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Investigator hopes cold case success brings more results
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
The investigator in charge of missing-persons cases for the city police department hopes a breakthrough last week in a 20-year-old case can lead to breakthroughs in other cases.
Detective Sgt. David Sweeney said he is hopeful that relatives or friends of other missing persons will see that police were able to find out what happened to Lina Reyes-Geddes, 37, whose body was found in 1998 in Utah but not identified until last week.
Sweeney has several open missing-persons cases he is working on, some older than the case of Reyes-Geddes, who went missing from her Austintown home in April 1998.
City police took over the case because her late husband had a business in the city and also because they had one of the few officers in the area at the time who could speak fluent Spanish. Reyes-Geddes’ family is from Mexico.
“We’re hoping because of this case, people come forward,” Sweeney said.
Duplicating some of the events that led to finding the identity of Reyes-Geddes, who was dumped in a remote area of Utah with a gunshot wound to her head and her fingerprints obliterated, may be hard to do, however.
Sweeney and counterparts in Utah, unbeknownst to each other, began in October to try and figure out their pieces of the respective puzzle, with Sweeney trying to find a relative of Reyes-Geddes and Utah officials hoping to identify a body that was found in 1998.
For his cases, Sweeney is trying to find either people who have information on the missing person or close relatives who could provide a DNA sample or items such as dental records, which can be checked against national databases to see if there are any matches.
One case Sweeney is particularly interested in is that of Joanne Coughlin, who disappeared without a trace in December 1974 while she was on her way to a Boardman health spa.
Also of note is the case of Samantha A. Joseph, who was reported missing in July 2009.
Sweeney has missing-persons cases going back to 1985, but Coughlin is the oldest case he is currently working on.
Investigators were able to identify Reyes-Geddes’ remains in Utah after a member of her family in Mexico submitted a DNA sample to investigators there. They also answered a news release Sweeney sent by email to several media outlets in the Laredo, Texas, area with her picture, asking if anyone knew who she was. Sweeney, when he received an answer from a relative of Reyes-Geddes’, put that person in touch with the Utah Department of Public Safety.
While she is now identified, the next question is who killed Reyes-Geddes. The Utah Department of Public Safety had believed she was a victim of serial killer Scott Kimball, who is serving a 70-year prison term for other murders, because of the way in which her body was disposed.
The Garfield County Sheriff’s Office in Utah, however, said that a suspect in the case was already dead and he committed suicide in Nevada in the early 2000s. At a news conference Thursday, agent Brian Davis of the UDPS identified that person as Edward Geddes, Reyes-Geddes’ husband. Davis said Geddes is not a suspect, but investigators will look at the case again now that they have an identification on the remains.
One former investigator on the case, however, considered Geddes a suspect. Former Detective Sgt. Jose Morales, now retired, was the Spanish-speaking officer who took the case because no one in Austintown spoke Spanish fluently at the time.
Morales said he interviewed Geddes and was convinced he was responsible for his wife’s disappearance, but he did not have enough evidence to make a case. He left town shortly after his wife’s disappearance was reported, which was not until September 1998. The disappearance was reported by family members.
“There was nowhere to go with it at the time,” Morales said.
Morales said the case has stayed with him over the years. He said he was surprised when he heard she had been found, because she was found so far away. He said he always thought she would be found closer to Youngstown.
A former Austintown detective who assisted on the case there, Raynor Holmes, said he also remembers the case, and he gave credit to Sweeney for being able to finally find Reyes-Geddes.
“He did a hell of a job,” Holmes said of Sweeney.