The Coffee Was Still On: The Disappearance of John & Shelly Markley

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On a Friday morning in December 1995, John and Shelly Markley helped their five children get ready for school in their Bristolville, Ohio, home. Shelly put the youngest, eight-year-old Johnny, on the bus around 8:30 AM. By the time those kids came home that afternoon, both parents had vanished. The doors were unlocked. The coffee pot was still on — it had been running so long it nearly boiled dry. John’s wristwatch sat on a shelf above the stove. Shelly’s purse, her Marlboro cigarettes, and her lighter were all still on the kitchen counter. There was no note.

Upstairs, the gun cabinet was open — something John never allowed. A small safe in the master bedroom was open too, with birth certificates and papers scattered across the dresser and floor. In the garage, the protective tarps that always covered John’s prized 1978 Corvette had been removed. The couple’s red and silver 1990 Chevy pickup truck was missing.

None of the five Markley children — who ranged from eight to fifteen — ever saw their parents again. Over thirty years later, the case remains unsolved. No remains have been found. No one has been charged. And a handful of unanswered questions continue to haunt investigators, the family, and anyone who comes across this case.

Who Were the Markleys?

John J. Markley Jr. was born July 8, 1959, in Trumbull County, Ohio. He worked as an independent truck driver and was thirty-six years old when he disappeared. By all accounts he was steady, meticulous, and devoted to his family. He kept his gun cabinet locked, his Corvette under tarps, and his wristwatch on at all times. He had no criminal record and no life insurance policy.

Shelly Renee Markley, born Shelly Applequist on November 16, 1963, married John on November 30, 1979. She was thirty-two years old when she disappeared. She was a stay-at-home mother to their five children: Ruthie, Stacey, Bonnie, Crystal, and Johnny. Family members described her as fiercely protective and always present — she was almost always home when the kids got off the bus, and when she wasn’t, she left a note. Every time.

Shelly’s sister, Linda Mason, put it simply: “John and Shelly love their children very much and were very protective. They would never, never go away and leave them unattended.”

Timeline: December 13–16, 1995

Wednesday, December 13 — John’s twin sister Bonnie dies of cancer. John is described as very distraught. The family begins planning funeral arrangements.

Friday, December 15 — The Day of the Disappearance

  • ~7:00–8:30 AM — The Markley family has breakfast together. The children get ready for school. Shelly puts the youngest, Johnny (age 8), on the school bus around 8:30 AM.
  • 8:30 AM–10:36 AM — The two-hour window during which the events inside the Markley home — the opened safe, the unlocked gun cabinet, the removal of the Corvette tarps — are believed to have occurred. No witnesses. No documentation of what happened.
  • 10:36 AM — John and Shelly are seen at a Bank One drive-thru in Bloomfield, Ohio, approximately five miles from their home. A bank teller sees John driving their pickup truck. Shelly is in the middle of the bench seat, writing a check on the dashboard. A third, unidentified man is in the passenger seat. Shelly signs a $1,000 check made out to cash. This is the last confirmed sighting of either John or Shelly Markley. The teller later describes the unidentified man as slender with dark hair but cannot provide further detail.
  • Afternoon — The Markley children return from school to find the house unlocked, their parents gone, and the scene described above.
  • 5:30 PM — Calling hours for John’s twin sister Bonnie are held at the funeral home. The five Markley children attend without their parents after waiting at their aunt and uncle’s house.
  • ~12:30 AM (December 16) — The children’s aunt and uncle report John and Shelly missing to the Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office.

Saturday, December 16 — Bonnie Markley’s funeral is held. John and Shelly are not present. The investigation begins.

Within days — John’s pickup truck is found locked and abandoned in the parking lot of Stambaugh’s Hardware on Elm Road, approximately ten miles from the Markley home. The keys are missing. Inside the cab: the couple’s cell phone. In the truck bed: a semitrailer tire and the protective tarps from John’s Corvette. The truck is covered in mud and appears to have been driven off-road — completely out of character for John.

The Evidence: What Was Left Behind vs. What Was Taken

Understanding the scene inside the Markley home is critical to understanding what might have happened that morning. The contrast between what stayed and what left with John and Shelly tells a story on its own.

Left in the house: Shelly’s purse. Shelly’s Marlboro cigarettes and lighter (she was a pack-a-day smoker). John’s wristwatch (he wore it every day). Clothes laid out on the bed, believed to be the outfits they planned to wear to calling hours that evening. The coffee pot, still on and nearly boiled dry. $865 remaining in their bank account, never touched again.

Disturbed or opened: The gun cabinet in the master bedroom — always kept locked — was found open. It was never determined whether any firearms were missing, as the children didn’t know how many guns their parents owned. A small safe in the master bedroom was open, with birth certificates and important papers scattered around the room. The beds were unmade, with some clothing on top.

Missing from the home: John and Shelly themselves. Their 1990 Chevy pickup truck. The protective tarps from John’s 1978 Corvette. $1,000 in cash, withdrawn from their bank account that morning. The checkbook (never recovered).

Found in the truck: The couple’s cell phone (inside the cab). The Corvette tarps (in the truck bed). A semitrailer tire. Mud covering the exterior, consistent with off-road driving.

The Ransom Scheme: Steven Durst

To understand what happened next, you have to understand who Steven Durst was — and how deeply his life had been intertwined with the Markleys before December 15, 1995.

About a year before the disappearance, the Markley family had taken Durst in. He was down on his luck, out of money, and had two school-aged children of his own. John and Shelly opened their home to him. Durst moved in, his children moved in, and John gave him work driving a second semi that John owned. For months, Durst lived inside the Markley home. He knew the layout. He knew where the safe was, where the gun cabinet was, and where John kept the tarps over his prized 1978 Corvette in the garage.

Sometime in the summer of 1995 — roughly six months before the disappearance — there was a dispute over money. John Markley fired Durst, evicted him and his children from the home, and withheld his last paycheck. In the months that followed, Durst was unemployed and telling people the Markleys owed him $1,000. That is the exact amount Shelly withdrew at the bank drive-thru on the morning of December 15 — with an unidentified man sitting in the passenger seat of the truck.

A day or two after Christmas, the Markley family’s phone rang. Gene Mason — Shelly’s brother-in-law, who was staying at the house with his wife Linda — answered. A male voice, raspy in character, asked for John’s oldest daughter Ruth, then for John’s sister. When Mason offered to take a message, the caller hung up. The next day, the same voice called back. He told Mason that John and Shelly were being held and would be “sacrificed to a cult” on New Year’s Eve unless he received $10,000. A minute later, the phone rang again — the same caller, this time telling Mason to sell the Markleys’ Corvette to raise the money. He knew the car was there. He knew what it was worth.

Police gave the Masons a recording device for the next call. On the morning of December 31st, the raspy voice directed Gene Mason to a Rally’s restaurant by the Eastwood Mall off Ohio 422 in Warren, where a note had been left in the change slot of a pay phone. The note — handwritten in block letters and misspelled throughout — directed Mason inside the Kaufmann’s department store to a display of Youngstown State University sweatshirts. He was to leave the bag of money between the shirts and wait. Undercover Detective Michael Davis was already inside, posing as a shopper. A man, a woman, and a boy approached the display, looked at the shirts, and walked away without touching the bag.

When Mason attempted the drop a second time, the caller phoned the house. He had spotted police. “I see the cops,” the raspy voice said. “You people are not following my directions.” He gave a new location: McQuaid’s Sunoco, a gas station and convenience store at Ohio 422 and North Road, half a mile from the mall. It was snowing. Detective Wayne Cardarelli watched from a strip mall parking lot fifty yards away. A hooded figure entered the restroom. When the figure came back out, a white car pulled around. Cardarelli moved in once the hooded figure was inside the vehicle. The driver was Steven Durst of Warren, Ohio — the same man Detective Davis had seen at the sweatshirt display inside the mall. The hooded figure was his teenage daughter, Deanna, who was nine months pregnant. Neither the Markleys nor the bag of dish towels were in the car.

Durst was arrested and charged with felony extortion. He volunteered to take a polygraph examination and failed. The results indicated he was being deceptive when answering all four of the following questions: Were you involved in John and Shelly Markley’s disappearance in any way? Did you see John and Shelly Markley after they were reported missing? Do you know where John and Shelly are now? Did you know in advance that John and Shelly Markley would disappear?

Durst steadfastly denied involvement in the disappearance, claiming he was a middleman collecting money on behalf of someone else. His attorney, George Kafantaris, told The Plain Dealer that jurors had suspected Durst of involvement in the disappearance and convicted him of the only charge they actually had. “It’s a puzzling case,” Kafantaris said. “It’s a sad case.”

In August 1996, Durst was convicted of extortion and sentenced to four to ten years at the Marion Correctional Institution. His appeal was dismissed in 1998. About a year after the disappearance, Chief Investigator Jane Timko went on record with her assessment: “I truly believe that Steven Durst knows what happened to them and he just won’t say.” She specifically cited the fact that he was unemployed and claiming the Markleys owed him $1,000 — the exact amount on that check.

Durst has never been charged with any crime related to the Markleys’ disappearance. He has consistently denied involvement.

The 2020 Kurtzman Property Search

Twenty-five years after the Markleys vanished, a seemingly unrelated incident in the same township drew renewed attention.

On April 9, 2020, Milton Kurtzman, a seventy-one-year-old property owner in Bristol Township, shot his roommate, sixty-four-year-old Allen Byler, three times in the abdomen at their shared home on Hyde Oakfield Road. Byler survived. Kurtzman was arrested and booked into the Trumbull County Jail. Less than twenty-four hours later, Kurtzman was found dead in his cell. The cause of death was later ruled natural causes.

Within days, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) and Trumbull County Sheriff’s deputies launched a large-scale search of Kurtzman’s approximately fifty-acre property. They used excavators to dig. They searched vehicles, buildings, and the surrounding land over multiple days. When pressed by reporters, officials refused to specify what they were looking for.

Chief Deputy Joseph Dragovich acknowledged only that an ongoing investigation was underway. But Sheriff Paul Monroe went further, stating they were hoping to find something that would crack a case that “dates back historically twenty years.”

No results from the property search have ever been publicly announced. No arrests were made. No remains were reported found. Whatever connection Kurtzman may have had to the Markley case — or to any other cold case — remains officially unconfirmed.

One additional detail from the coverage of the Kurtzman shooting: the neighbor who called 911 after Allen Byler staggered to her back porch was identified in WFMJ reporting as Veronica Markley — a woman with the same surname living directly across from Kurtzman’s property. Whether she is related to the Markley family has not been publicly confirmed.

The Family

A court granted custody of the five Markley children to family members after the disappearance. In December 2000, The Morning Journal ran a feature on the children headlined “5 kids alone: Reflect on life five years after parents just vanished.” The family appeared on the Montel Williams Show and the Maury Povich Show seeking information. They tried psychics. They maintained a public presence for decades.

John and Shelly were eventually declared legally dead. No remains have been recovered. There has been no funeral. There is no gravesite.

Today, the Markley children are in their thirties and forties. Johnny, the youngest — the boy Shelly put on the school bus that December morning — is in his late thirties. Ruthie, the eldest, is in her mid-forties. They continue to seek answers through the Facebook page Missing Persons: John and Shelly Markley.

The Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office still considers the case open and active.

How You Can Help

If you have any information about the disappearance of John and Shelly Markley — no matter how small or how long ago — please reach out.

Trumbull County Sheriff’s Office Tip Line: (330) 675-2540

Detective Rick Tackett (direct): (330) 675-2508

Agency Case Number: 956126

Facebook: Missing Persons — John & Shelly Markley

Someone in Trumbull County knows what happened on the morning of December 15, 1995. Thirty years is a long time to carry a secret. If you’re ready to put it down, these numbers are where you start.

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Sources

Official Missing Persons Databases

Primary News Reporting

  • p. 198: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1070460044
  • p. 199: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1070460053
  • p. 200: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1070460061
  • p. 201: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1070460065
  • p. 202: https://www.newspapers.com/image/1070460072

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