The Serial Killer's Apprentice

by James Renner

  “In 1989, I thought that was the killer’s face as he looked, then,” said Sylvia, as if picking the thought out of my mind. “But I came to understand that this is the face of the killer, as he will look when he is finally caught. It’s the face of the killer as he looks, today.”

  But he didn’t look like anyone I had met.

  Was it the face of the Jabberwocky? Whoever it is, he has had cameos in my nightmares ever since.

  * * *

  If there was a nemesis in my search for answers in Amy’s case, it was a woman named Karen Emery, the wife of the Ashland County coroner.

  The details of Amy’s autopsy were never made public after her murder. William Emery, the coroner in charge of it, went to great lengths to hide it from the media. He went so far as to wait an entire year after Amy’s body was found in his jurisdiction before completing her official death certificate, which, he knew, would be available to reporters at the county’s bureau of vital statistics.

  Although his wife is not on the county payroll, Karen answers phones at the coroner’s office inside the new Justice Center. Due to state nepotism laws, she must remain an unpaid employee. However, there’s no doubt she is in charge in Ashland County. She refused to give me access, she said, because “I don’t trust reporters.”

  At the time the book was published, Karen and Ashland County Prosecutor Ramona Rogers had me caught in a macabre Catch-22. They could not release the autopsy report, they said, because the documents did not exist inside Ashland County. In fact, it was the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office that had conducted Amy’s autopsy in 1990, because Ashland didn’t have the proper facilities and manpower to handle it. So, the records have always been kept in Cuyahoga County. But then–Cuyahoga County coroner Dr. Elizabeth Balraj could not release the records to me without the permission of William Emery. And Mr. Emery would not grant his permission.

  I contacted the ACLU, the attorney general’s office, the state’s coroners association, and finally Terry Gilbert, the attorney who represented Sam Sheppard’s son in the most recent trial. Threatening letters were sent, but the Emerys didn’t blink. Karen retaliated by demanding that the Ashland University bookstore take down a display of my book. I figured that I would just have to wait until Mr. Emery retired or finally keeled over and try again with the next coroner. I’m a young man, after all. And he is very old.

  Then, one afternoon, my wife Julie came home from school. She teaches high school choir in Akron. As usual, she went through the events of her day—which students were making progress, which students were being royal pains in the ass, etc. One of her students was working on logic puzzles. Mind teasers. And one of these puzzles lodged itself in my brain like a viral worm and kept repeating and repeating for hours. It was the one about the goat and the cabbage and the wolf and the boat.

  So there’s this goat and a cabbage and a wolf and a boat. And what you have to do is figure out a way to get each of the items onto the boat and across the pond to an island, without the wolf eating the goat or the goat eating the cabbage. The trick is, you can only keep one item in the boat at a time. The solution, like all good mind teasers, is elegantly simple—you take the goat to the island, then come back for the cabbage, then return to the island and drop off the cabbage, where you place the goat back in the boat, row to the mainland again, drop off the goat, pick up the wolf, take the wolf to the island, then return, at last, for the goat.

  Thinking of this puzzle, it dawned on me how I might get my hands on Amy’s autopsy report.

  I called Dr. Balraj. “Can you make a copy of the entire autopsy report?” I asked. “Everything you have related to Amy’s case, actually.”

  “Mr. Renner, I cannot release that information to you without Emery’s approval,” she said.

  “The copies aren’t for me,” I explained. “I want you to copy the report, then send it to Emery in Ashland County.”

  Dr. Balraj agreed to do me this favor. And as soon as I knew the documents were in Ashland County, I requested them again. This time, they were forced to let me see the report.

  “No pens, no pencils, no paper, no recording devices of any kind, and we won’t copy anything for you,” Karen told me before letting me inside the coroner’s office. “You can sit next to me and read it.”

  An old Chinese curse came to mind as I opened the file: Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.

  I wish I could unsee the photographs of the crime scene. I’d rather remember Amy as the bright-eyed girl in that school picture. I’ll not go into detail. However, there are some definitive answers in the autopsy report that are worth noting:

  Amy’s body was in the field for a long time before it was discovered by that morning jogger. A little seedling had actually grown through her pants leg.

  There is evidence suggesting Amy was murdered at a separate location and her body stored there for a short period of time before being moved to the field. A day or two. A week at most. Wherever it was, her body had been kept relatively cool and away from insects. It could have been stored in a cabin or a garage or a trunk.

  The material in her stomach was never identified. Contrary to rumor, it could have been what she had for lunch that Friday. Or it could have been a meal the killer fed to her after her abduction. It looks like it could have been pizza, actually, which was on the school menu the afternoon she was taken, so I, personally, lean toward that answer. And if it is school pizza, then she must have been killed shortly after being abducted, since it was not fully digested.

  There is evidence of a sexual assault.

  Amy’s underwear was inside-out, which suggests the killer may have redressed her after she was dead.

  There is a distinct possibility that DNA evidence was collected from Amy’s body.

  Her nails were damaged, perhaps as she fought against her attacker. I’d like to think she got a few good licks in, at least.

  When I was through, I put the file back on Karen’s desk and turned to leave.

  “Wait,” she said.

  What now?

  “Will you sign my book?” she asked.

  I smiled. “Can I borrow a pen?”

  * * *

  Factual accounts have a half-life. They degrade into myth, rumor, and legend over time, especially in high-profile cases like this. The more time separates a reporter from an event, the more difficult it is for us to sift through the junk for the few grains of truth that still remain untold.

  One of the rumors that kept resurfacing during my research was: “the man who abducted Amy called a bunch of girls in North Olmsted, too.” These girls, if they really existed, have never been named. They have never talked to reporters. I couldn’t think of any way to verify this claim while writing the book. But as soon as the book was published, they contacted me.

  So far, I’ve heard from eight young women who claim to have been called by Amy’s killer, in 1989, when they were 10 or 11 years old. Of those, four can be chalked up to other perverts who used phone lines to get off in the age before Internet chat rooms. Of the four that remain, three lived in North Olmsted. One lived in Bay Village.

  One of the women from North Olmsted, “Ms. C,” told me the man had called her at home and asked her to meet him around the corner from her house so she could go with him to the store to buy a present for her mom. She was heading out the door when a neighbor stopped her and asked where she was going. Luckily, the neighbor kept the girl home, sensing something was amiss, and alerted her parents. A week later, Amy was taken.

  The police and FBI know about these girls. After Amy vanished, their parents (and the parents of a half dozen other girls) were given directions to a building in Bay Village (perhaps the community center, behind the town hall) where they met one evening to talk about the case, in secret. There, detectives and special agents interviewed the girls to determine how they were all connected. The killer must have known them all. He knew when the girls were home alone and he knew their telephone numbers—in at least o
ne case, the number was unlisted.

  There are a few ways in which these girls’ lives overlapped with Amy’s. Many of them took horse riding lessons at area stables, including Holly Hill, Senoj Stables, and Blueridge Stables. One girl even had the same female instructor as Amy. They all visited flea markets in the fall of 1989. And they all visited Lake Erie Nature and Science Center. The nature center is on Wolf Road, in Bay Village. Amy went there all the time. (I donated 10% of what I earned off the book to the center, in her memory). Children visiting the nature center often signed their names and phone numbers on a ledger of guests that the museum kept displayed in the main hallway. A leading theory is that Amy and the girls from North Olmsted put their personal information onto this ledger, and the kidnapper copied it onto a separate piece of paper to use later.

  Around Saint Patrick’s Day, 2005, several of these women received a phone call from an FBI agent who worked on the case. One woman’s parents were awakened by a phone call in their cabin on a cruise ship in the middle of the Caribbean. The caller wanted to confirm that they had all visited the nature center. It seemed that an arrest was imminent. But, for reasons that still remain unclear, an arrest was never made.

  One of the young women called me directly after she read my book. “There’s a name in here that is familiar to me,” said “Ms. J.” “It’s the last name of Amy’s riding instructor. It’s such an uncommon last name, but there was a man who taught math at North Olmsted who had the same name. I wonder if they’re related.”

  I checked it out. Sure enough, the math teacher is the brother of Amy’s riding instructor. And he sometimes visited his sister at the horse stables. He was never questioned by investigators in 1989.

  I immediately turned that lead over to Bay Village and the FBI. It was a name they had not had before. But I’ve heard nothing more on the subject.

  These women still wonder who the man was, and how close they came to ending up like Amy.

  * * *

  The most common question I’m asked, of course, is: “Who do you think did it?”

  I don’t know. What’s frustrating is the number of men who had the opportunity to commit this crime.

  The FBI has a “Top 25” list. In December 2006, Bay Village police asked about six men to give DNA samples. All but one complied. In my opinion, Amy’s killer is probably one of the following five men.

  The Accountant

  Another rumor surrounding the case is that “an accountant is involved.”

  In 1989, a Cleveland police officer who worked sex crimes was given a tip by a prostitute-informant. The woman said that just before Amy was abducted, she had been contacted by one of her regular johns, who had asked her to find him a 10- or 11-year-old girl. He wanted to wrap her in plastic and defecate on her. Cleveland police detectives followed him for weeks—he lived in a house on the west side with his mother and worked in the city as an accountant for a large firm. Before work, he often stopped by area middle schools and watched the girls walking to class.

  After the composite sketch was released to the public, the Accountant cut his hair very short. Sometimes, the detectives would sit next to him at McDonald’s and watch him methodically eat his fries one by one, wiping the grease off his hands after each bite.

  They noticed that the Accountant kept his attic window open, odd behavior for such an anal man, especially in the middle of winter. They wondered if Amy’s body was being kept there, the window left open for ventilation. It was enough for a search warrant. But, to the detectives’ chagrin, the lead FBI agent assigned to the case refused to execute the warrant.

  We’ll never know what the Accountant was keeping in his attic—a fire destroyed the house some years later. The cause of the fire was determined to be “arson.” The Accountant blamed local kids. After Amy’s body was found, the Accountant went to Amy’s funeral service and gave Amy’s mother an envelope with $1,000 inside. “In my gut, I’ve always believed it was him,” says one retired detective, on the condition of anonymity.

  The Boarder

  A man with a shady past boarded his horse at Holly Hill, where Amy took lessons. He had a prior conviction for statutory rape in the state of Washington and was busted for fleeing the state and moving to Ohio, in 1989. His father worked at the courthouse here, and whether that had anything to do with it, he got off lightly, for a fugitive. For a while he a drove truck, but he retired on disability a few years ago. Girls at Holly Hill and Senoj Stables, where he moved his horse, recall the Boarder as a pervert who liked to tickle little girls. One girl, now a grown woman, claims he once drove her to Ashland County when she was a young teen. He promised to let her ride a horse down there, but the girl made him turn around after he tried to kiss her. He denies this event took place. Another woman, who knew him at Senoj, says that she once bumped into him in line at the grocery store. She had to use her driver’s license to write a check and feels he must have memorized her address to look up in a cross-reference directory later, because that night he started calling her on the phone, asking her to meet him, even though she had never given him her number.

  The Teacher

  The brother of Amy’s riding instructor is the one man who knew each of the girls from North Olmsted who received creepy calls in October 1989. He retired in 2006 and currently lives in Rocky River. He has no prior criminal record that I could find. But his self-evaluations contained inside his file at the school where he taught gave me goosebumps. In 1987, he told his principal that he was going to copy his students’ personal information onto note cards that he could take home with him, explaining that this would allow him to reach their parents on a more regular basis.

  * * *

  The Artist

  I met with the Artist in February of 2008, after learning of his identity via an anonymous e-mail. He lives on the West Side, off Lorain Avenue, and agreed to meet me at a coffee shop around the corner from his house. I was struck by his uncanny resemblance to the composite sketch of Amy’s abductor. He must have noticed it, too, because he once took a poster of Amy’s killer, punched out the eyeballs, and wore it as a mask to work. In 1989, the Artist was employed by the Metroparks, but prior to that he taught art classes at Emerson Middle School in Lakewood and Bay Village High School. He readily admits that when he was a teacher he invited female students back to his place, but he maintains this only happened “after they graduated.” In the fall of 1989, he worked on a couple of small projects at the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center. He also bowled regularly in the Bay Square bowling alley. He probably crossed paths with Amy during that time, though he says they never met. A check of his personnel records at the Metroparks shows he did not show up for work the day Amy was abducted, even though he was scheduled to. When questioned by the FBI in 1989, he told them that he couldn’t remember what he had done that day. When we met, the Artist wanted to show me a collage of pictures he had constructed from photos of a twenty-something Internet stripper he had befriended. Among the photos was the image of a prepubescent girl, whom he identified as his niece. I told him I thought it was strange that he lived so close to where Amanda Berry and Gina DeJesus were abducted. “You know what’s strange?” he said. “I knew Amanda Berry.” He said that Mandy’s best friend was his neighbor and that they had come to his house one day to “party.” But the friend, when contacted by the FBI, denied she knew Amanda Berry. He later claimed that he wasn’t really sure that it was the missing girl who had been in his house.

  The Shaggy-Haired Man

  The Shaggy-Haired Man hits the trifecta of circumstantial links to the abduction/murder of Amy Mihaljevic: he volunteered at the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center in 1989, he lived at his parents’ house in New London (less than five minutes from where her body was found), and he strongly resembles the composite sketch of Amy’s abductor. The Shaggy-Haired Man was once a teacher in the Amherst/Vermilion area. Several students I’ve spoken to say he occasionally took them back to his room, or out to eat, though all say nothing se
xual took place when they were alone. Though he was a teacher throughout the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, there is a period of two years between 1987 and 1989 when he simply disappeared. The story he told co-workers was that he had contracted a rare blood disease and believed he was going to die. He told friends he spent that time traveling the world. In 1989, he returned to Lorain County and resumed teaching until investigators, acting on a fresh tip, began questioning his relatives in 2003. At that time, the Shaggy-Haired Man abruptly quit his job and moved out of state.

  * * *

  Authorities are still offering a $25,000 reward to the person who can solve this case. Anyone with information should contact the Bay Village Police Department at 440-871-1234 or the Cleveland FBI office at 216-522-1400. I will continue to update this case at www.amymihaljevic.blogspot.com, and you can reach me, directly, at jamesrenner@grayco.com

  Amy is best known for the single ponytail she wore in her last class picture, but she usually wore her hair down, as in this earlier photograph. (Mark Mihaljevic)

  Amy Mihaljevic’s fifth-grade class photo became an iconic reminder of her mysterious abduction.

  Amy’s parents, Margaret and Mark Mihaljevic, appeared on many TV programs, pleading for the kidnapper to return their daughter. (The Morning Journal)

  Amy’s body was found 10 feet from the road on CR 1181 in a desolate corner of Ashland County. The FBI believes the killer was familiar with this location. (The Ashland Times Gazette)

  Volunteers distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of Amy’s missing poster with these illustrations in November and December 1989. The poster generated leads from as far away as Australia.