Episode 132: Manuel Gehrig
14-year-old Sarah and 11-year-old Philip
Stephanie Dietrich of Akron, Ohio, pictured center, receiving a citation from the FBI for her incredible efforts in finding the children’s bodies. Teri Knight, the children’s mother, is pictured left.
On July 4th, 2003, Manuel Gehring took his two children, 14-year-old Sarah and 11-year-old Philip, to attend a holiday fireworks show in Concord, New Hampshire. Witnesses said later that they saw the kids and Manuel fighting and arguing before they got into Manuel’s minivan. Just two days later, Manuel’s ex-wife and the children’s mother, Teresa “Teri” Knight, called police to report that her children were missing and that Manuel never dropped them back off with her. The two were in a child custody dispute and Teri feared the worst for her kids, especially as Manuel had been physically abusive towards her and emotionally abusive to her and their children. Teri and Manuel had met in 1979 while attending boarding school in Vermont, and the two married in 1985 and divorced in 2001.
Manuel was arrested four days later on July 10th, 2003, in Gilroy, California. During his arrest, police found that the inside of his car was covered in dried blood. On July 12th, authorities announced that they felt that the children were likely murdered.
Six days later on July 18th, Manuel was indicted on two counts of first degree murder. Police said that Manuel pulled over on their way home, shot both of the children in the car before dumping them somewhere along Interstate 80 in the Midwest. He had made a pit stop in Pennsylvania where he purchased a shovel. While in police custody, Manuel made half-hearted attempts to try and assist in locating the bodies of his children before he was brought back to New Hampshire on July 22nd.
Police continued to look for the bodies along a 700-mile long strip of I-80 that spanned through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Nebraska, Indiana and Iowa. They ended up concentrating the search on some rural, grassy areas on either side of the interstate from the Indiana Ohio state line to Joliet, Illinois, an area that was roughly 190 miles long. Manuel had given investigators a cryptic description of where he had buried the children, telling them that the site was off of Interstate 80 between Grove City, Pennsylvania and Iowa City underneath a tree that drooped like a willow and near a wire fence, an old pump and defunct concrete sewer pipes. He said there was also a pile of dried firewood, some slabs of irregular cement, and patches of six-foot-tall grass.
On July 30th, a released police affidavit revealed that Manuel had admitted to shooting his children and burying their bodies. Manuel had told police that he decided to kill the children because their lives were in a "downward spiral" because of the custody dispute, mostly because Teri had remarried and was pregnant with twins. The custody agreement they currently had involved Manuel getting to see the children about 60% of the time, but he still wasn’t happy with this.
On February 19th, 2004, 44-year-old Manuel died by suicide in his jail cell. He had strangled himself with a bed sheet before he could be tried.
Later that same year in 2004, the U.S. Geological Survey did a pollen analysis on soil found under Manuel’s minivan as well as on the shovel used to bury the children. The analysis came back with the results that the soil was most likely from Northeastern Ohio.
In a plea to the public, Teri stated “Take some time while the landscape is a little bit less dense than it was last fall. Please check your property. If you're out walking anywhere, just know that Sarah and Philip haven't been found." By the next summer of 2005, Teri and her husband traveled along the 700-mile strip of the I-80 to try to find the bodies of her children and bring the case back into the spotlight so they could be found. Devastatingly, her search was unsuccessful.
44-year-old Stephanie Dietrich, a cashier at the Acme grocery store in Akron, Ohio, heard of this story and decided to start searching around town on her own. She searched different areas of northeastern Ohio every few days and did so for the next six months. In December of 2005, Stephanie and her dog Rico located the bodies of Sarah and Philip. They had been buried in an isolated spot on the outskirts of Hudson, Ohio, in a wooded area. The two children had been placed in black trash bags before being buried in shallow graves. Dental records confirmed that the bodies were those of Sarah and Philip, and autopsy results showed that Sarah had been shot in the head three times with a handgun that then jammed, so a second handgun was used to shoot Philip. He was shot four times in the head, neck, and each arm. The guns had been recovered during Manuel’s arrest.
Amazingly, Stephanie had not been in touch with Teri during her searches and had felt compelled as a mother herself to look for the children’s bodies. After the bodies were found, Teri traveled to meet Stephanie and bring Rico a dog bone.
Image sources:
goupstate.com - “Man who killed his kids also professed to love them”
telegram.com - “Woman honored for finding bodies”