Just as the investigation into a 25-year-old cold case heated up this week, the prime suspect—the victim’s husband—called police and said he was going to kill himself.
Jim Sweeten, 79, made good on that threat. Texas police showed up at his home in a Welasco, Texas, RV park on Wednesday, and found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a shed, authorities said.
Two days earlier, the 1998 disappearance of Peggy Sweeten had jumped back into the headlines after police fished a 55-gallon barrel out of the water near the Oklahoma home she shared with Jim until she vanished.
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“Law enforcement returned to the former Sweeten home Monday this week to conduct an underwater search and retrieve a metal barrel that was discovered a few weeks ago and could possibly have been a burn barrel that was noticed to be missing around the same time as Peggy’s disappearance,” the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office said.
No human remains were found in the barrel, but detectives said they were more determined than ever to find out what happened to Peggy Sweeten and bring her presumed killer to justice, Fox23 reported.
After Peggy, a 52-year-old special education teacher, disappeared two decades ago, Jim claimed she had run away with a paramour. But there was no evidence of that, and he stopped cooperating.
He refused to submit to a polygraph test or property search and “appeared to be deceptive and evasive,” a detective later wrote in a search warrant application.
As the years went by with no sign of Peggy, police assumed she was dead. Her husband, meanwhile, had quickly moved on—marrying his mistress and eventually settling in Texas.
Numerous relatives, including Peggy and Jim’s son, Patrick, have long believed that he had a hand in whatever happened to her, but police were never able to charge him.
