For some people, cases never go cold

Victim's sister seeks closure New hope for solving 1988 killing

KEARNEYSVILLE, W.VA. -- Barbara Ott is once again reliving her brother's killing, more than two decades after his body was discovered in a shallow grave. As her 3-year-old grandson scurried around the front porch of her home last week, Ott paged through a flowery scrapbook that includes two bandanas, a high school graduation picture and the program for Henry Eric Ryan's memorial service.

At his office 31 miles away, Loudoun County Sheriff's Office Investigator Mark McCaffrey flipped through a two-inch red binder labeled Case No. 89-011253, filled with neatly organized interview notes, crime scene reports and autopsy information.

Ott and McCaffrey have worked closely together since the investigator called Ott a month ago, a few days before the 21st anniversary of Ryan's disappearance, to let her know that he was reevaluating the unsolved homicide.

At a conference in Annapolis on cold cases, a speech about a breakthrough in DNA testing caught McCaffrey's attention. When he returned to Leesburg, his supervisors gave him permission to use the new technology to try cracking the Ryan killing. He sent something retrieved from the crime scene to a lab in Manassas. He wouldn't say what, on the grounds that it might compromise the investigation.

"This isn't like an hour-long TV show, where the results pop up. It takes months," he said. "Hopefully, between physical evidence and witnesses, we'll eventually have our Perry Mason moment."

On Sept. 30, 1988, Ryan, a 28-year-old sheet-metal mechanic whom everyone called "Ricky," went to party on the banks of the Shenandoah River after cashing his paycheck and a tax refund check. He had recently discharged himself from a drug rehabilitation center -- his second stay -- and had progressed from using marijuana to PCP and harder narcotics, his family said.

Ryan, who was 5-feet-9 and skinny and had dirty blond hair, left the riverbank, where many young stoners went to swim, set bonfires and throw horseshoes on Friday nights, to buy beer. He never came back.

On March 14, 1989, four tattoos, including a small red devil and a skull, helped police identify Ryan's body. A black leather jacket was next to him in the six-foot-long, three-foot-deep hole along a logging road about 100 yards off Route 9.

McCaffrey said that people who stayed quiet because they were afraid to talk before have already come forward with helpful information. He said he has "developed a suspect or suspects" but declined to identify them.

"It's moving in the right direction," he said. "I have some promising avenues that I'm going down."

Ott, one of five surviving siblings, said her memory hasn't faded. She retired from the federal government after a career as a support clerk in 2003. She is divorced and remarried.

She remembers painstaking details about losing her brother and recites them stoically, betraying little emotion in her eyes. More than anything else, she said, she's determined to get justice and the closure that would come with it.