The Deck - Sharon Pretorius (6 of Diamonds, Ohio)

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

Our card this week is Sharon Pretorius, the 6 of Diamonds from Ohio. One September day in 1973, 13-year-old Sharon left her home to run a quick errand, an errand she’s run dozens of times before. But that day would be different. And for the last 50 years her family and investigators have put all their hope and energy into trying to determine what happened in just a 90 second window after she walked out the door.  If you know anything about the disappearance or murder of 13-year-old Sharon Pretorius in September of 1973, or if you’re a detective who’s worked a similar case, please call the Dayton Police Department Cold Case Unit at 937-333-7109.  To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org. Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllc The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Follow The Deck on social media and join Ashley’s community by texting [phone] to stay up to date on what's new!

Our card this week is Sharon Cretorius, the Sixth of Diamonds from Ohio. One September day in 1973, 13-year-old Sharon left her home just to run a quick errand. An errand she'd run dozens of times before. But that day would be different. And for the last 50 years, her family and investigators have put all their hope and energy into trying to determine what happened in just the 90 second window after she walked out the door. Maybe you out there listening can help. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck. back. Afternoon was fading into evening on September 28, 1973. And 15-year-old Richard Pretorius was sitting in the kitchen of an unusually empty and quiet

home unwinding after a long week of school. His mother and three youngest siblings were out running errands, so it was just him, his older brother Doug, and his younger sister Sharon at their four bedroom cottage in Dayton, Ohio. But that trio went down to two when Sharon came rushing through the kitchen, making a beeline toward the door. She was leaving told me where she was going.

She had a morning paper out and she didn't collect money from her customers at the same time. She delivered. She would deliver it in morning, typically in the dark before daybreak, but every week she would go out and collect the money. And that's what she was doing. Sharon had just gotten home from music lessons, not

too long before, but she kept a busy schedule. She had to go collect payment now so she could make it home in time for supper around six and then get to another event later that evening. Shortly after Sharon departed, Richard's mom, Mary Carol, and the other siblings returned from shopping. And soon enough, everyone was ready for supper. But Sharon didn't come to the dinner table. Right away, Mary Carol was worried.

Now Sharon did have a pretty long paper route, I'll put a map of it on the blog post for this episode. But it still only took her maybe 45 minutes to collect payment from everyone, which would have put her home by that point. Even David, the youngest sibling who was only six at the time, has vivid memories of the uneasiness that quickly filled the home that evening. I remember when my mother first started to get worried. I remember she was kind of fervent movement, she was antsy, she put her head down, she

didn't come home. And I'm six years old. I don't have an ability or a framework to understand what was going through my mother's mind and what the possibilities may have been for my sister. Even though Sharan was 13 and most 13-year-olds can be known to make silly or impulsive, even irresponsible decisions like skipping out on dinner without telling their family, that was not Sharon, because Sharon wasn't your average teen. You see, her father had passed away a few years prior,

leaving Mary Carol a widow with six young children. So Sharon had stepped up to provide her mother support as a quasi-parental figure. She was reliable. I mean, why is beyond her years this straight-laced kid? So naturally, with each passing moment, Mary Carol and the other children only grew more worried. But before doing anything rash, Doug and Richard agreed to go walk Sharon's paper route to see if maybe she'd gotten held up at one of the houses for whatever reason, or maybe one of her customers saw where she went. We went and checked on the first several houses on her paper house.

She never had gotten to any of those, so it seemed like something that occurred between when she left the house and when she got to the first house on a route. When Doug and Richard returned with the news, Mary Carol's stomach dropped. And she knew she couldn't wait any longer. With a heavy heart, she phoned Dayton Police to report her daughter missing and right away, DPD sent out a patrol officer to take the full report. Here's retired detective Roddrick, who's working Sharon's case today, recounting what the officer learned from the family.

Talking with the family, they had no reason that she would run away. She had no boyfriends or anything like that at the time. She was doing well in school. Home life seemed good. Given that information and considering the fact that she'd never run away before, police took Mary Carroll's concerns seriously and got to work right away. So the first thing they did was they searched the house

as you would to see if she's hiding There was no sign of Sharon at the house, but police did find a quote-unquote book of friends Like a little phone book that listed her friends names and phone numbers. Well, so jackpot, right? Police had basically everyone close to Sharon and how to contact them in the palm of their hands And they didn't take the value of that for granted, but they didn't want to cause a complete ruckus just yet by alarming everyone and their mothers, like literally. First, they needed to make sure she wasn't hidden in plain sight somewhere. They didn't extensive neighborhood search, they were scouring Alley's trash cans everything,

but there was no sign of Sharon. They did contact everyone on the paper out, and nobody had been collected from by her. After thoroughly searching and canvassing the neighborhood, police knew they couldn't delay in alarming people any longer. They reached out to Fairview High School, where Sharon had just begun her freshman year to talk to students there.

They also called everyone from Sharon's friends list, and out of everyone they talked to, not a single person had a bad thing to say about Sharon. No one mentioned any issues she'd been having, no enemies, nothing like that. Everybody that they talked to, whether it was school friends, family, teachers, everybody said she was just a happy girl, and no reason to run away, no reason to act out, or anything like that. From everything I can gather, she hung out only with good kids, was a good kid of herself. More importantly, no one had seen her. There wasn't much for investigators to grab hold of as far as Sharon's personal life

was concerned. But there were plenty of other things for them to look into because as soon as Sharon's disappearance hit the news, the tip floodgates were opened. There were many, so many suspicious car sightings. Now several of them weren't anything more than, I saw a vehicle I didn't recognize around the neighborhood earlier that day type of thing. Which it's not to say that any little piece of information isn't anything more than, I saw a vehicle I didn't recognize around the neighborhood earlier that day type of thing. Which it's not to say that any little piece of information isn't helpful, but this was a very residential area

right off a popular thoroughfare. So not some rural farm community where an unfamiliar car is the talk of the town. But along with those kind of tips, were more helpful leads that police could actually follow up on. Like one from a neighbor who said they'd seen Sharon walking with another girl from the neighborhood, and it looked like Sharon was going over to that girl's house. Police jumped on this tip, located the neighborhood girl, and searched her house from top to

bottom. But there was no sign of Sharon. That girl even said she didn't know who Sharon was. But no sooner did that fizzle than another tip captured investigators' attention. A classmate of Sharon's will call her Terry. She came forward and told police that she was sure she saw Sharon around 5.30 pm on September 28th. The exact time, almost to the minute, that Richard last saw Sharon on the way out the door. Terry said that she herself was at the intersection of Cornell and Philadelphia drives. About a quarter of a mile from the Pretoria's home, when she saw Sharon physically fighting with a man who was trying to force her into his car, this tip was huge for the investigation.

There was one thing that wasn't quite adding up. And that's the location. It's not far, but if you're going out to collect for your paper out, that's not the way you would go. To walk her route, Sharon would have left her house and gone immediately west, but the intersection of Cornell and Philadelphia was directly east. But police weren't going to let that dismantle their best lead yet. They could try and answer the why of the location

after they found Sharon right now. If this tip was true, they needed to focus on the who. And they did believe there was a who now, because this wasn't coming from just anyone. It was Sharon's classmate, someone who would have known her if she saw her. Well, at least that's what they thought at first. When investigators actually sat down with Terry to go over her story, that story started

to change just a little. Terry said, you know, I might have forgotten to mention something. I wasn't actually the one who saw this. It was my aunt. We're going to call that aunt Jennifer. Now to be fair to Terry, I'm sure she meant well with her initial tip, and she was right to come forward. But maybe she thought police would only take her seriously if it was a firsthand account, not secondhand.

So of course, once Terry divulged that little bit of information, police wanted to hear the story directly from the source. So they tracked down Jennifer. And she told police, yes, she'd seen a girl who looked like Sharon, just like her niece said. Jennifer said she was driving around with her friend when she witnessed the abduction.

The man had the girl's arm and was struggling with her right beside a blue 1965 Ford sedan. And Jennifer said she got a good look at the man. He was about 6 feet tall and in his maybe 30s or 40s, medium build, medium complexion wearing a brown waist-length jacket over a white t-shirt, Levi Blue jeans, a brown slim-brimmed hat, full beard, and he was all dirty. This was detailed. Now when asked why she didn't report it right away, Jennifer's answer was simple. She didn't realize she was observing what was possibly the last sighting of a missing

girl. She honestly thought she was watching a father fighting with his unruly daughter. Before totally committing to this being the narrative of Sharon's story, police wanted to be sure Sharon was actually the girl that Jennifer saw. So they showed her a pretoria's family photo, and Jennifer pointed right to Sharon saying that's the girl. But Detective Roderick's not sure that that identification is as promising as we might think.

You know that a 13-year-old girl has been abducted and you're showing the family photo. There's only one choice in that photo." The next step in vetting Jennifer's story was talking with the friend that she was with that day to see if he could corroborate what she saw. And to detective surprise, he said he could not. He didn't remember any of what Jennifer described. Now to be fair, Jennifer had let police know that her friend was intoxicated when all of this was going down, so depending on how drunk he was, maybe he really just did forget, or wasn't paying attention. But given the holes that could so easily be poked in Jennifer's story, police just couldn't

put all of their eggs in one basket. Though not wanting to completely discount her sighting, they did put out a description to the public to keep an eye out for the vehicle and the man. But there wasn't much else they could do. There wasn't a license plate number to follow up on or anything like that, so they had to move on. With each passing day, the community was becoming more antsy. Understandably, the idea of a kidnapper or worse walking around and targeting children

completely rocked the community. So everyone was doing what they could to help. Some people assisted in foot searches, others pooled together and put up a $1,000 reward. The journal Herald, the paper that Sharon delivered for, also put up a reward, and so did the high school where Mary Carol worked. And maybe it was all that reward money that led to some pretty wild tips and calls. Because around this time, DPD got a call from someone claiming he had Sharon. He didn't know her last name, but he knew people were looking for a girl named Sharon.

And he told the dispatcher that they could have her back if they gave him $1,000. Naturally, the dispatcher has tried to get a little more information like where this guy had Sharon, but he was being super shoddy about it all. All they could get from him was that he was in Zña, Ohio, but he wouldn't clarify exactly where within the city. When the dispatcher pushed further, he upped his price, do $100,000 and told her, quote, no cops, you can have her. I see any cops in Zña looking for her and I'll kill her, and that's a promise."

At first, police weren't sure what to do with this call, given that the caller provided no address to actually meet at. Also, I'm pretty sure detectives would have made note of the ransom money in consistency, like first he asked for a thousand dollars, then he's asking for a hundred thousand dollars, like that's a bit of a jump there. Now, Detective Rodrick said, it looks like there was no number to follow up with. So as far as he knows, they weren't able to contact the guy, nor did they hear from him again.

So, police eventually discounted the call as a prank. But it was red herrings like this that muddied the waters for investigators as they tried to sift through and find legitimate leads to pursue. And their search was made all the more urgent when they got word that the assailant might still be out on the streets terrorizing children. Police learned that four days after Sharon vanished, another area 13-year-old who will call Philip had a terrifying experience. Philip was on his way to school that morning when a man in a blue car who he didn't know

tried to force him into a vehicle. Thankfully, Philip eluded the man, but the following day, something perhaps even more bone-chilling happened to him. That very same man showed up at Philip's House and tried to assault him with a butcher knife. Now, detectives on Sharon's case today don't have many details about that particular incident. They don't know how the man knew where Philip lived or even if Philip actually got stabbed.

But they do know that Philip reported both events to police and officers ended up staking out Phillips House for a bit hoping to catch the man if he came back. But he never did. Philip was able to give police a partial license plate number, and investigators took that as far as they could. But ultimately, it ended up being a dead end. Of course, Dayton police were put into and two together. Young, teen victim, blue suspect car, that's a lot in common with Sharon's case

and the possible sighting from Jennifer. But with no way to track this man down, as more bit as it sounds, all they could do was wait for him to strike again, which as far as any official record say, it doesn't look like he did. The original officer on this did a very good job of detailing everything and following up and talking to people.

There was just not a lot of evidence. When you have somebody just picked up off the street, there's not a lot to go on. And back then, you don't have ring doorbell cameras or street cameras or anything like that that could help. Soon enough, things got quiet. Before anyone knew it, the weeks of silence faded into months and Sharon's case went cold. It would stay that way until 1976 when things started heating up again thanks to a tip. A man came forward and told police that he heard from someone that a local 13-year-old's

body was buried at a specific, recently demolished house about three miles away from the Pretoria's home. Now, according to the journal Herald, the tipster didn't specifically name Sharon, but everything he was saying matched up. So investigators assumed that's who the victim was. Now, of course, secondhand information is never ideal. But whoever this tipster was, they'd apparently proved reliable in the past, so a judge green-lighted a full-scale search of that property.

But that search was no easy task. They had to break through a concrete slab, then dig six feet under that. And after all that work, they didn't end up uncovering anything. Disappointing to say the least, but investigators couldn't help but wonder if their tipsur had maybe just told them the wrong house. Like second hand information is no better than a glorified game of telephone.

So maybe the rest of his tip was right and he just got that detail wrong. Before the time being, their hands were tied. And Sharon's case went back on the shelf waiting for the next tip to come along that would warrant a dust off. But that would take decades to happen. By the time the two thousands rolled around, the Pretorius family had just about given up hope that they'd ever see Sharon again. So in 2006, 33 years after her disappearance, they decided it was high time to properly mourn her death and commemorate her short but beautiful life.

They held a memorial service at a local church which drummed up some welcome and much needed media attention, which in turn must have opened up conversation in the community. But police wouldn't actually know about these conversations until 2011, when a woman contacted them to recount a conversation she had had five years prior. That lady said that back in 2006, a woman she knew told her that Sharon was buried on

the property of an old service station. And when the lady told police which service station she was referring to, their ears perked up. Because that station was literally just houses away from the property that they'd searched back in 1976. Now, the tips are said that the woman who gave her this information was now deceased, so getting additional info straight from the horse's mouth wasn't an option. And at this point, the service station and question had been demolished,

but detectives got permission from the property owner to search the lot. They pulled out the big guns, like brown penetrating radar, cadaver dogs, but to everyone's dismay they once again didn't find anything. Right around this time, investigators decided it was time to revisit their original informant from 1976, who was now imprisoned in Colorado. This was the person who sent them to that first house that they dug up. A detective went out there, and I'm honestly not sure what they were hoping to accomplish here. Maybe they wanted to just kind of like triple confirm his story, see if he remembered anything

new. But what they learned brought everything crashing down. The tipster said that the woman he initially got that information from. Are you ready for this? She had told him from the get-go that it was all a dream, a fact that he had neglected to mention however many other times he'd spoken to police in the past. Clearly, investigators couldn't trust this guy

as far as they could throw him. So they weren't even sure if he was telling the truth now. I mean, maybe he got spooked and was now lying about it all being a dream. So they tracked down the original woman, who was the source of the information, but then she confirmed it. All just a dream always had been. She said she told the tips to her back in the 70s just as much. Now, of course, investigators knew the woman could have been lying to, maybe she'd been scared into silence, but the detective who spoke with the woman felt she was being completely transparent.

And Belize concluded it was all just a silly dream that someone blew way out of proportion in hopes of getting some reward money. There was a lot of time and effort spent on that lead that led to nothing. The frustration police felt about wasted manpower was nothing compared to the letdown felt by the Pretorius family. At the time, Mary Carol wrote in a letter to friends and family, quote, �All this talk going around the community about a location gave me confidence that I could know where Sharon�s body was buried.

I have even driven a couple of friends over there to show them Sharon's burial location. I assumed all this community talk and police digs wouldn't be going on without some basis, but I didn't know the basis was a dream." With the biggest lead in the more than three decades old case now obliterated, police weren't sure where to go next. They checked some routine items off there to do lists like collecting DNA samples from Mary Carol and Richard to enter into databases in K Sharon's body ever turned up. But after that, the case went cold again. Little did Mary Carol

know she would never get to see it warm up again because sadly she passed away in 2021. But how happy she would be today to know that it wasn't the end of her daughter's story. Just last year, Dayton Police started once again actively working Sharon's case. Retired Detective Rodrick was asked to return to the department on a part-time basis to help out with the city's cold case unit, And that's when he was handed Sharon's case file. He spent the last few months scouring the pages and pages of 50 years of investigative info. And he's made a laundry list of things

that he wants to do in order to move the case along. And one of the main things that he's prioritizing is identifying similar cases that happened around the same time as Sharon's and in the same general area. Because to Rodric, if the perpetrator wasn't someone's Sharon knew, it had to be a serial offender. One of those cases he's looking into further is the still unsolved case of 13-year-old Linda Dirt

who was brutally murdered just outside of Dayton in 1973. Now, that was a little different house was broken into. She was raped and killed. Looking at pictures, though, of Sharon and Linda Dirt, long hair, ponytails, they kind of are similar Linda Durth, long hair ponytails that kind of are similar, and it was in the area at the time. The Durak case is being investigated by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, and Detective Roderick said they don't currently have their sights set on a suspect.

He also doesn't know yet if they have any usable suspect DNA or not, but he's going to work with the Sheriff's Office to get to the bottom of things. So I don't know if they would be related, but I'm looking for things like that that can be related. I want to look at solved cases from back then to see if somebody was arrested, that their MO would fit that kind of thing. As Detective Roger has been reviewing the case file, he's been piecing together his own theory, and homing in on the siding from Sharon's classmates' aunt, who saw her fighting with a man at the intersection of Cornell and Philadelphia. Again, that was the opposite direction Sharon was supposed to be walking for her newspaper

route, but Roderick honestly buys the account. What if she got picked up, almost right outside her home by this car and it was trying to bail out at Cornell Field Office? Because if it is a busier intersection and the car has to stop and you've been abducted, you might try to bail out at that point. Detective Roddrick isn't the only one with theories. Sharon siblings have also had 50 years to think about what happened to their sister. To David, what he can't shake is what he's always been told.

That Sharon never made it to the first house on her route to collect money, which he estimated would have taken 90 seconds to walk to. So he doesn't think it was some kind of crime of opportunity. For someone who have been driving down the road, a complete stranger happening upon Sharon walking on the road, and instantly making a decision, I'm going to stop the car, I'm going to kidnap that girl. Even if they had all those thoughts together quickly, it would have been very difficult to accomplish

if they were by themselves in the car. You know, that's a lot of planning. Planning that David thinks possibly involved stalking Sharon for an extended period of time. They would have seen her make that trip, you know, dozens of Fridays prior to that. And at the time, you collected weekly for the paper It's just standard protocol. So one conclusion that I have made is that someone was lying in weight It was premeditated that men were lying in weight for her and that you know they stepped out of a car and she was ambushed all of a sudden I suspect probably kept alive for a time to, you know,

it could be traffic to different homes in Dayton. Richard's theory echoes his brother, David's thoughts. I think it's probably likely she was abducted by folks in the local area. Very likely to, probably, three abductors involved. It's hard to see how one person would have been able to learn the car because he certainly wouldn't get into a car. And for one person, they're even pulling their car. She would have resisted that.

So I think she very likely was sexually assaulted, probably survived for two or three days, may have been done as a part of a gang initiation type of event. I suspect that there are still a number of people in the Dayton area that you have either director and direct information about what may have happened. If one of those people is you, now is the time to come forward. Or even if you don't have information about Sharon's case, you may be able to help detectives in another way. I don't know how many police officers you have listening to this,

but if there's detectives, older detectives that have worked, cases similar to this one, and they say, hey, I see a similarity here, that'd be somebody I'd love to talk to. So if you know anything about the disappearance and possible murder of 13-year-old Sharon Pretorius in September of 1973, or if you are a detective who's worked a similar case, please call the Dayton Police Department Cold Case Unit at 937-333-7109. Sharon was last seen wearing a long-sleeved yellow flowered shirt, blue jeans and white gym shoes. She was 5'7 and 140 pounds when she disappeared. She had brown hair that she often wore in pigtail braids and blue eyes.

She'd be 63 years old today. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit the DeckPodcast.com. So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve? visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa