Until they rule that no crime was committed, I'll put this here. IMO...a crime was committed.
Investigation into death of 18-year-old girl found in river reopened after 30 years
September 04, 2010|By Kevin Amerman, OF THE MORNING CALL
After a year of living with a boyfriend, Donna Kroboth, a pretty young woman with light brown, shoulder-length hair, told her mother she couldn't make ends meet and would be moving back home.
Joan Kroboth welcomed the news, thinking Donna, 18, should be at home with her parents and three brothers. But Donna never made it back to her parents' Parkview Drive home in Whitehall Township. Her family never saw her alive again.
Four days after she met with her mother, her body was found on July 11, 1980, in the Lehigh River in North Catasauqua. Bloated and decomposed, it had to be identified through dental records.
Thirty years later, the family still doesn't know how Donna died. But they hope a new investigation will provide answers. Intrigued by a letter Donna's father wrote, Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli is taking another look at the teen's death.
"The dad wrote me a letter and I thought it was something we shouldn't overlook," Morganelli said. "It did raise some questions."
Morganelli, who wasn't aware of the case before Joseph Kroboth contacted him, said if his investigation determines Donna was killed, it will be listed as a cold case and re-opened. If not, it will remain unsolved.
His decision gives Joseph and Joan Kroboth something on which to pin their hopes.
"We want to go to our graves knowing what happened," said Joseph Kroboth, 79, sitting with Joan, 76, on a bench outside their ranch home in Lehigh Township. "This has to come to a close. This is ridiculous that in this day and age, they don't know how she died."
No water in her lungs
Donna had been living with Eugene O'Donnell Jr. in a home on Canal Street in Northampton that abutted the river, Joseph Kroboth said. The riverbank was a popular gathering spot for teenagers then and Donna, friends said, would sometimes hang out there.
So when the Kroboths came across scuba divers combing the river four days after their daughter's disappearance, they took it as an ominous sign.
"My wife said, 'I think they're pulling someone out of the river," Joseph Kroboth said. "I said, 'No, they're probably just practicing.'"
Later that day, their fears were realized when the phone at the Kroboth's house rang and the coroner was on the line. He asked Joseph Kroboth if he could try to identify a body that was pulled from the river. It was a woman, dressed in a pink tube top, jeans and brown hiking boots.
"That's when my wife went to pieces," Joseph Kroboth said, recalling Joan clutching a glass vase so tightly, she crushed it in anguish.
Joseph Kroboth was spared the gruesome task when Joseph Reichl, then the Northampton County coroner, called back to ask for the name of Donna's dentist. The body, he said, was too decomposed to identify any other way.
The Kroboths never saw Donna's body. They were forced into having a hasty, closed-casket funeral at St. John the Baptist Church in Coplay that was so quick Joseph Kroboth hardly remembers it.
"Her body was so badly deteriorated the stench went through the church," he said.
O'Donnell and at least one other friend, who were among the last to see Donna alive, were interviewed by state police. But it's unclear how extensive the investigation was since the case was never listed as a crime and those who investigated it have since retired or moved on.
The Kroboths said they struggled to get answers from police back then so they hired attorney John P. Karoly Jr., who is currently in federal prison for tax evasion and money laundering. Karoly, who didn't charge the family, was able to find out who had been interviewed and he helped the Kroboths get a death certificate. But the Kroboths said they still haven't seen the autopsy report, which the Northampton County coroner's office recently allowed The Morning Call to view.
Reichl listed the cause of Donna's death as
'possible drowning' though the autopsy makes no mention of water in the lungs. The manner — meaning homicide, suicide, accidental or natural — is listed as 'undetermined.' The report notes that hair and fingernails were removed from Donna's body during the autopsy. Northampton County Coroner Zachary Lysek said there is more testing available today than there was in 1980. But he wouldn't say if the hair and nails would be sent to a lab for new testing.
Pathologist Isidore Mihalakis, who performed the autopsy on Donna, remembers her name, but not the exact circumstances of the case. He said
he would have preferred the cause of death also be listed as "undetermined" because "possible drowning" is not definitive.
In the autopsy report, Mihalakis noted traces of methamphetamine were found in Donna's body, but not enough to cause her death.
"There is no overt trauma or meaningful toxicological findings," Mihalakis wrote on the report.
Morganelli said the Kroboths have their suspicions about who may have played a role in their daughter's death,
but he said authorities haven't determined if there was foul play and "haven't zeroed in on anyone." He said
his review of the case probably won't conclude until at least October.
Time doesn't always heal
The Kroboths remained in their home in Whitehall for about 10 years, keeping Donna's bedroom untouched. But they eventually moved to North Coplay, then to their current home. Joseph Kroboth said his wife "couldn't face my daughter's bedroom, so we had to move out."
"I wouldn't let anyone in that bedroom," Joan Kroboth said.
Joseph Kroboth, who worked for an automobile battery manufacturer for 35 years before retiring, said he still wakes up in the middle of the night imagining how his daughter could have died. He said she was an excellent swimmer and he believes that unless she was injured, she would have been able to get herself out of the river..
Advertisement"It's a nightmare," Joseph Kroboth said. "We still miss her very, very much. They say time heals all wounds, but it doesn't heal all wounds and this is one of them."
Joan Kroboth was a corrections officer at Lehigh County Prison in 1980. She said she had to resign because inmates teased her so badly about her daughter's death, saying things like, "I hope she was raped."
Joan Kroboth said she had a mental breakdown after her daughter died and doesn't recall some things. But her memories of Donna's life remain vivid.
"She was a very smart girl," the mother said as she sifted through snapshots of Donna from infancy to young adulthood, stopping to take a closer look at a picture of Donna as a toddler in a light blue outfit, holding a teddy bear.
Donna dropped out of Whitehall High School in her sophomore year and worked as a waitress at Percy Brown dinner theater in Whitehall for about two years.
"She loved people," her father said, which makes the circumstances of her death all the more troubling for him.
"If anyone knows anything, we're hoping they come forward," Joseph Kroboth said. "We're not after anything but closure."
http://articles.mcall.com/2010-09-04/news/mc-kroboth-unsolved-death-20100904_1_joseph-kroboth-northampton-county-coroner-scuba-divers
