In the summer and autumn of 1994, in a wooded park in Ohio, two teenage girls would be found dead more than three months apart, but only eight-hundred yards from one another. To this day, it is unclear whether their murders were related, and both cases have tragically gone cold.
Fourteen-year-old Sarah Rae Boehm lived with her family in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. By all accounts, she was a bright, conscientious student, a cheerleader and active in her school band. Her family was apparently unaware of any particular troubles she was going through.
At around ten p.m. on the night of July 14th, 1994, Sarah told her mother she was going to a friend’s house, and she set out on foot. When the following day dawned and Sarah had not returned, her parents discovered that their daughter had actually never arrived at her friend’s house, and what’s more, the friend had not even been expecting her, suggesting that Sarah might have lied about her destination. The Boehm family reported Sarah missing on July 15th.
A few days after her disappearance, the girl’s uncle told authorities that he had found a note hidden beneath a pillow in the teenager’s bedroom. This bizarre letter, written in several different colors of ink, seemed to imply that Sarah felt as though she was a burden on her family and believed they would be better off if she ran away. She also claimed that she had been seeing a much older man who, while abusive, supposedly gave her the love she felt she was lacking and had promised to take care of her.
Because of this strange note, investigators assumed that Sarah was a runaway, and therefore did not feel the need to enter her details into the database of missing children.
A little more than a month later, seventeen-year-old Kathryn Menendez disappeared from her home in Portage County, Ohio. According to her mother, Kathryn had also been planning to visit friends on the evening of August 20th, but had never arrived at her destination and had never come home. Although Kathryn had run away from home before, her parents believed that this time was different, and reported their daughter missing on August 21st.
Days after that, on the 25th, the nude body of Kathryn Menendez was discovered on a track off Fewtown Road that led to an oil well. She had been stabbed, strangled and bludgeoned, though authorities never reported if she had been raped. Witnesses reported seeing her in Alliance, Ohio a day or two prior to her body being found, and it was assumed that she had been killed there and then dumped at this particular spot, near Berlin Reservoir in a state park in Portage County.
Kathryn’s mother believed that her daughter was murdered by someone who knew her, perhaps a scorned suitor with a violent temper. Police did investigate this angle, but came up with few solid leads.
And later that fall, they would be confronted with another crime that led them to suspect that a serial killer might be at work in the area.
On November 4th, 1994, the remains of a fourteen-year-old girl turned up near the Berlin Reservoir, only about half a mile from where Kathryn’s body had been found. Though this victim would be identified as Sarah Boehm in 2003, for many years, investigative miscommunications and other errors ensured that the Boehm family had no idea where their daughter was. Since Sarah had never been entered into the missing children database, and because the body was found a two-hour drive away from the Boehm household, a match was not made until nearly a decade after the girl vanished, and in the interim, the family made numerous reports to police that they had seen Sarah alive at various places before anyone realized that she was the unidentified body lying in cold storage in Ohio.
In an unsettling twist to the case, Sarah’s father would later be investigated for allegedly confessing to inappropriate behavior with a thirteen-year-old girl. The FBI was brought in on the Sarah Boehm case, as it constituted kidnapping over a state line, and they began to suspect that the mysterious letter found in the girl’s bedroom might have been planted. The letter contained not only Sarah’s father’s fingerprints, but also a lipstick print belonging to the father’s girlfriend.
Although it would seem that the proximity of the two bodies suggests the work of a single killer, there were some differences between the cases as well: for instance, Sarah was found clothed, while Kathryn was found nude; her clothing has never been recovered. In addition, the somewhat odd behavior of some of the Boehm family members has led some to believe that one or more of them might have been involved in the girl’s death.
In a sinister harbinger of the case, it came to light that in late 1993, Sarah claimed to have been accosted by a man in a Rochester Borough alley who attempted to abduct her before she fought him off. This incident was reported to police at the time, but authorities believed the girl might have made the story up and didn’t investigate any further.
The cases are still being investigated as connected crimes, in spite of all the complicating factors.
Crime Immemorial 