Thirty years after being sentenced to die for a double murder he has always denied committing, Tyrone Noling stood before the Ohio Parole Board this week to make his case for a full pardon. Noling, now 54, was convicted in the April 5, 1990 killings of Bearnhardt and Cora Hartig, an elderly Portage County couple found shot to death on their kitchen floor in Atwater Township. No physical evidence has ever tied him to the crime, and the men and women who once testified against him have since taken that testimony back.
The Hartigs, both 81, were discovered by a neighbor inside their ransacked home, according to the Associated Press, which reported that Bearnhardt Hartig was shot three times and Cora Hartig five times with a .25-caliber automatic handgun. Investigators never found the murder weapon. Authorities at the time said Noling was part of a group involved in robbing elderly couples' homes, and three other group members, then 14, 15 and 16 years old, initially implicated him in the killings — statements all three later retracted, telling authorities police had pressured them into naming Noling as the shooter, per the same Associated Press account.
Noling was first charged with aggravated burglary in the case, but those charges were dropped in 1992. A grand jury did not reindict him for the murders until 1995, and he was sentenced to death in 1996. His advocates, including the Ohio Innocence Project, say law enforcement notes and a cigarette butt found in the Hartigs' driveway point toward two other potential suspects instead — evidence Noling presented at his clemency hearing this week with the Innocence Project's support.
Evidence Pointing Elsewhere
Court documents cited by the Death Penalty Information Center describe a man who told authorities that his foster brother, Dan Wilson, bragged about committing the Hartig murders. Wilson lived roughly one mile from the Hartigs' home, had a history of home invasion robbery that resulted in an elderly victim's death, and was executed by lethal injection in Ohio in June 2009 for an unrelated 1991 murder. Separately, Noling's legal team has alleged in recent Portage County filings that prosecutors withheld evidence pointing to another set of alternate suspects — a father-son duo, Raymond and Dennis VanSteenberg — after a relative reported early in the investigation that Raymond VanSteenberg had disposed of a .25-caliber handgun around the time of the murders, according to Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.
Before he was ever charged, Noling voluntarily took and passed a polygraph test about the Hartig murders in 1992, while fingerprint analysis from the scene and DNA from that driveway cigarette butt excluded both him and his co-defendants, according to Injustice Watch. It took a separate, multi-decade legal battle just for Noling's attorneys to see the underlying investigative files: in March 2022, the Eleventh District Court of Appeals reversed a lower court and ordered that Portage County prosecutor and law enforcement records long withheld from the defense finally be turned over.
A Sheriff and a Juror Change Their Minds
Among the evidence Noling's team brought to this week's hearing were changed stances from the sheriff who once oversaw the case and from a juror who sat on his trial, according to the Associated Press. Ken Howe, a former Portage County sheriff, has said there were red flags in the case from early on and that later evidence persuaded him to support Noling's innocence claim. High-profile figures have also lent their names to the exoneration effort, with actors Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton and television personality Kim Kardashian voicing support for Noling, per the wire report. The case has drawn attention beyond the courtroom, having been featured in documentaries and true-crime podcasts over the years.
Noling denies committing the murders and has said he will not accept a commutation to life without parole — he is seeking release from prison, not a lesser sentence. He currently has no execution date. Larry Greene, public information director of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, where Noling is held, confirmed the parole board would deliberate in executive session after the hearing before issuing its recommendation.
DeWine's Shifting Stance on Capital Punishment
The hearing lands amid a broader reckoning over capital punishment in Ohio. In June, Governor Mike DeWine publicly called on the state legislature to abolish the death penalty, saying 40 years of data had convinced him it no longer deters violent crime — a striking reversal for a governor who helped draft Ohio's modern capital punishment statute as a state senator in 1981, according to the Statehouse News Bureau. Ohio has effectively halted executions since July 2018 amid difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs, leaving more than 100 inmates on death row and pushing roughly 30 scheduled executions past the end of DeWine's term later this year.
Since Ohio reinstated the death penalty in 1981, 12 death row inmates in the state have been exonerated — roughly one exoneration for every five executions actually carried out, per the Death Penalty Information Center. Hoodline has previously covered that broader pattern of wrongful convictions, including the state's death row exoneration crisis and the cases of exonerees Derrick Jamison and Elwood Jones.
What Happens Next
Under Ohio Revised Code Section 2967.03, the parole board is required to weigh community support or opposition as a statutory factor in formulating its clemency recommendation, according to advocacy group Action Network, which noted statewide letter-writing and call campaigns organized ahead of this week's hearing. Portage County Prosecutor Connie Lewandowski did not immediately return a voicemail seeking comment, the Associated Press reported.
The parole board is expected to send its recommendation to DeWine within six business days of the hearing. Because the governor holds sole authority to grant a pardon, that recommendation now stands as the pivotal threshold in a legal fight that has already stretched three decades — one that includes a December 2016 Ohio Supreme Court ruling in Noling's favor establishing that death row inmates have equal appellate rights to seek post-conviction DNA testing, according to the Innocence Project. Whether that history ends in exoneration or continued incarceration now rests with DeWine's final decision.
