On the evening of October 7, 1988, seventeen-year-old Pamela Sutter walked four blocks through a quiet Canton, Ohio neighborhood to babysit for a family she had known since she was eleven. She tucked two children into bed at 8:30 and was gone before their parents returned at 10:00. Her jacket hung on a hook by the door. Her shoes sat neatly on the mat.
Her backpack rested on the kitchen table. She never came home. Canton in 1988 was a mid-size city of factory workers and families who had lived on the same streets long enough that neighbors knew which children belonged to which house without asking. Pamela was a junior at McKinley High School, a clarinet player in the school band, and the kind of person who remembered what you had said three weeks earlier and showed up with soup when someone was sick.
She had been babysitting for the Dawson family, Mark and Carol and their two children, since she was in sixth grade. She had a plan to save for a school trip to Washington, D. C. that spring.
Her babysitting money sat in a painted tin box on her bookshelf, $43 inside, with a handwritten list of what she still needed. She was short by $60. Three more evenings of babysitting would close the gap. That Friday, she told her mother she would be home by 10:30.
She put on her jacket and walked out the front door. The street was quiet. It was 54 degrees and there was no wind. Mark and Carol Dawson returned at 10:10.
The house was quiet. The children were asleep. The television was off, which was unusual. Pamela typically watched something after the kids went down.
Carol called out. Mark checked the backyard. Nothing. They called the Sutter house.
Pamela had left at 6:45. Deputies arrived at 11:00. By midnight a search had begun. At 2:00 in the morning, a deputy searching a strip of overgrown land behind a row of garages one street over found Pamela Sutter, twenty meters from a gap in a chain-link fence that connected the alley to the Dawsons’ back garden.
She had been strangled. She was still wearing the jacket she had put on to walk to the Dawsons’. Her backpack was missing. Detective Sergeant Lou Ferretti, a sixteen-year veteran with the Stark County Sheriff’s Office, caught the case.
He worked the scene until 4:00 in the morning, interviewed the Dawsons, interviewed Pamela’s mother while she sat very still and stared at a point above his shoulder, and canvassed every house within a four-block radius. The forensic team recovered a single piece of physical evidence from beneath Pamela’s fingernails: biological material consistent with a male contributor. In 1988, DNA profiling was in its infancy in American law enforcement. The sample was collected and preserved, but there was no database to compare it against.
Ferretti ran the investigation hard for two years. He developed three strong persons of interest. One was a man who had recently moved to the street and could not account for his timeline that night; he was cleared when a witness placed him at a bar in Massillon from 8:00 until 11:00. The second was an older man with a prior conviction from 1971 who drove a vehicle seen in the neighborhood before the murder; he passed a polygraph.
The third was a nineteen-year-old who had asked Pamela to a school event the previous spring and been turned down; he had no physical evidence against him and an alibi that Ferretti could never fully break or confirm. The backpack was never found. The gap in the fence was examined twice. It had been there for at least two years, a shortcut neighborhood children used to pass between properties.
Anyone who knew the area knew about it. By 1991, the investigation began to slow. By 1993, it had no active leads. Ferretti requested a forensic review in 1994, but the lab told him the extraction techniques then available were not advanced enough to produce a reliable profile without a known contributor to match.
He filed the report. By 1997, the Sutter file sat in a folder in his desk. He retired in 1998, telling Barbara Sutter at their last formal meeting that he had not given up, and that if DNA technology improved, there might be a path. She shook his hand in the parking lot of the sheriff’s department, drove home, and sat in her car in her own driveway for twenty minutes before going inside.
For 34 years, Barbara marked every October 7th the same way. She visited the place where Pamela had been found, which had become a community garden maintained by the neighborhood association. Most of the residents tending the plots did not know why she came, and she never explained. A few had looked it up over the years, understood, and said nothing.
She sat on a small wooden bench along one edge, a bench with a plaque that read “A place for reflection,” put there by the association in 2005. It had not been placed there for her. She used it that way every October 7th for sixteen years. In 2021, Stark County joined a regional initiative to process cold case biological evidence through forensic genealogical profiling.
Cold case detective Karen Birch had reviewed the Sutter file in 2019 after a tip came in on a general cold case line, a tip that turned out to be unrelated. She flagged the preserved nail swab for submission. She read the original case file three times. She spoke to Lou Ferretti, who was 81 years old and still kept the photocopies.
She spoke to Barbara Sutter, who said simply, “Whatever you need. ”
The nail swab was submitted in January 2021. The genealogical profile was run against open access ancestry databases. The process took four months.
On a Wednesday afternoon in May, Birch received the analysis. The DNA pointed to a male contributor connected through the genealogical network to a family cluster in Stark County. She eliminated branches. Three weeks later, one branch kept returning.
The name at the end of it was Gary Thomas Melendez. He was 62 years old. He had grown up in Canton and lived from 1985 through 2003 on Garfield Avenue NE, two streets from the Dawson house. He had worked as a maintenance supervisor.
He had no prior criminal record. He had been married, divorced, and had two adult children who lived out of state. He lived in a suburb of Akron, 40 minutes from Canton. Birch pulled every document she could find.
Employment records placed him as available on the evening of the murder. A vehicle registration from 1988 listed him as the owner of a dark blue station wagon, a vehicle one witness had described as being parked near the alley behind the Dawson property that evening, though the witness had not noted the time precisely enough to be useful to the original investigation. Birch called Ferretti and read him the name. There was a long silence.
Then he said, “He was on my list. ” She asked which list. He said, “The one I kept in my head. The people I couldn’t eliminate and couldn’t prove.
”
A DNA sample was collected from Melendez through a discarded beverage cup in October 2021. The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation returned a confirmed match to the 1988 nail swab in three weeks. The partial DNA profile from beneath Pamela Sutter’s fingernails belonged to Gary Thomas Melendez. He was arrested at his home in Akron on December 2, 2021.
He opened the door, looked at the detectives, and said he had been wondering when this was going to happen. That was all he said. He maintained a not guilty plea through his attorney. The physical evidence supports the belief that Melendez had encountered Pamela in the neighborhood before that night, that he used the gap in the fence to access the Dawson yard, and that he attacked her in the narrow strip of overgrown ground where she was found.
The backpack was never recovered. When local news reached two of his former neighbors from Garfield Avenue, each said separately, without knowing the other had said the same thing, that they had always kept their children away from him, that they had never been able to explain why. Lou Ferretti drove to Barbara Sutter’s house the morning after the arrest. He had not seen her in eleven years.
She opened the door and he said, “We got him. ” She stood in the doorway for a moment without speaking. Then she said, “Come in. I’ll make coffee.
”
Barbara Sutter had spent 33 years keeping October 7th. She had kept the tin box. She had kept Pamela’s photograph on the mantel of every house she had lived in since 1988. Three houses.
One tin box. One photograph. She has said publicly that she intends to be in the courtroom for every day of the trial. The case changed something concrete.
Stark County now maintains an annual review cycle for all unsolved violent crimes with biological evidence, submitting new cases for genealogical analysis each year. In the two years since Pamela’s case broke, three additional county cold cases have been submitted. The science that solved this did not exist in 1988.
The evidence that solved it had been sitting in an envelope, properly preserved, waiting for the science to arrive.