Mary Matheny was 75 years old and gardening in the yard of her Lehner Road home in Clinton Township on the evening of August 27, 2002. By the next day, she was dead inside that same house, killed by blunt force trauma in a case that has never been solved.
The circumstances of her death have remained largely a mystery for nearly a quarter-century. According to records maintained by the Ohio Attorney General, Matheny was killed at her residence at 2313 Lehner Road, in an unincorporated area of northern Franklin County, but no motive or forced-entry details were ever publicly established. Investigators determined her cause of death was blunt force trauma after her body was discovered inside the home on August 28, 2002, as reported by 10TV. The case has remained open under case number 661 ever since.
State law enforcement records describe Matheny, at the time of her death, as a white female born October 5, 1926, standing 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighing 103 pounds — a profile still kept in Ohio's public unsolved homicide database. Because Clinton Township is unincorporated and surrounded by the city of Columbus, primary jurisdiction over the investigation falls to the Franklin County Sheriff's Office rather than any municipal police department, according to Compass Real Estate.
A New Push for Leads
On August 3, the Franklin County Sheriff's Office featured Matheny's unsolved murder in the second episode of its community web show, The FCSO Connection: Protecting and Serving Franklin County, according to a post on the Franklin County Sheriff's Office Facebook page. The 30-minute episode paired the renewed appeal for tips in Matheny's case with back-to-school safety updates and academy training insights before it was posted to social media and YouTube. A separate video shared by the sheriff's office, titled “Who killed Mary Matheny?,” frames the case as one detectives have tried to solve since 2002, with fresh investigators now seeking new leads as they reexamine the file.
Decades of Forensic Backlog
Matheny's case is one of dozens the sheriff's office has carried for years. When the Ohio Attorney General expanded the statewide Unsolved Homicides Database in December 2012, the Franklin County Sheriff's Office was among 54 participating agencies and had submitted 61 unsolved cold case homicides to the system, per the Ohio Attorney General's office. At the time, the state estimated roughly 5,000 unsolved homicides existed across all Ohio jurisdictions.
The scale of the backlog is even larger when viewed over decades. Cold-case tracking data compiled by Project: Cold Case and the Murder Accountability Project, cited by Uncovered, shows Ohio accumulated roughly 10,659 unsolved homicides between 1980 and 2019, out of more than 32,100 reported murders statewide — meaning about 66% of homicides from those 40 years were solved, leaving a third unresolved.
How Forensic Science Is Reopening Old Files
Franklin County homicide detectives periodically resubmit archived physical evidence, including touch DNA from clothing, bindings, and touched items, to state forensics labs as testing technology improves, 10TV has reported. Detectives focus on items likely to yield saliva or touch DNA that would have been undetectable in earlier decades, when Matheny's case first went cold.
That kind of forensic patience has paid off elsewhere in the county. Hoodline previously reported that Franklin County investigators used genetic genealogy in June 2024 to identify a suspect in a long-unsolved 1994 assault case, though long investigative delays can create legal challenges once charges are eventually filed. Franklin County has also seen a string of recent cold-case developments, including new indictments in a 2014 Franklinton slaying and an arrest in a 2016 South Linden killing, as well as the 2024 indictment of a Washington state man in the 1992 Franklin County murder of Amy Hooper. Even so, the Attorney General's own files note that key hurdles remain in older homicides like Matheny's, including witness availability, degraded physical evidence, and the difficulty of establishing an initial motive after so much time has passed.
How to Submit a Tip
Anyone with information about Matheny's murder can submit an anonymous tip directly through the state's unsolved homicide portal or call Central Ohio Crime Stoppers at 614-461-8477, according to 10TV. Tips submitted through Crime Stoppers can lead to a cash reward. More than two decades after Matheny was found dead in her own home, investigators are hoping that renewed public attention, paired with modern forensic tools, finally turns up the lead that solves her case.
