Hi everyone! I am very heartened to see how many people are still thinking about this young woman and working to identify her. I have spent the whole day reading all 72 pages of this thread.
Except for the 20 minutes I spent on Greenlee Rd this afternoon.
I live five miles from where her body was found. I did not live here in Troy until the mid-90's, but I stumbled across her grave in Riverside Cemetery a few years back and have been interested in her case every since. That interest has been ramped up recently by the work a friend is doing, but I'll get to that in a moment. First, I'd like to offer some observations about the area where she was found, and on the population and culture of the general area.
Let me begin with I70 and I75. I70 isn't far on a map from the St RT 55 exit one would have to take to get to Greenlee. The reality is that it is 15-20 minutes. This strikes me as an odd amount of time to take for a detour when you're looking to dump a body. I70 in either direction around the I75 interchange has many exits with little to no traffic even today. If it was a trucker on I70 it would be much easier to dump her somewhere between Columbus and Huber Heights or between Dayton and Englewood IMO. Heading north on I75 makes Troy a little more likely. Vandalia is the next big town north of Dayton, but it is also the exit for the airport. Too much traffic there. Next comes West Milton and Tipp City, but Tipp City especially is an older town and fairly well developed. No place to go there either. The second Tipp exit is exceedingly rural in appearance from the highway, even today except for the huge car and RV dealership which wasn't there in '81. Turn right and you're heading into Troy. Turn left and you're heading into a whole lot of wooded nothing on a dark stretch of road. So, then we come to the exit in question. It's exit 73, Troy/Ludlow Falls. In '81 there would have been a motel and a restaurant to the right. I think the Shell station was there too. Keep going and you end up in town. Turn left and you are headed toward Greenlee. In '81 there was probably at least one housing development going up within half a mile of the highway, but once past that it is nothing but farmland for miles. I mean, literally, there is nothing as far as the eye can see but fields and the occasional farmhouse tucked in at the front corner of the property. Until, that is, you get to Greenlee Rd. About half a mile before the right hand turn onto Greenlee there begins a row of cookie-cutter ranch houses all built in the 70s. I just can't imagine this looking like an ideal place to turn. There were far better less populated turns to take a mile or so back. One of those turns is Horseshoe Bend. It isn't actually a turn though. You sort of bear to the right. It's so little of a turn that it isn't enough to make your turn signal click off. It comes up fast too. I used to drive out Horseshoe Bend every week and I would still almost miss it sometimes. I nearly did today. There might be 10-15 houses before Greenlee. I would guess most of those were there in '81, but they are all concentrated at the bear off at 55. It doesn't take long for you to be in nothing but farm fields again. Even today, standing in the approximate spot where BG was found, I could only see 7 houses, and they were all new builds. Let me just say, I do not feel there was any way whatsoever a semi could have gotten back there. They are still narrow country roads and would have been worse in '81. In fact, there are signs on Horseshoe Bend saying semis and school buses can only go so far. All of this leads to my first hypothesis: the killer was local. Or he at least was familiar with the area. Greenlee just isn't some place you stumble across. I know what it looks like on a map, but the reality is that you aren't going to find it if you don't know it. Or if you do happen to find it you might have a tough time getting yourself turned around and back out in a timely fashion. So, this brings me to the actual dump sight. As I was standing there today taking in everything around me, considering what would have been there and what would not have been I turned and put my back to the ditch where she was found. It took a second for me to realize what I was looking at, but it has been mentioned here: Brukner. Brukner Nature Center is a 164 acre privately funded preserve that has nothing but a farmer's field between it and where BG was found. The interpretive building was built in 1974. There are a few miles of trails, but mostly what they do is wildlife education and rehabilitation. There has been a great deal of speculation that BG was not local. Brukner uses interns. I'm not sure for how long, but I have a call in to the executive director to find out how long the program has been in place. There is a house on the property as well where the out-of-state interns live. This is, I feel, a plausible explanation as to her physical condition and her "ruddy" complexion. It could also be why no one locally is looking for her. There are all kinds of scenarios, of course, but I felt I would be remiss if I didn't mention the possible Brukner connection.
So, I'd like to address some of the rodeo/biker/cult/Amish theories. No rodeo comes very close to here that I'm aware of, and, again, I feel very strongly that the killer was local or had been at one time. Motorcycles are common enough but you're more likely to find tractors. Lol!! There is a rather large population of German Baptists in the area, but the Amish are very few and far between this far south. Troy is deeply conservative, and has a great deal of very old money in it. I was told that at one time Troy had more millionaires per capita than any other city or town in the US. The next time you go into a deli look at the meat slicer and see if it doesn't say Hobart on it. The Hobart brothers are from Troy. If you've ever flown on a plane with a propeller, it was probably a Hartzell propeller. The Hartzells are from Troy. The next time you see someone doing a quick weld during a Nascar race, he probably went to the Hobart welding school. It's half a mile from my house. Despite this town only having about 25,000 people in it every Republican presidential candidate since H.W. has spoken here during election season (Well, except for McCain, but he sent Palin.). This may be part of the reason this case hasn't gotten a lot of publicity. Old rich people don't like untidy things like unsolved murders. It's a caustic thing to say, yes, but it's also true.
So, now I come to my friend, and.....potentially..... the crazy that gets me shown the door here. She has been working with other people around the world and with all kinds of technology to gather EVPs - Electronic Voice Phenomena. We had never discussed this case until about two weeks ago when she mentioned that she had found the grave site and done a few sessions out there. I'm not much of a believer in EVPs - our brains look for patterns in chaos - but she had a few that really made my hair stand on end. In one of the first sessions she asked BG her name. "Bev" was the soft but clear response. In a later session she asked if Bev was her name and "Yes, yes" was clear. I haven't heard all of the sessions she has done at the grave site, but she has told me that when she asked what happened BG responded that she was hiding in the house but he found her, she fought hard, and she got to where she was found by van. Her most recent session was on the 27th. I got to hear that one today. My friend asked where she had gotten the buckskin jacket from. The answer was, "Bought it private." My friend has reached out to Detective Huffman who has set up a meeting with her to hear everything this Friday. He is very open-minded and like so many of the local detectives familiar with the case (the police force paid for her burial and the detective assigned to the case at the time gave a eulogy at the grave side service) he wants to find the answers we are all after too. So, take what you will from any of this.
Oh, and as an aside, I saw Edward Edwards name tossed around somewhere in the 30s pages. He was not from Troy, Miami County, Ohio. He was from Troy Township, Geauga County, Ohio. That's north east of here between Columbus and Akron.
