While a person of interest was named Thursday in Johnson’s murder, the case, like Gwinner’s and a dozen other homicide cases throughout Butler County, remain opened and unsolved.
The mystery behind Gwinner’s death eats away at one former Butler County sheriff’s deputy.
“(Gwinner) was an absolutely beautiful girl who had her whole life ahead of her,” said Frank Smith a retired detective with the Butler County Sheriff’s Office. “She was 23-year-old and someone who still walks among us today killed her.”
Smith headed the cold case division of the sheriff’s office for 20 years, before retiring earlier this year. Smith’s steel trap memory can recall the dozen or so unsolved murders that the Butler County Sheriff’s office continues to investigate.
“You have to really ingest the case, you have to live it just like the victim is a family member,” Smith said. “We put these people away so all of us could be safe. Everyone we actually put away was a serial killer. Brutal, sadistic individuals that you deal with in this kind of thing.”
In the early morning hours of December 10, 1997, Gwinner disappeared while walking from Gilmore Lanes to her boyfriend’s house in Fairfield. Her body was recovered a month later in the Ohio River. The coroner could not determine a cause of death, but ruled she had died before being put into the river. Gwinner’s car, a 1993 black Honda Del Sol has never been recovered. Smith can recite the license plate and still looks for the numbers anytime he sees the make and model on the road.
Johnson’s body was discovered on Monday, April 18. The 15-year-old girl had been stabbed to death and left in a wooded area near a creek bed less than two miles from her Fairfield home. She was last seen on April 17, dressed in black shorts, a red tie-dye shirt and black flip flops.
On Friday, the JournalNews reported that George Donald Davis II, of Cincinnati, was behind bars, accused of soliciting sex in exchange for drugs from Johnson and was considered a “person of interest in her homicide.
Cases that go unsolved for a long period of time can sometimes be difficult for officers to deal with, said Mike Craft, chief of detectives for the Butler County Sheriff’s Office.
“There’s no question (unsolved cases) can weigh on an officer,” Craft said. “This is somebody’s loved one. You become a police officer because you want to solve a case and you’d love more than anything to crack this open.”
Smith said that cases a decade or more old provide numerous challenges for an officer.
“When you work on a cold case, you try to at least find the case,” Smith said. “Sometimes when looking back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, it’s very difficult to even find the paperwork on these kinds of things. The one thing everybody needs to remember, police work we did in the 70s... when we processed a crime scene, we hoped and prayed for witnesses and hoped and prayed for fingerprints. DNA wasn’t even in site at the time.”
Smith said many cold cases happened outside, in areas where the crime scene was likely contaminated before the officers could arrive and try to preserve it.
Some of the victims had been left there for weeks or months which destroyed the crime scene completely,” Smith said. “We had nothing to go on. You dog these cold cases as long as you can go with them, hoping you’ll get a lead.”
Since Smith’s retirement, the cold cases have been dispersed throughout the officers of the Butler County Sheriff’s Office. One thing that will never happen is an unsolved case not remaining open, Craft said.
“As long as it’s not solved, the case will be open, it doesn’t matter how old it may be,” Craft said.
Many times officers will have a pretty good idea of who did it, but lack sufficient evidence to make an arrest.
“Then you keep pushing for that one more piece that will push you over the edge,” Craft said.
“It’s very hard to face the families who you’ve worked with and tell them you have an idea of who did it, but the evidence isn’t there,” Smith said. “It’s one of the most trying parts of the job.
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