Akron, Ohio – The Ohio woman who found the bodies of two missing New Hampshire children said Monday that she had been searching with her dog for months on a personal mission that her friends and family considered an obsession.
Stephanie Dietrich, a grocery store cashier, said she was motivated to look for Sarah Gehring, 14, and her brother Philip, 11, by their mother’s public plea.
The children’s father, Manuel Gehring, shot them to death in 2003 and told authorities he buried the bodies somewhere along a 700-mile stretch of Interstate 80 across the Midwest. He gave investigators several details but said he could not remember the location, then committed suicide in jail before a trial.
Dietrich, 44, said she went searching with her dog more than 40 times since July near her Akron home because of clues suggesting the gravesite could be in the region. Investigators had concluded in 2004 that pollen found on dirt on Gehring’s minivan and shovel suggested that the soil most likely came from northeastern Ohio.
On Thursday, Dietrich was looking in the well-to-do suburb of Hudson for such things as tall grass, sewer pipes and a wood pile that the father described when her 101-pound mixed- breed dog, Ricco, stopped in the woods and “just laid down and started looking at me.”
Dietrich said she saw a small mound with twigs covering it. She started digging, came upon a plastic bag and pulled out what appeared to be part of a cross made of willow twigs and duct tape.
She called police on her cellphone, and the children’s bodies were removed from a shallow grave.
“It was like a personal challenge. Not like it was a game. I knew it was serious,” she said. “My family members and friends were like ready to have an intervention because I was obsessed with it.”
When Gehring rode along with investigators for days in a search for the spot, he failed to lead them to the site.
“He clearly led them away from the actual location,” New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney Jeff Strelzin said. “Having seen the violence he inflicted on his children, it was pretty obvious he didn’t want … the prosecution to be able to use that information against him.”
