arson case, even for one that seems open and shut. proving a decades old suicide that might actually be homicide? well, that is more a matter of timing and look. in the case of meg purk, the stars aligned in the summer of 2011, one detective ken mifflin walked into the office of summit county ohio prosecutor sherri bevan walsh. i actually still remember when detective ken mifflin came to my office, and he was basically asking for my assistance to file a motion to exhumed the body and reopen the case. he was pretty confident it was not a suicide, and this was a murder. my guess is you guys have plenty of open cases that are, as of that moment, unsolved? you probably didn t need one in a closed file reopened right
firefighters smelled gasoline as soon as they got out of their trucks. so a call immediately went out to stow police detective ken mifflin. when i got there, i saw the fire department still putting out the blaze. someone had taken probably a pipe wrench to disconnect the gas line. and it was blowing out natural gas. it was a very large roaring sound. at that point, the gas hadn t ignited? no. it could have possibly blown up. the person who said to the fire poured gasoline all the way to the gas meter and on top of the gas meter. the idea was fire starts, the gasoline goes to the gas main, and possibly destroys the house, and everybody in it? absolutely. mifflin found the purk family sheltered at a neighbor s house, and asked the father, scott purk, to step outside. we actually went over to my unmarked detective bureau car, and we sat in my car, where it
When Margaret Meg Purk was found dead in Ohio in 1985, her husband told detectives that his pregnant wife had died by suicide. Though investigators back then had an inkling that there was something amiss about the case, they didn’t know that it would take decades for the truth about the young woman s untimely death to emerge or that it would come from the grave.
On the morning of March 18, 1985, Scott Purk called emergency services to his Akron, Ohio home, claiming his wife had tried to kill herself. When emergency responders arrived at the scene, they found 24-years-old Meg Purk, who was 9 months pregnant, laying at the base of her stairs with a rope around her neck. She had no heartbeat and no pulse, but they were able to revive her and send her to the hospital.