Ohio community seeks clues after six women vanish

July 4, 2015 at 10:42p.m.

CHILLICOTHE

The fate of six women – four of them dead, two missing for months – has people on edge in this small southern Ohio city as relatives seek clues, seemingly in vain, to whatever happened to their loved ones.

Grieving family members and nervous residents worry about a serial killer in their midst. Police say they aren’t ruling anything out, but say it’s more likely the women’s troubled histories caught up with them in deadly ways. All were drug addicts, and several had prostituted themselves to feed their habit.

Police also say that because the women ran in the same circles, someone knows the fuller story.

“There’s that one person out there that has the information that’s going to break this case. We know that, we just have to get to them,” said Chillicothe police Officer Bud Lytle.

Charlotte Trego, who would be 28, has been gone the longest, missing since her mother dropped her off at an apartment in Chillicothe in early May 2014. She was into drugs and may have turned to prostitution to support her habit, said her mother, Yvonne Boggs.

“She wouldn’t go this long without calling me,” said Boggs, of Waverly, about 15 miles farther south on U.S. Route 23.

Tameka Lynch, 30, disappeared a couple of weeks later. Her body was found on a sand bar in Paint Creek by a group of kayakers May 24, 2014, four days after the coroner says she likely died.

Lynch was scared of water and wouldn’t willingly have gone anywhere near a river, said her mother, Angela Robinson. She described her daughter, a mother of three, as a beautiful but naive person who was too trusting.

“Somebody just tossed her away like a piece of trash,” Robinson said.