Anywhere But Here: The Life and Last Days of Amanda Ward-Romine
Who Amanda was, the marriage the record shows was violent for years, and the documented trail to the crawl space where her DNA was found.
This installment reconstructs Amanda Ward-Romine’s life and disappearance from Springfield Police reports, Clark County court records, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, NamUs, and Amanda’s own public social-media posts — all matters of public or personal record. It names Daniel “Danny” Michael Romine, who is deceased and was designated a suspect by the Springfield Police Division; he was never charged, and no living person is accused of a crime here. Documented domestic-violence incidents are described as they appear in police and court records; charges are noted as filed, and where a charge was dismissed that is stated. Unsolved Ohio centers the victim; a documented association is never proof of a crime, and 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.
To understand what happened to Amanda Ward-Romine, you first have to understand the man who claimed her, and the small, neon-lit kingdom he ruled.
Who Was Daniel Romine
Daniel “Danny” Michael Romine was born October 10, 1972, and died December 13, 2015. Earlier in life he was a heavy construction worker; later he tended bar at and helped run his father’s family-owned Whitie’s Tavern. He stood 5 feet 8 inches and carried 250 to 300 pounds — closer to 400, the coroner’s report would later note. He possessed a criminal history spanning 31 documented offenses, heavily featuring high-lethality domestic battery, strangulation, and narcotics.
Danny moved through Springfield with the heavy-footed confidence of a man who knew the terrain. His record was not a list of mistakes; it was a biography of aggression. It began in 1991 with a charge for receiving stolen property, but the violence surfaced fast: felonious assault in April 1992 (reduced to assault), aggravated menacing by August 1993, a menacing charge against a man named Timothy Eldridge in May 1997. He was even cited for “spotlighting wild animals” — a poaching charge that speaks to a man who liked to freeze his prey in the light and take what he wanted.
Whitie’s Tavern was more than a bar; it was a sanctuary for a slice of Springfield’s working class — welcoming by day, and by night a place where grievances were nursed, where alcohol fueled old vendettas, and where the loyalty of the regulars formed a protective wall around the owner’s kin. Danny Romine was the prince of that kingdom. And it was into it that Amanda Ward walked.
Amanda Ward-Romine
Amanda Ward-Romine was born to Karl E. Ward and Peggy (Nott) Ward on the chilly winter day of February 24, 1983. Springfield was the backdrop of her youth; she came up through Springfield North High School, tethered to a local family network.
By 2001 she reached for independence, taking addresses at 1614 Lagonda Avenue and 116½ North Plum Street — the crowded, overlapping house she shared with her sisters Aliya and Karla and Karla's first husband, Justin Minnick. Between 2001 and 2005 the neon glow of Dayton called, and she worked as a dancer and bartender, most notably at the Harem with her close confidante, Jessica Rowland, bouncing between Springfield and 354 Lancer Street. Trouble began as a low murmur — a July 27, 2002 citation for driving without a license, settled with an $80 bond in 2003.
It was in 2003, amid the grind of Dayton’s nightlife, that Amanda first locked orbits with Daniel “Danny” Michael Romine. As her sister Aliya put it, Danny began dating Amanda while she danced; when she went to prison, he sent her money; when she came home, they married. But that was years away, and the road there ran through other men and hard time.
In 2004 she settled at 3029 Idlewilde Avenue in Dayton, and on September 22, 2004, she married another man entirely — Michael S. Enochs, 14 years her senior, a man carrying his own history of explosive domestic violence and chemical dependency. The descent quickened: on November 4, 2004, she was indicted in Montgomery County for possessing less than a gram of crack cocaine, and given Treatment In Lieu Of Conviction that December. A failed urinalysis in May 2005 shattered her probation, and on September 9, 2005, the steel doors of the Marysville Women’s Correctional Facility closed behind her — a combined four years for state cocaine possession and one year in federal corrections for drug trafficking. Enochs filed for divorce a week later; the decree was stamped in March 2006 while she remained locked away.
Released from federal custody in 2009, Amanda sought sanctuary at 1114 Elm Drive near Indian Lake, and there she tethered her fate back to Danny — marking her skin with eternal devotion: “Danny” on one foot, “Romine” on the other. From 2009 to 2012 she poured drinks at Whitie’s Tavern, owned by Danny’s father. The violence was inescapable.
On June 23, 2009, a barefoot, sobbing Amanda flagged down police on East Main Street: Danny, on an all-night cocaine binge, had knocked her down, smashed her head into a concrete sidewalk, taken her keys and shoes, and broken her phone. He was jailed for domestic violence and assault — and the charges withered at the prosecutor’s request. On December 26, 2011, at 6:34 AM, she hailed officers from a red Jeep Wrangler with a worse account: Danny had forced his way through a window at 937 Avondale Avenue, pinned her to the bed, and choked her with a live phone-charger cord until she bit his hand to escape. He was arrested, and again released.
And then, inexplicably, the abused and the abuser married. A license filed March 20, 2012 was voided, then re-filed and solemnized on June 12, 2012.
The unraveling, in her own words
Between 2012 and 2013 Amanda’s fracture became painfully public on Facebook. On July 15, 2012, she mourned that her birth family skipped her wedding shower — “I guess I seen where I stood with them” — the kind of isolation abusers leverage. She flaunted a Chrysler Sebring Danny bought her, calling it her “pimp car,” and joked that she bartended “half drunk” while Danny, the “other owner,” was too. By September she was calling him a “loser,” threatening to return to the “Dixie Strip” to find “real men,” and dreaming of beauty school — of striking it big “anywhere but here.”
October 2012 became a diary of her unraveling. She fled the Avondale home to “start new” with her sister near Indian Lake; praised Danny at 1:20 PM one day and called him a “piece of shit” by 5:36 PM the same afternoon; declared she was divorcing; then returned to help him sober up, defended herself with a Swifty Sweeper handle and a glass candle holder, and was hit with a domestic-violence warrant of her own. Her posts peaked on October 15 — a photo of her rings; a territorial warning that she was “MRS. AMANDA ROMINE”; a celebration that Danny’s 50-day jail stint gave her “a safe window”; and, at 9:00 PM, a lament: “my husband has changed into an evil terrible person why did i do it?????” On October 30 she posted once more, and then went dark. Complete digital blackout.
She officially separated on January 1, 2013, moving permanently to Township Road 130 at Indian Lake. The court chased her for $340 in unpaid fees; she chased a divorce. And the abuse reached its crescendo on April 14, 2013: during a planned visit to Avondale to retrieve her belongings, an intoxicated Danny choked her, slapped her, and dragged her by the hair across a parking lot — while her right ankle was in a surgical boot from prior operations. She fled to a safe house at 360 Buxton Avenue, the home of Karla and Keith Coberly, and Danny was arrested for felony domestic violence. Between April and June she found quiet work at a bar called Coyote’s near Indian Lake, and prepared for her divorce.
The last days
The shadow fell completely in July. On July 5, 2013, Amanda left her sister’s home at Indian Lake to travel back to 937 Avondale Avenue in Springfield — her last known sighting in the city. The next day, July 6, she made her last voice contact, calling her sister Aliya and begging to be picked up and brought home. On July 7, community witnesses and local media placed her last sighting alive in the 300 block of Buxton Avenue. A haunting alternate account came on July 9, when Aliya’s 15-year-old daughter watched Amanda walk to the end of the private driveway at Township Road 130 and get into an unidentified gray 1980s Cutlass or Monte Carlo driven by an older, gray-goateed man named “Larry.” She was never seen or heard from again.
July 13, 2013 became the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s official “last seen” benchmark; by August 9, NamUs had logged her as an active missing-person case. And between July and September came the most chilling development of all: a tenant renting an apartment connected to Danny’s property told authorities that Danny had demanded he vacate instantly so that “work” could be done in a small crawl space beneath the floor. When a BCI forensic sweep scoured the darkness beneath those boards, investigators recovered hair and skin cells that matched Amanda’s DNA.
That is where her documented chronology ends — not with an answer, but with a crawl space.
The next installment turns from what the record shows to where it breaks — the conflicting dates, vehicles, and accounts that muddy Amanda’s final days. Subscribe to read the full Amanda Ward-Romine case file at unsolvedohio.com.