The Monster Under the Bed: Karla Ward's Seven Marriages and the Men Around Amanda Ward-Romine's Disappearance
A sex offender free in Springfield the summer Amanda vanished, and a wedding on the very day she was reported missing — the men who moved through her sister's seven marriages.
This installment maps Amanda Ward-Romine’s extended family from Ohio marriage, divorce, and court records — all public record. It names living former in-laws and describes documented charges and, where they occurred, convictions; none of them is a suspect in Amanda’s disappearance, and naming them is not an accusation. Robert Geiger’s Tier II sex-offender status and Oliver Reed’s aggravated-assault conviction are matters of public record. Charges are described as filed, not as convictions unless a conviction is stated, and questions raised in the text are identified as questions, not findings. A minor’s identity and personal phone numbers have been withheld. Unsolved Ohio centers the victim and treats a documented association or family tie as a starting point for investigation, never as proof of a crime; anyone not convicted of a specific crime is presumed innocent. This is an educational publication and not legal advice — read our full sourcing standard, presumption-of-innocence framing, and corrections policy in our Disclaimer.
In the last installment we followed the Ward family tree through Amanda’s parents and her sister Aliya. This is the other branch — the most tangled one. Amanda’s younger sister, Karla Suzann Ward, born October 7, 1985, has married seven times. Most of it is the private churn of a chaotic life. But two of the men she married sit squarely inside Amanda’s case: one is a convicted sex offender who was free in Springfield the summer Amanda vanished, and one she married on the very day she walked into the police station to report Amanda missing.
Follow the white rabbit a little further.
Marriage 1 — Justin Carlton Minnick
Justin Carlton Minnick (born February 2, 1980) married Karla on April 13, 2002. She was 16; he was 22 — an age gap that is itself an early marker of a controlling dynamic. The marriage collapsed in March 2004 with a divorce complaint that included a motion for Ex Parte relief, the legal mechanism used when a spouse needs immediate protection from abuse.
Minnick’s record runs dense and violent through 2000–2001: guilty pleas to two counts of domestic violence and resisting arrest (July 2000), an indictment for assaulting a police officer (July 2000), aggravated menacing and domestic violence (June 2001), and a protection-order violation (August 2001). Weeks after the 2004 divorce he was charged with three counts of felonious assault with a weapon — all three dismissed, a pattern of severe charges collapsing that often points to witness intimidation or non-cooperation. His documented file is the classic trajectory of an escalating domestic-violence offender.
Two threads tie him to Amanda. First, 116 North Plum Street: in 2001, Amanda, Karla, Aliya, Justin Minnick, and Phillip Hoelscher were all tied to that Ward-family address, and in 2001 Justin and Amanda shared that roof while Amanda worked nights at the Harem in Dayton. Second, a 1995 gray Oldsmobile — the car Minnick was cited driving in April 2010. Hold both the address and the gray car; they matter in the summer of 2013.
By the cold arithmetic of the record, Karla became pregnant in 2001, at 15, while Justin — then 21 — was often the only adult at the Plum Street house during Amanda’s long Dayton shifts. Beth’s question is blunt and, she is careful to say, only a question: was there a grooming relationship in those empty afternoons? No such crime was ever charged, and nothing in the record documents it; it is raised here as a question the timeline forces, not as a finding.
Marriage 2 — Robert Allen Geiger: the monster under the bed
By 2006, at 21, Karla married Robert Allen Geiger, 11 years her senior. His early record is licensing and drug-paraphernalia violations, but inside the marriage it turned physical. On April 24, 2007, after accusing Karla of infidelity, Geiger shoved her head into her car seat and struck her in the jaw; he was convicted of domestic violence in Clark County. In her statement Karla quoted him:
“Get out of my face or I’m going to kill you.”
Then came the phase that makes Geiger matter to this case. An investigation by the Fairborn Police Department established that on June 1, 2009, Geiger engaged in unlawful sexual conduct with a minor. He pleaded guilty to three counts of third-degree-felony sexual conduct; on November 13, 2009, he was sentenced to four years and classified a Tier II sex offender, bound to 25 years of address registration. Karla’s second divorce complaint was filed while he was at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution; the decree was granted March 4, 2011.
Geiger was released, and after a 2012 hearing set his post-release control, he was free and living in the Springfield area in the summer of 2013 — the season Amanda disappeared. For Karla, the marriage had been “a terrifying detour into the darkest corners of human behavior.” For this investigation, Geiger is a documented, convicted sexual offender inside the family’s immediate orbit at exactly the wrong moment.
Marriage 3 — Kevin Richard Warner
Karla married Kevin Richard Warner (born July 3, 1972) on November 8, 2011 — she was 26, he was 39, continuing a pattern of much older men. Warner’s record is thin: a 1990 disorderly-conduct/intoxication charge and a handful of OVIs and license violations across 2002–2012. What matters is the timing and the geography. Karla divorced Warner on April 12, 2013 — two months before Amanda disappeared — and listed her new address as 354 Lancer Street, New Carlisle. That is the same address Amanda listed on a 2005 arrest record. The house belonged to James “Chuck” Pennington and Peggy Ward — Peggy’s longtime boyfriend — a shared family node both daughters passed through.
A note on the father: Karl Ward
The Lancer Street house is also where the family’s temper surfaces in the record. On December 9, 2006, Deputy Matthew Kerns documented threatening phone calls from Karl E. Ward to James Pennington after Peggy had her daughter Karla over. Karl, described as “highly intoxicated” and belligerent, called repeatedly; told the deputy he “did not give a shit” and that if jailed he’d “be out the next day.” He was charged with telecommunications harassment, a first-degree misdemeanor. It is a small file, but it sketches the controlling, volatile patriarch at the root of this tree.
Marriage 4 — Keith Alan Coberly: a wedding and a missing-person report
August 9, 2013 was an 82-degree, cloudless Springfield afternoon — a perfect day for a wedding. Karla Ward, a mother of five from three prior marriages, married Keith Alan Coberly, for the first time a man near her own age. Coberly was a widower: his first wife, Priscilla Ann, had died suddenly on February 10, 2012, at 27, two days after posting on Facebook that they had separated. On their marriage license, Karla and Keith listed a shared address: 360 Buxton Avenue.
That evening — 7:00 PM on her wedding day — Karla walked from the Clark County Courthouse next door into the Springfield Police Department and filed a missing-person report for her sister, Amanda Ward-Romine. The last-seen location Karla gave: 360 Buxton Avenue, on July 7, 2013. The same house the newlyweds shared.
That coincidence pulls an investigator toward the law of marital privilege — the reason it matters when a marriage begins. Confidential marital-communications privilege seals private words spoken during a valid marriage, but it protects words, not observations, and — critically — it does not cover anything said before the vows. A courthouse vow does not retroactively silence the past.
To be explicit: this is a lens, not an allegation of guilt against anyone.
Coberly’s own record is violent. He was convicted of two counts of child endangering (2003); in 2006, per Officer Roger Jenkins II’s affidavit, he beat a man bleeding from a head laceration and fled in a white Buick; in 2016 he threw a gallon of pink paint on a neighbor’s car after “snapping” over a stolen safe; and in August 2019, per Officer R. Hawley’s affidavit, he was arrested for domestic violence and assault after breaking a television, throwing his partner on a bed and choking her, and punching her brother.
Marriage 5 — Joshua Joseph Sagraves, and the pattern
Joshua Joseph Sagraves (born August 18, 1982) was an auto mechanic and tow-truck driver. Karla married him June 4, 2021, and divorced him July 13, 2023. Three months and sixteen days later, on October 29, 2023, Joshua died of cancer at 41. In his obituary, Karla was listed as a “special friend.”
Here the record stops being a list and starts being a pattern. Karla’s intervals between husbands shrank relentlessly — a year and eight months, then eight months, then three — and after Joshua’s death she remarried within three months and twelve days. Forensically, this reads less like a woman falling in love seven times than like what analysts call “branch swinging”: securing the next spouse before the current bond is even dissolved, an intolerance for being unattached, relationships as utilities rather than partnerships. As Beth puts it: she did not grieve; she reloaded. None of that is a crime. It is a behavioral baseline — chaos as a home address — and it is the water Amanda’s family swam in.
Marriage 6 — James Everett Delawder
Karla married James Everett Delawder (born April 16, 1980) on February 10, 2024 — 212 days after the Sagraves divorce, and, by a grim coincidence, exactly twelve years to the day after Priscilla Coberly’s death. Delawder’s record is a string of driving-under-suspension and no-valid-license citations from 2009 to 2026 — which raises Beth’s question of why a man refuses, for seventeen years, to hold a license. They divorced May 21, 2025. One small-world note from the record: the 832 Mound Street address where Coberly committed his 2006 assault is also tied to Delawder’s father and sister.
Marriage 7 — Oliver Alan Reed
Twenty days after the Delawder divorce, on June 11, 2025, Karla married Oliver Alan Reed (born January 2, 1982) — a gap so short that analysts treat it as a red flag in itself. Reed came with a violent, recent record. On February 21, 2021, per Deputy Whittemore’s affidavit, his then-wife Shelly Reed reported that Reed, highly intoxicated, threatened to “slit her throat,” shoved her, and grabbed her by the neck; deputies photographed finger-shaped redness on her neck and arrested him for domestic violence and assault. Shelly told deputies Reed had been visiting a “crack house” with an unidentified woman.
In January 2025 Reed was charged with violating a protection order that protected his minor daughter. Then, on February 13, 2025, per Officer K. Kitchen’s affidavit, Reed struck a man in the face with a hammer; the victim identified him from his BMV photo, and a felonious-assault warrant issued.
That case is a matter of public record:
Case No. 25CR0151 — State of Ohio v. Oliver A. Reed, Clark County. Indicted March 4, 2025 on felonious assault; pleaded guilty June 4, 2025 to the amended charge of aggravated assault (fourth-degree felony); sentenced July 2, 2025 to 17 months in the Ohio State Penitentiary; transported to Orient, Ohio on July 10, 2025.
Karla married a man on his way to prison — 20 days after her previous divorce, three-plus months after his hammer arrest.
We close here. Take the time to recover from going this far down the rabbit hole. Then gather the strength to go back down into it — because the next installment leaves the family tree behind and picks up the trail of Amanda Ward-Romine herself. Subscribe to read the full Amanda Ward-Romine case file from the beginning at unsolvedohio.com.