Most people never experience the pain of a loved one being murdered or going missing. Merle Brady of Bardstown, Kentucky, however, has endured both.

On October 6, 1991, Merle’s fifty-five-year-old husband Frank was murdered by two violent escaped prisoners near Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Two-and-a-half-years later, her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Melisa Sloan, went missing in Orlando, Florida.

The two cases are related only by lineage and differ in endings. Frank Brady’s killers were apprehended and returned to prison, but Melisa Sloan is still missing.

                                         Frank Brady      Melisa Sloan

Father And Daughter

In September 1991, Michael St. Clair was sentenced to two life terms in prison for two murders committed in Oklahoma.

Drug trafficking ran in the career criminal’s family; customer sharing did not. After St. Clair’s uncle, Ronnie, attempted to lure some of his nephew’s buyers to his operation, his nephew hired hit man William Kelsey, Jr. to murder him. Shortly afterward, St. Clair himself killed Kelsey.

St. Clair was held at the Bryan County Jail in Durant, Oklahoma, as the state decided where he would serve his sentence. On September 19, he and another prisoner, Dennis Reese, who was awaiting trial for murder, escaped.

The two men continued their killing ways, going on a murderous crime spree.

                                        Dennis Reese    Michael St. Clair

Three weeks later, on the evening of October 8, a Kentucky state trooper pulled over a pickup seen fleeing from a burning vehicle near Elizabethtown, seven-hundred-fifty miles from where St. Clair and Reese had escaped. As the truck slowed down, the passenger, identified as St. Clair, jumped out and fired several shots at the trooper, none of which hit him. Several minutes later, the truck was found abandoned off Interstate 65. The front tires had been blown out.

The abandoned truck was registered to fifty-five-year-old Frank Brady, a distillery worker who was last seen cashing a check at a convenience store twelve hours earlier. His body was later found approximately twelve miles north of Elizabethtown. He had been handcuffed and shot execution-style in the back of the head in a manner nearly identical to how St. Clair’s Uncle Ronnie had met his end.

Carjacked And Murdered

The vehicle St. Clair and Reese had burned belonged to twenty-two-year-old paramedic Tim Keeling of Denver, Colorado. Similar to Frank Brady, Tim had vanished after entering a convenience store. His body was found in a roadside ditch on the outskirts of Clayton, New Mexico, over 1,000 miles from Elizabethtown, Kentucky.  He was believed to have been murdered on September 27.

Tim Keeling

Four days after St. Clair fired on the Kentucky trooper, authorities believe he and Reese struck again. On October 12, two men matching the escapees’ descriptions robbed the J&W video store off United States Highway 45, in Milan, Tennessee and, in the process, shot twenty-year-old clerk Kathy Stoots to death.

Thirty minutes later, the duo are believed to have robbed the Country Oasis convenience store off United States Highway 79 in Atwood, eight miles to the northeast. Twenty-three-year-old store clerk Tammy Tidwell was shot. She died three days later.

A 2007 article in The Tennessean about the murders of the two convenience store clerks features these pictures, but it does not identify which woman is Kathy and which is Tammy.

 

The Murdered Clerks

The Convenience Store Where

Tammy Tidwell Was Murdered

The killers then split up and stayed on the lam for another two months. St. Clair was captured on December 19, 1991, in Hugo, Oklahoma; Reese was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, on January 5, 1992. Both men were convicted of the murder of Frank Brady. Reese was sentenced to life in prison while St. Clair was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison on appeal.

In 2011, Reese confessed to murdering Tim Keeling; St. Clair was convicted the following year. Each man was given an additional life sentence.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/96313893/francis-chandler-brady

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/112537931/timothy-wayne-keeling

 

St. Clair And Reese Are Captured And Convicted

Neither St. Clair nor Reese were charged with the murders of Kathy Stoots or Tammy Tidwell. It is unclear if this is because authorities did not believe they had enough evidence against them or because they did not want to go through the cost of the trials in lieu of the pair already being convicted of the other murders.

Both murders are still listed as unsolved. If you have information on the murders of Kathy Stoots or Tammy Tidwell, please call the Gibson County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Department at (731) 855-1121, the Carroll County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Department at (731) 986-8947 or email [email protected]

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/226150885/kathy-rena-stoots

Open Cases

Two-and-a-half years after Frank Brady was murdered, tragedy again struck his family.

After a whirlwind romance, Frank and Merle’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Melisa, had wed John Sloan in 1993. They soon moved from Kentucky to Orlando, Florida.

After being unable to reach her daughter for a week, Merle, from Kentucky, reported Melisa missing to Orlando police on May 8, 1994. The last sighting of Melisa had been on May 1, one week earlier. A bank surveillance camera showed her withdrawing $20 from an ATM in downtown Orlando.

Melisa Sloan

Frank Brady’s Daughter

Melisa was a licensed practical nurse at Orlando Regional Hospital. John had recently been discharged from the Army Special Forces and was a night security guard at the hospital. He was also attending school to become a motorcycle mechanic.

John and Melisa’s short union had been rocky, marked by two incidents of domestic violence in the nine months preceding Melisa’s disappearance. John was arrested and charged with assaulting his wife on the second occurrence.

As the legal proceedings against John began, Melisa took a two week sabbatical from work and returned to Kentucky. When she came back to Florida, she and John, who had been released on bond, resumed living together.  Melisa, however, told her co-worker, Mike Moss, that she was going to divorce her husband. She was scheduled to testify against John on May 11, 1994, ten days after she disappeared.

John told police Melisa had left him for a lover whose name he did not know.

A Strained Marriage

In searching the Sloan apartment, police found that most of Melisa’s clothing and belongings were gone, but her most prized possession was left behind. Friends and family say she would have taken her beloved cat if she had intended to disappear. Small blood stains found in the apartment were not enough to indicate evidence of foul play.

Melisa’s car was found in the apartment complex parking lot. Forensic tests conducted on it found nothing unusual.

Car And Cat Not Taken

John Sloan divorced Melisa eight months after her disappearance and remarried. His second wife soon died of a drug/alcohol overdose.

John re-married again shortly thereafter and moved across the country to Bellingham, Washington, where he had children with his third wife. He has refused to further speak with investigators regarding Melisa’s disappearance.

I could not find a picture of John Sloan. He has never been charged in connection with Melisa’s disappearance, but authorities consider him the prime suspect.

Husband Suspected

The Charley Project, a respected database of missing people, says Melisa planned to rent a car at Orlando National Airport and drive to Houston, Texas, nine-hundred-sixty miles from Orlando. The rental car was said to have been found abandoned, burned, and stripped in Pensacola, four-hundred-fifty miles northwest of Orlando in the Florida panhandle.

I could not find confirmation of the rental car in any of the newspaper articles about Melisa’s disappearance.

A Rental Car?

Melisa Maureen Sloan has been missing since May 1, 1994, when she was twenty-three-years-old. At the time of her disappearance, she was five-feet-four inches tall and weighed one-hundred-thirty pounds. She had blond hair and both of her ears were pierced. Her Social Security number and credit cards have not been used since she vanished.

Foul play is suspected, but not confirmed, in Melisa’s disappearance. Her mother and two sisters have submitted DNA samples to test on Jane Does. So far, no match has been made.

Melisa Sloan would today be fifty-three-years-old. If you have any information on her whereabouts, please contact the Orlando, Florida, Police Department at 407-246-2909.

Melisa Is Still Missing

Frank Brady’s life came to a violent end. His daughter, Melissa Sloan, may have met a similar fate.

A Double Dose Of Family Tragedy

SOURCES:

• Associated Press
• Charley Project
• The Denver Post
• Doe Network
• The Louisville Times
• Murderpedia
• NamUs
• The Oklahoman
• The Tennesseean
• Unsolved Mysteries