MASSENA, N.Y.— It was that familiar rumble of a tractor-trailer — the mystery of coming or going, and of the man behind the wheel — that finally drove Caroline A. Stuart and her children away.

Away from Clinton, Mass., and away from those they knew. Away for hundreds of miles, to Massena, a place so different that it hugged two sovereign lands — Canada to its north and Mohawk land to its east — and winter was less a season than a state of being. But this is what she needed: a complete change of scenery, roads as bland and long as they were unfamiliar, so that even the baritone of a large truck sounded different.

Back in their Clinton home, her children would hear a truck and run to the window, hoping that this time, finally, it’d be Daddy behind the wheel. It hurt to watch this, because she knew what the children would see: someone else’s truck driven by someone else’s man. Disappointment every time.

Daddy wasn’t coming home. At the time, 1976, Kenneth R. Stuart was a rambling man, a burly, bearded character who called trucking his only love, and who drove through relationships as he did cities. He never called. He never wrote. He disappeared, almost entirely, for 24 years.

It wouldn’t be until 2000, when the children were grown and had babies of their own, that they’d make meaningful contact with him. Relationships would be built. Talk would turn to rekindling the marriage.

But three years later, just as in old times, the children would once again be left to wait and hope he’d come rolling up in his truck, this time for a family reunion near their home.

And just as in old times, he wouldn’t show.

Caroline told them to let it go, that their father was a lost cause. And it would stay that way for three years, until the middle of last month, when Caroline and her children learned that the short, squat, man-sized hole in their lives may have had no choice in missing that 2003 family reunion.

He had been killed and dismembered, his body trucked across the country and left in a storage unit, stinking so badly that it drew police. It was discovered in April of this year, and it took investigators weeks to identify the body. But it took months for the news to reach Caroline and her children.

Now they’re left to wonder: Did the man they knew as Kenny plan on coming back to them? Had he really changed? And why would Kenny’s best friend, a man named Oral Wayne Nobles, kill him in such a brutal way?

A few weeks ago, the family gathered in front of a computer to look at scanned wedding photos of Caroline and Kenny, faded images bright and crisp on the monitor. The couple in the photographs looks happy but subdued — just two people who went to see a justice of the peace in Berlin, Mass., and then to the bride’s parents’ home for some cake and good cheer.

“I think it would have been great if you guys got back together and worked it out,” one of Caroline’s children, Billy, said to her. “It would have been great.”

Caroline, now 56 and with a smoker’s rasp, nodded.

“There could have been a happily ever after,” she said.

•

Caroline met Kenny at a bar in Clinton, about 1970. She was dating a friend of his at the time, but it was nothing serious. That night and in the days to come, Caroline and Kenny talked frequently; they dated for a year before getting hitched. She already had Billy — William J. Green Jr. — by another man, and two more children would come quickly with Kenny: first Alan, then Anthony.

Kenny related to the children on his own terms, which mostly involved trucking. As a boy no older than 7, Billy would accompany Kenny on his road trips. He’d help him change tires or clean rims, and would try gobbling down large stacks of pancakes the way Kenny always did.

At home, Kenny would gather the kids in the back of a dump truck. He’d make a little pile of sand on the ground, then tip the truck so his small children would go tumbling out. They still laugh about the game today.

But even then, things weren’t smooth. Kenny had a third-grade education, was more interested in trucking than family, and had little patience for dissent. He’d hit Caroline and his children, she said, and she frequently took him to court because of it.

“He was no saint,” she said. “He was very hard on women and kids. That’s why he went through so many women.”

More than she would know. He told Caroline she was his first wife, but she said she later found out she wasn’t, and might have even been his third. (After her, Kenny would go on to father at least four more children with two women.)

In 1976, he was supposed to return home from a trucking trip for her birthday, but never showed. When Caroline called his boss, she learned that Kenny was in town — but he was in Sterling, Mass., seeing a girlfriend.

It was Sept. 6, the day after Caroline’s birthday. They were living on Water Street in Clinton, she was pregnant with their third child, Susan, and she wasn’t interested in a man who slept around. So Caroline got a hold of him and served notice.

“I put it in trucker terms,” she said. “I said, ‘Baby, keep on trucking. You don’t have a truck stop on Water Street no more.’ ”

If Kenny took it hard, the family wouldn’t know. He was gone.

•

On March 31, 2006, police came to investigate a smell coming from inside the Essex Street Storage Facility in Whitman, a suburb of Boston. State police were called in, and their cadaver dogs narrowed in on an unplugged freezer in a storage unit. Inside, there was a body.

The storage unit was rented to a 71-year-old Orange restaurant owner named Oral Wayne Nobles, and police tracked him to his brother’s house in Kingman, Ariz. Speculation about the body zeroed in on Kenny Stuart, Mr. Nobles’ 63-year-old close friend who had disappeared from his home in Orange a few years earlier.

Soon, Mr. Nobles confessed.

The story, as Mohave County Deputy Attorney Lee F. Jantzen has learned, is of two friends clumsily bound by money. Mr. Nobles had been the trustee of Kenny’s small trust fund — a few thousand dollars, if that — and Kenny needed Mr. Nobles’ approval to spend it.

One day, about August 2003, in a home they shared in the desert town of Golden Valley, Ariz., the two argued about how to use the funds. Words turned to fists, or perhaps weapons, and Kenny died of a blow to the head. To clear the scene, Mr. Nobles cut up the body, put it in a freezer and drove it across the country in a U-Haul truck.

The freezer was placed in a storage unit in Massachusetts and Mr. Nobles returned to Arizona.

Years passed, and nobody thought to look for Kenny — that is, except for Mr. Nobles, who in January of this year began worrying about the body’s stench. So he went back to Massachusetts and bought another freezer at a Home Depot. Under the darkness of night, Mr. Nobles took both freezers to the store’s parking lot, set up curtains around him, and then transferred the body.

The smell was so strong that, days later, it still lingered in Mr. Nobles’ rental van. The new freezer, with a rotting body inside, was taken to the Whitman storage facility.

“I think he was hoping the new freezer would block the odor,” Mr. Jantzen said. “But it didn’t.”

Mr. Nobles now sits in the Mohave County Jail, facing charges of second-degree murder, fraud and tampering with physical evidence. The fraud charge is connected to accusations that, after the killing, he spent Kenny’s trust money and Social Security checks. Some of the money, Mr. Jantzen said, was used to hide the body.

The next court hearing is tomorrow, at Mohave County Superior Court. Mr. Jantzen said a trial date will likely be set then.

The story made news in Arizona and Massachusetts, but nobody, it seems, thought to check on Kenny’s wife, or even knew she existed.

For much of his adult life, even Kenny may not have known to whom he was married: He filed for divorce against Caroline in the 1970s, but never followed through. The Worcester Trial Court declared the divorce application inactive in 1980, and Caroline, who received notice of that in 1982, never responded. She saw no need.

An old friend of Kenny’s finally remembered this wife in New York, and tried giving her the grisly news. He told someone he knew, who told Caroline’s aunt, who told Caroline just before she went off to work her usual 4 p.m.-to-midnight shift as a housekeeper at St. Lawrence Centre, the only mall in Massena.

Caroline kept the news to herself until she got home, and then told her children that their father was dead. It was Tuesday, June 20, 2006, almost three months after the body was discovered.

Alan, 33, was filled with questions. Tony, 32, went upstairs, angry and determined not to care, but came down later to hear the details. Billy, 37, who never knew his biological father and considered Kenny his dad, felt the sting.

“When she told me that, my whole world just went — whew — down and out,” Billy said.

Susan, 29, who is developmentally disabled and lives in Georgia with her husband and child, was told more than a week later.

•

Alan S. Stuart is the eldest child born of Caroline and Kenny, and lives more than an hour away from Massena in a town called Turner Falls. He has two boys, ages 5 and 7, and works as a treatment aide at a center for developmentally disabled people who break the law.

As with the rest of his siblings, Alan’s father’s absence left an open wound. But he also had, as Caroline said, a “hero worship” attitude. Kenny may never have reached out to his children, but he was still their father and that seemed worth something. So, Alan would search for him.

Alan was 16 when he first found Kenny, but the burly father didn’t understand what his son was looking for. If Alan wanted money, Kenny told him, he didn’t have much. If he was looking for a place to stay, he could stay. The connection didn’t go much further.

But in 2000, as his babies turned into toddlers, Alan renewed the search. It took a month.

“No matter what I think of my father, my kids have a right to know their grandfather,” he said.

Alan found Kenny in Orange, and also in a very different state of mind. The once-wanderer had diabetes and health complications, and had lost his trucking license. He was a man of the road stuck in one place and, it seemed, by force or resignation, to be calmer and more settled.

This time, the relationship stuck. Alan and Kenny spoke monthly, catching up and bonding over shared interests such as professional wrestling. Kenny admitted regrets; Alan told him you can’t fix the past, but can focus on the future.

One day, Alan decided to reunite his parents, and so he drove Kenny to the mall when Caroline was working.

“I figured it was a lot easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Alan said. “He hadn’t seen her in years, and it was my mother and father. We were hoping for a family portrait.”

“Jerry Springer style,” Tony joked.

It worked out better than they expected. Kenny stayed in touch, and even came to a 2001 family reunion. He wanted to get back together with Caroline, and she liked the idea. He was a different person, she said: No more running around, no more hitting her. And anyway, he was the only man she ever loved enough to marry.

But they disagreed over who should move: He wanted to live in Massachusetts or Arizona, but she wouldn’t leave Massena. It’s her life, she said. She’s even picked out a place, across the river from Billy’s trailer, in a park with flowers and a gazebo, to scatter her cremated ashes.

They talked it over. She thought she convinced him.

•

Every July 4, the Snyders gather in Fort Covington, N.Y., for a boisterous reunion. They welcome anyone with even a vague connection — the reunion motto is “family, friends, in-laws, outlaws and in-betweens” — and it draws hundreds of people from around the country.

This is Caroline’s side of the family; her maiden name is Snyder.

The 2003 family reunion was supposed to be an especially exciting one: Kenny would be there, and so would Tony, who had yet to meet his father. Although Billy, Alan and Susan had seen Kenny in the past few years, Tony had been away in the Army — stationed at times in Fort Bragg, N.C., and in South Korea — and missed the opportunities.

But the reunion came and went without Kenny. Concerned, Alan called Mr. Nobles, whom he had met while visiting Kenny in Orange. The two of them were always together, it seemed. If anyone knew where Kenny was, it would be him.

Mr. Nobles had bad news.

According to Alan, Mr. Nobles said Kenny left Orange July 3 with the intention of driving to the family reunion in Massena, then heading across the country to Arizona. Mr. Nobles planned to meet him out West. But when Mr. Nobles arrived in Arizona a week later, he found Kenny in the hospital, recovering from a heart attack.

Two days later, Mr. Nobles reportedly said, Kenny was released from the hospital, and the friends stayed the night nearby. The following morning, Mr. Nobles told Alan, a woman drove up in a car; Kenny grabbed some bags and hopped in. They drove off, never to be seen again.

When they heard this story, Caroline and her children were furious. They felt duped, abandoned again by the man who once seemed so different. There was certainly no reason to doubt it: It was the same old Kenny; always moving, never caring.

“I thought he just up and went — said, ‘Bye bye, catch you later’ again,” Alan said.

For three years, that anger festered. It was a fear confirmed, an insult renewed — Kenny’s way of saying he didn’t really love his kids, and didn’t want that reunion with his wife.

So when the family learned that Kenny had been killed — and by Mr. Nobles, no less — they struggled to rethink everything, to redefine him, and to shift their anger from Kenny to Mr. Nobles. Their first villain was no longer the bad guy.

“I’d love to send a letter to Mr. Nobles and tell him he’s a jerk,” Tony said, “and I’ve waited 29 years to meet my father. And because of his little situation, that can’t happen. He didn’t ruin one life; he ruined many lives.”

•

When Kenny left in 1976, Caroline tried raising four children as best she could. But she couldn’t always do it. The boys were in and out of foster homes; father figures were in and out as well.

They stayed close, putting a high premium on their togetherness. Tony and Caroline share an apartment and got their GEDs together.

But still, as Kenny’s sons learn about their father, they’re struggling not to be like him. They talk of not wanting to repeat his mistakes, but see much of him in themselves. Tony acknowledges having Kenny’s temperament; Tony and Billy have children they don’t see because of bad relationships with the mothers; Alan lives with his girlfriend and their two children.

“I told my girlfriend when we had our first kid, ‘Now you’re stuck with me forever, because I won’t leave my kids,’ ” Alan said, as he stood with most of his siblings outside Billy’s trailer.

That seemed to inspire Billy.

“I’m going to pull my ex into court so I can get visitation with my kids,” he said.

Since they learned of Kenny’s death, they’ve created binders full of news stories about it. They scour the Internet and hypothesize. Did Mr. Nobles kill for money? Love? Did he fear Kenny leaving him for the family in Massena, for a life in one place?

It’s just one more mystery, the final one, surrounding a man they barely knew.

But at least Kenny’s at peace, they said, and at least they know where he is — in an unmarked grave in a family plot in Sterling. Although they’ll never really know, they’d like to think that Kenny planned on coming to the family reunion, that he wanted to see them, that their home would become his.

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Contact Jason Feifer by e-mail at jfeifer@telegram.com.