STILL SEARCHING — Daya Riffle Pethtel leafs through a stack of news clippings her mother kept after her sister, Vicki Riffle Dylewski, was murdered 40 years ago in Fernwood State Forest. -- Contributed

STEUBENVILLE — Lori Riffle was only 16 when she saw her big sister heading out for a jog. She didn’t know it then, but it would be the last time any of them would see her alive. The following day, police would find Vicki Riffle Dylewski’s body in Fernwood State Forest, dumped over an embankment.

She’d been shot once, in the head.

“Who thinks their sister is going to get murdered after you see her get ready to go for a run?” said Lori, now 56 and living in North Carolina.

“I was coming home from school that day, I remember my parents saying, ‘We need you to sit down, we need to talk to you.’ I just got my learner’s permit and Vicki had been teaching me to drive. I already knew she was missing because there’d been a lot of chaos in our house when she didn’t come home, we’d all been talking about it. I sat down and my mom and dad just told me, ‘Vicki was found dead today in Fernwood Park.’ I remember being really sad, really shocked. Things like that didn’t happen in our community. Things like that didn’t happen at all.”

Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of Vicki Riffle Dylewski’s murder, and her family is still waiting for justice to be served. Police at the time had suspects, but never enough evidence to make an arrest.

In a 1982 interview, Mrs. Riffle would tell a local reporter that Vicki, a nurse anesthetist, had just finished a 48-hour stint on call and was looking forward to a week off. She’d said her daughter slept a bit, then around 4 p.m. told her mother she was going to go for a run.

Investigators retracing Dylewski’s steps were able to determine that on the way to Fernwood she’d stopped off at her own house, donning her jogging suit and grabbing an orange toboggan, then picked up something to eat at a fast-food restaurant. She parked her green Z280 Datsun near the park office, then started her run. Other park-goers told investigators they’d noticed her taking a different trail than she normally used.

That was the last anyone, other than her killer, saw of her. The following morning her parents officially reported Vicki missing and a search was launched. That afternoon, a fire protection airplane pressed into service by searchers spotted her orange toboggan. Authorities figure she’d been dead between 16 and 24 hours.

Mrs. Riffle told the reporter her daughter’s fully clothed body was discovered “about a quarter-mile up the road and over an embankment from where her car was parked.” She said the killer “drug her a short distance off the road” into the woods.

Daya Riffle Pethtel, now an East Liverpool resident, said her parents struggled with their grief, “they didn’t know what to do, they couldn’t (fix) it.”

“I can tell you it consumed a lot of my mother and probably my father, though he was less of a talking person,” their son Ted, now a Columbus resident, added. “My mother, she stirred the pot. For a while she called the sheriff every day. Eventually she called him every week, then it was every month, then every year.”

Lori agreed it weighed heavily on her parents.

“My brothers and sisters were already out of the house, so it was just me, my mom and my dad,” she said. “My mom cried a lot. I remember she had a mural made of my sister — an oil painting that’s about three feet-by-three feet, it was like a live picture of my sister. My mom would sit in the living room and talk to her all the time. It drove me nuts — now, I can understand it, but then I just thought it was crazy. My mom was just haunted with trying to figure out what had happened to Vicki. Until the day she died she was haunted by it.”

Lori said her mom even kept what amounted to a murder scrapbook — a collection of news clippings, photos and even some handwritten notes. “She spoke to (someone) we’d thought might have done it, and wrote the conversation down so she wouldn’t forget anything,” she said.

Their parents are gone now — Ted Sr. died in 2013 and their mother, Edna, in 2017.

“I was with my mom when she died, we had her in hospice,” Lori recalled. “Before she took her last breath, she told me, ‘I see Daddy and I see Vicki.’ I said, ‘Go get them.’ She died (a few) minutes after that. Even though she’d been having a hard time breathing, I could see the smile come over her face because she could see my sister. Even when she was suffering through her own pain, she thought of her.”

None of them can understand why anyone would want to hurt Vicki.

“She was hardworking, she was intelligent,” Daya said, her voice breaking. “She loved nature, she loved exercising.”

Ted, who was studying engineering at Ohio State University at the time, said he and his sister were a lot alike. “We were both strong-willed and stubborn.”

“She wouldn’t let people take advantage of her,” he added. “She was independent, she was strong-willed and intelligent, an attractive young woman.”

Lori said her sister was passionate about children, “maybe because she couldn’t have any of her own,” and loved life.

“She never smoked, not even pot, and she never drank,” Lori added. “She was probably the cleanest person I’ve ever known. She was a good and kind person, she always wanted to help people — and by trying to help people, she ended up getting herself killed. I can’t remember Vicki ever having any enemies, but I was a kid then, what did I know?”

Daya pointed out her sister was shot at close range, and figures the only way the killer could have gotten so close to her sister was if Vicki knew him or her.

“From what I remember of the autopsy report, whoever shot her knew exactly where to put the gun on her neck to kill her instantly,” Lori said. “So, it was somebody she let in her space because she wasn’t scared, but she shouldn’t have.

“If I remember correctly, I think she was chased,” she added. “I think they actually took the door off one of the restrooms at Fernwood because the door was smashed in. I think she was standing on the toilet, trying to hide. I think she realized something bad was happening and couldn’t do anything — they didn’t have cell phones back then, so it’s not like she could call for help. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, but it’s something I remember.”

Ted remembers hearing his parents talk of a struggle, and said his sister “had some scratches.”

“You only hope that it happened quick and she didn’t suffer,” he said, “but we don’t have any way to know that.”

It rankles all of them that her killer has never been brought to trial.

“Someone took a life and got away with it,” explained Daya’s son, Cory Gooch, who was just a few years old when his aunt was killed. “I know the investigation led to a couple suspects, but … it just went cold.”

Investigators, led by then-sheriff George Thomas, had questioned a couple of suspects and even had them polygraphed, to no avail. Three months after her death, Vicki’s body was exhumed because of “newly discovered evidence,” though no one ever said publicly what that evidence was or what they found out.

“Hell, yeah, it bothers me,” Lori said. “I think it would be very satisfying to know who did it. I’m sure my mom and dad already know. They’ve already reunited with her. But just to give us that satisfaction, to be able to say, ‘You’ve been caught.'”

“Whoever it was, they stole a life,” Ted added. “They stole Vicki’s life, and it would have been a good life — she was a productive member of society. She was a good sister and a good daughter. It didn’t just impact her life, it impacted all of us.”

Jefferson County Sheriff Fred Abdalla, who took office in 1984, three years after Vicki’s murder, said he’s never forgotten.

“That case was never closed,” he said. “I’ve worked that case off-and-on since I was sheriff of this county, hoping I could solve it while (her parents) were still alive.”

The fact that he hasn’t been able to close it out bothers Abdalla almost as much as it has bothered the Riffle family for the last four decades.

“My heart always broke for her mom and dad,” he said. “Every time I’d see them, they looked so sad. The main thing is to get the case solved — it’s not going to bring her back, but it brings peace-of-mind for her family.”

He said Mrs. Riffle saved every scrap of information she came across.

“Everything she heard or saw, she wanted to be able to show somebody and solve the case but it never happened,” he said, pointing out that there’s been “maybe 55 homicides since I’ve been sheriff and every one of them has been solved, some of them easier than others.”

He said Vicki Riffle Dylewski’s murder is the kind that haunts you.

“I’ve been in and out of there a dozen or more times, going through the files, looking for something we might have missed,” Abdalla said. “There’s so much paperwork, you’ve got to look at it all because there’s always a chance you could have missed something.”

Lori said she knows that feeling: Back when she was a senior in high school, she said she “tried to dive into it.” She said her mother was terrified Vicki’s killer would find out and do something to her, too.

“My mom kept telling me to stop, she was scared because we didn’t know who did it,” she said. “But I went out there several times to walk the area. It was scary, it really was, but my sister was killed out there. My mom told me to stop but I had to do it, I just had to go out and see what that area was like.

“One night I just decided to go out there and take a walk. I didn’t even know where it was, but I drove right to it — right to the restroom where they say she was.”

Gooch said he’s been out there, too, more times than he can count.

“It really doesn’t haunt me, but it drives me,” he said. “I think I was a junior in high school when they actually found her drivers’ license in downtown Steubenville, and a handgun was retrieved about the same time as the license was found, I believe. Ballistics was done and it just happened to be the same caliber as the gun that killed her.”

After his grandfather’s death he spent as much time as he could with his grandmother, helping her with odd jobs around the house, “and she would bring it up every once in a while. She’d say, ‘You remind me of your Aunt Vicki’ or ‘Your aunt used to do things like that,’ so I knew it was still on her mind.”

Ted said he decided it was time to “stir the pot” himself and reached out to Abdalla recently. He and other members of the family will be meeting with the sheriff in a couple weeks to go through the files with him, just as he used to do with their parents.

“Since her passing, nobody had really done it,” Ted said. “I felt like I needed to stir the pot a bit. I accept that my sister is gone, she’s never coming back — probably in the early years it was a lot harder than it is now. Now, it’d be nice to just get her a little justice.”