Cold Case Files - Murder In The Midwest

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

When the body of Lori Nesson is found in a ditch in 1974, her death is not ruled as a homicide. Her sister knows that there was foul play, but it takes 40 years for the cause of death to be changed to homicide. Investigators now have to catch a killer with a four decade head start. Check out our greats sponsors! Angi: Download the free Angi mobile app today or visit Angi.com Nutrafol: Grow thicker, healthier hair by going to Nutrafol.com and use code FILES to save $15 off your first month’s subscription! ZocDoc: Go to Zocdoc.com/ccf and download the Zocdoc app for FREE and find and book a top-rated doctor today! Progressive: Quote your car insurance at Progressive.com to join the over 29 million drivers who trust Progressive!

An A&E original podcast. This episode contains descriptions of violence and sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised. All those years, nobody ever tried to figure out what happened to my sister, Lori. Her death was not ruled as a homicide. It was ruled as undetermined natural causes. A 15-year-old girl is going to walk about 10 miles, take all her clothes off in the woods,

and then walk another five miles naked and lay down in a ditch and pull foliage over her. I never thought it would be solved, but don't ever give up. Somebody somewhere knows something. Now, 45 years later, I want to make sure families know there is hope. There are 120,000 unsolved murders in America.

Each one is a cold case. Only 1% are ever solved. This is one of those rare stories. It's September 27th, 1974 in Columbus, Ohio, and 15-year-old Eastmore High School sophomore Lori Nessen has plans to go to the football game. After the game, Lori heads to a couple of parties, and she's supposed to be spending the night with a friend. By 11 the next morning, Lori still hasn't come home, and her 13-year-old sister Tony can see that her mother is worried. Lori's mother starts making

calls to her daughter's friends to see if anybody has seen Lori. They said no. The last that they had heard is Lori was just going to go home. She was going to walk home. It was 1974. We walked places. Lori's mother contacts the Columbus Police Department to file a missing persons report. My mother was scared to death, but she would not portray that to me because she did not want to scare me.

Tony and Lori's mother, Joyce, is raising her two girls on her own. Joyce divorced the girls' fathers years earlier, but it doesn't change the focus and determination Lori exhibits from a young age. She was a kid, but she was so ahead of her time. She was a volunteer on McGovern's campaign in 1972, so she would have been 12. I mean, wrap your head around that. Twelve years old and is volunteering to work on a presidential campaign. She was off the charts smart and she was extremely active in Israeli rights. My family is Jewish. She was so deep and so sensitive and so wanted to be a voice for anybody that didn't have one.

Lori would never disappear. She might come home a little late, but never, ever would she disappear. Lori has been missing for just a few hours when a call comes in to a police department in a nearby town. Reynoldsburg Police Sergeant Jim Koslow and Lieutenant Bill Early recall the report. A husband and wife were hunting for hedge apples, and they see a deceased young female laying in a ditch.

Detectives responded, and they document that it's a white female in her late teens. She had no clothes on. She did have what appeared to be some bruising on her left arm. It was not obvious to them what had caused the death of this young woman. They don't see any telltale sign like a rope around the neck or a gunshot wound or anything like that. And then they examined the bottom of her feet, which appeared to be

for the most part clean it led investigators out that a fact to believe that whatever happened to the young woman happened somewhere else and then she was left there on Rose Hill Road the coroner takes the unidentified victims's body to the morgue, and the story hits the local news that night. A friend of Lori's called the police department and notified them that a friend of his matched the description of the young woman that was found in Reynoldsburg, deceased.

The police ask Joyce Nessen to come to the morgue to identify her daughter's body. Every parent's worst nightmare is confirmed when she sees Lori on the coroner's table. Sadly, she has to break the news to her other daughter, Tony. She said, I need to talk to you about Lori. And I looked at her and I said, oh, well, what about her? And she said, she's not coming home. She's gone. She died. I didn't understand. One minute she was there, the next minute she was gone. The coroner begins to investigate Lori's death.

The autopsy determined that she did have some kind of sexual relation with somebody, but it was not ruled that she was raped, and the manner of death was not ruled homicide. They just weren't able to determine what that reason was. It's possible that she had a drug overdose or she died of some other cause and was taken there by someone who panicked and dumped them. The toxicology report is still pending, and so they continue to investigate this as a suspicious death. So the investigators, they do just a number of different interviews with fellow friends, students, parents, just about anybody who had contact with her through the football game or any of these after parties.

Lori was last seen by a friend leaving the party at about 10 after midnight. And then again, within a few minutes after that, two more friends that had me driving by saw Lori walking. Lori only lived a few minutes walk away from the party she had gone to. Her body was found miles away from her home, so investigators believe that she had accepted a ride from someone.

This theory doesn't sit well with those who know Lori. Everybody was very adamant about Lori would not get into a car with a stranger. No way, okay? So the police said that she got into a car with someone she knew. In my experience, people are killed by, more often than not, by people that they know. This nice little Jewish group of kids now started looking at each other like,

well, who did she get in the car with? Within a day of Lori's body being discovered, the news of her death dominates the local media outlets, and the coverage leads to tips. One of those tips stands out above the rest. They receive a call from a woman named Donnana up who worked at mount carmelis hospital and had been on her way to work at around 5 45 in the morning and she says i recall seeing a girl dressed in similar clothing to what lori nesson was wearing when she went missing she also reports

that she saw a small red colored car that was pulled off in a lane that to locals was called Lovers Lane. They did focus on people that had access to their red car. Scott Richards drove a red Mustang. Lori and Scott were like super, super close, like best friends. And he lived on the same street as us. Scott Richards was around 16. He hosted the after party at his parents' house

that she first went to after the football game. The investigators take a closer look at Scott Richards. He was in her circle of friends and acquaintances. But her friends said he was strange and we think he could do something like that. It wasn't just like one person. And the more information you get on somebody and the more people are telling you the same thing,

that information carries more weight than other. So police acted on that. They went and interviewed Scott Richards as the suspect. He's able, through his parents and himself, to account for his whereabouts and the time frame from the after party to when she's found dead. So even though there may be some lingering doubts,

there's no ring door camera video, and there's no cell phone GPSing, so they can't even really go out and verify someone's story. They have to take it at face value. Two days after Lori's body was found, the Reynoldsburg police get a call about potential evidence. Reynoldsburg police actually got a phone call that somebody had found shoes on the side of the road in Gahanna, which is a neighboring suburb.

And then another report came in that the sweater and the road in Gahanna, which is a neighboring suburb. And then another report came in that the sweater and the jeans were found. The clothing was located approximately three miles from where Lori's body was found. Lori's clothes and shoes are strewn along the right side of the road. It would be logical to draw the idea that there were perhaps two people in the car when that clothing was thrown out. on the right side of the road. It would be logical to draw the idea

that there were perhaps two people in the car when that clothing was thrown out. Someone's driving, and then someone's in the passenger side from where the clothing went out the window. I didn't know any of the circumstances surrounding her death. I did not know that her clothes were in Gahanna. My mom was just protecting me.

I don't think a 13-year-old could understand the violence that surrounded Lori's death. Angie's List is now Angie. And they've made it easier than ever to get all your home projects done right. If you need help with landscaping, electrical, remodeling, roofing, or just a handy person, Angie can help you find what you need. One of our producers recently used Angie to find a much-needed plumber for a busted faucet. Using Angie, it helped narrow down the exact cause of his problem, then helped him assess if he needed to repair, replace, or install a new faucet. It made his life so much easier. Angie has over 20 years of home service experience, and they've combined it with new tools to simplify the whole

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I say, because if I do die, I'm going to ask the Lord, let me haunt you. We so often hear about those that don't make it out of danger alive. But what about those that do? My body got warm and it just said, get up. You're not done. Get up. I'm Caitlin VanMal, back with a brand new season of I Survived. The more I begged him, the happier and the more excited he got. Join me for new episodes of I Survived every Monday and subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. During the first week of the investigation, the investigators come across a report Lori's mom had filed in August 1973. According to the report, Lori, who was 14 at the time,

was leaving school when a man tried to lure her into his car. Lori escaped and ran home to tell her mother what had happened. An officer puts two and two together and says, I think I know who this is because this is somebody that they had dealt with. His name was Eugene Guay. He was known to operate in that area on the east side of Columbus, and he would try and lure girls into his car. Mr. Guay was followed to a bar

where it was noted that Mr. Guay had what looked like to be maybe like an infected laceration on his head or his face, and that he could have been injured in a struggle what looked like to be maybe like an infected laceration on his head or his face, and that he could have been injured in a struggle if Lori was fighting for her life. And they decide, hey, we should probably talk to this guy. He's very noncommittal on his whereabouts

around the time frame of the crime, nothing that they're able to confirm. He doesn't have an alibi. They actually have a photograph of her, and they show it to him. Not only does he recognize her, he makes a comment about, yeah, I didn't like her because she had braces.

And so that raises some of the red flags for the investigators that this is somebody that we should really zero in on. Eugene Gouet denies being involved with Lori's death, and he agrees to do a polygraph in October 1974. The investigators receive a phone message from the attorney that now represents Eugene Gouet, who says that he will not be taking the polygraph.

They do get permission via consent to search his vehicle in the hopes that they might find something that would link Eugene Guay to Lori Nessen, and they don't come up with any evidence. Once he retains an attorney, there really isn't anything left for them to do. It's now November 1974, and the toxicology results from Lori's autopsy come back.

The results show that there were no drugs or alcohol in her system at the time of her death. Once they receive the final coroner's report, it's not ruled as a homicide. It's ruled as an accidental death from unknown origin. There's more questions than answers. You didn't have to be some kind of brain to look at the circumstances surrounding her death and where her clothes were and where her body was in relation to where we lived. How anybody could rule that as anything

but a homicide is beyond me. The accidental death ruling means that the investigation comes to an end. And as far as finding a potential killer, the case goes cold. Lori's family tries to pick up the pieces, and Joyce wants to make sure her surviving daughter can lead a normal life. We've never talked about Lori, ever. It was too painful for my mom. I truly, 100% believe that if Lori would have been an only child,

I do not believe my mom would have survived it. She had me, so she still had to go on. My mom made me go back to school. She got me involved in riding horses. I played sports and got good grades and a boyfriend. My mom was always a very, very vivacious person that loved to entertain entertain loved to go to parties loved to dance and then it all stopped she went to work and she came

home there was always something missing and it was Lori I always wondered who took my sister from me at some point there's got to be some kind of answer somewhere, but I didn't know where to go or how to get it. 44 years pass by, and it's August 2019, when Officer Craig Brafford gets wind of the case. I came across the case August of 2019 while looking through the file room. That's what piqued my curiosity, is the death certificate did not list a manner of death as homicide. It was listed as undetermined.

Although the patrol officer is not a detective, he spends his free time reexamining local cold cases. When Lori went missing, she was the same age as my daughter was. She was 15 years old. And I couldn't imagine going through the next 46 years with no answers. Officer Bradford gets permission from the deputy chief

to investigate the case on his own time. He gathers the case files and pours over the autopsy photos. There were some injuries that were not listed. Some trauma may have been behind a left ear, but my aha moment was there was one photograph in particular of a detective that lifted up Lori's upper lip, and there was a lot, a lot of damage, which was consistent with possibly being rubbed against the top braces that Lori had, so someone could have been mashing her mouth down to try to keep her quiet. This was a clear, clear, obvious homicide. It's February 2020, 45 years after Lori was murdered.

And Officer Brafford informs Lori's sister that he's investigating the cold case. I never thought it would be solved because how could it be? It wasn't even ruled a homicide? All those years, nobody ever, ever cared about what happened to her until Craig Bradford. I contacted Tony. I felt she deserved answers. Her family deserved answers. And I felt that we had an opportunity now to do this, to do it right. He said, well, I don't want to reopen an old wound, but I would like to talk to you about your sister.

And literally, the minute he said that, it was like somebody punched me in the stomach. So the first thing that I said to Craig when I finally could catch my breath was, you can't reopen something that was never closed. Before Brafford can move forward, he needs to convince the coroner that Lori's death was no accident. She was murdered.

The county coroner and some of the other physicians would have to sit down and review all the aspects of the case before the elected coroner would sign off on it. After five months of deliberation, the coroner's office comes back with a decision in September 2020. The manner of death is overturned and changed from undetermined to homicidal violence. Craig got her case reopened

and for the first time in 45 years I felt that somebody actually cared about Lori. And so it was extremely emotional for me. That was extremely satisfying, but we still

had an uphill battle on our hands because we still had an investigation to conduct. The two main people that had been looked at at the time, Eugene Guay and a friend of Lori's, Scott Richard, had both passed away several years ago. Detectives hope new forensic technology will give them a solid lead. They submit Lori's clothing to the crime lab for DNA testing. Bureau of Criminal Investigation's forensic scientist,

Devani Herdman, gets involved with the case. Unfortunately, this case came in right before the start of the COVID pandemic, and that did slow progress. Like most of the country, we were working from home and definitely can't do DNA analysis from my house. Suspects from the 1970s have died. That, combined with the global pandemic, slows the case to a crawl. Tony is determined not to let the case go cold again.

Here it is November, and I got nothing. And that's when I called Lieutenant Early, and I said, I'm going to the media. Somebody somewhere knows something, and we need to find that person. Tony was very adamant about the fact that she wanted to run a news story on it. So one of our local reporters from a news channel here was willing to do that. You're trying to find a cause for your symptoms.

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It's December 2020 and Gene Adams, the brother of 17-year-old Karen Adams, who had been murdered just six months after Lori in 1975, hears about Lori's case. I get a phone call from my cousin, Jean. She says, have you seen this story on TV about Lori Neeson? I said, no, I haven't. And she said, well, that sounds just like Karen. So she called the police department. Karen Adams' body had been discovered around two and a half miles from where Lori had been found. The detectives feel as though the timeline and geographical closeness of the murders show a connection between Karen and Lori's cases. At the time of the murder, Karen Adams lived just 10 minutes from Lori Nessen.

On the night she was killed, Karen told her parents she was going out for an hour. She drove off and never came back. She said she was going to see a friend about a scarf that she'd left over there and was going to go get it and she'd be right back. 11 o'clock turned around and we knew something was going on then. Karen was never out late at night. The next morning, Karen was reported missing. I was driving around, talking with her friends, trying to find my sister. I found her car in a parking lot. I knew something was wrong. She would have never left that car. Never. Karen had finally saved enough money from her waitressing job to purchase the car just a few months earlier. It was her first car and her pride and joy.

I'd worked on it a little bit, fixed it up a little bit for her. And I remember her taking me for a ride and how happy she was to have that car. I fixed it up a little bit for her. And I remember her taking me for a ride and how happy she was to have that car. That's the only memory that I kind of keep, me and her riding around in that car. Karen was the third of five children, four girls, one boy, I'm the oldest.

She was special to our family, had a great sense of humor. She was looking so much forward to her future. Franklin County Sheriff's Office cold case detective Chuck Clark solved Karen's case in 2011. He recalls the details of the discovery of Karen's body on March 10th, 1975. It was roughly six to eight miles east of White Hall where Karen lived. Two people just happened to look in the ditch and saw a body. We got the call from the police. They'd found her body. It's like somebody just pulled my guts out of me. All I could think of was how Karen's last few moments were. She had some marks on her neck. And once they took her from the scene and did the autopsy,

obviously that was confirmed that, one, she was sexually assaulted, and two, that she was strangled to death. There were no witnesses or fingerprints. Detectives followed as many leads as they could. They spent a good six months to a year on it. They interviewed everyone they could and ran out of leads. The family was, hey, what are you people doing?

I asked to see the file on Karen. They wouldn't show it to me. I just couldn't get any answers. I tried bribing people. That didn't help. And then it got colder and colder and colder, and pretty soon everybody forgets. In December 2010, 35 years after Karen's murder,

cold case detective Chuck Clark is searching the database for an inactive case to take on. That's when he finds Karen Adams' file. Her case seemed to have one of the highest probabilities of being solved, mainly because DNA had come around. A forensic test on Karen's clothes reveals the DNA profiles of two unknown males. They put them in CODIS, which is the system that identifies suspects.

One came back as unknown, and one was a known male that had done time in prison for rape and kidnapping, and his name was Robert Meyer. Meyer had been arrested and convicted of raping and kidnapping two women in Toledo, Ohio, in 1976, just a year after Karen Adams' murder. He spent 25 years in prison and was released in 2001. When he was released, he was required to provide a DNA sample because of his conviction. We just needed to get a DNA swab from him to verify the hit that I got in CODIS from the lab. We knocked on his door. Mr. Meyer was very cordial, very polite,

and he was very compliant. So I got DNA swabs from each cheek and took those swabs right to the lab to be compared. Detectives showed up at my door. They said they had a DNA hit with CODIS. And as soon as they get the evidence confirmed, they were going to arrest him. It all came back like a flood. It seemed feeling that I got when I found out that Karen had got killed, I got again.

They never told me the name. What they told me was it was a 71-year-old convicted rapist that was living in Cincinnati. Well, all you have to do is go to the Hamilton County sex offender website and figure out how many 71-year-old guys you got there. One. I got an address off the website. I went down to see him. I took my gun and I knocked on his door. After discovering the address of the man suspected of killing his sister 35 years earlier,

Gene Adams heads to Robert Meyer's house with a gun. I kept thinking about my sister's last moments and how bad I wanted to hurt Robert Meyer. I had the gun in my pocket. He opened the door. What do you want? Inside my head was ringing like I was going to blow up. I stood within two feet of him. And I didn't see his face.

I seen my mother's face. I just couldn't do it. He doesn't deserve that much attention. There's no way I could kill that man and put my mother through more heartache over this. I just turned around and walked away. In September 2011, the DNA hit is confirmed, and Meyer is transported to the Cincinnati Police Department for an interview with Detective Clark.

Meyer denies knowing Karen Adams. I got the feeling that he actually didn't remember. I think it would have been possible. Who knows how many other crimes he committed against women. They arrested him. He pleads guilty to murder. He was convicted, sentenced, 25 years in life. You know, he died four years later. Meyer's conviction and death brings some closure

to the case, but the identity of Karen's other attacker is still a mystery. I discovered that he had an accomplice in Toledo. That person's name was Charles Weber. Robert Meyer and Charles Weber actually met in prison back in the early to mid-1960s. They lived together as soon as they get out of prison, and one of them's out of prison not two weeks, and we have Lori Nesson show up dead. Around six months later, we have Karen Adams,

who is found dead. And then Weber and Meyer actually moved to Toledo, Ohio, and they attempted twice more to abduct, sexually assault, and murder two more victims. Charles Weber went to prison until 1989, and he was released, and he died, so we didn't have the opportunity to get his DNA. Four years later, in March 2016, Detective Clark tracks down Charles Weber's biological son. Using familial DNA, he can confirm that Weber was the second suspect in Karen Adams' murder. It is such a relief to find out who

did this and move on with your life and keep the memories of what you had that were good and let the rest of it go. But that is the hardest thing to do. It's December 2020, and news stories about Lori Nesson's case generate tips. We received calls with people saying the news story about the death of Lori Nesson sounded very similar to the death of Karen Adams. I contacted Devanya Herbman at the DNA lab. She was actually familiar with the Karen Adams case because she had done the DNA analysis on it. I had started comparing Karen's profile from her underwear

to the profile from Lori's jeans. They were identical. And not only did we get one foreign individual, but the same two foreign individuals that did this to Lori. The DNA match and stories from Webber's and Myers' surviving victims lead to a theory about what happened the night Lori Nessen was murdered. The women in Toledo said that they tried to approach them

under the guise of needing help. And then once they got close to the car, they'd jump out and would grab them. They forced her into the vehicle, sexually assaulted her, and then decided that killing her was the best way of concealing their crime. Convinced that Weber and Meyer killed Lori, investigators finally have answers for Lori's sister, Toni.

Once Craig told me that Lori's case had been solved and they're both dead, I think I did ask, is there any way that we could exhume their bodies so that I could run over them with my truck multiple times? I'm very upset that they never had to pay for what they did to my sister. But I can't spend the rest of my life being concerned with them.

So what we did on July 13th, which was my 60th birthday, we did a very small memorial service at the graveside. My mom is buried next to Lori, and I got to tell them both that Lori's case was solved and that they could rest in peace. The tragedies of their sister's murders bond Gene and Tony together as friends. Me and Tony Hessen has become very good friends over this. We'll always be in this together, and we talk quite often about the need to do shows like this to get the word out. Law enforcement and the families all believe that there are other victims out

there, we're sure of that. If you know of anybody that sounds like this story, contact your local authorities. I want to make sure that these families out there and friends don't ever give up. Don't ever give up. There's always some sort of hope. And if my story can help another family, then all of the pain that I've been through is worth it. Cold Case Files is hosted by Paula Barrows. It's produced by the Law and Crime Network and written by Eileen McFarlane and Emily G. Thompson. Our composer is Blake Maples.

For A&E, our senior producer is John Thrasher and our supervising producer is McKamey Lynn. Our executive producers are Jesse Katz, Maite Cueva, and Peter Tarshis. This podcast is based on A&E's Emmy-winning TV series, Cold Case Files. For more Cold Case Files, visit aetv.com.