Jury selected as murder trial in missing man case gets under way

Prosecutors and a defense lawyer for a man charged with the death of his father chose a jury of five women and nine men Thursday, with trial testimony scheduled to begin Friday in Lucas County Common Pleas Court.

Timothy Darrow, 39, of the 4100 block of Peak Street is charged with two alternative murder counts stemming from the July 27, 2017, disappearance and presumed death of Alvin Darrow, 63, from the 300 block of Majestic Drive in North Toledo.

While questioning potential jurors before Judge Dean Mandros, prosecutor Jennifer Liptack-Wilson addressed the fact that there was no dead body found in the case.

“Do you think that there is a rule requiring the state of Ohio to produce a deceased body in a murder case?” Ms. Liptack-Wilson asked. “No. None of you would be here then, right?”

Kaitlin Durbin, a former Blade reporter, interviewed Timothy Darrow for an eight-episode podcast The Blade produced in 2020 called Code 18: Unsolved . It was reported in that podcast that he and his father had been fighting about a stolen motorcycle shortly before Alvin Darrow disappeared.

Alvin Darrow's disappearance was reported by another son, Jeremy Darrow.

County authorities said in 2021 that they simply did not have enough evidence to file charges, but during the ensuing two years investigators gathered enough additional information for the Lucas County Prosecutor's Office to present the case to a grand jury.

After Mr. Darrow's October indictment, Michael Loisel, chief of special prosecutions for the county, said there had been "a lot of follow-up" by the Toledo Police Department in which investigators "pinned down some time line about how it unfolded."

A death certificate was issued for Alvin Darrow one month before the indictment.

While questioning potential jurors, Ms. Liptack-Wilson emphasized that while potential jurors might “disagree with Alvin Darrow’s lifestyle,” such personal judgments should not impact a verdict. She also highlighted that the state did not need to prove motive, and that the state could rely solely on witness evidence — not forensic evidence — to prove its case.

During her time in front of the potential jurors, defense attorney Autumn Adams pressed on the issue of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Ms. Adams said that if, after all evidence and arguments, jurors still felt there was a reasonable possibility that Alvin Darrow had disappeared under different circumstances than those charged by the state, the state had not upheld its burden of proof.

Ms. Adams highlighted that Alvin Darrow’s body had never been found.

“You’re not gonna hear about a pile of blood,” Ms. Adams said. “You’re not gonna hear about a bullet wound.”

Ms. Adams also emphasized that forensic evidence and criminal convictions can be fallible, invoking the wrongly convicted Central Park Five and Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer wrongfully jailed because of erroneous fingerprint analysis.

Ms. Durbin, who produced the podcast on Alvin Darrow’s disappearance, was listed by the prosecution Thursday as a possible witness who could be called to testify in the trial.

During her questions of the potential jurors, Ms. Adams briefly brought up the topic of crime podcasts.

“Do you think a true crime podcast is meant as clickbait, or meant to be taken seriously?” Ms. Adams asked a potential juror.

“It’s entertainment,” the potential juror responded.

Four of the 40 potential jurors had some familiarity with the case through news coverage, though none of those four was included in the final jury.

Also charged in the case was Michael Johnson, who was indicted for a single count of obstructing justice and was interviewed in The Blade's podcast. He has an Aug. 12 trial date.

Timothy Darrow gave conflicting accounts to The Blade of what happened with his father and the stolen motorcycle.

First, the podcast reported, he told Jeremy Darrow that some men who were presumably trying to retrieve the motorcycle chased his father away with guns.

Then, he said he left immediately after the fight, at which point nothing was amiss with his father. He later told The Blade he was pulling out of the driveway when he saw men pulling up with another stolen motorcycle for his dad.

None of those accounts was ever corroborated.

Timothy Darrow subsequently told The Blade the fight over the motorcycle turned physical at some point.

"I punched him, he punched the bike," he recalled in an interview segment on the podcast's fifth episode. Alvin Darrow's blood was found on the motorcycle.

Leading up to the trial, the prosecution and defense both have sought the exclusion of evidence the other side planned to introduce.

Judge Mandros granted a defense motion to exclude a portion of Timothy Darrow’s interrogation by a Toledo detective in which the detective asserted knowledge about the suspect’s prior interactions with his father but allowed the introduction of cell-phone evidence that the defense argued could not be authenticated.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, sought to exclude text messages Alvin Darrow exchanged with a girlfriend the morning before he vanished on the grounds that they tarnish the victim. The defense countered that they support alternative theories regarding the elder Mr. Darrow's disappearance, and, as of Thursday afternoon, the judge had yet to rule on their admissibility.