Missing
Janet Sue Kirkup
Janet, approximately 1992; Robert Kirkup, approximately 2008
Date and time person was reported missing : 06/01/1992
Missing location (approx) :
Jackson, Michigan
Missing classification : Endangered Missing
Gender : Female
Ethnicity :
White
DOB : 08/13/1939 (81)
Age at the time of disappearance: 52 - 53 years old
Height / Weight : 5'7, 160 pounds
Description, clothing, jewerly and more : Unknown, but she usually wears several rings and other jewelry.
Distinguishing characteristics, birthmarks, tattoos
: Caucasian female. Graying blonde hair, blue eyes. Janet may use the last name Johnson. Her four front teeth are capped and she keeps her fingernails long.
Information on the case from local sources, may or may not be correct : Janet was last seen in Jackson, Michigan during the summer of 1992. That summer she and her husband, Robert Kirkup, were on a road trip in a recreational vehicle (RV) at the time.
The couple had three daughters, Shana, Sherry and Susan. Robert worked in senior manAge at the time of disappearance: ment throughout much of his career, but in 1989 he decided to quit and buy a saloon. The business went under, however, and by the fall of 1991 the Kirkups' house in Apple Valley, California had been repossessed.
Janet and Robert decided to go an extended vacation in their RV. Shana and Sherry were adults by this time and had moved away; Susan was sixteen and lived with her parents. For five months, she joined her father and mother in the RV, but eventually she decided to go home and live with Shana. The Kirkups headed east, stopping at the homes of various relatives along the way. Janet kept in touch with her children by telephone and letters.
Janet disappeared sometime during the trip after she and Robert visited his relatives in Genesee County, Michigan. Her calls and letters to her children stopped, and whenever her children called Robert would tell them Janet was unavailable to talk. She has never been heard from again.
In January 1993, Robert wrote a six-pageheader letter to his children to say that Janet had in fact been missing for months. He stated she ran away with another wealthy man who drove a big RV, and he last saw her when he dropped her off at an airport hotel in Buffalo, New York.
Robert didn't provide many details about the incident, and after Janet's disappearance he continued to travel around the country in his RV.
The Kirkups' daughters initially believed Robert's story about Janet leaving with another man, because they knew how dissatisfied she was with the situation.
Susan stated that while she was with them on the RV trip, her parents argued frequently, both of them drank and Janet was very unhappy. Susan was close to her mother, but she described Robert as an abuser who could become violent, particularly when he was drinking.
Shana remembered differently, stating Janet was volatile and occasionally hit her children, but Robert never had. She described Janet as a very materialistic person who was concerned about having a lot of money, and Shana could believe that her mother would have left her husband for someone with more money.
After all the sisters' attempts to locate Janet led to nothing, Sherry filed a missing persons report.
The police found no record or any sightings of Janet after her visit with Robert's parents in the summer of 1992, and the couldn't identify the man Robert said she had left with. They came to believe she had vanished under suspicious circumstances and might have met with foul play.
In 1999, authorities tracked Robert to Michigan, went there and interviewed him. He repeated the story about Janet's having left him, but then added, "I had nothing to do with her death." The investigators pressed him, but Robert refused to say anything further and demanded a lawyer.
Authorities got a search warrant on his RV and found a 1992 calendar in which Robert had kept a meticulous record of his RV trip, daily noting the destination, miles traveled and the gas mileAge at the time of disappearance: . The entries for August 16 and 17, however, had no location listed; they were the only dates on the calendar without one.
Robert confessed to Janet's murder after the police persuaded Shana to confront him. He stated he and Janet got into a fight inside the RV at a campground near Buffalo, New York on August 14, 1992. He strangled Janet after she attempted to stab him, then buried her body in a wooded area in New York, but he couldn't remember exactly where.
Robert insisted he had killed his wife only in self-defense. He was sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison for Janet's murder.
Janet's body has not been located, but foul play is suspected in her case due to the circumstances involved.
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