Sharon Pretorius (6 of Diamonds, Ohio)
2023-10-25 00:28:10
For years, some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing card decks with images of missing and murdered people and distributed those cards in prisons hoping inmates would come forward with information needed to crack these cold cases wide open. Now, audiochuck is dealing you in. Each week, we will be working with investigators and family members to bring you the details of some of the coldest cases from around the country in hopes that someone listening can finally bring these victims the justice they deserve.
Our card this week is Sharon Pretorius, The Six of Diamonds from Ohio. One September day in 1973, 13-year-old Sharon left her home just to run a quick errand, an errand she'd run dozens of times before. But that day would be different. And for the last 50 years, her family and investigators have put all their hope and energy into trying to determine what happened in just a 90-second window. After she walked out the door. Maybe you out there listening can help. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is the deck.
Afternoon was fading into evening on September 28, 1973, and 15-year-old Richard Pretorius was sitting in the kitchen of an unusually empty and quiet home, unwinding. After a long week of school, his mother and three youngest siblings were out running errands. So it was just him, his older brother, Doug, and his younger sister, Sharon, at their four-bedroom cottage in Dayton, Ohio. But that trio went down to two when Sharon came rushing through the kitchen, making a beeline toward the door.
She was leaving, told me where she was going. She had a morning paper out and she didn't collect money from her customers at the same time. She delivered. She would deliver in the morning, typically in the dark, before daybreak, but every week she would go out and collect the money. That's what she was doing.
Sharon had just gotten home from music lessons not too long before, but she kept a busy schedule. She had to go collect payment now so she could make it home in time for supper, around six, and then get to another event later that evening. Shortly after Sharon departed, Richard's mom, Mary Carol and the other siblings returned from shopping. And soon enough everyone was ready for supper. But Sharon didn't come to the dinner table right away. Mary Carol was worried.
Now, Sharon did have a pretty long paper route. I'll put a map of it on the blog post for this episode. But it still only took her maybe 45 minutes to collect payment from everyone, which would have put her home by that point. Even David, the youngest sibling, who was only six at the time, has vivid memories of the uneasiness that quickly filled the home that evening.
I remember when my mother first started to get worried. I remember she was kind of furtive movements, she was antsy. She, you know, she put her head down and Sharon didn't come home. And I'm six years old.
I don't have an ability or a framework to understand what was going through my mother's mind and what the possibilities may have been for my sister.
Even though Sharon was 13, and most 13-year-olds can be known to make silly or impulsive, even irresponsible decisions, like skipping out on dinner without telling their family. That was not Sharon, because Sharon wasn't your average teen, you see. Her father had passed away a few years prior, leaving Mary Carol a widow with six young children, so Sharon had stepped up to provide her mother support. As a quasi-parental figure, she was reliable.
I mean, wise, beyond her years, this straight-laced kid. So, naturally, with each passing moment, Mary, Carol and the other children only grew more worried.
But before doing anything, Rash, Doug and Richard agreed to go walk Sharon's paper route. To see if maybe she'd gotten held up at one of the houses for whatever reason, or maybe one of her customers saw where she went.
We went, checked the first several houses on her paper route, she never had gotten to any of those. So it seemed like something must have occurred between when she left the house and when she went back to the first house on her route.
When Doug and Richard returned with the news, Mary Carol's stomach dropped and she knew she couldn't wait any longer. With a heavy heart. She phoned Dayton Police to report her daughter missing, and right away DPD sent out a patrol officer to take the full report. Here's retired detective Roderick, who's working Sharon's case today, recounting what the officer learned from the family.
Talking with the family, they had no reason that she would run away. She had no boyfriends or anything like that. At the time. She was doing well in school, home life seemed good.
Given that information, and considering the fact that she'd never run away before, police took Mary Carol's concerns seriously and got to work right away.
So the first thing they did was they searched the house, as you would, to see if she's hiding.
There was no sign of Sharon at the house, but police did find. A quote-unquote book of friends, like a little phone book that listed her friends names and phone numbers. Well, so jackpot, right? Police had basically everyone close to Sharon and how to contact them in the palm of their hands. And they didn't take the value of that for granted. But they didn't want to cause a complete ruckus just yet by alarming everyone and their mothers. Like literally, first, they needed to make sure she wasn't hidden in plain sight somewhere.
They did an extensive neighborhood search, they were scouring alleys, trash cans, everything, but there was no sign of Sharon.
They did contact everyone on the paper route and nobody had been collected from by her.
After thoroughly searching and canvassing the neighborhood, police knew they couldn't delay in alarming people any longer. They reached out to Fairview High School, where Sharon had just begun her freshman year, to talk to students there. They also called everyone from Sharon's friends list, and out of everyone they talked to, not a single person had a bad thing to say about Sharon. No one mentioned any issues, she'd been having, no enemies, nothing like that.
Everybody that they talked to, whether it was school, friends, family, teachers, everybody said. She was just a happy girl. And no reason to run away, no reason to act out or anything like that. From everything I can gather, she hung out only with good kids, was a good kid herself.
More importantly, no one had seen her. There wasn't much for investigators to grab hold of as far as Sharon's personal life was concerned. But there were plenty of other things for them to look into. Because as soon as Sharon's disappearance hit the news, the tip floodgates were opened. There were many, so many suspicious car sightings. Now. Several of them weren't anything more than I saw a vehicle I didn't recognize around the neighborhood earlier that day type of thing.
Which it's not to say that any little piece of information isn't helpful. But this was a very residential area, right off a popular thoroughfare, so not some rural farm community where an unfamiliar car is the talk of the town. But along with those kind of tips were more helpful leads that police could actually follow up on. Like one from a neighbor who said they'd seen Sharon walking with another girl from the neighborhood, and it looked like Sharon was going over to that girl's house. Police jumped on this tip, located the neighborhood girl and searched her house from top to bottom. There was no sign of Sharon.
That girl even said she didn't know who Sharon was, but no sooner did that fizzle that. Another tip captured investigators attention. A classmate of Sharon's We'll call her Terry. She came forward and told police that she was sure she saw Sharon around 5.30 p..m. on September 28th, the exact time, almost to the minute that Richard last saw Sharon.
On the way out the door, Terry said that she herself was at the intersection of Cornell and Philadelphia. Drives, about a quarter of a mile from the Pretoria's home. When she saw Sharon physically fighting with a man who was trying to force her into his car. This tip was huge for the investigation, but there was one thing that wasn't quite adding up, and that's the location.
It's not far, but if you're going out to collect for your paper route, that's not the way you would go.
To walk her route, Sharon would have left her house and gone immediately west, but the intersection of Cornell and Philadelphia was directly east. But police weren't going to let that dismantle their best lead. Yet they could try and answer the why of the location after they found Sharon.
Right now, if this tip was true, they needed to focus on the WHO, and they did believe there was a WHO now. Because this wasn't coming from just anyone. It was Sharon's classmate, someone who would have known her if she saw her. Well, at least that's what they thought at first.
When investigators actually sat down with Terri to go over her story, that story started to change just a little, Terri said. You know, I might have forgotten to mention something. I wasn't actually the one who saw this. It was my aunt, we're going to call that Aunt Jennifer.
Now, to be fair to Terri, I'm sure she meant well with her initial tip and she was right to come forward. But maybe she thought police would only take her seriously if it was a firsthand account, not secondhand. So, of course, once Terri divulged that little bit of information, police wanted to hear the story directly from the source. So they tracked down Jennifer and she told police Yes, she'd seen a girl who looked like Sharon, just like her niece said. Jennifer said she was driving around with her friend.
When she witnessed the abduction, the man had the girl's arm and was struggling with her right beside a blue 1965 Ford sedan. And Jennifer said she got a good look at the man. He was about six feet tall and in his maybe 30s or 40s medium build, medium complexion. Wearing a brown waist-length jacket over a white t-shirt, Levi blue jeans, a brown slim-brimmed hat, full beard. And he was all dirty. This was detailed.
Now, when asked why she didn't report it right away, Jennifer's answer was simple. She didn't realize she was observing what was possibly the last sighting of a missing girl. She honestly thought she was watching a father fighting with his unruly daughter.
The aunt had remembered saying, If that was my kid, I'd spank him for acting that way because he was wrestling to get her in a car.
Before totally committing to this being the narrative of Sharon's story. Police wanted to be sure Sharon was actually the girl that Jennifer saw, so they showed her a pretorious family photo, and Jennifer pointed right to Sharon, saying, That's the girl. But Detective Roderick's not sure that that identification is as promising as we might think.
If you know that a 13-year-old girl has been abducted and you're shown the family photo, there's only one choice in that photo.
The next step in vetting Jennifer's story was talking with the friend that she was with that day to see if he could corroborate what she saw. And, to detective's surprise, he said he could not. He didn't remember any of what Jennifer described. Now, to be fair, Jennifer had let police know that her friend was intoxicated when all of this was going down. So depending on how drunk he was, maybe he really just did forget or wasn't paying attention.
But given the holes that could so easily be poked in Jennifer's story, police just couldn't put all of their eggs in one basket. Though, not wanting to completely discount her sighting. They did put out a description to the public to keep an eye out for the vehicle and the man. But there wasn't much else they could do. There wasn't a license plate number to follow up on or anything like that, so they had to move on. With each passing day, the community was becoming more antsy.
Understandably, the idea of a kidnapper, or worse, walking around and targeting children completely rocked the community, so everyone was doing what they could to help. Some people assisted in foot searches, others pooled together and put up a $1,000 reward. The Journal Herald, the paper that Sharon delivered for, also put up a reward. And so did the high school where Mary Carol worked, and maybe it was all that reward money that led to some pretty wild tips and calls.
Because around this time, DPD got a call from someone claiming he had Sharon. He didn't know her last name, but he knew people were looking for a girl named Sharon. And he told the dispatcher that they could have her back if they gave him $1,000. Naturally, the dispatchers tried to get a little more information, like where this guy had Sharon, but he was being super shoddy about it. All all they could get from him was that he was in Zinnia, Ohio, but he wouldn't clarify exactly where within the city.
When the dispatcher pushed further, he upped his price to $100,000 and told her. Quote No cops, you can have her. I see any cops in Zinnia looking for her and I'll kill her. And that's a promise. End quote. At first, police weren't sure what to do with this call, given that the caller provided no address to actually meet at. Also, I'm pretty sure detectives would have made note of the ransom money inconsistency. Like first he asked for $1,000, then he's asking for $100,000..
Like, that's a bit of a jump there now. Detective Roderick said it looks like there was no number to follow up with. So, as far as he knows, they weren't able to contact the guy, nor did they hear from him again, so police eventually discounted the call as a prank. But it was red herrings like this that muddied the waters for investigators as they tried to sift through and find legitimate leads to pursue. And their search was made all the more urgent when they got word that the assailant might still be out on the streets, terrorizing children.
Police learned that four days after Sharon vanished, another area, 13 year old, who we'll call Phillip, had a terrifying experience. Phillip was on his way to school that morning when a man in a blue car, who he didn't know, tried to force him into a vehicle. Thankfully, Phillip eluded the man. But the following day, something perhaps even more bone chilling happened to him. That very same man showed up at Phillip's house and tried to assault him with a butcher knife. Now, detectives on Sharon's case today don't have many details about that particular incident.
They don't know how the man knew where Phillip lived, or even if Phillip actually got stabbed, but they do know that. Phillip reported both events to police and officers ended up staking out Phillip's house for a bit, hoping to catch the man if he came back, but he never did. Phillip was able to give police a partial license plate number, and investigators took that as far as they could, but ultimately it ended up being a dead end. Of course, Dayton Police were putting two and two together. Young teen victim, blue suspect car. That's a lot in common with Sharon's case and the possible sighting from Jennifer.
But with no way to track this man down, as morbid as it sounds. All they could do was wait for him to strike again, which, as far as any official records say, doesn't look like he did.
The original officer on this did a very good job of detailing everything and following up and talking to people. There was just not a lot of evidence. When you have somebody just picked up off the street, there's not a lot to go on. And back then you don't have ring doorbell cameras or street cameras or anything like that. That could help.
Soon enough, things got quiet before anyone knew it, the weeks of silence faded into months, and Sharon's case went cold. It would stay that way until 1976, when things started heating up again thanks to a tip. A man came forward and told police that he heard from someone that a local 13-year-old's body was buried at a specific, recently demolished house about three miles away from the Pretoria's home. Now, according to the Journal-Herald, the tipster didn't specifically name Sharon, but everything he was saying matched up.
So investigators assumed that's who the victim was. Now, of course, second-hand information is never ideal, but whoever this tipster was, they'd apparently proved reliable in the past. So a judge greenlighted a full-scale search of that property, but that search was no easy task. They had to break through a concrete slab, then dig six feet under that, and after all that work, they didn't end up uncovering anything.
Disappointing, to say the least. But investigators couldn't help but wonder if their tipster had maybe just told them the wrong house. Like, second-hand information is no better than a glorified game of telephone. So maybe the rest of his tip was right, and he just got that detail wrong. But for the time being, their hands were tied and Sharon's case went back on the shelf, waiting for the next tip to come along. That would warrant a dust-off.
But that would take decades to happen. By the time the 2000s rolled around, the Pretorius family had just about given up hope that they'd ever see Sharon again. So in 2006, 33 years after her disappearance, they decided it was high time to properly mourn her death and commemorate her short but beautiful life. They held a memorial service at a local church, which drummed up some welcome and much-needed media attention, which, in turn, must have opened up conversation in the community. But police wouldn't actually know about these conversations until 2011, when a woman contacted them to recount a conversation she had had five years prior.
That lady said that back in 2006, a woman she knew told her that Sharon was buried on the property of an old service station. And when the lady told police which service station she was referring to, their ears perked up because that station was literally just houses away from the property that they'd searched back in 1976. Now, the tipster said that the woman who gave her this information was now deceased, so getting additional info straight from the horse's mouth wasn't an option. And at this point, the service station in question had been demolished.
But detectives got permission from the property owner to search the lot. They pulled out the big guns, like ground-penetrating radar cadaver dogs. But to everyone's dismay, they once again didn't find anything right. Around. This time, investigators decided it was time to revisit their original informant from 1976, who was now imprisoned in Colorado.
This was the person who sent them to that first house that they dug up. A detective went out there. And I'm honestly not sure what they were hoping to accomplish here. Maybe they wanted to just kind of like, triple-confirm his story, see if he remembered anything new. But what they learned brought everything crashing down. The tipster said that the woman he initially got that information from, Are you ready for this? She had told him from the get-go that it was all a dream.
A fact that he had neglected to mention, however many other times he'd spoken to police in the past. Clearly, investigators couldn't trust this guy as far as they could throw him, so they weren't even sure if he was telling the truth. Now. I mean, maybe he got spooked and was now lying about it all being a dream. So they tracked down the original woman who was the source of the information, but then she confirmed it.
All just a dream always had been, she said. She told the tipster back in the 70s just as much now, of course. Investigators knew the woman could have been lying, too.
Maybe she'd been scared into silence, but the detective who spoke with the woman felt she was being completely transparent. And police concluded. It was all just a silly dream that someone blew way out of proportion in hopes of getting some reward money.
There was a lot of time and effort spent on that lead that led to nothing.
The frustration police felt about wasted manpower was nothing compared to the letdown felt by the Pretorius family at the time. Mary Carroll wrote in a letter to friends and family. Quote. All this talk going around the community about a location gave me confidence that I could know where Sharon's body was buried. I've even driven a couple of friends over there to show them Sharon's burial location. I assumed all this community talk and police digs wouldn't be going on without some basis, but I didn't know the basis was a dream.
End quote with the biggest lead in the more than three decades old case now obliterated. Police weren't sure where to go next. They checked some routine items off their to-do list, like collecting DNA samples from Mary Carroll and Richard to enter into databases in case Sharon's body ever turned up. But after that, the case went cold again. Little did Mary Carroll know she would never get to see it warm up again because, sadly, she passed away in 2021.
But how happy she would be today to know that it wasn't the end of her daughter's story. Just last year, Dayton Police started once again actively working Sharon's case. Retired detective Roderick was asked to return to the department on a part-time basis to help out with the city's cold case unit. And that's when he was handed Sharon's case file.
He spent the last few months scouring the pages and pages of 50 years of investigative info. And he's made a laundry list of things that he wants to do in order to move the case along. And one of the main things that he's prioritizing is identifying similar cases that happened around the same time as Sharon's and in the same general area. Because, to Roderick, if the perpetrator wasn't someone, Sharon knew it had to be a serial offender.
One of those cases he's looking into further is the still-unsolved case of 13-year-old Linda Durth, who was brutally murdered just outside of Dayton in 1973.
A different house was broken into. She was raped and killed. Looking at pictures, though, of Sharon and Linda Durth, long hair ponytails that kind of are similar. It was in the area at the time.
The Durth case is being investigated by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office, and Detective Roderick said they don't currently have their sights set on a suspect. He also doesn't know yet if they have any usable suspect DNA or not. But he's going to work with the sheriff's office to get to the bottom of things.
So I don't know if they would be related, but I'm looking for things like that that can be related. I want to look at solved cases from back then to see if somebody was arrested, that their M..O would fit that kind of thing.
As Detective Roderick has been reviewing the case file, he's been piecing together his own theory and homing in on the sighting from Sharon's classmate's aunt, who saw her fighting with a man at the intersection of Cornell and Philadelphia. Again, that was the opposite direction Sharon was supposed to be walking for her newspaper route, but Roderick honestly buys the account.
What if she got picked up almost right outside her home by this car? And it was trying to bail out at Cornell and Philadelphia? Because if it is a busier intersection and the car has to stop and you've been abducted, you might try to bail out at that point.
Detective Roderick isn't the only one with theories. Sharon's siblings have also had 50 years to think about what happened to their sister. To David, what he can't shake is what he's always been told that. Sharon never made it to the first house on her route to collect money, which he estimated would have taken 90 seconds to walk to. So he doesn't think it was some kind of crime of opportunity.
For someone to have been driving down the road, complete stranger happening upon Sharon, you know, walking on the road and instantly making a decision. I'm going to stop the car, I'm going to kidnap that girl. Even if they had all those thoughts together quickly, it would have been very difficult to accomplish if they were by themselves in the car. You know, that's a lot of planning.
Planning that David thinks possibly involved stalking Sharon for an extended period of time.
They would have seen her make that trip, you know, dozens of Fridays prior to that, and at the time you collected weekly for the paper. Just standard protocol. So one conclusion that I have made is that someone was lying in wait. It was premeditated that men were lying in wait for her. And that, you know, they stepped out of a car and she was ambushed. All of a sudden, I suspect, probably kept alive for a time to, you know, it could be traffic to different homes in Dayton.
Richard's theory echoes his brother David's thoughts.
I think it's probably likely she was abducted by folks in the local area, very likely two, probably three abductors involved. It's hard to see how one person would have been able to learn the car, because you certainly wouldn't get into a car for one person. Or even pull her into a car. She would have resisted that, so I think she very likely was sexually assaulted, probably survived for two or three days. May have been done as a part of a gang initiation type of event.
I suspect that there are still a number of people in the Dayton area that you have either direct or indirect information about what may have happened.
If one of those people is you, now is the time to come forward. Or, even if you don't have information about Sharon's case, you may be able to help detectives in another way.
I don't know how many police officers you have listening to this. But if there's detectives, older detectives that have worked cases similar to this one and they say, Hey, I see a similarity here, that'd be somebody I'd love to talk to.
So, if you know anything about the disappearance and possible murder of 13-year-old Sharon Pretorius in September of 1973? Or if you are a detective who's worked a similar case, please call the Dayton Police Department Cold Case Unit at 937-333-7109.
Sharon was last seen wearing a long-sleeved yellow-flowered shirt, blue jeans and white gym shoes. She was 5'7 and 140 pounds. When she disappeared. She had brown hair that she often wore in pigtail braids and blue eyes.
She'd be 63 years old today.
The Deck is an audiochuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast..com. So what do you think, Chuck, do you approve?
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