Jacque Waller's Parents Say They Have 'No Doubt' What Happened To Their Missing Daughter

Missing mom's parents say they have "no doubt" their son-in-law played a role.

ByABC News
July 14, 2011, 9:30 AM

July 14, 2011 -- As new clues emerge in the disappearance of Jacque Sue Waller, the Missouri mother of 5-year-old triplets who has been missing for more than six weeks, her family says she was a victim of domestic abuse, and say they stand by their claims that their daughter's estranged husband, Clay Waller, knows exactly where she is.

"He tore my family to pieces," Jacque's father, Stan Rawson, said today on "Good Morning America." "I have no doubt in my mind. I stand by anything I've said."

Rawson's defense refers to a July 13 post on the family's "Find Jacque S Waller" Facebook page written by the screen name "Jacque's Father" to Clay Waller that reads, "I just wanted to mention that you're not fooling anybody at all. I under the sheriff has a [sic] orange jumpsuit picked out for you, and a fine room at the Cross Bar Hotel…You will regret hurting my girl and the Tripps—I promise you you will!"

Clay Waller was the last person to see his wife alive, on June 1, the day 39-year-old Jacque went missing. That day, she returned to Cape Girardeau, Mo., from nearby St. Genevieve, where she had been staying with family since the couple's separation weeks earlier.

She met with her estranged husband and her attorney to finalize paperwork for their divorce, and later went to Waller's home to pick up her son.

In an interview with police immediately following his wife's disappearance, Clay Waller said the couple fought and she left his home on Woodland Drive around 4 p.m by foot. He then left his home, he said, and returned around 6 p.m. to find her blue Honda Pilot gone. It was later found abandoned with a flat tire on a nearby interstate.

Interest in the case picked up this week when personal business cards belonging to Jacque were found on a stretch of road just 10 miles from where her car was discovered.

Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department officials said Wednesday that an area resident found the cards Monday in a packet with a Blue Cross Blue Shield logo. Jacque worked as a manager at the Cape Girardeau location.

"We are now well over 250 leads into it," James Humphreys, chief of police in Jackson, Mo., told ABC News of the investigation. "We still have not found Jacque but we're continuing to search every day and each week."

Jackson police have labeled Clay Waller a person of interest, but not a suspect, in his wife's disappearance.

"The police are operating on the assumption that something must have happened, that's for sure," Rawson said. "I am operating on the assumption that something did happen, and have no doubt in my mind about what happened."

Rawson's wife, Ruby, told "GMA" she hasn't spoken to her former son-in-law in more than a month but did confront him on the night her daughter disappeared.

"I asked him what he'd done to her and he said 'I didn't do anything,'" Mrs. Rawson said. "I said, 'Yeah, you did and you know you did, because of all the threats you've been saying to her over the last year.'"

"He said, 'I have never threatened her,'" she told "GMA" of their heated conversation. "And I said, 'Yes, you did, and we knew it all along.'"

Jacque Waller's sister, Cheryl Brenneke, also told ABC News that her sister feared what her husband may do if she ever left him.

"He'd been threatening her for a solid year," she said. "He told her that divorcing her would be a death sentence."

"She always said, 'you don't know what he's capable of, I just don't want to be dead,'" Brenneke told ABC.