FREMONT — This year marked the 10th year since the brutal murder of Heather Bogle, which I was reminded of after reading a Facebook link in my feed to a WTOL Toledo News Channel 11 report from Emmy Award-winning news anchor Melissa Andrews.
For many readers interested in true crime mysteries, this story is a magnet. But the mystery isn’t who killed Heather Bogle — her homicide was solved two years after her death when a new sheriff connected all the dots — giant boulder-sized pieces of evidence, really — always there and ever-present from the very start.
The lead detective — Sean O’Connell — was either too dumb to see it, or too arrogant and corrupt to do the right thing about. That’s the mystery: Why did this detective screw up this investigation and so many others?
Andrews, in her investigative report, takes a pretty exhaustive look at the former Fremont police detective and sheriff’s deputy, a dirt ball cop in Sandusky County for more than 25 years before he was sentenced to prison in 2017 after he trying to frame three young Black people for Bogle’s murder.
Why? Why did he want to frame three innocent people. He had a history of targeting Black people, but it’s difficult to believe that could be his only motivating factor. And why did he botch a number of other cases.
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