Cashier finds bodies after six-month search

Woman began search for kids after hearing mother’s plea

NEW YORK — A supermarket cashier has found the corpses of a murdered brother and sister after searching for their grave s for six months.

Stephanie Dietrich, 44, of Ohio, was so moved by the story of Sarah and Philip Gehring, 14 and 11, who were killed by their father, an accountant, in 2003, that she began her quest for their bodies even though she had never met them.

Before Manuel Gehring killed himself in jail last year, he gave an agonizingly vague description of the burial site.

They would be found somewhere along the 11,400 kilometre s of h i g hway between Pennsylvania and Iowa, under a tree that drooped like a willow and near a wire fence, an old pump and defunct concrete sewer pipes, he said.

The children’s mother, Teresa K n i g h t , o f New Hampshire, spent the whole of the summer combing long stretches of highway looking for them.

Her search was fruitless but it inspired Dietrich, who had never had any contact with the Gehring family, to find the children herself.

In her every free moment, Dietrich set out in her car, with four spades, a pickaxe, boots, a flashlight and her dog, looking for the elusive burial site.

Last week she found the children, buried in a desolate spot in the woods of northeastern Ohio, wrapped in black garbage bags decorated with crosses made from sticks and masking tape.

“ It was the mother’s plea that made me do it,’’ said Dietrich. “ I’d give away as many of my work hours as I could. I couldn’t focus at work.’’

Dietrich pored over transcripts of Gehring’s description of the site from a website about the case.

She also followed up on evidence found in his van — pollen and residue from a sweet birch tree — suggesting that the children were buried in western Pennsylvania or eastern Ohio.

Dietrich visited six spots over and over again, occasionally with her husband or friends.

“ I wanted to try to show them that I wasn’t crazy,’’ she said.

“I would go to a spot and might sit there an hour and half, just think about stuff and re-read manuscripts.’’

Once, after visiting a site near her home town of Akron, Ohio about 30 times, digging knee-deep in two or three places, she alerted the police and the FBI, who searched the area in vain.

Last Tuesday she f irst came upon the site in Rico, Ohio.

“I kept moving to this spot under a tree whose branches were hanging down like a willow,’’ she said.

“Digging under the tree, I had only to go down about a foot and a half and I hit a black trash bag.’’

In the six months of her search, Dietrich never sought public attention and never contacted the children’s mother.

“ I didn’t want to disappoint her,’’ she said.

“Overall there’s a sense of release,’’ their mother said.

“It’s almost been like a ball and chain that we had to carry with us, that was part of our life, that we didn’t know.’’

Gehring, who had been involved in a bitter custody dispute over the children with their mother, shot his daughter three times in the head and his son four times in the head, neck and arms.

He then drove hundreds of kilometres west to what he assumed was Ohio, before burying them in shallow graves. He was tracked down by police in California but hanged himself in his cell before the case went to trial.

Daily Telegraph