Kids playing in the woods find suitcase with remains inside of man who was dismembered by his son and dumped on rural road: Police

Insets, left to right: Lawrence Drotleff, Larry Drotleff (Tuscarawas County Sheriff's Office/WJW). Background: A stretch of Winkler Hill Road in Dover Township, Ohio (Google Maps).

A man dismembered his father's body and hid the remains in two suitcases he dropped along rural roads in Ohio that were later discovered by children, according to law enforcement.

On Saturday, the Tuscarawas County Sheriff's Office announced that it had solved a mystery dating back decades, when a group of kids made a gruesome discovery in a rural part of Dover Township, around 85 miles south of Cleveland.

"On February 1, 1998, the Tuscarawas County Sheriff's Office received a complaint about a suitcase being located by a group of kids along Winkler Hill Road in Dover Township," the sheriff's office said in a Facebook post. "That suitcase contain[ed] several unidentified male body parts[.]"

A second suitcase also containing body parts was discovered about a week later on a different rural road some 15 miles away. Although DNA testing indicated that the remains in both suitcases belonged to the same person, investigators were unable to identify the victim. He remained anonymous until 2023, when the case was reopened and reexamined with the help of more advanced DNA testing methods that ultimately led law enforcement to Larry Drotleff, 81.

In a January 2024 interview with Ohio law enforcement, Drotleff allegedly revealed that he had found his father's dead body at the home they shared.

"Larry stated that he was residing with his father and had left for work one day," the Tuscarawas County Sheriff's Office said. "When he came home, [he] located his father deceased. Larry indicated that he then cut up his father's body with a manual hand saw (not a power saw) and disposed of some body parts in the suitcases and others by just putting them in bags in a dumpster near his work place."

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Drotleff provided DNA, which "confirmed he was the biological son of the victim," who was then identified as Lawrence A. Drotleff.

"[H]e would have been approximately 93 years old at the time we located the suitcases," the sheriff's office noted of the victim.

Larry Drotleff cannot be charged under Ohio state law due to the long-expired statute of limitations, but he is facing federal charges for allegedly stealing hundreds of thousands in benefits intended for his father.

For some 15 years, federal prosecutors say, Larry Drotleff stole nearly $250,000. A federal criminal complaint filed in the Northern District of Ohio noted that because authorities were "unaware that death had occurred," monthly Social Security and pension deposits continued to be made in the elder Drotleff's accounts.

"From in or around February 1, 1998 to in or around September 13, 2010 … [Larry Drotleff] did willfully and knowingly steal, purloin and convert to his own use [Social Security benefits] in the amount of approximately $111,485," a federal complaint says. He allegedly stole even more — $135,040 — from his father's General Electric pension, the complaint says.

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The Tuscarawas Sheriff's Office noted that "[w]hile the case did not prove to be a murder, it should be noted that the inhumane treatment of the corpse was conduct so inexcusable" that the office never fully abandoned it.

"It remains difficult to comprehend that the greed of theft could cause someone to treat their father's body in this manner," the sheriff's office said.