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Detectives take different tracks on missing person cases
By Joe Gorman
YOUNGSTOWN
Several generations of detectives have taken a crack at solving the 1974 disappearance of Joanne Coughlin. Now it’s Youngstown police Detective Sgt. David Sweeney’s turn.
In the 1981 disappearance of Phyliss Brewer of Coitsville, however, Detective Pat Mondora of the Mahoning County Sheriff’s Office is the first investigator to see if her fate can be determined.
The two cases are among the oldest missing persons cases in Mahoning County. Both are featured on the state Attorney General’s website in the missing persons section.
Coughlin’s case has far more notoriety and has been the subject of newspaper and television news stories since her disappearance Dec. 27, 1974, while on her way to a Boardman health spa.
While other detectives in the past have made attempts at finding out what happened to her, Sweeney said he has other advantages they did not, mainly the advent of the internet and improvements in DNA technology.
Last year, Sweeney was able to use DNA and pleas for help in Texas to help resolve the fate of a woman who went missing in 1998, with help from a tipster on the internet.
Sweeney said he has not only been in contact with past Youngstown detectives who worked the case, but detectives in Boardman as well, since Couglin, 21, was on her way to a spa there when she disappeared. Although Coughlin signed in at the spa, family members claim the signature is not hers. She had plans to meet her boyfriend later in the evening but was never seen again. Her 1968 Ford Fairlane was also never found.
Her case file is one of the largest in the detective bureau, and Sweeney said detectives at the time of her disappearance interviewed more than a dozen people. Sweeney said he plans to interview several of those witnesses again. Having so much data to sift through is helpful because it gives him a starting point, but it’s also a hindrance in a way because going through all that data is very time consuming, Sweeney said.
“There’s plenty of material to filter through, but that filtering takes so long,” Sweeney said.
Mondora, though, does not have a lot to start with.
Brewer was never reported missing. The only reason that came to light was when a sister of hers died the Mahoning County Coroner’s office found out that she had a sibling who is unaccounted for.
Brewer, 19, disappeared June 13, 1981, from her home in the 400 block of North Hubbard Road when she left for a walk. Mondora said there is no police report for her disappearance, and he got the case because of the information received from the coroner’s office.
At the time she disappeared, Coitsville did not have a police department, only a constable, Mondora said.
“We couldn’t even find a report,” Mondora said.
He began working the case in 2014 and did manage to get a DNA sample from a niece of Brewer’s.
Mondora said he knocked on doors in Brewer’s neighborhood, and while a couple of people knew of her disappearance, a few more who lived there at the time she disappeared were unaware that someone had gone missing, which Mondora said he considered odd.
Another oddity to the case is that a brother of Brewer’s died three days before she disappeared in an industrial accident at a chemical plant on Meridan Road in Austintown.
Mondora said he has had some leads on the case but after checking with other law-enforcement entities none of them panned out.
If anyone has information on Coughlin’s case, they can call the police department’s detective bureau at 330-742-8911. For any information on Brewer’s case, people can call Mondora at 330-480-5051.