The Teenager Who Was Murdered When She Was Leaving A Party. 40 Years Later The Truth Was Known

In 1974, 15-year-old Lori Nesson lived with her mother and 13-year-old sister in Columbus, Ohio. The teenager was a student with honors from Eastmoor secondary school.

On the night of September 27, he attended the football game that was played at that school. Then she joined her classmates at several parties and was last seen leaving one of them at about 12:30 p.m.

Unfortunately, Lori never got home.

Her mother called the police and they immediately started looking for her. The morning of September 28, her body was found on a Reynoldsburg road just a 16-minute drive from Columbus. Her attacker left her naked in a ditch and along the road her clothes were scattered.

The strange thing is that at first Lori’s death was not classified as homicide, the coroner directly described it as a death by suffocation of indeterminate origin.

With the lack of evidence and the few capabilities that existed at that time with DNA tests, the case cooled and remained so for decades.

Over the years they reviewed Lori’s case twice, once in 1998 and once in 2007, but without success. Fortunately in 2019 the case was reopened thanks to Craig Brafford, a Reynoldsburg officer. Based on a hunch, he asked the coroner’s office to review the case since in the files he found several inconsistencies that suggested that Lori’s death had been due to foul play.

In September 2020, Bradfford got Lori Nesson’s death officially declared a homicide. For its part, the girl’s family always maintained that someone had ended her life. Toni, the sister stated the following:

“Someone knows something. A light-weight, fifteen-year-old girl doesn’t lie naked on the side of the road and dies alone.”

When Lori’s death was declared homicide, police sergeant Jim Costlow received a phone call that would change the course of the investigation.

On the other side was Karen Adams’ cousin, a young woman whose fate was very similar to Lori’s.

On March 9, 1975, someone took the life of Karen Adams of seventeen just six months after Lori.

The Young woman disappeared while was walking to a friend’s house. The next day her body was discovered in a ditch in Blacklick, Ohio, less than four miles from Reynoldsburg. As with Lori, Karen’s case remained unresolved for decades.

Sergeant Costlow contacted the investigator who helped solve Karen’s case in 2011. This man used advanced forensic technology with the DNA they found in the girl’s body, which led him to identify two killers: Robert Meyer and Charles Webber.

According to the records, these two individuals met in prison in the 1960s. After their release in 1973, they went to live together in Ohio where they began to kidnap and abuse girls and women. In 77 Meyer and Webber were convicted of attacking a woman. Meyer spent 25 years in bars and was released in 2001, on the contrary, Webber died in prison.

When they were identified by Robert Meyer, who was 70 years old at the time, he was arrested.

This man at first said that he had never seen Karen and that he did not know why his DNA was found in the body, but then he ended up pleading guilty. Because of this he was sentenced to 15 years in prison and died there 3 years later.

In court, Karen’s brother confronted the man who had taken her sister’s life.

“You came out with yours, and that’s where you sit. I hope you rot in hell.”

Returning to Lori’s case in March 2021, the investigators announced that they had solved it.

Based on Karen’s case, they put the focus on Meyer and Webber. The police thoroughly analyzed Lori’s clothes where they found several samples that were compared with Webber’s. With Meyer they had it more complicated because he had been dead for a long time. To do this, they asked their son to collaborate by contributing his own DNA. The analyses certified that the samples found in the teenager’s clothes coincided with that of the two men.

The Reynoldsburg police asked other Ohio police agencies to review the unresolved cases from 1974 to 1977 because perhaps Meyer and Webber were the culprits.

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