Attempts to solve the murder of Sarah Rae Boehm after the 14-year-old left her Beaver County home in July 1994 were impeded by poor police work, erroneous reports and a lack of communication between agencies, one of the investigators said at a symposium on cold cases Friday at Duquesne University.
“This is a case where ego and problems came up. I got involved in it in 1994, and the case haunts me still today,” said Andrew Gall, assistant chief of detectives for the Beaver County District Attorney’s office.
His hourlong tale of false reports, dead-end leads and missed opportunities came on the second and final day of “Finding Closure — The Science, Law and Politics of Cold Case Investigations.” The symposium was the 14th annual conference presented by the Cyril H. Wecht Institute of Forensic Science and Law at Duquesne.
Mr. Gall showed a haunting WTAE-TV news clip from late 1993 in which Sarah is interviewed about her attempted abduction by a man she claims to have fought off in a Rochester Borough alley. “I was thinking, ‘Oh, God, please don’t let him kill me. ’ ”
Rochester police looked into the report but eventually didn’t believe it rang true.
Eight months later, on July 15, 1994, Sarah was reported missing to Rochester Township police by her mother. Her older brother reported that the previous night, Sarah said she had their mother’s permission to walk to a friend’s home. He said he was supposed to watch his sister walk the route but was too involved watching a movie to do so.
As it turned out, the story was false — Sarah's friend knew nothing about a sleep-over. Police discovered that Sarah may have been involved with an older man who abused her.
Because police believed Sarah had run away, they didn’t enter her disappearance in the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children database.
Six years later, in an unconnected case, Sarah’s father confessed to Mr. Gall about indecently assaulting a girl under 13 years of age. Learning that Sarah was still missing, Mr. Gall went to Rochester Township police to discuss the case. That’s when she was reported missing to the national center and a task force was formed.
Throughout the years there were reported sightings of Sarah, including one by her twin cousins, but none was confirmed. Still, that led police to mistakenly believe Sarah was alive.
In 1998, when a Portage County, Ohio, detective contacted Rochester Township police about a girl’s skeletal remains found in 1994 by a hunter, police mistakenly said it couldn’t be Sarah because she had been seen. It took until April 2001 for that mistake to be discovered after a Beaver County detective thought a facial composite put out by the Doe Network was a match for Sarah and contacted Portage County about it.
DNA samples from the remains and Sarah’s mother were submitted for comparison to the FBI, but results were delayed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Finally, a positive match was made in May 2003 — nearly nine years after her remains were discovered.
Mr. Gall said the lessons learned from the case were that missing person reports need to be taken seriously; poor police reporting and documentation can cause cases to go cold; missing person task forces are needed; and multiple jurisdiction sharing procedures are necessary.
Mr. Gall said police have developed good suspects for Sarah’s killer and that of an Alliance, Ohio, girl about her age whose remains were found not far from Sarah and around the same time.
But at this point, he said, “It’s been 20 years since that little girl ran away and we don’t know what happened. I have a couple of years left in me and I’m willing to work them trying to find out.”
First Published: November 1, 2014, 4:00 a.m.
