Editorial: Cold cases demand continued questions to find answers

With a missing persons case, sometimes it seems as though the only answer sought is about location.

It isn’t.

A disappearance is a chain reaction of questions that beg to be answered. “Where?” is only the first.

It is also the one that kicks off the dominoes of those that follow: What happened? How? Why? Who is responsible?

That is why a missing persons case can be so heartbreaking. It isn’t a quest for justice. It’s the beginning of what can be an endless search for more and more answers.

We at the Tribune-Review know what those trails are like. We regularly follow the cases of those who can’t be found. Most are quickly resolved. Some are as simple as a runaway teen. Others involve mental health concerns or age-related illness. Some were not about foul play but terrible accidents. Those are the ones we can update with answers, sometimes in as little as hours.

But answers don’t come fast for all of them. That is the case of Cassandra Gross, the Unity woman who disappeared in April 2018 and was declared legally dead a year later. It took four years for charges to be filed against Thomas George Stanko in 2022, but the case is still rife with unanswered questions and open wounds for family.

And then there are the cases we follow even more closely because of connection, like that of Dan Niehaus of Penn Hills. He was 49 when he disappeared in 2013. He had been working for the Tribune-Review since 2005. It was when he didn’t show up for work at the West Deer plant that people became concerned.

The “where” was answered when remains were discovered in 2014 along the Ohio River in Avalon and identified in 2015. Since then, answers to what happened, why, and how and who is responsible have not come.

Answering those questions remains important.

“Our ($10,000) reward remains available for information,” said Trib Total Media President and CEO Jennifer Bertetto. “I want people to know Dan mattered to us, we haven’t forgotten him, and we’re going to keep talking about this until we get answers.”

We would also like answers in the case of Gregory Lee Smith, who was shot and killed in New Kensington while delivering the Tribune-Review in 2019.

According to the federal Office of Justice Program, the number of missing people and unidentified remains in America hovers over 600,000. The FBI puts the number of unsolved murders at just over 50% annually. In Pennsylvania alone, that is thousands of families and communities suffering without answers.

The unsolved stories of decades ago are just as important, like Teala Thompson, 13, who vanished in 1967 and whose remains were found later that year; or Kelly Nicole Godfrey Smith, 27, found dead in the Allegheny River in Lower Burrell in 2007; or unidentified remains that police regularly match with names because of more sophisticated DNA technology.

They need to be followed by police and prosecutors. They also need to be remembered by the media — and the community. There are answers out there. It just takes the right people to ask and the right people to speak up.