— Jimmy Steward

May 28, 2026

There is a venerable axiom within the investigative trades, a hardboiled imperative that dictates a rather simple methodology: if one desires answers, one must shake a few trees and observe what falls to the earth.

Beth sought to apply this arboreal metaphor to the digital public square. She published a graphic featuring forty-one women tethered by geography to Springfield and Clark County. Their statuses varied grimly — some missing, some murdered, others deceased under opaque circumstances, and a handful still breathing. The accompanying inquiry was deliberately provocative:

“What do these forty-one women have in common?”

This was not an idle parlor game. It was the culmination of months of rigorous victimology — a mapping of overlapping kinships, environmental proximities, and the predictable associations of the criminal milieu. Her aspiration was characteristically modest, yet perhaps overly optimistic. Beth reasoned that within the sprawling, unavoidable panopticon of Facebook, a former confidant might recognize a forgotten link, or a relative might stumble upon an explanatory thread that could illuminate how these fractured lives intersected.

What fell from the tree was not enlightenment.

It was venom.

The inquiry was met not with communal deliberation, but with a torrent of hostility. The focus of the digital mob migrated swiftly from the forty-one women to the author of their sudden visibility. The discourse devolved into disturbing private messages and unambiguous threats of violence. Ultimately, the post was removed from the forum entirely — a disappointing testament to a subculture that prefers the comfort of amnesia to the discomfort of inquiry.

One artifact of this vitriol, however, demanded pause.

An anonymous respondent had taken the original mosaic of victims, appended Beth’s photograph, and adorned it with a chilling epitaph:

“Beth Donahue RIP.”

It is customary for investigators to feign an armor of indifference to such things, chalking them up as the occupational tax levied on those who pursue unwelcome facts. And, to be sure, the transient chill of a threat is largely eclipsed by the profound satisfaction of nudging an investigation toward closure, or delivering a solitary clue to law enforcement that edges the arc of the moral universe closer to justice.

Yet this episode illuminates a stark sociological divide in how we process tragedy. The women whose lives Beth seeks to reconstruct exist primarily in society’s margins. They are not the telegenic subjects of national morning shows. They are not the quintessential Catholic co-ed found tragically on a manicured campus, nor the doctor’s wife whose sudden absence paralyzes a respectable suburb. When tragedy visits the bourgeoisie, the aggrieved families invariably clamor for the klieg lights. They demand podcasts, press conferences, and the relentless scrutiny of journalists. They desperately want answers.

Springfield presents a different topography of grief.

Here, among the families and associates of Beth’s subjects, the prevailing instinct is to fiercely guard the rock against anyone attempting to turn it over. Sunlight, in this context, is not a disinfectant — it is an existential threat. To invite scrutiny is to risk the exposure of one’s own complicity, perhaps hastening an indictment. Thus, the preferred strategy is enforced isolation, maintained through the crude instrument of intimidation.

Even when one understands that the vast majority of such threats are merely performative — designed to silence rather than to strike — there remains that inevitable, quiet moment of reckoning. One is forced to pause, survey the hostility, and ask whether the agonizing extraction of justice from an unwilling populace is truly worth the toll.

I watched Beth ask herself that question. I knew what her answer would be before she gave it.

She has been asking that question since long before she started this investigation. Twenty-four years of asking it. Ten times she tried to leave and kept coming back anyway — not to the relationship, but to the work of exposing what the relationship had taught her. The woman who put Beth Donahue’s face next to forty-one dead women and typed “RIP” was counting on Beth to fold.

She has never folded. She will not start now.

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

— Arthur Schopenhauer

The introduction to Case 2 — Amber Marie Whitmer — publishes on Tuesday.

September 27, 2024

It is a long drive from Springfield, Ohio to the Aloft Hotel in Chicago. It sits right on the Mag Mile, where the Midwestern Criminal Justice Association holds their annual conference. I was presenting a paper on Serial Domestic Violent Offender identification and definitional criteria. Jimmy and I had about five hours to talk in our 2015 Toyota Highlander.

I loved that truck. It never broke down. Of course, I got into a car accident in late 2025 and totaled it. But I digress. Maybe not entirely — on May 14, 2026, a bipartisan pair of Ohio lawmakers moved to create a public registry of repeat domestic violence offenders. I hope to be a part of that conversation. Okay. Now I’ll begin.

Jimmy drove and I talked. I talked about generational crime in Springfield. I talked about court case dismissals in Clark County. I talked about crime statistics. I talked about the missing women. And somewhere between Springfield and the Indiana state line, I said to Jimmy: we should research Amber Whitmer’s story.

Jimmy told me to focus on the presentation.

My ADHD was kicking in, and Jimmy had to pull me back before I started talking about life on other planets. Did I tell you I loved my Toyota Highlander?

August 7, 2025

I had just published Bloodlines & Bullets — Generational Crime in Springfield, Ohio. The research had consumed years. The conclusion was devastating: over 80% of the murder victims in Springfield were related — by blood, by relationship, by environment — to the other victims and offenders. Generational crime, running like a current through the same families and the same streets, decade after decade.

Once the book published, my Facebook blew up. And so did the violence.

From the probable cause report of Detective K. Miller, sworn and filed, regarding defendant De Jona Marie Crossley:

“Bitch don’t put my brother in your cheap ass full of shit ass book bitch you don’t even know wtf you talking about, ain’t got no respect for nobody, bitch you gone be in your own book next!”

“Aye bitch for one stop writing storys abt my dad bc u will get beat tf up.”

De Jona Marie Crossley was found guilty of Menacing. There is currently a bench warrant for her arrest. She skipped town.

Whoever coined the phrase “True Crime is easy” clearly never did the work. It’s a sanitized narrative for the armchair detectives — a simple task of copy-pasting news clippings, swapping a synonym here or there, and calling it a day. But if you’re actually out here doing the labor, you know the truth: real investigation is a slow, methodical act of desecration. It is the art of turning over rocks, one by one, and watching the spindly, spineless things underneath scramble for cover.

They hate exposure. They are creatures of deep shadows, organisms that have thrived in the rot of secrets for decades. When you pull back the stone, you aren’t just uncovering facts — you are disturbing an ecosystem of malice. They despise the sunlight, and they certainly despise anyone bold enough to shine it on the cold, hard reality of an unsolved murder or a vanishing that the world has long since tried to bury.

They cling to the past, desperate to keep the timeline of their own history obscured. They’ve been curled beneath those stones, waiting, hoping the world would forget the names of the women who died while they hovered at the periphery — watching, participating, or simply keeping their silence.

They want no connection to the ghosts they helped create.

But they have one fatal problem: Justice is relentless. Justice is a high-noon sun that refuses to set, and it burns brightest when you finally expose the undersides of their carefully placed stones.

My inbox is a graveyard of threats. The names they call me would make a seasoned sailor blanch, and the promises they leave — promises that I will be the next woman to vanish into the dark — have started to arrive with terrifying frequency. They want me to stop. They want the rocks put back.

But I’ve already seen what’s underneath.

There’s no turning back now.

December 5, 2025

Note: The following names an individual whose documented public records and presence near deceased victims places him within the investigative scope of this case. No individual named here has been charged with any crime in connection with these deaths. This entry documents an investigative discovery, not an accusation.

I have been digging through endless probable cause statements. And Brian Stoops — a man connected to Amber Whitmer’s world — has been physically present in the same location as Angela Kilgore (deceased), Ruth Ann Cain (deceased), Ciera Spitler (deceased), and Malissa Mae Hall, just days before they died. He was simultaneously involved with Felicia Barletto (alive) and Amber Parks (alive) during the same period.

I am going to dig deeper into this.

March 18, 2026

Today I discovered siblings that Jimmy and I did not previously know existed.

Holy cow.

A whole year and a half working on this case and not a word about them — not in any news report, not in any document we had seen. A lot of hard work tracking and tracing connections, and this felt important. Not just genealogically, but personally. Every new connection has the potential to reveal another piece of Amber’s life — her environment, her relationships, her support system.

The research has been frustrating too. Family relationships are rarely as straightforward as they appear on paper. One marriage leads to another surname. One birth record raises new questions. One family branch suddenly connects to another.

The deeper I dig into Amber’s victimology, the more I realize that understanding the people around her may be just as important as understanding what happened to her.

April 2, 2026

Over the last several weeks, FOIA requests and public records responses have started coming back. Every time a new document arrives, I hope it will answer questions. Sometimes it does. More often, it creates new ones.

As I began comparing records from different agencies, I started noticing inconsistencies. Dates did not always match. Timelines appeared to shift. Information that seemed certain in one document was missing from another.

The experience has reinforced an important lesson: no single record tells the whole story. Every document has to be compared, verified, and placed into context. The more records I receive, the clearer it becomes that victimology is not about finding one answer. It is about slowly assembling hundreds of pieces until a larger picture begins to emerge.

April 28, 2026

Over the last few weeks, I have spent a significant amount of time mapping relationships between victims, family members, and social circles. What began as an effort to understand individual cases has begun to reveal something much larger.

As I worked through family trees and public records, I discovered that some of the victims were actually related. In one instance, a woman who went missing in 2009 was the sister of another woman who died in 2017. In another case, a young woman who died from an overdose in 2016 was the daughter of a woman who would later overdose herself in 2018.

It confirms the pattern at the heart of my first book — Bloodlines & Bullets — generational crime. Finding these connections has been both fascinating and heartbreaking. The more I research, the more I find myself asking whether we are looking at isolated tragedies or something that spans multiple generations, families, and social networks.

Every new connection raises more questions than answers.

May 3, 2026

There are moments during research when a discovery completely changes the way you look at a project.

When I first started documenting missing women, overdoses, suspicious deaths, and homicides, I viewed each victim as a separate story. I am increasingly wondering whether many of these stories are connected in ways that have never been fully examined.

The connections are not always direct. Sometimes they involve family relationships. Sometimes they involve shared neighborhoods, social circles, former partners, or overlapping timelines. But the more victimology work I complete, the harder it becomes to view these women as isolated cases.

I did not know that 2009 missing person Michele Rice is the sister of Malissa Mae Hall. This opens another can of worms and a deeper look into her boyfriend Burton and his connections. It also draws in Prentiss Hare. Michelle Rice lived 500 feet from 13 South Light Street, and Malissa Mae Hall knew Hare.

It goes even deeper down the rabbit hole.

Tomorrow, Jimmy picks up where I can’t. There are moments in this investigation that hit too close to home — for both of us, but differently. What happened in May was one of them. He’ll tell you about it in his own words.

The full Amber Whitmer case investigation begins Tuesday right here on Unsolved Ohio.

I was exhausted — already on my third coffee of the day. Deep in the weeds writing about serial domestic violence offenders for an upcoming conference in Chicago, I found myself tracing the origins of the term “serial killer” — possibly first appearing in The London Daily Post on November 9, 1898. The headline: “’Jack the Ripper’ Claims 5th Victim, Woman Brutally Hacked to Death.” Investigators, the text noted, hoped forensic evidence would lead to the capture of the “Whitechapel serial killer.”

It was dig, dig, and more digging through police records and endless reading. While sifting through victim profiles that fit this pattern, I ran across an online news article about a woman named Nikki Lyn Forrest. She was a missing person, but since she wasn’t from Springfield, I didn’t continue the research. I went right back to my digging.

March 2025

I don’t recall the exact date, but I remember it was early March. I had begun writing my first book about generational crime in Springfield from 2021 to 2025. Nikki’s name came up again as I was researching missing women in the area. I still hadn’t investigated her full story, but I told myself I eventually would.

June 10, 2025

It was a weekday. I received a call from a reporter wanting to discuss domestic violence in Springfield. I had been railing against city hall and was becoming quite a problem for the mayor — which, at that point, felt like progress.

I met her at the Panera Bread in Springfield. Her name was Vicky Forrest. I told her the name sounded familiar and asked if she knew Nikki Forrest or if there was any relation. She said no, but then she told me about a young pregnant girl who had disappeared from Troy, Ohio. I mentioned I thought she might be from Enon, or maybe I was thinking of someone else entirely. I made a mental note to look into her.

I didn’t get around to it until July.

July 2025

I’m not sure of the exact date — sometime after the 4th. I had been gathering information on about twenty women from this area who had been reported missing when I came across Nikki Forrest again.

I began to read and — what the heck? The first story had no information. None.

This can’t be right. I dug and dug and found nothing. The media said she was at her boyfriend’s house — okay, but where? What was his name? What time was she there? What was she wearing? Nothing.

The police claimed she walked eight miles from Piqua to Troy in the blistering sun while pregnant. Who does that?

They said she went to visit a friend — but which friend? Where? I have never seen a missing persons case with so few details. Every disappearance has at least some scattered information, fragmented timelines, old newspaper clippings. Here, there was absolutely nothing. It was as if someone had decided, from the beginning, that Nikki Forrest didn’t warrant the effort.

August 5, 2025

This date remains etched in my mind as the worst nightmare imaginable.

A mob of 50 to 60 people gathered outside my home — people connected to the criminals and murders I had exposed in my first book. They weren’t there for a civil debate. They wanted my book banned and my voice silenced. Because I had documented the interconnected crimes of Springfield, they chose violence to protest my First Amendment rights.

The attack left both me and Jimmy reeling. For my safety, I had to flee to Florida to stay with my daughter, while Jimmy stayed behind to maintain our home and coordinate our departure from the city my family had called home since 1871. During that time away, I poured my energy into writing The Killing Fields of Springfield and began digging deeper into the criminal records of the people who had once surrounded Nikki Forrest.

The investigation into Nikki continued from a hotel room in Florida. It did not stop.

February 9, 2026

Jimmy and I were deep in the digital trenches — gathering every record we could find and reaching out to the community online. We started with the Nikki Forrest Facebook memorial page, which has over 800 members. Of the three administrators we contacted, only Rinda Bell responded.

There is a fundamental rule in crime research: never ask a question unless you already know the answer. The responses we received were still jarring — names of former boyfriends, details of early police work, three leads we hadn’t had before. I felt a sense of progress. I also felt a profound sadness. Rinda’s account triggered memories of my own teenage experiences with sexual violence. Some cases get under your skin before you realize it. This one had been there for months.

Late February 2026

Near the end of the month, we accidentally discovered a 2005 subpoena for Nikki buried deep within court filings.

As I read through those documents, I broke down.

I told Jimmy I couldn’t write for a few days. Seeing how the people she trusted — and the systems that should have protected her — had failed her so completely was almost more than I could hold. This wasn’t just a cold case. This was a thirteen-year-old girl who had been left alone in the world and a nineteen-year-old woman who had disappeared into a silence that no one in any official capacity seemed particularly interested in breaking.

There are cases you research and then there are cases that follow you home. Nikki Forrest is the latter.

I can’t let go of her. I don’t intend to.

Where should we start? Honestly, it started on a summer walk into downtown Springfield. Jimmy and I were walking and talking — or, to be more accurate, I was doing all the talking while he did the listening. He’s always been good at that. At the time, Jimmy was still new to Springfield, but I’m a child of five generations of Donahues. My family has called this city home since 1871. My roots here aren’t just deep; they are the foundation of everything I know. Almost everyone in my family was a cop for Springfield, or one in a neighboring community.

As we walked, I asked him if he’d seen the paper. There were over 20 people arrested for domestic violence in a single day. He told me it’s like that every day — that seeing fewer than ten charges would be the real rarity. We passed the old, closed “Main Stop” convenience store, and I pointed to the pavement. “Do you know about all the murders that have taken place right here?” I asked.

He didn’t, so I told him. And that was the spark.

What began as a conversation turned into a years-long descent into the dark heart of our city’s records. Together, we uncovered more than 50 women who had been murdered or gone missing within a 20-year span.

Jimmy approaches this like a scientist. As a criminologist and Social Network Analysis expert, he quantifies social relations to find the patterns of victimization that everyone else chooses to ignore. He wanted to know why these homicides remained dormant while the same names kept appearing in the city’s criminal landscape. He realized these women weren’t just “isolated statistics.” They were human beings connected in a densely woven web of social failure.

But data only tells half the story. I dug in from the other side — as a domestic violence advocate and a tracker of serial abusers. I focused on the seriality of the abuse, watching how predators exploit the systemic vulnerabilities of women trapped in the drug trade and sex work to maintain control. I saw how they used the very systems meant to protect women as tools for further evasion.

I didn’t just stay behind a desk. I took this to the people in charge. I attended City Commission meetings. I spoke out until my voice was hoarse. I wrote letters, I confronted the Mayor, and I sat across from the Police Chief. I made myself a problem for the city because the status quo was killing women.

While I was on the news, Jimmy found the smoking gun: the Springfield Police Department was underreporting murders to the FBI. We held news conferences and public meetings. The people of Springfield listened, but the politicians in power? They stayed silent.

Then came the final blow. Jimmy discovered that while our police were making record-breaking arrests for violent crimes, domestic violence, and the rape of girls younger than 16, the city prosecutors were dismissing 85% of those cases. They were letting offenders walk free to assault, rape, and eventually kill the same women who had begged the court for protection.

The City Prosecutor eventually resigned and fled the city, but as the old song goes: meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The names on the office doors changed, but the indifference remained. The system continues to fail the most vulnerable among us while the men in suits congratulate themselves on a job well done.

That is why we are here. This Substack is for the women who were silenced, the families left behind, and the people tired of being lied to by a leadership that views justice as a budget line item.

We aren’t going anywhere. It’s time to look at the math of crime and the reality of the survivors.

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

— Elie Wiesel