Patti Adkins was last seen leaving the Honda of America plant in Marysville, Ohio, where she worked. She finished her second shift on June 29, 2001, a few seconds after midnight.
She had been working at the plant for almost ten years and had worked her way up to becoming a supervisor on the assembly line. She was looking forward to a promotion when she vanished. Because of the Fourth of July, the plant closed that night and didn’t open again for a week. No one has ever heard from her again.
At the time Adkins went missing, she was having an affair with a married co-worker. They had been dating on and off for years. His name hasn’t been made public yet. She told her family and friends about the relationship and said that the man was planning to leave his wife for her.
She gave him about $90,000 over the course of several years by spending down her savings and borrowing from her 401k. The money was supposed to help the boyfriend buy out his wife’s share of the business they owned together before he left her for Adkins. Adkins told her boyfriend that she would need to start paying back the 401k loans soon, not long before she went missing.
Adkins told her family and friends that she was going on vacation with her boyfriend to Canada right before she went missing. She put her pets in a kennel and asked her sister to watch over her 7-year-old daughter while she was gone. She said her boyfriend told her they were going to a cabin in the middle of nowhere with no phone service, so she wouldn’t be able to call her family. He also told her not to bring anything with her because they would buy everything she needed when they got there.
Adkins asked a female friend to drive her to work the night she went missing so she could start her vacation with her boyfriend. She told her friend that her boyfriend had to give a male coworker a ride home and had told her to hide in the back of his pickup truck until he dropped off the other man.
Even though her boyfriend told her not to bring anything, Adkins had packed a small duffel bag in teal. She told her friend that it was something blue that she had bought at Victoria’s Secret. No one has ever found the bag or what was in it.
Adkins was supposed to see her hairdresser when she got back from vacation, but she never showed up. Her sister reported her missing on July 8 when she didn’t come home to get her daughter. She left her car in the garage and all of her things in the house where they were.
When her boyfriend was asked, he said that he and Adkins had no plans to go on vacation together, that he had never had an affair with her, and that he barely knew her. He and his friend said they left the factory together on June 29, drove 30 miles toward their hometown of Canton, Ohio, stopped at a Burger King, waited 45 minutes in the drive-through line, got their food, and went home.
The boyfriend’s wife backed up their story by saying that her husband came home as usual at 2:30 a.m. and that she had no idea he was having an affair. The Burger King manager, on the other hand, said that they were never busy early in the morning and that no one would have had to wait 45 minutes in the drive-through to get their food.
The boyfriend of Adkins let the police search his house, where they found a new truck bed cover in the garage. The boyfriend bought it on June 26 and said he used it to cover fishing gear in the back of his truck. He put it on the truck in the morning of June 29 and took it off on July 8. He didn’t drive the truck very often, but on the night Adkins went missing, he drove it to work.
When the police looked at the cover, they found cat hairs and a small spot of blood on it. The hair came from Adkins’ cats, according to her vet, but the spot of blood is too small for authorities to test for DNA. Police also found things at the boyfriend’s house that Adkins said she had given him, which went against what he said about how well they knew each other.
The boyfriend was asked about the case in a polygraph test, which he failed. Soon after Adkins went missing, he quit his job at the Honda plant and never went back.
In 2006, Adkins was officially ruled dead. Since she went missing, her bank accounts have not been touched. Her friends and family said she was happy with her life and job and that she still got along well with her ex-husband. Both the authorities and her family think that she was killed. Her case hasn’t been solved yet.
