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Silent Witness to a Murder
by Candy Lawrence

by Candy Lawrence
 
In this small, sleepy town of Burton where farm animals graze in pastures, corn, hay and soybeans fill the fields at harvest time and Amish buggies pulled by horses clippity clop around the oval that houses a community log cabin where maple syrup is produced, the church bell chimes its mournful wail, every hour on the hour, a sound somehow comforting and reminiscent of a fantasized, idyllic country community, the kind you’d never think would include murder.
  
There’s something so final and unfair about death, especially when a life is taken so callously in its prime, a light violently extinguished far before it had a chance to express the full spectrum of its potential. It’s a brutally tragic reminder of our own fragility. And when a murderer is the cause of that death, it sends those left behind in a tailspin of horror, painfully wrestling with their own issues of mortality, their own questions of why. It becomes a senseless theft, a violation that leaves deep scars on the hearts of family and friends.  
 
Several years ago while driving along a deserted country road, Dan Ott swerved to avoid hitting what he thought was a pig laying motionless in the middle of the road. Moved by compassion, he turned around and headed back to see if he could help. To his surprise, it wasn’t a pig at all. It was an English Bulldog hovering precariously near death, his paws pathetically frozen, his skin testimony to a difficult life, riddled with cuts, bruises and sores. Ott picked him up off the icy pavement, bundled him into his car, took him to a vet the following morning and decided to name him Mulligan.  
 
Unknown to Ott, he later would learn that the ironically appropriately chosen name, when referred to in golf-speak, meant ‘Second Chance’. In a strange synchronicity, it would turn out to be a second chance for both of them. Little would Dan Ott know when he picked up that suffering, tortured bulldog laying in the middle of the road on a cold November day, that one day, Mulligan might be able to return that unselfish act of compassion, by not only transferring his energy of empathy and love to family and friends in Ott’s absence, but by functioning as a forensic key to unlock a case gone tragically cold.
  
It was an early spring morning in late May. Dan Ott, 31, was looking forward to starting a new life in Michigan. For three years Ott, who specialized in botany as an expert grower nurturing seedlings into plants, managed that aspect at Urban Growers Greenhouse in Burton, Ohio. He had landed a bright, new job with a promising future and had planned to move with his girlfriend, Mary Ricker, 35. The couple had already made several trips to the Michigan area, moving their furniture and belongings to the new apartment out of state.  
 
Ricker was going to join him in Michigan a month later after he had a chance to settle in, planning to stay behind to tie up loose ends. “Back in January Dan told me he was offered the job in Michigan. It was way back then that he had asked me to join him in Michigan,” Ricker explained. “So I applied for my Michigan State licence for cosmetology. I was staying behind because his new employer, a gentleman who he had formerly worked for in Kipton, Ohio, had asked Dan to bump up his original start date from July 14 to the first of June and come in early. It was a last minute change which Dan agreed to.”
 
Tom Samuelson, Ott’s new employer, was scheduled for unexpected back surgery, and had requested Ott to start a month earlier in order to assure that the Michigan greenhouse was covered while Samuelson was recuperating. Ott, ever loyal, agreed to push the departure date up and arranged that Ricker would meet him up there 30 days later.  
  
But for the moment, they were both looking forward to celebrating the Memorial Day weekend of 2006, their last weekend together in Ohio. Ott had just finalized his last day at the Burton garden facility, and the farmhouse where he lived, located on the greenhouse property, was nearly empty when they fell asleep that Thursday night.
 
“We were sleeping on an air mattress in the living room,” Ricker said. “Most everything was packed up since we had already begun setting up the Michigan apartment the month prior. There was nothing in the house but odds and ends.”
 
At approximately 6:30 on the morning of May 26, the couple was awakened by the sound of their bulldog rustling about in the adjoining room. “We heard Mulligan stirring in the kitchen. His claws were on the linoleum. He was up earlier than when he normally wakes up. Usually we get him out at about 8 a.m. in the morning, so that was unusual but we didn’t think much of it at the time. Dan woke up and mumbled, ‘It’s your turn to let him out’ but I ignored him and started to fall back asleep and so did Dan. I wonder now what would have happened if I would have gotten up, how things might have unfolded differently,” Ricker mused.
 
“I think Dan fell back to sleep more heavily then I did. You know that feeling you get when you’re sleeping at night and you get a surreal dream like when your foot falls asleep and you think, ‘Oh my God’. I thought I heard footsteps so I told Dan I thought someone was in the house and we both looked over at the doorway by the bathroom and a man dressed in camouflage holding a shotgun was standing there. You can’t imagine the wave of fear coming over you, not knowing what will happen, just imagining what might happen. You just freeze.”
  
The gunman, cowardly hiding under a cloak of fabric cover like a jihad executioner, had no intentions of being identified. “It all happened so fast. I can’t even remember seeing a face. I might have blocked it out. I don’t know,” recounted Ricker, who has repeatedly asked authorities to hypnotize her in order to bring up buried memories, a licence plate, a better description of the perpetrator, anything at all that would help identify the intruder. “He asked Dan his name to which Dan responded and then we were told to lie on our stomachs. He didn’t want us to look at him so I rolled over and put the covers over my head to oblige him. He duct taped Dan’s hands behind his back but first he told Dan to roll off the mattress onto the floor, I guess so he could duct tape him up without stepping on the air mattress because he probably would have lost his footing.”
 
Either the gunman was an amateur, Ott was too adept at practicing escape, or both, but when Ott realized that his companion and friend was not going to be subdued with duct tape, and that the gunman might harm her, he frantically struggled to free his hands from the tape which bound him, uttering an expletive in the process.  
  
“When he was a little boy,” Leroy Ott, Dan’s father recounted, “The kids in the neighborhood used to play with duct tape, handcuffing each other up and seeing which one could get their hands out of the bind the fastest. It was a game.” A game that the Ott family realizes might have cost him his life, but Dan would have had it no other way even if it were on instant replay with the option to alter a devastating future reality. His intent was to protect his companion from danger, even if that meant giving his life. Always the champion of the underdog, always the defender of the weak, Ott was not about to compromise his integrity at any cost.
 
“Dan never got really angry ever,” Mary said. “He was always calm and relaxed and actually was very good in conflict resolution. There was a big difference in his mood that morning. I felt his rage. I just felt like I was breathing it in. I felt all of his anger. He was being threatened and he recognized that I was being threatened also, combined with the violation of an intruder coming into our house. I had never before felt him that angry. It was like fight or flight. It was like one of those dreams where you are paralyzed. You wake up and you’re so scared, you can’t move.”
 
Furious with the threat of intrusion, Ott struggled to tear his bound hands out of the duct tape and lunged toward where the perpetrator had gone, chasing him through the adjoining room. The gunman got to the door, no doubt panicked, turned and fired, shooting him in the chest just above Ott’s heart. Ricker, hearing the commotion, ignored the gunman’s earlier instructions to remain laying face down on the air mattress and ran to Ott’s side, horrified at what she saw.
 
“I jumped up because I heard the gunshot and two seconds later, the peel of what sounded like tires on gravel, and I glanced out the window, that’s when I saw the car, a late model maroon colored Ford Escort type vehicle.” But in the chaos of emotional shock, she was not able to decipher the license plate as it sped away from the tiny white farm house on Claridon-Troy Road (State Route 700).  
 
 “Without thinking to grab a phone, I immediately bolted to Dan and when I saw him I began screaming and screaming. I just couldn’t stop. He was calmer than I was. He was actually comforting me. He told me to calm down and call 911 so I ran back into the living room where we had been sleeping to grab my cell and was dialing it as I was running back to Dan. When I realized he was shot, I just lost it. I grabbed a towel and pressed it to his chest. I couldn’t believe this was happening. I couldn’t even think. I was just panicked.”
 
Desperate, frantic and in the confusion of the moment, Mary couldn’t relay the address correctly to the 911 dispatcher, but could only blurt out the numbers 1658. She could barely concentrate. “I just couldn’t remember. I must have been in shock so I said to Dan, “Honey, please help me...the address, I can’t remember, I can’t think...” and he said, “16058”.  
 
“Some people have said that he couldn’t have possibly spoken after being shot close range with such a caliber of weapon, but they weren’t there and most likely have never been in that situation, and the lady who took the 911 call heard me and heard Dan because I kept dropping the phone as I had my neck cranked sideways and was trying to talk and press the towel against Dan’s chest at the same time. I know the dispatcher would no doubt testify that she heard me talking to Dan and no doubt heard his responses. She had to have,” Ricker explained.  
  
“If I wasn’t constantly holding pressure on his chest, maybe he wouldn’t have been able to talk, I don’t know, but he said a lot of things in those last moments,” Ricker continued, adding that she wasn’t sure how much time it took for the rescue squad to respond, only that it felt like forever and that time stood still, frozen in a tortured abyss. When pressed to estimate the time that elapse, she could only reply that it seemed like an eternity. “Dan asked, ‘Where are they? Where are the EMT’s?’ He told me he wasn’t allergic to any drugs. At one point he moved his arm and said he couldn’t feel his arms anymore and then he looked up at me and said he was sorry, that he thought the man was going to rape me.”
 
As she knelt by his side in desperation, her knees still bearing scars from the rug burns of that morning, seeping wounds from having frantically scooted about the carpeted area where he lay, trying to stop the bleeding, she begged him to stay with her, not to leave her. “I told him I loved him and I kissed him and kept asking him, pleading with him, ‘don’t die on me, please, honey, don’t die on me’. And I held him and begged him to stay.”  
  
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but now I realize he must have died in my arms that morning, because there was a point when, and I don’t want to describe the graphicness of it all, he just stopped communicating with me. He was just shutting down. I told the 911 dispatcher what was happening. I didn’t know what to do, how to help. I just was so helpless. I just couldn’t keep him with me, as desperately as I tried, as much as I begged and pleaded. And even though it was happening, I just couldn’t process it, or acknowledge it. Even at the police station I kept thinking that he was on the operating table and he was going to be okay. I just kept praying. I couldn’t believe this was really happening,” Ricker recounted.
 
Horrified, Ricker recognized the only familiar face among the surrounding strangers, police officers and medical personnel who arrived at the scene. Standing at the driveway’s edge was Ott’s friend and boss, John Urbanowicz. Ricker so desperately longed for the comforting presence of someone she knew or felt close to. Not only Urbanowicz but even her parents and immediate family were not permitted to speak to her.
 
“My mom wanted to go to the hospital to be with Dan and she was told he was life flighted to Metro but he never left Geauga County,” Ricker said, wondering aloud about the abilities of law enforcement authorities to solve the crime and bring closure to Ott’s family and friends.  
 
The family has heard no word from detectives regarding evidence that has been returned from the Bureau of Crime Investigation. Despite bi-weekly calls inquiring about the status of the case, they are simply told to be patient and that, ‘we’re working on it’ while the gruesome Dan Ott story appears to have withered, melted into an equally morbid stagnation. No one is talking. Not the Sheriff. Not the investigators. Not the detectives.
 
“We had hoped the Sheriff’s Department would issue an update, or call a press conference. We are simply told they have a ‘seven man team’ on this case, yet there has been no movement, no justice for Dan,” Ricker said.  
  
The police interrogated Mary Ricker from the early morning hours until 5:30 p.m., without an attorney present. Ricker remains without an attorney and has no plans to hire one. She repeatedly asked to see her family and the Ott family during the interrogation immediately after the shooting and was continuously told the words, ‘soon, soon’ but was given no other information on his condition, nor was she permitted to go to the hospital. To her horror, it wasn’t until 3:00 p.m., a good eight plus hours after the attack, that she was callously informed that the man she loved had expired, no doubt in the early morning hours when the attack occurred. It was the beginning of a battery acid nightmare that was to relentlessly plague her for months to follow.
 
Emotionally crippled at the time, Ricker has since become more stoic, internalizing the tragedy as she plays the morning’s events over and over in her mind. “I felt so helpless that morning, too, because it was so early and Dan was laying there. It was horrible. I looked out of the picture windows in that room over at the greenhouse, frantic, just out of my mind, and I just hoped that someone could hear my screams. I just begged they would hear me. I just felt so helpless because no one was there to help Dan and there was nothing I could possibly do but just stay by his side and hope the paramedics would get there soon. It is so frustrating. I sleep with the light on at night, when I can sleep that is.”
 
  
Aaron Graley was the first deputy on the scene and stayed with Ricker throughout the entire morning of May 26th, yet it was a week later at the funeral home when she realized how mentally and emotionally damaged she must have been. “At the calling hours, I kept seeing a bald headed man and I kept asking people who he was because he looked so familiar but I couldn’t place him. And then it clicked. I was so overwhelmed to find out he was Graley, the man who was with me the entire first morning. It was only then that I realized how fried I must be, how this has effected me so drastically,” Ricker said.
 
By complying with the intruder’s instructions and covering her head with a blanket, coupled with the impending threat of a shotgun pointed at the couple, Mary was unable to get a detailed composite of the gunman. The primary feedback she was able to reveal was auditory. But for Mulligan, Dan’s bulldog, he not only heard it, he visually witnessed it all as it unfolded. The innocence of Dan’s best friend might hopefully prove to unveil a long awaited justice that has thus far alluded the case.
 
Dr. Joy Halverson, a veterinary geneticist who normally performs DNA tests on dogs to verify pedigrees for the American Kennel Club, explained that when it comes to crime scene investigation, “It’s impossible for someone to come into someone else’s environment without adding something to it or taking something away. If you combine that with the fact that probably half of American households own either a cat or dog, the chance that you are going to get some kind of transfer of hair at a crime scene is pretty good.”
  
Mulligan was taken into custody the morning of the murder and released to Ricker just under 48 hours later. She then made arrangements to move him to a horse farm that is also a sanctuary for homeless animals where Ricker continued to care for him, providing food, enrichment programs and paying for veterinary expenses, visiting him on a daily basis for quiet outings by the lake where they both began the long process of healing. It was a refuge during a tormented time, a time that continues to cast a painful shadow over her life. Investigators came to the farm and took DNA samples from Mulligan, samples which could become trace evidence and be used to convict a suspect once identified.
 
Bulldogs are known to slobber and drip saliva continuously and Mulligan had a history of incontinence. The killer had to have picked up Mulligan’s DNA on the soles of his shoes or boots and tracked this evidence into his vehicle and into his home.
 
Although not a widespread crime-fighting tool, canine DNA has become more commonplace. Over a year ago, the Journal of Forensic Science published Haverson’s study of 558 pure and mixed breed dogs. Last year a $300,000 grant from the National Institute of Justice earmarked to create another such database was awarded to the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory’s forensics department at the University of California at Davis. Canine DNA has been admitted in several criminal trials throughout the United States and Britain since it was first used to help convict a murderer in 1994 when Canadian police used a hair from a cat named Snowball to help convict a killer.
 
While human DNA labs are backlogged with requests, the handful of laboratories who are equipped to do forensic DNA testing on animals are only recently experiencing an increased demand. “People are not aware of us and not bringing cases to us that we could help with,” Halverson said.
  
 Dan Ott was just a nice, clean-living guy. Plain and simple. He had no enemies. In this quiet town, there never seemed a need to lock your doors. People rarely ever did. The doors of the farmhouse that fateful morning were innocently unlocked, as they often are among country residences in the area.  
 
A jokester at heart, he loved nothing more than to raze a room and bring it alive with peels of laughter. But Dan was also a complex man of serious purpose with a maturity beyond his years. Yet he could make light of the most difficult situations and had an empathetic heart of gold for those less fortunate. He was content to commune with nature, take long walks in the woods and surround himself with plants and animals. Drugs and alcohol were not even remotely a part of his life.
 
“Dan Ott was my best friend since middle school. He was like a brother to me,” Frank Workman, a Captain in the Marine Corps and military police officer wrote on BurtonBlog.com. Created by local proprietor Scott Weber, owner of the Gunrunner Shop located in the heart of Burton, the blog’s intent is to be used as an alternative to conventional media sources. Geared to addressing issues relative to the rural community of Burton, Weber’s blog has had as many as 27,000 hits a day, primarily due to the interest generated in the Ott case. It averages 15,000 hits per week and has been the sole source for updates on the cold blooded Ott murder. During a single week in October, BurtonBlog boasted an incredible 25,124 hits.
 
 “Nothing is certain in life,” Workman continued, “However, I know Dan. He did not do drugs, he did not smoke and he hardly ever drank...You can usually tell a good deal about a person by the company they keep...Some of Dan’s other close friends from growing up were at his funeral. One is a mortgage broker, one works for NASA, and one is an Air Traffic Controller. Not exactly a gang of thugs.”
 
Weber, an outspoken advocate for all things Burton and a champion for justice, has been the self appointed town crier of the Ott case, badgering officials for answers. “It just seems to me,” Weber wrote on one of his blog posts, “that the Sheriff is going on with his election campaign and efforts at public relations instead of solving this very important of cases. I maintain that the killer is still out there among us...Could he strike again? The answer has to be: Of course. I WANT AN ARREST AND A CONVICTION SOON.” (sic)
 
Weber also addressed the possibility of the intruder’s association with drugs. “Desperate people do desperate things,” Weber, a horseman, a former teacher and published journalist wrote.  
 
 He also questioned why authorities never contacted area gun stores to review their sales records and check if any suspects purchased a gun or ammunition. “I am in the firearms business,” Weber wrote. “My store is only two miles from the murder scene. I sell thousands of firearms and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition a year and not once has the seven man team been here to see me or call me on the phone (except Sheriff Dan McClelland about other matters of the case).”  
 
It’s bad enough dealing with death and having to cope with a tragic loss of shattered dreams, but for Ricker, it became an unbearable nightmare coupled with unwarranted guilt, knowing that Ott died trying to protect her, dying at what she might imagine was her expense or her fault. Emerging from that weakened, battered shell has been a long, painful struggle and Ricker bears scars that may never heal, but they are wounds that have strengthened and empowered her. Cocooned for months in a fetal position of shock and disbelief, Ricker is ready to go into the ring and fight the same way Dan Ott fought for her. Shifting into the next phase of grief, Ricker has been wrestling with her own demons of rage and anger. But it’s a somehow positive, nondestructive anger, an anger that creates action.
 
 “We will find this man if it takes me my entire life and when he’s caught I’m going to have to be handcuffed or in some way restrained when this goes to court. We all want to see Dan’s murderer come to justice. I’m not sure that Dan knew who this man was. If he had any inclination of who he was, Dan would have told me that morning. He was able to tell me other things, so he would have told me that. That’s who Dan was. He wouldn’t have held that back. He would have told me who it was. He was straight forward and paid attention to details. Dan was a thinker. He was the type of guy who thought, ‘If this happens, what are the consequences of that happening’. He went into protective mode that morning. He would have told me if he knew who the man was or even who he thought the man might be. He had a memory like a steel trap.”
 
Josey Carey, a long time friend of Mary’s, witnessed first hand the couple’s caring devotion to each other as they interacted over the last two years, and watched as the intensity of that relationship deepened day by day. A tragic love story prematurely denied, they were preparing for a life together and had talked about starting a family. They never imagined there was any rush. They felt they had time to get to know each other. But those expectations shattered like broken glass in a single second.
 
“I actually had first hand contact with Dan and Mary as a couple,” Carey explained. “Many people weren’t aware of what they shared together given that Dan was a very private person. I, however, on many occasions, got to experience their relationship first hand. Dan had a very fun loving, quirky sense of humor and exposed Mary to it on a daily basis. He’d light up a room and made people laugh. He would call and leave her messages on her phone everyday just to tell her that he missed her and couldn’t wait for her to get home from work. He’d buy her what seemed to be worthless objects to most, but something that had great meaning between the two of them, things that Mary treasured. They really cared about each other. Nobody will ever know how much and many people can speculate on the subject, but seeing them so often together, and having personally known both of them, I know the depth of their love and commitment toward each other.”
 
  Anyone who has had animals will attest that dogs grieve, too. They are not exempt from experiencing the emptiness that goes along with loss. Anyone with a basic knowledge of biology knows it to be true: we are all animals. In the early morning hours of October 14, Mulligan, exhausted with age, drew his last breath and quietly slipped away to join his friend and caretaker, Dan Ott. As a silent yet powerfully formidable witness, Mulligan will live on, continuing to speak volumes to the world of forensic science and hopefully, one day, will arrive full circle to vindicate his best friend, the man who showed him so much love, compassion and empathy throughout his difficult life.
 
If you have any information regarding this case, please contact the Geauga County Sheriff’s Department at 440/635-1234 or contact detectives at 440/279-2009.








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