Back to Bath
July 1991
The Western Reserve, as the northeastern corner of Ohio refers to itself, baked throughout the summer of 1991 under a blanket of searing heat. A merciless drought crippled agriculture and going outside became a paradoxical adventure, like living in a humid desert. On top of the grim forecast for the crops came the continuing drumbeat of bad economic news on the industrial front.
As the recession had tightened everyone’s pocketbooks, people had cut back sharply on purchasing new cars, throwing automobile sales into a
spin and dropping more tough times on area industries that supported the Detroit carmakers. That meant restructuring, a fancy name for lay-offs, as business executives sought to stave off disaster. The Akron Beacon-Journal published a business survey that proclaimed that about half of the seventy-six companies interviewed had lost money or seen earnings plunge in the previous year.
Over the years, a number of tire companies had been purchased by foreign ownership and only one major plant, Goodyear, remained headquartered in Akron. Firestone was under Japanese ownership, the Germans held General Tire, and many old factory buildings now sat empty and useless, their thousands of windows targets for boys with rocks.
A consumers’ group, known as Citizen Action, released a report based on findings of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, saying that Ohio rated second in the nation for producing chemicals that can cause birth defects, third in total toxic pollution, and fifth in turning out chemicals that can cause cancer. Summit County itself rated fourth in the state on the list of cancer causers and seventh on the chart of producers of chemicals that can cause birth defects. Unemployment benefits in Summit County soared to $17.2 million from January through May of 1991, some $2.1 million more than the previous year’s payout for the same period. And the state’s public, four-year colleges and universities learned that state
subsidies would be cut for the next year because of declining enrollment. That meant a $1 million hit for the University of Akron.
But Bath Township seemed almost impervious to the slide. The population actually grew from 8,150 in 1980 to 9,015 ten years later, as well-heeled workers from as far away as Cleveland discovered the serenity of this isolated community. Average home prices took a slight dip, but nobody worried about property values, even in the teeth of the recession.
The place had always gone against the tide, even back in the early days when it was owned by the Connecticut Land Company. Originally, in 1806, it had simply been called Town 3, Range 12 on the survey charts, but one of the surveyors took a look at the undulating, grassy land and decided the place should be called Wheatland. Then, in a change lost to history, the tiny settlement became known as Hammondsburgh, which was too much for Jonathan Hale, one of the first landowners. A town meeting argument terminated when Hale thundered, “Call it Jerusalem, Jericho or Bath—anything but Hammondsburgh.” So they called it Bath.
From the start, the factories were elsewhere and the homes were in the township. In neighboring Ghent, Yellow Creek provided the power for the early sawmills, distilleries, and flour and cotton mills. People rode over to work there, then rode back to their homes in Bath Township. Decades passed, but the pattern remained.
In 1991, as Bath Township sweated through the sultry dog days of summer, Jeffrey Dahmer, from his Milwaukee interrogation room, suddenly reminded everyone that he, too, once lived in Bath. For the first few days of his arrest for multiple murders, there had been talk, of course, about the local boy, mostly just the gossipy kind of interest. Local interest took a giant leap forward when Dahmer told detectives that his first victim had not been in Milwaukee, but right in the middle of tranquil little Bath Township, Ohio. He did not remember the name of the first man he had murdered.
Milwaukee authorities called their counterparts in Summit County and immediately Bath Police Lieutenant Richard Munsey and John Karabatsos, a Summit County sheriff’s detective, began searching back through their files for an unsolved case that matched Dahmer’s story. Karabatsos eventually came across a folder that was about an inch thick, one that had hardly been touched for a decade. It was a missing persons report filed on June 18, 1978. The name was Steven Mark Hicks.
With that name and a couple of thirteen-year-old photographs of Hicks, the two officers flew to Wisconsin for what turned out to be an extraordinary interview with the suspect, Dahmer. In three hours of talking over two days, the police were deluged with information about the crime. But actual identification hit a snag when they showed Dahmer a photo of Hicks. After being
given a negative response, the Ohio officers slid a second photo forward. Dahmer gazed at it for a moment and settled back into his chair, saying casually, “Oh yeah. That’s him.”
Karabatsos said Dahmer appeared to be fairly relaxed during the long interrogation, able to keep track of the questions and answers. It was not too unlike a business meeting. “I wasn’t grossed out or anything. Jeffrey is a very intelligent person. He had very excellent recall,” the sergeant would say.
That was proven out when Dahmer began to detail the crime, describing precisely how he had seen Hicks with his thumb out along the Cleve-Mass Road, how he had picked him up, taken him home, and killed him. Then more detail flowed, as Dahmer outlined the ordeal of trying to dispose of the body by burial and dismemberment and how he couldn’t make up his mind at the time how to get rid of the evidence.
Finally, Dahmer told the amazed officers how he had stood beneath the trees and turned in a circle, sowing the crushed bones out into the night more than a dozen years earlier. The police lieutenant and the sheriff’s sergeant pressed for more detail and Dahmer obligingly pulled a blank paper toward him and drew a map of his boyhood home in Bath County and of the property surrounding it. He pointed out the room where the murder had taken place, the crawl space where he had chopped up the body, and then drew an outline of where the bones could be found, out by
the old property line. To further authenticate his staggering claim, he described in detail the personal items Hicks had had with him. Once he started, Dahmer apparently could not stop divulging new pieces of evidence. He even recalled the name of the victim.
“He gave us information in reference to personal belongings that we didn’t even know about,” Summit County Sheriff David W. Troutman said. In a news conference, after talking to his man in Milwaukee, Bath Police Chief John Gardner, in an understatement, declared, “Potentially, we have a crime.”
Munsey and Karabatsos then flew back to Ohio to lay it out for their bosses and for county Prosecuting Attorney Lynn Slaby. They decided to move quickly.
As Bath police strung yellow tape around the grounds of the home and posted a guard to keep the curious away, Munsey was writing up an affidavit for a search warrant for the home at 4480 West Bath Road and two adjoining properties. It declared that the search of the grounds was necessary to corroborate a confession made by Dahmer, and that officers would be looking for “bones, or bone fragments, blood, trace evidence, including any body fluids, clothing remnants, trash bag remnants, identification evidence and jewelry of Steven Mark Hicks, or any other evidence relating to the murder of Steven Mark Hicks.” He submitted it to Judge Glenn B.
Morgan of the Summit County Court of Common Pleas, who immediately authorized the search.
It did not take long to get at least a partial result. William Berger, who had purchased the home in 1978 when Lionel Dahmer moved to nearby Granger Township, told officers that, while doing some yard work several years ago, he had come across a bone. He’d looked at it with only mild interest, figured it was part of some animal that had met its fate in nature’s scheme of things, and tossed it back onto the ground. He recalled where it landed and it was quickly hustled off to the office of Summit County Coroner William Cox, who was about to become a very busy man. The ball-shaped bone, about three inches in diameter, was first thought to be part of a human thighbone but actually turned out to be from a dog.
Then a man called police and told them he had done some landscaping work for the Dahmers before they had sold the house on West Bath Road, and that while raking the back area, he had found fragments of bones. He said he had called the unusual discovery to the attention of the family, but that after he’d put them in bags, he did not know what happened to them.
The grunt work began on Tuesday, July 30, as a squad of law enforcement officers and men from the office of Coroner Cox began the hard job of trying to locate the remains that Dahmer claimed were hidden there. They knew they were in trouble at the start, for the area that had been described
was so thick with undergrowth that in many places it was impossible to set a boot onto the rocky soil. Ropes of poison ivy curled through the undergrowth and the summer sun quickly made things insufferably hot, even in the shade.
But with shovels, makeshift sieves, gloves, and Ziploc bags, they went to work. The ground was measured off into a grid of squares by crisscrossed red ribbons and yellow ropes. If something was found, the place would be marked by a stake and the bone shard dropped into one of the plastic sacks. Before the first day was complete, some fifty bones were found in the woods, but investigators going through the house, which Berger had vacated, made several significant finds. In the dark crawl space beneath the house, officers sprayed a chemical called Luminol onto the dirt floor. When Luminol contacts a blood-stain, it begins to glow with an eerie, yellow-green hue. Not one, but a number of spots began to shimmer in the dirt, right where Jeffrey Dahmer said he had butchered Steven Hicks. A few bone shards were also discovered there in the dirt. Cox told a roadside news conference after the day’s grisly task was done that “The suspect’s admission that he dismembered a body in the crawl space is consistent with the amount of blood and bone fragments we found.”
They were back at it on Wednesday, with more men and more equipment. While they hacked weeds and sifted dirt, a media circus hit West
Bath Road, with more than fifty news reporters and television people swarming over anyone who even looked as if he might have something to say. Neighbors winced, but kept their cool. Leena Tripp, thirteen, and Stacy Staats, twelve, quickly began hawking sodas and coffee to the news herd at twenty-five cents a cup.
But the terrain remained tough as the surface search continued through six more grid squares. The major finds of the day were four human bones and three teeth, which could be matched to dental records for identification purposes. In an attempt to wrap up the search, more men were called in from adjoining municipalities for the final day of hunting on Thursday, and tactics changed when the platoon-sized unit got to work. Men using metal detectors swept over the soil, looking for metal fillings that might pinpoint a tooth. The howl of chain saws rent the quiet neighborhood’s silence as some men used heavy cutting tools to rip away the pesky undergrowth, saplings, and tangles of vines. “We’re in lawn enforcement today,” quipped one policeman, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into the greenery. Others dug six to ten inches into the dirt and dumped the loads into screens tacked to four wooden legs. They found a forensic treasure. Some fifty more bone fragments turned up, giving Cox enough material to begin his work trying to piece together the skeletal remains that were discovered.
He would use a combination of genetic DNA tests, dental records, and the help of experts at
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.—where they regularly rebuild dinosaurs millions of years old—to try to determine if the findings in the dirt on West Bath Road were indeed human and, if so, whether they once were part of a young man named Steven Mark Hicks.
Watching sadly from a distance was the Hicks family. Their son had vanished thirteen years ago and now the homecoming was turning out to be of the most disastrous sort.
And out of the blue, up spoke Art Swanson, a member of the Summit County Council. He said that the sheriff and the coroner were using the incident to try to boost their budgets for the coming fiscal year. “After they find some bones, they don’t have to find them all,” said Swanson, who for many years was the treasurer of Summit County and who portrays himself as the watch-dog of the public purse. No one seemed to agree with him, particularly since that very month the United States government was making extraordinary attempts to bring home the remains of men missing in action from the Vietnam War.
After the digging stopped and the minicams were gone, normalcy quickly settled back over Bath Township. Hot, expensive cars drove the secluded lanes again, shoppers could go out without being caught in a crowd, and men began wondering about the upcoming football season of the Revere Minutemen. But in the back of their minds, everyone knew that something had
changed in the community. Perhaps they were not as isolated as they thought they were.
“It’s not as if we are promoting ourselves as being apart from the world,” said Trustee J. T. Norman. “A lot of things go on here. The problems of the world are also the problems of Bath Township.”