Death in the Cornfield

Sierah Joughin was a 20-year-old University of Toledo student from rural Fulton County, Ohio. On the evening of July 19, 2016, she left her boyfriend’s home and rode her bicycle toward her own house along County Road 6 near Metamora. She never arrived, and her family began searching that night.

Her bike turned up in a cornfield beside the road. Nearby lay fuses, a screwdriver and other items, and a passing driver had picked up a bloodstained motorcycle helmet there that night. The blood was Sierah’s, and James Worley, 57, who lived on the same road, admitted the items were his. Worley had already served prison time for a 1990 attack in which he struck a woman on a bicycle and tried to handcuff her. A search of his property uncovered a freezer buried in a barn floor, restraints and an air mattress with Sierah’s DNA. On July 22, a volunteer searcher spotted drag marks and disturbed soil in a cornfield about a mile and a half from where she was taken, and her body was recovered there. She had been gagged and had suffocated.

A jury convicted Worley of aggravated murder, kidnapping and other charges on March 28, 2018, and he was sentenced to death on April 16, 2018. Ohio later passed Sierah’s Law, which created a violent offender database.