CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — For more than two decades, the person who stabbed 89-year-old Kenneth Conley to death and set his home ablaze to cover it up has never been identified, let alone charged. A J News Network review of more than 50 pages of Chillicothe Police Department investigative records reveals a case that was, at various points, awash in leads — jailhouse confessions, bar-room boasts, feuding rumors and even a prison inmate who claimed responsibility years later — yet somehow never crossed the finish line into an arrest.
The records paint a portrait of a small-town homicide investigation overwhelmed by its own momentum: dozens of witnesses, a web of secondhand and thirdhand rumors, physical evidence that pointed in contradictory directions, and — ultimately — a piece of DNA that has sat unmatched for years while investigators say they’ve struggled to secure funding for the modern testing that could crack it open.
On the evening of December 3, 2003, Chillicothe firefighters were called to a residential fire near East Main and Rose streets. When they arrived, flames were coming from the front entrance of a duplex-style structure at 525 East Main Street. As crews worked to knock down the fire, a woman came running from the rear of the property, telling an officer that her brother-in-law was still inside.
After the blaze was extinguished, firefighters found the elderly homeowner in a bedroom near the front of the residence. He had lived alone in the house since his mother’s death, according to relatives who spoke with police, and was well known to neighbors along the East Main Street corridor — an area lined with small apartments, a shoe store and a Dairy Queen.
What officers found when they entered the burning structure quickly turned a fire call into a homicide investigation. The victim had visible wounds to his chest that did not appear to be caused by the flames. A subsequent autopsy would confirm the worst: the fire had been set to disguise a murder.
The autopsy, conducted at a regional coroner’s office, documented a ferocious assault. The victim had sustained four stab wounds to the left side of his chest, delivered with enough force to fracture ribs and pierce his diaphragm, spleen, left lung, heart and the sac surrounding it. Two of the wounds passed entirely through his chest cavity and exited his back — evidence, the coroner noted, that the blade used was at least five and a half inches long.
He had also been stabbed six times in the left side of the face, breaking his jaw and another facial bone, along with additional wounds to his mouth and a cut to his throat. The medical examiner determined he had stopped breathing before the fire reached him — meaning he was already dead, or dying, when his home was set alight. His wristwatch, recovered at the scene, had stopped at 6:45 PM.
Investigators located a broken knife blade — more than six inches long — directly beneath where the victim had fallen. The handle was never found.
The East Main Street block where the victim lived was, in 2003, a dense patchwork of apartments and rental units, several of them clustered above and around a defunct bar next door to his home. In the days and weeks after the murder, that neighborhood became the epicenter of an investigation that would balloon into one of the most rumor-saturated cold cases in the department’s files.
Within days, detectives were fielding tips pointing toward at least a half-dozen different individuals or groups as possible culprits — accounts that arrived secondhand, thirdhand, and sometimes fourthhand, often relayed through friends of friends, ex-girlfriends, jailhouse acquaintances and bar patrons. Several people were reported to have bragged, while drinking or using drugs, about having killed “the old man.” Others said they’d heard the killers had broken in through a window, smothered the victim, robbed him of cash and prescription pills, and then torched the house to destroy evidence — a narrative that circulated for years but never matched the actual, far more violent, cause of death revealed by the autopsy.
Detectives ran down an extraordinary number of these leads. They interviewed neighbors, employees of nearby businesses, relatives of people who had allegedly confessed in bars or jail cells, and acquaintances several times removed from any direct knowledge of the crime. Multiple individuals agreed to polygraph examinations — some passed, some were ruled inconclusive, and in at least a few cases, people who claimed to have heard direct confessions were found to be truthful about what they’d heard, without that testimony ever translating into a case detectives felt they could file.
One particularly persistent thread involved a young man who lived in the apartment immediately next door to the victim, whose erratic behavior on the night of the fire — refusing to help neighbors and firefighters, then leaving the residence hours later — drew early suspicion from his own roommates. Over the following years, at least half a dozen separate acquaintances came forward independently, each reporting that this same individual had, at different times, told them he was involved in the killing. He was interviewed multiple times, submitted to a DNA swab, and ultimately gave a lengthy recorded statement in which he denied any involvement and agreed to a polygraph examination that investigators determined he passed.
A separate rumor implicated a different acquaintance, who was also polygraphed and found truthful when he denied committing the murder — though the examiner noted his session was ultimately ruled inconclusive after inconsistent reactions on control questions.
Crime-scene technicians recovered a wide array of physical evidence from the residence and its attached, largely vacant second unit: kitchen knives, a hand-held saw, small bloodstains found on an exterior wall near the front door (later matched via DNA to a firefighter who had cut himself at the scene), and a woven bracelet that one witness said had been given to a child by an acquaintance who claimed it came from the victim.
A white T-shirt bearing a football-themed logo was recovered from a dumpster behind a shoe store next door to the crime scene, torn and stained with what appeared to be blood. Years later, in 2007, a DNA hit through the national CODIS database matched blood on that shirt to a man with a lengthy local history who was, by then, incarcerated. Investigators determined the profile came from cuttings taken directly from bloodstains — not from sweat or skin cells on the shirt’s collar or armpit — suggesting the blood, not necessarily the wearer’s identity, belonged to him. When confronted, the man denied any knowledge of the murder or how his blood ended up on the shirt, suggesting he might have been in a fight with whoever wore it. He was never charged.
Perhaps the most significant piece of evidence: a business envelope found disturbed inside a metal box in an upstairs bedroom, apparently rifled through by the killer, tested positive for blood. DNA analysis determined the blood belonged to an unknown female — a profile that has never matched any person tested in connection with the case, including the victim’s female relatives, all of whom were swabbed and excluded.
That unidentified female DNA profile remains, to this day, one of the case’s few tangible leads.
More than a decade after the murder, the case took an unexpected turn. In February 2016, an inmate, Casey Pigge — already serving time for a similarly gruesome 2008 killing in which he had cut a woman’s throat and set fire to her apartment, and who had just murdered his own cellmate — told a prison investigator that he had also killed “an old man in Chillicothe” years earlier, in a similar fashion.
Detectives and prosecutors traveled to interview him directly. He confirmed the claim, telling investigators he had cut the victim’s throat, stolen prescription medication and set the house on fire — but he offered few verifiable details, said he wasn’t “prepared” for the interview, and insisted he would provide corroborating information “at a later date.” He never did. Investigators told him plainly that what little he’d offered was either widely known from local rumor or simply inaccurate. The case file shows no indication the claim was ever substantiated, and no charges followed.
Advances in DNA science have periodically revived the investigation. In 2020, a crime-lab scientist reached out to Chillicothe detectives to note that touch-DNA analysis — a technique unavailable at the time of the murder — could now be run on preserved evidence. The following year, additional testing confirmed that bloodstains on the envelope found in the metal box all belonged to the same unidentified woman.
That confirmation reopened a door that has, according to detectives’ own case notes, remained only partially open ever since: the possibility of submitting that DNA profile for investigative genetic genealogy testing — the same emerging technique that has cracked decades-old cold cases nationwide by tracing distant relatives through consumer DNA databases.
According to the case file, a Chillicothe detective was told by a state forensic scientist in August 2022 that the genealogy testing would cost several thousand dollars. The detective then contacted the Ross County Prosecutor’s Office to request funding — and, according to the same report, never received an answer on how to proceed.
That funding standoff, first reported by Investigative Journalist Jason Salley, remains unresolved. The county prosecutor previously cited cost as a significant obstacle, even as the county sits on a multimillion-dollar reserve fund, and as neighboring states and federal agencies have expanded funding specifically earmarked for this kind of forensic genealogy work in cold homicide cases.
Twenty-two years after the murder, the file on the East Main Street killing remains open. No one has ever been charged. The knife that killed the victim was never matched to an owner. The identity of the woman whose blood was found on the rifled envelope has never been determined. And a small city’s collective memory of rumor, resentment and secondhand bar talk has, so far, outlasted the physical evidence that might finally settle the question of who is responsible.
For the victim’s family, the frustration is not the absence of leads — the case file shows detectives chased dozens of them, some credible, most not — but the sense that the one piece of evidence that could still resolve the case has been left waiting for a decision that never comes.
