Maryland Beverly Ann Collins 1992 Cold Case SOLVED — Arrest Shocks Community

It was the last week of September 1992. One of those Maryland autumns that arrives before anyone is ready for it. The kind of week when the mornings smell of woodsm smoke and the afternoons still feel like summer and the leaves on the maples along Main Street in Thurermont have just started turning at the edges.

Red bleeding into gold in a way that makes people stop on sidewalks and look up without quite knowing why. Beverly Anne Collins had been planning this weekend for a month. Her youngest daughter was turning seven on Saturday, and Beverly had spent three evenings at the kitchen table with construction paper and ribbon.

 Making the kind of birthday decorations that you don’t buy at a store, the kind that gets saved in a box and found decades later, and understood immediately as love made into paper chains. She had ordered a cake from the bakery on Frederick Road. She had called her sister Linda three times that week to go over the details, and Linda had laughed and told her she was overthinking it, and Beverly had said she knew and then called again the next day.

 She was 41 years old. She was a mother. She was the person at the Frederick County Department of Social Services who had been assigned the hardest case load for 11 years because she was the one who could be trusted not to flinch. And on the afternoon of Thursday, September 24th, 1992, she left the office at 5:15, got into her white Dodge Caravan in the parking lot on East Patrick Street, and was never seen alive again.

 The birthday party happened without her. The decorations she had made were never opened. To understand what was lost that September, you first have to understand who Beverly Anne Collins was, which means you have to understand Thurmont. Thurmont sits at the foot of Katakton Mountain in northern Frederick County, a town of just under 5,000 people in 1992.

The kind of community where the diner on Iser Road has had the same pie menu since the 1970s and where the high school football games draw half the town on Friday nights regardless of the season’s record. It is the town closest to Camp David, which means it has a quiet, understated civic pride, a sense of itself as a place that can be trusted with serious things.

Beverly had grown up 20 minutes away in Smithsburg and had moved to Thurmont when she married her husband Dennis in 1978. She had worked at the Frederick County Department of Social Services since 1981, starting as a case worker and moving into a senior position handling child welfare cases.

 Her colleagues described her in the terms that are easy to say and harder to mean. dedicated, tireless, the one you called when a case wasn’t going anywhere. She had a gift for sitting with families in the worst moments of their lives without making those moments feel like bureaucracy. She was 5’4 with dark hair she wore short in the practical way of a woman who didn’t have time for anything that required maintenance.

 She drove a white Dodge Caravan because it fit the kids and the groceries and the equipment for her daughter’s soccer team, which she had agreed to manage that fall despite already managing everything else. She made the best potato soup in the church potluck rotation, a distinction she held without vanity and defended without mercy.

 She sang off key in the car and made no apologies for it. She had two daughters, Melissa, who was 10, and Katie, who was about to turn seven. She read to them every night without exception. Dennis later said that even on the evenings when she had worked a 14-hour day and driven home in the dark and couldn’t keep her eyes open at the dinner table, she still read to them.

She never once skipped it. She had told Dennis on Wednesday evening that she thought the birthday party was going to be the best one yet. She had found the ribbon she’d been looking for. The cake was confirmed. The following afternoon, she walked out of her office and into a parking lot and was gone. Dennis Collins called the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office at 7:52 p.m.

 on Thursday, September 24th. Beverly was never late without calling. The girls had eaten dinner. It was almost their bedtime. Something was wrong. Deputies reached the Department of Social Services parking lot on East Patrick Street within 20 minutes. Beverly’s White Dodge Caravan was found at 8:31 p.m.

 parked in its usual spot, locked, undamaged. Her purse was on the passenger seat. Her briefcase was in the back. Her keys were not in the ignition and were not found in or around the vehicle. The department building had been locked since 5:30. The security log showed Beverly had badged out at 5:17 p.m. The last employee to leave.

 14 colleagues had been in the building when she left. None of them had seen her reach her vehicle. The parking lot was partially screened from the street by a row of overgrown boxwoods along the property line. A ground level security camera at the building’s rear exit had been inoperative since August. The repair request was still pending in the facility’s log.

 Beverly Anne Collins had walked from the door to the parking lot a distance of approximately 40 m and had not been seen again. The Frederick County Sheriff’s Office opened a missing person’s investigation the following morning. Detective First Class Howard Ghart was assigned the case. He was a methodical investigator who had worked missing persons and homicide in Frederick County for 14 years.

 and he told his sergeant within the first 48 hours that the circumstances of Beverly’s disappearance, the purse left behind, the locked car. The absence of any voluntary departure indicator pointed in one direction. Beverly’s body was found on October 2nd, 1992, 8 days after her disappearance, in a wooded area off Apple’s Church Road near Thurmont, approximately 4 miles from the parking lot where she was last seen.

She had been there for several days. Cause of death was determined by the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner to be homicidal violence. The specific manner was confirmed but not released to the public. She was 41 years old. Her daughter’s birthday party had been 6 days earlier. Dennis had told the girls their mother had to go away for work.

 He didn’t know what else to say. Detective Ghart worked the Collins case through the fall and winter of 1992 and into the spring of 1993. Beverly’s case load at the Department of Social Services was one of the first investigative avenues. Child welfare work generates adversarial relationships by necessity, parents whose children have been removed, family members who have lost custody, individuals who have filed complaints and been found in violation.

Beverly’s files contained 11 active cases and 47 closed ones going back to 1985. Ghart and his partner, Detective Patrice Warren, worked through every name on that list. They were looking for someone who had been the subject of Beverly’s professional decisions and had responded with hostility, threats, or escalating behavior.

They found three individuals who had made direct complaints about Beverly to her supervisors in the preceding two years. All three were interviewed. All three had accounts for the afternoon of September 24th that were checked and found to hold. None of them produced any physical connection to the Apple’s church road site.

 A man named Gary Lester Odum appeared in the investigation, not through Beverly’s case files, but through a neighbor’s tip in the second week of October. He was 44 years old, a landscaping contractor who had done work at several properties in the Thurmont area over the preceding several years, including a job at the building immediately adjacent to the Department of Social Services.

 He had a prior arrest from 1985, an assault charge in Carol County that had been pleaded down to disorderly conduct. ODM was interviewed on October 19th, 1992. He was calm, cooperative, and specific. He said he had been at a job site in Haggartown the afternoon Beverly disappeared and gave the name of a client. The client confirmed it.

 The confirmation was noted in the file. Odum’s name remained in the file, flagged, but without sufficient basis for further action. Evidence collected from the Apples Church road site included soil samples, partial tire impressions from a turnout area off the road, and biological trace material collected from the scene.

Forensic analysis in 1992 was unable to produce a match against any named individual. By spring of 1993, Detective Ghart had pursued 31 investigative leads without producing a chargeable case. The investigation continued at reduced intensity. By 1994, it had effectively stalled. Dennis Collins had told the girls the truth in the spring of 1993 as gently as he could. Melissa was 11.

Katie was seven. He sat them down at the kitchen table, the same table where Beverly had made the paper chains, and told them their mother had died and that someone had hurt her and that the police were still trying to find out who. He had practiced what he was going to say for three nights. When the moment came, he forgot all of it and just told them the truth.

Melissa asked if it was someone their mother knew. Dennis said he didn’t know. That answer did not satisfy her and would not satisfy her for 31 years. Katie kept the birthday decorations. She found them in a box in the hall closet 6 weeks after her mother disappeared, tied with the ribbon Beverly had been looking for.

 She left them in the box. She put the box on the shelf in her bedroom and didn’t open it again. It went with her when she moved out at 18 and to the apartment after that and to the house she bought in her 30s. It sat on the shelf in her closet. Linda, Beverly’s sister, called Detective Ghart’s line every January. When Ghart retired in 2006, she started calling the general cold case line.

 She was never told there was nothing happening. She was also rarely told there was anything new. She donated to a foundation supporting unsolved homicide families and attended their annual ceremony in Annapolis every year. She wrote Beverly’s name in the book at the ceremony table every time. The boxwoods along the parking lot at the Department of Social Services building were removed in a facilities renovation in 2001.

 The security camera that had been inoperative on the night of September 24th, 1992, the repair request still sitting in the facilities log when investigators had found it, was replaced that same year as part of a countywide upgrade. 9 years too late for Beverly. Every case on this channel is built from weeks of research, records, court documents, evidence logs, and the painstaking work of finding people whose stories deserve to be told in full.

If that work matters to you, please take a moment to like and subscribe and leave a comment telling us where you’re watching from. We read everyone. Now back to Thurmont because in 2023 the file on Beverly Anne Collins was reopened. Detective Sergeant Renee Okafur of the Maryland State Police Cold Case Unit had been assigned the Collins case in January 2023 as part of a statewide review of pre200 unsolved homicides in which biological evidence had been collected and archived but never subjected to modern analysis. The

Apple’s Church Road evidence sealed and logged by the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office in October 1992 had been preserved in the state’s evidence storage facility at Pikesville. 31 years of careful storage meant the biological trace material remained viable for current generation DINA analysis.

 Detective Okafor submitted the samples to the Maryland State Police Forensic Sciences Division in February 2023. The Deanna profile returned in June 2023 was entered into Kodis, the FBI’s combined Deanna index system, which contains biological profiles from more than 21 million individuals, including convicted offenders, arrestes, and forensic unknowns from unsolved cases across all 50 states.

 The process is automated, systematic, and in cases like this one, patient. The database does not grow tired of looking. The hit came back on August 11th, 2023. Detective Okaphor was at her desk when the notification arrived. She opened it. Read it. Read it again. Then she pulled the original case file from the shelf beside her desk.

 The same file she had read through four times since January. The same file that contained Howard Ghart’s 1992 interview notes and turned to the tabmarked persons of interest. Gary Lester Odum, 44 years old at the time, landscaping contractor. Prior arrest, 1985. Interviewed October 19th, 1992.

 Alibi confirmed his Cotus profile had been entered following a conviction for aggravated assault in Washington County in 2004. She sat for a moment with the file open on her desk. Then she picked up the phone and called the Frederick County States Attorney’s Office. She said three sentences. She said she had a Dina match on the Collins case.

She said the name. She said they needed to talk about 1992. Gary Lester Odum was 75 years old in 2023. He had retired from landscaping work in 2011 and lived in a ranch house outside Hagerstown with his wife of 32 years. He had two adult sons. He attended a Baptist church near his home. He drove a late model Chevrolet and mowed his own lawn.

He had to anyone who observed his daily life the appearance of a retired working man spending his last years in ordinary comfort. Detective Okafor spent 6 weeks building the evidentiary package before moving. She requested the 1992 client alibi records through the state’s attorney’s office. The client Gary Odum had named, a Hagggertown homeowner who had confirmed his presence at a job site on the afternoon of September 24th, 1992, had died in 2009.

His widow, reached by investigators, said she had no specific memory of that day. The records of the landscaping work, whatever records had existed, were gone. The alibi that had closed the 1992 interview could not be verified. It also could not be disproven. What could be demonstrated with the weight of current forensic science was that Gary Lester ODM’s biological material had been present at the site where Beverly Anne Collins was found.

The arrest warrant was executed on the morning of October 4th to 2023. Two Maryland State Police detectives and a Frederick County Sheriff’s deputy knocked on Gary Odum’s door at 7 in the morning. His wife answered. She called her husband’s name. He came to the door from the back of the house. He was in a flannel shirt and reading glasses.

 He looked at Detective Okafor for several seconds. He did not speak. He did not ask why they were there. He simply looked at her with the specific expression of a man who has been waiting for a particular moment for 31 years and has just watched it arrive. He was handcuffed on his own front porch and walked to the waiting vehicle. His wife stood in the doorway with her hand over her mouth.

 A neighbor who had come out to collect her morning paper stopped at the end of her driveway and watched. The news reached Thurmont by afternoon. By evening, it had reached everyone who had ever known Beverly Anne Collins. The reaction in the Department of Social Services building, where some of Beverly’s colleagues from 1992 had long since retired, and others had worked there for three decades, was described by the office director as stunned silence, followed by something she didn’t have a word for.

Not relief, exactly. not closure. Something more complicated than either of those words suggests. Gary Lester Odum was charged with firstdegree murder. He entered a not-uilty plea at his initial arraignment in November 2023. His trial opened in Frederick County Circuit Court in September 2024. The prosecution presented the Dena evidence, the forensic analysis of the Apple’s Church Road site, the unverifiable alibi, and the history of ODM’s presence in proximity to the Department of Social Services building in the period before

Beverly’s death. The defense challenged the Dena’s chain of custody and argued contamination. The jury deliberated for three days on October 2nd, 2024. 32 years to the day after Beverly Anne Collins was found off Apple’s Church Road, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on the charge of firstdegree murder. Gary Lester Odum showed no visible reaction.

 His wife, who had attended every day of the trial, left the gallery without looking at the jury. His two sons were not present. He was sentenced in December 2024 to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Dennis Collins was in the courtroom. He was 72 years old. He had sat in the same seat every day of the trial, and he had said very little to journalists in the hallway during recesses, and when the verdict was read, he did not speak or move for a long time.

 He had brought a photograph of Beverly to every session. the same photograph that had been in the family’s Christmas card in 1991, the last one she had been alive to send. She is looking slightly away from the camera, the way people do when they’re laughing at something just off to the side. It is not a posed photograph.

 It is a real one. Melissa Collins, now 42 years old, gave a statement to the court at sentencing. She said her mother had spent her career trying to protect children and that whoever had taken her had understood on some level what Beverly represented. A person who stood between vulnerable people and those who would harm them and had decided that standing was something they wanted to stop.

 She said her mother had never stopped. That even after 32 years she had not stopped. That the verdict was proof of that. Katie Collins said nothing at the sentencing. She did not need to. She had brought the box. The birthday decorations Beverly Anne Collins had made at the kitchen table in September 1992. The paper chains, the ribbon she had been looking for were held in Katie’s lap throughout the hearing, the box open, the contents visible.

She did not take anything out. She did not need to show anyone what was inside. It was enough that it was there. Beverly Anne Collins left her office at 5:15 on a Thursday afternoon with a birthday party 5 days away and a box of decorations on the hall closet shelf and two daughters who were waiting for her to come home and read to them.

She was 41 years old. She had spent 11 years doing the hardest work in public service with the kind of steadiness that makes the people around you feel like everything might be all right, even when you’re not sure it will be. She made potato soup and paper chains and called her sister one too many times and sang off key in the Dodge Caravan and never once skipped the bedtime reading.

 Gary Lester Odum had decided on a September afternoon in a parking lot in Frederick County that her life was something he was entitled to end. And then he had lived another 31 years, retired, attended church, mowed his lawn while Dennis sat in that courtroom every day, and Katie kept the box on her shelf, and Melissa drove toward an answer that took three decades to arrive.

 What do we owe to the people who spend their lives protecting others? in the specific way that Beverly Collins did. The case workers, the social workers, the people who sit with families in the worst moments, when those very people are made vulnerable by the ordinary routines of a working life, a parking lot, a boxwood hedge, a security camera that nobody fixed for 9 years.

 How many Beverly Collinses are in cold case files right now, waiting for a Dena submission that hasn’t been made yet, for a file that hasn’t been reopened, for a detective who hasn’t yet decided to look again. I’d like to know what you think. Leave your thoughts in the comments below and tell me, what does a verdict 32 years late mean to the people who spent those years waiting for it? Justice found Beverly Anne Collins, 30, two years after a parking lot in Frederick County.

It found her because a detective in 2023 decided that biological evidence preserved for three decades deserved a modern set of eyes and because Beverly’s family never stopped believing it would. That is why this channel exists. If you believe truth is worth pursuing no matter how long it takes, subscribe and more solved cold cases are waiting in the description.

Thank you for being here.