It's Time

A lot of people who have become emotionally involved with this case in the past couple years came out to meet me at the bookstores, today. The overwhelming majority of them, like me, have come to believe that Dean Runkle is responsible for the abduction and murder of Amy Mihaljevic. I think it's time to show the police detectives and prosecutors the level of support we have built for them in the event they now have enough evidence for an indictment.

Not every case comes wrapped in a bow. Sometimes you have to trust the jury. And if you people are any indication, I believe the jury will make the right decision.

Please take a moment, for me, to reach out to them. Let them know how you feel. Let them know what you believe in your heart.

Bay Village Detective Lieutenant Mark Spaetzel: mspaetzel@cityofbayvillage.com

Assistant County Prosecutor Steve Dever: p4sad@cuyahogacounty.us

All I Want for Christmas...

Is for investigators to finally speak to three people I think may hold pieces to the puzzle of this mystery.

1. The daughter of Dick Stose, who lived on CR 581 in 1989, and who was almost abducted while waiting for the school bus one morning, a few weeks before Amy was kidnapped. Runkle was not working full-time at Amherst yet (he was still subbing) and that road, too, was well within his daily walking area.

2. The woman from Aurora who was almost abducted around the same time.

3. The woman from Sheffield Lake who was raped as a young girl by a man in a park, there. She got a good look at his face and could identify him, today.

Investigators know these women's names and should have spoken to them in the last few years as new leads developed, but, as far as I can tell, have neglected to do so.

Separated at Birth?

I've spoken to the witness of Amy's abduction a few times, now. She is sure the composite sketch is reliable. This man haunts her nightmares.

And, I believe, the resemblance to Runkle is uncanny.

What do you think?

Upcoming Appearances

Signings:

Saturday, January 24: M&P Bargain Books in Willoughby Noon-1PM

Saturday, February 7: Home and Garden Show Noon-1PM

Saturday, February 14: Barnes & Noble, Crocker Park (signing and discussion) 3-5PM.

Saturday, March 7: Barnes & Noble, Mansfield. 3-5PM

Saturday, April 18: Southeast's 3rd Annual Literacy Day (10AM-2PM, Southeast Middle School in Portage County)

Readings:

Thursday, April 16: Stow Library 7PM

Tuesday, May 26: Baldwin Wallace, Berea. A reading for the Institute for Learning in Retirement. 11AM-3PM

Hope to see you there!

-James

Question for Readers: Runkle/Willoughby

Does anyone know if Runkle was connected to the Willoughby neighborhood in any way?

-James

New Witness!

I was approached by a woman named Patty at my book signing in Mentor over the weekend who claims to have seen Amy Mihaljevic the day after her abduction with a man outside a Burger King. She was questioned extensively by FBI in 1989. She is positive it was Amy that she saw and she's always remembered the man who was with her.

She says the man looked like Runkle.

All Runkle, All the Time

Met up with a guy who was at Amherst in 1989. He doesn't want me to use his real name because he believes he will one day have to testify in this case, so I'll call him Tim.

Tim got to know Runkle very well in 1989, in the first weeks that Runkle became a teacher at Amherst. He is 100% positive that Runkle talked about the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center. He said Runkle was all over the metroparks, looking for flowers and specimens of all sorts, and spent a lot of time in Rocky River.

Anyway, when Amy was abducted, and the composite sketch of her kidnapper was released, Tim and his friends brought it into school and hung it on Runkle's blackboard. They thought it was funny that it looked so much like their teacher. After Amy's body was discovered, though, the joke wasn't so funny because Tim knew how close Runkle's home was to the location of the body. And so Tim called Bay Village P.D. himself and left a detailed message asking them to look into this teacher.

Flash forward to 2003/2004, when an Amherst detective and a retired FBI agent tracked him down to finally ask him some questions about Runkle. He told them what he knew.

"Do I think Runkle killed Amy Mihaljevic?" he said to me. "Yes, I do."

One of the reasons he feels so sure is that Runkle lies about the Nature Center when asked about it today. "He talked about the Nature Center a lot," Tim says. "He talked about it a lot, until they found her body. After that, he didn't bring it up." Why is Runkle lying?

Other things Tim had to share:

-Runkle told him he knew how to make chloroform. "He said you don't need to order chloroform, you can make it out of 2 household items.

-Runkle frequented parks in Sheffield Lake.

-Runkle lied about why he left Amherst so suddenly. When Tim ran into him at a gas station, Runkle told him that he had left because he got a job teaching high school biology. The next thing Tim knows is the police are asking him about Runkle and telling him that Runkle had turned up on their radar in Florida, after trying to pawn a watch.

-Runkle loved to gossip. And he liked to joke about everything. He joked and gossiped about everything with his kids, says Tim. "Everything except Amy Mihaljevic." When anyone would joke about her, or about how he looked like the composite sketch, it was like someone turned a switch. He suddenly found something else to do. "It didn't register with me until years later what that might mean."

-Runkle joked about keeping a dead body in the refrigerator at school, which was in a little alcove by his room.

-Runkle "seemed to be attracted to the girls in the classroom but also treated them with a little bit of contempt. You could see he coveted them."

-Runkle mentioned housesitting for someone in 1989 and having to take care of their dogs.

Runkle's Ever-Growing List of Circumstantial Evidence

1. He told at least 6 students that he volunteered at the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center in 1989. Shortly before Amy's abduction, Amy and every other girl who was called by her killer, visited the Lake Erie Nature and Science Center, where there was a log book in which they could sign their names and home phone numbers.

2. He strongly resembles the composite sketch of Amy's abductor. A witness to the abduction says she finds the resemblance so striking, she suggests the police and FBI take a serious look at Runkle.

3. Runkle lived two blocks away from where Amy's body was found in Ashland County. An avid walker/jogger, he would have walked past the dump site on several occasions.

4. Gold fibers were found on Amy's body. In 1989, Runkle drove a gold-colored Grand Am.

5. One of the girls who received a phone call like Amy did is indirectly linked to Runkle through family members.

6. A girl in Runkle's class at Amherst received a call at home from a man who told her that she would end up "just like Amy Mihaljevic".

7. He kept a skeleton in his school room closet and often told kids that it was a woman who had been stabbed to death--Amy was stabbed to death.

8. Runkle made sexual advances--in written letters--to at least one student, in 1989.

9. He offered to take one young girl out to an isolated field to "look for flowers" but the girl didn't feel right about it, so she went with her mom. When she wandered off alone, she heard someone in the woods, following her. It appears that person was Runkle, as the girl noticed his car parked near her mother's when she returned to the vehicle.

10. Runkle has no alibi for the time of the abduction.

11. At the time investigators started asking around about Runkle, this former teacher of the year quit his job and moved to Key West (about as far as you can get from Bay Village without leaving the country) where he lived out of a homeless shelter for about six months before getting a job at a fast food joint--the same fast food joint he used to take his students to in Amherst. That is quite a fall from grace.

12. In the mid-90's, the Amherst superintendent investigated Runkle for improper relationships with students.

13. The Amherst principal and a local police officer caught Runkle alone with a kid in his car on more than one occasion.

14. A woman who believes she say Amy the day after her abduction with a man at Burger King says the man she saw her with looked like Runkle.

Each item may be blamed on coincidence, but taken as a whole, this is starting to look like a pretty good case. What would the probability be of one person being so connected to this crime? Better odds, I think, than DNA even gives us. Others have been convicted on far less.

I will update this list as the case moves on.

Skeletons in the Closet

This picture of Runkle came from a former student of his who also remembers the female skeleton he kept in the closet of his school room. He often told his students that the skeleton was a murder victim who had been stabbed to death.

How Far Does It Go Back?

Got a call from a woman named Dorothy who--I was able to verify--was in Runkle's class in Vermilion in 1971. She lives in Wisconsin now, but wanted me to know that even then Runkle put the girls with the short skirts in the front row and made every excuse to "accidentally" look up those skirts when he had the chance. He liked to come up behind Dorothy when she was sitting, she suspects, to look down her shirt. Runkle's Fan Club can chalk this up to bad memory or suggestive questions, but there's a couple more things that Dorothy wanted me to know.

-Runkle once asked her to help him move a barrel full of formaldehyde. Some of it spilled and they had to evacuate the school. She has always wondered what he possibly needed with so much formaldehyde.

-Runkle took such a specific interest in her, when Dorothy's parents bumped into him in 2002, he asked about her by name.

-Dorothy was a star student and was looking for more places to collect flowers for one of Runkle's projects one week. Runkle told her about a specific isolated place in Birmingham that should have the flowers she needed. He offered to give her a ride there, but she didn't think that was right. Instead, her mother drove her out to the site later on. Dorothy wandered off by herself and says she heard footsteps in the woods, close by, as if someone was following her off of the path. When she turned around and headed back, she spotted Runkle's car parked next to her mom's.