Thirty years after Rob Mohney vanished, his family is still searching for answers
A renewed Westerville police appeal has brought old memories, unresolved grief and cautious hope back to the family he left behind.
In an old family photograph, Robert “Rob” Mohney sits beside his mother, Jackie Zapert, and his sister, Sue. All three are young, and the disappearance that would shape the rest of the family’s life is still years away.
Rob vanished from his Westerville home on July 16, 1996. Jackie and Sue both died without learning what happened to him, leaving his niece Megan and nephew Jacob to carry the search for answers into another generation.
Megan Mohney was 10 when her uncle disappeared, and Jacob was 8. Both remember him, but after three decades, those memories have begun to fade.
“I thought my whole life that I would solve this,” Megan said. “Is that a crazy thing to say?”
She still searches news reports, Facebook posts, property records and county maps for anything that might explain what happened.
“You wouldn’t believe how much searching and looking up and on the county auditor’s maps and stuff,” she said. “I’ve driven myself crazy with this.”
For Jacob, the renewed attention surrounding the 30th anniversary brought a different realization.
“I’m starting to lose all my memory of him,” he said. “I just realized since this all came back up that I can’t remember the sound of his voice anymore. And that sucks.”
Family photographs preserve some of what time has taken. They show fishing trips, motorcycles, motocross trophies and children gathered in living rooms and around kitchen tables.
Before Rob became the subject of police files, property searches and anniversary appeals, he was a son, brother and uncle who shared in the ordinary moments of family life.
Jacob grew up in Nelsonville while Rob lived in the Westerville area, so they did not see each other regularly. Motocross was one of the things that connected them, and Jacob said Rob sometimes came to watch family members race.
Megan remembers visiting Rob and his wife, Angie, spending time near the river and seeing their dog, Sprocket.
“I only have memories of Rob until I was 10,” she said. “It’s not enough.”
Those childhood memories became intertwined with the grief that followed his disappearance.
After graduating from high school, Megan lived with Jackie. She remembers a ritual that unfolded almost every night as Jackie drank wine, talked about Rob and eventually asked to watch his wedding video.
“We’d have to go over it all,” Megan said. “It was a nightly thing, and she just, she never came back from that.”
Jacob recalled that his great-grandmother, Helen, also spoke about Rob constantly. When the telephone rang and no one spoke, or when an unfamiliar out-of-state number appeared, she sometimes wondered whether it was him.
“She thought it was Rob trying to get ahold of her and that he just couldn’t talk,” Jacob said. “Maybe he just wanted to hear her voice.”
The uncertainty changed the family, Megan and Jacob said. Relatives died without answers, while others gradually drifted apart.
“It’s destroyed my family,” Jacob said. “It really has.”
The questions that consumed Rob’s relatives are the same ones Westerville police are still trying to answer.
His final day had appeared routine. Detective Steve Grubbs said Mohney went to work, stopped at Kroger to buy food for dinner and returned home. He met briefly with friends before they left.
While preparing a steak dinner, Mohney received several telephone calls. He had sat down and begun eating when he abruptly got up and left, leaving his wallet and other belongings behind.
Neighbors saw him get into his red 1995 Pontiac Firebird and drive away alone along Central College Road. It was the last known sighting of him alive.
Columbus Watershed officers found the Firebird abandoned later that evening in the upper west parking lot at Hoover Dam, according to the Westerville Division of Police. Mohney was not found.
Investigators obtained the telephone records, identified the callers and conducted interviews and follow-up inquiries, Grubbs said.
“We do have the call logs and everything like that,” he said. “Those calls have been definitely looked into.”
Because the case remains open, Grubbs declined to identify the callers or discuss what was said. Asked whether the calls explained why Mohney left his dinner and drove away, he said they had produced “nothing definitive.”
During the past three decades, police have conducted ground and underwater searches using bloodhounds, cadaver dogs, drones, dive teams and sonar. They also have issued subpoenas, searched properties and interviewed witnesses.
In November 2010, officers used cadaver dogs and excavation equipment to search farmland off Hartford Road in Delaware County. Police did not publicly disclose whether the search produced evidence.
Grubbs has handled the renewed investigation since 2020, when he was asked to inspect Mohney’s former home before it was demolished.
Investigators wanted to be certain there was nothing more to examine before the property changed forever.
“They just wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything else related to the house itself that we needed to do before it was gone forever,” Grubbs said.
The inspection produced no new evidence, and the house was torn down. The case is unusually difficult because investigators have neither Mohney’s remains nor a confirmed crime scene, Grubbs said.
“We don’t have a specific crime scene,” he said. “We don’t have a body. We’re trying to piece this together when we don’t have a great starting point.”
The detectives who conducted the original investigation are no longer with the Westerville Division of Police. Some have retired, while others have died.
Grubbs has reviewed their reports and re-interviewed people who previously spoke with investigators, looking for details that may have been overlooked, omitted or remembered differently decades later.
“I don’t want to just go off of information from 1996 that was written down and forgotten about,” he said. “I want to go back and verify and make sure that we have the information as accurate as possible.”
He said the absence of public developments does not mean the investigation has stopped.
“Just because there’s no news doesn’t mean that we’re not doing anything about it,” Grubbs said.
The renewed public appeal has already prompted at least one person to come forward. Two days after Westerville police again asked for information, Grubbs interviewed a woman about something that had remained in the back of her mind for 30 years.
She had never previously reported it, and investigators do not yet know whether the information will advance the case.
“I feel like every person that we talk to is going to bring us one step closer,” Grubbs said, “and hopefully they have that little bit of information that’s just that one missing piece that we need to fully break it open.”
Hillary Bates, Westerville’s community affairs director, said that possibility is why the city again turned to the media and asked residents to revisit the case.
Someone may have seen or heard something in 1996 that did not seem important at the time, she said, but could matter when considered with the rest of the investigation.
“The whole reason we do this is the hope that someone will be moved to come forward,” Bates said. “We’re not bothered by a tip that doesn’t work out. Come forward if you have something to share.”
For Megan, the renewed attention has brought back hope, disappointment and the familiar urge to keep searching. She has heard years of rumors and theories, making it difficult to separate what is known from what has merely been repeated.
“There’s been so many stories and ideas,” she said. “You don’t know. I don’t know what’s real.”
The family photographs offer a different kind of record. They do not show what happened on the night Rob disappeared, but they show what existed before it: a family together, children growing up and people who expected to have more time with one another.
Thirty years later, Megan hopes the latest appeal reaches someone who can finally explain why that life changed.
“I hope this sparks something,” she said.
Anyone with information about the disappearance or death of Robert S. Mohney may call the Westerville Division of Police’s dedicated tip line at 614-901-6866 or email tipline@westerville.org. Tips may be submitted anonymously.
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