The Night a Child’s Name Almost Ruined an Innocent Man

Picture a quiet evening in Pataskala, Ohio, April 28, 2002. A 38-year-old mom named Rhonda Bogs is inside her house on the edge of town, stirring something on the stove while her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter Amanda plays nearby. She’d just talked on the phone with her husband Dave-he’s sitting in jail over unpaid child support, nothing violent, just life being messy. Rhonda glances out the window, sees a dark shape move past, shrugs it off. People walk by sometimes. She goes back to dinner.

The next morning she doesn’t show up for work. A coworker named Gary gets worried, drives over, knocks. No answer. He peers through the window and sees little Amanda standing there, waving. He gets inside. Finds Rhonda in the kitchen. Stabbed more than a dozen times with one of her own steak knives. The house looks tossed-drawers open, stuff scattered-but no broken windows, no forced door. Just her body and a terrified toddler who’d spent the night alone with her mom like that.

You know that sick twist in your stomach when a story starts like this? Yeah. It only gets weirder from there.

Pataskala’s a small place. Seventeen cops total, and this is their first murder in six years. They’re working out of what used to be an ambulance bay turned makeshift station. Chief Chris Forshey is trying to piece it together. Rhonda’s sister Kim floats the idea that maybe Dave arranged something from jail-marital problems had been bad. But Dave’s locked up. Solid alibi.

Then Amanda, through a social worker, says something that flips the whole case: “Uncle Nick did it.”

Uncle Nick is Richard Nicholas Robinson-second cousin, family friend, the guy who’d been helping out with chores while Dave was away. Cops bring him in. After a six-hour interrogation he cracks, says he came over to kiss Rhonda, she fought back, things got out of hand, he stabbed her “by accident.” He signs a confession.

Case closed, right?

But something never sat right. Nick’s lawyer hires a private investigator. They start digging.

Turns out Nick was at two different bars that night-Mary Melody’s, then Fair View Inn-until 10:30 p.m., wearing this loud, memorable t-shirt. Bartenders remember him clearly. No blood. No panic. And the drive times? They run a stopwatch test. No way he makes it from the bar to Rhonda’s house, kills her, cleans up, and gets back without someone noticing he’s gone missing for hours.

Worse: DNA on the knife doesn’t match Rhonda or Nick.

So who?

The stolen stuff tells the story. Rhonda’s purse, jewelry, clothes, even her ID-all of it ends up in a blue Cadillac that gets sold the very next day for $300 cash to a woman named Leticia Gordon. She finds the items inside, keeps quiet at first (people do strange things when money’s tight). But eventually she talks.

The Cadillac belonged to Chris Williams. Dave’s old bandmate. A guy with a drug habit-crack-and a history of breaking into houses to feed it. Police had heard his name early on but never chased it hard. Chris had been desperate that night. High. Broke. He picks Rhonda’s place because he knows it, knows Dave’s away. She walks in on him mid-burglary. Things turn ugly fast. He grabs the steak knife in a rage.

Chris Williams gets convicted in 2005-murder, aggravated robbery, burglary, even escape (he’d slipped custody once). Twenty to life plus eight more years. Twenty-eight total.

Nick walks free. Charges dropped. He sues the town for $3 million, eventually settles. Stops drinking. Goes back to work. But you can imagine the scars.

The toddler’s words-“Uncle Nick”-sent everyone down the wrong road for years. A false confession. A rushed investigation. Tips ignored. A knife never properly tested for DNA until much later. And the real killer almost got away because the key evidence-a car title transfer-was sitting quietly at the DMV the whole time.

Crazy, isn’t it? One piece of paper in a government filing cabinet ends up being the thread that unravels the whole lie.

Makes you think about how fragile truth can be in a case like this. One child’s innocent phrase, one lazy assumption, and an innocent man almost spends his life behind bars. Meanwhile the guy who actually did it walks around free for years.

I don’t know about you, but stories like this leave me a little uneasy. Not just because of the violence, but because of how close we came to getting it completely wrong. How many other cases have a hidden DMV receipt or a bartender’s memory that never got asked about?

What would it take for any of us to notice the detail that actually matters… before it’s too late?

And then the file gets closed, the headlines fade, and the world moves on. But someone, somewhere, is still living with what really happened that night in Pataskala.