekend. She'd arrive at his house by 10 p.m. Friday and leave on Sunday to
head to her father's house in Delaware. Linder said they filled some of their
time Christmas shopping.
On one occasion, Linder recalls buying two gifts, which were to be presents for
Ashley, a little girl whose parents shared his home in Levittown.
Linder said he paid for the gifts, a remote-controlled doll called Skateboard
Shannen, and a set of three Spice Girl dolls.
On the day she disappeared, Linder convinced Kathleen to bring the gifts with
her so they could wrap them together.
But Linder would never see Kathleen Mohn again.
Two weeks after she vanished, her husband made a surprise pre-Christmas visit
to her brother's Delaware home.
Among the unwrapped presents he delivered was a Skateboard Shannen doll.
"It was very weird," said Novak. "He came down the week after she was missing
and he had these unwrapped gifts. And he just patted her father on the back and
said she just left and he didn't know where she went."
In the weeks before she disappeared, Kathleen Mohn began scrutinizing her
husband's finances in preparation for her divorce. Her husband kept a tight
reign on his money, Linder said, and Kathleen told him he rarely let her have
cash.
She used a credit card for all her purchases, even for a single pack of
cigarettes.
She drove a 1993 Ford Explorer. Linder said she told him she had begged her
husband for more than a year to buy her a newer vehicle, but he had refused.
On Nov. 22, Thomas Mohn told his office manager that his wife was leaving him.
"He told me that she was in love with another man. He was upset. I could see
that he had been crying," Julianne Ranieri, his office manager, told police.
After Thanksgiving, divorce tensions between Kathleen and her husband
escalated, Linder said, as the two argued about money.
Linder said he sometimes overheard Thomas Mohn yelling at Kathleen through the
telephone when she would call at night, often sobbing.
She continued to spend long hours on her computer, which further angered her
husband, Linder said.
"Two to three weeks before her disappearance, he ripped her computer out of the
wall," Linder said. "He just flipped out."
Linder said Kathleen told him she was so frightened that she hid several
shotguns that the couple had inside their home.
The fights weren't always about money. Sometimes they were about sex, he said.
"There were nights he begged her for sex and she didn't want it," Linder said.
"He would yell at her over the phone 'You're going to stop this affair and be
my wife.' "
The pressure of the divorce was wearing on Kathleen, and she began to drink,
Linder said.
When she didn't show up the night of Dec. 3, Linder grew immediately concerned.
He called her home and left repeated messages.
By Monday morning, he and a mutual friend began scanning bar parking lots and
motels along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, hoping to find her Ford Explorer. They
called every motel and hotel from King of Prussia to Bristol, to no avail.
Thomas Mohn reported his wife missing on Sunday, but for weeks he failed to
tell police about her affair or their impending divorce. His refusal to help
police find his wife has frustrated investigators, who have spent many hours in
foul weather searching desolate fields in Lower Bucks County.
Linder, who has passed 10 lie detector tests, has been ruled out as a suspect.
Her husband has not.
"He is not acting like a man who is upset that his wife is missing," said
District Attorney Bruce Castor.
Her family didn't know about Kathleen's affair, but they did know she had come
to the end of her rope with Thomas Mohn.
Her father, a devout Catholic who had been married to her mother for 48 years,
did not believe in divorce.
"She mentioned to him that there was a problem with her marriage, and he told
her to work it out. Kids today give up too easy," said Novak.
Her younger brother said he, too, knew she was divorcing, but he declined to
talk about their relationship. He said police detectives told him to keep
quiet.
"Police know something bad has happened to her. We all still have a little bit
of hope. But we're not naive. I'm sure if she could, she would call."
Maggie
"Caution: Cape does not enable user to fly."
-Batman Costume warning label
