Ohio Woman Helps New Hampshire Mother Close a Painful Chapter

Dec. 5, 2005 — -- Stephanie Dietrich was deeply touched by Teri Knight's plight. Knight's two children had been slain by her former husband, who later committed suicide before revealing where he had buried them.

Knight, who lives in New Hampshire, couldn't get to the area Manuel Gehring described, but Dietrich, who had a hunch that she lived nearby, could.

Dietrich, of Akron, Ohio, made finding the graves of Sarah and Philip Gehring, 14 and 11, her personal mission.

"I looked three days a week for five months," she said. "He said Akron, Akron … and he knew that Route 303 and Route 8 intersected. I found eight landmarks he mentioned."

With her dog, Ricco, Dietrich, also a mother, combed through areas around her home. She finally found the children's shallow graves last Thursday. She immediately called the police. Autopsies confirmed that the remains belonged to the Gehring children.

The autopsies showed Gehring shot Sarah in the head three times and shot Philip four times, once in each arm, in the head and in the neck, said senior assistant Attorney General Jeff Strelzin of New Hampshire.

Gehring gave the FBI clues to where his children's bodies might be located in a taped confession. Investigators concluded last year that pollen on Gehring's minivan and shovel suggested that the soil most likely came from northeastern Ohio.

"It's a dirt road with grass," Gehring had said. "There was a fence where you couldn't go much further. Yeah, it was probably six feet tall and it had some kind of pump. Green pump."

The children were last seen alive at a July 4, 2003, fireworks display in Concord, N.H. Gehring took them and began driving. He told police that he pulled over later that night, shot them, and kept driving for hours before he stopped to dig their graves.

Gehring was arrested in California a week later. He hanged himself before he could reveal the exact location of the children's graves. He did, however, say that he marked their graves with makeshift crosses.

Knight will travel to Ohio this week.

"We've been carrying around this tremendous burden for two and a half years," she said. "To us this is the final ending in a real lousy book."