(dramatic music) - 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
gonna 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. (dramatic music) (wind blowing) Good boy. Oh, what a good dog you are. He has the most
beautiful blue eyes. I probably should
have named him, Paul, after Paul Newman or
Frank, after Frank Sinatra. He has been licensed as
an emotional therapy dog. He helps me when I
talk about my sister. He will put one paw
here and one paw here and let me just cry
on his shoulder. (ambient music) I've told this
story so many times, it never seems to get easier. (gentle piano music) (eerie music) (school bell rings) I was in eighth grade at East
Moore Junior High School, and Lori was a sophomore. I was 13, she was 15. I'm the bratty, little sister. (calm music) It was a Friday night. Everybody went to
the football game. Lori went to a couple
people's parties after the football game. She was supposed to spend the
night with one of her friends. - [Bill] By 11,
the next morning, Lori still hasn't come home. (eerie dramatic music) - Lori Nesson's mother started
to make some phone calls to friends to see if
anybody had seen Lori or if she had spent
the night somewhere. - They said no. The last that they had heard is, Lori was just gonna go home. She's gonna walk home. It was 1974. We walked places. - And then she contacted the
Columbus Police Department to file a missing
person's report. - My mother was scared to death, but she would not
portray that to me because she did not
want to scare me. (dramatic music) - [Bill] Toni and
Lori's mother, Joyce, is raising her two
girls on her own. - My parents divorced. I'm not sure what year. I was really little. I wanna say, maybe five. - [Bill] Lori didn't
let her parents' divorce stand in her way. She was focused and
determined 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. - I just wanna warn
the American people just as clearly as I can,
don't buy this Nixon lie. - So she would've been 12. I mean, wrap your
head around that, 12 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. (gentle piano music) Lori would never disappear. She might come
home a little late, but never ever
would she disappear. (gentle piano music) - [Bill] Lori had been
missing for just a few hours when a call comes into a police
department in a nearby town. - A husband and wife were
hunting for hedge apples, and they see deceased,
a young female laying in a ditch. (dramatic music) - 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 the investigators
after the fact to believe that whatever happened
to the young woman happened somewhere else and then she was left
there on Rose Hill Road. (ambient music) (clock ticking) - [Bill] The coroner
takes the Jane Doe's body to the morgue. The story hits the
local news that night. (gentle piano music) - 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. - [Bill] Police ask Joyce
Nesson to come to the morgue to identify her daughter's body. - 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, she's gone, she died." (somber music) I didn't understand. One minute she was there the
next minute she was gone. (gentle piano music) (ominous music) - The autopsy was
conducted the next day. It was determined
that she did have some kind of sexual
relation with somebody, but it was not ruled
that she was raped. (ominous music) 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
happened to be driving by saw Lori walking. - [Bill] Lori lives just
a few minutes walk away from the party she'd gone to. Lori's body was found
miles away from her home. Investigators believe she'd
accepted a ride from someone. (ominous music) - 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. (ominous music) - This nice little
Jewish group of kids now started looking
at each other like, "Well, who did she
get in the car with?" (dramatic music) (dramatic music) - We've never talked
about Lori, ever. It was too painful for my mom. I truly 100%
believe that if Lori would've been an only child, I do not believe my mom
would have survived it. She had me. So she still had to go on. (piano music) - [Bill] Lori's murder
dominates the local news. And that leads to tips. One of those tips stands
out above the rest. - They receive a call from
a woman named Donna Up who worked at Mount
Carmel East 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. So they did focus on
people that had access to the 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,
who was around 16, he hosted the after party
at his parents' house that she first went to
after the football game. (dramatic music) - He was in their 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 timeframe 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. (dramatic music) - 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
her jeans were found. The clothing was located
approximately three miles from where Lori's
body was found. - [Bill] 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. Someone's driving and then someone's in the
passenger's side from where the clothing
went out the window. (piano music) - Earlier in the investigation, the investigators came
across information that Lori's mom had filed a
report back in August of 1973. - [Bill] According
to the report, Lori, who was 14 at the
time, was leaving school, but a man tried to
lure her into his car. She escaped, ran home and
told her mother what happened. (dramatic music) - An officer puts two and
two together and says, I think I know who this is, 'cause 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 if Lori was fighting
for her life. - And they decided, hey, we should probably
talk to this guy. He's very, non-committal
on his whereabouts around the timeframe
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. (tense music) (dramatic piano music) - Eugene Guay absolutely
denied being involved with Lori's death. (dramatic music) They offered him a polygraph
and he agreed to that. (piano music) - The investigators
receive a phone message from the attorney that now
represents Eugene Guay, 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 Nesson, and they don't come
up with any evidence. Once he retains an attorney, there really isn't anything
left for them to do. (piano music) - The toxicology results
came back from Lori's autopsy and there was no drugs or
no alcohol in her blood. - Once they received the
final coroner's report, it's not ruled as a homicide, it's ruled as a 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. - [Bill] The
accidental death ruling means the end of
the investigation. Lori's case goes as cold
as Ohio's icy winter winds. (dramatic music) Her family tries to
pick up the pieces. Joyce wants to make sure
Toni can lead a normal life. (ominous music) - 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. (calm music) My mom was always a very,
very vivacious person that loved to 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 gotta be some kind of answer somewhere, but I didn't know where
to go or how to get it. (calm guitar music) - I came across the
case August of 2019 while looking through
the file room. What piqued my curiosity
is the death certificate did not list a manner
of death as homicide, it was listed as undetermined. - [Bill] Though he's
not a detective, Patrol Officer Craig Brafford 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. - [Bill] Officer
Brafford gets permission from the deputy chief
to investigate the case on his own time. He gathers the case files and
pores over the autopsy photos. - There were some injuries
that were not listed, some trauma may have
been behind her left ear, but my "a-ha" 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. (gentle piano music) - 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 Brafford. (piano music) - I contacted Toni. 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 wanna
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. - [Bill] Before Brafford
can move forward, he has to convince the
coroner that Lori's death wasn't accidental and
that 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. - [Bill] In
September of of 2020, after five months
of deliberation, the coroner's office comes
back with a decision. - The manner of death
had been overturned 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. And I mean, just look at my... Can you see my hand? Just thinking about that. - 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 a Eugene Guay, and a friend
of Lori's, Scott Richard had both passed away
several years ago. - [Bill] Detectives hope
new forensic technology will give them a solid lead. They submit Lori's
clothing to the crime lab for DNA testing. - 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. - [Bill] Suspects
from 1975 have died. That combined with
the global pandemic slows the case to a crawl. - Here it is November,
and I got nothing. (piano music) 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. - Toni 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. (dramatic piano music) - I get a phone call
from my cousin, Jean. She says, "Have you
seen this story on TV about Lori Nesson?" I said, "No, I haven't." And she said, "Well, this
sounds just like Karen." So she called the
police department. (dramatic music) - [Bill] 17 Year old, Karen
Adams had been murdered just six months after
Lori, back in 1975. - And if you were to
draw a straight line between the locations of both of those victims, it's probably only two and a half miles at best. We felt very strongly that
there might be a connection between these two crimes. (dramatic music) (dramatic piano music) - A detective from the
Reynoldsburg Police Department contacted me in reference
to a cold case homicide that I solved back in 2011. It was the Karen Adams case. (dramatic music) - [Bill] At the
time of her murder, Karen Adams lived just 10
minutes from Lori Nesson. The night she was killed, 17 year old Karen
told her parents she was going out
for about 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 she was gonna go get
it, 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've never
left that car. Never. - [Bill] Just a
few months earlier, Karen finally saved
enough from waitressing to buy the 1965 Mercury
Comet, her first car. - 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. That's the only memory
that I kind of keep, me and her riding
around that car. (dramatic music) Karen was the third
of five children, four girls, one boy. I'm the oldest. She's special to our family. Had a great sense of humor. She was looking so much
forward to her future. (gentle piano music) - 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 outta 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. (gentle music) - [Bill] Cold case
detective, Chuck Clark is searching the database for
an inactive case to take on. What he finds, Karen Adams file. - Her case seemed to have one
of the highest probabilities of being solved, mainly because DNA
had come around. - [Bill] A 2010 forensic
test on Karen's clothes reveals the DNA profiles
of two unknown males. - They put him 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. - [Bill] Meyer had been arrested
and convicted for 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 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 my door, they said they had a
DNA hit with CODIS. And soon as they get
the evidence confirmed, they were gonna arrest him. It all came back like a flood. The same 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. (dramatic music) One. (tense music) I got an address
off the website, I went down to see him. I took my gun and I knocked on his order.
(dramatic music) (dramatic piano music) - 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 gonna blow up. I stood within two feet of him and I didn't see his face,
I seen my mother's face. (dramatic music) 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. (piano music) - As soon as we got
the confirmation DNA, I had Mr. Meyer transported to the Cincinnati
Police Department to a detective bureau where
I conducted an interview. - I got the feeling that he
actually didn't remember. I think it would've
been possible, who knows how many other crimes
he committed against women? - He arrested him, he
pleads guilty to murder. He was convicted, sentenced,
25 years and life. He died four years later. - [Bill] Meyer's arrest and
death bring 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 three years later, so we didn't have the
opportunity to get his DNA. (dramatic music) - [Bill] Four years
later in March of 2016, Detective Clark tracks down
Charles Weber's biological son, and using familial
DNA, confirms 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. (gentle music) - We received calls with
people saying that a news story about the death of Lori Nesson, and it sounded very similar
to the death of Karen Adams. (dramatic music) I contacted Devonie
Herdeman at the DNA lab. She was actually familiar
with the Karen Adams case because she had done
the DNA analysis on it. - So I'd started
comparing Karen's profile from her underwear to the
profile from Lori's jeans. They were identical. (tense music) And not only did we get
one foreign individual, but the same two
foreign individuals that did this to Lori. I screamed, I
screamed at my desk. - [Bill] The DNA
match and the stories from Weber and Meyer's
surviving victims lead to a theory
about what happened the night Lori
Nesson 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 jump out and
would grab 'em. - I think they forced
her into the vehicle. They sexually assaulted her and then decided
that killing her was the best way of
concealing their crime. - [Bill] Convinced that Weber
and Meyer's 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? (somber piano music) 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. (somber piano music) 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. (somber piano music) - Me and Toni Nesson 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. (somber piano music) And 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. (somber music) - 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. (somber music)
