Missouri 'Package Killer' Committed String of Brutal 1990s Murders: 'I Still Dislike That Negative, Dark, Short Period'

The St. Louis area's convicted so-called “package killer” is spending the rest of his life in prison after he recently pleaded guilty to committing two murders in the 1990s.

Gary Muehlberg, 75, already was in prison 28 years for an unrelated murder case. Authorities say he then admitted killing two other people.

“I still dislike that negative, dark, short period in (my) past life,” Muehlberg wrote in a letter from prison to a police detective in suburban O'Fallon, Missouri.

KTVI reported four of Muehlberg's victims were killed in the early 1990s. He gained his nickname because the bodies were found in trash receptacles.

The guilty pleas were for the murders of Brenda Pruitt and Donna Reitmeyer.

Pruitt vanished in May 1990. Her body was found 17 months later in a trash can along a St. Louis County road.

Reitmeyer's body was found in a trash can inside the St. Louis city limits in June 1990.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Muehlberg's criminal record began in 1995, when he was convicted of murdering Kenneth Atchison two years earlier.

Then Muehlberg pleaded guilty in March 2023 to murdering Sandy Little. Her body was stuffed inside a dresser, which was abandoned along a highway in suburban O'Fallon in February 1991.

DNA work by an O'Fallon officer connected Muehlberg to the cases with the most recent convictions.

Muehlberg also faced charges in connection with the March 1990 killing of Robyn Mihan.

Authorities say Mihan's body was sandwiched between two mattresses, which were wrapped with wire and left along a rural road.

The fifth case involving Muehlberg involves a victim who never has been found. Authorities say he admitted killing a woman at her home, then leaving the body in a metal barrel near a car wash.

The female victims reportedly were connected with a south St. Louis neighborhood known for prostitution. But a motive for Muehlberg's actions never has been revealed.