Patricia Adkins

Case background and investigation

Patricia "Patti" Adkins was a 29-year-old single mother who worked at the Honda of America manufacturing plant in Marysville, Ohio. According to NBC News, she clocked out shortly after midnight on June 29, 2001, at the end of the second shift, just as the plant began its annual shutdown week. She has not been seen or heard from since.

NBC News reported that Adkins had told her sister, Marcia Pitts, that she was going on a week-long trip to Canada with her boyfriend, a coworker at the plant who was married to someone else. She arranged for her sister to look after her seven-year-old daughter and was expected back on July 8. When she did not return to collect the child, her sister reported her missing. The case passed to the Union County Sheriff's Office on July 10, 2001, where Lieutenant Jeff Stiers was assigned to it.

According to the same reporting, Adkins had given the man about $90,000 in the months before she disappeared. A banker told investigators she had been withdrawing the money so that he could buy out part of a side business ahead of a divorce. Family members said she had planned to hide in the bed of his pickup truck when they left the plant. Investigators found no DNA from Adkins in the truck bed. They did recover a phone and a T-shirt that her sister said Adkins had given him, as well as a letter she had written about the relationship.

Police have never publicly named the coworker. NBC News reported that he was interviewed and denied any involvement in her disappearance. The sheriff's office has described him as the primary suspect, while acknowledging, in Lieutenant Stiers's words, that an arrest would require evidence proving the case beyond a reasonable doubt. No one has been charged.

Central Ohio Crime Stoppers has said that none of Adkins's financial or personal records show any activity since June 2001, and that a court has declared her legally dead. According to a 2024 report by WCMH carried on NewsNation, Crime Stoppers offered a reward of $25,000 in 2022 for information leading to her discovery.

In 2025, Sinclair stations including WJLA reported that an investigator from the Union County Prosecutor's Office had been assigned to work on the case full time, reviewing the file for gaps. In that report the county sheriff said the matter was being treated strictly as a missing person case and that he would not commit to describing it as foul play. Adkins's daughter, who was seven when her mother vanished, has said publicly that knowing what happened would make closure easier. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Union County Sheriff's Office tip line at 937-642-7653.