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After 32 years, Klotz family still seeks closure
Klotz was strangled while kids slept, body stashed in home
new_deh_roberta klotz mug shot.jpg
Roberta Klotz

It was on Jan. 7, 1987, that Roberta Mae Klotz was reported missing. Four days later, she was found strangled, her body stashed in her Great Bend mobile home. 

Since that fateful day 32 years ago, the Great Bend Police Department case is listed as an unsolved homicide. 

“It doesn’t get any easier,” said Kloutz’s sister Tammy Correll. “It should, but it doesn’t.”

Correll, her sister Penny and their mother Shirley, all now live in Oklahoma. Klotz’s two daughters, now grown with families of their own, reside in Kansas.

“We all just need closure,” Correll said, adding Klotz has grandchildren who never had a chance to meet their grandmother. There are still so many unanswered questions, so many unknowns.

With this being the holidays, “this is a terrible time of year, too,” she said.

Despite the cold case status, “we at the GBPD have not forgotten this incident and continue to investigate it along with the Kansas Bureau of Investigation,” said Police Chief David Bailey. “The department, along with other law enforcement agencies, have continued to investigate the killing as leads came in.”

Now, Bailey is asking once again for the public to contact law enforcement with any information they might have regarding Klotz’s death.

Correll pleads for the same. “If anyone knows anything, please come forward.”


The case

According to police reports, on Jan. 7, 1987, 30-year-old Klotz put her two daughters, ages 10 and 12, and a friend of one of her daughters to bed at about 10:30 p.m. When the children woke up the next morning, Klotz was gone. 

Police believed that she would not have voluntarily left her children at home. All of Roberta’s personal items, including her medicine, were still in the home.

On the morning of Sunday, Jan. 11, officers did a full search of the mobile home and found her body hidden there. She had been asphyxiated.

The police believe she was killed either late Jan. 7 or early Jan. 8. They think her body was in the house the whole time and she was killed while the three children were sleeping in the home.

Klotz lived at 125 Maple in an almond-green and white mobile home with her two daughters. She also had a live-in boyfriend, Belton Sullivan.

All immediate suspects were cleared of the crime.

Those with information regarding the case can contact the Great Bend Police Department by calling 620-793-4120, Crime Stoppers at 620-792-1300, or any local law enforcement agency.  

There is a reward of $5,000 being offered from the Governor’s Reward Fund.