It was 2019 when I first heard the story of the Truman State suicide cluster. The tragedy had unfolded in Kirksville, Missouri, a few years earlier, when, over the course of one academic year, several members of the Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity took their own lives. I was a freelance reporter at the time, and an editor suggested it might make a good piece of longform journalism. For good reason. The tragedies were both immensely unsettling—and, I’ll admit it—deeply intriguing, because one fraternity brother had close ties to all the deaths.
Brandon Grossheim was the person who discovered the bodies in two cases. In the third, the deceased had left behind a slip of paper with Grossheim’s email address written on it. Part way through the school year, the fraternity expelled the 19-year-old Grossheim. He moved into an off-campus apartment building, which became the site of two more deaths.
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An Alton native who transferred to Truman from community college, Grossheim reportedly had a fixation on death and a tendency to gravitate toward people in distress. He called himself “The Peacemaker.”
The story exploded into national and international headlines after the parents of two of the deceased filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Grossheim. Six years later, I’m finally able to share what I Iearned about the case in a new longform podcast. Called The Peacemaker, it was co-written and co-produced with fellow St. Louis-based journalist Ben Westhoff (who serves as its host), iHeartMedia, and Coolfire Studios. Steve Luebbert, the executive vice president for original programming at Coolfire, says that, back in 2019 when he first heard the story, he also knew right away it was one he had to tell.
Go Deeper: The Peacemaker has a difficult question at its core: Was Brandon Grossheim again and again simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, or did he play a more sinister role in these deaths? Grossheim has consistently proclaimed his innocence.
But the podcast isn’t just about him. It’s about the families left behind—how they find closure after a loved one’s suicide, and how, in many cases, they ever really do. It’s about a police investigation that left essential questions unanswered, and about how media narratives around these events have over the last six years distorted memories even among the people who witnessed them firsthand.
What’s Next: The first episode of The Peacemaker is out today. The wrongful death suit filed against Grossheim in 2019 is still making its way through the courts. It’s currently scheduled to go to trial next year.
