By ERIC MEYER
and PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writers

An autopsy will be needed to identify a body found Sunday in a pickup truck registered to interim Peabody city clerk Jonathan Clayton.

Clayton vanished Aug. 3 while the target of several still-pending investigations.

The body was found at 2:45 p.m. Sunday in Clayton’s crashed pickup truck near the US-50 / I-135 interchange northeast of Newton. Identification papers from Clayton reportedly were found on the badly decayed remains.

State troopers were seen soon afterward in Peabody, apparently notifying Clayton’s husband, city council member Christopher King.

Clayton, a convicted financial felon promoted from dogcatcher to interim clerk after a wave of resignations and firings in Peabody, last was seen Aug. 3 in his red 2011 Chevrolet Silverado.

A farmer notified Harvey County sheriff’s deputies the truck had been found down a steep incline where westbound US-50 merges onto I-135.

Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which has taken over the case, confirmed that the truck was registered to Clayton.

According to the Highway Patrol, KBI called in members of the Highway Patrol’s critical accident reconstruction team to investigate the accident.

It remains unclear when the wreck might have occurred, whether it was accidental or intentional, and how long the truck and body might have remained undiscovered.

The location is less than half a mile from a Highway Patrol office but is some distance off the highway and is not easily viewed from roads passing by.

A woman who works as a nurse reportedly found the location while looking for horses on a farm and noticing buzzards and a scent of decay.

The vehicle had been driven off the road and crashed into a tree, KBI said.

Clayton, a former director of COVID aid grants with Kansas Department of Commerce, is believed to be at the center of investigations into grant programs in Peabody and Mullinville, where he and King resided before moving to Peabody.

While Peabody officials continue to emphasize that no money has been found to be missing there, Mullinville officials have stated that $190,000 appears to be missing in their city.

The Commerce Department has filed suit, asking for the return of $425,398 in grant money awarded in Mullinville and has given Peabody Main Street until Sept. 4 to complete paperwork or return $740,000 in grant money awarded there.

Commerce, where Clayton worked from February, 2020, until November, 2023, began examining grants he was involved with after it was reported that Clayton had been sentenced in 2018 for financial felonies in Pennsylvania and still owed $195,712.50 of $210,000 in restitution he was ordered to pay.

Five years’ probation was ordered in Pennsylvania. Clayton still would have been on probation when he moved back to Kansas.

When a probationer or parolee moves from one state to another, an interstate compact requires the new state to be responsible for tracking the offender.

A parole officer would have been aware Clayton went to work for Commerce and might have contacted Commerce to let them know Clayton’s background.

That did not happen, however. Clayton never was supervised by Department of Corrections, department spokeswoman Jennifer King told the Record.

Why Clayton was not assigned a parole officer in Kansas is not known. King has not responded to a question about it.

Commerce spokesman Pat Lowry said that his department had not checked Clayton’s background before hiring him.

He referred to an executive order issued May 18, 2018, by Governor Jeff Colyer saying that state agencies were to remove from employment applications a box asking whether applicants had a criminal record and that a criminal record “shall not automatically disqualify an applicant from receiving an interview.”

The executive order also states “nothing in the order prevented the conduct of a criminal background check as a condition of employment.”

The Department of Administration said only certain agencies, each under legislative order to do so, were allowed to ask the Federal Bureau of Investigation to do a background checks and that Commerce was not one of them.

Authorities have declined to release any further information on the wreck of Clayton’s truck and the status of KBI’s investigation.