The 1989 brutal slaying of an Atchison Daily Globe publisher shocked the residents of this small northeast Kansas town and garnered media attention from across the nation.
Charges against the man arrested in connection with the slaying of Larry Sarvey were dropped during the third day of his trial, and bizarre twists and turns abounded.
Twenty-five years later, the slaying remains unsolved. Key players in the case have died, and one is serving a life sentence.
Some Atchison residents don’t want to talk about it and would rather forget that tragic day and the aftermath. Others who do talk about it are guarded because they wonder whether someone got away with murder.
A shocked
community
Sarvey was found dead July 29, 1989, in the living room of his house. He was shot at least twice in the head with a 12-gauge shotgun.
The publisher arrived in Atchison 18 months before his death and had recently divorced his wife after 15 years of marriage. Two weeks before the slaying, Sarvey’s ex-wife, Cathy Sarvey, and their children moved back to upstate New York, where the former couple had family.
Sarvey grew up in Vestal, N.Y., the youngest of four children, according to his sister, Cheryl Butler.
Butler recently spoke to The Topeka Capital-Journal from her home in Vestal.
“(I miss) everything,” Butler said of Sarvey. “His love for us. The way he made us laugh. He was my buddy.”
Sarvey’s body was discovered about 12:30 p.m. after his girlfriend, Sandi Heaver, went to his house. Heaver worked in the Globe’s advertising department and was pregnant with Sarvey’s child, according to previous Topeka Capital-Journal articles. Most of Sarvey’s and Heaver’s co-workers didn’t know the two were in a relationship.
“I asked him if he was having an affair,” said Jean Buchanan, who worked as the managing editor of the Globe at the time of the slaying. “He said no.”
Heaver, who is now known as Sandi Burge and remains in Atchison, had tried numerous times to reach Sarvey the day he was found dead.
She rang the door bell at the publisher’s house, and when she didn’t get an answer, she unlocked the door.
“I stuck my head in the door,” Heaver recalled during the trial of her ex-husband, Lloyd Heaver, who was accused of killing Sarvey. “It was dark. I called out to him.”
Heaver could barely squeeze through the door because it was obstructed by Sarvey’s body.
“I saw blood,” she said during her testimony, “so much on the floor where it ran and made a puddle.”
Heaver ran next door and called Buchanan, who showed up at the scene minutes later.
“When I opened the door, all I saw were his feet and a lot of blood,” Buchanan said in a recent telephone interview. “It was surreal.”
Buchanan left Atchison about a year after the slaying. She now works at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Atchison Police Chief Mike Wilson, the lead detective in the case, said in an interview last week that a window screen and door screen had been cut or torn, and the telephone line had been cut outside the house, which was near the Atchison County Courthouse.
“I remember it very vividly,” Wilson said. “It was a scene that was horrific.”
People were shocked after news of the slaying broke. The media poured into town, and some residents feared for their lives.
“The days after the murder were very frightening, because we didn’t know who did it,” Buchanan said. “I remember being on edge. I learned how to use a gun.”
The investigation As police began to dig, they found out Sarvey was in a relationship with Sandi Heaver. They also learned Sarvey may have had other affairs. In 1990, the Kansas City Star Magazine interviewed one of Sarvey’s friends, Lou Sumner. “Sumner says that when he learned how Sarvey died he was not surprised,” the article states. “He had come to believe that Sarvey would one day die violently. ‘When I heard about the manner of his death,’ he says, ‘it seemed as natural as a heart attack.’ Over a 15-year period, Sumner says, he had witnessed a side of Sarvey unknown to most people.” Sumner described a pattern of womanizing, deceit and irresponsibility. Buchanan to this day recalls how stunned she was after learning of the lies Sarvey told, because she liked him, even though he had flaws. The week before his death, Sarvey told Buchanan and other co-workers he was traveling to visit family. “He even brought me a T-shirt,” Buchanan said. In reality, Sarvey had traveled to New York to interview for another job. He had accepted the position in New York, and allegedly made plans to get back together with his ex-wife. Marilyn Andre, who worked with Sarvey and still works at the Globe, shared good memories about Sarvey. “He was a jokester,” Andre said. “He was so full of life — going 90 miles per minute.” Police learned during interviews Sarvey was having a relationship with Sandi Heaver and that she was pregnant with his child. They also learned about her ex-husband, Lloyd Heaver, who quickly became the focus of their investigation. Lloyd Heaver, who was 40 at the time, shared a home in the Decade Acres trailer park in Atchison with Richard Keith Arndt. Arndt was 29 at the time and liked to share outrageous stories with people around town. “He said he was a Mafia hit man, a professional who had killed at least twice,” the Star article states. “He said he was a drug runner who flew cocaine from Columbia to Texas. He said he was a bank robber who had buried $200,000 in the Arizona desert.” Lloyd Heaver moved from St. Cloud, Minn., to Atchison in April 1989 to be closer to his and Sandi’s daughter, Sabrina. He worked as an over-the-road truck driver. The arrest, trial During questioning by police, Arndt claimed Lloyd Heaver had talked to him a few times about killing Sarvey. Lloyd Heaver was arrested in connection with Sarvey’s death and was later charged with first-degree murder, criminal solicitation to commit murder, aggravated unlawful use of weapons, burglary and unlawful possession of a firearm. “He (Heaver) didn’t really like Larry,” Arndt said at a preliminary hearing for Lloyd Heaver. “It wasn’t because of anything Larry had done to him. He just didn’t want somebody coming between him and his daughter, I think.” Arndt was declared a material witness in the case and was held in the Atchison County Jail in lieu of $10,000 bond. He was granted immunity. “Arndt said his roommate’s anger and frustration over the possibility that Sandi Heaver and Sarvey might marry and take Sabrina out of state continued to grow,” according to The Capital-Journal’s archives. Two of Sarvey’s sisters, including Butler, traveled to Atchison for court proceedings. They spent hours in a vehicle with Sarvey’s ex-wife. During opening statements in Heaver’s jury trial, which began Nov. 1, 1989, Heaver’s attorney, Richard Senecal, accused Arndt of being the actual killer. Gunnar Sundby, who was the Atchison County attorney at the time but now serves as a judge in the 1st Judicial District, fired back. Sundby said the state’s evidence would show Lloyd Heaver took it upon himself to kill Sarvey after he became frustrated and angry when his roommate failed to carry out his promise to kill the 38-year-old publisher. “This was a personal execution,” Sundby told jurors during his opening statement at Lloyd Heaver’s trial. A strange turn of events On Nov. 3, 1989, three days after it began, the trial of Lloyd Heaver ended quickly when Sundby dismissed four of the five felony charges after his case unraveled. The jury had just spent three hours listening to Arndt testify. Damaging evidence from Arndt’s uncle, Ed Maul, who lived in Rushville, Mo., at the time, caused Sundby to dismiss the charges. Maul testified he and Arndt talked about Arndt being hired “to make a hit on somebody.” After the two spoke, Maul agreed to take Arndt to Atchison’s downtown area and drop him off a few houses from where Sarvey lived. Maul noticed Arndt had a handgun in his waistband. “When asked under cross-examination by Senecal when, and how he learned of Sarvey’s death, Maul’s response that Arndt told him about 12:30 p.m. July 29 elicited a murmur from those in the courtroom,” according to the Capital-Journal article. In another strange turn of events, Sarvey’s ex-wife, Cathy Sarvey, was seen dancing with Lloyd Heaver at a motel the evening the charges were dropped. The two were married eight months later. “When I met Lloyd and we decided we were going to spend the rest of our lives together, we knew there would be talk and speculation,” Cathy Sarvey told the Globe in an August 1990 interview. “But that didn’t really change our feelings for each other.” “It was bizarre,” Buchanan said last week. “It was completely bizarre.” It was even more bizarre to Larry Sarvey’s two sisters, who had traveled to Atchison with Cathy Sarvey and were staying in the same motel with her. “We aren’t stupid people,” Butler said. “This was about greed, revenge.” An unsolved case Current police chief Wilson said the case remains open and police want to solve the crime. However, Wilson and other law enforcement officers think they had the right man on trial for Sarvey’s death. “We felt it was more than sufficient,” Wilson said of the information provided to prosecutors. Lloyd Heaver died in March 2009 in Minnesota. He was 60 years old. There was no mention of Cathy Sarvey Heaver in the obituary. Arndt is serving a life sentence in Texas for aggravated sexual assault. The Sarvey family found fault with the police department and the prosecution, Butler said. “If they would have done their job, that girl (in Texas) would never have been raped,” Butler said. The family learned additional details about Larry Sarvey’s death after the Kansas Bureau of Investigation did a thorough, follow-up investigation, Butler said. She isn’t at liberty to share those details, she said. No one else has been charged, but Butler said the family has had some closure. “My consolation — the family’s consolation — is that one of them is in jail, one is dead,” Butler said. “One is walking around free.” Sandi Burge, as well as her and Sarvey’s daughter, Meg, declined comment. Buchanan called the Sarvey death “a very, very dark period in my life.” “It was an assassination, and a very ugly one,” she said. Buchanan doesn’t think the brutal death of her former boss will ever be solved, and she understands why people are reluctant to talk about it. “I’m getting tense just talking about it,” she said. “I think it’s just one of those things where too much time has passed.” Buchanan said there are two things she wants to know in life, both having to do with former Atchison residents. “What happened to Amelia Earhart,” Buchanan said, “and what happened in the Sarvey case.”
