BLUE ICE—

A novel by Phil Stortz; maybe

A chill crawed up my spine as my retired policeman friend pondered the rural creek where he helped recover the body of a murder victim those many years ago.

Stortz was the chief of the Butler, OH police department in 1984. He had taken the original missing person report on this victim. That was about a month before Boy Scouts cleaning litter along the road saw an arm sticking out of the ice of the Possum Run Creek down near Butler Newville Rd.

County sheriff deputies investigating the scene called on Stortz, who lived nearby, to use his personal tools to chop the victim from its icy tomb.

In doing so, they carefully preserved the ice encasing the victim which later revealed clues that helped convict the killer.

The successful investigation took many strange twists:

--A psychic described moving water and a steel structure as the location of the victim’s body, (the stream and bridge?) before a murder was known to have been committed.

--The victim, trapped in prostitution had a child fathered by a policeman in a nearby city.

--With local welfare officials forcing her to reveal the father’s identity for purposes of child support, the father/cop was found to have offered her a cash settlement to keep his wife from learning the sordid details.

--A second officer was learned to have been seeing the same victim.

The first cop was ultimately convicted of murder and sentenced to prison where he served approximately 16 years. He was released from prison in 2004 and was last reported living in the area.

Armed with intimate knowledge of this case and its principals Stortz is now a budding author. He has submitted his creation to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award program where it has gained positive review.

His manuscript is now a work of fiction because of contest requirements as well as close family connections to local law enforcement combined with a respect for the survivors, many of whom live in the area.

The top prize at the end of Stortz’s writing rainbow is $25,000 and a publishing contract.

That’s a nice dream for a retired cop from Butler, Ohio.