On the morning of May 5, 2007, a farmhand in Delaware County, Ohio, placed a call to 911 after he showed up to work and his boss, Eveline Ashbaugh, was nowhere to be found.
Deputies with the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to Eveline’s farm to search for her. What they found was a crime scene: 60-year-old Eveline had been stabbed to death in her bedroom.
So began an investigation that has spanned nearly 20 years. Detective Sergeant Joshua Clarke is the third detective to work Eveline’s case. “One of the biggest issues with this case in particular is that there’s no shortage of potential persons of interest,” he told Dateline.
Eveline’s farm was in a rural area, a couple of miles north of Delaware City. And Eveline was no ordinary farmer. “She had about 30 to 40 llamas,” Clarke said. “There’s money to be made with llama fur that -- it can go for a high amount. And then she was also working on establishing bloodlines and breeding rights.”
Divorced and not in a relationship at the time of her death, Eveline lived alone in the farmhouse. “She did have a circle of friends,” Clarke said, adding that those friends described her as “kinda brusque and eccentric.”
The last known contact with Eveline was between 11 p.m. and midnight on May 4, when she spoke to a friend on the phone. According to Clarke, investigators believe she was killed a few hours later, between 2 and 4 a.m. on May 5.
Due to the clutter in the house, investigators didn’t locate Eveline during the initial search. “When they scoured the house a second time, that’s when they discovered her,” Clarke said. Eveline was found kneeling at the edge of her bed. “There was some miscellaneous jewelry on her back,” Clarke said. “One of the dresser drawers, a cloth, and a laundry basket had been placed on her head.”
Based on the crime scene, investigators believed Eveline may have been killed by someone with a personal vendetta against her. She had been stabbed multiple times in her upper body. “It certainly appears to be a crime of passion. There’s certainly overkill,” he said.
Investigators noticed a ladder propped up against the outside wall of the house that reached Eveline’s second-floor bedroom window. The window was open, but there were no signs of forced entry. Based on the location of Eveline’s body and the blood-spatter analysis, investigators don’t believe anyone came in through the window. Clarke told Dateline that investigators at the time believed the placement of the ladder was staged. “It’s far more likely that someone had come in through her bedroom door, and that the door into the residence was either unlocked or someone was able to unlock it,” he said.
Because of the clutter, investigators found it difficult to determine whether anything of value had been taken from the residence. Her purse was in her vehicle, and it appeared to have been dumped out, but investigators found several hundred dollars in cash inside. “It’s possible they just dumped it out really quick and didn’t notice it, or it’s possible it was staged,” Clarke said. “My theory is that the primary reason to go there was to kill her, and that anything else would have been a secondary reason.”
Investigators believe Eveline knew her killer -- or killers. “We haven’t discounted the theory that it was really potentially multiple people involved,” Clarke said. “It was definitely someone that would have known the residence, would have known her, would have known her routine.”
As investigators dug into Eveline’s life, they looked closely at both her personal relationships and her business dealings. “There was this perception, we think, by some of the people that worked for her that she maybe had money, but the truth was she was financially destitute,” Clarke said, adding that according to Eveline’s business partner, the llama operation never made a profit.
Clarke says it seemed like the constant financial strain was getting to Eveline. “We were told by almost everybody that worked for her that she was not pleasant to work for,” Clarke said. “They would quit ‘cause they just couldn’t stand working for her, and that she’d owed them money and never -- and wouldn’t pay them.”
Investigators ruled out Eveline’s former romantic partners, such as her ex-husband and her business partner, with whom she had once been romantically involved. But according to Clarke, they were able to identify a few individuals whose romantic overtures Eveline had rejected. “The way that she was killed,” Clarke said, “indicates to us that it was someone that was very angry at her, potentially, or at least partially, for some kind of romantic slight.”
Clarke says investigators have identified at least 10 potential persons of interest. “At least 10 people that I can’t rule out for various reasons,” Clarke said. “The victim was not well-liked by a lot of people. She had employed several people that had criminal histories, and a lot of the people that we had talked to did not have kind things to say about her.” According to Clarke, even the farmhand who called to report Eveline missing is considered a person of interest.
Investigators also administered polygraph tests and Computer Voice Stress Analysis exams to several people. “We did have one person of interest that did take that and did fail,” Clarke said. “We have, um, a couple other persons of interest that took it and passed, and then we have another person of interest that said they would take it and then canceled and has not agreed to take anything since.”
Physical evidence collected in the case has so far done little to narrow the list of persons of interest. A bloody, partial footprint was recovered at the scene. “We checked several shoes of various persons of interest,” Clarke said. “But we never found the matching tread.” DNA collected at the scene has also not led to answers. “A lot of the persons of interest provided DNA samples that were run against other DNA that was collected. Nothing has matched thus far,” Clarke said.
The murder weapon was never found. “We did test several knives that we recovered from different scenes that were potentially connected, but none of those yielded a match,” Clarke said.
Eveline’s case remains active, and investigators are now reevaluating the evidence. “In this past year or so is when there’s been new kind of movement on this case, but we don’t have new information per se,” Clarke explained. “It’s just looking at the old information and seeing if we can get anything different this time.”
Clarke plans to request that some of the evidence be retested. “Nothing has been tested since it was initially submitted,” he said. “There’s been a lot of advancements and maybe things that we couldn’t test very well back then; there might be a better shot now.”
Related: Dateline first learned of Eveline’s case when reporting on the 2001 cold case murder of Regina Hicks in Willard, Ohio. Former Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told Dateline about his cold case initiative, which was created to help solve cases like Regina’s and Eveline’s.
“We believe somebody out there knows, you know, more than they’ve maybe told us, and we think it’s probably someone that we’ve talked to at some point,” Clarke said. Nearly two decades later, all persons of interest in the case are still alive. “Anyone we feel that’s got direct knowledge, we think is still alive and is still out there.”
Clarke strongly encourages anyone who may know something about Eveline’s case to reach out to the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office. “Someone may think of something, like they might not necessarily think it’s important, but it might be the key that lets us start unraveling some of the mysteries behind this.”
If you have information regarding Eveline’s death, contact the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office at 740-833-2810 or submit an anonymous tip online.
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