If you have information about these murders, contact Montgomery County Sheriff’s Detective Brad Daugherty at 937-225-4072.
Four murders, just days apart, all in broad daylight.
Now, decades later, a cold case detective is taking a fresh look at the January 1973 murders of a young woman and three children just 12 days and 15 miles apart.
A gun and a newspaper ad links the two crime scenes.
“Forty-one years now that nobody has had to answer for these crimes,” said Detective Brad Daugherty of the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. “It pulls at your heart strings, especially in these particular cases. These children were brutally murdered.”
The victims
Daugherty is asking the public for help in solving the cold case — crimes that raised so much panic investigators made public pleas for “calmness and common sense.”
Jack Buck returned from a hunting trip on Jan. 13, 1973, to find his home at 2020 Arthur Ave. in Harrison Twp. surrounded by the flashing lights of police cruisers.
“I thought my little boy got hit,” Buck told the Dayton Daily News at the time. “I took off running for the house. They grabbed me on the way.”
Buck’s daughter Tracy, 6, and son Scott, 5, had been stabbed to death. His wife Gloria was beaten, stabbed and shot in the head. Detectives said Gloria had fought for her children’s’ lives. Her hands were covered with defensive wounds.
“It was very violent,” said Daugherty, who wasn’t born when the murders occurred. “It was definitely a scary person who could do something like this.”
The “scary person” would strike again 12 days later.
Robert Dearth, 17, and his sister Linda, 13, were at home on Jan. 25, 1973, because Northmont Schools were closed for the funeral of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Robert left the house for approximately two hours, returning before noon.
“He walked in and hollered her name and he still says to this day, that she tried to answer,” said his mother, Betty Odean Dearth. “He hard a noise come from her.”
Linda had been raped and shot three times in the head.
The investigation
Several months after Linda’s murder, detectives linked the crimes through firearm cartridge cases recovered from both houses.
“They were a match,” Daugherty said. “The gun used in both crimes appeared to be the same gun.”
That gun is believed to be a Ruger.22 that was stolen from a gun case in the Buck home.
There is yet another link.
“The Bucks were selling a television set and the Dearths were selling a car,” Daugherty said. “Both were listed in the Tradin’ Post back then.”
Jack Buck, who is now deceased, was quickly eliminated as a suspect along with Linda’s brother.
Detectives then focused on Patty Brown, a teenage babysitter for the Buck family, who was charged with the triple murder, and then exonerated after ballistic tests linked the Buck and Dearth cases.
Brown had been in custody when Linda was murdered.
‘We need closure’
The Dearths, Betty and husband Dwain, now live in Murrysville, Ga., but recently returned to Brookville to visit with family and friends, and — and Linda. She is buried at Arlington Cemetery, just a few miles from their former home on Diamond Mill Road.
The Dearths have pushed for some resolution to the case.
“I’m hoping somebody knows something and that they’ll come forward with it because we need it,” said Betty. “We need closure and I think Linda needs it too.”
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