Ohio 1969 Cold Case Solved — DNA Exposes The Last Person Anyone Suspected

It was the last Saturday of September. One of those Ohio autumns that arrives like a gift. The maples along Creston Avenue burning orange and gold. The smell of woodsmoke already in the air. The afternoon light so clean and low it made everything look like a photograph of itself. Donna Jean Howell had spent that morning canning tomatoes at her mother’s kitchen table on the east side of Millfield.

 The same thing she had done every September since she was old enough to reach the stove. She was 24 years old. The young wife of a grain elevator worker. The mother of an 18-month-old boy named Curtis. Who had his mother’s dark eyes and his father’s stubborn chin. She had plans that afternoon. She was going to drop Curtis at her sister’s house two streets over.

 Run a quick errand into town and be back in time to put a pot roast on before her husband Ray got home from his shift at 6:00. She had done that kind of errand a hundred times before. She kissed her boy on top of his head and walked out into that golden September afternoon. By the time Ray Howell pulled his truck into the driveway that evening, Donna Jean was gone.

 The pot roast was still sitting on the counter. Unwrapped. The oven had never been turned on. And nobody in Millfield, Ohio would understand what had happened to her for another 53 years. Millfield sat in Athens County in southeastern Ohio. A part of the state that the rest of the country had never paid much attention to.

 But that the people who lived there loved with the particular fierceness of people who have stayed somewhere by choice. The Hocking River ran through the valley below town. And the hills around it were thick with second growth timber. oak and hickory mostly, with dense tangles of ironwood and pawpaw in the hollows. It was coal country, or it had been.

By 1969, most of the mines had closed, and the men who remained worked the farms and the grain operations, and the few small manufacturing plants that had come in to replace the coal economy. The town had two churches, a hardware store, a diner called Patsy’s on Main Street, where the coffee was strong and the pie was worth the drive, and a volunteer fire department whose members doubled as the informal emergency response for half the surrounding township.

Donna Jean Howell, née Corbett, had grown up on the eastern edge of town, where the houses gave way to pasture. Her father, Walt Corbett, had driven a school bus for 22 years. Her mother, Ruth, kept the most productive kitchen garden on Creston Avenue, and was known countywide for a sour cherry preserves that she gave away every Christmas in Mason jars with handwritten labels.

Donna Jean had graduated from Federal Hocking High School in 1963, married Ray Howell at 20, and settled into a life that looked, from the outside, like contentment, and from the inside, according to everyone who knew her, actually was. She sang alto in the choir at First Methodist. She kept a vegetable garden of her own, having learned from her mother.

She had a habit of writing grocery lists in tiny, precise handwriting and then losing them before she got to the store, which her sister Linda said was the most Donna Jean thing about her. She wanted three children, she had told Linda the week before she disappeared. Curtis was going to have a brother or sister by the time he started kindergarten.

She was, by every account recorded in the case file that investigators later assembled, a woman with a future that belonged entirely to her. That Saturday afternoon was the last time anyone in Milford who loved her would see her alive. Ray Howell called his wife’s sister, Linda, at 6:40 that evening when the driveway was empty and the phone had rung unanswered at the house three times.

Linda told him she hadn’t seen Donna Jean. She had been expecting her that afternoon, but she’d never arrived. Linda had assumed the errand had run long and the drop-off had been canceled. By 7:00, Ray had called his mother-in-law. By 7:30, Walt Corbett had driven the route between his daughter’s house and the center of town twice in his truck.

By 8:15, Ray Howell was standing at the counter of the Athens County Sheriff’s Office. The deputy on duty that night, a man named Gary Teays, took the report. He noted that Donna Jean Howell had been gone for approximately 4 hours, that her vehicle, a 1964 Ford Falcon in pale blue, was not in the driveway or parked on the street, and that she had left without her purse, which was found on the kitchen counter next to the unwrapped pot roast.

That last detail, a woman who left her purse behind, Teays called his supervisor. By 9:30 that evening, the sheriff himself, Dale Musselman, was at the Howell house. The Falcon was found the next morning. It was parked on a gravel pullout along Township Road 214, a rural route wound back into the timber covered hills south of Millfield, approximately 3 miles from the nearest intersection.

The car was unlocked. The keys were in the ignition. There was no sign of mechanical failure. One of Donna Jean’s shoes, a tan flat left foot, was on the floor of the passenger seat. One shoe. The other was never found. The sheriff’s office called in the state police. A search began that afternoon. 40 volunteers walked the timber for 2 days.

They found nothing. No sign of Donna Jean. No second shoe. Nothing that explained what a young woman with a pot roast on the counter and a son at her sister’s house had been doing on a gravel road 3 miles into the hills. The shoe stayed in the evidence room. It would be there for 53 years. The detective assigned to lead the official investigation was Sergeant Harold Finch of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, a 20-year veteran who had worked homicide in the Columbus district before transferring to the southeast field

office. He was a careful, methodical man whose reports were later described by a reviewing detective as the most thorough documentation of an era before computers that she had encountered in 15 years of cold case work. Finch knew within the first week that this was not a voluntary disappearance. The purse, the shoe, the car in the hills with the keys in the ignition, the errand that would have taken 20 minutes.

These things did not add up to a woman who chose to leave. He looked carefully at two men. The first was a farmhand from a property adjoining the Corbett land, a man with a temper and a prior arrest for disorderly conduct, who had made a remark about Donna Jean at a church social two summers earlier that her friend Beverly had not forgotten.

 Finch interviewed him three times. His whereabouts on the afternoon of September 27th were documented by a family he had been helping move a grain silo. Four witnesses, none of them related to each other. He was eliminated. The second was a man in his early 30s who had moved to Athens County from Gallia County the previous year and who had no local connections that Finch could establish, which in a community where everyone knew everyone made him visible in an uncomfortable way.

Finch could not connect him to Donna Jean at all. No shared geography, no shared social circle, nothing. He faded from the inquiry without being formally cleared. What Finch could not explain was who had driven the Falcon to Township Road 214. No fingerprints usable for comparison were recovered from the vehicle.

The steering wheel had been wiped. Court documents confirmed that Finch noted the wiped wheel in his report and underlined it. Someone had known enough to do that. Someone had thought ahead. The family’s parallel experience of those months was, as Linda Corbett would later describe it, a kind of slow drowning.

Ruth Corbett stopped sleeping through the night and never fully started again. Walt Corbett drove Township Road 214 on Sunday mornings for two years as if the road might eventually offer something the search parties had missed. Ray Howell kept the pot roast money in a jar on the kitchen counter, the same counter, because he said he couldn’t move it without it meaning something final.

He raised Curtis alone. He never remarried. In the spring of 1970, the Athens County Sheriff’s Department closed the active phase of the investigation for lack of leads. Sergeant Finch wrote a memo to the file. It was three pages long. The last line read, “I believe this case is solvable. I believe the relevant evidence exists.

I believe it will require resources and time that this department does not currently possess.” He was right on all three counts. >> By 1980, 11 years had passed. The Hocking River ran the same course through the same valley it always had, and the hills above Millfield were a little thicker with timber each year, the hollows a little darker.

 Walt Corbett had retired from the bus route. Ruth Corbett’s kitchen garden had gone a little ragged at the edges, the way a garden does when the heart goes partly out of it. Curtis Howell had started fourth grade at Federal Hocking Elementary and had his mother’s dark eyes. I I’m sure content may be learning or share content and no memory of her face at all, only the photographs his father kept on the bookshelf in the living room.

 By 1987, Ray Howell had sold the house on Creston Avenue and moved with Curtis to Lancaster, 40 miles northwest, because the proximity of everything in Millfield, the diner, the church, the road to the grain elevator, had become a kind of daily wound he no longer had the reserves to sustain. By 1993, Ruth Corbett died without an answer. I I’m sure content may be learning or share content.

Walt Corbett followed her in 1990 high school. He stood at his grandfather’s graveside and thought about his mother and about how her case file was sitting in a box somewhere in the Athens County Sheriff’s property room and about what it meant that he had grown up without her because of something nobody had been able to explain.

The woman who never stopped believing through all of it was Linda Corbett, Donna Jean’s younger sister. Linda had married a man named Dale Ferguson and stayed in Millfield and for 30 years she had kept a folder in her filing cabinet at home that contained every news clipping, every letter she had written to authorities, every response she had received, and every name she had ever suspected and then been unable to prove.

She had written to the Athens County Sheriff four times across three decades. She had written to the Ohio Attorney General’s office twice. In 1998, she wrote content, she wrote to the FBI or filed careful responses that said some version of the same thing. Without new evidence, there was nothing to pursue. I always knew the evidence existed somewhere.

Linda would say many years later. Donna Jean didn’t disappear into the air. She was there. He was there. Something was there. I just couldn’t make anyone look hard enough. The case had been cold for 34 years when everything changed and it happened the way these things often do, not through a dramatic discovery, but through the quiet persistence of a single name on a cold case review list.

>> Every case on this channel represents weeks of digging through records, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that were lost. If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, please take a second to like this video, subscribe, and let us know in the comments where in the world you’re watching from.

Your support is what makes this possible. Now, let’s get back to Donna Jean. In 2003, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation established a dedicated cold case unit within its forensic science division. The unit’s mandate was to systematically review older unsolved homicide and missing persons cases for physical evidence that could be re-examined using DNA technology that had not existed when the original investigations were conducted.

 The Howell case came to the unit in 2004, pulled from the Athens County archive by a BCI analyst named Rachel Ostrowski, who was working through a regional backlog of cases involving missing women from the 1960s and 1970s. The shoe was still in the evidence box. The original packaging was intact. Ostrowski submitted it for DNA analysis.

What came back from the laboratory was unexpected in the best possible way. A small amount of biological material had been recovered from the insole of the shoe, skin cells consistent with being deposited when someone other than the shoe’s owner had handled the shoe’s interior. It was degraded. It was partial.

But it was there. A partial male DNA profile was extracted and entered into CODIS, the National Combined DNA Index System. No match was returned. The profile went into the database and waited. Rachel Ostrowski called Linda Ferguson with the news in the spring of 2004. Linda sat in her kitchen in Millfield and cried, not from grief, she later said, but from the specific relief of being told that what she had always known was now something the system could see, too.

“Someone touched that shoe.” Ostrowski told her. “We have him. We just don’t have his name yet.” The name arrived in 2022. 53 years after Donna Jean Howell walked out into a September afternoon and did not come back. The Ohio BCI’s cold case unit submitted the partial profile to a forensic genealogy firm under protocols established for exactly this kind of historical investigation.

The process works by comparing crime scene DNA against profiles in public ancestry databases. The same databases that millions of ordinary Americans have uploaded their genetic information to in order to find cousins and trace family trees. And working backwards through shared genetic markers to identify the unknown contributors relatives.

 Then narrowing the family tree to a single candidate. The genealogist assigned to the Howell case was a woman named Patricia Darby who had worked on cold cases in three states. She later described the Howell profile as one of the cleaner matches she had processed despite its age because the partial profile was strong enough to return multiple significant family matches in the database.

She built the tree over the course of six weeks. She identified a family from Athens County. She identified a birth range consistent with an adult male in 1969. She handed the name to the BCI unit. Detective Sergeant Michelle Carr who had been the lead on the Howell file since 2019 stared at the name on her screen for a long time.

She knew it. Not personally. But she knew it in the way that anyone who had spent 3 years reviewing the original case file knew it. The name appeared in the original 1969 investigation. Not as a suspect, but as a community member interviewed during the early canvas. He had been 29 years old that September. He was a deacon at First Methodist Church.

He had told Sergeant Finch in a brief interview recorded in the file that he had not seen Donna Jean Howell that Saturday, that he had been home with his wife all afternoon, and that he hoped the young woman turned up safe soon. Finch had noted the interview and moved on. There was no reason not to. His name was Gerald Eugene Mast.

By 2022, he was 82 years old, a retired school teacher and former school board member who had spent 50 years as one of the most trusted figures in the Millfield community. He had taught fifth grade at Federal Hocking Elementary for 27 years. He had been named Athens County Educator of the Year in 1991. He had a wife of 58 years, four grown children, and 11 grandchildren.

A man who attended the community vigils. A man who signed the sympathy card that the congregation sent to the Corbet family in October 1969. A man who in the weeks after Donna Jean’s disappearance had helped organize the collection that the church took up for Ray Howell and the baby. He was the last person anyone would have suspected.

He was the only person whose DNA was on that shoe. In September 2022, covert investigators collected a DNA sample from Gerald Mast through surveillance. The sample was submitted to the BCI laboratory under urgent processing protocols. The full DNA profile returned a match to the partial profile extracted from the shoe insole in 2004.

The match was confirmed. The match was absolute. On October 14th, 2022, Detective Sergeant Carr and two Athens County Sheriff’s deputies arrived at the home of Gerald Eugene Mast at 7:00 in the morning. His wife answered the door. Gerald Mast was in the kitchen at the table with a cup of coffee and the morning paper.

He looked up when the detectives came into the room. He did not speak. Carr read him his rights. She told him he was being arrested in connection with the murder of Donna Jean Howell in September 1969. He set down his coffee cup. He looked at the table. “After all this time,” he said, that was the only thing he ever said about it.

His wife, who had been married to him for 58 years, and who by all accounts had never suspected anything at all, had to be helped to a chair by a neighbor who had been summoned. Gerald Mast was walked to the waiting cruiser while a half dozen people on the quiet street where he had lived for 40 years watched from their driveways.

The couple across the road, retired farmers named Eldon and Bett Hartman, had known Gerald for 30 years. Eldon Hartman told a reporter from the Athens Messenger that he had stood in his driveway in his work boots and not been able to move. He said he had watched Gerald Mast coach Little League. He said he had watched Gerald Mast carry groceries for elderly women at the IGA.

He said, “You spend your whole life thinking you know someone. And then you find out you didn’t know the first thing about them.” The school where Gerald Mast had taught for 27 years, where Curtis Howell had attended fourth grade, held a staff meeting to address the news. The principal sent a letter home to parents.

Former students who had been in his classroom in the 1970s and 1980s called each other and did not know what to say. Records show that investigators subsequently identified a wooded property adjoining Township Road 214 that had been owned by Mast’s family in 1969 and that was sold in 1974. A forensic search of the property, conducted in the spring of 2023, located remains.

The Athens County Coroner confirmed the identification through dental records in July 2023. Donna Jean Howell had been found 54 years after the September afternoon when she had kissed her son on the head and walked out into the gold and smoke of a beautiful Ohio day. Gerald Eugene Mast died in custody in March 2024 at the age of 84 before his case proceeded to trial.

 The Athens County Prosecutor’s Office noted in a public statement that the evidence assembled was sufficient to have secured a conviction and that while the death of the accused before trial was an outcome the family had not wished for. The identification of Donna Jean’s remains and the naming of her killer constituted a form of resolution that the law was no longer able to improve upon.

Donna Jean Howell would have been 78 years old when her remains were identified in the summer of 2023. She would have watched Curtis grow up. She would have had grandchildren who carried her dark eyes into the future. She would have put up tomatoes every September with her mother until her mother was gone. And then she would have kept doing it alone the way women in that part of Ohio did.

Because some things are too important to stop just because the person who taught you is no longer there. She had wanted three children. She had wanted a pot roast on the table when her husband came home. She had wanted a life that was ordinary and complete. And it had been taken from her by a man who sat beside her family at church, who signed her family’s sympathy card, who looked Sergeant Finch in the eye in the autumn of 1969 and said he hoped she turned up safe.

Curtis Howell, who was in his mid-50s when his mother was found, gave a brief statement through his attorney. He said that he had spent his entire adult life not knowing and that not knowing was its own kind of sentence. He said that he was glad his father had not lived to know who it was. Ray Howell had died in 2011.

The grocery list jar still on the counter, his family said, right up until the end. Curtis said that if there was anything he wanted people to understand, it was that his mother was not a case. She was a woman who sang in the choir and wrote grocery lists and lost them before she got to the store. She was a woman who kissed her son on the head on a Saturday morning in September.

 And that should not have been the last thing she ever got to do. The Howell case changed how Athens County and the surrounding district understood what cold case forensic genealogy could accomplish. The Athens County Sheriff’s Office subsequently partnered with the Ohio BCI to conduct a full audit of physical evidence in 17 other unsolved cases from the 1960s and 1970s.

Two of those cases, as of this recording, have returned partial DNA profiles currently under genealogical investigation. What stays with you turning this case over is the particular quality of the cruelty involved, not just the act itself, but the 53 years after it. The sympathy card, the Little League coaching, the Educator of the Year plaque on a classroom wall in a school where the victim’s own son sat in fourth grade.

Gerald Mast did not just kill Donna Jean Howell. He spent half a century performing grief and community while her family carried a wound he had made. That is not a story about one crime. That is a story about what a person is capable of sustaining if no one ever makes them stop. Truth found Donna Jean after 53 years.

It found her because a single piece of evidence was packaged carefully in 1969 by people who believed it mattered. Because a woman named Rachel Ostrosky pulled the right file in 2004. Because the science existed that hadn’t existed before. And because Linda Ferguson never stopped writing letters to people who weren’t listening yet.

All of those things had to be true at the same time. This time, they were. What do you think it means that Gerald Mast was embedded so deeply in this community, teaching its children, serving its church, that no one ever looked at him? Is that a failure of systems or something harder to explain? And what about the family members of perpetrators like Mast? People who had no idea.

 What do we owe them if anything in these moments? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. These conversations matter. Justice found Donna Jean Howell after 53 years. Stories like hers are why this channel exists. If you believe truth is worth pursuing no matter how long it takes, subscribe so you don’t miss the next case.

And if you want more solved cold cases, the links are waiting in the description. Thank you for being here.