Corey Edkin Part 2: Theft, murder, and suspicion

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Part two will bring our timeline to the present day, following the developments in Corey’s cold case and the suspicious coincidences and charges that continue to pile up around his family members. That will include the unsolved homicide of his mother’s future boyfriend and his grandmother’s conviction for poisoning her third husband.

Part one recap

Let’s rewind the clock about 35 years and return to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna Valley to pick up the case of missing toddler Corey Edkin where we left off. Before we begin part two of this three part series taking a deep dive into Corey’s disappearance and several other related cases, let’s review what we covered in part one:

  • We focused on Corey’s mother, Debbie Rovenolt, and her side of the family, especially her mother, Corey’s grandmother, Myrle.
  • In less than 10 years, Debbie and Myrle experienced four fires. One involved a tenant named Douglas Walburn, a convicted arsonist. Debbie moved in with Douglas’s ex-girlfriend, Alberta Sones, after both women are displaced by fires.
  • In 1984, Debbie’s older sister, Rhonda, was addicted to cocaine and was the victim of a burglary that her boyfriend committed. She tried to blackmail him for half of the stolen money.
  • In January 1986, Debbie’s second husband, Daniel Wise, was arrested for raping Debbie’s 14-year-old sister. That same year, in October, her two-year-old son with her first husband, James Edkin, disappeared from her New Columbia home without a trace.
  • One month later, Debbie’s father and Corey’s grandfather, Ron Rovenolt was hospitalized after being poisoned with arsenic. His wife, Myrle, is charged with attempting to kill him so she could start a new life with her boyfriend, Jack Plotts.

We ended part one at the Northumberland County courthouse in July 1988, where Ron Rovenolt’s two oldest daughters, Debbie and Rhonda, were publicly accusing him of mental, physical, and sexual abuse. Myrle Rovenolt was acquitted of attempted homicide shortly after that confrontation, but she was separately sentenced to time served for stealing two rifles from a private residence in December 1987.

New theory and investigation

In October of 1988, three months after Myrle Rovenolt’s acquittal and two years after Corey Edkin’s disappearance, investigators announced that they were working on a new theory in which Corey was abducted by someone he knew. It would have been “almost impossible,” they said, for him to have gotten out without someone noticing. They noted that the home Corey lived in had a reputation as a “party place…frequented…by a group of 10-20 young people.” Their connections and activities, not specified but implied to be criminal, is what officers say made the “investigation so tough…almost everyone was reluctant to give information.”

The next month, November 1988, Debbie suffered yet another loss: a stillborn, her fifth child, named Frankie. The baby was also Frank Derr’s, and he and Debbie married a month afterward, in December 1988.

In January 1989, Jack Plotts was charged for the first time with writing several bad or “worthless” checks. From November 1987 through October 1988, after he was living with Myrle Rovenolt, he had written seven bad checks totaling over $600 at local service stations and grocery stores.

A federal grand jury was convened to review Corey Edkin’s case in the spring of 1989, but no charges or additional evidence came out of it. Corey’s grandmother, Myrle, was questioned because one of the threatening phone calls made to local newspaper in March 1987 was traced back to her home. However, she lived on a farm property and the phone was located outside of her residence, so it’s possible that the call was made by someone else.

Accumulating charges

In May 1989, 20-year-old Ron Rovenolt Jr was arrested along with a 17-year-old male for breaking into an apartment and stealing over $3,000 in cash. Ron Jr was also charged with trespassing and conspiracy to commit burglary that April. In June 1989, Ron Jr’s older sister Rhonda was involved in an armed robbery – she drove a 16-year-old male to a convenience store, waited outside while he demanded cash, and drove him back after the crime.

In February 1990, Debbie and Frank Derr had another daughter named Alora. But in June, it appears that Debbie had a new boyfriend living with her, Kevin Guffey, and that she stabbed him in the leg during an argument. The charges may have been dropped as there are no details after the initial report. In November 1990, Myrle and Jack Plotts finally married.

A year later, in June 1991, Debbie’s younger brother Franklin was charged with the theft of a motorcycle. He was 18 at the time – similar in age to the male teen who accompanied his siblings Ron Jr and Rhonda in their 1989 burglaries, although this has not been officially confirmed.

A new lead investigator was assigned to Corey Edkin’s case in 1991 and began conducting new interviews. Even with the renewed effort, leads continued to dwindle. Debbie’s romantic life continued with its ups and downs in the meantime: Frank and Debbie filed for divorce in March 1992, and she married a man named Brook Dyer in May 1992.

Franklin Rovenolt’s problems continued into 1992 as well. In February 1992, Franklin and two other teenagers broke into their high school and stole $4,800 in cash plus candy, soda, and electronic equipment. Then on Valentine’s Day, he entered the home of his ex-girlfriend, Heather Schaeffer, with a loaded shotgun. He took Heather, her three-month-old daughter, and her mother hostage for two hours, threatening to kill all of them along with himself. The situation ended with Franklin being arrested for reckless endangerment, terroristic threats, criminal trespassing, and simple assault.

Between February and April 1992, Myrle Rovenolt was also turning to burglary. She and another woman, Jeanette Walker, were charged along with three male teenagers for stealing six rugs valued at $3,450 from a woman’s home. The teens were caught and confessed in September of that year. Myrle was placed on parole.

Myrle’s return to prison

In June 1992, commemorating what would have been Corey Edkin’s eighth birthday, his older brother Tommy wrote a poem of remembrance that was published in the local paper. Tommy would later say that it was an opportunity to express what Corey’s siblings were going through. “I just didn’t understand why the newspapers kept me and my sister out of it. He meant just as much to me as he did to my parents.” In July of that same year, police received a tip that Corey was spotted in Honolulu, Hawaii. It didn’t pan out, but investigators said the report is a “sign of hope” that Corey may still be alive.

Myrle and Jack Plotts’ problems only intensified when, in July 1993, Myrle was charged with stealing “nearly $30,000” from a local social club. Jack was the club’s secretary, but he was not charged along with his wife at first. Myrle plead guilty to theft in exchange for related charges being dropped and a reduced sentence, admitting to writing several checks to Jack from various club accounts between November 1991 and September 1992, depositing or cashing them through their joint back account.

Myrle claimed that she used the money for various personal needs but also loaned some to her daughter Debbie so she could buy Christmas presents for her five children. In addition to the checks, Myrle also stole about $2,000 from membership dues, taking a little out each time she visited the club and using it to play games of chance. Myrle considered the money she took as “loans” and intended to return it, “but the situation got out of hand and she was unable to pay it back.”

At sentencing, Myrle insisted, “I want to make things right in my life and make a home for my daughter,” referring to her youngest child, Rebecca, who was only 13 at the time. She faced a maximum sentence of seven years along with a $15,000 fine and probation.

Jack Plotts was also charged with the theft in April 1994. He admitted that he was aware of what Myrle was doing and that he used some of the money himself to make ends meet. He was sentenced to only 15-23 days in county prison, and he and Myrle were ordered to repay $26,000.

When Jack was arrested, he also mentioned Myrle’s previous gun theft, stating that it was part of a “burglary ring” within the county. Coincidentally, three of Myrle’s children were charged with multiple burglaries during that same time period, and Myrle had accumulated 10 bad check convictions by 1988, ending about the same time the burglaries began.

Progression

It’s unclear when Debbie and her latest husband, Brook Dyer, had divorced, but in September 1994, Debbie had another daughter with Frank Derr, named Larenda, her final child. Debbie was living with her mother, Myrle, at the time, when Myrle was still on probation for theft.

There were a few quiet years for the family until March 1998, when an age-progressed photo showing Corey at age 12-13 was direct mailed to 73 million US households. Debbie shared that seeing Corey’s age-progressed photo was “hard” for her and her family but hoped that it would help generate new tips. “I will always have hope that he will come home.” Within a month, police had received about 20 new leads and sightings throughout the country, but none of them resulted in locating Corey.

Fire and murder

Incredibly, in November 1998, Debbie experienced another house fire. Debbie, her boyfriend Charles Burgess, and two of Debbie’s children were living with Charles’s sister, her child, and Charles’s mother. No one was home when the fire broke out around 8:45pm on a Saturday night, but they and another tenant living on the other half of the duplex were left homeless as a result of the blaze. The cause was not determined to be suspicious.

Debbie and Charles Burgess were still living together when he was found murdered seven months later. Charles was a 45-year-old retired Air Force veteran who drove tour buses for a living. Around 10:00pm on Saturday, June 19, 1999, he checked into a New Jersey motel. Charles was scheduled to pick up a group in Manhattan early the next morning and take them on a trip to Niagara Falls. They called the motel when he never showed up.

A motel staff person found Charles in his second-floor room at about 7:30am, naked and lying face down on the bed in a pool of his own blood. Charles died from blunt force trauma to the back of his head, but no murder weapon was found. There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry, but because Charles’s cash had been taken from the room, police theorized that robbery might have been a motive.

Debbie and her mother Myrle attended Charles’s funeral, but the two aroused suspicion, at least from Charles’s family members, who say they were “involved in an insurance dispute when Charles died.” In fact, after she learned that Charles died, his mother, Rose Michael, said that “Myrle walked in the house on Fourth Street [where he lived in Sunbury] and told Deb that she was entitled to half of everything.”

Investigators followed leads back to Sunbury and even Ohio, but they remained tight-lipped with case details. DNA testing in 2000 “failed to implicate anyone,” but in April 2001, police arrested an unidentified 15-year-old girl from Ohio and charged her with Charles’s murder. Another Ohio suspect was arrested within the week, this time an adult, but police didn’t release their identity either, concerned that other suspects connected to the investigation might flee. Nothing seems to have come of either arrest, and there have been no significant developments in the case since then.

New millennium, same Myrle

In January 2001, Myrle was once again facing charges for writing two bad checks totaling almost $1,000 for vehicle repairs. Her daughter Debbie married again in August 2003 to Murray Zechman, and they filed for divorce in August 2006. That same year, 20 years after Debbie’s son Corey disappeared, police released another age-progressed photo of him at age 21 and confirmed that his case was “still an active investigation” despite not having new information “for some time.”

Debbie applied for a marriage license with Robert James Mowery twice in 2009 (June and September) and they tied the knot in October. Robert died at his home a year and a half later, in May 2011, at only 53 years old. It appears that Robert was Debbie’s last husband. Myrle’s husband, Jack Plotts, also died in 2011. He was 67 years old at the time and died in his home on Christmas Day.

Myrle married her third husband, John Nichols, a year after Jack died, in December 2012. In 2013, Myrle became John’s Power of Attorney and the sole beneficiary in his will. She began writing checks from John’s banking and investment accounts to herself and to cash. Around the same time, two of John’s three life insurances policies had been changed to remove his children and add Myrle as the beneficiary.

In 2014, Myrle used her former name – Plotts – to petition for bankruptcy. In the petition, Myrle claimed that she was a widow, and that John Nichols, her current husband, was her landlord, to whom she made monthly $1,500 rental payments.

Closing in

In the summer of 2015, when Corey would be turning 30, law enforcement obtained DNA from his family members so it could be compared with unidentified remains that might turn up. They also shared their latest theory about his unsolved disappearance: that Corey was kidnapped by a family member. Former lead investigator Trooper Philip Davis even mentioned that “someone [came] forward from back then,” but wouldn’t elaborate further. Officials refused to speculate on whether they believed Corey was still alive, but they did confirm that they haven’t discovered a single trace of him or his whereabouts.

On April 5, 2018, John Nichols, Myrle’s husband of five years, received a call from the local agency on aging. They asked him about his investment accounts, which were in the negative. John thought he had about $260,000 in the accounts but admitted that he never saw the account statements. Myrle handled the finances and told him that it cost $8 for a statement to be mailed.

John agreed to an investigation to the missing funds, and in the meantime, Myrle began searching terms like “divorce” and “marriage laws in PA” on her computer. Myrle had John call the agency back to say that everything was fine, but they could hear Myrle giving him instructions in the background and refused to stop their investigation. After that, Myrle, a lifelong nurse, started searching side effects and complications from different prescription drugs online, including her own blood pressure medication, verapamil.

On April 14, nine days after the agency on aging first contacted 77-year-old John Nichols, he was dead. Myrle would claim that John got up from his bed late that night to use the bathroom, ended up urinating on the floor, and then returned to bed. He awoke a little later saying that he couldn’t breathe, and that’s when Myrle called two family members – her daughter-in-law, Cathy Rovenolt, and her daughter Debbie – before contacting 911. Witnesses at the scene were struck by how busy Myrle and Debbie made themselves searching for John’s legal and financial documents while EMTs were trying to resuscitate him in another room.

Grand juries

In May 2021, a grand jury recommended charging Myrle with murdering John Nichols by poisoning him with her own prescription medication. In addition to revealing the details of Myrle’s suspected financial crimes, an expert testified that they believed John’s signature had been forged on several legal and financial documents and that another man impersonated John during phone calls to his insurance company.

Myrle’s son Paul would later admit that Myrle asked him to make those calls claiming to be John. Paul told the grand jury that Myrle gave him gifts of money from time to time, but only if he agreed not to tell John about it. Remember back in 1988, when Paul was only 12 years old, he testified that his father, Ron, confessed to him that he poisoned himself with arsenic-based ant killer and framed Myrle.

A separate grand jury convened in 2021 to review Corey Edkin’s case after his grandmother, Myrle, was charged. James Edkin, Corey’s father, was called before the grand jury as a witness, and although he was bound by a gag order, he did reveal his personal belief that Myrle knows something about Corey’s disappearance. The Union County District Attorney overseeing both cases, however, says there is no evidence that Myrle is involved. Charles Burgess’s family is also hopeful that Myrle’s arrest will lead to movement in his unsolved murder, although police refuse to comment on any rumored connections.

Myrle’s second trial

Myrle went to trial in April 2023, accused of poisoning her late husband, John Nichols, with verapamil, knowing that it would cause his heart to fail. The motive? Myrle defrauded John by illegally taking at least $87,000 from his bank accounts and taking out two loans totaling $27,000 against his life insurance policies without his consent, all while professing her love to other men online. The local agency on aging was catching on, and perhaps John was too, but at any rate, Myrle saw his death as the only way out.

Jurors would hear about some of Myrle’s former burglary charges, but not about her 1988 acquittal for allegedly poisoning her first husband or her familial ties to the cold cases of Corey Edkin and Charles Burgess – that evidence was determined to be too prejudicial. Myrle didn’t testify on her own behalf. Throughout the weeklong trial, Myrle’s defense attorney emphasized that Myrle and John were a married couple with shared finances, and that she had permission to sign the checks she did.

It only took 50 minutes for a jury to find 78-year-old Myrle guilty of first-degree murder, insurance fraud, theft by deception, forgery, perjury, and dealing in unlawful proceeds. She was sentenced in July 2023 to life in prison without the possibility of parole along with 104-294 months for her other charges, to be served consecutively. She was given credit for the 786 days she already served since her arrest and ordered to pay almost $400,000 in restitution.

At sentencing, five of John Nichols’s family members referred to Myrle as “evil.” His daughter, Lori, told Myrle, “Your soul is just too dark to feel anything…you are the definition of evil.”

Myrle filed an appeal for a new trial in August 2023, citing that “errors occurred in jury deliberations as was evidenced in the hasty resolution” and that there was “insufficient evidence to convict.” Myrle contends that she acted lawfully under her marital rights and her status as John’s Power of Attorney. A hearing on her post-sentencing motion was rescheduled for March 2024.

Henry Bush

That’s where Myrle’s case ends for now, but it sounds like the investigation into Corey Edkin’s disappearance is finally starting to heat up again. The cold case’s first major break came in August 2023, nearly 37 years after Corey went missing, when 54-year-old Henry Bush was charged with obstruction after a grand jury determined he had lied about his relationship with Corey’s mother.

There’s no official word whether Henry is suspected of being directly involved with Corey’s disappearance or suspected of knowing more than what he’s shared with investigators so far. Henry’s employer said that when Henry had to appear in court, he wouldn’t say why other than “it was because he got mixed up with the wrong people at the wrong time.”

Henry was 18 years old when he was first interviewed back in 1986. He admitted to being at Debbie’s house the weekend that Corey went missing, but he said that he and Debbie weren’t romantically involved. Debbie said that she knew Henry because he was friends with her babysitter, who stayed at her home for a time before Corey went missing, and that Henry was “like a son” to her.

On Saturday, Henry washed Debbie’s car and spent the night, and on Sunday he attended her older son’s birthday party. Henry said that Debbie drove him to his mother’s home afterward, where he lived. Around 2:00am, Henry went to his grandmother’s home in response to her medical alert alarm. Later that day, Henry returned to Debbie’s home to help her look for Corey.

The next day, someone discovered suspicious items in the burn barrel in Debbie’s backyard – the partially burned remnants of torn children’s clothing and one of Henry Bush’s shirts. Henry admitted that the shirt was his but said he had gotten oil on it from working on Debbie’s car, so she had been using it as a rag.

In 2020, Henry’s story changed. In his latest recollection of events, Henry barely knew Debbie and rarely spent time at her home except through his association with her babysitter. Not only was he not at Debbie’s house the weekend Corey went missing, but he had lost contact with her 1-2 weeks prior. Henry had a new story for his shirt turning up in Debbie’s burn barrel too: he mowed Debbie’s grass as a “one-time deal,” and he wiped the fuel tank with his shirt when it overflowed while filling it up. He discarded it in the burn barrel afterward.

Henry also offered a new theory that Corey’s body was disposed of in an Allenwood gas station dumpster about five miles from his home. When asked where he heard that information, Henry said it was from a newspaper article he read early in the investigation. No such article exists, and Henry is the only person to provide that information to police.

Henry Bush waived his preliminary hearing, and his formal arraignment was scheduled for November 2023. The current lead investigator, Trooper Brian Watkins, is “confident” that “the individuals who caused this tragedy will be brought to justice.” He’s optimistic about advanced forensic technology and cooperation from individuals close to the case. There is a $10,000 reward offered for any information leading to Corey’s whereabouts.

Cold case links

People who have been interviewed in recent years about Corey Edkin’s case say they were asked about individuals connected to the 1986 murder of Rickey Wolfe and the 1989 disappearance and presumed murder of Barbara Miller. Rickey and Barbara’s murder cases are already linked: investigators believe that Barbara knew who killed Rickey and was about to share that information with police. The people involved in all three cases tend to overlap, and there is at least one “reported link between [Debbie, Corey’s mother] and an individual in the Barbara Miller case.”

In our next episode, we’ll focus on Rickey Wolfe and Barbara’s Miller’s cases, shedding more light on their connections to everyone and everything we’ve covered so far, and wrapping up our effort to detangle an extensive web of information and get closer to resolution nearly 40 years later.  

We remind you that if you have any information regarding Corey’s disappearance, or any other serious crime, to contact Pennsylvania Crime Stoppers at 1-800-4PA-TIPS or online here.

Additional resources

COREY EDKIN

MYRLE PLOTTS – Continued thefts and financial crimes

CHARLES BURGESS

MYRLE MILLER – Poisoning homicide of third husband

COREY EDKIN – Latest developments