Sunday, November 25, 2012
These cases in the Pittsburgh area did not have a happy ending but finding those missing persons might have brought closure to families.
As early as this July, people in the law enforcement community knew that the remains of Amanda Sue Myers of Pittsburgh had been identified through DNA comparison. However, it was only last week when Pittsburgh police finally released the news. In July, two separate sources told Patch that Amanda had been identified but that police wanted to hold off on releasing information until some interviews had been conducted. Amanda, who was 22 at the time of her death, was last seen in Pittsburgh at the end of 1999 but may have been in Florida and Tennessee as late as April 2000. She was not reported missing until 2007, according to the Pennsylvania Missing Persons website. Known unofficially as Homestead Jane Doe, Amanda was found deceased on Oct…
Sunday, November 18, 2012
The murder of the 30-year-old secretary from Penn Hills has never been solved.
Long Road in Penn Hills gets a fair amount of morning rush hour traffic—school and Port Authority buses, along with commuters leaving their homes and heading for their jobs in Pittsburgh. Weekday mornings, at the end of Long Road, cars often form a line waiting to make a left hand turn at the Churchill Valley Country Club onto Beulah Road. As they drive up the hill, they pass the Blackridge Civic Association clubhouse and then, at the top of the hill, intersect with the Parkway East or Penn Avenue toward Wilkinsburg. When Barbara Jean Lewis graduated from Penn Hills High School in 1964, she had her eye on a secretarial career. Her dream to enter the business world came true. She was a secretary at the downtown Pittsburgh offices of …
Saturday, October 20, 2012
In July 1979, Carol Jursik picked up some groceries on her way home from jogging but vanished just 10 houses from her front porch.
Life seemed like it was on the right path for Carol Jursik that July evening in 1979 as she jogged with a housemate. A nationally ranked college woman fencer and possible contender for the 1980 U.S. Olympic team, Carol, 24, was a Penn State graduate student working for the summer at the U.S. Steel Corp. in Monroeville through a cooperative job program. Carol and a friend, Michael Pierce, had jogged 15 miles together the night of July 30 before they separated at roughly 9:15 p.m. about one mile from the home, which had been converted into apartments, on Murrayhill Avenue (also spelled Murray Hill) in Squirrel Hill they shared with four other friends. Carol continued on to the Squirrel Hill Giant Eagle supermarket on Murray Avenue at …
Sunday, October 14, 2012
A woman's body was discovered in the river at Fox Chapel in 2003, but she has never been identified.
The Allegheny River is pretty in the fall—the colors of the leaves reflect off the water and when the sky is blue, it can look like a picture postcard. But sometimes all that's pretty from a distance isn't as beautiful up close and under the surface. Sometimes the Allegheny River carries litter, tree limbs and other debris from far upstream. A worker saw something in the middle of the river channel off Old Freeport Road, near the Fox Chapel Yacht Club in O'Hara Township, on Oct. 23, 2003 that at night looked like garbage. The next day, at approximately 10 a.m., the (debris) came closer to shore. At that point, a worker suspected that it might be a body and called 911. A woman's body, wrapped in a blue blanket and bound with duct tape, was …
Sunday, September 9, 2012
The Seneca Valley teacher was found shot to death in his home along Perry Highway in Lancaster Township on Nov. 24, 2010.
Steven Russo, 48, was a popular statistics and calculus teacher at Seneca Valley High School in Jackson Township, Butler County. Students liked his style, including that he used March Madness brackets to teach the statistical probability of winning. His students had even created a page called "I Love Mr. Russo and His Russo-isms" on Facebook. That Facebook page turned into a place where students poured out their sympathies and memories after Russo was found shot to death in his home along Perry Highway (Route 19) in Lancaster Township on Nov. 24, 2010. A neighbor told the Post-Gazette that Russo had returned from school for lunch the day before and discovered an intruder in the home. The person just ran out of the house, the neighbor said…
Monday, August 20, 2012
In 1991, the 28 year old returned from a date, went back out and was never seen again.
Terry Slaugenhoupt, 28, came home from a date to the East Liberty apartment in the vicinity of the 1400 block of North St. Clair Street that she shared with a roommate. There are two versions of what happened next. One is that she got a phone call and told her roommate she was going out again. The other is that she told the roommate she was going out to make a phone call. No one knows who the call was to or from and where she was headed—and two decades ago, tracking calls wasn't as easy as it is today. That was the last time Terry was seen and she was never heard from again. She would be 50 years old today. At the time of her disappearance, on Jan. 6, 1991, she was 5 feet, 2 inches tall, and weighed between 105-120 pounds. She had long, …
Saturday, August 11, 2012
The 1-year-old was last seen in the front yard of his West End home in 1986.
Little Jamie Martin Thornton was a little more than a month shy of his second birthday as he played in the front yard of his home in the West End of Pittsburgh on Oct. 4, 1986. But when his birthday arrived on Nov. 12 that year, Jamie, whose nickname was "J.T," wasn't there to celebrate it. Some reports say he disappeared in Chartiers Creek. There is very little information available on his case, other than the standard online listings on the Pennsylvania Missing Persons, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, NamUs and The Doe Network. He is considered one of the "endangered missing." Today, he would be 27 years old. In a March 7, 2011 story, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported Jamie's mother, Gloria Steffens of Overbrook, …
Sunday, July 15, 2012
The Clairton teenager was reportedly headed to a high school pep rally but she never made it there.
Football has always been a big deal in Clairton. Just last December, the Bears celebrated winning the team's third PIAA championship in a row, continuing a decades-old tradition of being a powerhouse team. As memorable as those games are for some, the one played on Nov. 6, 1981 is remembered by others—but not because of the sport. For them, the disappearance of ninth-grader Toni Lynn McNatt-Chiappetta the night before is what brings that game to mind. A petite 14 year old, Toni left her home on Van Kirk Street, just one block over the Clairton Bears' football stadium on Miller Avenue. Atop her white sweater and jeans, she was wearing a black jacket with orange-trimmed cuffs and waist. "Toni" was in white letters on the front and "Clairton …
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Was the death of this Churchill man in 1975 a case of mistaken identity or just a burglary gone bad?
In his split-level home on a quiet street in residential Churchill Borough, William Sockel was following his usual routine the night of Feb. 5, 1975. Methodically, Sockel would drive into his garage using an electronic opener, walk to the gameroom level of the home, place his heart medications and a cane used to help with a bout of arthritis on the stairs in the foyer area, and get water from the gameroom so he could take the pills. It appears that was what he'd done the night of his death. He had left a men's clothing store in Monroeville Mall about 7:45 p.m.—the last place he was reportedly seen alive—as snow started falling outside. Former Allegheny County homicide detective Capt. Robert Meinert told the Pittsburgh Press in a story …
Saturday, June 9, 2012
In 2007, a serial killer confessed to killing the Robinson Township teen, missing since 1977—and claimed her body is 'unrecoverable.'
Ranee Ann Gregor was just nine days away from turning "sweet 16" the evening of Oct 21, 1977 when she and boyfriend John Feeny left her residence on Clever Road in Robinson Township and were believed to be headed for a pizza parlor. They made it as far as a gas station, where they were last seen about 10 p.m. But they never made it home. The next morning, John, a 17-year-old who lived on Maple Street in Coraopolis, was found slumped over the armrest of the rear seat of his blood-splattered van. He had been shot once in the neck at close range with a shotgun. The vehicle, with its engine still running, was parked on a secluded dirt road known as a lovers' lane, off Crescent Drive near the airport in Findlay Township. Ranee, 15, a Montour …
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