Solved cold cases in Ohio
5 documented cases.
Billy Lavaco and Judith Straub
William "Billy" Lavaco, 21, of Doylestown, and Judith "Judy" Straub, 18, of Sterling, were found dead on August 8, 1977 in Silver Creek Metropolitan Park in Norton, Ohio, south-west of Akron. Each had been shot point-blank in the neck. The case stayed open for thirty-three years. In July 2009 Edward Wayne Edwards, a 76-year-old former FBI Ten Most Wanted fugitive turned motivational speaker, was arrested in Louisville, Kentucky after DNA linked him to the 1980 killings of Tim Hack and Kelly Drew, a teenage couple who vanished from a wedding reception in Wisconsin where he had worked as a handyman. In April 2010, while he waited for trial in a Wisconsin jail, an inmate wrote to prosecutors in Akron to say Edwards had bragged about a double homicide, and Edwards himself wrote to the Summit County prosecutor offering information. A Norton detective and a prosecutor's investigator went to Wisconsin, and he told them he had killed the couple. Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh announced the statement on May 4, 2010. Under a plea deal covering both states, Edwards pleaded guilty in Wisconsin on June 9, 2010 and, before Judge Thomas Teodosio in Akron on June 11, to two counts of aggravated murder, receiving two consecutive life terms, the most the law allowed for a 1977 killing. He later confessed to murdering his foster son in 1996, was sentenced to death for it in March 2011, and died in an Ohio prison medical center on April 7, 2011.
Debra Lee Miller
Debra Lee Miller, an 18-year-old high school senior who worked at a Mansfield coffee shop, was beaten to death in her first-floor apartment at 151 W. Third Street in Mansfield, Richland County, Ohio, on April 29, 1981. She was bludgeoned with cookware, including a burner grate from a gas stove, in a crime scene investigators called one of the most gruesome they had encountered. The 1981 investigation, which predated the use of DNA in criminal cases and became mired in allegations of police misconduct, never charged anyone, and Miller's upstairs neighbor, James Vanest, was questioned and released without becoming a suspect. The case was reopened by the Mansfield Division of Police in 2021 after a retired lieutenant urged Detective Terry Butler to revisit it. DNA analyst Dawn Fryback performed more than 80 analyses on the preserved evidence and developed a firm DNA profile, mixed with Miller's own, on items tied directly to the homicide; it matched Vanest. Re-interviewed in 2021, Vanest offered an account that appeared to explain away his DNA; he refused a second interview in 2024 and fled to West Virginia. As prosecutors prepared to take the case to a grand jury, Vanest was federally indicted on gun charges, and on November 18, 2024, he was fatally shot after he opened fire on U.S. Marshals and SWAT officers serving the indictment at a North Canton motel. Mansfield police announced the case solved at a December 30, 2024 news conference, declaring that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Vanest killed Miller.
Kimberly Fulton
Kimberly Fulton, 28, and her 17-month-old son Daniel were found dead in a burned-out mobile home in Palmer Township, Washington County, Ohio, on March 5, 1995. Investigators determined the pair had died before the fire was set; neither had carbon monoxide in their lungs, and gasoline was later identified on Kimberly's clothing, indicating the blaze was staged to conceal the killings. The case went cold for nearly a quarter century. Scott Hickman, a friend of Kimberly's estranged boyfriend, had been arrested in 1998 but released after roughly three weeks for lack of evidence. When the Washington County Sheriff's Office cold case unit and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation reopened the file in 2019, the breakthrough came not from forensics alone but from people Hickman had talked to over the years -- jailhouse inmates he had confided in and a former girlfriend who said he detailed the murders to her. Hickman was indicted in October 2021, and after a two-week trial he was convicted in August 2025 on four counts of aggravated murder and two counts of murder. He was sentenced to life with the possibility of parole after 20 years.
Regina Rowe Hicks
Regina Rowe Hicks, 25, left her boyfriend's home in Huron County, Ohio, at about 8 p.m. on October 18, 2001, to pick up her four-year-old son and never arrived. Four days later her white Camaro was found in a pond in Willard with her body inside. The autopsy showed bruising on her head and authorities did not believe it was an accident. Her estranged husband, Paul Hicks, had filed for divorce the day after she was reported missing and told police he thought she had killed herself. Investigators found no direct evidence and he made no admissions; a polygraph did not go forward. Regina's mother spent about a decade on billboards, rewards and ads, and died before the case moved. Eventually a cold case team from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation re-interviewed witnesses, including a friend of Hicks who was granted immunity. Hicks was arrested on April 22, 2025, and a Huron County jury found him guilty of three counts of murder and one of kidnapping on December 19, 2025. A state analyst testified there was no physical evidence tying him to the death; the case rested largely on the friend's testimony. He was sentenced to 25 years to life and is appealing.
Stephen Lindsey
On April 20, 2002, 28-year-old Stephen Lindsey was found shot once in the head, slumped over the wheel of a Chevrolet van in the parking lot of the former Red Roof Inn on Rothrock Road in Copley Township, Ohio. Copley police identified a prime suspect within their investigation, a 20-year-old man named Neil Anderson, but with no eyewitness and no direct physical evidence tying him to the killing, the case went cold for more than two decades. It was not DNA or new forensics that finally closed it. In March 2023, while dying of a terminal illness, Anderson confessed to his brother that he had shot Lindsey rather than repay a debt he owed him. The brother carried the secret for roughly a year and a half before bringing it to police in November 2024, supplying details investigators said only the killer or the police could have known. With those details matching the original crime scene, detectives declared the case solved and officially closed it more than 22 years after the murder.