Ryan Widmer
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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com/forensictales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In the summer of August 2008, the young lives of Sarah and Ryan Widmer from Ohio were forever changed. What began as an ordinary evening at home became a chilling mystery.

when Sarah mysteriously died in the bathtub. As their families grieved her sudden death, whispers of foul play and conspiracy filled the air. And the question quickly became, what really happened to Sarah? And why did she die so young in that bathtub? This is Forensic Tales, episode number 184, The Ryan Whitmer Story.

Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.

Forensic Tales is a weekly true crime podcast covering real, spine-tingling stories with a forensic science twist. Some cases have been solved with forensic science, while others have turned cold. Every remarkable story sends us a chilling reminder that not all stories have happy endings.

As a one-woman show, your support helps me find new compelling cases, conduct in-depth fact-based research, and produce and edit this weekly show. You can support my work in two simple ways. Become a valued patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales or leave a positive review. Before we get to the episode, we've got two brand new supporters that I want to thank.

Thank you so much to Benjamin G. and Brittany D. for becoming the show's newest patrons. Now, let's get to this week's episode. In August 2008, Sarah and Ryan Widmer were just your typical all-American young couple from Ohio. 24-year-old Sarah worked as a dental hygienist at a dental practice, and 27-year-old Ryan worked in sports marketing as a sports planner.

By August 2008, they had celebrated four months of marriage together. Sarah and Ryan went to Costa Rica for their honeymoon and planned a trip to Cancun in the next couple of months. They also had plans to adopt a puppy together, a major step in their relationship before having kids. By all accounts, Sarah and Ryan's lives, as well as their marriage, were as bright as ever.

But all of that was about to come crashing down one night in August of 2008. On August 11, 2008, Ryan and Sarah had dinner at home. Neither one of them felt like cooking, so they had leftovers—hamburgers, potatoes, and corn on the cob. After finishing dinner, they sat together on the couch and watched some TV.

At first, they watched an episode of one of Sarah's favorite shows. But after that, she let him switch the channel to put the football game on. After they watched TV a bit together, Sarah told Ryan that she was going to go upstairs and take a bath before going to bed. She said she was tired and wasn't feeling that great. Little did Ryan know that this would be the last time he saw his wife alive.

At 10.49 p.m., a hysterical Ryan dialed Warren County's Hamilton Township's 911 system. Throughout the seven-minute emergency call, Ryan told dispatchers he thought his wife, 24-year-old Sarah, might have fallen asleep in the bathtub and thought she might be dead.

Police and paramedics were immediately dispatched to their home, and the 911 operators kept Ryan on the phone to get as much information as possible about what exactly was happening. Ryan said he was downstairs watching TV, and when he came upstairs to check on his wife, he said he found her lying face down in the bathtub.

He said his wife was known to, quote, fall asleep in the tub all the time. So he feared that's what happened. But now she wasn't responding. While on the phone with 911, dispatchers asked him if he knew how to perform CPR. At first, he sort of hesitated and said that he learned it once, but it was a long time ago. So 911 told him not to worry. They would help him do it while they waited for paramedics to arrive.

To try and save Sarah, they needed Ryan to start CPR. The 911 operator also told Ryan to drain all the water from the bathtub and pull her out. So Ryan put the phone down for a few seconds while he drained the tub and pulled his wife out, which took about 29 seconds, according to the 911 transcript. After Ryan got Sarah out of the tub, Ryan attempted CPR following the dispatcher's instructions.

Then about six minutes later, the first responding officer arrived at the house, Deputy Steve Bishop with the Warren County Sheriff's Office. Deputy Bishop went straight to the master bedroom where he saw Sarah. According to his own police report, she was lying naked on the carpet floor of the master bedroom. That's where Ryan said he moved her after pulling her out of the water.

Ryan was standing next to Sarah wearing only boxer shorts. Before paramedics arrived, Deputy Bishop took over doing CPR, but nothing seemed to be working. And according to Deputy Bishop's police report, he noticed a pinkish white foam coming out of her nose and mouth, a telltale sign of drowning.

When paramedics from the Hamilton Township Fire and Rescue Department finally got to the house, they tried opening Sarah's airway by attempting to place a bag valve mask over her nose and mouth, but that didn't seem to work either. Sarah's head kept falling, causing the mask to pop off. So next they tried using a defibrillator. They placed the pads over her body to shock her heart back into its normal rhythm, but that also failed.

Paramedics next made two attempts to intubate Sarah while still in the bedroom. The first one instantly failed. On the second attempt, they performed the Selleck maneuver so that they could see her vocal cords and place the tube in her trachea. Paramedics then decided they needed to transport her to the hospital while continuing to try to get her to breathe.

Before they started driving to the hospital, paramedics tried putting in an IV, but they couldn't find a good enough vein in either her right or her left arm. So they tried to start an IV on her external jugular vein on the left side of her neck, and that eventually worked. While they headed to the hospital, they attempted a fourth intubation, but no luck.

By the time Sarah arrived at the Bethesda Aero Springs Hospital, she wasn't breathing and still didn't have a pulse. At 11.41 p.m., after nearly 20 minutes of being treated in the emergency room, 24-year-old Sarah Widmer was pronounced dead. The young dental hygienist had apparently fallen asleep in the bathtub and drowned.

Ryan and Sarah met through mutual friends and were set up on a blind date at a local bar. From the moment their first date ended, they were inseparable. They hit it off instantly, and the first date quickly became a second date, and then a third, and then a fourth.

A few months after they started dating, Ryan and Sarah purchased a house together. Then after they moved in, Ryan popped the question, to which Sarah immediately responded, yes. It was supposed to be a happily ever after for both Sarah and Ryan. It was supposed to be. But not all stories have happy endings.

The first time the police questioned Ryan was at the hospital. He told investigators that he was at home with Sarah that night. He said he was watching a football game on TV downstairs while Sarah bathed upstairs. According to Ryan, this was around 10 o'clock p.m. He said about 40 minutes later, he went upstairs to check on Sarah and to go to bed. And that's when he discovered his motionless wife in the bathtub.

He said his first thought after seeing her was that she might have fallen asleep. But when the investigators asked if she had ever fallen asleep in the tub before, he said no, but she would often fall asleep in some pretty strange places. So he just assumed that's what happened. She accidentally fell asleep in the bathtub.

During this conversation at the emergency room, the police asked Ryan if it was okay for a couple of the officers to take a look around the house. They said they needed to get a better picture of how Sarah might have fallen asleep in the tub. And without hesitation, without even second guessing, Ryan agreed. Now, a few observations stood out when the officers started looking around Ryan and Sarah's house.

Insights that made them question Ryan's original story. For starters, they thought the bathroom looked unusually dry. According to Detective Lieutenant Jeff Barley from the Hamilton Township Police Department, the bathroom floor and the items lying on the floor, including magazines, a bath mat, clothes, and a brown towel, all appeared dry.

He also wrote in his police report that the bathtub itself even looked dry. It almost looked like there hadn't been much, if any, water in it recently. He only said he saw a couple drops of water near the drain, but that was it. Even more disturbing were the bath items around the tub.

According to this same lieutenant, all of Sarah's bath products were still neatly placed around the tub. The only items inside the tub were a loofah and a bottle of dial soap. Everything else, though, was still perfectly sitting around the edge of the bathtub. But it wasn't only the bathroom that seemed off to investigators.

When the officers thoroughly searched the rest of the house, other strange things seemed to pop up, like the TV. Ryan told investigators that he was downstairs watching a Cincinnati Bengals football game while Sarah was upstairs in the bathtub. But when the police officers turned the TV on, it was set to an entirely different channel, not the channel showing the football game.

However, the TV in the master bedroom was set to the Bengals game. Even though Ryan told the police that he found Sarah in the bathtub and she was asleep, they had their doubts. The following day, August 12th, Dr. Russell Updegrove, the Warren County coroner, performed Sarah's autopsy. Based on his review of her body, he determined that Sarah's cause of death was drowning and

But that's not all he discovered. Dr. Updegrove discovered several injuries covering Sarah's body, including a bruise on the right side of her forehead, a petechial hemorrhage on the inner surface of her eyelid, a bruise on the left side of her neck, a contusion on the back of her neck, an abrasion on her left armpit, and a cut on her upper lip.

not injuries consistent with your typical accidental drowning case, at least not according to Dr. Updegrove. Internally, Sarah had even more injuries. She had deep muscle hemorrhaging in her neck and contusions on her scalp. Again, not injuries consistent with a normal bathtub drowning. Dr. Updegrove ordered a complete toxicology report to see if there might be any drugs or alcohol in Sarah's system.

But before the results of the toxicology came back, he had already made up his mind about what happened to Sarah as well as the manner of death. Based on her injuries, both internal and external, he ruled Sarah's death a homicide. According to him, this wasn't an accidental drowning in a bathtub.

He believed the injuries on Sarah's body were caused before she died, and they weren't consistent with injuries commonly resulting from CPR either. On top of the injuries, the police believed there were significant inconsistencies in Ryan's story. First was the football game. When they turned the TV on, it was turned to an entirely different channel. It wasn't on the Bengals game.

But according to the police, his story had even more consistencies that wasn't just football. One major inconsistency was how he said Sarah's body was positioned in the tub when he found her. Initially, he told 911 that Sarah was lying face down. But later on, he told one of the nurses in the emergency room at the hospital that she was lying face up. Maybe this was a simple mistake.

He could have mistakenly said his wife was lying in the bathtub, but was it face up or was it face down? According to the police, this was a major red flag, a red flag that meant Ryan was lying. Two days after Sarah died, Ryan was arrested on aggravated murder charges on August 13th, 2008. That same day that he was arrested, a search warrant was executed to search his and Sarah's house.

This search warrant allowed investigators to conduct a much more deeper search of the house than they did the same day that Sarah died. First, the investigators looked for fingerprints on the bathtub where Sarah died. They wanted to find out if there was going to be any other prints on the tub besides Sarah's. According to the police report, they found several marks in the middle of the tub that looked like either fingerprints or handprints.

Danny Harness, a latent fingerprint expert from the Miami Valley Crime Lab, was brought to the house to examine the prints. But when he got there, he couldn't see any visible prints, even after using ultraviolet imaging. But instead of moving on, the police decided to have the entire bathtub removed from the bathroom and sent to the Miami City Lab for more testing.

At the crime lab, they found several fingerprints using fingerprint powder. But when the fingerprints were examined, they were determined to have, quote, no identifying characteristics, end quote. In other words, they were useless. They couldn't be compared or matched against either Sarah or Ryan.

Besides the bathtub, other items from the house were also collected and sent to the Miami Valley Crime Lab for testing. Inside the bathroom, the police recovered and collected a bottle of Lysol wipes, and they wondered if Ryan might have used the wipes to try to clean up blood or any other forensic evidence. But when the bottle of Lysol wipes was tested, it came back negative for any presence of blood.

Carpet samples from the master bedroom were also collected and sent to the lab. Unlike the Lysol wipes, the carpet samples did test positive for blood. Now, these were sections of the carpet directly underneath where Sarah was lying when emergency personnel arrived. So finding her blood there might not be so surprising. Miami Valley also did DNA testing on samples collected from underneath Sarah's fingernails.

Most of the sample contained Sarah's own DNA, but they also found an unknown female DNA profile underneath her fingernails. The DNA profile was uploaded to DNA databases, but they couldn't identify a match. They couldn't determine who the unknown female DNA belonged to.

Sarah's mom was excluded. The female nurses who treated her at the hospital were also excluded. And even the female police officers who responded to the house were also ruled out. From the very moment that Ryan was arrested, he maintained his innocence in his wife's death. Although he wasn't with her in the bathtub that night, he stuck to his original story that she must have fallen asleep and accidentally drowned.

Despite never falling asleep in the bathtub before, at least not that we know of, he claimed Sarah was known to fall asleep anywhere and everywhere. It was almost like a running joke with Sarah's family and friends that Sarah Widmer could fall asleep anywhere. But the police and prosecution weren't buying his story. How does a healthy 24-year-old woman simply fall asleep and die in the bathtub?

Why wouldn't she wake up the moment her head hit the water? And what could explain the internal and external injuries she had when she died? If you asked Ryan, he said it was simply an accident. She fell asleep. Her head fell below the water and she drowned. But if you ask the prosecution that same question, their answer is different. They say that Sarah was murdered.

They found no traces of drug or alcohol in her system. There was no evidence that an intruder broke into the house. So suspicion centered almost immediately on the only other person at home that night, Sarah's newlywed husband of only four months, Ryan Widmer. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. Was Ryan telling the truth or was he trying to cover up something? Brace yourself for a rollercoaster ride of emotions as we uncover the shocking truth that will leave you questioning everything.

Ryan went to trial for aggravated murder in March of 2009. Throughout the trial, no one argued about the manner in which she died. Both the prosecution and Ryan's defense agreed on the cause of death. Sarah Widmer drowned. But the bigger question at trial was how. How did a seemingly healthy, young 20-something-year-old woman accidentally drown in a bathtub?

Was it an intentional drowning, as the prosecution alleged, or was it an accidental drowning, as the defense argued? The answers to these questions would come down to which forensic expert the jury believed. The prosecution argued Ryan had intentionally drowned his wife, and the entire scene was staged right from the beginning, starting with the 911 call.

At the beginning of the call, Ryan says, quote, my wife fell asleep in the bathtub and I think she died, end quote. According to the prosecution, this statement suggests the call was staged. How could Ryan know she fell asleep in the bathtub if he was downstairs watching a football game? He didn't speculate when he said it either.

He didn't say, I think my wife might have fallen asleep in the tub and now she's not breathing. He said, my wife fell asleep in the bathtub and I think she's dead. The 911 dispatcher asked Ryan if he had started performing CPR on his wife yet. And Ryan said, quote, as much as I could, what little bit I know, end quote.

Well, the prosecution argued this was simply a lie. How could Ryan have performed CPR on Sarah as much as he could if she was still in the water? Because by this point, she was still in the bathtub. Now, this leads the prosecution to their third point about the 911 call.

The third thing that the prosecution pointed out about the call is that Ryan hadn't pulled Sarah out of the bathwater until the 911 dispatcher asked him to. On the phone call, the dispatcher asked Ryan, quote, she's still in the bathtub? And Ryan said, yes, end quote.

Now, they thought this was strange that the first reaction after seeing his wife unconscious in the tub wasn't to pull her out even before calling 911. Then finally, there was his statement to the 911 dispatcher about how exactly he found Sarah, a statement that the prosecution really latched onto throughout the trial.

According to the 911 audio recording, Ryan said that she was lying face down in the tub, but later on, he told the nurses at the hospital that she was face up. So which one is it? Face down or face up? Throughout the entire trial, the prosecution kept going back to the 911 call.

They pointed out all of Ryan's inconsistencies and said that the entire phone call was staged. It just seemed like Ryan was trying to say too much. He told the dispatcher everything they did the night without them even asking. They even went as far as to say that they don't even believe that he was attempting CPR like he said he was.

To the prosecution, Ryan orchestrated the entire 911 call to cover up the fact that he murdered his wife. The next area of intense scrutiny was the bathroom. The prosecution argued that there was simply nothing wet inside the bathroom except for a few drops of water near the tub's drain. Other than that, the tub was almost completely dry, at least according to the police reports.

And they also alleged that the paramedics who treated her that night said that Sarah's hair was only damp. It wasn't soaking wet like you'd expect it to be if she had just been dragged out of the water. And the rest of her body also appeared to be completely dry.

So the prosecution argued that if Sarah had drowned and Ryan had pulled her out of the bathtub, almost everything should have been wet. The floor, the towels, the clothes that were on the floor, everything should have been wet. But again, based on the police reports, everything was dry. But it wasn't only the bathroom that screamed inconsistencies, at least according to the prosecution.

There was also the television. Based on Ryan's story, he said he was downstairs watching a Cincinnati football game when Sarah said she was going upstairs to take a bath. But when the police searched the home, the downstairs TV was turned to a different channel. It wasn't the same channel that showed the football game. But the most compelling argument of the prosecution's case wasn't the 911 call.

It wasn't the dry bathroom. It wasn't about what channel the TV was turned to. The entire case centered around the forensic evidence, specifically what the coroner documented during his autopsy. The prosecution called Dr. Updegrove to the stand. Now, Dr. Updegrove was the county coroner who performed Sarah's autopsy the day after she died.

His testimony was the heart of the state's case against Ryan. Dr. Updegrove testified that for Sarah to have a dry body and damp hair, one likely explanation would be that her head was pushed over the tub's edge. It could have been pushed forward or backward, either in running or full water.

An interesting point that Dr. Updegrove said during his testimony was that it might not have been a bathtub. He believed Sarah could have been drowned in either the bathroom sink or even the toilet. That could explain why the bathtub wasn't as wet when the police and paramedics got there. It was only assumed that the bathtub was involved because of Ryan's story.

But Dr. Updegrove believed Sarah's head could have also been put in either the toilet or the sink with running water, and that caused her to drown. During his testimony at trial, Dr. Updegrove didn't dispute the fact that Sarah drowned. But based on his observation at the autopsy, he believed she was murdered.

He specifically testified to Sarah's internal and external injuries, including bruising and hemorrhaging on her head, neck, and face. Based on his expertise and experience, these injuries weren't consistent with a typical accidental drowning. And more importantly here, they weren't quoted as resuscitation artifacts either.

In Sarah's case, police and emergency room doctors did everything they could to try and save her. Now, this included five separate attempts to intubate her. None of them worked until they got to the hospital. They also tried several times to get an IV in her arms, and neither of them worked. They were only able to get an IV in through her neck.

And multiple people tried CPR on her, which included chest compressions. If you've been keeping track, that is a lot of trauma for anybody. Now, in many cases, these life-saving efforts will leave behind injuries referenced as resuscitation artifacts.

So when Sarah arrived for the autopsy, her body was covered with both internal and external bruises. But according to Dr. Updegrove, the prosecution's expert witness, these injuries that he observed weren't from these life-saving efforts. They weren't from CPR. They weren't from multiple attempts to intubate her or anything else they did that night.

Instead, he believed that they were likely injuries that Ryan inflicted on her based on his expert opinion and that these injuries likely happened either before she died or while he was killing her.

Between the 911 call that the state alleged was staged, the lack of water at the scene, specifically the bathroom and Sarah's own body, and the presence of bruises and hemorrhaging, the prosecution explained to the jury that it must have been Ryan who held her head underwater and drowned her. Therefore, based on the forensic evidence, he should be found guilty of murder.

Ryan's defense was built on the same premise as the prosecution, but they believe the evidence told a much different story. Regarding the 911 phone call, Ryan's defense lawyers directly challenged the state's claim that it was a staged phone call. They claimed Ryan sounded very upset, like any husband would sound if they just found their wife unresponsive in the bathtub.

They also said that everything the 911 dispatcher asked him to do, he did. He pulled her out of the water when he was told to. He started CPR when he was told to. And he waited for the police and paramedics to get there to take over, just like he was told to do.

So they argued that there was nothing about the phone call that was staged. And they also pointed out that everyone simply acts different to traumatic events. And certainly, finding your wife unresponsive in a bathtub would be highly traumatic for anyone. So there's no right or wrong way to act. Everyone responds differently.

The defense countered the state's claim about Ryan making assumptions that his wife fell asleep in the tub by pointing toward her history of falling asleep. Several of Sarah's close friends took the stand and testified about her sleepiness and constant headaches. They all said that she got a lot of headaches and that her usual response to it was to go and take a nap.

According to her coworkers who worked with her the day that she died, Sarah had complained about a headache that day. And Ryan said the same thing. He claimed that Sarah talked about not feeling well, and that's why she decided to go upstairs and take a bath.

So when Ryan told 911 that he thought she fell asleep, he was just guessing that's what happened because she was known to fall asleep at a drop of a dime. He wasn't staging a 911 call like the prosecution wanted the jury to believe. When it came time for Ryan's defense to talk about this scene, they tried using the state's own arguments against them.

First, the state claimed nothing in the bathroom was wet, not even the bath mat or the towels right next to the tub. Well, the defense tried to explain to the jury that this evidence actually contradicts the prosecution's claim that Ryan drowned Sarah.

Because if the towels were wet, that should have been a telltale sign that Ryan cleaned up a watery mess in the aftermath of a forced drowning. They also told the jury that no freshly dried towels were found in the dryer either. So it's not like Ryan used the towels to try and clean up any water and then put them in the dryer.

So the defense argued, hey, the scene being dry actually supports our claim that Ryan is innocent. It doesn't support the state's argument that a murder took place there. Because even if they want to argue Ryan was drowning Sarah in the bathtub, the toilet or the kitchen or the sink, right?

Wouldn't there be water everywhere in that case as well? But again, using the prosecution's own evidence against them, the defense said that a dry bathroom actually supports more of a claim that Sarah fell asleep. The defense also argued that there was no evidence of a cleanup either. Ryan hadn't used any cleaning supplies to clean anything up.

He didn't use any towels to even dry the bathroom floor. Nothing was used because if he had, this would have pointed towards his guilt. So the defense maintained that almost everything about the scene, the bathroom, pointed towards an accidental drowning.

Like the prosecution, the most significant piece of evidence for Ryan's defense lawyer wasn't the 911 call or the scene itself. It was the forensic evidence collected at the autopsy, specifically Sarah's injuries. Two days after Warren County Coroner Dr. Updegrove performed Sarah's autopsy, a second autopsy was performed.

But this second autopsy wasn't performed by the county's coroner. Instead, Ryan's family paid for and hired their own forensic pathologist to conduct an independent autopsy. On August 15, 2008, Dr. Warner Spitz, an expert in forensic pathology, also examined Sarah's body.

And like Dr. Updegrove, the county coroner, he also believed the cause of death was drowning. But, and this is a big but, he disagreed that this was a homicide. In his expert opinion, he would have ruled her death as undetermined.

During the trial, Dr. Spitz was called to testify on behalf of Ryan's defense, and he testified that he also saw external bruising on several parts of Sarah's body, including the front of her neck, her left arm near her elbow, her upper lip in the back of her neck. Internally, Sarah also had visible injuries, including scalp injuries, a liver tear, and hemorrhaging on her neck.

But unlike Dr. Updegrove, the county coroner, he didn't find any petechial hemorrhaging. The major difference between Dr. Spitz and Dr. Updegrove's findings was the cause of the injuries. Dr. Updegrove testified for the state, claiming the injuries came from a struggle. They came from Ryan attacking Sarah and forcing her underwater until she eventually drowned.

But Dr. Spitz completely disagreed. He testified to the jury that he believed the injuries could have come from repeated CPR attempts as well as attempts to intubate her. Although he couldn't say for sure if CPR was the cause of the injuries, he also couldn't rule it out either.

So based on his inability to either rule in or rule out CPR, as well as all the other life-saving procedures they did on Sarah that night, he couldn't rule them in or out as causing her injuries. So in his expert opinion, he would have ruled the death as undetermined. He wouldn't have been able to classify it as a homicide like the county coroner suggested.

Ryan's defense lawyers also argued that the injuries found on her body were likely a result of prolonged CPR and multiple intubation attempts that night. This happened inside the house, inside the ambulance, and at the hospital. So in their opinion, it's very likely that all of these life-saving and very invasive attempts occurred

could have caused some bruising and hemorrhaging. Again, we're talking about multiple people performing CPR, moving her body, and at least five different attempts to intubate her. It could have caused some injuries, according to Ryan's defense. Another powerful argument for the defense was the lack of defensive wounds.

When Sarah's body arrived for the autopsy, she didn't have any defensive wounds on her hands, feet, or arms. In fact, she had recently gotten a manicure, and all of her fingers were still perfectly manicured. There wasn't even a single chip on her nail polish. And there also wasn't any blood or Ryan's DNA underneath her fingernails. Then there was Ryan's body.

When the police and paramedics arrived, there wasn't a single scratch on his body. Plus, he was only wearing a pair of boxer shorts, so if he did have any injuries, they would have been almost immediately visible, but none existed. No scratches, no marks, nothing. So Ryan's defense argued that if he had intentionally drowned her, why wasn't there any evidence of that?

There wasn't any evidence of a struggle. If Sarah was about to be killed by her husband, wouldn't you expect her to fight back? She was a 24-year-old, apparently healthy woman. Why would a woman like that put up a fight to save her life? Ryan's lawyers argued that Sarah likely fell asleep while in the bathtub, but they also didn't rule out other possibilities.

According to the defense, she could have also experienced some type of medical emergency. It's possible she had a seizure or experienced a complication with her heart. Maybe the real cause of death was missed and undetectable during both of her autopsies. The defense also explained why her body was dry and why her hair was damp.

They said it was simple. Skin dries faster than hair. And by the time paramedics got there, her skin had already dried since Ryan was the one who pulled her out of the bathtub. But her hair was still damp because hair generally takes longer to dry than skin does. Now, one of the defense's biggest challenges at trial was how does a healthy adult accidentally fall asleep in the bathtub and die?

Wouldn't she have woken up the moment her head went underwater and she couldn't breathe anymore? Wouldn't that wake her up immediately? No matter the defense's evidence, they couldn't answer any of those questions. They couldn't explain to the jury why Sarah didn't wake up when she went underwater.

Her toxicology reports all came back clean. She didn't have any drugs or alcohol in her system that might have caused her to be in a deep sleep and she didn't notice the water. And the defense's only argument was that Sarah was known to fall asleep quickly. She could fall asleep anywhere and everywhere. But that was it. They had absolutely no evidence to explain why she didn't wake up after her head went under the water.

The defense might not have had an answer to that question, but the prosecution did. According to the state, Sarah didn't come up for air because Ryan held her down. She didn't fall asleep. She was forced down. Once the defense and the prosecution rested, the case was handed over to the jury to deliberate. They needed to decide which forensic expert they believed more.

Dr. Updegrove, the state's coroner, who believed Sarah's injuries didn't come from CPR or other life-saving methods, or Dr. Spitz, the expert forensic pathologist who stated the injuries might have come from CPR. The determining factor for the jury was solely the forensic evidence. Ryan chose not to testify in his own defense, so they didn't get to hear from him directly.

And no one else was home when Sarah died, so they had no eyewitnesses. The case really boiled down to which expert they believed the most. After 22 hours of deliberating, both the state and the defense were on pins and needles waiting for a verdict. It's impossible to say how the jury will lean after such a long deliberation, 22 hours.

Some people say the longer juries deliberate, the more likely the defendant will be acquitted, while others believe the longer the jury deliberates, the more likely they are to be found guilty. But in Ryan's case, after 22 very long hours, the jury returned with a verdict.

They didn't find Ryan guilty of aggravated murder, but they did find him guilty of the lesser and included charge of murder. Now, under Ohio law, aggravated murder would pretty much be the equivalent of first degree murder in other states, while murder is similar to second degree murder.

So ultimately, Ryan was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison. Almost immediately after he was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life, Ryan's lawyers filed a motion for a new trial. His lawyers had discovered that some of the jury members during their deliberation had improperly discussed personal and external matters.

Specifically, it was discovered that some of the jury members had talked about how long it took them to dry off after a shower. One lady on the jury in particular said that she went home, took a shower, and then stood outside of the shower without a towel and she timed how long it would take her body to dry off.

She then went back to court the next day and told the rest of the jury exactly what she did and how long it took. Now, if this wasn't bad enough, then the rest of the jury used this experiment, for lack of a better term, to then influence their decision about the prosecution statement about how dry Sarah's body was.

So four months after the conviction, Ryan's motion for a new trial was granted based on jury misconduct on July 22nd, 2009. You just simply can't have jury going doing their own experiments or considering evidence that wasn't presented at trial. So a retrial was scheduled for May of 2010.

But unlike the first trial, the jury in the second trial couldn't reach a unanimous decision. So ultimately, the judge declared a mistrial. And then a third trial was scheduled for January 2011. But before the start of the third trial, something completely unexpected happened.

Jennifer Crew, a woman from Ohio, contacted the Warren County Prosecution's office and said that she had some new information about Sarah's death. In September 2009, Jennifer Crew watched an episode of the television show Dateline about Sarah's story.

After watching the episode, she decided to contact Ryan, and within a few days, the two of them were regularly communicating via emails, phone calls, and text messages. When Sarah contacted the DA's office, she claimed that on October 29, 2009, she received a phone call from a distraught Ryan Widmer.

Jennifer claimed that Ryan had admitted to her that he killed Sarah, saying, quote, I did it. I did it. I killed Sarah. I did it. End quote. According to Jennifer Crew, Ryan said that on the night Sarah died, they were fighting in the living room about his pornography obsession, cheating, drinking and smoking habits.

The argument then continued upstairs in their bathroom, at which point Sarah had told Ryan that she was done and that their marriage was over. She said she was tired of his drinking, cheating, and porn. That's when Jennifer said that things turned violent. According to Jennifer, Ryan had told her that he punched Sarah in the chest, causing her to fall backward and hit her head.

He said that Sarah must have blacked out because when he went down to check on her, she wasn't breathing. According to Jennifer, Ryan said that he freaked out and started wiping the water on the bathroom floor with towels, thinking of how he could cover up Sarah's death.

He then decided to call 911, and when the 911 dispatcher told him to do CPR, he only pretended to breathe into the phone. And Jennifer claimed that he never tried to perform CPR. He was just pretending.

Jennifer also claimed Ryan admitted to her that he knew he messed up when the nurse at the hospital asked how Sarah was positioned in the bathtub because he had told 911 that she was lying face down. But then he made a big mistake and told the nurse at the hospital that she was face up. According to Jennifer, that's the moment that Ryan knew he had made a big mistake.

Jennifer told the authorities that she promised Ryan that she wouldn't say anything about his confession. And according to her, Ryan allegedly threatened her by saying, quote, I hope not because I wouldn't want you to be where Sarah's at, end quote. According to Jennifer, after Ryan's threat, she feared for her safety and she thought about calling the authorities.

But instead of going to the police, Jennifer and Ryan continued communicating through late November 2009. It wasn't until June of 2010, after she found out about Ryan's second trial had ended in a mistrial, that she decided to come forward, around the same time his third trial was scheduled to begin.

Ryan's third trial began in January 2011. Almost all of the same evidence in the first two trials was presented during the third, with one key exception, Jennifer Cruz's testimony. Ryan's defense tried to argue that Jennifer's testimony should be completely thrown out because she's a known drug user with several misdemeanor theft convictions.

But the judge disagreed and allowed her testimony to be presented as evidence for the prosecution. The third criminal trial lasted four weeks and included over 40 witnesses, including the paramedics who treated Sarah, the cops who investigated her death, and the two forensic pathologists who performed her autopsies.

But this third trial had additional witnesses who testified for the defense, including more of Sarah's friends and coworkers. Several friends and coworkers testified that Sarah would often fall asleep in her car before work or even during her lunch breaks. They also testified that she had severe allergies and often complained about headaches and stomach aches.

According to her coworkers, at least one of Sarah's headaches was so bad that she had to go into a dark room at the dental clinic where she worked to simply lie down. Sarah's close friends also testified about her sleepiness.

Friends described incidences where Sarah would fall asleep anywhere, and one particular friend had testified that she had even fallen asleep while tailgating at an NFL Cincinnati Bengals football game. Another testified that she fell asleep while watching a movie in the middle of the afternoon. And another testified that she saw Sarah fall asleep at a bar.

Evidence was also introduced that Sarah was diagnosed with a functional heart murmur in November 1984. But the prosecution had an expert, Dr. Charles Jeffrey Lee, an expert in pathology, testify that this innocent quote-unquote heart murmur that she was diagnosed with in 1984 wouldn't have had anything to do with her death.

None of this new testimony was able to persuade the jury. After closing arguments, the trial court provided jury instructions for the offense of murder and the lesser included offense of voluntary manslaughter. When the jury returned from deliberation, they found Ryan guilty of murder. Once again, Ryan was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

Today, Ryan Widmer is serving his 15-year-to-life sentence in an Ohio prison. He is currently appealing his conviction, but so far, all of his appeals have been denied. Ryan's conviction was largely based on the evidence presented by the prosecution's expert forensic witnesses, including the coroner who performed Sarah's autopsy.

All of this evidence pointed toward the conclusion, Ryan must have drowned Sarah in the bathtub that night. But what do you think? Which forensic expert do you believe? The prosecution or the defense? Did Ryan drown his wife of only four months after getting into a fight about drinking and cheating? Or did Sarah, a 24-year-old seemingly healthy woman...

accidentally fall asleep in the bathtub, and drown like his defense claims. To share your thoughts on the story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales. After each episode, I release a bonus episode where I share my personal thoughts and opinions about the case.

You'll want to listen to this one because I'm going to share with you what I think about Ryan's case. And I'm going to let you know my opinions about either his guilt or his innocence. Don't forget to subscribe to Forensic Tales so you don't miss an episode. We release a new episode every Monday. If you love the show, consider leaving us a positive review or tell friends and family about us. You can also support the show through Patreon.

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