BY JOHN A. DARNELL JR.
      associate editor
      Following DNA testing that resulted in naming the killer of 13-year-old Bradley Bellino 50 years ago, Boardman police are now considering their options into advanced DNA testing in an effort to determine what caused the death of 13-year-old David Evans in 1975.
      Bellino’s body was found in a dumpster behind the Boardman Plaza on Apr. 4, 1972. Three weeks ago, Boardman police announced that DNA testing had determined his likely killer was a man named Joseph Norman Hill, formerly of 151 Shadyside Dr. in Boardman. Hill was 32-years-old at the time, and police say his family relocated to southern California about six years later.
      Following the death of his wife, Bonita, in 1993, Hill became estranged from his remaining family and lived in various places in California until he died on July 3, 2019 in Yusiapa, California of senile degeneration of the brain. To date, there is a paucity of information about Hill’s life in California, except one claim he was charged in 1986 with solicitation of a lewd act.
      David Evans lived at 208 Ridgewood Dr. in Boardman, and on Jan. 18, 1975 at 2:10 a.m., his father reported his son, a diabetic, was missing. The boy’s frozen body was found four days later in the rear yard of a home on Crestline Place, near the intersection of Rt. 224 and Market St.
      Like the Bellino death investigation, efforts to determine what happened to David Evans have been ongoing for nearly five decades, and now veteran Boardman police detective, Sgt. Mike Hughes, has been named the lead investigator on the case. Hughes has been a Boardman police officer for three decades, serving the department for many years as head of its Narcotics Enforcement Unit (NEU).
      The Story of David Evans
      The Evans family moved to Boardman’s Ridgewood Estates in 1976 from Lakewood, New York in New York State’s southwestern tier, by Lake Chautauqua.
      Interviewed by legendary local writer, Janie S. Jenkins a week after David went missing, his parents, Peter and Gracia, said the family moved to Boardman, in part because the local school system offered what their children needed.
      At school in western Ney York, David was described as a self-conscious lad who was often the subject of ‘verbal harassment’ from his schoolmates. He was born with a deformity that resulted in one hand with two fingers and a thumb, and more narrow than the normal hand---He also had an operation to correct eye muscles when he was six, and at the age of nine was diagnosed with diabetes.
      “The other children in New York were not kind about it,” the parents told Ms. Jenkins.
      In Boardman, David played in Boardman Little League for longtime coach Rudy Granito. He learned to catch using his deformed hand to catch the ball without the glove falling off, spending hours bouncing the ball from his house roof into the mitt. He was an ‘A-B’ student as a seventh grader at Center Middle School, where he was a member of the band. He went to the YMCA and liked model airplanes.
      Mr. Granito told police that David was not the kind of boy who would get into a car with somebody that he didn’t know.
      “He was shy...picky with his friends and did not just mingle with anybody...He was a more grown-up boy that some of the boys on our team,” Granito told police.
      His father told Ms. Jenkins his son had “a fierce determination to succeed in everything, from studies to athletics, and that was the result of having ‘to excel to overcome’ the diabetes, eye surgery and malformed left hand.” He also said his son wasn’t ‘a hanger-outer’ and had been taught to let his parents know where he was going after school, or after a game, and he always did.”
      A Boardman Police Department report taken at 12:10 a.m. by Ptl. George Statler on Jan. 18, 1975 provided the first notification that David Evans could be missing, when his father said his son had not been seen for six hours.
      David was last seen near the intersection of Withers Dr. and Market St. about 6:00 p.m. on Jan. 17, an area where the stocking hat he was wearing was later found in the snow. His father said he thought David was walking home and told Ptl. Statler his son “never had any problems at home, nor had he been depressed,
      “Mr. Evans then stated ‘David is a diabetic’ and needed a shot once every day.”
      Within 20 minutes of the information, Boardman police scoured the Ridgewood Estates neighborhood, nearby Lake Forest Cemetery, as well as Boardman Lake area---then the Boardman Plaza, Southern Park Mall, Boardman High School, and two middle schools
      “Many dumpsters were looked-in, all of the night coffee shops and restaurants were checked,” Capt. Harry VandenBosch said. Information in the missing boy, as well as his need for insulin was provided to all area law enforcement agencies. The Ohio National Guard provided a helicopter to assist in the search.
      On Jan. 23, 1975, Boardman police were notified a body had been found in the back yard of a home on Crestline Place. David Evans was found---laying on his back in below-freezing temperatures, without the stocking cap his father said he had been wearing.
      One day after the body was found, Mahoning County Deputy Coroner Dr. William A. Johnson ruled an “investigation developed no element of criminality” into Evans’ death, and the immediate cause of death as a diabetic coma.
      County Coroner Dr. Nathan Belinky said “since David’s death was caused by diabetic coma, and there were no physical findings serious enough to cause traumatic death.”
      The ruling was made, despite strong objections from Ptl. Steve Balog, who was on the scene of the discovery of the body.
      As Balog and others argued, the body of David Evans showed fractures to his left radius and ulna were suffered after he died, as well there was a puncture wound in his lower back, also incurred after death. Assistant Coroner Johnson also noted the were “multiple abrasions” on the child’s face, including left eyebrow, right chin and earlobe, and upper part of his back.
      “How could the boy suffer broken bones after he was dead,” Capt. Balog and others opined.
      Despite the coroner’s findings, then Boardman Police Chief Grant L. Hess asked the Ohio Bureau of Identification (BCI) to process an ‘Inventory of Evidence’ that included the clothes Evans was wearing, “slides” of fingernail scrapings and a surveyor’s stake.
      “We are particularly interested in any evidence of semen, blood, hair samples, fibers or other particulars,” Hess said.
      On Feb. 3, BCI Identity Technician Charles Barna told Hess his examination found “no seminal fluid or blood on Evans’ clothing; hair,” however he did find red and white fibers and orange paint particles on Evans’ shoes, and a hair was found on the jacket the boy had been wearing. A button was also missing from the jacket he was wearing.
      “The red and white nylon fibers could be from a blanket or a carpet,” Barna said, noting the greatest concentration of material on the shoes was “on the back of the heel, as though he was drug.” Barna also said the sole of a shoe “appeared sticky.” He also noted a tire track had been located near where the boy’s body had been found, but was “as yet unidentified.”
      Late in the evening on Jan. 24, 1975, a woman called police saying she was in a parking lot of a dance studio on the night Evans was first reported missing. The parking lot abutted the property where Evans’s body was discovered.
      The woman said she pulled into the parking lot about 7:00 p.m. and believed she observed a “red, full-sized auto back up to the embankment, near where Evans’ body was found,” Ptl John Rosensteel said.”
      According to a report filed by Rosensteel, the woman said a white man wearing a tan windbreaker exited the car, “looked around and then tossed something over the embankment.
      “She observed the man return to his car, flip the front seat forward and flash a light around the back seat.”
      The woman gave police what she believed was the first several letters and numbers on the car’s license plate. Several years later, attempts were made to match the license plate with a red car, to no avail.
      As for the stocking cap found the night of David’s disappearance in the area of Market St. and Withers Dr.---On Jan 28, Ptl. William Laubenheimer said that he received a call from an anonymous man who said sometime between 6:00 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on Jan. 17, someone had observed a man and a boy in a struggle near Market St. and Withers Dr., during which both got into a black car.
      Boardman police never closed their files on the Evans case, and as in the death of Bradley Bellino, tracked down potential suspects throughout much of the eastern United States; and as was the case in the Bellino investigation, to no avail.
      Sometime after his son’s death, Peter Evans received a letter in the mail from an inmate in an Ohio Penitentiary in which the inmate claimed to know his son’s killer, who was also in the same jail and had talked about the crime.
      After lengthy exchanges of letters, on July 26, 1988 BPD Capt. Steve Balog (who as a patrolman found Evans body) and Det./Lt. Robert Rupp travelled to Lucasville Prison to interview the inmate.
      “After listening to the facts of the case that he was aware of, it became evident that his knowledge of the case is extremely limited,” Capt. Balog said.
      Current Investigation
      Det./Sgt. Michael Hughes is hopeful that new and enhanced DNA testing could lead law enforcement to a suspect in the Jan., 1975 death of David Evans, as it did in the Bellino investigation; and anyone with information can call him at 330-726-4144.
      Bellino Investigation
      In the Bellino investigation, certain evidence in an effort to obtain DNA samples was sent by Boardman Det. Ben Switka to BCI on Sept. 19, 2017 for analysis that concluded that semen had been identified on pants that Bellino was wearing, and on Jan. 11, 2018, DNA was obtained from one of the boy’s femur bones. Then on Nov. 1, 2022, evidence sent by BPD Det. Rick Kridler contained another DNA standard.
      DNA that showed Joseph Norman Hill as a 98 percent match for the DNA found on Bellino’s body.
      A 100 percent match was not possible because Hill was cremated after his death and had no DNA on record to test, Boardman police Capt. Albert Kakascik said, adding a forensic scientist with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation was comfortable agreeing it was Hill’s DNA that was found on Bellino’s pants.