Man sentenced in 2015 shotgun killing that spurred mother’s search across Northland

A Liberty man was sentenced Wednesday to 28 years in prison for the murder of another man who disappeared in 2015 and was found dead two years later in rural Missouri.

Micah L. Wynes, 31, was sentenced in Clinton County Circuit Court, where he pleaded guilty in December to a charge of second-degree murder in the 2015 killing of Donald Christopher Hadden.

A co-defendant in the case, Joseph Seward, 31, pleaded guilty to abandonment of a corpse and was sentenced earlier this month to four years in prison.

Wynes and Seward, both 31, were charged in 2017 after the discovery of Hadden’s remains in a roadside ditch in Clinton County.

Hadden, 33, had been reported missing in Clay County in 2015. He was from Avera, Ga.

His mother Leisa Hadden traveled from Georgia to Kansas City several times to hand out fliers throughout the Northland, interviewing several of her son’s acquaintances, trying to piece together what had happened to him.

In early 2016, she put up $1,000 in reward money for information regarding her son’s disappearance. A Greater Kansas City Crime Stoppers billboard along Interstate 435 drew attention to the case. 

According to court documents filed with the charges, Hadden and the defendants had been doing drugs together when members of the group suspected that Hadden planned to give information to the police.

He was driven to the rural area and killed with a shotgun, according to the documents.