The cold case hotel murder of a traveling salesman 41 years ago has been solved — with an Ohio man being charged in the deadly robbery after he was linked to evidence found behind a Cracker Barrel hundreds of miles away.
Randy McAllister was indicted by a grand jury last week in the death of John Warren at a since-demolished Holiday Inn off I-75 in Middletown, 40 miles north of Cincinnati, on Oct. 16, 1985, Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell said.
Warren, an employee for an auto parts company, had been in the area for sales meetings when he was found dead inside his room the next morning.
Some of the 44-year-old’s belongings, including his 1985 Oldsmobile, were reportedly missing from the scene.
Detectives initially investigating the murder ran into a dead end with insufficient evidence after following up on multiple leads.
Some of the stolen items were found dumped behind a Cracker Barrel in Dalton, Ga. — roughly 400 miles away — days after the murder, with the missing car located in Redington Beach, Fla., according to Fornshell.
Three men from South Carolina were named as suspects in Warren’s death, but charges were later dropped after lie detector tests confirmed their alibis, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer.
The investigation into Warren’s murder ran cold for decades — until detectives reopened it in 2019 and began to reexamine the evidence.
Some of the recovered stolen items were sent to crime labs for analysis, and McCallister and an unidentified dead accomplice were named as suspects.
Detectives have investigated the case since 2021 before presenting the evidence to a grand jury and indicted McCallister last week, Fornshell revealed.
“‘Cold case’ investigations are ‘cold’ for a reason. Many times there is some evidence that points to a suspect, but just not enough evidence to move forward. And leads diminish over time,” Fornshell said Monday.
“But particularly over the past five years, Warren County Sheriff’s Office detectives have been tenacious in their investigation of this case to get it to a point that our office believed we had sufficient evidence to charge McCallister for the murder of John Warren. And the grand jury agreed,” he said.
The prosecutor’s office did not reveal what the exact evidence was that allegedly pinned McCallister and his accomplice to the murder.
McCallister is being held at the Warren County Jail on aggravated murder and murder charges.
He is expected to be arraigned on Tuesday, according to jail records viewed by The Post.
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