27. Call Me When It’s Solved
Previously This Season on Ice Cold Case
Belmont County 911, what’s your emergency?
That’s what they were doing – drug dealers robbing drug dealers knowing the victims weren’t gonna call.
I mean a lot of people didn’t like your dad because he was a snitch.
We didn’t tell her the truth
There was no way I was gonna be able to you know sugarcoat this.
Man y’all know I didn’t do this man. What the –
There was a saying… You gonna kill somebody, do it in Belmont County.
I don’t know what happened
It was an inside job. That’s what everyone always said. It was an inside job.
Hello, You have a prepaid call from… Rico McGhee
That was it. Like they didn’t want to solve the murder or nothing.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You didn't think I'd show, huh
Well, I never expected to hear from you ever in my whole life.
I’ve heard different things, that it was his own gun.
You don't know he killed his uncle. Everybody knows it.
Part 0: The Beginning
I’ve spent the last few weeks reflecting on how I felt when I started investigating the murder of my father, John Cornelius McGhee. In the beginning even just saying that phrase “murder of my father” felt like a fever dream – that didn’t happen to me, that isn’t my life. I saw myself as an audience member in my own story, completely disconnected from the weight of it all. I was watching from the outside, keeping a safe distance, because if I stayed far enough away, maybe it wouldn’t feel real.
My dad’s murder was not just unsolved, it was a cold case – no new leads, no new information – for nearly twenty years. There was so little movement surrounding the case, it almost seemed like people had completely forgotten what happened to my dad. This wasn’t just a cold case, it was frozen. The casefile freezer burned in its neglect. When something stays frozen for that long, you start to think that’s all it will ever be.
My determination sent me down a rabbit hole, a spiral that I was not prepared for, a rollercoaster of emotions that oddly enough, given the circumstances, contained moments of joy and happiness. There have been wins along the way that left me feeling hopeful, encouraged, and inspired. At certain times I really believed I was one phone call away from solving the case. The fulfillment and satisfaction was so close I could feel it, which made it all the more disappointing to watch it slip through my fingers time and time again. Hope is a dangerous thing when it keeps showing up just long enough to convince you it’s worth having.
I remember questioning the outcome before I even began: What happens if I do all of this and I still don’t solve the case? Part of me never imagined I could really do it, and part of me thought there’s no way I’m not going to solve this. But regardless of the legal outcome, I did something I never thought was possible. Against all odds, I got you to care about J.C. McGhee as a father, a brother, a friend, and a victim. I wish that was enough to close this case.
There is no pretending that I’m unaware of what this moment actually is, no dodging the reality of where I’ve landed. I started this journey terrified, every step was taken in the dark unsure of where I was going or what I’d find when I got there. Somewhere along the way, I found comfort in the isolation, in the moments of loneliness, and in the intrinsic motivation that kept pushing me forward even when nothing on the outside was changing.
But now I’m here. And the only thing scarier than a beginning is an ending…
Part 1: The Podcast
When I first started digging into my dad’s case, I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t even really know what I was looking for. I just knew that I couldn’t silence the curiosity that had been building since I found out the truth about my dad’s murder.
For the first ten years my dad was dead, I believed he died of a heart attack and I repeated it like a fact. By the time I learned the truth, the damage of that delay had already been done. Evidence had aged. Memories had faded. Decisions had been made without me ever knowing they existed.
What confused and frustrated me the most was how the case seemed to disappear, especially considering how large and tight-knit the McGhee family presents itself. There are so many siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews – generations of people who loved my dad. And still, somehow his murder had settled into the background and the fact that it was unsolved became an acceptable reality.
There was no moment of accountability. Just a quiet expectation that I would also accept the gap in the story and move on, but I couldn’t move on because I didn’t actually know what I was moving on from.
My knowledge of the case started with a few simple facts. My dad, John Cornelius McGhee, was shot and killed in his home on July 11, 2002 in Bridgeport, Ohio which is in Belmont County. It was a clear homicide paired with a home invasion next door at my aunt Pearl’s house. There were witnesses to the home invasion. There were initial suspects. There were people brought into the station and interviewed for hours. But more importantly, there were several clear motives for killing my dad. But no one was ever charged. The case was never “closed,” it was just sitting cold… and getting colder and colder as decades passed.
It’s bizarre to be thrown into a category – co-victim of crime – but then I joined the niche “inner circle,” co-victim of a cold case. Someone living without answers, potentially forever, unless someone does something. But who would take on the unsolved murder of a black drug dealer in rural industrial Ohio? That doesn’t make headlines. That doesn’t sell a television series. That doesn’t make for a hit podcast.
This project wasn’t born out of curiosity in the way people like to imagine it. It wasn’t a hobby or a passion project. It was a response to a physiological need – I felt it in my bones. I knew if I didn’t start asking questions, no one else was ever going to.
I wasn’t on a crusade to take down the law enforcement officers who worked on my dad’s case. I didn’t think I could succeed where they had failed. At that point, I wasn’t even sure what officials had or hadn’t done. I was desperate to understand J.C. McGhee’s case on a micro and macro level. I needed to understand how a case like this ends up frozen in time – how a person becomes a file, and how a file becomes something no one feels responsible for anymore. And further than that – how an entire town can seem to carry pieces of the same story while a daughter is desperate for answers. I learned very quickly that silence doesn’t mean nothing happened. In this case it means something did and no one wanted to deal with it. Once I started pulling at that thread, it became impossible to stop.
Going from sitting in a Buffalo Wild Wings with my mom and finding out that my dad was murdered to sitting down with suspects, meeting with Belmont County’s Sheriff’s Department and prosecutors, and getting phone calls from strangers saying they have information… was not a trajectory that I anticipated. But it was necessary in order to start putting all of these pieces together. I spent almost a thousand hours talking to people in Belmont County – listening to stories and theories and unofficial testimony – letting the hushed whispers of the town fill in the gaps that were never fully explained in official reports. All conversations were driven by one question: what happened to my dad on July 11, 2002.
This series became a place to document it all – to say names out loud, add context to conversations, and publicly ask questions that should have been asked a long time ago. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but the alternative was letting the story disappear completely… and that was never an option.
This case has moved silently throughout Belmont County for over two decades and I’m here to make sure it never goes quiet again.
Part 2: The Case
Before we go any further, it’s important to lay out what we know and where things stand in the case of the unsolved murder of J.C. McGhee.
John Cornelius McGhee was shot and killed on July 11, 2002 in Belmont County, Ohio. The type of gun, according to various reports and witness testimonies, was either a shotgun or a handgun. From the beginning, J.C.’s death was a murder investigation. Next door to his house lived his sister Pearl and her son Omar. A little over thirty minutes before my dad was shot, between four and six men entered Pearl’s house, tied up Pearl, Omar, and Omar’s girlfriend Kim Smith, and ransacked the home. A few minutes after they left Pearl’s house is when the single shot was fired that killed my dad.
Because the case remains unsolved, it has never officially closed, it simply sat idle.
Five years ago, that is all the information I had about my dad’s case. That is everything I knew. So I spent the last twenty-six episodes taking you through my journey. During that time I’ve gone back through police reports. I’ve read hundreds of pages of witness statements. I made awkward phone calls and knocked on doors. I’ve heard retellings of the stories from secondhand sources, potential suspects, and my own family members who I had never met before. A lot of the story and timeline that exists now is because of my bullish attitude to not take no for an answer and hear someone’s version that should have been formally recorded by investigators a long time ago.
Within the hour that my dad was killed, there were already multiple narratives circulating about what happened that night – completely different versions and explanations of events. After reading through everything and speaking directly with the Belmont County Sheriff’s Department, I have very little clarity about how those narratives were vetted, prioritized, or ruled out.
The number of theories about what happened to my dad seemed endless – a revenge plot, a custody battle, a family feud. It all seems equally plausible and simultaneously hard to prove. With so many people connected to my dad socially, personally, and circumstantially, I started to notice several names pop up repeatedly. Names that weren’t exactly easy to find or willing to talk, but I didn’t let that stop me. Some of these people I found myself, some of them found me. Most of the information I was able to gather was never formally documented at the time.
There were also obvious investigative steps that felt incomplete to me. According to the detectives, evidence was collected but not fully tested. Possibly leads were acknowledged, but lacked follow through. Decisions were made to ignore details without any written explanation for why one direction was pursued over another.
Over time, the theories started to fill in the gaps. But having too many theories worked against me. Between the personal disputes and criminal activity and rumors that spread faster than facts, it felt like I would never get close enough to see the truth clearly. Now so much time has passed that I wasn’t sure if any of these claims could be verified at all.
Throughout this series, I explored those theories carefully. Even with my closeness to the case, I tried not to sensationalize them, but to understand why they could be valid. Mostly, I wanted to understand the root of them – each theory came with an origin story. Those stories typically pinned my dad as an antagonist, and I’ll even admit, there are some lines he straddled that I probably would not have crossed myself. But it has become very clear: there is no single agreed-upon version of events of what happened that morning or why this happened.
In a functioning investigation, conflicting accounts are tested against evidence, timelines are reconstructed. Statements are corroborated or disproven. Over time, the story narrows. That narrowing never fully happened here. Much of what is publicly known about this case now exists because of the work I’ve done over the last five years.
The reality I am living with is this:
The evidence that exists has never been exhausted or examined using modern methods.
Some witnesses were never re-interviewed after initial contact. Decisions made early in the investigation were never clearly explained – not to the public, and not to my family. I guess it’s unfair to say that no one cared or that nothing was done, but this case reached a point where momentum was lost. Once that happens, inertia takes over.
What’s left today is a case defined less by what’s known, and more by what was never fully addressed – a record that exists in pieces, a timeline that still has gaps, a set of questions that has never been conclusively answered, and rumors that continue to rumble through the community about who killed J.C. McGhee.
Even if this podcast didn’t answer all of my questions, it brought a lot to the surface. It put everything regarding this investigation in one place. It documented what exists, and what doesn’t. Oh, and of course… for the first time in twenty-three years, the state of this case is fully visible to the public. It’s not frozen in the form of a rumor or scattered across memories. It’s all laid out, exactly as it stands.
Ice Cold Case was not just a show made for your entertainment. It became an accidental investigative tool. I was able to put out a theory and get feedback in real time from the people closest to the case and draw out people who had been sitting on information for years. As witnesses age, disappear, and die and evidence sits untested whatever details I can gather are all I have left. Now the murder of John Cornelius McGhee exists outside of memory, rumor, and institutional disregard.
Part 3: The System
Hindsight is a powerful thing. A lot of things are more clear in the rearview. It’s much harder to navigate what to do in the heat of the moment, especially when things are moving quickly and nothing is predictable. So I acknowledge that looking at this from my point of view makes it easier to see the holes in the investigation.
When people talk about cold cases, they often focus on one singular thing that went wrong during the investigation – a missed lead or a bad call. People like to blame the one decision that changed everything, but what I’ve come to understand is that cases like this don’t stall because of one mistake. They stall because of systems that allow negligence and accept inaction as the norm.
Investigations rely on momentum. The first twenty-four hours are make or break. Evidence, witnesses, and public attention all have a window, and once those windows close, reopening them takes intention – resources, pressure, and accountability. Without those things, cases don’t just slow down. They settle. Five years ago, resources, pressure, or accountability.
That settling happens when there are no consequences for delay, no requirement to revisit old decisions, and no mechanism that forces unanswered questions back onto the record. For a while I accepted inaction as an inevitability. Investigators start to use the absence of progress as a justification for why the case can’t get solved. I always wonder what came first, the laziness or the excuse.
Systems of policing are designed to prioritize what feels urgent, and urgency fades quickly when a case no longer draws attention. That same pattern extends beyond law enforcement. Law enforcement prioritizes what captivates the public, and unfortunately a lot of people – in the media, in the prosecutor’s office, in local government – did not believe J.C. McGhee’s story would draw any interest.
So that’s what I tried to do – I begged for people to care about this case and about me and about my dad. I wrote to news outlets and independent reporters and true crime podcasters asking them to cover my dad’s unsolved murder and report on his case. But every time I asked, I heard a version of the same response over and over again…
Call me when it’s solved.
It never felt intentionally cruel. Sometimes it was framed as logistics or an editorial thing. Sometimes, and I hate to acknowledge this reality, people thought my dad’s case wasn’t entertaining enough to audiences because it was about a type of person that other people struggle to relate to. It’s hard to see my dad as someone who doesn’t deserve to be murdered. Even for the people who weren’t thinking that way, the message was loud and clear: unsolved cases weren’t considered valuable enough to cover.
There’s a belief – often unstated – that stories are more compelling once they’re finished. Producers view victims as easier to talk about when justice has already been served. To them, ambiguity is risky. Networks and companies believe that audiences want answers, not questions. But with more than 250,000 cold cases in America, there’s a significantly high chance that you or someone you know is connected to an unsolved crime. Living without closure is a reality for so many, but when you are flipping through true crime content, it does not reflect that truth.
The media ecosystem rewards resolution and overlooks process. Cases that fit a narrow definition of a “perfect victim” and a clean narrative move forward. They provide satisfaction to the audience, a satisfaction that a lot of families will never feel. Because the cold cases, especially the ones that don’t highlight victims preferred by the media, are left waiting.
What is easily ignored is the role attention can actually play in an investigation. Media coverage doesn’t just generate leads and new information that could solve the case. It can apply pressure to do something with those new details. It can force stalled systems to respond. But when coverage is contingent on a case already being solved, attention becomes more of a reward instead of a tool.
For families navigating unsolved murders, that creates a second barrier. You are fighting for action within the system while also fighting for visibility outside of it. Without visibility, there’s very little leverage.
My dad’s case didn’t lack the kind of complexity that makes for compelling storytelling. I’m still here twenty-seven episodes in. It certainly didn’t lack people who had something to say. I think we’ve heard from some of the most interesting people in Appalachia – and they all had a lot to say when it came to my dad’s murder. J.C. McGhee’s case lacked sustained attention, the kind that forces institutions to explain their choices and confront what hasn’t been done, which is what I’ve tried to do here. But I shouldn’t have had to. That is just what happens when systems defer responsibility long enough. The burden shifts from investigators to families, from public records to private grief. Once that shift happens, it’s very hard to undo.
Families become investigators but are then reprimanded by police for overstepping and impeding on an open and active investigation. This places an unfair emotional labor on the families and loved ones of victims. Do they do absolutely nothing or do they do whatever it takes? Well, I think it’s pretty obvious that I chose to do whatever it takes.
Part 4: The Cost
There’s a version of this story where the cost is obvious. I’ve measured it in the form of grief, sadness, anger. I think often of the childhood with my dad I was robbed of. I wish for moments that don’t feel like faded recollections. But right now, that’s not the version I want to tell you about; because the real cost of this investigation has been much quieter than that.
It’s been time – the years spent circling the same questions, following leads that went nowhere, waiting for calls that never came. My hours that could have gone to something else, anything else, but didn’t. As soon as I learned the truth about my dad’s murder, my mind wouldn’t let me wander very far without fiercely pulling me back in. I’ve spent the better part of the last five years completely consumed by this case. Everything I did, everything I talked about, everything I worked towards was to solve this case. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but I also can’t. Time is not a bargaining chip because you can’t undo it, unwind it, or take it back.
This process cost me relationships, specifically with my family. Conversations became tense after so many months of pleading for answers. Eventually some family members stopped answering, and others only reached out when they wanted to know something about the information I was getting. They weren’t looking at me and my reasonable frustration as a daughter or a person, but they saw me as a problem – as someone who wouldn’t let things stay hidden.
When you fight for what you believe in no matter the cost – becoming difficult. Not just with my family, but with the Belmont County Sheriff’s Department, I was a problem. When you’re trying to solve a cold case and you are reliant upon the authorities to fight alongside you for answers, having issues with them is not ideal. To them, I lost my identity as a daughter. They just saw me as someone who was an extreme bother.
There’s also a cost to knowing too much. Learning details you never asked for opens up a can of worms that once released, can never be shoved back in. The dark secrets inside of my family and my dad’s past shook me to my core. It was equal parts shocking and eye-opening. I understood my dad in a unique way that I had never experienced before and didn’t think was possible after he was dead. Nothing can possibly prepare you for how you will see the world after learning the darkness surrounding your father’s murder. That information changes how you see people, places, and institutions you were once told to trust. You don’t get to un-experience those things. They leave a mark in your brain that sometimes seems to escape, but always creeps back in.
This work reshaped how I move through the world. It changed how I listen. It forced me to read between lines. Now I understand silence as something active, as a choice. There were moments when the investigation eclipsed everything else. When it was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I carried to bed. For several years I thought it was easier to keep going than to stop and ask what it was taking from me. It took a certain kind of innocence – the belief that systems correct themselves, that effort is always rewarded, that time naturally leads to truth. Those ideas don’t survive prolonged contact with a case like this.
Then there’s the personal cost that’s harder to explain. I now carry the weight of being the person who keeps the story alive. I am the one who uncovers and shares details that others have forgotten. That responsibility doesn’t come with relief. It comes with permanence. This isn’t a job that I can clock out of. It follows me… into other work, new relationships, evolved versions of myself. It will shape my decisions long after the active investigation pauses. I am forever changed by my blind determination to make my dad’s case known.
Part 5: The Result
Before I ever started calling around for the case files or asking a lot of questions, I paused to check in with myself. What is the goal? Is it to see this all the way through to an arrest, a trial, a conviction? Is it enough just to know? At the time I thought knowing would be enough. Now that I have pushed this boulder up the hill every day only to watch it roll back down again, I understand this is so much bigger than that. The goal was to change, and no matter what, not let my dad’s case be in the same situation it was in when I started.
This series didn’t end with an arrest, it didn’t produce a confession, and it didn’t deliver the kind of resolution people are used to hearing at the end of a story like this. But something did change.
Conversations started happening – not just privately, but publicly. People who did not know the name John Cornelius McGhee can now google him with endless search results about his case. Questions that had once been whispered quietly were said out loud, and were being asked by strangers. Details that lived in fragments were placed next to each other. For the first time, this case was discussed on a global scale.
Visibility brought pressure. Once the case was public, it became harder to ignore. Interest from locals started increasing, my phone was constantly buzzing with messages, and pressure followed. There were detectives I had never heard of before starting to look into the murder of J.C. McGhee and international news outlets were calling a small town Sheriff’s department in Ohio for comment.
Information surfaced. Some of it confirmed things already suspected and some of it complicated them. Some of it contradicted what had been accepted for years. Not every lead took me somewhere but it is now documented and able to be revisited later. I’ll never have to phish on a floppy disk in a library to learn about my dad’s murder ever again.
This podcast also created a public archive. A place where timelines, names, decisions, and gaps exist together – not scattered across memory, rumor, or unofficial accounts. What was once fragmented is now centralized. What was once vulnerable to being forgotten forever is now imprinted. That alone matters.
Even without formal action from law enforcement, the narrative shifted. This case stopped being defined solely by its age, or my dad’s background. The record now exists outside of any one institution’s control. It’s not dependent on who’s in office, who’s assigned to the case, or who decides whether it’s worth revisiting. It’s public. It’s accessible. And that can’t be undone.
That doesn’t mean justice has been served. But my idea of what justice is has changed. It doesn’t always start with arrests. The first step is visibility. So as I look at what I’ve done and if I’m proud of myself for getting this far, it is a resounding yes. Every bone in my body wanted to see an arrest. I so badly wanted to end this show with “and that’s when (insert name here) knew he couldn’t get away with it and confessed.” But that’s not the reality today, though that reality is much closer than it has ever been.
I have very mixed feelings about it. Wanting something isn’t enough, and even doing all of this work sometimes just isn’t enough. I wanted closure, and I got resolution – the kind that isn’t tangible or achieved in a courtroom. But it’s the kind that makes me laugh when I think about my dad and what he would say about all of this, the kind that makes me feel like I got to build a relationship with him in this very unique way, the kind that makes me believe persistence can be rewarded. So even though this part of the story is ending, quitting was never an option. There is still someone out there who knows what happened, and someone who killed my dad.
Part 6: The Listeners
I won’t give you a name because I can’t in good conscience say who it is for certain at this time, and I understand from a listener's perspective how frustrating that can feel. But I want you to know something about this show, this journey, this case – it would not be in its current form without you. You played a very vital and unique role in this story. You’ve become a character in it. Every listen, every download, every share pushed this case into the algorithm. Every push added pressure.
Because of all the press coverage, in the spring of 2025, we got a new detective assigned to the case. That is because you affirmed that this story matters with your care and attention to the details of this case. Every episode you showed up and sat on the edge of your seat, excited to hear my progress. You believed in me and you agreed that my dad’s murder did not deserve to be forgotten. There will never be enough thank you’s in the world for what you have given me in the form of love and support.
Now I need to let everything I’ve built simmer, but there are still ways that you can help. If you feel so inclined, please continue to help me apply pressure. Writing into the Belmont County Sheriff’s Department and Prosecutor’s office on a monthly or quarterly basis. Never letting them think that just because Ice Cold Case is over, so is the attention to J.C. McGhee. Continuing to talk about his case could actually solve it. So please, don’t give up on me and don’t give up on my dad.
I am endlessly grateful. Thank you for listening and supporting this show. My creative work doesn’t stop here.
Part 7: The End
This is where the podcast ends. Let me be extremely clear – the story is not finished, all my questions have not been answered. But there comes a point where continuing to speak doesn’t add clarity. It only adds noise.
For the last several years, Ice Cold Case has been my way of keeping this investigation alive and making sure my dad’s name wasn’t reduced to a small town tale. I refused to let time quietly do what it often does, let memories fade into oblivion. In this case, time did not heal all wounds… it cut them wide open.
In ending this now, I’m not walking away from the truth. I’m choosing how this story lives moving forward. Stepping back is an act of care – for myself and my dad’s legacy. It’s a way of protecting the parts of myself that this investigation doesn’t get to consume. It’s recognizing that carrying this alone, indefinitely, is not the same thing as honoring my dad. Whatever movement happens next, whatever developments transpire it will be because I made sure John Cornelius McGhee was never forgotten. This show is ending. My determination is not.
I can only control what I can control. The circumstances surrounding our lives are not fully in our hands. Whatever guiding force you believe in, something prompted me on May 4, 2012 to ask a question that would change my life forever. “Was Omar there when my dad died?” The long, exhausting journey that followed taught me more about life, tenacity, my dad, and myself than I ever thought I would learn in a lifetime. My dad left behind memories and moments. The stories that will always stick with me are those of his kindness, friendship, and fatherhood. It has been an honor to amplify his legacy. Whether one person or an entire county knew this entire time who killed my dad might remain unanswered for now, but I can confidently say silence did not win.
And if you are waiting for me to call you when I’ve solved the murder of my dad, John Cornelius McGhee… I’d wait by the phone.
Credits:
Thanks for listening to Ice Cold Case a Yes! Podcast
Recorded in Los Angeles at Spotify, KeyFrame Studios, and my apartment
This show was written, hosted, produced, and edited by Madison McGhee
Produced, copy editing, and additional research by Opheli Garcia Lawler and Jeremy Benbow
Recorded by EJ Cabasal and Danny Sellers
Sound engineering and sound design by Sian McMullen and Cody Campbell
Original music by Matt Bettinson
Graphic design by AJ Christianson
All outside sources are linked in the show notes.
A special thank you to everyone who agreed to be interviewed for this project and submitted valuable information.
A video version of this episode is available on our YouTube Channel and a transcript is available at icecoldcase.com
Please continue to submit any tips or information through our email – icecoldcasepodcast@gmail.com
