Cheryl Thompson was a UC freshman when she disappeared in 1978. Her body was found in Loveland on the bank of the Little Miami River on March 24, 1978. Nineteen-year-old university student Cheryl Thompson went missing after she left her parents’ home to meet her boyfriend at a disco in Cincinnati, Ohio. Two weeks later, her decomposing body was found along the bank of the Little Miami River in Ohio. So, what exactly happened to Cheryl? Did she drown while swimming, or did she suffer a far worse fate? Hi and welcome back to Mysterious Hook.
Friends, today we are looking at the 37-year-old cold case of Cheryl Thompson. But first, about 93 percent of you are still not subscribed to the channel. Please consider subscribing as it motivates us to create more intriguing content for you. So, without any further ado, let’s dive right into this mystery. Today’s case will take us to the third-largest city in Ohio, Cincinnati. It was founded as a town in 1788 and currently boasts a population of more than 300,000 people. Cincinnati is home to the Hamilton County government seat as well as the oldest baseball team in America. In addition to these, the central and economic hub is also famous for its art and unique Mediterranean-inspired chili. The city is also the hometown of the American movie director, writer, and producer Steven Spielberg.
Cheryl grew up with her parents and two brothers, Bill and Dan Thompson, in the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. Everyone who knew Cheryl described her as a smart, kind-hearted, and fun-loving teenager. In addition to this, she also had a cheerful nature and this made people easily warm up to her.
“She cared about everything—animals, people. She was everyone’s best friend,” Bill Thompson, Cheryl’s older brother, said to the media. When Cheryl was 19, she got admitted to the University of Cincinnati to study nursing. For her, it was a dream come true. Nursing was a profession she had always wanted to study. Since her school was in the same city where her parents lived, it was easy for her to shuttle between the two places.
“You always knew she was going to be the one that would grow up in a job of helping other people. It’s just the way she was,” Bill had said.
Cheryl also had a friend by the name of Laura Bressert. Laura was someone Cheryl was comfortable sharing her secrets and fears with. Anyone could instantly notice that there was a strong bond between the two friends. Among other things, the two also shared a similar interest, and this was going to the disco every weekend to dance.
“We would dance together, which would throw people off. We were just having fun, just out there dancing together,” Laura had said. Cheryl was living a carefree life without any worry, but things would soon take a dark turn.
In the spring of 1978, the University of Cincinnati closed for spring break, and Cheryl decided to spend this well-deserved time at her parents’ house located in Wooster Pike, Cincinnati. At the time, Dan and her parents were the only ones at home. Her other brother, Bill, was studying at a police academy in Austin, Texas. On March 24, 1978, Cheryl made plans to meet with her boyfriend at the Gatsby disco located at 3225 Madison Road, Oakley. They planned to meet later in the evening that same day. She also let Laura in on her plans, and Laura agreed to join her at the disco. It was all set to be a fun-filled evening. However, Laura soon called her back and told Cheryl that she had changed her mind about going to the disco. It was unexpected, and Cheryl was not pleased by this.
“I begged her on the phone not to go because I had a bad feeling,” Laura said. Cheryl, however, did not listen to the pleas of her friend. She had made up her mind to go to the disco and nothing was going to stop her or ruin her plans. At around 10:30 PM, she said goodbye to Dan and stepped out of the house.
She got into her car and made for the Gatsby disco. That was the last time anyone saw her alive. Meanwhile, Cheryl’s boyfriend had arrived at Gatsby’s disco and proceeded to patiently wait for her. By midnight, he had grown extremely worried because Cheryl had still not shown up. Many thoughts flashed through his mind. He soon stepped out of the building to search for her. When he looked around, he immediately saw her car. It was parked a short distance away from the disco building. This surprised and, at the same time, alarmed him.
He moved closer to the vehicle and tried to open it, but discovered that it was locked. To be sure that Cheryl was not back at the disco and also looking for him, he made his way back to the building, but after searching for several minutes and seeing no sign of her, he slowly came to the realization that something was horribly wrong. He decided to go to her parents’ house. When he got there, he met Dan and explained everything to him. He also grabbed a spare key for Cheryl’s car and made his way back to the disco. Upon getting to the disco, he moved Cheryl’s car to a legal parking space and then continued his search for her. But there was no sign of her. It was as if she had parked her car and then decided to take a long walk into the night. After a fruitless search, the worried and upset boyfriend made his way back to where he had parked Cheryl’s car. To his surprise, he saw the car being driven away by an unknown man, and he immediately gave chase. However, he could not keep up with the speed of the car and soon lost it. His day just kept getting worse; first his girlfriend had disappeared without a trace, and now her car had been stolen.
By daylight, the news of Cheryl’s disappearance had spread like wildfire. She was reported missing by her family, and authorities immediately began their search for her. Officers from the Cincinnati Police Department as well as Hamilton County sheriff’s deputies combed through wooded areas and vacant buildings to cover more ground. A helicopter was donated by the Ohio Highway Patrol and it was used in the search. However, none of this yielded any results as Cheryl was nowhere to be found.
Surprisingly, Cheryl’s car was found the following day after her disappearance. It was discovered on Box Street, several blocks from the disco. After the car was found, officers began going door to door to ask if anyone had seen anything that could help them in their investigation. A description of her was also released to the public with the hope that someone might have seen her, but it was all to no avail. It was as if Cheryl had vanished off the surface of the Earth. Days turned into weeks, and Cheryl remained missing.
It was an agonizing period for her family and friends, and they feared the worst. On the morning of April 8, 1978, a game warden by the name of Mike, who worked at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, was walking along the bank of the Little Miami River in Loveland. This area is only a few minutes away from Cincinnati. While checking the fishermen’s licenses, he came upon something entangled amongst the shrubs down an embankment. On moving closer, he realized that it was the decomposing body of a dead woman. The woman, who appeared to be in her early 20s, was partially clothed and was lying about 20 feet away from the river. She still had on shoes, socks, and jewelry, but her undergarment looked like it had been tampered with. There were also bruises on her neck. Mike was horrified by this; he immediately went back to his vehicle and notified the Hamilton County sheriff’s deputies. In a matter of minutes, officers arrived at the scene and secured the area. A closer look at the body revealed no sign of stabbing or gunshot wound, and the officer’s first thought was that she had drowned.
The body was soon transported to the Hamilton County coroner’s office for identification and autopsy. The body was identified through dental charts as Cheryl. The result of the autopsy revealed that she had been raped, strangled, and had also been hit on the head with an unknown object. No one knew exactly when she had died, but the coroner who conducted the autopsy believed that she had been dead for about three days before her body was found. A rape kit was collected as evidence and stored at the Hamilton coroner’s office. Since the technology available at the time was not advanced enough to carry out any analysis, there was little detectives could do. When Cheryl’s family was told about her death, they were devastated and bitter.
“It’s got to be some completely insane person who’s lost it,” Dan had said at the time of Cheryl’s death. “Someone who just doesn’t know where his head is at.”
Since detectives had no leads, the case soon went cold. Years went by, and Cheryl’s family and friends bore the pain that her death brought them. Her parents died without getting to know who had senselessly killed their daughter, but her brothers, Bill and Dan, held out hope that their sister’s murder would one day be solved. In 2010, detectives from the Loveland Police Department and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation decided to analyze the DNA evidence from Cheryl’s case. The evidence was sent to the lab and the result produced was a partial DNA profile. When the profile was checked against the database, it did not return any match. It wasn’t something detectives had expected, and they were left scratching their heads for answers.
More than 10 more years would go by before detectives finally got the answer they were looking for. In 2022, detectives sent semen from Cheryl’s rape kit to a third-party genealogy company. The company made use of genetic genealogy, which involves using DNA to determine the relationship between individuals. The results identified a family tree. Three people were singled out from the family, and they were a brother, cousin, and uncle. All three were located by the authorities and were told the reason why they were being investigated. The three individuals gave authorities their full cooperation and even agreed to submit semen samples for further testing. When the result of the test came out, it showed that none of their DNA matched the DNA of the unknown person who had raped and killed Cheryl. Detectives were astonished by this. However, the three men gave detectives a piece of vital information, and this was that they had a brother by the name of Ralph Howell, who had died in his mid-30s in a car accident back in 1985.
With this information, detectives had a new lead. They decided to dig up Ralph’s body, which was buried at the Rest Haven Memorial Park in Evendale. On getting to the burial site, Ralph’s body was exhumed and his jawbone was removed and sent to the lab for forensic analysis. All that was left was to wait for the result of the test. When the results finally came out, it was what detectives hoped for. The DNA taken from Ralph’s jawbone matched the one that had been recovered from Cheryl’s body. Detectives were overjoyed by this breakthrough. After more than four decades, the case was finally solved.
“We couldn’t have done this without science,” said retired detective Steve Moster, who worked on the case. Bill and Dan were contacted and given the news by detectives.
“It was all a surprise,” Bill told the media. “Everyone goes down the path of making their own ideas about what happened, and it was a complete surprise to me that it was a complete unknown person with no previous history to Cheryl.”
Apparently, a closer look at Ralph’s past showed that before his death, he worked as a newspaper delivery man for a newspaper company known as the Cincinnati Enquirer. It was also revealed that Ralph was a man with a criminal past. In 1983, just five years after Cheryl’s death, he had tried but failed to abduct a woman. According to reports, he had stopped the woman by the side of the road and offered her a ride home in his newspaper delivery truck. The woman had initially been reluctant to accept the offer, but he remained persistent and she had eventually gotten in. To the woman’s horror, Ralph told her that he wanted to have sex with her. He immediately placed a rope around her neck and began to strangle her. She had put up a fight, and after much struggling, he had eventually stopped the truck and let her go. Ralph was eventually arrested and he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of unlawful restraint. It’s not clear if he spent any time in jail for the crime. Apart from this, detectives also believe that Ralph might have been responsible for the death of three other women. The three women had all died between 1976 and 1978. They included 17-year-old Charmaine Stolla, 18-year-old Nancy Ann Theobald, and 24-year-old Victoria Hincher. They had all been found raped and strangled just like Cheryl. However, unlike Cheryl’s case, no DNA evidence was obtained from the three murders.
“The tireless work of the Loveland Police Department and BCI should be commended. They never stopped searching for Cheryl Thompson’s killer, and now over 40 years later, Cheryl’s family has closure,” Hamilton County prosecutor Joseph Deters said about the case. “I have prosecuted multiple serial killers in my time as prosecutor. My office firmly believes he is another,” he added.
Even though Ralph was dead, detectives met with Cheryl’s family and told them that they could present the evidence to the jury if they wanted further closure. The family agreed to this. On November 17, 2022, Ralph was indicted for one count of aggravated murder and one count of rape. Although there would be no trial, the indictment of Ralph provided Cheryl’s family and friends with closure on the matter.
“For me, it helped finalizing it, knowing that a person had been charged with the murder of my sister,” Bill said. “Whether he was dead or not, it really didn’t matter to me.”
Laura was also grateful that her friend’s murder was finally solved.
“She was a really good person. She didn’t deserve something like that,” Laura had said. “I really am grateful. Thank you guys, finally that you got him,” she added.
What happened to Cheryl was heartbreaking. She had her whole life ahead of her but never had the opportunity to live it. Many young women like her have suffered a similar fate, and sadly, many of their killers remain at large. Hopefully, the long arm of the law catches up to them soon. But do you think Cheryl would have been alive today if she had listened to Laura’s pleas and not gone to the disco? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section. Don’t forget to like, comment, share, and subscribe.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
