Teen’s Body on the Tracks Finally revealed a Dark Family Secret After 27 Years

The train driver saw her from 200 meters out and knew even then that he was too late. On the morning of Saturday the 3rd of September 1994 at 6:47 a freight locomotive running south on the Midland line through the rural township of Harick, Ohio, population 2060 rounded the long curve past the grain silos.

 And the driver, a man named Dale Obert, who had been running that route for nine years, saw something on the tracks ahead. He applied the emergency brake. He had time to register that it was a person. He had time to register that she was young. He did not have time to stop. The locomotive came to rest 430 m past the point of impact. It took Obert 11 minutes to reach her on foot.

 She was lying in the tall grass at the track’s edge, thrown clear by the force of it. And she was wearing a white cotton dress with small blue flowers on it. That was entirely wrong for a September morning this far north. Too thin, too summery. The kind of dress a girl puts on for something that matters to her. She had no shoes. She had no identification.

 She had a small silver bracelet on her left wrist with a single charm, a four-leaf clover that had somehow survived everything intact. She was a teenager. She looked, Obert would say in every interview he gave for the rest of his life, like someone who had been placed there rather than fallen. She had no name. Not yet.

 For 5 days, she had no name. But she had a story hidden inside a family that lived 11 miles from those tracks. And it would take 27 years to get out. To understand what was finally revealed, you first have to understand who she was. And to understand who she was, you have to understand the house she came from and what that house had been hiding.

Harwick, Ohio, sits in the flat farmland of Wayne County. In the part of the state where the land opens up wide and the sky feels very large and the nearest city is far enough away that people stay local out of habit and preference both. In 1994, it was a town of grain elevators and hardware stores and a single screen cinema that showed films 3 weeks after they left everywhere else.

and a high school whose sports teams were the primary civic entertainment from August through to May. The summers were thick and humid. The Septeers arrived like a relief. Carla Myrt was 17 years old. She had lived her whole life in Harwick in the house on Fenwick Road that her father Douglas Myrt had built with his own hands in 1974, the year before she was born.

 Douglas Myrtau was a man the town knew primarily through his truck, a black pickup that sat in driveways and car parks with the particular solidity of something that has been the same thing for a long time. He worked in agricultural equipment repair, ran a small workshop from a converted barn behind the house.

 He was the kind of man described when described at all with words like solid and dependable, which in a town like Harwick meant that he paid his debts and kept his fence lines straight and didn’t make trouble for anyone outside his property. What happened inside his property was not something Harwick knew. Carla’s mother, Sandre Myrt, had left the family in 1986.

 When Carla was 11, she had moved to Columbus and within a year had limited contact with her children. There were two, Carla and her brother Kevin, who was 14 in 1994 and three years younger than his sister. Sandre’s departure and the silence that followed it was explained in Harwick as one of those things. a marriage that hadn’t held. A woman who hadn’t stayed.

Nobody in town had thought to ask Carla or Kevin what they thought about it. Carla was a quiet girl at school. Not shy in the way that announces itself, but contained. a girl who watched more than she spoke, who sat in the back row of her English class and handed in work that her teacher, a woman named Gail Torbert, would later describe in court documents as being startling in its intelligence and almost painful in its honesty.

She wrote poetry. She had a best friend named Josie Ren who lived four streets over. And Josie was the one person in Harwick who knew that Carla was more than the school understood her to be. She had plans. That was the thing about Carla Mr. that Josie would spend 27 years trying to make the world understand.

She had plans. She was going to study literature at Ohio State. She had filled out the early application in the spring of 1994, the first in her family ever to attempt university. and Gail Torbert had written her a reference that she said she was prouder of than almost anything she’d done in her teaching career.

She had bought the white dress with the blue flowers at a thrift store in Worster in July. She’d shown it to Josie and said she was saving it for something. Nobody knew what the something was supposed to be. Nobody knew she had worn it that morning. Nobody knew she was gone until the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office released a description of the unidentified girl on the Midland line and Josie Ren went white at her kitchen table and said her name out loud before anyone had told her. That was how Carla Myrt came home.

Not through her father, through her best friend. That was the first thing investigators noticed. And it was not the last. Detective Roy Stiller of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office was assigned to the case on the morning of September 4th, 1994. Once Josie Ren’s identification had been confirmed through dental records, Stiller was 44 years old, a straightforward and experienced detective who had worked Wayne County for 18 years.

 He was not in the language of the case files. He would eventually fill several boxes with a man who formed conclusions before he had evidence. But he would say privately to the investigator who eventually cracked the case open 27 years later that within the first week he had formed an impression that he could never prove. And the impression had shaped every step he took from there.

 Douglas Myrt was interviewed on September 5th. He stated that Carla had been at home on the evening of September 2nd. He stated that he had last seen her at approximately 10:00 that night when he had checked that the children were in bed. He stated that he had not known she had left the house.

 He stated that he did not know why she would have gone to the railway line. He stated these things in a flat and unvarying register that Stiller noted in the case file as consistent, controlled, no visible distress. Kevin Myrtto was 13 years old and did not give a statement in the first week. His father was present for all interactions with police.

Kevin looked in Stiller’s notes like a boy who had learned to make himself very small. The physical evidence from the track site was processed by the state forensic lab. The cause of death was confirmed as fatal injuries sustained from contact with the locomotive consistent in the forensic determination with the body having been placed on or near the tracks prior to the train’s approach.

Not consistent, the forensic pathologist noted carefully with a voluntary decision to be in that location. There were findings that pointed away from accident and pointed away from suicide and towards something that the pathologists report described in the formal restrained language of someone who knows what they are saying and understands the weight of it.

 but without a witness, without physical evidence connecting anyone to the scene, without a surviving account of what had happened inside the house on Fenwick Road on the night of September 2nd, 1994, Stiller could not take what he knew toward what he needed. He interviewed Douglas Myrts. Each time, the answers were the same.

Each time Douglas Myrtto sat across from him in the same posture with the same controlled flatness and said the same things. Each time Stiller walked out of the room knowing exactly what he believed and unable to do a single thing about it. Kevin was placed with his maternal aunt in Columbus, Sandra Myrtto’s sister, within two weeks of Carla’s death.

 Douglas offered no objection. The speed of his agreement was, Stiller noted, the kind of detail that looks like nothing and means everything. Douglas Myrtto was not charged. The case was classified as an unresolved suspicious death. The file remained open. Stiller kept it. By 1997, 3 years in, the state forensic review board had revisited the pathologist’s findings and affirmed them.

 The determination of suspicious circumstances was formalized. It did not bring them closer to a charge. In the town of Harwick, Carla Myrtau was buried in Greenwood Cemetery on the east side of town, and her teacher, Gail Torbert was at the funeral, and Josie Ren was at the funeral, and almost everyone else in Harwick was at the funeral.

 And Douglas Myrtto stood at the graveside in a dark jacket with his hands folded and his face in the expression that Stiller had come to think of as a mask. So old the man had forgotten it was one. By 2001, 7 years had passed. Kevin Myrt was 21 years old. He was living in Columbus with his aunt, had completed a trade qualification in electrical work, and was, by all visible indicators, building a life of careful ordinarity, the kind of life that people build when they have had enough of the other kind.

He had not returned to Harwick. He did not speak to his father. He had not spoken to the police since 1994. Roy Stiller had called him twice in 1998 and again in 2001 gently and without pressure. Kevin had not hung up. He had listened. He had said each time that he didn’t have anything to say. Stiller had thanked him and said he understood and left his number and said Kevin could call whenever he wanted.

 Kevin had not called. Stiller understood. He had read enough files in his career to understand what it looks like when someone is not yet ready. The question was whether ready would ever come. By 2008, 14 years gone, Douglas Myrt had sold the house on Fenwick Road and retired to a lake property near Millersburg. He was 61 years old.

 He had, in the years since Carla’s death, been briefly remarried and divorced. He had no contact with his son. He drove his truck, a new one now, but black, always black, around the lake roads and repaired his own equipment and kept to himself, and the people of Millersburg knew nothing about him except that he was quiet and that he paid what he owed.

Gail Torbert, who had retired from teaching in 2005, still kept the reference letter she had written for Carla Myrtto’s Ohio State application. She kept it in a manila folder in her home office. She took it out sometimes and read it. She said to the documentary filmmaker who eventually made a film about the case that every time she read it, she was reminded of what a letter like that costs a teacher, the particular hope of it, and what it means to write one for someone who never gets to use it.

Josie Ren had moved to Cleveland in 1999. She worked as a social worker. She had for years said that the work she did was connected to Carla. And when people pressed her on what she meant, she described it simply. She worked with young people who were in danger inside their own homes. And she was good at recognizing what that looked like because she had seen it and not known how to name it when she was 16.

She had always known something was wrong on Fenwick Road. She had not known what to do with that knowing. The case had been cold for 20 years when Roy Stiller retired in 2014. He was 64 years old. He transferred the Myrtto case files, four boxes carefully ordered to the Wayne County cold case unit. He wrote a two-page summary memorandum for the incoming detective that was by all accounts of those who read it one of the clearest articulations of an unproven certainty ever committed to an official document.

He named Douglas Myrt. He explained why he believed what he believed. He said that the key was Kevin and that Kevin would talk when Kevin was ready and that whoever inherited the case should be patient and should not push and should keep the number available. He left his own home number, too. Every case on this channel represents weeks of research, verifying facts, and piecing together lives that deserved better.

 If you want us to keep uncovering the truth behind stories like this one, please take a second to like this video and subscribe and tell us in the comments where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get back to Carla. In 2019, Kevin Mertr was 39 years old. He was living in Columbus, had been for 20 years.

 He owned his own electrical contracting business. He had a partner and a daughter. His daughter was 8 years old. Her name was Carla. On the evening of November 14th, 2019, Kevin Mertr called the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office cold case line. The detective who answered was a woman named Sarah Howell, 36 years old, who had been assigned to the Myrtto file 18 months earlier, and who had read Roy Stiller’s summary memorandum and done exactly what it told her to do, been patient, not pushed, kept the number available.

Kevin Myrtto spoke for 2 hours and 40 minutes. He had been in the house on Fenwick Road on the night of September 2nd, 1994. He had been 13 years old. He had witnessed an argument between his father and his sister. An argument that had been building, he said, for the entire summer. He described a pattern of behavior inside that house that went back years.

 a climate of control and violence and threat that had intensified after Sandra’s departure and that had focused in the months before Carla’s death on Carla herself because Carla had started fighting back because Carla had filled out a university application because Carla had started making plans to leave. He said he had heard his father’s voice and his sister’s voice and then sounds he could not describe and then silence.

He said he had stayed in his room with the door closed because that was what he had learned to do. He said he had not gone out. He said that in the morning his sister was gone. He had been 13 years old. He had carried it for 25 years because he was afraid. And then he had named his daughter for his sister. And the morning she started school, he looked at her walking through a door and he thought about Carla walking into a classroom for the last time and filling out an application to Ohio State.

 And he went home and sat at his kitchen table for a long time. And then he picked up the telephone. Detective Howell had been trained not to show what she was feeling during interviews. She showed it anyway. Kevin’s testimony, combined with the original forensic pathology findings, now reanalyzed by a forensic pathologist at Ohio State University using updated methodology, provided the foundation for a prosecution case that had been 25 years in the building.

 The reanalysis affirmed and extended the original findings, removing the language of ambiguity that had made a 1994 charge impossible. Physical evidence re-examined from the original seam collection included a fragment of dark cotton fabric caught on the wire fence line 12 meters from the point of impact. Consistent with work wear, not consistent with any clothing Carla Mertr owned.

The fragment had been stored in the original evidence repository since 1994. Dena extraction using techniques developed in the intervening decades returned a partial male profile. The profile run through the state and federal databases was consistent with a firstderee relative of Kevin Myrtto. A warrant was obtained.

Douglas Myrtto provided a Dena sample on January 7th, 2020 at the Millersburg Sheriff’s substation. He was 69 years old. He sat in the interview room with the same flat controlled expression that Royce Stiller had described in 1994. He said he didn’t know what this was about. He said he’d like to know what this was about.

The Dena came back in 11 days. Full match. The arrest of Douglas Myrt took place on the morning of January 22nd, 2020 at his lake property near Millersburg. Three detectives and a county prosecutor’s investigator drove up before dawn. He answered the door in his workclo. When the lead detective told him why they were there, Douglas Myrt looked at her for a long moment.

He looked past her at the dark lake, at the trees, at the road. He looked at his own hands. He said nothing. He was handcuffed in his doorway and walked to the vehicle and placed in the back seat. and the black truck sat in his drive in the gray January morning, and the lake was very still. In Harwick, the news moved the way it does in small towns, quickly and completely through phone calls and kitchen tables and the hardware store counter.

 And by the end of the day, there was not a person in town who hadn’t heard. People who had attended Carlo’s funeral in 1994, who had stood at that graveside and watched Douglas Myrt stand there with his hands folded and his face in that expression, found themselves replaying that image against what they now knew.

 And the feeling that came with it was not satisfaction and was not relief, and was something more like the long overdue arrival of a truth they had been half carrying without knowing it. Gail Torbert heard the news from a former colleague. She sat in her home office and took out the Manila folder and read the reference letter she had written for Carla Myrtto’s Ohio State application.

She read it all the way through. Then she folded it, replaced it, and closed the folder, and she allowed herself for the first time in 26 years to cry about it. Douglas Myrtto was tried in the Wayne County Court of Common Please in October 2021. Kevin Myrtto testified for 4 hours. He was composed throughout with the particular composure of someone who has been practicing the words for a very long time and is finally saying them in the right room.

Josie Ren testified about what she had observed of Carla’s home life in the years before her death. the things Carla had said and more often the things she hadn’t said. The specific vocabulary of omission that a girl uses when she is protecting a secret she has no safe way to name.

 The forensic evidence, the dena, the testimony, the pathology report reanalyzed and clarified. Douglas Myrtto maintained a not-uilty plea throughout the trial. He did not testify. The jury deliberated for nine hours and returned a verdict of guilty on one count of aggravated murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

 He was 70 years old. Kevin Myrtto was in the courtroom for the sentencing. He sat in the public gallery with his partner beside him. When the sentence was read, he was very still. Outside the court, he gave a single brief statement to the press. He said that his sister had wanted to study literature at Ohio State.

 He said she had been the bravest person he had ever known. He said he was sorry it had taken him this long. And then he corrected himself and said he was not sorry. He had been 13 years old and he had done the only thing that kept him alive, which was survive. And now he had done the next thing. The next thing was this.

He said, “Now I’m done.” He drove back to Columbus. He picked his daughter up from school. He did not tell the journalist who followed up 3 weeks later what he had said to her or what she had said to him. Some things he said are private. Carla Myrtto is buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Harwick, Ohio on the east side of town. She was 17 years old.

 She wanted to study literature. She had a best friend who knew she was more than anyone understood and a brother who named his daughter for her and a teacher who kept the letter she’d never used in a manila folder in a home office for 27 years. The clover bracelet, the silver one with the single charm, the one that survived everything intact, was returned to the family after the trial.

Kevin has it. He said he’s keeping it for his daughter for when she’s old enough to understand what it is and who wore it and why it matters that someone kept it. Justice does not always announce itself when it is doing its most important work. For 25 years, Kevin Myrtto woke up every morning with the weight of what he had witnessed and the knowledge that no one had asked him to carry it alone except that they had because he had been 13 and the only other people who might have helped were the ones he was afraid

1. The system missed him. The town missed him. The tragedy is not only what happened to Carla. It is that her little brother watched it and lived with it alone in the room next door for a quarter of a century. When he finally called, it was because of a girl named Carla starting school. That is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

Before you go, a few questions worth sitting with. Kevin named his daughter Carla and then watched her walk through a school door. And that was what broke 25 years of silence. What does that tell us about how grief and love work on the same thread? Josie Ren became a social worker who specialized in recognizing danger inside homes.

 She turned what she couldn’t do for Carla into what she could do for others. Do you think that’s what survival looks like? And the fabric fragment from 1994 kept in a repository for 26 years, never matched until the technology existed. What does it say about the value of preserving evidence carefully even when it seems to mean nothing? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

 We read everyone. Justice found Carla Murrt after 27 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’re here for the next case. More are waiting in the description below. Thank you for watching.