Northern Ohio Cold Cases: An interview with author Jane Ann Turzillo

Benjamin Morris (00:01)

Jane, welcome to Crime Capsule, and congratulations on your upcoming book.

Jane (00:02)

Welcome to Crown Castle and congratulations.

Oh, thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Benjamin Morris (00:11)

So your book comes out in just a couple of weeks. Are you excited?

Jane (00:17)

Oh yes I am. I'm always excited. I just, you know, I can't wait to get it and hold it in my hands.

Benjamin Morris (00:27)

You know, this is an experience for you which we are privileged to say you've had many, many times. This is, as I recall, your tenth book. And tell us, how did you get your start?

Jane (00:37)

My tenth, yes, yes.

Oh wow. Well, I have, I guess I've probably written all my life. And I started when my son was a baby I needed something to do while he was napping and I started writing some really horrible books. I think I have four that are in the trash now. And then I then I turned to writing articles and

Benjamin Morris (01:02)

Mm-hmm.

Hahaha

Jane (01:13)

short stories and I soon became published. So I got on to this crime thing. As I said, my son was small and I belonged to a group of people that, well we had met in a writer's class at the University of Akron and we went to a

Benjamin Morris (01:27)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jane (01:42)

it was i guess you see you would say well it was a it was for the western reserve uh... magazine which is no longer published and uh... they talk to us about you know writing for them and so i wanted to get something that i could you know something that i was got interested in that i could write right about and so if one of the other girls and i went to the uh... summit county

Benjamin Morris (01:53)

Okay.

Jane (02:11)

historical society and they let us upstairs into their library where all their books were. Well, I had my son with me and he was in one of those umbrella strollers and I wasn't paying much attention to him. I was just rocking him back and forth and he pulled a big book out of the shelf. And it flew open to the sound, to the story

Benjamin Morris (02:32)

Okay.

Oh.

Jane (02:42)

here in Calga Valley. And I started to read it and I thought, that's it. And so that was kind of my, that was the beginning of my writing and getting published and writing crime. And...

Benjamin Morris (02:57)

That is so interesting. I mean, you just, the pages fell, fell just to that story and you got hooked.

Jane (03:03)

It just fell, yeah, just fell open to that. So it was kind of like that was meant to be. So.

Benjamin Morris (03:13)

So did you ever end up working on that particular counterfeiter for one of your historical pieces?

Jane (03:16)

Oh I did, oh I did, I published it in I think three different places and one of them was the New Orleans Times-Picayune and I won a literary prize for it.

Benjamin Morris (03:26)

Mm-hmm.

My heavens, well, I'm just gonna have to go downtown here on Loyola Avenue and check out the old archives and see if I can find your piece. That's fantastic.

Jane (03:35)

Ah! Ha ha

It was in 1976, I believe. And from there, I kind of decided, well, if I wanted to write this stuff, maybe I should have a degree in it. So I went back to the University of Akron and got a two-year degree in criminal justice technology. And while that, while I was doing that, I met the, Ken McCormick was his name, he was the head of the department.

Benjamin Morris (04:01)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (04:10)

And he was kind of interested in me being, you know, liking to write. And so he said, well, bring me something that you've written. So of course I took him my, you know, my prize winning piece. And he said, later on he gave me a slip of paper with a weekly newspaper name on it and a phone number. And he said, they're looking for a writer.

Benjamin Morris (04:23)

Yeah.

Jane (04:38)

a staff writer, he said, I want you to call and apply. So I did and I got the job. However, it wasn't exactly what I had hoped. It was more of what we used to call the kiddie corps and the nursing home beat. And here I had background in police, in criminal justice.

Benjamin Morris (04:44)

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, the technology, yeah, yeah.

Jane (05:08)

And there was another woman who had that beat, but, and I hate to say this, this really sounds awful, but she finally died. And so they didn't have a choice, they had to put me in there. And so that's kind of what started it all. So.

Benjamin Morris (05:18)

Ugh.

Oh my goodness.

So I have to stress, Jane, I mean, this is a point of utmost importance. I have to stress to our listeners that there are some words in English language that only appear in a certain order in the most rare and unusual and welcome of instances. And there's a phrase that we hear about once every 50 years or so that when we hear it, it just sort of makes us think that there is hope.

you know, for the universe after all, and that phrase is, quote, they're looking for a writer. You know, nobody ever says that anymore, right? And so when you do hear it, there's just something really magical that happens inside your soul, which I think for those who are not involved in the book trade, you know, I just want to, I just really want to highlight the fact that you got to hear the magical phrase that we maybe hear once in our lifetime, you know.

Jane (06:04)

Nobody ever says that anymore, right? Until when you do hear it, there's just something really magical that happens.

I got to hear it, yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (06:25)

And then we go from there. So that is wonderful. Now let me ask you, you also have kind of another really creative thread to your backstory here, which is that you were an owner of a newspaper for some time. And, you know,

Jane (06:42)

Okay.

Benjamin Morris (06:46)

My brother was a journalist and he used to say that there's something about having ink in your blood, that sort of thing, right? But you must have seen so many different kinds of stories come through from that vantage point, right?

Jane (06:58)

Oh wow, oh wow. Yeah. Well, yes, the small newspaper that I originally worked for, five of us broke away from there and decided to start our own newspaper, a bigger newspaper. And I think it's probably one of the biggest weeklies, maybe even in the state.

Benjamin Morris (07:25)

Wow.

Jane (07:26)

And of course, I did all the police and fire news. And yeah, I got to see a lot. You know, one of the police departments that I reported for was Bath Township. And you, of course, know who came out of Bath Township, don't you?

Benjamin Morris (07:44)

Mm-hmm.

Remind me real quick

Jane (07:48)

Jeffrey Dahmer.

Benjamin Morris (07:50)

Oh good heavens. Well, what a claim to fame.

Jane (07:52)

Yes, yes, yes. And so I was riding with, I used to ride with the Fairlawn police regularly and they were close to Bath and it was mutual aid, so they would go back and forth if they needed help. And so this one night in, I think it was 78 or 79, I can't remember for sure, it was in the summertime.

Benjamin Morris (08:02)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jane (08:23)

We got a call that there was a disturbance at, it was kind of a no-tell motel at the time, and it was in Bath Township. And so my sergeant that I was riding with said, shall we drift on over, which is kind of police talk. Yeah, and we weren't doing anything, so I said sure. So Dahmer was sitting in the back of the cruiser.

Benjamin Morris (08:31)

Mm-hmm.

Oh lovely. I love it.

Jane (08:51)

that night he had been arrested. And that was before we knew that he had murdered anybody, but he had already murdered his first victim, Stephen Hicks. But I didn't, I only saw his silhouette, if you will, because it was nighttime.

Benjamin Morris (08:57)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Bet you were that close.

Jane (09:12)

Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (09:14)

Spooky, oof, spooky. Good heavens, that gives me a little chills just kind of thinking about it. So tell me this, in much of your work you have focused on the region of.

northern Ohio. Now is this because when you were working in and around the journalism business, you know, we love that phrase ripped from the headlines, right? And I'm just wondering, were you, for your early work, I mean, were you ripping these stories from the headlines? Because you had in fact written the headlines and the stories were just kind of, you know, right there waiting for you? Or were you interested in kind of a different take on that particular region?

Jane (09:51)

Oh, well that's a good question. I guess I really didn't think about it. I was just interested in the stories themselves and doing more research, more in depth. Cause there's always more to it than what's in the newspapers. And I kept what I refer to as my hanging file.

Benjamin Morris (10:05)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

always.

Jane (10:19)

I subscribe to a couple of different newspaper subscription services. And so I collect stories. I cut them out and I collect them and put them in my hanging file, you know, if they're interesting to me in case I may need them sometime.

Benjamin Morris (10:27)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. And you write in the introduction to this new book, to Northern Ohio Cold Cases, that your interest in this particular area dates all the way back to 1980, the first case that kind of piqued your attention as far as unsolved and unresolved cases. I mean, we're going back 40 years now. So take us to that moment.

Jane (11:04)

Okay, that would be the story of Norm Liver, Norman L. Liver Jr. He was a man that I knew most of my life. My dad owned a construction company and Norm was his executive vice president. He was a soils engineer.

Benjamin Morris (11:26)

Hmm.

Jane (11:29)

He was very, very well thought of. He was sought after for his expert testimony. Other companies that needed him for different construction sites having to do with soils and sand and everything.

Benjamin Morris (11:39)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jane (11:53)

So he was, you know, he was around most of my life. And one morning he did, well, after my dad died, my mother took over the company and she didn't know anything. I mean, she was, my dad was an expert in concrete. And my mother knew nothing, but she...

Benjamin Morris (12:07)

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Jane (12:18)

she just moved into his office. And so she relied on Norm a great deal because he knew the people, he knew the superintendents, the workers, he knew all the people in the office and he knew the business. And so when he didn't come to work one day, she got real nervous. She was kind of an excited.

Benjamin Morris (12:34)

Yeah, absolutely.

Jane (12:43)

type person anyway, excitable person anyway. And also the girl who sat at the front desk, the receptionist, she also started to get kind of nervous because Norm was never late for work and if he was going to be he would call in and he hadn't called in. So finally the girl at Ellen Lane called.

Benjamin Morris (12:43)

Excitable. Yeah.

Jane (13:12)

where Norm lived and said, asked the manager, would you go down and look and see if Norm's car is in the garage? He lived in Lakewood and in a high rise. And so the manager did that. He came back, called back and said, yes, his car is still in the garage downstairs. So we waited a little bit longer. By that time, my mother had called me and asked me to come.

to come there because I had worked at the company as well, although I wasn't working there at the time. And so then she called back to the manager and said, can you do a wellness check? Can you get into his apartment? And so he then called the owner and they went in and they found him. And he had been killed.

Benjamin Morris (14:00)

Yeah.

Jane (14:10)

And so that's kind of what started it. I collected everything out of the newspaper. And of course, I probably knew more than the newspapers because I knew the man. And so that was, and I thought I got to write about this someday.

Benjamin Morris (14:10)

Hmm.

Yeah, that is such a deeply personal start to, you know, looking into these types of cases. I can only imagine what that must have been like for you for him to be a, you know, family friend, and then, you know, to have to sort of work in the aftermath of his passing. Now, the book that you have,

Jane (15:01)

Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (15:05)

coming out is a collection of about a baker's dozen of unsolved and cold cases from the northern Ohio region. And you have all types of folks from all sort of different walks of life. But today we are going to talk about two in particular. You have two police chiefs, one at the very beginning of the book and one at the very end of the book.

to explore and it's fascinating Jane because you know when you think about missing persons or when you think about unsolved cases or murders you know that have never been resolved.

I'm going to just go out on a little bit of a limb here and say it's probably more rare statistically that those individuals are members of law enforcement. Typically, the law enforcement are doing the investigating, and in each of these disappearances or unsolved cases, as it may be, you know, they – there's both compelling in very, very different ways, very different stories.

Jane (15:56)

Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (16:12)

I thought we would just sort of take a look at each one. Shall we start with Mel Wiley, the very first chapter of the book?

Okay. So Mel is interesting because he, here is a story not just of an unsolved murder, but it is also a story of a secret life. So tell us.

Jane (16:20)

Okay.

Benjamin Morris (16:39)

I say unsolved murder, excuse me. We're not sure that he was murdered. It's, yes, I should be more careful with my language there. An unsolved case. We don't know what happened to Mel, but we do know that he had a lot of secrets, so tell us about him.

Jane (16:41)

Until.

Mel was a police chief of Hinkley, Ohio. He had a background in law enforcement. He had been in the service. He was a fingerprint expert. He had been an investigator for the United States Department of Defense.

and he became the police chief there in hinkley is a very small town it's known mostly for the returning of buzzards in uh... yes uh... in no it's the buzzards in hinkley and uh... he was uh... everybody kind of thought that he was just the right person for the job uh... he had it

Benjamin Morris (17:29)

Yeah

Not quite the swallows of sin capistrano, is it? Yeah.

Jane (17:48)

He also was a writer. He loved to write. He had written a police novel called Harvest of Madness. He also liked to write poetry. He was a member of a writer's group in Medina. He lived in Medina, Ohio, which is right next to Hinkley. But he,

Benjamin Morris (18:02)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (18:18)

He had a secret. Actually, he had two secrets when I stopped to think about it. One was, he was divorced. And he had what I think he thought was a girlfriend. And she was married. But she told him that she was never gonna divorce her husband.

and marry him. So that may have played one part in what happened to him. The other thing is that he had a very good relationship with the woman.

Benjamin Morris (19:00)

Yeah. And our time frame here is that we're in the 1980s, right? We're kind of in the mid 1980s. Yeah, yeah.

Jane (19:03)

1985, yes, 1985. So the other thing is, is like I said, he liked to write. And apparently he was even writing while he was on the job, but the thing that he was writing was pornography. And that was found out. So after a while,

Benjamin Morris (19:23)

Oh.

How? I mean, what was, what was, is, I'm thinking, I'm visualizing sort of small town police station, you know, sort of, you know, maybe my, maybe my imagination goes to like Colombo, where it's like, you got all those desks and all the desks are out in the open, you know, and everybody's kind of, you know, milling around the, the really bad filter coffee, you know what I mean? And everybody's kind of in view of everybody else.

at all the times, you know, and you kind of hard to get away with, with surreptitious activity here. So like, how was he able to kind of do these things out from underneath the eye of his other colleagues?

Jane (20:09)

You know, I honestly, I don't know, and nobody seems to know, except that the dispatcher, the way that we found this out was the dispatcher dug a bunch of this out of the waste paper basket. He was just, he would just write this stuff and then he'd throw it in the waste basket. I mean, how dumb is that? He's a police chief. You know? Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (20:14)

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Oh, classic move, yes!

Yeah, not smart. Oh boy, oh boy.

Jane (20:38)

And apparently, but they, you know, they didn't make a big thing out of it. I don't quite understand that. And then there was a patrolman that said he was going to call attention to this illicit love affair. But nothing was ever, and a lot of the police reports came up missing.

Benjamin Morris (20:57)

Mm-hmm.

convenient.

Jane (21:07)

Uh huh, yeah. And I'm not sure whether they were Hankeley police reports, but I do know that I could not get any police reports out of Medina. Yeah, and I know that there were police reports because I spoke with a, you know, he was a Cleveland Plain dealer reporter at the time that all of this happened, and he had seen,

Benjamin Morris (21:20)

Interesting. Okay.

Jane (21:36)

police reports, Medina police reports. Now, yeah, now he had a very good friend who he had been friends with when he was on the Sheriff's Department, Medina County Sheriff's Department, and this friend was a investigator, was an investigator, a detective still on the Medina Sheriff's Department.

Benjamin Morris (21:39)

And these would have been internal investigations that you're talking about. OK.

Jane (22:04)

and his name was Jim Bigam.

Benjamin Morris (22:08)

Okay.

Jane (22:09)

and I said they were friends. So anyhow, he may have had something to do with that. I don't know. I'm not sure. But anyhow, so this girlfriend broke up with him. Apparently some of the pornography had been found. So he disappeared.

He claimed that he was going to go, July, yeah, well, he's, no, okay, he had, he had another girlfriend that had asked him to go swimming with him, and he said no, he just wasn't interested in swimming. Although, later on, right after all of this came to light, he told her that he was going to go on, it was on a Sunday.

Benjamin Morris (22:39)

It's just like that, I mean just one day magically vanished.

Jane (23:06)

He said he was going to go swimming up at Lake Erie, Aged Water Park, with a friend. Now, when all of this came out, well, let me back up. So, nobody thought, you know, or she didn't think anything of this, but she did wonder why he wouldn't go swimming with her, but he would go up with this friend. So on this particular day, July 28th, 1985,

There was a car sitting in the parking lot there at Edgewater Park and it sat there and it sat there and it sat there. And finally the park rangers started to get suspicious so they opened it. And they found a neatly folded stack of clothing with a couple packs of cigarettes which he smoked like a chimney I guess.

Benjamin Morris (24:01)

Okay, okay.

Jane (24:03)

his police badge, his, I can't remember whether his badge was there or not, but anyhow, and his driver's license and some folding money. So they started to think, well, somebody's out there. Well, they called the police department and the police had said, oh, they didn't even realize that he hadn't come in to work.

which was kind of odd. And so then they started to drag the lake. I don't think they dragged the lake. I think they sent some divers in. They couldn't find anything. And so this Jim Bigam and this dispatcher went to his apartment and they were able to get in. And they found that it was unusually neat because he was not.

Benjamin Morris (24:39)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Jane (25:02)

very neat. He was kind of a rumpled type guy. He cut his own hair and you know he had cats. Well the cats were there but there was plenty of food left for them. The refrigerator was empty except for a jar of mayonnaise. And what this Jim Bigam found was not what was there but what was not there, which was the manuscript that he had been working on.

Benjamin Morris (25:04)

Sure, sure, sure. Okay.

Okay.

Hmm. Yep.

Jane (25:31)

Harvest of Madness, his book of poetry, his music, and oh, was there one other thing I can't remember? Oh, and his scrapbook and his address book, I think, if I remember correctly. Those things were gone. But laying on the kitchen table was a slip.

Benjamin Morris (25:34)

Yeah.

Jane (25:58)

for his uniforms at a dry cleaners. So this Bigum thought that's strange because Wiley never cleaned his, never sent his uniforms to the cleaners. So Bigum went to the cleaners and he found, they had fished out an Amtrak schedule. And there was an Amtrak station quite close to where the car was found.

So then they're thinking, plus the Park Rangers said, you know, if there was a body, it would have floated up by now.

Benjamin Morris (26:31)

Hmm

Right.

Jane (26:42)

So then they started looking at his typewriter. Now, you know, we had no computers at that time. And the typewriters...

Benjamin Morris (26:53)

Right. Let me say one thing, Jane, just for the benefit of our listeners, because it is actually important. In this day and age, we think about a book manuscript, and you can put a book manuscript on a little flash drive that's as big as your thumb. You can stick it in a pocket and you can walk out with it. You can put 10,000 manuscripts on a little flash drive as big as your thumb and disappear with it, no problem. But in the 80s, of course, that media wasn't there. Computers were barely coming into.

you know, existence in home use, you know, a manuscript was a big ol' honkin' stack of paper that was 200, 300, 400 pages, right, exactly, and like you had to put it in a briefcase, it had its own special carrying, you know, kind of requirements, it could be set on fire, you know, faster than you would like to imagine, you know, there are all sorts of ways to, if it's physically lost, it's gone, there's no reproducing it at that point, you know, so this...

Jane (27:28)

Yeah, 200, 300 work pages, yeah.

Benjamin Morris (27:52)

notion that the manuscript was not found or that the book was not found. I mean, we're talking hard physical evidence and we're talking a lot of hard physical evidence and that would have been absolutely a felt absence. And this is, this is, 40 years is an eternity in...

Jane (28:10)

Hmm

Benjamin Morris (28:11)

writing technology. You know, the last 40 years have been an eternity in writing technology and those developments. So I just want to stress that because, you know, writer to writer here, of course, we get real interested in when issues of manuscripts come up, but for evidential purposes, it's even more important.

Jane (28:28)

Right, right. One other thing I forgot to mention was that one of the former police chiefs said another oddity was that in the car that the seat was moved forward. That, you know, as if a shorter person, he was 5'11", I believe, so that a shorter person had been driving it.

Benjamin Morris (28:58)

Interesting, yeah.

Jane (28:59)

So anyhow, back in the police department, they start looking at his typewriter, and back then the typewriter ribbons were one-time use. So they started looking at the ribbons, and he had written a letter to this woman that he was in love with. And I don't know whether I can find any of the, any of what was on there, oh.

Benjamin Morris (29:05)

Yeah?

Mmm.

Oh boy.

Jane (29:29)

I can read a little bit of it. He said, a couple of nights ago, long after dark, when I felt no one in particular, you included, might see me, I took a walk that eventually led me down your street and past your house. And he went on to say that he realized that they could never be together, okay. Then he says, in three or four months, you've taken a man,

Benjamin Morris (29:31)

Okay.

Hey.

Jane (29:57)

and have given him some of the major things he's pretty much desperately wanted most of his life. Love, affection, a sense of real purpose for someone who counts in a great deal to him, a sense of being worthwhile after all, and lastly, a realization that you, for one, pretty much like him and want him for the person he happens to be. If that's not leaving a mark by you of some kind,

I certainly don't know what is. True, it's only one item, but don't you think what you've done there that makes for possible numbers if you were inclined to keep a running score? Quality not quantity. That's what they found. Uh-huh.

Benjamin Morris (30:47)

Wow, so a little, I mean, that's very heartfelt. I could do without the little stalkery portion at the very beginning, you know? But there's a pretty deep reservoir of feeling there, that's really interesting.

Jane (30:55)

I'm sorry.

Yes, so when Bigam gets into this, they find that, of course he was never gonna go swimming because he had burns on his body from radioactive material when he was in the service. And so he was always covered up. He had it on his arms and such. So you see, he would never go on swimming.

And he, what else was it I wanted to mention? Oh, his wife started to, his ex-wife, they talked to his ex-wife, and she felt that he disappeared and that he probably went back to San Francisco or to Fort Ord where he was in the service.

Benjamin Morris (31:49)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (32:00)

because she said he always loved San Francisco, in particular Chinatown. Although there were other friends that said that he had friends in Florida. So.

Benjamin Morris (32:15)

So we just don't know. All we can surmise is that, I mean, it's interesting, isn't it, Jane? Because, I mean, here you have a police chief who's very familiar with evidence trails and that sort of thing. And he leaves one. I mean, we don't know how much of, it's a little hard to say how much of his evidence trail was deliberate and how much was accidental, right? It sounds like there's kind of a mix of both kinds of.

Jane (32:28)

Any late? Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Morris (32:40)

pieces of evidence there, which is what makes it so sort of delicious, right, as a mystery. It's sort of, you know, okay, now we got to figure out where was, you know, what was he thinking at what point. You know, much of it sounds pre-planned and then other portions like the typewriter ribbon or the car seat maybe were a little bit more accidental. But I mean, what is your theory of the case? Let me ask you that.

Jane (32:41)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yes.

Oh, I think he went back to San Francisco. He's, I don't know whether he's, let's see, I forget how old he was at the time, but he would be up in his 80s if he's still alive. But like I say, he smoked like a chimney, so who knows? I don't know, I suppose, somebody wanted to try to track him.

Benjamin Morris (33:24)

Yeah.

Jane (33:36)

You know, they might look at writers clubs in San Francisco, which I'm sure there's dozens of, millions of, yeah. He also was a train buff, he was a model train buff. And you know, there's model train shows all over and clubs that he may have joined. One of the things that I learned from, you know,

Benjamin Morris (33:43)

Billions, yes.

Jane (34:06)

with the police and even talking with police and in doing these stories is that sometimes the best way to track a person is to remember, you know, their hobbies and the things that they like to do because they don't give those things up.

Benjamin Morris (34:19)

Mm-hmm.

You know, what is so tantalizing about this particular case, of course, is that somewhere, assuming he didn't, you know, dispose of it, somewhere in the world is this unpublished novel called Harvest of Madness, you know, and, you know, is it still on these?

Jane (34:40)

manuscript yeah

Benjamin Morris (34:47)

you know, hundreds of sheets of sort of dot matrix printer paper or, you know, typewriter paper, you know, that sort of thing. Did he ever do anything with it? Mel, if you're out there, you know, like check in with his buddy, like tell us what's going on. We'd love to read your book. But, I mean, it's one of these sort of fascinating little threads, which is actually quite a large thread. And if he tried to publish it under a different name.

Jane (34:57)

Uh huh. You know, like, you're with this buddy, telling us what's going on. We'd love to read your book. Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (35:16)

you know or if he tried to publish the book under a different name not just a pseudonym for himself but you know to get it out there who knows

Jane (35:23)

Well, exactly, and I've thought about that, but I think that he had talked so much about the book and talked about the plot and everything that if it did show up on Amazon and somebody bought it, they would recognize it, even if they changed, and I'm sure he changed his name.

Benjamin Morris (35:41)

Yeah.

Almost certainly. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Jane (35:49)

And if he tried to publish it, I'm sure that he would have changed its name.

Benjamin Morris (35:54)

Yeah. How intriguing there is such a, such a depth to this particular mystery. So many layers.

to it that it's just kind of hard not to speculate as to what all those possibilities might be. And I certainly hope that some aspiring gumshoe out there takes up the case and goes on the hunt. You know, the mid-'80s were not that long ago, and there would be people with living memory of that era, hopefully, that would, you know, if you were to take a pic, you've got plenty of pictures of Mel, you know, Chief Wiley, right? I mean, there's no shortage of likenesses out there to take around.

Jane (36:20)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Benjamin Morris (36:34)

to the old haunts of the fish market or anywhere in the Bay. You never know.

Jane (36:43)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's more that I haven't talked about, of course, that's in the chapter, so.

Benjamin Morris (36:55)

Well, let's switch gears and take a look at another police chief. Thank you for that, Jane. That was absolutely fascinating. And yes, absolutely, listeners, please, you know, if you think you have a lead on the case or you want to take it up yourself, Jane's book comes out in a couple of weeks and you can read much more about the disappearance of Chief Mel Wiley there. But let's take a look at the last chapter in your book because here you have it.

a case that involves the death, the confirmed death of a police officer in the line of duty and very, very difficult for the force at that time and he left a proud legacy behind of a faithful public servant.

But there's still questions, you know, that surround it. And even though some new evidence and testimony has come to light over the years, it never really was resolved. So we're going to go back a little bit further in time for this particular case to 1970. Yeah. So tell us about Robert.

Jane (38:02)

70.

Okay, well, he became the, we're going up to Ashtabula County, Rock Creek is a small town up there. And they had, their police was mostly the sheriff's department for a long time. But then around in the 1960s, they had a group of young men that

Benjamin Morris (38:26)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (38:37)

They called them the Rock Creek Gang. And they just disturbed everything from what I could find out. And they also ran a chop shop. And I guess cars would be stolen out of Cleveland and brought up there, and then they would chop up these cars. And of course, they didn't want anybody

Benjamin Morris (38:40)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Scrap them.

Jane (39:07)

to know what they were doing. So they just pretty much, oh they, you know, they got into bar fights and they were just, you know. So the Sheriff's Department was, because this was, this is a large county, the Sheriff's Department were, they were stretched kind of thin to patrol the entire, the entire county.

Benjamin Morris (39:28)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (39:36)

the mayor of Rock Creek decided that he wanted a police department. So he started out with two different police chiefs and they only lasted, each one lasted only about six months. And it was because of, because they would get threatened and it was because of this Rock Creek gang. So in July of 1969, the mayor,

Benjamin Morris (39:41)

Mm-hmm.

goodness.

Jane (40:06)

swore in Robert Hamrick, Robert Gilbert Hamrick. He was 29 years old. He had been in the service. He had been a patrolman in Geneva on the lake. So he kind of knew what he was doing. And he just wasn't gonna be bullied. So he started out to...

Benjamin Morris (40:10)

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Well, he'd also done time himself, which is a really fascinating detail about him.

Jane (40:33)

Yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, but you see this was back in the 60s, okay. So yes, he had done time for robbery with a couple other guys, but he got out sooner than later and turned his life around. Got married and he had three little kids and he became the police chief. But this was all unbeknownst.

Benjamin Morris (40:50)

Sure. Yeah.

Jane (41:01)

to the mayor, the mayor did not know that he had a record. Well, he just, I guess, either forgot it or just... Well, I don't know that they... Well, I think it did because he knew this mindset, okay? And...

Benjamin Morris (41:05)

That's interesting.

Or someone on his staff did not do their due diligence for heaven's sakes, but I like to think that qualified him even more for the jobs.

Mm-hmm.

Jane (41:30)

And I think back then they probably didn't do their due diligence as much as what they do today, because it's much easier to do it today. So anyhow, the first thing he did was he tried to arrest one of the gang members. This was a guy that was in trouble. He had a long rap sheet.

So he in the evening, he was patrolling around town in the evening and he found this guy at one of the bars and he talked to him and he said, you know, there's a warrant out for you. And he said, I got to take you in, put you in jail. And the guy said, no. He said, he said, I'll tell you what, he says, let's wait till morning. And he says, I'll report to you in the morning.

and things will be fine. So Chief Hamrick said, okay, he said, but you don't get into any trouble tonight, and I'll see you first thing in the morning. The guy goes, oh yeah, fine. So of course the guy does

not show up in the morning, naturally, and instead, what he does is he goes in and threatens the person who had

Benjamin Morris (42:41)

Of course.

Jane (42:53)

filed the police file against him. Okay. So, Hamrick goes looking for him. Well, this guy was quite a driver. So he had a pretty speedy car. And so Hamrick finds him and he starts to chase him. The guy's not gonna pull over. So, and we're talking, this is a small town.

Benjamin Morris (42:58)

Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Jane (43:21)

So Hamrick goes, his police cruiser is not all that fast. So he goes to another one of his, of a friend who was a, another cop who had a Pontiac GTO and those were fast. So he, yeah, so he takes his, his lights and he puts it on the GTO and they take off and they start looking for this guy again and sure enough they find him.

Benjamin Morris (43:37)

Oh, absolutely.

Jane (43:50)

and they give chase and they're chasing like ninety miles an hour and uh... they uh... they go down a dip and up a dip i guess and hammer decides to shoot at the car he's gonna shoot above the car just uh... to scare him into stopping only the bullets go through the car and uh... the guy has a passenger and one of the bullets hits the passenger

Benjamin Morris (44:06)

Uh-huh.

Jane (44:19)

So, Hammert got in a little bit of trouble for that, but he did get his man and got him arrested, okay? So, after that, he and this friend of his that had the GTO, they find out that, oh, he gets looking at this barn, okay, that seems to be deserted, and he's suspicious of the barn, and so he,

Benjamin Morris (44:25)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (44:50)

He and the friend, they keep looking at it and they finally find that there's a Corvette, it was a 1969 Corvette, was sitting in there. And so they hide in the barn. The two of them hide in the barn.

Benjamin Morris (45:08)

Yeah.

Jane (45:18)

Pretty soon, huh? Pretty soon, these, yeah, pretty soon, these two guys come driving up in a pickup truck and they come in and they start talking about, well, do you want this part and do you want that part? They're gonna take it, you know. So at that point, Hamrick and Chapman was his friend's name, come out of hiding and they said, okay, we're police and you're under arrest.

Benjamin Morris (45:18)

Pretty bold. It's very, very bold. I like that, yeah.

Jane (45:47)

So they find that this car was stolen out of, where, I can't remember where, and it had been stolen on Christmas Eve. So this, of course, makes these Rock Creek gang really mad because now he's really getting into their bread and butter, if you will. Right, right, right. So.

Benjamin Morris (45:57)

Mm-hmm.

He's hitting their supply chain. Yeah, absolutely.

Jane (46:17)

So anyhow, so they start calling his wife and telling his wife when he isn't home, and telling his wife that he better get out of town and just quit all this stuff. And, hold on.

You know what? I've got a dog I have to let in. Can you hold on a second? Okay.

Benjamin Morris (46:43)

Yeah, yeah, of course we can.

Jane (48:06)

Okay, so sorry about that. But he, yeah, he was out there barking and I knew he wouldn't

Benjamin Morris (48:07)

All right, no problem, no problem at all. We'll just pick right back up.

Jane (48:14)

stop. So.

Benjamin Morris (48:14)

Yeah, sure. So they call his wife telling him he needs to get out of town.

Jane (48:20)

Yeah, and they don't want him as police chief anymore. But I think because he had been in prison and he had a record that he wasn't going to be bullied. And I think he was, as I remember, I think he was pretty tall and he just wasn't going to be bullied. So anyhow, this one night.

uh... is around one o'clock in the morning one fifty or something like that uh... he's out patrolling and he calls in uh... to the dispatcher and says that he has a uh... he has a uh... he's in pursuit of a vehicle and then a few minutes later he calls back in and he says uh... i've turned off from route

and I'm still in pursuit. And that was it. They never heard anymore from him. So this Chapman was, he was about 30 miles away, and he thought, well, maybe he would come up and see what Hamrick was into. But he got in an accident and had to stay and wait for the Ohio State Patrol.

to come and take an accident report. So after that, he thought, he didn't hear anymore about Hamrick on the radio or anything, so he just went on about his way. And finally then the dispatcher again came on and said, you know, he came out and asked Chapman to come and check on Hamrick. He said, I haven't heard from him in quite a while. So.

Chapman goes down this and the road was, it was gravel but it was at the time it was winter, it was March and it was kind of icy. So Chapman starts down the road and sure enough he finds that Hamrick has run into a tree that he skidded off the road and run into a tree.

Benjamin Morris (50:23)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (50:44)

So he stops, he calls in and he tells him what has happened. He said, and his words are, Chief Hamrick is up a tree. And so he goes to the cruiser and he sees that Hamrick is, you know, in a bad way, he's bleeding, and he's kind of laying across the seat, and he tries to get him out of the,

out of the driver's side door, but that door is jammed. So he goes around to the other side, gets a blanket, and puts it around him to try to comfort him, and he calls for an ambulance, and he calls for a tow truck. And by then, Corporal Johnson, who eventually became the sheriff, he came to help out. And...

they get him out of the car and put him in the ambulance. And then they radio ahead and the police clear all the roads to the hospital. And they get him to the hospital there in Ashtabula. But.

and they take all his personal effects and they give him to his family.

Benjamin Morris (52:12)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (52:19)

And they soon at the hospital, they soon realized that he is in too bad a shape, that they are not a trauma one hospital. So they decide to take him to Cleveland Clinic. So again, by this time it's like six o'clock in the morning or so. So again, the police clear all the roads to the Cleveland Clinic. They wire ahead to all the police departments and they, you know.

Benjamin Morris (52:28)

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Jane (52:47)

and so that they can get him there as quick as they can. And he died, of course. So the rumors started just like right after, right after the accident.

Benjamin Morris (52:48)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Let me say one quick thing, Jane. Let me just sort of say this. There's a couple of wrinkles here which are worth observing. I mean, one is the, you know, the tragedy of the fact that his fellow officer Chapman was held up. You know, this story could have turned out very, very differently had that other accident, you know, not taken place. I mean, if, you know, yeah, I mean, a few minutes or even, you know, an hour or two could have made just all the difference.

Jane (53:14)

Yeah.

could have gotten to him sooner.

Benjamin Morris (53:26)

in the world, and it's hard to read this story and just reflect on that kind of little butterfly effect, you know, taking place right there. I mean, the other aspect is that, you know, we just don't know what happened in those final hours of his life, and you went so far as to investigate the actual dispatcher's report, which is really interesting. I thought your research on that was really compelling, but...

Jane (53:34)

Yeah.

Right.

Benjamin Morris (53:53)

there are these questions, you know, what actually transpired. And, you know, you say rumors, and the rumors are born out of such a lack of knowledge that it's hard to stop them once they get started.

Jane (54:07)

Well, true. And the rumors started, the rumors were that the Rock Creek gang wanted to get rid of him. So, whoever he was chasing came back and hauled him out of the, out of his car and beat him senseless with a nightstick or whatever. Okay. And...

Benjamin Morris (54:32)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (54:36)

But they never knew who, and they didn't know who he was chasing. And was the chase set up so that they could get him out of town and get him in a place where he wouldn't have any help? They claimed that they said, well, this was born out because there was a lot of blood beside the car.

that he had been hauled out of the car and beaten. Well, the blood came off from the blanket the Chapman had put around him.

Benjamin Morris (55:15)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (55:17)

And when they took him out of the car, the blanket fell off from him, and that's where the blood came from. Also Chapman.

as he was investigating the accident, he found that there were no footprints in the snow around the car. And they found that all of his gun, his holster, what else, his nightstick, a couple other things, they were all with him or they were in the car. They were found. But

Benjamin Morris (55:39)

Right.

Right, they weren't missing, they hadn't been sort of taken. Yeah.

Jane (55:59)

No, they weren't missing like, you know, what the conspiracy was. They say, well, his gun is missing and his nightstick is missing. And, you know, but you see, there had been these threats. And so, you know, of course, people are going to wonder. They're going to wonder if, you know, they're going to put two and two together and maybe come up with five,

Benjamin Morris (56:05)

Yeah.

Right.

Yep.

Jane (56:23)

which is what I think they did.

Benjamin Morris (56:23)

Now there's a little bit of suspicion which is cast on this gas station attendant, right, who seems to have been, you know, had some knowledge or seen some of the individuals that evening and it was kind of this early, I won't call it a red herring because, you know, it's probably more to the story than we'll ever know with this guy, but it was a lead that just didn't pan out the way that everybody had hoped.

Jane (56:30)

Okay, yes.

Well, of course, when Chapman and Johnson and then the detectives, they started to investigate. They called dispatch and they said, what was the car, what was the license plate of the car that Hamrick was chasing? So they came back with the license plate. They traced it and it came back to a woman that lived in the next town over.

So they went to visit her and she said, well, I don't have the car. She said, I'm leaving for Florida tomorrow. So I dropped my car off at the Sunilco station to have it all checked out so that I can drive to Florida. So they go to the, excuse me again, sorry.

Benjamin Morris (57:38)

It's okay.

Jane (57:55)

So they go to the Sunoco station where she had dropped the car off and they see the car there and the station attendant is changing a tire on it and it's all muddied up and everything and it's a it was a javelin.

And so they think, well, you know, this is kind of weird because the woman that owned it then, she looks at the car and she said, my car was clean. And she said, and I had more than a quarter of a tank of gas in it. So, and also she'd had stuff on the back of the, you know, up in the back window and it had all come forward as if, you know, the car, somebody had slammed on the brakes or.

Benjamin Morris (58:30)

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right. All right.

Jane (58:49)

or whatever. So they started to question the... Oh, and there was a cigarette butt on the floor and she didn't smoke. So they started to question the station attendant and...

Benjamin Morris (59:00)

Yeah.

Jane (59:07)

He said, well, you know, he drove a car that was around the corner of the station. And so Johnson goes around and he lays his hand on the hood. And it's cold. It had not been, you know, it hadn't been any place. And the windows were kind of frosted over. So it hadn't been any place. So finally, the guy admits and he said, well, he said, yeah, he says, I took it out. I took her car out for a test drive.

Benjamin Morris (59:20)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jane (59:37)

And so that was the story there. I won't go into the end of it.

Benjamin Morris (59:43)

Sure, sure. Let me ask you this. I mean, this is a very sad case, obviously, because...

it feels in so many ways you know preventable or that justice was never done. And we won't spoil you know the outcome of the later investigation and so forth. But whatever happened to 50 years ago now, whatever happened to the Rock Creek gang? I mean were they ever kind of brought to justice as a whole that they just sort of fizzle out over time. I mean what was the end of that story?

Jane (01:00:17)

Well, a lot of them are dead. Some of them took, I did follow up to find out where they were. Some of them later took lie detector tests and passed. One moved, where do you go, to Texas, I think?

One now lives in Texas. I don't think anybody was ever brought to, for any of their, well, the one guy that Hamrick arrested off the bat and the two in the barn with the corvette, with the stolen corvette, they of course, had it, you know, got.

Benjamin Morris (01:01:15)

Yeah, but the ring was never busted up as a whole. I mean, there was never like this crackdown on it.

Jane (01:01:16)

lodged in jail. But it was, well, it was, well, no, not that I know of.

Benjamin Morris (01:01:25)

Well, for the rest of the story, we'll have to go to your book. Let me ask you this. You write about so many different kinds of cases. Would this be one? Yeah.

Jane (01:01:36)

Can I just say one thing, ending up with that? I did have all the police reports. I had all the Ohio State Patrol reports, the coroner's report. So they were all, and Ohio Bureau of Investigations looked into it. So.

Benjamin Morris (01:01:52)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (01:02:07)

And so I, yeah, I reported on everything that was.

Benjamin Morris (01:02:07)

Pretty comprehensive.

Jane (01:02:13)

that I could find.

Benjamin Morris (01:02:14)

Yeah. And who knows, maybe there's a deathbed confession waiting out there somewhere today, but it's kind of hard to hold out hope at this point. It's been a long time. You never know. You write about so many different kinds of cases in.

this book, Jane, and it really is fascinating to kind of read through and get the breadth of the mysteries that still lie unresolved in northern Ohio. Just out of curiosity, we've talked about two in detail, but is there one that you would just want to kind of tease us with? Maybe one that you particularly enjoyed working on or thought was sort of especially compelling in some kind of way?

you know a little worm on the end of the hook you'd like to dangle you know in front of us and i'm curious just as a as kind of a researcher and writer if there was one that stood out for you

Jane (01:03:07)

Well, let's see, I told you about Norm Liver's story. It's in the book. There was a couple in Trumbull County who disappeared and in the 90s, they had five kids and the kids went off to school one morning and everything seemed to be pretty normal.

Benjamin Morris (01:03:28)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (01:03:37)

The dad was an over the road truck driver. The mom was, she was a mother and a housekeeper. They had no debt, no enemies that they really could think of. And they disappeared one. The kids went off to school and when they came home, their mom and dad were gone.

Benjamin Morris (01:03:49)

Mm-hmm.

oof

Jane (01:04:06)

as you know was their truck. They did find, police did find that they took a fairly large amount of money out of their bank account. They drove up to a drive-in window at the bank and the teller said, well, there were three people in the car. There was Mr.

Benjamin Morris (01:04:27)

Mm-hmm.

Oh

Jane (01:04:35)

Marzic and there no can't know I can't say the name John the father was in the car and the mother was in the car and there was a third man but couldn't really get you know get a good a good view of what he looked like except that he was a man and that they but they took out a large amount of money but not their entire

Benjamin Morris (01:04:41)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jane (01:05:06)

not their entire bank account, which at the time was something like, I don't know, $1,500 or something, which at that time probably was quite a bit for a family. And it was money that they had borrowed for him to put new tires on his truck. But they only took like eight or $900 out.

Benjamin Morris (01:05:13)

Uh huh.

Jane (01:05:34)

So they don't know who the man was. They found the truck parked in a parking lot somewhere and it was all covered with mud as if it had been off road. And they said that just was not like the owner, John, because he kept his pickup truck in just sterling condition.

Benjamin Morris (01:05:51)

Mm-hmm.

Jane (01:06:04)

So, and so far we don't know much about what happened to them.

Benjamin Morris (01:06:11)

We'll leave it there then for heaven sakes don't I mean Who knows what a wow that there's that that's the makings of like a Cormac McCarthy novel You know from the from the jump that is That is really that's really compelling So now we all not have to go read that chapter in your book and try to come up with our own theories Absolutely, absolutely

Jane (01:06:35)

Well, I hope you read the whole book!

Benjamin Morris (01:06:39)

Jane, this has been such a pleasure. We really appreciate your taking time for us to come onto the show. Let me ask you this. How can folks follow up with you? If they want to find your books, what's the best way for them to do so?

Jane (01:06:52)

Well, they're in book stores. I guess they're even in like CVS and some of the grocery stores. They're on, well, they're on Amazon. They're all on Amazon. And I have a website which is www. And I'm soon going to be starting a newsletter. So.

Benjamin Morris (01:07:22)

Great.

Well, that's wonderful. That's, I know everybody will look forward to that. Thank you so much. This really has been a lot of fun and congratulations again on the upcoming publication of Northern Ohio Cold Cases and who knows what might happen in the months to come once the book comes out. You know, we've had some guests on who have seen things come to light with, you know, some publications and tips.

Jane (01:07:35)

Thank you.

Benjamin Morris (01:07:51)

tips and ideas, suggestions come out of the woodwork, you never know what might happen.

Jane (01:07:56)

I did have one of my books, Ohio Heists. There was an embezzler, he actually was an embezzler that stole $215,000. His name was Ted Conrad. And I did get a tip from someone and I handed it over to the US Marshals and they closed the case because of it. So it does happen.

Benjamin Morris (01:08:22)

What? That's amazing!

Jane (01:08:24)

So it does happen, yeah.

Benjamin Morris (01:08:27)

Wow, okay, we're gonna have to have you back on to tell us just about that sometime. Jane, what a win.

Jane (01:08:32)

Oh sure, yeah.

Benjamin Morris (01:08:35)

What a win! Amazing. Well, on that note, thank you again and congratulations and we'll see you soon.

Jane (01:08:44)

Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Benjamin Morris (01:08:47)

It's been our pleasure.