KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Larry Schnackenberg, meet Luke Stevens.

Replaying this summer’s bizarre mystery in which Schnackenberg of Lenexa, Kan., disappeared for 20 days before wandering shirtless and weak from the woods, Stevens, a 23-year-old Tonganoxie, Kan., man, re-emerged Thursday from a different set of woods.

He disappeared weeks before the retired Hallmark employee. This time the reappearance came after three long months.

During that period, Stevens’ grieving mother, Joyce Stevens of Kansas City, Mo., became convinced her son had been murdered, his 6-foot-5, 250-pound body dumped in the idle waters of Longview Lake or buried in its woods.

Volunteers were once again set to pass out “missing person” fliers on Luke Stevens’ behalf this weekend.

That was until about 10 p.m. Thursday, when Joyce Stevens received a message on her cell phone from her deeply relieved ex-husband, Dan Stevens of Tonganoxie.

“I was shocked,” said Joyce Stevens, 50. “It said he had just received a call from Luke.”

Their son had called from a convenience store pay phone south of 120th Street and Holmes Road to ask to be picked up and taken home.

At 2:56 a.m. Friday, Dan Stevens sent this brief e-mail to family and friends:

“Luke is home and safe! Was living in the woods near Longview Lake. Thanks for all the support. Dan.”

Such reappearances are “rare,” said Sgt. Chris Lantz, the supervising officer at the Kansas City Police Department’s Fugitive Apprehension, Arraignment and Missing Persons Unit.

In Kansas City, for example, the unit has logged 158 missing person reports this year. Of those, most are people who simply don’t want to be found by the people looking for them. A handful of the missing do fall victim to foul play – in Kansas City, five this year.

“Where they disappear for two or three weeks and just come back? That’s unusual,” Lantz said.

Luke Stevens, while living at his father’s home, disappeared without a word on May 26. As days passed without any contact, the family worried and filed a missing persons report.

Fears mounted when, in early June, rangers with the Jackson County Department of Parks & Recreation called to say Dan Stevens’ 1983 blue work truck was found parked and abandoned at the entrance of the lake’s Mouse Creek boat ramp, some 45 miles away from Tonganoxie in Leavenworth County.

The truck’s radio had been ripped out, but there was no blood, no smashed windows, no keys. No sign of any crime. (Similarly, six weeks after Stevens disappeared, the Ford Explorer of 58-year-old Schnackenberg was found at Shawnee Mission Park with no evidence of foul play, either).

In checking his son’s closets, Dan Stevens, 51, found a couple of shirts and his son’s laptop missing, but the cell phone was there.

Most of the family’s theories were grim: carjacking, murder, suicide.

Jackson County sheriff’s crews descended on the lake.

They searched the woods on all-terrain vehicles.

Cadaver dogs scoured the brush.

Divers in scuba gear dragged the lake and pulled out a body. But it wasn’t Stevens’. It was a man, pulled from the lake in his car, who had been missing for nearly a year. His death was later determined to be a suicide.

As the Stevenses are a prominent family in Tonganoxie – Luke Stevens’ grandfather has been a physician there for 55 years – the town was captivated by the case.

Desperate for information, Joyce Stevens would hire a psychic. The medium told her that her son was at peace and had “passed over” into the world of spirits.

By ERIC ADLER