SWANTON, Ohio (AP) – Pedaling her bicycle past hidden lanes that cut through fields of 7-foot-high corn, Jennie Price thinks about the two missing children from New Hampshire.

Out here, somewhere in the Midwest near Interstate 80, authorities believe, Manuel Gehring might have buried his son and daughter in shallow graves after shooting them and heading across the country in his van.

“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about those kids,” said Price, whose home sits about a football field away from the highway. “We’ve all been talking about how horrible it is.”

Touched by the children’s disappearance July 4, those who live along the interstate that crosses northern Ohio have given police hundreds of ideas on where to look for a grave. A few have searched on their own.

A motorcyclist in northwest Ohio found freshly turned dirt along a dirt road and told a sheriff’s deputy. It turned out to be where crews buried road kill.

Two women showed up with shovels and started digging around a county dump near the Indiana-Ohio state line a couple of weeks ago, to the dismay of authorities.

“That’s the absolute last thing we want,” said Williams County Sheriff Alan Word. “Somebody doing that could ruin some important evidence.”

The sheriff said the tips, coming from well-meaning people, haven’t yielded anything. They can’t check on all of them, because there have been so many.

Tips have taken his deputies and other authorities to abandoned factories, city parks and dead-end streets.

Gehring, 44, has told police that he shot the children after a fireworks show in Concord, N.H., drove to western Pennsylvania and bought a pickax and a shovel at a Wal-Mart.

He drove on Interstate 80 three to four more hours to somewhere in Ohio or Indiana where he dug graves for Sarah, 14, and Philip, 11, court documents said. Gehring ended up in California, where he was arrested July 10. He is charged with murder.

Gehring described the grave site as being in tall grass near an old-fashioned water pump, a line of wire fence, a concrete slab, discarded concrete pipes and an aged woodpile.

Doris Rosenberger sees a similar sight from her home in Shalersville, in northeast Ohio. Authorities searched woods across the road but she wondered if they should come back.

Rosenberger, 58, and her family have worked out a timeline and believe Gehring would have been in the area late at night or very early in the morning.

“It made me feel creepy even that they were looking here,” she said. “To think somebody could have done that in your own back yard.”

Based on Gehring’s description, the graves could be nearly anywhere in the endless maze of corn and soybean fields that can play tricks on the eyes in northern Ohio and Indiana

“I’m a farmer and lived here all my life, but you get 10 miles away from here and you’re lost,” said Milt Keener, 65, who said he, too, has been keeping watch while driving around.

Deputies searched a pond and around a group of pine trees last month that sit a half-mile off the road at his farm near Toledo Express Airport.

Initially, the search was centered close to the interstate and the airport. Keener said that made residents in his neighborhood more alert.

“If people saw a mound of dirt, I think they’d say something,” he said.

Janice Dunkley, 52, looks out her car window every weekday when she travels to work on the interstate, wondering “where the little kids are.”

“It hits home,” she said, staring out toward a vacant, overgrown field that separates her house from the I-80, which is also the Ohio Turnpike. “These poor kids. You don’t know what to think anymore.”

The search is so vast – a 700-mile stretch from 10 miles north or south of I-80 between Pennsylvania and Nebraska – that some people wonder if the children will be found.

Others think the burial site will turn up when farmers begin harvesting crops or when hunting season begins in the fall.

“There’s so many acres and acres that are undisturbed,” said Bryon Meyer, 25, who installs water and sewer lines around the highway near Fremont. “There’s a good chance nobody will ever find them.”



Eds: AP writer Kristen Gelineau in Cleveland contributed to this report.



On the Net:

Ohio Turnpike: http://www.ohioturnpike.org

AP-ES-08-16-03 0951EDT


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