His troubles - namely sexual assaults that occurred in 1980s - landed the Darke County man in Indiana jails and prompted such discussions with probation officers. Rodeheffer was charged twice with sexual assaults of two different women. For his crimes, he spent nearly four years in jail for separate cases.
"Two and a half years does not seem like a lot of time for a rape, does it?" asked Linda Stemmer, an Indiana attorney who was special prosecutor in a 1983 case against Rodeheffer.
After his last release from Indiana jail, Rodeheffer returned to his home and his family in northern Darke County.
Now, Rodeheffer, 43, is the subject of a nationwide search as a suspect in the abduction and slaying of 19-year-old Lynn Topp. Topp, whose body was found buried on Rodeheffer's farm March 6, was abducted Feb. 21 while walking or jogging on roads near North Star. The FBI and Darke County sheriff's deputies have been trying to find Rodeheffer since.
A Darke County farmer found the body of a white male Saturday evening in his barn on Ohio 49, about a half-mile south of Rodeheffer's property and contacted the sheriff's office.
Authorities await a coroner's ruling, possibly available by Monday, to determine the man's identity, but no one else has been reported missing in Darke County. Rodeheffer's wife is expected to view the body today.
The youngest of four children, Rodeheffer grew up in northern Darke County. He was a fair student at Mississinawa Valley High School and elected class president his junior year, a teacher wrote to a judge handling one of Rodeheffer's cases. He was intelligent and hard working. But he was already drinking heavily. One night, he told probation officers, he got drunk and broke into the school.
Rodeheffer began his battle with the bottle as a 14-year-old growing up in Lightsville in northern Darke County, he told Indiana probation officers. By 19, he drank so much he would have blackouts. He got in trouble only when he drank, he told them.
After graduating from high school in 1974, Rodeheffer, then 18, married and moved with his bride, Maidra, to her family's 80-acre farm. He started working at Westinghouse in Union City, Ind., raising his son and daughter and working part time for his father's gravel-hauling company.
Early incident began in a bowling alley bar
In August 1981, Rodeheffer was sitting at the bar in a Union City bowling alley when a 26-year-old woman he knew from his youth came in from the parking lot. She had asked the bartender for help because she'd locked her keys in the car.
Rodeheffer stood up from his stool and offered to drive her home, said the woman. She now lives in the Miami Valley and spoke on the condition she not be identified.
Rodeheffer instead drove her to a secluded field and forced her to perform oral sex on him. He told her he would leave her alone if she did not tell police.
She did not.
In December 1981, she said she was asleep in her home in Union City when Rodeheffer came in through an unlocked patio door, chased her through the house and raped her.
This time she went to police and an Indiana State Police officer investigated. A polygraph test she took about the two assaults came back inconclusive. Because of that, she said, no one would prosecute her case.
She collapsed emotionally and began doubting herself.
"Everybody turned on me and I turned inside out," the woman said. "I felt so dirty. I kept thinking, 'I shouldn't have been drinking in that bar.' But I did not say `yes.'"
A Marion County, Ind., probation report for a 1987 case against Rodeheffer included this notation:
"Investigator for this (1981) incident related to the Randolph County probation department that there was no doubt in his mind that Tim Rodeheffer committed this rape. The exact reason why this case was not filed or brought before the prosecuting attorney is unknown."
The prosecutor, who now is a judge, did not return calls. The Indiana State Police officer who investigated is retired and could not be found.
Once again, alcohol led to sexual assault
In 1983 Rodeheffer was arrested after breaking into a woman's home north of Union City, Ind. The woman, who had three daughters asleep inside, said he raped her. Rodeheffer said he had drank 15 beers and a half-pint of whiskey that night.
Stemmer, who prosecuted the case, agreed to a plea bargain to avoid putting on the stand the victim and one of her young daughters, who witnessed part of the assault.
"I realize I have a drinking problem or that I am an alcoholic and I need some help," Rodeheffer wrote in asking the judge for leniency in the 1983 case.
Rodeheffer, who admitted the rape, pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of burglary and battery. He was sentenced to eight years, three suspended. But he had already been in jail a year awaiting trial and Indiana gave prisoners one day off their sentence for each day of good behavior. After a little more than a year in an Indiana prison, Rodeheffer was sent to the prison's work-release program in Indianapolis.
During the program he met an Indiana man who helped him get a job at an auto parts store. The man and Rodeheffer soon struck up a workplace friendship. They and the other men in the office would hang around after hours on some nights with the older couple who owned the shop. They'd all sit in the front office and drink beer.
Rodeheffer would occasionally talk about his family back in Ohio. His wife and two children were receiving Aid to Dependent Children and he was nearly $100,000 in debt at the time, according to Indiana court records.
On March 27, 1987 - two months after he was put on probation for the 1983 attack - he and the co-worker who helped get him the new job began a night's revelry with a few beers at the shop.
From there, they went to a night club, still in their work clothes and covered with grease. Several rounds of drinks and several hours later, the man remembered climbing into Rodeheffer's truck to be driven home. He passed out.
Court depositions spell out what witnesses said happened next:
The man's wife, 28 years old and six months pregnant, was asleep in her bed around 6 a.m. when she saw a face hovering a foot from hers. Someone had pried open the window over her bed and was climbing in on top of her.
Half asleep, she looked and saw the face of her husband, who occasionally climbed in through windows when he forgot his keys. She rolled over.
When the man climbed into the bed and began kissing her neck, she said, "Jim, don't."
The man grabbed her on the neck and rolled her toward him. This time she saw Rodeheffer's face. She screamed.
Rodeheffer put one hand over her mouth and nose and told her to "shut up." With the other hand he groped her chest and reached down and ripped the pocket of the hospital scrub pants she wore as pajamas. The two tumbled onto the floor and the impact shook Rodeheffer's hand from the woman's mouth.
"He kept telling me to shut up. 'Shut up. Jim's passed out. Don't worry about him,' " the woman said in court records.
She screamed again and begged for him to stop. She was six months pregnant, she told him.
Rodeheffer stopped. He stood up, pulled up his pants, and ran to the door.
Hung jury, then plea bargain ended the case
Outside, he jumped into the truck and drove off. Then he drove by the house three times. The woman's husband remained asleep in the front seat of the truck.
The woman telephoned her sister, who drove to the home with her husband. She arrived in minutes and ran into the house. When Rodeheffer tried to back out of the driveway again, the victim's brother-in-law pulled a .22-caliber revolver from his pocket and pointed it at Rodeheffer.
"I threw the gun down on him, cocked the hammer back and told him to stop or I was going to blow his brains out," the man later said in court depositions. "He kept telling me he was going to leave, and I said 'You're not leaving. If you try to leave I'm going to shoot you.'"
Rodeheffer started hitting the victim's sleeping husband on his front seat to wake him up. The man awoke and went into the house. Rodeheffer tried to follow him.
"He said, 'Uh, uh Jim, don't believe nothing they say,'" the woman's husband said in court depositions. "He said, `I've got to talk to you for five minutes.' He says, `I have a wife and two little girls and Jim, don't believe nothing your wife or any of them says.'"
The woman gave birth four weeks early to a baby girl. She told court probation officers she blamed the stress of the attack for thepremature delivery.
Rodeheffer was charged with attempted rape, burglary and confinement. Prosecutors offered to let him plead guilty to the first two charges and face up to 40 years in prison. Rodeheffer rejected it.
In November 1987, his case went to a one-day trial, which resulted in a hung jury.
Two months later, as prosecutors were preparing to take the case to trial again, they reached a new plea agreement that allowed Rodeheffer to plead guilty to one count of confinement. He was sentenced to one year in the Marion County jail.
Later that year, Rodeheffer had returned to Ohio, living at his home on McFeely-Petry Road. A neighbor, James Evans, said the two have fought over the years and shot at each other in disputes over their dogs. Rodeheffer held down a second-shift job at Minster Machine Co.
For the next 10 years, he avoided any major run-ins with the law. That all changed last month.
It was after a night of work at 3 a.m. Feb. 21 that he went to a party next door to Minster Machine, according to a Darke County arrest warrant. After the party, around 8 a.m., he began driving toward home around the time Lynn Topp walked out her front door for a four-mile walk.
CONTACT Jim Bebbington at 335-3997; or at
jim_bebbington@coxohio.com