The Mysterious Disappearance of John and Shelly Markley
The doors were unlocked and the coffee pot was on, but the Markleys had vanished
The Markleys
John J. Markley Jr. (born July 8th, 1959) and Shelly Applequist (born November 16th, 1963) got married on November 30th, 1979. The couple had five children together: Ruthie, Stacey, Bonnie, Crystal, and Johnny.
John worked as an independent truck driver, while Shelly was a stay-at-home mother. The large family resided in rural Bristolville, Ohio.
A Bizarre Scene
December 15th, 1995, started off uneventfully enough for the Markley family. They had breakfast together and the children—who ranged in age from 8 to 15—left for school.
When they arrived home that afternoon, however, they were surprised to find that the doors were unlocked and their parents, along with their red and silver 1990 Chevrolet pickup truck, were gone.
This was especially unusual because Shelly was almost always there when her children came home from school, and on the rare occasion that she wasn’t, she always made sure to leave behind a note detailing where she was going and when she’d be back.
There was no such note in the Markley residence that day. In fact, multiple aspects of what they would find in and around the house pointed to extremely uncharacteristic behavior from their parents. For example, the coffee pot was still turned on and John’s watch (which he always wore) had been left on a shelf above the stove.
Shelly, a pack-a-day smoker, hadn’t taken her cigarettes or lighter with her. Her purse was still there, too.
The mystery only deepened when the kids walked upstairs to investigate. The gun cabinet, which John typically kept securely locked, was now open. It’s unclear if anything was missing as the Markley children had no idea how many guns their parents owned.
The small safe in John and Shelly’s bedroom was open, and important papers, such as birth certificates, were scattered around the room as if someone had been frantically searching for something. As with the gun cabinet, it’s unknown if anything had been taken from the safe.
It appeared that they had left home in a hurry, but why?
The strangeness didn’t stop there.
Inside the garage, the children discovered that the two tarps that usually covered their father’s 1978 Corvette had vanished, too. John never left his car uncovered.
The only other item known to be missing was the couple’s checkbook.
By this point, the Markley kids were unsettled and deeply confused. They decided to head over to their aunt and uncle’s place to await word from John and Shelly. Unbeknownst to them, they would never see or hear from their parents again.
John's Sister
Two days before the Markleys disappeared, John’s twin sister Bonnie, who was diagnosed with breast cancer three years earlier, had passed away. John, who was very close to his sister, did everything in his power to help her, even raising $15,000 so that Bonnie could undergo experimental treatments in Mexico.
When she died, John was not only incredibly distraught but also angry.
“He was angry. I told him that Bonnie was in a lot of pain and that God took her so she wouldn’t have the pain,” said John’s sister, Linda. “He was very bitter about his sister’s death. He blamed everybody. He blamed the doctors, he blamed God.”
However, she added that he had “seemed fine the day after she died,” and that, while John was deeply saddened by the loss of his twin, she didn’t believe that Bonnie’s death had played any role in the disappearance of her brother and sister-in-law.
Investigation
When John and Shelly didn’t show up for Bonnie’s funeral the following day, the family knew that something was horribly wrong.
“This is so far out of character (for John) that it’s scary,” noted Thomas Yeager, Linda’s husband.
Linda and Thomas reported the couple missing that day. The children stayed with them.
The authorities found no signs of forced entry or evidence of foul play in the Markley home. They initially considered the most plausible explanation to be that the couple had run off due to overwhelming stress. After all, Bonnie’s death had been just one more tragedy in a string of recent losses for the Markleys.
On July 4th, 1993, their home burned down. Exactly one year later, John’s father died, and a few months after that, their nephew committed suicide.
John and Shelly had been through more in a few short years than some people endure in decades, so it seemed reasonable to investigators that they simply needed some time away to clear their heads before returning.
Except that their family knew they’d never do such a thing.
“John and Shelly love their children very much and were very protective of them. They would never go away and leave them unattended,” stated Linda.
Roughly 100 local people searched hundreds of acres surrounding the Markley residence, but their efforts turned up nothing.
Markleys' Truck Found
Within days of John and Shelly’s disappearance, their truck was found locked and abandoned in a hardware store parking lot on Elm Road, 10 miles away from their home in Bristolville.
The truck was covered in mud—another odd detail, given how meticulous John was about keeping it pristine. It appeared that it had been driven off road. But where? And by whom?
Their cellphone was still inside the vehicle. Additionally, the missing tarps were located in the bed of the truck.
By then, law enforcement was beginning to suspect that John and Shelly might have been the victims of foul play.
Police conducted an air search and had divers search all surrounding lakes and waterways, including Nelson Ledges Quarry, Mosquito Lake and Lake Milton. The efforts did not succeed in locating the Markleys.
A Mysterious Bank Withdrawal
Detectives soon learned that money had been taken out of the Markleys’ bank account on the day they went missing. A $1,000 check (leaving $865 in their account) signed by Shelly had been cashed at 10:36 a.m. at a Bank One in Bloomfield, Ohio, approximately five miles away from their home.
The teller reported seeing an unknown male in the truck with them in the bank’s drive-through that morning. Unfortunately, she couldn’t remember anything about his appearance and was unable to identify him. To this day, the mysterious stranger— almost certainly the key to explaining the circumstances of the Markleys’ disappearance—has never been identified.
How Steven Durst Became a Suspect
Shortly after the Markleys went missing, one of John’s former employees, a man named Steven Durst, contacted the family. He claimed to be holding John and Shelly captive and demanded a $10,000 ransom (or $100,000 depending on the source) for their safe return.
They reported Durst to the police, who staked him out at a gas station. Durst, who showed up expecting a bag of money, was instead given a bag full of rags and then arrested.
Strangely, though several of his answers regarding John and Shelly’s disappearance were marked as “deceptive” during his polygraph examination, law enforcement concluded that he was probably not involved in whatever happened to them.
“There’s nothing we found that would lead us to believe he has any involvement in them being missing,” said Trumbull County Sheriff Tom Altiere.
Instead, the police believed that Durst was merely a malicious opportunist. He confirmed this by making the claim that he belonged to a group who was running extortion schemes, but that he didn't have any actual role in or knowledge of whatever had become of John and Shelly.
By the first anniversary of the Markleys’ disappearance, however, investigators would have a very different opinion.
“I truly believe that Steven Durst knows what happened to them and he just won’t say,” asserted Chief Investigator Jane Timko. “Durst was out of work when the Markleys disappeared. He told a lot of people that the Markleys owed him $1,000.”
Since his arrest, Durst—who was convicted on a felony charge of extortion for his ransom scheme and sentenced to 4–10 years in prison—has consistently denied any involvement in John and Shelly’s disappearance and has never been charged in direct connection to it.
Trumbull County Sheriff Tom Altiere stated:
“My gut instinct is that they died. I don’t have any solid evidence that way, but I just tend to think that if they were still alive, that we would have been able to track down credit card receipts or something.”
A Heartbroken Family
Linda and Thomas, who had come up from North Carolina for Bonnie’s funeral before all of this started, were determined to help their nieces and nephews as much as possible and not disrupt other aspects of their lives any more than necessary. They decided that, if Shelly and John remained missing, they would move into their home and take care of the children for as long as needed.
“These children will not be taken from their home,” vowed Thomas.
During the high-profile search for the Markleys, the desperate family consulted with psychics and agreed to interviews on the Montel Williams and Maury Povich shows. Due to the enigmatic nature of the case, the family was also featured on Unsolved Mysteries.
The children had to navigate the limelight during their trauma. “I know I’m still a kid, but I see things differently,” said a 19-year-old Stacey Markley. “We were made to grow up fast.”
The couple’s youngest child, eight-year-old Johnny, wrote down only one entry for his Christmas wish list that year: “All I want for Christmas is Mom and Dad.”
Each of the children found a way to survive. Ruthie, who went on to have her own child, struggled to adjust. “I told myself, ‘You’ve got to turn cold. That’s how I’ll deal with it.'"
Later Developments
In 2015, Trumbull County Sheriff Tom Altiere announced that they had new leads in the case. While he declined to elaborate on the exact nature of the new information, he did say that they’d recently interviewed a few people. However, he admitted that the case was still at a “roadblock.”
Another development that some suspected was connected to the Markleys’ case occurred in 2020. A man named Milton Kurtzman, 71, was arrested and charged with felonious assault for shooting his roommate. He died in jail of natural causes shortly thereafter. The authorities soon began an extensive search of his property, refusing to reveal the purpose of this investigative turn.
Trumbull County Chief Deputy Joseph Dragovich stated that he didn’t want to say whether they were looking for human remains or stolen property.
However, another officer, Trumbull County Sheriff Paul Monroe, did specify that they were hoping to find something that would crack a particular cold case.
“This is something that dates back historically 20 years that we’re looking at,” he said.
What connection Kurtzman may have had to the Markleys, if any, or if the Markleys’ case was even the one being alluded to is unclear.
Since then, no further developments have been announced. For now at least, what happened to Shelly and John Markley on that cold December morning in 1995—and why—remains unsolved.
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