Written by On the 1st of June 1979, 17-year-old Catherine Louise Conley went missing.
Around 8:45 pm that evening, the resident of 217 Windsor Street departed her family home and walked to the Kroger grocery store formerly located on S Main Street near the intersection with Columbia Street, in order to purchase formula for her six-month-old baby girl, Naomi.
She never returned home.
On the 3rd of June, her family filed a missing person’s report with the Marion Police Department. The Marion Star subsequently published a notice of her disappearance on June 14th.
The morning after the Star article went out, around 9 am, Catherine’s partially decomposed body was found by Eric Anthony in a hedgerow between two of his family’s fields, 15 miles away in Morrow County, near the intersection of County Road 9 and County Road 131, about a mile north of the village of Edison.
The body of the young woman, unidentified at first, was sent to the Hamilton County Morgue in Cincinnati for an autopsy, where she was later identified based on Catherine Conley’s dental records, which were supplied by the Marion Police Department. The cause of death was determined to be severe blunt force trauma to the head.
Once her body was identified, the Morrow County Sheriff’s Department, Marion Police Department, and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation examined the scene of the crime and began searching for both witnesses and potential suspects.
Marion Police interviewed witnesses, including employees, at the Kroger on S Main Street; however, according to the coverage in the Marion Star, nobody claimed to have seen anything.
Over in Morrow County, a witness reported seeing a strange vehicle with a single occupant leaving the scene of the crime that night. Back then, that location had a reputation of being a “parking spot” for teens and others, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary to see couples back there. However, it was strange, according to the witness, to see a solitary person back there, so the witness recorded the vehicle’s license plate number on a piece of paper.
Unfortunately for investigators and Catherine’s family, that witness somehow misplaced the piece of paper with the license plate number and could not provide a description of the vehicle or any further information that was of use.
Later that week, Catherine Conley’s family buried her earthly remains in the Chapel Heights Memory Gardens Cemetery, located about three miles north of Marion. Left to mourn her loss and carry the unanswered emotional scars were her daughter, Naomi Craig; her mother, Margaret W (Hackworth) Conley; her grandmother, Maude M (Lambert) Hackworth; her brother, Shannon Hackworth; and her two sisters, Twila M (Hackworth) Craig-Gray and Heidi R (Phillips) Lundquist.
Although the newspapers at the time didn’t publish it, law enforcement did in fact question the man that we now know murdered Catherine Conley: 19-year-old Dana Slane, a then resident of 749 Wilson Avenue in Marion.
Dana Slane, the son of Paul W Slane, a then resident of Edison, OH, and Stella (Kight) Slane of Marion, was a regular visitor to the Marion City Parking Lot, which was located at the corner of S Prospect Street and W Church Street, back when that was a popular hangout for Marion’s youth.
Prior to his violent murder of Catherine Conley, Slane had been arrested for disorderly conduct, but for the most part, his criminal record wasn’t much of note–at that time.
However, two months after he murdered Catherine, he was arrested by Marion Police and charged with two counts of gross sexual imposition for an occurrence on the 19th of August 1979.
According to the arrest notice, Slane picked up a 20-year-old woman and a 17-year-old girl at the Marion City Parking Lot and drove off with them. One of the victims somehow alerted law enforcement and he was pulled over on Cardington Road.
Remember, this was only two months after Dana Slane had murdered Catherine Conley under similar circumstances. Had he not been pulled over, who knows what would have happened.
The following year, Slane was arrested some seven times for disorderly conduct, public intoxication and obstructing official business.
In June of 1980, Catherine’s family held a protest in front of Marion City Hall to draw attention to law enforcement’s failure to find her murderer.
All the while, the investigation of Catherine’s murder got colder and colder.
The preceding is the first part of a special series that will be covering regarding the recent solving of a 46-year cold case murder by the Morrow County Sheriff’s Department.
*All research was conducted by OMW’s historian and commentator, Cody Higley