Cold Case Files: Her husband killed her in 20o2 and the family has been trying to locate Hope's body for 24 years
Hope Meek was twenty-five when she vanished from her house in Valliant on February 21, 2002. She was small, about five-one or five-two and somewhere under a hundred pounds, with sandy blonde to light brown hair and blue eyes.
She left her glasses and contacts behind, which mattered because she could barely see without them. She also left her phone, her keys, and her old Chevy pickup sitting there.
She had her ears and belly button pierced and a little indentation scar on her right thigh from something that had been cut out years before. People called her Hope Boggs or Hope Kidd or sometimes Deanie. She lived on Section Line Road with her husband Jerry and their three little kids, one of them from before she met him.
She worked at the McCurtain County jail, walking prisoners over to court, and she was almost done with a degree in criminal justice because she wanted to be a dispatcher. Her mom talked to her basically every day.
She made the kids’ baby food herself. The marriage wasn’t great. There had been police calls about fights. The day before she disappeared she called Jerry’s work asking if he was messing around with a coworker, and she told her mom he had beaten her and that she had glass stuck in her back and arm and rear end. People who knew them said he had choked her before.
Jerry said he saw her at the house around three that afternoon, left her five hundred bucks because they were splitting up, and took the kids camping. He came back around midnight because it was too cold, and she was gone along with the money.
Everything else was still there. He didn’t call the police for five days. Her family kept asking where she was. About two weeks later, he filed for divorce and got the kids. She never picked up her last paycheck. She never called her mom or the kids again. No one ever saw her use her Social Security number or her phone after that.
That same day, security cameras caught him buying two big fifty-gallon plastic totes at the Walmart in Hugo around one o’clock. He also pulled a thousand dollars out of an ATM in Valliant and didn’t show up for work. One of the older kids later said they heard their parents fighting that night and then Hope just went quiet.
The kids helped him cut up some carpet in the bedroom after that, and then they went fishing. People figured he put her in the carpet and dumped it somewhere around Hochatown. They searched landfills and brought in dogs and never found anything.
It sat for ten years until a new prosecutor said he would take the case even without a body.
In August 2012, the OSBI arrested Jerry at the paper mill where he worked. The trial was all circumstantial. They had the earlier fights, the affair stuff, the totes he bought the day she vanished, the five days he waited to report her, the quick divorce, the glasses and phone and truck left behind, the fact she never contacted anybody, and what the kids said. The jury convicted him in November 2013 and gave him life without parole.
He appealed and lost, including in federal court years later. He still says he didn’t do it. Her body has never turned up.
Her family just wants to know where she is so they can bury her. In McCurtain County only seven people have been listed missing since 1987, and she is still one of them.
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