If you have information about the murder of Kelly Camargo, call the Preble County Sheriff’s Office at (937)-456-6262.
Cold case investigators hope DNA evidence processed with new technology will help solve the murder of Hamilton teen Kelly Camargo, whose remains were found in Preble County in September 1993.
The Preble County Sheriff’s Department recently gave DNA evidence to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, or BCI, a division of the Ohio Attorney General’s Office.
“I won’t go into what the evidence was or anything like that,” Preble County Sheriff Mike Simpson said, “but in 22 years, technology changes. I mean it can change every five years with DNA with what science can do. So we’ve submitted evidence to BCI and we’ll see what we get back from there.”
Camargo, 16, was a week away from starting her junior year at Hamilton High School when she went missing Aug. 21, 1993. She told her mother she was headed to a teen pool hall in Fairfield, but the girls ended up in the parking lot of a now demolished bar called PJ Shooters in the 800 block of South Erie Highway in Hamilton. Camargo eventually got into a car with a man her friends didn’t know.
“It’s our understanding that she left there with some folks,” Preble County Sheriff’s Detective Dean Miller said. “Don’t know if she knew them or did not know them. Maybe she met them that night.”
Later that evening, the 16-year-old was seen at The Camden Bar on East Central Avenue in Camden. It was the last time she was seen alive.
Her mother, Donna Jones, reported Kelly missing the next morning.
“I know my daughter and I knew something was wrong. Definitely,” Jones said in an interview in her Oxford home. “I mean, I didn’t know she had passed, but I felt something was very wrong, like somebody holding her hostage. That’s what I thought.”
Thirteen days later a father and son out hiking found Camargo’s badly decomposed body in a wooded area of Sommers Twp. in Preble County, just north of the Butler County line. The location is just a few miles from the bar where she was last seen in Camden. The death was ruled a homicide.
“It’s not a place where you randomly just show up,” said retired Preble County Sheriff’s Detective Terry Snowden, the first investigator assigned to the murder case.
Whoever left the teen’s body beneath a pile of brush had to have been familiar with the area, Snowden said.
“When we first came back there, there was actually a gate,” he said. “And you had to physically get out and unlock the gate and go through that gate to get back here.”
Snowden has traveled as far as Seattle chasing leads in the Camargo murder case. Even in retirement, he works at it occasionally.
“This has always bugged me,” Snowden said. “This is one of the cases in my career I’ve wanted to wrap up the most. It is a solvable case. We just need one or two more little pieces.”
Miller said he knows there are local people who know what happened to Camargo.
“We believe there are local people who have information that might lead us closer to an indictment or a conviction on the case,” Miller said, “and we have local persons of interest that we think may have actually been involved in the homicide.”
Jones hopes that DNA evidence from BCI may give her the answers she has wanted for more than two decades.
“It would mean a lot to have closure,” she said. “Kelly was robbed of her life. I just want to know who killed my daughter and have justice.”
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