She was 16 years old. She babysat his children three nights a week. Two boys, ages four and six, who called her by her first name and ran to the door when they heard her knock. He was 38. He was their neighbor. He was the kind of man who showed up at the block association meetings and organized the Fourth of July cookout and was always without exception available to help someone load a moving truck or jumpstart a dead battery in the January cold.

 In Stubenville, Ohio in the winter of 1993, Kevin Dreer was what people in workingclass river towns called a solid citizen. And on the night of February 3rd, 1993, after 16-year-old Amy Torrance finished babysitting his boys and walked the 140 ft across the snow covered front yards to her own family’s house. She never arrived.

 She was found the following morning in a drainage easement at the end of the street, 31 years before the truth about Kevin Dreer was finally established by a detective who had never stopped being angry. But before we get to that detective, we have to go back to Stubenville. Because to understand what was taken from Amy Torrance and what her parents, Pat and Linda, spent 31 years living alongside, you first have to understand who she was.

It was February of 1993, and Stubenville sat along the Ohio River the way it had always sat. A steel town that had outlasted the steel, smaller than it once was, but tightly knit in the way that communities become when they have survived a shared decline together. The river ran dark in February, carrying thin ice along its edges.

 And the neighborhoods that ran up from the water toward the hilltops were the kind of neighborhoods where families had occupied the same houses for 30 years, and children grew up knowing the names of everyone on their block. It smelled of cold river air and wood smoke, and the particular iron smell that steel towns never fully lose, even long after the mills slow down.

Amy Torrance was 16 years old. She was a junior at Stubenville High School where she was in the band Second Chair Clarinet and had been quietly talking about going to Ohio State to study music education. Her band director, Mr. Hollis, told investigators that she was the kind of student who stayed late to get something right rather than leaving when the clock permitted.

At home, she was the older of two children, and her brother Daniel, 12 at the time, looked up to her in the particular wordless way that younger siblings do, following her around, borrowing her records without asking, appearing in the doorway of whatever room she was in. She babysat for the Dreer Boys three evenings a week.

 She was good with children in the natural, unrehearsed way. Patient, interested, imaginative. Kevin Dreer’s wife, Marlene, had told a neighbor that Amy was the best babysitter they’d ever had, and they were lucky she lived so close. On the evening of February 3rd, 1993, Amy babysat as usual, putting the Dreer boys to bed at 8:30 p.m.

and then watching television in the living room until Kevin and Marlene returned home at approximately 9:45 p.m. Kevin paid her the usual rate. Records show she received $12 for the evening. Marlene walked her to the door. The distance between the Dreer front door and the Torrance front door was 140 ft, measured later by investigators.

It was a clear night. The porch lights on both houses were on. It was not, in anyone’s assessment, a dangerous walk. Linda Torrance was watching the evening news. She waited for the sound of Amy’s footsteps on the porch stairs. The footsteps never came. At 10:47 p.m., Linda called the Dreer House.

 Marlene picked up and confirmed that Amy had left at approximately 9:50 p.m. Pat Torrance was out of the door before the call ended. He and three neighbors searched the street, calling Amy’s name within 15 minutes. Jefferson County deputies were on the scene by 11:30 p.m. Amy’s body was found at 7:15 a.m. the following morning by a deputy searching the drainage easement at the northern end of the block, a shallow snowcovered channel that ran between the residential street and a utility access road.

The investigation was immediate and thorough in its early stages. Detective Sergeant Carl Malone of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department took the lead. He understood immediately the significance of the geography. Amy had been taken within 140 ft of her own front door on a street she had walked dozens of times in a neighborhood where she knew every face.

That meant the person who took her was likely known to her. It meant she had not run. It meant she had either not had the chance to call out or had not recognized the threat in time. Kevin Dreer was interviewed within the first 24 hours as a matter of standard protocol. He was the last confirmed person to see Amy alive and the crime had begun within feet of his property.

He was cooperative, visibly distressed, and consistent in his account. Marlene confirmed his presence in the house from 9:50 p.m. onward. A deema sample was not requested at that stage. Detective Malone later described this as one of the failures of the early investigation. That standard protocol of the era did not routinely request elimination samples from household contacts the way modern investigation guidelines would require.

 Biological evidence collected from the scene was submitted to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation Lab. The profile was clean and clear. It was entered into Cody when the national database became operational in the late 1990s. No match returned. Kevin Dreer continued to live on the same street. He continued to attend block association meetings.

 He watched his boys grow up in the house across from the Torrance family. Pat and Linda Torrance continued to live in that house, too. They had nowhere particular to go, and leaving felt in some way they could not name, like abandoning Amy. They watched Kevin Dreer mow his lawn. They waved to him because what else do you do? By 2003, 10 years after Amy’s death, the investigation had passed through three different case officers and generated no new leads.

 The Cotus entry remained unmatched. Kevin Dreer had relocated to Columbus by 2005 following a job transfer. The Stubenville neighborhood continued its quiet life. Daniel Torrance, Amy’s younger brother, had grown up and was working in construction. He called his mother every Sunday, the way Amy had when she went away on band trips.

Linda kept Amy’s clarinet in the hall closet in its case, as it had always been. One detective had not let the file become a box in a storage room. Detective Anita Reeves, who joined the Jefferson County Cold Case Unit in 2009, pulled the Torrance case in her first month and made herself a personal commitment to it that she did not explain to colleagues because she didn’t know how to explain it except to say that 16-year-old girls walking 140 ft home deserved better than an open file.

She pursued every avenue permitted by her resources. In 2018, she submitted a request for investigative genealogy services through a state-f funded cold case program that had been established with federal grant money. The request was approved in 2022. The DINA profile was uploaded to consumer ancestry databases in early 2023.

 Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying facts, and piecing together real lives that were lost. If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, take a second to like and subscribe. Drop a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get back to Amy.

 The case had been cold for 31 years when a genealogy analysis built from the Dena profile came back with a lead that pointed directly toward a Columbus, Ohio address and a man named Kevin Dreer. The confirmation was not immediate. It never is with investigative genealogy. The genetic analysis identified a family cluster that when the resulting family tree was built backward through three generations pointed to a single viable candidate within the right age range and with the right geographic history.

 That candidate was Kevin Dreer. Investigators conducted discrete surveillance. A biological sample was obtained from a discarded item. Court documents describe the method as consistent with established case law on abandoned dena. The comparison was completed in September 2023. The match probability was stated in the forensic report as greater than one in 1 trillion.

Kevin Dreer’s Dena was an exact match to the evidence collected from the drainage easement in Stubenville, Ohio in February 1993. He was 68 years old when Detective Reeves personally participated in his arrest in Columbus on a Thursday morning in October 2023. He was retired. He had grandchildren. He lived in a tidy house in a tidy suburb and was by all outward appearances an old man living an ordinary retired life.

 When investigators told him what they had, he sat for a long time before he spoke. He then said that he wanted to talk to a lawyer. The community response in Stubenville was complex and complete. For people who had known Kevin Dreer, who had eaten at his cookout table, whose children had played with his sons, the arrest required a form of recalibration that did not have a clean word.

 They had not been wrong to trust him in all the ordinary ways. But he had used that trust as a wall between himself and consequence for 31 years. He had smiled at Pat and Linda Torrance across a fence in the years after their daughter’s murder. He had done so while carrying the knowledge of what he had done and the confidence that it was buried.

 Kevin Dreer was tried in Jefferson County in 2024. The Dena evidence was presented alongside Detective Reeves’s decade plus of reconstructive work, the original investigative record, and the testimony of Amy’s family. He was convicted of aggravated murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

 He showed no visible emotion when the verdict was read. Pat Torrance sitting in the second row with Daniel on one side of him and his sister on the other closed his eyes when the word guilty was spoken and did not open them again for a long time. Amy Torrance was second chair clarinet. She was patient and imaginative with children.

 She wanted to go to Ohio State. She kept her music going in the hall closet of a house she had walked home to a hundred times. And on one of those times, someone she trusted not to be dangerous used that trust against her in the worst possible way. The 140 ft between two front doors is nothing. It is a distance you can cover in less than a minute.

 It is a distance you should be safe across on a street, you know, in a town, you know, on a night with the porch lights on. Amy Torrance was not safe across it because the person who had just paid her for the evening had decided she was not going to be. Detective Anita Reeves spent 14 years being angry on Amy’s behalf.

 And that anger was precise and productive and it resulted in a conviction. That is what sustained and directed anger in the hands of the right person can do. What do you think about cases where the perpetrator maintained a relationship with the victim’s family, lived alongside them for years after the crime? Does the geographic intimacy of this case change the way you think about neighborhood trust? And what does it mean that modern Dena technology can now reach back 30 years to cases that seemed completely cold? We want to hear your thoughts in the

comments. Justice came for Amy Torrance after 31 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. More solved cold cases are waiting in the description below. Thank you for being here.