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In May 1999, Hannah Hill was standing at the beginning of what should have been an exciting new chapter in her life. Not only was she starting a new job, but she was only days away from celebrating her 19th birthday.
On the night of May 19, when Hannah walked out of her family’s home, she didn’t say where she was going, but she told her mom she would be back soon. Sadly, Hannah never came home. When she failed to show up for the very first day of her new job the next morning, her family knew this was not at all like her.
What followed was a search for an 18-year-old who seemed to have vanished without explanation. As the investigation unfolded, mistakes were made, opportunities were missed & questions began piling up – questions that would haunt Hannah’s family for years. Even after they learned what happened to her, their fight was far from over.
It would take thirteen years & multiple court battles before her family would finally get the justice they had long been waiting for.
Hannah Hill was born in Akron, Ohio on May 30, 1980 to parents Elza & Kimberly Hill. She had three brothers, Justin, Phillip & David. According to her dad, she was a very bubbly kid who loved everyone. The former high school homecoming queen adored the Spice Girls & signed all of her letters with tiny pink hearts. Her friends described her as a super laid back person who was easy to be close with.
Although she was a hopeless romantic at heart who had always been determined to find her own Prince Charming, those close to Hannah weren’t impressed with the guy she was dating. 19-year-old Brad Oborn was a drug dealing high school dropout who was not only unfaithful to Hannah, but was also physically & verbally abusive. To her family’s dismay, despite their volatile relationship, Hannah was smitten with Brad.
By late spring 1999, she seemed to be growing distant from those she was once close to & they worried that Brad was starting to isolate her. Because she was someone who trusted easily & saw the best in everyone, she was that much more vulnerable.
On Wednesday night, May 19, 1999, after the Hill family finished their dinner, Hannah was down in her basement bedroom, dressed for bed & chatting with some friends on the phone. When she came upstairs at about 10:30 pm, Kimberly saw that her daughter was now dressed in regular clothes. She told her mom that she was going to head out for a bit, but she would be back soon. This was sadly the last time she was ever seen alive.
The following day, Hannah was scheduled to start her first day at her new full-time job working as a secretary for Diebold, a company that makes ATMs. When her employer called her parent’s house on Thursday morning, May 20 to see why she hadn’t come in, Kimberly realized that her daughter hadn’t come home the night before.
According to Brad, he had been paging Hannah all morning when she didn’t come by to pick him up as planned. Since she normally called him back quickly, he started to worry that something bad happened.
When no one had seen nor heard from her throughout that day, Kimberly contacted the Akron police that evening to report Hannah missing.
When there was still no sign of her five days later, the police turned to the media on Tuesday, May 25, asking the public for their assistance in finding Hannah.
During this time, five members of the community contacted the Akron Police Department to report an unfamiliar car that was parked along Cain Road, a quiet dead-end street. One of the neighbors had reported seeing the keys inside the gold Geo Prizm while Hannah’s name was clearly visible in two places, including the rear license plate frame. There was also a photo of Hannah & Brad sticking up from a slot on the passenger-side air bag.
Despite these calls & the fact that the car had been ticketed on Sunday, May 23, the department failed to connect the car with Hannah’s missing persons case. It wasn’t until three days later on Wednesday, May 26, seven days after Hannah left her home for the last time, that they realized the significance of the car.
When officers opened the trunk, they tragically found Hannah’s body inside. She was naked from the waist down with her bra exposed & her body positioned in a degrading manner with her feet placed together & her knees splayed apart. This was something her killer had no doubt done intentionally.
Both her keys as well as her pager were also inside the car.
Because her car hadn’t been found sooner despite the public’s alerts, the Akron Police Department was under intense scrutiny, which resulted in three police dispatchers being later disciplined.
On May 31, 1999, one day after Hannah would have celebrated her 19th birthday, she was laid to rest in a family plot in Kentucky. Meanwhile, ribbons were attached to a nearby tree along the residential street where her body & her car had been found as a way to honor her short life.
The medical examiner ruled Hannah’s death a homicide by asphyxiation from manual neck compression/strangulation. Her face had been beaten & there was a 2-inch cut to the back of her head. There were signs of recent sexual activity based on the semen found inside her body, but because her body had remained undiscovered in the trunk of her abandoned car for a week, it was too degraded to be useful for a standard match.
Police officers quickly focused on Hannah’s boyfriend, Brad Oborn. Her loved ones had been outspoken about the volatile nature of their relationship & that they always felt she could have done far better than Brad. When it came to their relationship, her father, Elza, had always tried to censor his words, knowing if he said too much, he would only drive his daughter farther away.
When authorities first met with Brad, they found him to be aggressive & highly abrasive, demanding to know what was being done in his girlfriend’s case. He voiced frustration, accusing officers of not doing enough. Although he seemed concerned about Hannah, they couldn’t be certain that it wasn’t an act. He was cooperative, providing his finger & palm prints, but they couldn’t help but notice concerning scratch marks on his body that he claimed he’d gotten at work. He did allow photos to be taken of his body & he never once requested an attorney.
According to Hannah’s phone records, she made four phone calls on the night she vanished. One call was to a girl friend, two were to Brad & the fourth was an 18-minute call to a 20-year-old named Denny Ross, a name that wasn’t familiar to Hannah’s family.
On the same evening that Hannah’s body was found, Wednesday, May 26, detectives went to the three-bedroom apartment where Denny Ross lived next to a pawn shop. It was a filthy place where young people were known to party & crash & it was a little more than a mile away from where Hannah’s car had been found.
When Denny, who was only days into probation on a drug charge, opened his door to detectives, he was holding a phone in his hand, saying he had his attorney on the line. He was interviewed at his apartment that evening at 7:30 pm with his lawyer present during a recorded conversation.
Investigators came to learn that Hannah had met him through Brad since they were friends. When questioned about his whereabouts on the night of May 19 when Hannah vanished, Brad told officers that he’d stayed in. However, they were astonished when he mentioned that Hannah had actually come over that night as this would have made him the last known person she had been with.
He admitted that they kissed & messed around, but he was adamant that they never had sexual intercourse. While she had been at his apartment, Brad had paged her several times, but Denny claimed that she’d left after midnight & that was the last he’d seen her.
When a team of 18 police officers came back to Brad’s apartment with a search warrant hours later at 3 am, now on May 27, they saw that he had a young female guest over.
As the officers were making their way up the exterior steps of the building, they heard a thud. Now searching the back side of the building, they found a garbage bag hidden in the bushes under Denny’s apartment window.
The bag held all of Hannah’s missing clothing, including her shirt, her brown corduroy pants, her underwear, shoes & socks. Her purse was also inside, which held her makeup, cigarettes, her ID & credit cards. When the clothing was tested, semen was found on the exterior of Hannah’s underwear that matched the DNA profile of Denny Ross.
There were no identifiable fingerprints found on the bag & it didn’t match the three additional types of trash bags that were seized from his apartment. Since officers hadn’t checked the temperature of the bag, there was no way of saying how long it had been lying in the bushes outside. According to records, temperatures that day in Akron dropped to as low as 42℉/6℃
Denny Ross was arrested that day & charged with aggravated murder, rape, kidnapping, tampering with evidence & abuse of a corpse. The indictment was amended in October of that year to include a death penalty specification.
Regardless of the arrest, there was continued criticism against the Akron PD as to how the case had been handled. Not only was Hannah’s car found later than it should have been which caused forensic evidence to degrade, but Brad’s alibi was never checked. Although he claimed to have been home watching TV with his roommates on the night Hannah vanished, investigators never spoke with them to confirm his story. Hannah’s pager records were also never checked.
Despite the fact that visible blood spots had been found on Denny’s apartment walls, a Luminol test was never done on the carpet inside. Of the dozens of samples of blood & fibers that were sent out for testing from his apartment, nothing came back that linked to Hannah.
21-year-old Denny Ross pleaded not guilty & his capital murder trial began in October 2000. If convicted, he faced the death penalty.
According to the prosecution, when Hannah went to Denny’s apartment on Wednesday night, May 19, 1999, he beat her into submission so that he could rape her before ultimately strangling her to death. After he realized that she was dead, he panicked, stripping the clothing from her body, stuffing her belongings into a garbage bag that he ended up throwing out his window when police officers arrived with a search warrant a week later. He then placed her body in the trunk of her car before abandoning it along a residential street about a mile away.
The medical examiner indicated that Hannah had been beaten, raped & then strangled to death by manual compression. No forensic evidence presented suggested that the sexual assault had occurred post-mortem.
Denny’s father hired David Chesnoff, a prominent defense attorney from Las Vegas to represent his son. He argued that although Hannah’s body had been found nude in the trunk of her car, based on the blood found on her shirt, Hannah had been clothed when she was murdered.
This would mean one of two things: that Denny raped her, put her clothes back on, murdered her, took her clothes back off again & then carried her nude body to her car. Or, he raped her, put her clothes back on, murdered her, carried her body to her car, took her clothes back off again & then brought the clothing back to his apartment.
Chesnoff argued that the more reasonable explanation would be that someone else murdered Hannah after she left Denny’s apartment. The real killer then tossed the bag with her clothing & purse into the bushes outside his apartment as a way to frame his client. Not only did the bag not match any of the others Denny had in his apartment, but his fingerprints weren’t found on the bag itself.
There was also no physical evidence found inside his apartment that proves Hannah was murdered there, nor was there evidence linking him to Hannah’s car. A palm print recovered from the trunk where her body was found has never been identified.
Investigators hadn’t documented the position of the driver’s seat which could have helped determine who last drove her car. Although Denny’s semen was found on the exterior of her underwear, his attorney argued that this wasn’t proof of a crime, just proof that two kids had been fooling around. Chesnoff accused police of tunnel vision, rushing to pin everything on Denny, thus ignoring other potential suspects.
Following the state’s presentation of evidence, Judge Jane Bond granted Denny’s motion to drop the kidnapping charge as based on the prosecution’s narrative as well as forensic evidence, Hannah had willingly gone over to Denny’s on the night of her disappearance.
The defense then rested without calling any witnesses & the jury began their deliberations on Friday, October 27, 2000.
The following afternoon on Saturday, October 28, 2000, as the jury was preparing to announce its verdicts to acquit Denny of aggravated murder, murder & rape, Judge Bond received a note from the jury foreperson. She indicated that a juror had made a comment that Denny Ross had to be guilty because Brad Oborn was innocent since he passed a polygraph test. This was information that the judge had explicitly excluded from the trial.
The foreperson also reported that at least one juror had changed his vote to go along with the group to find Denny innocent of all charges because he was in a hurry to leave in order to attend to his affairs at home.
Although the jurors had signed the verdict forms, writing not guilty on Denny’s remaining charges, Judge Bond officially declared a mistrial on November 2, 2000.
After waiting in jail for nearly a year while the courts tried to figure out how to proceed, Denny was released on a $1 million bond in September 2001.
While the inconclusive trial took an enormous toll on Hannah’s family, Brad Oborn lived under a shadow of suspicion as people continued to question if he had murdered Hannah. He delved deeper into drugs & served time for robbing a bank.
Because Denny’s defense team discovered that the jury had already signed not guilty forms before the mistrial was called, they claimed that an acquittal had occurred. They argued that for him to stand trial a second time, was the exact definition of double jeopardy.
After years of appeals in the state over the double jeopardy argument, the Ohio Supreme Court overturned lower court decisions, ruling that Denny Ross could be retried for Hannah’s murder on charges of two counts of murder, tampering with evidence, abuse of a corpse & felonious assault.
The rape charge had been dropped in 2003 citing insufficient evidence based on the prosecution’s original presentation. This, paired with the fact that the kidnapping charge had been dropped during the 2000 trial, meant that the death penalty was off the table. Under Ohio law, a defendant cannot face the death penalty for a standard murder conviction.
The second trial began 13 years after Hannah’s murder, on Monday, August 20, 2012.
By this time, Denny was serving a 25-year prison sentence for a 2004 attempted murder & rape of another Akron woman that happened while he was out on bond during the appeals process for Hannah’s case. 32-year-old Jennifer Tittle told police that in June 2004, he raped her at knifepoint, punched her in the face, fracturing her jaw & collarbone, threatening to kill her if she called the police. After the attack, her jaw was wired shut for six months.
Jennifer testified about the brutal sexual assault she survived, telling jurors that she met him at a bar in mid-June 2004. After drinking heavily together, she invited him & some friends over to her house. When everyone else had left, he stabbed her in the face, wrestled her to the bottom of the steps & began punching her in the face, threatening that he would kill both her & her children if she fought him.
He choked her while raping her until she lost consciousness, something the prosecution believed was exactly what had happened to Hannah on the night she was murdered. When she fell to the floor, pretending to be dead, he said, Oh f**k, she’s dead. Not again.
Denny’s ex-girlfriend, Heather Hamrick, testified that he would often choke her during sex to the point that bruises were left behind. He would whisper disturbing things in her ear such as, You’re not going to live through this or Wouldn’t you like to be dead? He also joked that both she & Hannah had the same initials of HH, saying he got the wrong H.
Heather told jurors that she had been at his apartment on the night that Hannah disappeared & she’d heard strange noises coming from his bedroom. Although she initially denied being there on the night Hannah died, she changed her story months before the second trial began, saying that she hadn’t spoken up sooner out of fear.
Another woman named Nicole Estep also testified. She had been 17-years-old when officers showed up with a search warrant on May 26, 1999. She told jurors that she saw Denny toss something out of a picture window of his apartment before officers found the garbage bag containing Hannah’s belongings in the bushes beneath the window.
Although she was interviewed for 10 hours following that night, she didn’t tell officers about seeing him throw the bag out of the window until December 28, 2011, saying she was fearful of retribution had she spoken up sooner.
She also testified that Denny had raped her that night & that she’d overheard a phone conversation in which he may have been talking about Hannah when he said, I did it. I did it. She’s gone. She’s dead. She admitted that they had been drinking heavily before their non-consensual sexual encounter.
Michael Riley, one of the many young men who often partied at Denny’s apartment, testified that only hours after Hannah’s body was found, Denny had asked him & a friend to clean his apartment, offering them $25 & a bunch of beer.
Daniel Doyle, a former friend of Denny’s, told the jury that when he drove Denny to an auto auction sometime in May 1999 before Hannah’s murder, Denny had been angry with her, blaming her for setting him up for an arrest on drug charges. He specifically said, If I found she narked me out, I’m going to kill that (expletive).
According to Doyle, when he realized that Hannah had been murdered, he called the police three times, but they never got back to him.
Since the first trial, DNA testing had advanced to the point that Denny’s DNA could now be detected in the blood droplets on Hannah’s pants as well as on the left armpit of her t-shirt. His DNA cells were also found under an autopsy clipping of a fingernail of Hannah’s left hand.
Because he told officers that he & Hannah had kissed & fooled around before she left after midnight, the blood would be inconsistent with this narrative. While prosecutors felt it was consistent with a violent encounter, Denny’s defense attorneys argued that the spots of blood were so tiny that they proved nothing, saying it could have come from something as innocuous as mosquito bites or a paper cut.
According to the medical examiner, Hannah had a nearly two inch long cut to the back of her skull that was described as an anti-mortem injury, meaning, it occurred before the onset of death. Because her heart was still beating, it would have produced a lot of blood. Since none of Hannah’s blood had been found in Denny’s apartment, his defense team argued that she had not been killed there.
Knowing that his attorneys would suggest that Brad Oborn had been Hannah’s killer, the prosecution decided to call him as a witness. During his six hours of testimony, he admitted that although he loved Hannah, he had not been a good boyfriend since he’d been abusive & that they argued often.
He testified that one day before she vanished, they’d gotten into a heated argument in the living room of his house when they had both been drinking. Angry about his infidelity, Hannah attacked him, scratching his neck, arms & back before other men there had to break it up. This was why he had scratches on his body when investigators first spoke with him. He admitted to pulling her hair that night, but nothing more aggressive.
Brad voiced his responsibility for Hannah’s death, saying his biggest mistake of all was ever introducing Hannah to Denny. When he last spoke with her on the phone sometime before 8 pm on May 19, 1999, she told him she was going to bed, but she would see him in the morning.
On Tuesday afternoon, October 2, 2012, the case was handed to the 12-member jury who came back three days later on Friday, October 5. In a unanimous verdict, they found Denny Ross guilty on all counts on a day that just so happened to be Elza Hill’s 73rd birthday. He described it as the best birthday he ever had after waiting nearly 13 ½ years for justice in his 18-year-old daughter’s 1999 murder.
Four days later on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, 33-year-old Denny Ross was given the maximum sentence of life with a non-parole period of 19 years. The sentence would begin at the conclusion of his 25-year sentence he received in 2004 for his attack against Jennifer Tittle. He was given 841 days credit for time served while awaiting the trial in 1999, 2000 & partially in 2004.
When all is said & done, he’ll first be eligible for parole sometime in 2046 when he’s 67-years-old. His lawyers noted that convicted murderers rarely receive parole after their first hearing.
Hannah Hill’s family had to wait thirteen long years for justice; years that were filled with unanswered questions, painful setbacks & a fight that no grieving family should ever have to endure. In the meantime, Denny Ross was a free man in between trials, allowing him to attack & nearly kill yet another victim. Although she survived, emotional scars will no doubt remain for the rest of her life.
Regardless of justice, nothing will ever give Hannah back the future that was stolen from her, or return the countless birthdays, holidays & ordinary moments her family should have been able to share with her.
When she walked out of her family’s Akron, Ohio home on May 19, 1999, she had been less than two weeks from celebrating her 19th birthday. She never got the opportunity to grow up, to start the job she was supposed to begin the next morning or to figure out what she wanted the rest of her life to look like. Hannah Hill had been a daughter, a sister & a friend who should have had an entire lifetime ahead of her.
References:
- Akron Beacon Journal: Witness testifies to cleaning Denny Ross’ apartment on day Hannah Hill’s body found
- Akron Beacon Journal: Hannah Hill’s former boyfriend takes stand at Ross retrial
- Akron Beacon Journal: Jury gets Denny Ross case
- Akron Beacon Journal: Denny Ross found guilty on all counts in slaying of Hannah Hill
- Akron Beacon Journal: Witness: Denny Ross threw something from the window on night of police search
- Akron Beacon Journal: Denny Ross gets maximum sentence in Hannah Hill slaying retrial
- Sportskeeda: 5 chilling details about Hannah Hill’s disappearance
- In the Supreme Court of Ohio: State of Ohio v. Denny Ross
- Podcasts: Dateline: Transcripts of The Night Hannah Hill Disappeared
- Fox 8: Gruesome pictures shown at Denny Ross trial
- Fox 8: Hannah Hill’s ex-boyfriend admit to abuse at Ross trial
- Fox 8: Prosecutors present possible motive in Ross trial
- Find a Grave: Hannah Christine Hill
- 19 News: Suspect in 1999 murder sentenced in rape case
- YouTube: News 5 Cleveland: Denny Ross’ ex-girlfriend
- Justia U.S. Law: State v. Ross
