Pride Month: Kori Glossett

In honor of Pride Month I’m featuring a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer missing person every day for the month of June. Today’s case is Kori A. Glossett, who was 25 years old when he disappeared sometime in the second half of June or in early July 2016. I have the place of his disappearance given as Van Wert, Ohio, but he was a drifter and also hung around in Delphos, Middle Point and Lima.

I’ve written about Kori on here a few times before, because he was local to where I grew up. We attended the same school (not at the same time) and I knew relatives of his.

I haven’t found any news stories about his disappearance that are more recent than a year and a half ago, but I know foul play is suspected in Kori’s case. The cops have executed some search warrants and conducted some digs; they usually don’t go digging places if they expect to find a missing person alive.

I know he had issues and he had a lot of enemies. He was either gay or bisexual, and open about it, which by itself is enough to make people in rural Ohio hate you, and which is why I’m profiling him today. Kori didn’t deserve whatever it was that happened to him, and his family doesn’t deserve to be stuck in limbo like this.

Maybe I should phone this in on Monday

Earlier this month I mentioned on this blog a case of a local guy who disappeared, Kori Glossett, and how I went to school with Michael and Michelle Glossett, presumably relatives of Kori. Kori himself went to the same school but he was many grades below me and I’m not sure we ever met.

In my blog entry I’d said I had seen Michelle in a gas station awhile back. She was working there. Yesterday evening I was at the same gas station and, as I’d like to satisfy my curiosity as to what the Glossett twins’ familial relation is to Kori and maybe get more details about his disappearance, I asked the guy behind the counter if Michelle still worked there. Nope, he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh well. I run a missing persons database, you see. There’s a guy named Kori Glossett missing from around here and I figure Michelle must be related to him and I was going to ask her about it, see if she could tell me something I could put on my site. I don’t know a lot about his case.”

“Kori?” the gas station guy said, as if in surprise. He looked to be about 25 or so, about Kori’s age. “That ***hole? He’s STILL missing?”

“Yup,” said. “For over a year now.”

I was a bit surprised he was using that kind of language, given how he was an employee and I was a customer and we didn’t know each each other. I mean, I didn’t mind but I bet his boss would have had something to say about it.

“He’s not REALLY missing, you know,” the guy said. “He’s buried out in the woods.”

“Hmm,” I said noncommittally. I know there had been multiple search warrants executed on private properties, and digs on said properties for Kory’s body. You don’t really need to read between the lines to realize the cops think he’s dead.

“A LOT of people wanted Kori dead,” Gas Station Guy said. “This is what happens to scumbags, especially when they get into drugs.” He just kinda shrugged and smirked at me as he said that.

I gave him one of the Charley Project business cards. Maybe he will give it to Michelle or Michael or someone else in the family, and they’ll contact me.

But what I’m thinking is maybe I should call LE about this.

Chances are this guy knows nothing in particular about Kori’s case and is just repeating rumors he’s heard. Maybe LE has spoken to him already. But suppose he DOES actually know something and suppose the cops HAVEN’T interviewed him or heard of him? Maybe he even knows the person or persons responsible for Kori’s disappearance. Anything’s possible.

I didn’t catch the guy’s name or anything but it should be easy for the cops to learn his identity. Only two people were working in the gas station when I walked in yesterday.

So what’ll y’all think?

[EDIT: Yeah, like ten minutes after writing this I decided to call it in right then and there even if it was Saturday. The man who answered the phone listened politely, wrote down what I said, and promised to pass the info on to the detectives, plus my name and phone number for if they need to talk to me.

My mom is worried because this guy has my Charley Project business card and I used my credit card to buy snacks at the gas station so he’s got that info too. What if the police come to talk to him and he gets mad about it, she says. Well, the credit card billing address is my dad’s apartment, not my own house. He could harass me online, I suppose, but I doubt he will, and even if I did, I’ve certainly dealt with that before. He could steal my credit card info and buy stuff with it just to give me a hard time, but if someone does that within the next few days or weeks, I will tell the credit card company to look at him as a possible suspect in the theft.

I doubt anything will come of this at all but I’ve done my bit. It’s all you can do.]

This has literally never happened before

You know I’ve really been on a roll lately with updates. I posted 20 for today just a few minutes after midnight, went to bed, woke up in the early morning hours and now I’ve started on tomorrow’s updates already.

Anyway, I wanted to bring up a case I’m going to add tomorrow: Kori Glossett, missing from Ohio since late June or early July 2016. I really don’t know much in the way of details yet because I haven’t actually started researching writing the case yet, but things are kind of contradictory — one source I’ve seen gives the place as Van Wert, Ohio and the date as “approximately” July 1, and the other other source says it was Middle Point, Ohio and the date was June 24.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing about Kori is I’m 95% certain I went to school with close relatives of his.

A set of twins named Michael and Michelle Glossett were in my class at the Lincolnview school district in Van Wert County when I was growing up. Lincolnview is a super rural district, to the extent that it doesn’t actually have a town attached to it, but one of their campuses was in Middle Point and many of the students came from there. (And I will note that the name of the town is Middle Point with two words, not Middlepoint, as the link above says. Just makes me wonder how many other errors are out there on state databases and stuff that it would take a local to spot.)

Given the proximity and the surname and the fact that both Michael and Michelle are listed as “friends” on Kori’s Facebook page (along with five other Glossetts), I’m sure Kori has got to be a close relative of those kids I attended school with. Probably not a full brother, because Michael and Michelle are biracial (black and white) and Kori is listed as white. But perhaps a half brother or a cousin.

I actually saw Michelle at a gas station in Van Wert a few months ago, and I was aware of Kori’s disappearance at the time, but I didn’t think to ask her about it until I’d already left.

I’ve never actually known anyone from my life prior to my missing persons involvement who had a relative that disappeared and stayed gone this long. I do have a longtime friend whose grandfather (I think?) disappeared, and he asked me for advice on what to do about it, but the missing man was found (dead, alas) a week or so later.

Anyway. I’ll do the best I can for Kori.

[EDIT: Gah, this is proving difficult. The published information about Kori’s tattoos may be inaccurate. I found photos of the tattoos on his Facebook page but they’re not clear enough to read. See Charley’s Facebook page. Sigh.]