By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

NEOSHO, Mo. — Sheriff’s investigators acknowledged this week that the inquiry into the murder of a Hmong male, whose skeletal remains were discovered in a field near Granby more than four months ago, has stalled.

Chief Deputy Chris Jennings, of the Newton County Sheriff’s Department, said every lead officers have received on the murder of Ger Lee, 40, since the discovery of his remains May 5, including information received just this past week, has been pursued.

“We can’t say we’ve discounted all of them. We can’t say they were dead ends. But we haven’t been able to turn them into anything substantial,” Jennings said.

He said that doesn’t mean that sheriff’s detectives are shutting the case down. Unsolved homicides are never closed, he said.

“But we are pretty much at a standstill until we develop new leads, whether that comes from people contacting us or from (our own) further investigation.”

Lee was a Laotian refugee of the mid-1980s who lived in California before moving to Missouri more than three years ago with his girlfriend, Soun Sachao, and their first child. Although he had yet to obtain U.S. citizenship, he was part of a community of about 100 Hmong-American families living in the Cassville area in Barry County. He had a second child with Sachao before his disappearance in early January of this year.

His cousin, John Lee, of rural Cassville, reported him missing Feb. 21. The cousin later recognized a distinctive gold Buddhist necklace that Ger Lee wore when a photograph of the piece of jewelry found with the remains was made public in May. He came forward to authorities and a positive identification of the remains was made through dental records.

An autopsy determined Ger Lee was shot in the head.

Investigators’ suspicions regarding the murder initially were directed toward St. Paul, Minn., where the victim had been stopped and arrested in June of 2007 for alleged possession of a little less than one pound of opium. The discovery of $1,392 cash in his possession and another $10,000 cash in a motel room that matched a key card he was carrying led to a charge of first-degree possession of narcotics.

His cousin has acknowledged that Lee suffered from an opium habit.

Lee was seen in the company of another Asian male in Barry County with tattoos on his hands prior to his disappearance on or about Jan. 10. The description of the tattoos reportedly matched tattoos St. Paul police noted on a passenger in Lee’s vehicle at the time of his arrest.

Lee also was driving a black Acura with Minnesota plates just before his disappearance. Investigators initially assumed that it may have been driven back to Minnesota by his killer.

Then detectives tracked the Acura down to a wrecker service in Lawrence County, where it had been towed after being found abandoned at the Talbot Conservation Area in the adjacent county on or about Jan. 20. That raised the possibility that the murder may have been more local in origin than initially thought.