There's No Turning Back Now
The Diary of How the Amber Whitmer Investigation Began — and Why They Want It to Stop
There are investigations that begin with a decision. And then there are the ones that begin in a car, somewhere between Springfield and Chicago, when your husband tells you to focus and you can't stop talking about the dead.
This is our second investigative journal from Unsolved Ohio. The first covered how we found Nikki Forrest. This one covers how Amber Whitmer found us — and what we found when we started looking.
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.