Meet the Investigators
A Survivor, a Criminologist, and Thirty Years of Cold Cases
On Tuesday we told you about the Killing Fields of Ohio. We told you about a hundred women and thirty years of silence. We told you the police say no.
Today we tell you who we are — and why we are the people to say otherwise.
Beth Donahue
I am not just an author. I am an architect of truth in a landscape often obscured by silence and systemic failure. As an expert on Serial Domestic Violence Offenders, my work exists to bridge the vast, sterile gap between academic research and the visceral, lived reality of the Midwest’s most vulnerable populations.
My credentials are not printed on parchment. I hold a PhD from the “University of Hard Knocks,” where my curriculum was forged in the fire of broken bones, psychological warfare, and years of systemic betrayal. I graduated Summa Cum Laude from a life of survival, earning a bullshit detector that I now use to sift through mountains of court documents, probable cause affidavits, and witness reports. When I write, I am not merely telling a story — I am conducting an autopsy on the climate of a community and the secrets that lie just beneath its surface.
My advocacy is fueled by the stark, numerical reality of a system that refused to see the patterns until it was nearly too late. My work is not based on abstract theory. I see and write through the lens of a personal history that the justice system ignored. To the courts, these were isolated incidents. To me, they were the architecture of a prison:
24 years enduring emotional and verbal abuse.
10 times I tried to leave.
9 years of being stalked, threatened, and followed.
6 times law enforcement, lawyers, and judges believed my abuser — concluding that I was the one lying, exaggerating, or hurting myself.
5 times I begged for a restraining order. 5 times I was denied.
2 times my daughter was kept from me while the courts stood by.
0 arrests. That is the number of times my abuser was held accountable.
When the system refuses to connect the dots, victims are left isolated and unprotected. This refusal is what drives me. In 2022, I founded the Springfield Domestic Violence Coalition, turning my private pain into a professional mission to protect women and hold serial perpetrators accountable.
I have taken this fight to the national stage, presenting groundbreaking research at the Midwestern Criminal Justice Association in both 2024 and 2025. My work — Serial Perpetrators of Domestic Abuse: Common Characteristics and Offending Patterns as Serial Killers, Serial Rapists, and Serial Pedophiles — challenges the legal system to recognize coercive control as a behavioral signature every bit as dangerous as those of the most notorious criminals.
With four books to my name, including Bloodlines & Bullets, I write with the authority of a survivor and the precision of a criminologist. I don’t write to entertain. I write to ensure that the next victim isn’t just another number in a dusty file. I write to bring the monsters out of the shadows and into the light of justice.
Jimmy Steward
I have spent the better part of thirty-five years finding patterns where others see only chaos.
Whether I was mapping the consumer behaviors of global giants like Procter & Gamble or tracking the clandestine movements of methamphetamine networks across the American Midwest, my career has been defined by a single relentless objective: uncovering the hidden connections. To the untrained eye, a criminal enterprise or a social trend looks like a tangled web of random noise. To me, it is a map waiting to be read.
My foundation was built on discipline and service. From 1990 to 2011, I served as an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Service Corps, retiring as a Captain. That season of my life was not spent in the machinery of taking lives — it was spent saving them, caring for American soldiers wounded on the battlefield. It was there that I learned the weight of responsibility and the necessity of precision. When the stakes are life and death, there is no room for guesswork.
It was in the intersection of criminology and Social Network Analysis where I found my true calling. As the Director of Human Intelligence Profiling Research, I was the hammer to the nail in the war against narcotics. Working as a contractor alongside the DEA, over 45 county drug task forces, and the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, my mission was to hunt drug kingpins and dismantle the methamphetamine rings that were gutting our communities.
Long before the world had heard of Facebook, I was building my own social networks — thousands of interconnected nodes and edges representing the breaking points of human relationships. I fed raw data into programs daily to generate complex link analyses, identifying the specific social sutures that, if cut, would cause a criminal organization to collapse. I carried a Top Secret clearance while working for the Department of Defense and the Defense Foreign Language School in Monterey, California. I published the papers, presented my findings at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and watched as the Steward Crime Network Analysis techniques were adopted by law enforcement to dismantle organizations that thought they were invisible.
But today I am in a different season of life — one defined by gray hair and the joy of grandchildren. The data points I once used to track international terrorists and methamphetamine kingpins have been repurposed for a mission closer to home: the cold cases of Ohio.
For too long, the files on missing women and unsolved homicides in this state have sat in drawers, gathering dust while families wait for answers in the silence. These are not just names in a database. They are daughters, mothers, and neighbors. Their stories deserve more than a folder in a filing cabinet.
This is investigative journalism conducted in a laboratory. Every day I perform deep analysis using Natural Language Processing and data extraction to sift through decades of court documents and police affidavits. Through social mapping I visualize the relationships between suspects, victims, and locations to find the missing links that traditional investigations overlooked. I write the unfiltered truth from a criminologist’s perspective, exposing the political hurdles and systemic failures within local law enforcement that keep cases cold.
I have spent a lifetime putting numbers to what we know. Now it is time to use those numbers to find the people we have lost.
Our First Case
Her name is Nikki Lyn Forrest. She was nineteen years old, four and a half months pregnant, and carrying medication she could not afford to leave behind. On September 25, 2010, she walked out of a driveway in Troy, Ohio, got into a car, and was never seen again. Her case has been classified as an active investigation for fifteen years. No charges have been filed. No answers have been given. Her family has nothing.
Nikki is exactly the kind of woman this publication exists for.
The first case file publishes this Tuesday. If you want to follow the investigation from the beginning — and if you want to be part of finding what happened to her — subscribe before then.
The police say no. We say otherwise.
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