Distrust, dysfunction in Brown Co.

• Brown Co. coroner disputes claims she has mishandled bodies, evidence.
• Petition to remove her has more than 1,700 signatures; 300 more needed to move forward.
• Federal suit alleges coroner left chunk of skull, evidence at suicide scene.

When the phone call came Jan. 9 that her 24-year-old son had been shot in the head, Rebecca Adamson had a hard time believing it.

A few hours later, when she said the Brown County coroner told her that her son had committed suicide, disbelief turned into confusion. Soon after, when she arrived at her dead son's home, confusion gave way to anger.

"We came in through an unlocked door," said Adamson, of Georgetown. "There was blood and brain matter everywhere. There were toe tags and gloves on the floor. This was a Thursday. There wasn't even an investigation started until Monday, when the (Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations) started one."

These days in Brown County, such complaints aren't isolated. The coroner and her husband, Judith and Dennis Varnau, have drawn the ire of several families whose loved ones have died. The families allege that bodies and evidence have been mishandled, leading to a series of botched death investigations that have ripped away all hope of ever learning what happened to their loved ones.

"It's a bad time to die in Brown County," said Tracy Hawkins, a lawyer helping the Adamsons gather signatures for a petition to remove Judith Varnau from office.

Angry family members blame a longstanding political feud: The coroner's husband lost a bid for sheriff in 2008 and appealed the loss all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, which let the election of Dewayne Wenninger stand. Dennis Varnau has publicly accused the sheriff and his subordinates of evils that include drug trafficking and murder. When talking to the families of the dead – families who call his house for answers from his coroner wife – he acknowledged he at times steered the conversation to issues with the sheriff's office.

The coroner and sheriff's officials are supposed to work in tandem to investigate deaths in hopes of determining cause and manner and to hold bad guys accountable in homicides. By all accounts, that relationship is hobbled here, and residents are the ones left to suffer.

Coroner: 'I am not mistreating bodies'

Brown is a rural Appalachian county east of Cincinnati with about 44,000 residents. It's a rugged area with spotty cellphone reception and gas stations doing double-duty as corner groceries. About 10 percent of residents have college degrees, far below the statewide average of 25 percent.

Judith Varnau, an obstetrician-gynecologist, won the coroner's post in 2012 with 176 write-in votes. She'd decided to run at the last minute, she said, when no one else stepped forward for the job. Her motivation was twofold: to fulfill a lifelong interest in combining medicine with detective work and to serve the public. The 67-year-old took office in January 2013 for the job that pays $24,000 a year.

It's a powerful post. Varnau's death rulings are legally binding, according to Ohio law. But it isn't a glamorous one: Varnau has no county-provided office or vehicle, using instead her home and personal truck; autopsies are outsourced to other counties.

So far, the petition to remove her has more than 1,700 signatures. Organizers need 2,000 from among the county's nearly 30,000 registered voters to move forward.

Varnau also is targeted in a federal lawsuit related to a different death – the alleged suicide of Hanson Jones Jr., 67, of Ripley. Jones' family said in a suit filed last month in U.S. District Court in Cincinnati that the death wasn't thoroughly investigated. They say Varnau didn't test Jones' hands for gunshot residue – one way of indicating that the deceased actually pulled the trigger of the shotgun pressed to his head. The suit accused Varnau of leaving large skull fragments, the shotgun and other evidence behind in Jones' unlocked home.

Varnau's husband is also a defendant in the lawsuit. Though he isn't paid by the county, he routinely drives his wife to death scenes, posts on social media about death investigations and handles open records requests submitted by the media. He refers to himself as her office assistant and said he analyzes crime-scene photographs and measurements to help her investigations.

Dennis Varnau, 65, told The Enquirer that he always stays in the truck as his wife investigates. But he also described – without prompting and in detail – the position of Jones' body, the gaping wound in the victim's head, the type of shotgun used in the death and the efforts by EMTs to remove the body from the scene.

He explained that members of Ripley Life Squad, a private ambulance and rescue company, asked for his help to hold a flashlight in the dimly lit crime scene. He has left his vehicle at only four death scenes to assist his wife, he said, and accompanies her as protection.

Speaking exclusively to The Enquirer from their Georgetown home, the couple said they've done nothing wrong. They declined to be photographed for this story.

"I think I'm doing a good job," said Judith Varnau, her jaw tight and tears in her eyes when asked about the allegations she faces. "It really hurts me very much to hear some of what people are saying.... I've heard, 'You're treating his body like a piece of garbage.' I am not. I am not mistreating any bodies. I'm treating them as my brother, my daughter."

Dennis Varnau is more pointed.

"This petition stuff, everything they're basing that on is all lies and disinformation, and they're going to pay for it," he said.

Family: Inquiry botched in son's fatal shooting

Zachary Adamson was a fit man with intense eyes and a sensitive heart. When a friend of his died during one of Adamson's four tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Airborne Ranger in the U.S. Army, Adamson took the loss hard. He hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine in his friend's honor, beginning in March 2013.

"He was doing that to walk off the war," Rebecca Adamson said. By the time it ended in October, "he had the best beard," she said with a laugh.

By early January, Zachary Adamson was finding his groove back at home, working at Adamson Fire Protection, his family's business in Mount Orab. On Jan. 9, he talked with his dad, Steve Adamson, about plans at the business. After that chat, he called his mother.

"He said, 'It's snowing! You have to go look outside,' " Rebecca Adamson said.

That phone call came at 7:12 p.m., she said. By 8:30 p.m., her son was bleeding to death from a gunshot wound to his right temple. Adamson said Varnau approached her at the hospital and said their son's death was a suicide.

"I said, 'But I just talked to him and he was fine,' " Adamson said.

The Adamsons went to their son's home and said they found the door unlocked. In addition to toe tags and gloves left on their son's bedroom floor, the handgun used in his death was left behind as well, they said. The Adamsons say Varnau left it with their son's roommate; Judith Varnau said she had her husband call the sheriff's office and request that they collect it, but the deputies refused.

Wenninger did not respond to an email or phone call seeking comment.

Varnau said Adamson's death investigation is still underway and that the manner of death hasn't yet been determined.

Lawyer: Lack of cooperation is 'unusual and tragic'

The Jones and Adamson deaths aren't the only cases raising eyebrows. Varnau, by her own acknowledgment to The Enquirer, left one dead body in the back of a vehicle while it was towed to a spot her husband had secured as a workspace. The Varnaus placed another body in the back of their personal pickup truck and drove it from a death scene to the hospital.

Judith Varnau said there were reasons for such decisions, usually related to bad weather and hours-long waits for the Bureau of Criminal Investigations to arrive at the scene.

"It was a judgment call," Dennis Varnau said of the body hauled in the couple's truck. "He was in a body bag, perfectly protected."

While Judith Varnau said her motives are not political, her husband responded to a records request with a trail of emails in which his wife outlined her belief that Wenninger is in his post illegally.

Mirroring the claims made in Dennis Varnau's post-election challenge, the letters state that Wenninger didn't meet the legal requirements to run for the post. Varnau insists still that Wenninger isn't truly the county's sheriff. But the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that too much time had passed since Wenninger's first election in 2000 for Varnau to challenge his qualifications in 2009.

"Mr. Wenninger has never legally been elected or appointed to the office of sheriff," read one letter on Varnau's letterhead to Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine dated Dec. 30, 2012. "It is also suspiciously evident, from the text of emergency legislation passed and court opinions handed down, that there has been a surreptitious, organized effort to continuously hide this illegal condition from the public...."

Varnau said she simply wanted indemnification from either the Brown County prosecutor or, in case of a conflict of interests, the state's attorney general, as protection from any wrongful death lawsuits if she treated Wenninger as a law-enforcement agent when she "knows" him to be illegitimate.

DeWine's office responded Jan. 15, 2013, that the Ohio Supreme Court "has settled the question of the sheriff's qualifications to hold office and confirms the legality of his service as county sheriff."

Al Gerhardstein, who represents the family in the Jones federal lawsuit, said he's never seen such dysfunction between a county's sheriff and coroner.

"The bottom line is that this is an unusual and tragic failure to cooperate between the coroner and sheriff," Gerhardstein said. "You have crime scenes being interfered with, houses being left unlocked. It's a systemic problem that needs a systemic solution."

Residents caught in middle asking for 'common decency'

Many of the complaints lobbed at the coroner have more to do with her husband than herself. Dennis Varnau is gruff, rattling off Ohio Revised Code numbers from memory and going off on conspiracy-theory tangents to such an extent that his wife regularly attempted during an interview to reel him in by interjecting, "Well, that's what we think," to which he bellowed, "No, that's what I know!"

Dennis Varnau also made sweeping inflammatory statements, such as, "The county prosecutor doesn't understand the law." (Prosecutor Jessica Little declined to comment through an office representative.) Speaking about a bereaved woman who took for safekeeping a gun that had been left in her dead brother's unlocked home, Varnau said that "she trespassed and burgled the house."

Complicating matters further are ongoing allegations by Dennis Varnau that one sheriff's deputy is a county drug lord and that the sheriff's office is involved in a coverup of a jailhouse death that Judith Varnau ruled a homicide. No charges have been filed related to either allegation.

The Varnaus said they compartmentalize their concerns when at death scenes so that politics don't play a part in their findings or in how they work with sheriff's officials.

"For me, I go to the scene and do my job. There is absolutely no politics at all that is involved," Judith Varnau said. "I try to correspond with law enforcement, with the EMTs, with the families without any politics. That word doesn't even belong in there."

Family members of the deceased think differently, though. According to the Hanson Jones lawsuit, Jones' sister, Donna Elfers, called Judith Varnau at her home and instead had to get information on her brother's death from Dennis Varnau.

Varnau began ranting about a feud with the sheriff's office, the suit said. Elfers asked him to stop talking about politics because she had just lost her brother.

Dennis Varnau allegedly shot back, "Everybody loses someone every day!"

Varnau said the quote was taken out of context.

Whatever the truth behind the dispute, the Adamsons say county residents have been caught in the middle long enough. They want Varnau booted from her post quickly – long before she's up for re-election in 2016.

"We won't ever know what happened to our son," said Rebecca Adamson, her face contorting with tears. "That's why we're doing this. They treated our son like they were taking out the trash. I don't want this happening to anyone else."

"I'm concerned for anybody who loses someone to death in Brown County," Hawkins, the Adamsons' lawyer, said as she gathered signatures for the removal petition. "We're not asking for stars and rainbows after his death. All we're asking for is common decency."

What's next?

Organizers behind a removal petition targeting Brown County Coroner Judith Varnau began gathering signatures March 1. Within two weeks, they had more than 1,700 signatures. Here's what happens next:

• Ohio law requires that removal efforts alleging misconduct in office need the support of 15 percent of the number of voters who cast ballots in the most recent gubernatorial election. For Varnau's removal, petition backers need about 2,000 signatures.

• Once the signatures are gathered, they'll be forwarded to Brown County Common Pleas Court Judge Scott Gusweiler, who will decide if the signatures should be passed on to the county Board of Elections to verify that they're valid signatures of registered voters.

• If more than 2,000 valid signatures are gathered, the judge would hold a hearing within 30 days. Varnau could ask that the judge decide her fate, or she could request that the decision be left to a jury of 12.

• If either the judge or at least nine members of the jury decide that Varnau indeed has engaged in misconduct, she would be removed from her post. Varnau would have the opportunity to appeal.

• If the removal were to stand, the Board of Elections would then order a special election to fill the remainder of Varnau's four-year term.

Sources: Ohio Revised Code 3.07-3.09,

Ohio Secretary of State's Office,

Brown County Board of Elections