What Happened to Sarah Boehm? The Letter and the Menendez Link

The Sarah Boehm murder remains unsolved more than thirty years after the 14-year-old left her home in Rochester Township, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, on the night of July 14, 1994. Her remains were found that November in a wildlife area in Ohio, but she was not identified until 2003, and no one has ever been charged. The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office continues to investigate alongside authorities in Pennsylvania and Ohio.¹

The Night She Disappeared

Sarah left her home on Mellon Avenue on July 14, 1994, telling her family she was going to a friend’s house for a sleepover. When she got there, the friend had family visiting and could not host her. Sarah told her mother and brother she would stay somewhere else and left. She took only the clothes she was wearing and her purse. She was reported missing the next day.²

Sarah was blonde and blue-eyed, roughly five feet five inches tall, 110 to 120 pounds, with a scraped knee from a recent bicycle wreck.¹ Her parents were going through a divorce at the time. Her father, Jack Boehm Jr., struggled with alcoholism and gambling.³

The Letter Under Her Pillow

Days after Sarah disappeared, her uncles found handwritten letters hidden under her pillow. In them she described herself as a “burden” and wrote, “I have always said that the day I walk out the door is the day you never see me return.” She also referenced an abusive older man: “I met a guy who gave me love and whatever else I was not getting at home. He was a very, very abusive man. Didn’t anyone wonder why I was always injured and said I fell?”⁴ The letters mentioned plans to travel to New York City or Washington, D.C.²

Those references steered the early investigation toward a runaway theory. Police searched the woods behind the home, canvassed Rochester Township, and posted Sarah’s photograph nationwide, including on milk cartons. Reported sightings came in from Beaver County to the West Coast; all were ruled out.²

The letters themselves raised questions. Detective Michael Kryder observed that the note appeared to have been written in two different inks at different times. A later forensic examination found four different inks and five sets of fingerprints on the documents, along with a lipstick smudge identified as belonging to Jack Boehm’s girlfriend at the time. Beaver County District Attorney Anthony Berosh said the findings were “not making sense” and that investigators believed the letter may have been “pieced together.”⁵ Investigators released the letters publicly in 2011 in hopes of generating new leads.⁴

How Her Body Was Found and Identified

On November 4, 1994, hunters found human remains in the Berlin Lake Wildlife Area in Deerfield Township, Portage County, Ohio, near the Berlin Reservoir. The site sits about two hours from Sarah’s home. The remains were badly decomposed. An autopsy ruled the death a homicide, but two separate autopsies could not determine a specific cause. The FBI has since stated it believes she was strangled.⁶⁷

The remains sat unidentified in a cooler at the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office for years. Forensic experts initially estimated the victim was 17 to 22 years old, and dental matching was hampered because the victim had very little dental work.⁸

The break came in April 2001. Detective Lieutenant Kim Clements of the Beaver County District Attorney’s Office was searching the Doe Network, a volunteer-run catalog of unidentified remains, when she came across a sketch of the Portage County victim and compared it to photos of Sarah. Clements later described “something in my gut that told me we were right about this one.”⁸ A first DNA attempt failed. A second attempt, using DNA extracted from a femur and compared with a swab from Sarah’s mother Phyllis Williams, produced a match. Final confirmation did not come until June 2003, slowed in part by a backlog at the FBI lab after the September 11, 2001, attacks.⁹ Nearly nine years after Sarah vanished, her family finally knew what had happened.

The Kathryn Menendez Question

About a half-mile from where Sarah’s remains were found, the body of 17-year-old Kathryn “Kathy” Menendez of Alliance, Ohio, had been discovered on August 25, 1994. Menendez was last seen on August 21, 1994. Her nude body was found on an oil well access road near the Berlin Reservoir. She had been strangled, stabbed, and bludgeoned, and investigators believe she was killed elsewhere and left in the woods. Her clothing was never recovered.¹⁰⁶

Investigators believe Sarah’s body was already in the woods when Menendez was killed. The proximity and overlapping timeframe have prompted questions about a shared killer, but the FBI has stated that “it is unknown if these two unsolved murders are connected or not.”¹¹ In June 2024, investigators exhumed Menendez’s body from St. Joseph Cemetery in Alliance to collect potential DNA evidence that may have been preserved on her hands. Portage County Chief Deputy Ralph Spidalieri said detectives had followed fresh leads over the preceding two years and maintained “a couple of potential suspects.”¹²

Who Investigators Have Looked At

No one has been charged in Sarah’s death, but several lines of inquiry have come and gone over the decades.

Family members, including Sarah’s parents, were considered suspects early on. Her father, Jack Boehm Jr., drew scrutiny because of his troubled history, which later included a conviction for sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl. Detectives questioned him for years and ultimately cleared him. He is now deceased.³¹³

Author Christopher Hawley Martin has advanced a theory linking the killing to Larry Hall, a convicted serial killer from Wabash, Indiana, who was active in the early 1990s. Martin pointed to Sarah’s body being found along U.S. Route 224, which he described as “virtually a straight line” between the Rochester area and Hall’s home. Hall, a Civil War reenactor who frequently traveled to historic sites in Pennsylvania, confessed to murdering young women and girls before his arrest in November 1994. The file does not indicate that law enforcement has ever formally named Hall as a suspect.²

In November 2021, Beaver County Chief Detective Andy Gall told reporters that investigators had identified a “strong person of interest” who had spent time in both Beaver County and Portage County during the relevant period. The individual was serving a prison sentence on unrelated charges, and a polygraph had been scheduled.³ No public follow-up has been reported on the result.

Where the Case Stands Now

The FBI’s Pittsburgh field office is the lead federal agency, working with the Beaver County District Attorney’s Office, the Portage County Sheriff’s Office, the Alliance Police Department, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.¹¹

As of July 2024, a new FBI agent was assigned to the case after the retirement of the previous agent who had worked it for more than two decades. The FBI acknowledged that while names had surfaced over the years, investigators had “nothing specific that we can follow-up at this time.”⁴²¹⁴

One central question has never been answered: how a 14-year-old from western Pennsylvania ended up at a remote wildlife area in eastern Ohio, roughly two hours from her home. Sarah’s uncle, Kevin Boehm, has urged anyone with information to come forward, saying, “Until we get closure, until we find out who did this, life will never be the same.”³ Tips can be submitted to the FBI at (412) 432-4000 or online at tips.fbi.gov.¹

1
FBI. Sarah Rae Boehm
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Beaver County Times. Detectives Continue the Search for Answers in the Murder of Sarah Boehm
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CBS News Pittsburgh. Person of Interest in Killing of Sarah Boehm
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WTAE. Sarah Boehm 30 Years Later
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WTAE. Hidden Letter in Cold Case Released
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WKBN. Who Murdered 14-Year-Old Sarah Boehm and 17-Year-Old Kathryn Menendez
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WTAE. Berlin Reservoir Ohio Unsolved Murders
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Doe Network. Sarah Boehm Identification
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CNN. Cold Case: Boehm and Menendez
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Ohio Attorney General. Kathryn Menendez Cold Case
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FBI. FBI and Local Partners Seek Information in Two Unsolved Homicides
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News 5 Cleveland. Body of 17-Year-Old Girl Exhumed at Alliance Cemetery 30 Years After Her Murder
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Record-Courier. Investigation Discovery Episode on Murder of Sarah Boehm
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Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. FBI Seeks Public’s Help in 25-Year-Old Murder of Beaver County Teenager