by James Renner
When the third trial began on April 27, Dever zeroed in on the blood found on the bedroom door and the step inside the garage. Forensic pathologists were called in to testify in detail about the blood evidence.
“Small means a lot,” says Dever, referring to the minute drops that were recovered. “It’s spatter. When the droplets are that small, it means it’s coming at high velocity.” According to pathologists, such droplets are the product of a severe beating that happened nearby, not of a typical household cut.
Krotine’s defense countered with a surprise of its own. Mel Twining, an I-X Center vendor who saw Ramona at the hotel party, testified he had stepped outside to smoke that night around 2:30 a.m. He noticed a man standing by a Toyota Camry while someone else struggled to set something in the back seat.
“Later, I thought maybe it could have been someone holding someone down in the back seat,” Twining says.
On the stand, Twining stunned jurors with another revelation. The day after the party, he attended a cookout at the house of Susan Ziegler, an acquaintance of Ramona’s from the I-X Center. While Twining was there, Ziegler had checked her voice mail; among the messages was one left at 6:45 a.m. that day—a female voice pleading “Help me” in a whisper, before the line went dead.
“It sounded like somebody dying,” Twining recalls. Ziegler had testified at the first two trials as well, but neglected to mention the phone call until she was asked about it in the third trial.
Twining says that prosecutors were aware of him for over a year, but that they had greeted his story with anger and told him that he could hurt their case. “If they treat all their witnesses like me, it’s no wonder no one testifies,” he says. “I went down there to do some good and got treated terrible.”
Krotine believes the prosecution hid Twining, as well as the phone call to Ziegler’s house, during the first two trials for fear that such evidence would diminish the case against him.
“That is absolutely incorrect,” counters Zimmerman, who says he gave Twining’s name to the defense before the first trial.
Some say that the turning point in the third trial came when the Krotines’ youngest son, Jason, took the stand. When he spoke of sleeping inside a hole half-filled with water during his stint in southern Iraq, his father broke down and cried. Then came the crucial question.
“If, for one minute, you thought your father brutalized your mother in that house, what would you do?” attorney Richard Drucker asked in a booming voice.
Jason stared calmly back. “He wouldn’t be here right now.”
On May 27, 2005, Krotine was acquitted.
* * *
It’s early June, 2005, and Jeffrey Krotine is sharing a booth near the back of the 100th Bomb Group restaurant on Brookpark Road with Mary Engel, the woman with whom he conducted a two-year affair. Engel e-mailed me during the third trial, after the Plain Dealer published some of her testimony. She was upset that the paper had laid bare her third-floor trysts with Krotine but hadn’t bothered spell her name correctly.
Slight of build, with a high voice and soulful eyes half-concealed under dark bangs, Engel edges in comments occasionally, but Krotine, who took over this conversation early on, shows no sign of letting up. She seems not to mind.
“During the trial, it felt like I was in slow motion and everything around me was sped up,” Krotine says between forkfuls of tuna. “After the trial, I feel like I’m in fast-forward and everyone else is in slow motion. I imagine it’s kind of like decompression. It’s a feeling of coming back into society.”
Toward the end of the third trial, prosecutors had offered to reduce the murder charge to manslaughter in exchange for a guilty plea. Krotine would only have served 3 to 10 years.
“The main reason I said no was I knew, if I took a plea deal, they would stop looking for my wife’s killer,” he says.
Krotine says he knows who murdered Ramona, thanks to the work of Chris Giannini, a private investigator hired by his lawyers for the second trial.
Witnesses say a man named Robert Cameron danced with Ramona Krotine the night she disappeared. A handyman who lived in Lakewood, Cameron was employed by Sam Mazzola during the I-X Center’s sports-and-outdoor show in March 2003. The two ran an exhibit that offered photographs taken with live bears and tigers. Mazzola says they attended the hotel party together at the end of the week.
As Mazzola left that night, he recalls, he offered Cameron a ride. It was late, and he knew that Cameron relied on public transportation. But he declined. The next day, Cameron showed up for work with long scratches on his head and hands, according to Mazzola.
Cameron said he was mugged at an RTA stop by “three niggers.” Mazzola suspected Cameron was lying. When Ramona’s body was found later that day, his suspicions escalated.
Giannini describes Cameron as an ex-con who is “deep for trouble.” He was busted for passing bad checks in 1991 and pleaded to felony theft in Lorain County in 1992. In 1997, his ex-wife filed for a restraining order, accusing him of domestic violence. At the time of Ramona’s murder, his house was in foreclosure.
Ray Boyle, who operated a fence-building company with Cameron in 2002, hasn’t seen him since then. Boyle says he ended their relationship after equipment and money went missing.
Cameron moved four times in 2003 before Giannini lost track of him.
“He’s a scumbag drifter,” Mazzola says. “He knew she was carrying $4,000 that night. He stole from friends of mine too. He knew everybody’s business.”
Mazzola and a friend were talking about Ramona’s murder a couple of months later, when Cameron joined the conversation. “He told me that he got a ride from the hotel to the RTA station from Ramona that night,” remembers Mazzola. “I looked at him and said, ‘You killed her, didn’t you?’ I told him I would go to police.”
Mazzola shared his story with Brook Park Detective William Lambert prior to the first trial. He was stunned by the response.
“He said he was going to charge me with perjury,” he claims. “He said he wanted blood samples to see if I was at the crime scene.” Detective Lambert and the Brook Park Police Department declined comment on Cameron and Mazzola.
Mazzola didn’t volunteer his help to either side in the three trials. “I finally got to the point where I said, ‘I don’t know Jeff. I don’t owe him anything. I can’t do this anymore,’ ” he says. “I was done with it.”
Krotine’s defense never called Cameron to testify. In a conversation with Giannini, Cameron denied that Ramona had given him a ride.
“We didn’t call him, because he wouldn’t help us,” says Michael Peterson, one of Krotine’s lawyers in the third trial.
According to prosecutors, no evidence directly linked Cameron to Ramona’s car. An arrest on an unrelated charge seemed to discredit Mazzola’s claim.
“We have a booking photo from a week later, when he got into a fight at an RTA station,” says Assistant Prosecutor Zimmerman. “There are no markings, no scratches on his head.” And it shows that it’s not out of Cameron’s character to go fisticuffs with people at bus stops.
Cameron sued Mazzola in 2004, claiming he had been injured by the hood of Mazzola’s truck while filling the oil tank but abruptly dropped the suit later that year.
“That was his way of getting back at me for going to police,” says Mazzola.
Reached at his home in Vermilion, Cameron referred all comment to his lawyer, Michael Duff. “He had absolutely nothing to do with this. The defense created this as a red herring, something to confuse the jury with,” Duff says.
To this day, Cameron has never explained why he never filed a police report if he really did get jumped at the RTA station the night Ramona died.
* * *
Krotine believes that Cameron killed his wife. But he insists the man was no more than a pawn—a hired gun in a sweeping conspiracy that implicates Krotine’s longtime employer as well as the prosecutors who tried to put him away.
Krotine mainta
ined a tense relationship with State Farm that went back at least to 1997, when, he says, local agents were asked to sign new contracts that would reduce their commissions on auto policies. Krotine was offered a substantial buyout, but with his long list of clients, he figured he would be better off not signing. He believes State Farm has had it in for him ever since.
His paranoia escalated in the fall of 2001, when one of his employees, Trese Huber, defected to another State Farm agency, taking many of her clients with her. The following year, Krotine lashed out, filing a $4.5-million civil suit against Huber and State Farm for violating its own noncompete clause.
At this point, Krotine’s theory veers sharply beyond mere legal squawking. Facing his lawsuit and still paying him the higher commission, State Farm figured it would be cheaper to hire a hit man and frame Krotine for Ramona’s murder, Krotine believes.
“The whole point was to take me out of the picture,” he says.
Not surprisingly, Krotine’s alleged co-conspirators are taken aback by his theory.
“That’s so patently ridiculous we don’t even want to comment on it,” State Farm spokesman Phil Supple wrote in an e-mail. (CEO Ed Rust Jr. declined comment.)
“He’s a sick man,” says Trese Huber, who still works for State Farm. “I don’t want to be in his path.”
“This guy has gone off the deep end,” Zimmerman says of Krotine. “The story is just so ridiculous, it demonstrates how desperate he is to point the finger at anyone else. He knows he did this, and it weighs on him every day.”
Krotine’s own lawyers cringe at the notion of a State Farm conspiracy. “I think he’s a good man at heart,” allows Michael Peterson. “He’s just bizarre.”
Krotine’s suit against State Farm was dismissed in 2004. He remains insured by the company. Though he has never owned a boat, Krotine joined the Edgewater Yacht Club in 2001, when he was still a wealthy State Farm agent. In 2005, he shelled out $4,000 from his savings to be reinstated. They took his money, but he doesn’t feel welcome. People talk behind his back, he says, trying to find a way to force him out.
But he takes solace in regaining a small piece of his old life: the wind drifting off Lake Erie, the view of the towers of Cleveland in the distance. And he’s returned to selling insurance, as well. “I don’t really know how to do anything else,” he says.
He still sees Mary Engel, although the two say they’re just friends. His children go on with their own lives apart from him, the relationship made more complicated by the lingering presence of the other woman.
“It seems like he’s made his choice. We asked him not to come around anymore,” says Jeff Jr. “This thing has totally ripped our family apart.” Jennifer and Jason Krotine deferred to their older brother for comment.
Technically, Ramona’s case is still open. But Brook Park Police say they already got their man.
“We stand by our investigation,” says Chief Kevin McQuaid. “The evidence pointed only one way.”
Another detective, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, puts it more bluntly: “What’s frustrating is, we know who did it, and now there’s nothing we can do. I hoped the family would sue him for wrongful death, but they just want to put it behind them. And I don’t blame them, I guess. The jury expected more. We got screwed by CSI. People expect concrete evidence linking a murderer to a crime, but that doesn’t usually happen like it does on TV.”
There’s one thing we can be certain of: Jeffrey Krotine is guilty of being a strange man. And that’s no crime. But because Brook Park police and Cuyahoga County prosecutors have been so vocal about their personal opinions of his culpability, he will likely serve out the remainder of life in a prison of sorts, anyway; a world where most people he meets remember his name and associate it with doubt and suspicion. Nine out of ten people who meet with him to set up an insurance policy walk out the door as soon as they realize who they’re dealing with, he says.
But Krotine does agree with police and prosecutors on one point. Somebody got away with murder.
* * *
Anyone with information related to the crime can contact Brook Park detectives at 216-433-1239.
Ramona and Jeff Krotine during happier times. (Jeff Krotine)
The Krotine family home in Brook Park. Police believed Ramona was murdered here. (Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office)
The killer shot Ramona while she was lying in the back of the car. A baby seat was taken out to make room for her body. It has never been found. (Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office)
Ramona’s body was found in the trunk of her car at a rapid transit station on Brookpark Road. The white shoe was a crucial piece of circumstantial evidence for prosecutors. (Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office)
After his wife’s murder, Krotine redecorated their bedroom and painted part of one wall. He pulled up carpeting and painted a small section of the floor, to cover a stain where he had spilled cognac, he said. (Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office)
Jeffery Krotine kept a 9 mm sidearm at work, the same type of weapon that killed his wife, but prosecutors could not prove it was the one that shot Ramona. (Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office)
Chapter 8
The Battle of Shaker Heights
The Unsolved Murder of Lisa Pruett
The young nurse became fascinated with the accused murderer during long shifts inside the mental ward. A hesitant friendship formed over games of chess, where he was the teacher and she was the student. But all that ended, according to her, with a confession of sorts.
This was in the fall of 1990. Anna (name changed to protect anonymity) had just graduated from Cleveland State University and was anxious to get a full-time job at a Northeast Ohio mental health facility to put her clinical psychology degree to use. She accepted a part-time position at Laurelwood, a prestigious hospital on the East Side where some of Cleveland’s more notable families seek help for their troubled loved ones. She worked in the stabilization unit, where the most violent and deranged clients were kept, the unit with the “rubber rooms.” Her job was to check patients’ vital signs, write reports on their mental status, and search rooms for sharp objects and other contraband. Administrators promised her she would soon be offered a full-time job, if things worked out.
And so Anna didn’t complain—at first—when managers assigned her an ever-changing array of shifts. There was no set schedule for her. On any given day, she might work morning, afternoon, or night. It wore on her. But it also gave her a unique perspective on the people staying at Laurelwood.
She noticed one young man who often wandered the halls, late at night. He seemed out of place. He didn’t take medication like the other patients. He didn’t wear a wrist band like the other patients. He didn’t participate in group therapy. All he really did was play chess.
“The first time I saw Kevin, he was cool as a cucumber, playing chess in a room full of completely out-of-hand people,” Anna told a Shaker Heights detective, in an interview two years later.
Tressler walked across the room to Kevin Young, the 18-year-old sitting in front of the chessboard, and asked him if he could teach her how to play. He was defensive, at first, almost paranoid. When he realized all she wanted was to learn the game, he calmed down, and began to teach her the basics.
Over the course of the next several days, Anna used chess as a means to communicate with Kevin, to get him to open up to her. Their conversations began innocently enough—what sort of CD player should I buy, Kevin?—but quickly led to more personal topics. He wanted to tell her about the pain he felt when he was rejected by girls at school. And, in return, she told him stories about her romantic relationships on the outside. He suggested they get together when he finally got out.
Then, one evening, she and Kevin and several other patients were watching the nightly news when the account of a local crime—the unsolved murder of Lisa Pruett—began. Kevin Young’s picture appeared on screen, as the named suspect in the teenager’s death. A couple of people in the roo
m gasped. Kevin got up and walked away.
She gave him a few minutes, then went to his room. He said he didn’t want to talk about it and asked her to leave.
Anna didn’t bring the subject up again. The next day, it was as if nothing had happened. Their games of chess resumed. And so did their increasingly personal banter. He wanted to know who she was dating and how it was going for her.
Towards the end of October, during another game of chess, according to Anna, he casually said to her, “They think I killed the little girl.”
Anna didn’t know how to respond. If he was talking about Lisa Pruett, who was 16 at the time of her murder, she thought it very odd of him to refer to her as a “little girl.”
As media attention on Lisa’s murder grew into a frenzy not seen in Cleveland since the Sam Sheppard case, Kevin became increasingly withdrawn and depressed. He mumbled to himself in Anna’s presence. “I didn’t mean to hurt the little girl, I didn’t mean to hurt the little girl,” he said, according to Anna.
One night, his percolating anger finally burst through. As Anna described it, Kevin stalked off from the common area and headed for his room in a huff. She didn’t know what had caused him to react that way. She followed him down the hall. “Well, maybe I did hurt the little girl, maybe I did do it,” she heard him say. Then, he punched the wall, hard.
“It was like he was a different person than he had been and it was a scary person,” Anna would tell police. “I think I never believed up to that point that he was capable of such violence, but that night that did it for me.”
That was the end of their friendship. A short time later, Anna quit her job at Laurelwood.
Like Tressler, many residents of Shaker Heights still believe Kevin Young killed Lisa Pruett, even though he has been acquitted of that crime.