Nearly a year after investigators exhumed the body of a suspect, the Kentucky State Police has denied the release of DNA results in the Heather Teague case.
KSP’s public records branch on Monday evening responded to a request the Courier & Press submitted in May. It cited Kentucky revised statute 17.175(4), which states “DNA identification records produced from the samples are not public records but shall be confidential and used only for law enforcement purposes.”
That language is certainly clearcut. But earlier this year, KSP appears to have released similar DNA information to a Kentucky resident who filed a records request of their own, according to documents reviewed by the Courier & Press.
They broke down limited findings from testing that took place at DNA Labs International in Florida in 2023, as well as scant information from subsequent tests ordered at Bode Technology in Virginia in 2025.
Aside from collecting a sample from the waistband of a bathing suit bottom, the record shows the Florida lab did little more than visually examine a few items found on Newburgh Beach on the Kentucky side of the Ohio River on Aug. 26, 1995, the day a shirtless bearded man in cutoff shorts allegedly appeared from a grove of trees and dragged Teague – a former Webster County cheerleader and poet – away as she sunbathed. Her family hasn’t seen her since.
In the days afterward, KSP zeroed in on Marvin Ray “Marty” Dill: a Kentucky man whose red Ford Bronco matched the description of a vehicle spotted at the beach that day. He’d also worn shaggy hair and a beard in the past, just like the suspect.
But Heather’s mother, Sarah Teague, as well as Dill’s former lawyer and members of Dill’s family have all said he was clean-shaven and his hair close-cropped by the time Heather Teague vanished. Nevertheless, officials still amassed outside his trailer in Poole, Kentucky, five days after the disappearance. And around 3:15 a.m. on Sept. 1, 1995, Dill was declared dead from what police say was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
KSP exhumed Dill’s body on Aug. 25, 2025, one day before the 30th anniversary of Teague’s abduction.
The items tested at Bode included some of his bones and teeth, records show. There were also the bathing suit bottoms found at the scene, two towels, carpet samples from Dill’s Bronco, and “buccal standards” – or cells from the inside of the cheek – from two other people.
The record didn’t include any actual results. It said only that the specimens would be entered into Kentucky’s DNA index, where they could be “routinely searched.”
The Courier & Press sought more expansive records from Bode, but were denied.
Keshia Dill, the wife of Marty Dill’s son, told the Courier & Press in April that KSP relayed to her that none of Marty Dill’s DNA had been found on the bathing suit bottoms − potentially a key bit of information in the family’s quest to clear Dill’s name. A reporter left KSP spokeswoman Sherry Bray a message seeking confirmation, but didn’t receive a response.
For Sarah Teague, the DNA question is yet another roadblock in her 31-year mission to find out what happened to her daughter.
“I just don’t understand why somebody won’t just say ‘this is where she is’ and let us bring her home,” she said.
A new search for Heather Teague in the Green River
Another effort to do just that could unfold in the next few days.
Teague has spent three decades fielding gruesome and heart-wrenching tips on Heather’s potential fate. The latest arrived over the weekend: that Heather’s body had been put into the kind of toolbox you bolt to the back of a pickup truck and then dumped into the Green River.
Sarah Teague said volunteers are working on compiling sonar equipment to conduct a search once the water recedes to safer levels.
“That is happening as we speak,” she said.
She’s also desperate to get KSP or Ramsey Dallam – the special investigator in the Kentucky Attorney General’s office tasked with handling any prosecution in the case – to follow up on the flurry of activity outside Cagey’s General Store in Reed, Kentucky last year.
That June, Teague got a call from a woman she asked the Courier & Press not to name. The woman reportedly told her she had gone to KSP in 2023 and passed on a tip that Heather’s body, separate from her head, was buried in a well behind the store. It was similar to a 2000 tip already nestled in KSP’s case files.
On July 3, the Courier & Press and Teague’s friend Catherine Frederick combed over that very spot. Two months later a man with an excavator dug into the well as Heather’s sisters, Holly and Haven, looked on. And that’s where they found the bones.
Multiple fragments sat alongside a long, intact skeletal remain. The excavator also unearthed duct tape and red carpet fibers that could align with a Ford Bronco. Less than 24 hours later, however, Henderson County Coroner Sheila Patterson said an anthropologist who examined the bones ruled they were animal remains, at least partially from a deer.
In December, there was another twist. The handler of a dog trained to pick up the odor of decomposing human remains told the Courier & Press the canine detected just that outside Cagey’s soon after the excavation.
The handler said she shared her findings with KSP and provided a supplemental statement to investigators. Trooper Corey King, spokesman for KSP Post 16 in Henderson, said at the time that investigators would consult with the attorney general’s office on next steps. Police were were even eyeing “certified cadaver canines for further evaluation.”
If that’s happened, investigators haven’t said so publicly.
It’s been a constant battle, Sarah Teague said, to gather information. She emails both KSP and Dallam multiple times a day, spilling her anger and worry onto the page. She said she rarely, if ever, receives a response.
“My daughters are just devastated from holding those bones,” she said. “… It’s the lack of humanity. If I could get a word from the Department of Criminal Investigation – ‘yes, Ms. Teague, the evidence you presented is solid and hard and we are looking into it’ – but I get nothing, unless it’s an automated reply. Can you imagine the disrespect?”
Despite that, she said she will keep searching for the daughter she misses so much.
“We continue to get leads that Heather was poured in concrete and we’ll never find her body. But we know, we know, I know, from the bottom of my heart, that we will find her,” Teague said. “The sad and harsh reality is that we’re gonna have to be the ones to bring her home instead of the agencies that have had leads all these years. That’s what breaks my heart.”
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: KSP denies request for DNA records in Heather Teague case
Reporting by Jon Webb, Evansville Courier & Press / Evansville Courier & Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Jon Webb, Evansville Courier & Press | USA TODAY Network
