Unsolved Murders & Disappearances in Northeast Ohio
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At 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, October 15, Anita told her mother where she was going. The temperature was starting to dip from its high of sixty degrees, so Anita put a black coat on over her white-hooded sweater and gray skirt. She slipped into her beige flats and left the house for the half-mile walk to the Campion Dairy, a little mom and pop soda fountain owned by Bill Campion and run by Mama T. The shop sat on the north side of Mahoning Road, between Louisville and Canton, and was a favorite hangout for neighborhood teenagers.
Anita Drake disappeared in 1963. Courtesy of Roger Drake.
As it grew dark that night, Kermit Sr. and Virginia began to worry. They went to look for Anita but couldn’t find her or anyone who had seen her. Finally, around 11:00 p.m., when she had not turned up, they called the Stark County Sheriff ’s Office. Sergeant G. Reese took the initial missing persons report. He wrote her description: “She was five feet, four inches tall and had a slim build of only one-hundred ten pounds. Her hair was light brown and her eyes were brown. She had no identifying scars.” A later description on the Charley Project website page added that she had a mole an inch below her lower lip.
At first, the family feared she had run away. Her parents did not know of a steady boyfriend, but the initial police report stated that she may have been in the company of a certain young man, and their destination could have been Kentucky. The young man in question was a neighbor on the next street over from the Drakes’ house. He drove a semi-truck and made many runs to Kentucky.
“He hung around our family. My brothers mostly.” Roger also said the young man often did drugs. “He was like a loner. He was not a desirable person. He was in and out of jail for small stuff. I thought of him as a predator.”
Kermit Sr. never liked this young man because he rode a motorcycle, was unkempt and had long hair and a beard at a time when long hair on men was not fashionable. He was divorced with three children, and Kermit Sr. did not think he was a good father.
But would Anita have taken off with this man? Would she have run away from home? If she had, she had not taken any clothing with her. If she had any money, it was just pocket change. It is not known whether the police ever questioned the young man. The police file is only two pages, and the newspapers never covered her disappearance.
Anita may have been a bit rebellious, but no more so than most teens. Her brother Roger remembers she tried to boss him and the younger boys around. But what teenage girl wants to be pestered by her little brothers?
Roger and his brothers did not pay much attention to her that summer before she disappeared. As young boys, they were busy playing outside most of the time. Anita spent most of that summer at Linda’s house.
“She was smart, and she was a great artist,” Linda said. “She had a wonderful personality.” Linda, who was married at the time, probably knew Anita best. Anita babysat for Linda’s four-year-old son, taught him his alphabet and how to read. When it was time for him to start school, he was more than ready because Anita had spent time with him.
“She had a great sense of humor.” Linda told about the Christmas her husband wanted new living room furniture. “Anita went and bought a small plastic doll house–size living room set and wrapped it up and gave it to him as a present. It was funny.”
Although Anita did not seem to be interested in any one particular boy, Linda did remember an incident sometime prior to her sister’s disappearance. Anita was babysitting at Linda’s when the phone rang. It was the wrong number, but there was a young man on the other end. They talked for awhile. He told her his name was Eddie and he worked and traveled with a hypnotist from California. Anita told her family about him and said she was going to meet him. Her family did not know whether she ever did meet him, but they told the police about the incident.
Another younger brother, Kermit “Junior,” was only four when Anita disappeared, but he remembers her. He has had a lot of years to think about what could have happened to her. He wonders if she met friends that night and got in a car. “What may have started out to be fun, maybe went wrong, terribly wrong,” he said. “Anybody involved is probably not around to tell anymore.”
There were sightings through the years. Not too long after Anita disappeared, Gary was at the Holiday Bowl on Mahoning Road. He thought he saw her coming into the bowling alley. When she saw him, she turned and immediately left. He was sure it was her. He chased after her on foot but lost sight of her. Could it have been Anita? Or was her brother just hopeful?
Two years after she disappeared, another sister, Cheryl Lee, also now deceased, received a tip that Anita was working at a JCPenney’s in Columbus. The information came from a person who supposedly hired her. The person identified Anita from a photograph as someone named Nancy Woods. The Stark County sheriff ’s report of investigation form said, “Anita Drake was known to have told of having ficticious [sic] friends by the name of Ann Billings and Nancy Woods.” The description fit, especially the mole on her lip.
The Stark County sheriff ’s investigator sent word to the Columbus juvenile bureau, but the family decided to conduct its own investigation. They went to the JCPenney’s store to see for themselves. It was a dead end. They did not find Anita or anyone named Nancy Woods. If there was a Columbus police report, it was unavailable.
Kermit Sr. and Virginia saw a picture of a woman on television who had been arrested in Cleveland. It looked enough like Anita that they and Linda drove up to the jail to have a look for themselves. They looked through the bars at the woman, but it was not the missing Anita.
“We’d get out hopes up,” Junior said. “Every lead we ever had ended in a dead end.”
And there were phone calls. Every Christmas Day around 6:00 p.m. for five years after Anita went missing, someone called Virginia. “The phone would ring. When answered, no one would say a word.” Linda said. “Mom always thought it was Anita, and she wanted to hear Mom’s voice.”
Roger did not think so. He thought it was someone who had killed his sister and was trying to make the family believe she was still alive. “I think someone murdered her.”
Junior thinks her body could have been dumped somewhere, perhaps in a lake on a piece of uninhabited, wooded land not far from Anita’s home. “Maybe she’s living somewhere under an assumed name,” Junior said. “Maybe she has children. Maybe something happened and she was ashamed to come home.” But he does not believe this is the case. “If someone did something to her or knows something, they probably took it to their grave,” he said with resignation.
According to an October 2013 Canton Repository article written by Lori Monsewicz, the four surviving Drake siblings cooperated with lab technicians from Fort Worth, Texas, by giving saliva samples for a DNA comparison to a woman’s body found in Delaware. There was no match, but the samples went into CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, and the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System Database, known as NamUs.
Roger was always suspicious of the young man who hung around the family, the one their father did not like. In the 1990s, that man succumbed to throat cancer. Before the man died, Roger asked him if he had anything to do with Anita’s disappearance. Disease had wasted away the man’s voice, but he wrote “No” on a piece of paper.
Anita’s father, Kermit Drake Sr., died on February 14, 2003. Her mother, Virginia, died on May 16, 2007. They died without ever knowing what happened to their pretty, vivacious daughter Anita. “It really affected them the longest day,” Roger said. “They really mourned.”
Will this family ever find out what happened to their sister? “Everything is just a guessing game,” Junior Drake said. “We just don’t know.”
SOURCES
NEWSPAPERS
Akron (OH) Beacon Journal
Akron (OH) Press
Ashtabula (Ohio) Gazette
Ashtabula (Ohio) Star Beacon
Canton (OH) Repository
Chicago Tribune
Cincinnati Commercial Tribune
Cincinnati Post
>
Cleveland (OH) Leader
Cleveland (OH) Plain Dealer
Columbus (OH) Dispatch
East Liverpool (OH) Review
Geneva (Ohio) Times
Lake County (OH) New Herald
Lima (OH) News
Newark (OH) Advocate
Orrville (OH) Courier-Crescent
COURT RECORDS, CENSUS AND AUTOPSIES
Hargrove v. Evans, et al. Docket, n.c., Lake County Common Pleas Ct. (1960).
“Ohio, County Death Records, 1840–2001.” Index and images. https://familysearch.org.
“Ohio, Marriages, 1800–1958.” Index. https://familysearch.org.
Smith, Stephen, M.D. Report of an Examination of the Alledged [sic] Skull of the Late Mr. Collins, of Cleveland, Ohio. With Conclusions. New York, 1878.
State of Ohio v. Hargrove. Docket, case no. 4931, Lake County Common Pleas Ct. (1960).
Summit County Medical Examiner. Coroner’s inquest (Case No. 4324). Akron, OH: 1929.
Townsend v. Sain. 372 U.S. 293. (1963).
United States census, 1860, 1930.
BOOKS AND MAGAZINES
Beaufait, Howard. “The Case of William Potter, 1931.” Cleveland Murders. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce Inc., 1947.
Corts, Thomas E. Bliss and Tragedy: The Ashtabula Railway-bridge Accident of 1876 and the Loss of P.P. Bliss. Birmingham, AL: Sherman Oak Books, 2003.
Leeke, Jim. “Who Killed Harry Beasley? The Unsolved Murder of Newark’s Hero Cop.” Timeline Magazine (October/December 2004): 44–53.
Peet, Reverend Stephen A. The Ashtabula Disaster. Chicago: Lloyd & Co., 1877.
Simmons, David A. “Fall From Grace: Amasa Stone and the Ashtabula Bridge Collapse.” Timeline Magazine (June/July 1989): 34–43.
Waight, Glenn H. “Carnival Girl.” East Liverpool Historical Society, 2007.
WEBSITES
EmedicineHealth. “Drowning Causes, Symptoms, Treatment—Dry Drowning vs. Wet Drowning.” http://www.emedicinehealth.com/drowning/page3_em.htm.
Wikipedia. “United States Occupation of Veracruz.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Veracruz.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jane Ann Turzillo is a full-time author and speaker. She concentrates on true crime and history. Unsolved Murders and Disappearances in Northeast Ohio is her sixth book for The History Press and Arcadia Publishing Company. She holds degrees in mass-media communication and criminal justice technology from The University of Akron. She is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime and the National Federation of Press Women.
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