BURTON, Ohio — We are hearing from the man who helped crack one of Northeast Ohio’s biggest cold cases. He is not a detective, but rather, someone who simply shared DNA.
Late last year, Vernon Holden submitted his father-in-law’s DNA to a website called “GEDmatch.”
Within months, police came knocking at his home in Omaha, Nebraska.
“My initial reaction to it was, ‘How close of a match is this, and is my family involved?’” Holden said.
Little did he know that investigators had produced a family tree of roughly 1,400 people in the infamous “Geauga’s Child” case.
Dave Gilger, Vernon’s father-in-law, was a distant cousin of “Geauga’s Child.”
It was a major clue in a mystery that began in March 1993, when the infant boy’s body was found abandoned along a rural road in Thompson Township.
“The entire county was affected by this case,” Geauga County Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand said.
“The sheriff’s office and the prosecutors had never stopped,” Detective Donald Seamon said. “They followed every lead they possibly could.”
Gilger never believed the most critical lead would come from him.
“I think God had something to do with this,” he said.
This summer, 49-year-old Gail Eastwood Ritchey, a married mother of three, was charged with murder.
Deputies say she confessed, admitting she did something similar with another child, and showed little remorse.
On Thursday, Holden was honored at the Geauga County Fair by both the sheriff and the prosecutor.
“We got closure for everybody,” he said.