PORTSMOUTH, Ohio — A Scioto County man told a sheriff’s detective in 2012 that he had sex with a 15-year-old girl he met on a mobile dating app, and that when the girl messaged him her real age, he told her to send a second message claiming she was 18 — “to cover his tracks,” the detective wrote.
The man, identified by reports as Gene R. Zimmerman was jailed on a first-degree felony rape charge and kidnapping. Twenty-five days after the case reached the Scioto County Court of Common Pleas, prosecutors dismissed it and told the court they were sending it to the state for further investigation.
Fourteen years later, no one has been charged. Zimmerman is not on Ohio’s sex-offender registry. He now lives in Ross County, where sheriff’s deputies have taken three complaints about him since June — and where he works at a giant local retailer near kids.
And the clock has not run out. Under Ohio law, the lesser offense his own admissions describe — unlawful sexual conduct with a minor — carries a 20-year statute of limitations that does not expire until May 2032. The rape count carries 25 years and does not expire until 2037.
What the report says
The Scioto County Sheriff’s Office released its 2012 incident report to the Guardian in June, with juvenile and victim identifiers redacted.
The report says a deputy was dispatched to Southern Ohio Medical Center’s emergency department on an evening in 2012 on a rape complaint. The girl’s mother told the deputy that a man she knew only by the screen name “Bubbles” had picked her daughter up in South Point on the promise of driving her to see her boyfriend in Ashland, Kentucky.
Zimmerman did not. According to the girl’s account in the report, he drove her instead to his apartment in Haverhill, told her he had lied about the boyfriend, refused to take her home and said he wanted to have sex with her. When she refused, the report says, he grabbed her shirt with both hands, tearing it at the left shoulder strap and below the chest, and forced her into the bedroom. She told the deputy he struck her along the right eye with the back of his hand, swelling it, and that she then “gave in.” Zimmerman made her shower afterward, she said, and told her not to tell anyone.
The report lists the victim’s date of birth as 1996 — 15 years old at the time. Court and law enforcement records list Zimmerman’s date of birth as 1974, making him 37 in 2012.
Deputies went to his apartment the next day. The report says they knocked for roughly two hours before he came to the door; he later told the detective he and two girls had been hiding in a bedroom closet the whole time. Zimmerman signed a consent to search, and deputies collected his bed sheets and a DNA sample from him.
Then, according to the detective’s narrative, he began talking.
Zimmerman “stated that he did have sex with” the girl “and he knew her DNA would be on the sheets,” the report says. He said he met her on the app Skout, picked her up at her house and brought her to his apartment. He said she wanted to have sex.
At the sheriff’s office, after being advised of his rights, Zimmerman first said he thought the girl was 18. The detective wrote that he then backtracked by saying she had messaged him saying she was 15 — and that he had called her and told her to send another message saying she was 18 “to cover his tracks.” He admitted lying to the girl’s mother about why he was in the neighborhood. He denied hitting her, denied tearing her shirt, and denied making her shower.
The detective also wrote that on the ride to the office Zimmerman “kept bringing up sexual registration and was asking a lot of questions about it and knew a lot.” Asked whether he had ever been in trouble before, he said no, but that is not anywhere near the truth.
Zimmerman’s own then-wife and mother told the detective otherwise. They said that in 1994 he had been charged with gross sexual imposition in Lawrence County and that the victim was a young girl. His wife also told the detective she had seen him on the computer “talking to underage girls,” the report says.
Zimmerman was arrested at the Sheriff’s office that day and booked on rape and kidnapping.
Dismissed in 25 days
The felony case reached the Scioto County Court of Common Pleas 25 days after the arrest assigned to Judge William T. Marshall. The court records show the charge as rape, a first-degree felony. Bond was set at $30,000. The court appointed a defense attorney.
25 days later — the case ended. The docket entry reads:
“THIS DAY CAME THE PROSECUTING ATTORNEY, ON BEHALF OF THE STATE OF OHIO, AND IN OPEN COURT, FOR GOOD CAUSE SHOWN, WITH LEAVE OF COURT, ENTERED A DISMISSAL WITHOUT PREJUDICE ON THE ABOVE CASE. THE DISMISSAL IS IN EFFORT TO PRESERVE SPEEDY TRIAL TIME AND ALLOW FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION BY THE OHIO BUREAU OF IDENTIFICATIONS AND INVESTIGATIONS.”
The prosecuting attorney of record was Mark E. Kuhn, who ran the office from 2005 until July 9, 2019 — seven years to the day after the dismissal — when he left to take a seat on the Scioto County Common Pleas bench. Shane A. Tieman, then an assistant prosecutor, was appointed to succeed him that month and has held the office since. The sheriff in 2012 was Marty V. Donini, whose name appears on the evidence routing forms in the case. David Thoroughman is sheriff today.
The docket shows nothing after July 2012. Fourteen years of entries: none.
‘An open investigation’ — and an attorney general’s office that says it never heard of it
Asked in August what the status of the case was, Chief Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Danielle M. Parker responded in a single paragraph.
“This is still an open investigation,” Parker wrote on Aug. 14. “No further details regarding the steps being taken by law enforcement in the investigation of this matter will be disclosed at this time.”
Parker had already refused to release the file. In a June 18 letter written, she said, as legal counsel to Tieman, she denied a public records request for the case file in full, citing the trial-preparation and confidential law enforcement investigatory records.
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) likewise refused to release anything. In a June 22 letter, BCI Senior Assistant Attorney General Lindsay Potter denied a records request on the ground that any BCI records “are investigatory work product in a criminal law enforcement matter that has not concluded.”
But when the Guardian put the question to the attorney general’s office directly — the prosecutor and sheriff both point to BCI; what is BCI doing? — the answer did not match.
“I am not aware of a request for our office to become involved in this case,” Steve Irwin, communications director for Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson, wrote on Aug. 13.
Told that the prosecutor’s office, the sheriff’s office and the court’s own docket all say the case went to BCI, Irwin did not respond further. Neither did the office’s press secretary, Dominic Binkley.
So the record now contains two irreconcilable propositions. A court entry and two county agencies say the case was handed to BCI in 2012 and remains there. The attorney general’s spokesman says his office is not aware of being asked to take it.
Either way, the result is identical. Zimmerman has not been charged.
What could still be filed today
Ohio’s rape statute requires proof of force. The victim’s account in the 2012 report describes force; the man denied it. That is the kind of dispute that goes to a jury — or, if a prosecutor concludes it cannot be proven, that ends a case.
But that is not the only charge available, and it never was.
State law makes it a crime for an adult to engage in sexual conduct with a person 13, 14 or 15 years old when the adult knows the victim’s age or is reckless about it. Consent is not a defense. Force is not an element. The offense is a fourth-degree felony, elevated to a third-degree felony when the offender is at least 10 years older than the victim. He was 22 years older.
The evidence for that charge is, on the face of the sheriff’s report, Zimmerman’s own admission: that the he had sex with the teen, that she had told him she was 15, and that he coached her to send a message saying otherwise. A conviction of that charge is a sexually oriented offense requiring sex offender registration under Ohio law.
No record produced by any agency in this reporting shows that the girl recanted. The sheriff’s office says the 2012 report is the only report it holds under the suspect’s name.
Lawrence County, 1994
The prior case the man’s family described to the detective is real, and it is on file in Ironton Municipal Court.
In 1994, an assistant Lawrence County prosecutor filed a complaint on the affidavit of an Ironton police detective alleging that in December 1993, Zimmerman — then 19 — had sexual contact with a girl who was less than 13 years old; gross sexual imposition, a third-degree felony. The affidavit identifies the child, then 6, as his cousin, and describes the contact in explicit terms. A warrant was issued the next day.
In January 1994, the court’s judgment entry records that the prosecution moved to reduce the charge, that the court approved the reduction and that he changed his plea to guilty. Zimmerman was sentenced to 60 days in the Lawrence County Jail with 57 days suspended, a $100 fine, $40 in costs and probation, and the balance of house arrest. The entry adds counseling as a probation term.
The statute the charge was reduced to is not legible on the copy of the entry obtained by the Guardian. What is legible is that the felony sex charge did not survive to conviction, that he served four days, and that Zimmerman did not end up on a registry.
Eighteen years later, a Scioto County detective would write that Zimmerman “knew a lot” about sexual registration.
Ross County, now
He moved to Ross County this spring.
Since June, Ross County sheriff’s deputies have written three reports involving Zimmerman and minors.
No answers
The Guardian asked Tieman and Parker on Aug. 26 for an interview about why a case with a recorded admission has sat for 14 years, what BCI has been asked to do, whether the office ever considered a charge for unlawful sexual misconduct with a minor, and whether the victim was ever contacted after 2012. Parker’s Aug. 14 statement — “This is still an open investigation” — remains the office’s only answer. Records show that case fell off the radar of local authorities and only became “under investigation” in June after being asked for public records.
Thoroughman was asked the same day what his office has done on the case since 2012 and whether it has ever asked the prosecutor to refile.
“I do not have much information on the case. The only information that I have is what you informed me of and my inquiry, finding out that the case did not proceed for some reason at the prosecutor’s office. And, us being asked to locate the victim,” the sheriff said, and proceeded to ask the Guardian not to publish a story.
Tieman did not respond to a June 2 request for the file or to the August interview request.
An email-tracking service used by the Guardian logged the June 2 message to Tieman being opened eight times in a short period, and Parker opening the August message nine times.
Fourteen years on, the girl in the 2012 report is 29-years-old. The man m who told a detective he had sex with her when she was 15 lives in a neighborhood filled with children, and the state of Ohio has until 2032 to decide whether that admission was worth a charge. Meanwhile, Zimmerman works at a local giant retailer where one person said that they do not like he is “shopping for children while families shop for dinner.”
If you or a loved one has been victim of sexual assault, confidential help is available by phoning 800.656.HOPE or text HOPE to 64673.
