CLARION, Pa. (EYT) – The last time anyone saw Patrick Ryan alive was in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 14, 2005. He was having a drink at the Captain Loomis Bar on Main Street in Clarion. He held a yard sale at the house he rented on Wood Street a few hours before. (PHOTO ABOVE: Dr. Peter Ryan. The Ryan family. Front top clockwise: Pete Ryan, Debbie Ryan, Kaitlin Ryan, Erin Ryan, Patrick Ryan.)
Patrick had just graduated with a master’s degree in library science from Clarion University, and was moving with his girlfriend, Melissa Ernst, to New Jersey. She left before he did because her new job as a librarian began earlier than his. He’d accepted a job as a writing professor at Bucks County Community College, and was also going to work in the library there. He stayed behind to pack up their stuff, borrowing his dad’s Chevy Blazer and renting a U-Haul trailer. He told his dad on the phone the Friday before he disappeared that everything was going well. He was going to pack the trailer on Sunday and hit the road.
Patrick had struggled with alcohol addiction for most of his adult life. He had been in and out of rehab, had a couple of DUIs on his record, and tried to stay sober by following Alcoholic Anonymous’ 12 step program. Melissa helped him stay on the straight and narrow, but with a few hundred dollars in his pocket from a successful yard sale and nobody around to keep his addiction in check, Patrick headed to the Captain Loomis to celebrate the completion of graduate school and the beginning of a new chapter in his life.
Dr. Peter Ryan, a general dentist in Coudersport, and his wife, Debbie, were in Wisconsin visiting their daughter who had just delivered a new baby. The happy grandparents were in town to lend a hand to their daughter’s growing family. Pete thought it a little odd that Patrick hadn’t called him to wish him a happy birthday, which fell on the same day he was holding his yard sale. His son always called on his birthday. When he didn’t call the next day, or the next, he and Debbie got worried.
Melissa called on Tuesday and asked Pete if he knew where Patrick was. Worried, Debby called her brother, Patrick Lewis, in Emporium to go and check on their son. He drove to his nephew’s house. Not finding him there but seeing the Blazer parked out front, he went to the Clarion Borough Police.
According to Pete, his brother-in-law encountered skepticism at the police department. Maybe a 30-year-old man with an alcohol addiction might decide to go to Mexico or California. Maybe, they told Mr. Lewis, his nephew had just bailed on his entire situation. Lewis pressed, and by Thursday was allowed to file a missing person report.
Meanwhile, Pete and Debbie got the earliest flight they could out of Wisconsin. They flew to Buffalo, NY, and then drove to Clarion. When they arrived, they were met by Melissa and her mother. They spent the next two days, Thursday and Friday, creating flyers, printing them off, and posting them all over Clarion. Suspecting that Patrick had fallen off the wagon, they went to all the bars in the area and asked if anybody saw Patrick. They didn’t have any luck.
© Erin Ryan. Patrick Ryan with nephews, Brett and Mitchell, and Pete Ryan.
Eventually, Bill Peck, who led the investigation and is now the Chief of Police at the Clarion PD, discovered that Patrick had been in the Captain Loomis Bar Saturday night into the early hours of Sunday morning. Witnesses remembered Patrick getting into an altercation with another young man, but the two separated and there was no further incident. Nobody saw him leave, they just remembered he wasn’t there anymore.
In my first conversation with Pete, he told me that all three of their kids had gone to Clarion University and that it was known that Clarion had problems with illicit drugs at the time. The night Patrick disappeared, there had been rumors of a big party going on somewhere in the woods. I wondered if his son, in his drunken state, would have decided to go to that party.
With witness statements about Patrick disappearing from the bar, the Clarion PD was taking the case seriously. They helped organize volunteer searches in different parts of the area, including the Clarion River. Pete and Debbie’s son-in-law, a special operations helicopter pilot, flew in from New Mexico and helped to lead the search efforts. They were all fruitless. By this point, Pete wasn’t confident they’d find his son alive, and just hoped to be able to find his body so they could figure out what happened.
Patrick’s badly-decomposed body was discovered on August 23, 2005, near a pull-off in the woods of Howe Township by a forestry worker who had stopped there for a lunch break. Patrick didn’t have his wallet on him, nor his car keys. His body was badly decomposed, lending to the suspicion that he died the day he disappeared and somehow was dumped or left in the spot where he was found. The warm and humid August weather hastened his decomposition. Pete provided the dental records that assisted authorities in identifying his son.
The following November, Forest County Coroner Norman J. Whitmer announced that Patrick had died of a combination of drug and alcohol toxicity. But, Coroner Whitmer explained at the time, the manner of Patrick’s death could not be determined. When Patrick’s dad sent me his son’s death certificate, the manner of death is still listed as “could not be determined.” What does that mean? I looked at the autopsy report for clarification.
© Erin Ryan. Patrick Ryan with nephews, Brett and Mitchell, and Debbie Ryan.
Patrick had 300 milligrams per deciliter of ethyl alcohol in his blood. That’s a 0.3% blood alcohol level. To put that into perspective, for a man built like Patrick, that would have taken about 15 drinks according to Dr. Elizabeth Hartney’s article on VeryWellMind.com. That much alcohol was likely to cause loss of consciousness.
Keep in mind, though, that Patrick had been dead for nine days when he was found. Ethyl alcohol is a known byproduct of decomposition. So, it’s unknown exactly how much of the alcohol in Patrick’s blood was from drinking and how much was from decomposition.
Patrick had 1200 nanograms per milliliter of sertraline, or Zoloft, in his blood. Sertraline is prescribed as a treatment for depression, panic attacks, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, and social anxiety disorder. Patrick had been prescribed the medication, which he took twice a day, to treat his anxiety. He’d been on the medication for years at the time of his death.
© Erin Ryan. Patrick and Erin Ryan.
The opinion of Dr. Eric Lee Vey, the forensic pathologist who performed Patrick’s autopsy, reads, “The combination of the elevated ethyl alcohol and sertraline levels in this case served as a plausible substrate upon which the death of Patrick Ryan could have occurred through the mechanism of combined drug and alcohol toxicity. Confounding factors that could potentially complicate the interpretation are the presence of the discontinuity of the brachiocephalic artery and the apparent disruption of the 5th intervertebral disc in association with the neck angulation noted at autopsy. Both of the findings may represent postmortem changes, possibly induced or exacerbated by decomposition-related alterations. However, the possibility that these resulted from antemortem trauma cannot be unequivocally excluded, but nonetheless seems remote.”
To simplify Dr. Vey’s language, it says that the idea that Patrick died of a combined overdose of alcohol and sertraline is defensible, though he admits that the elevated levels could have happened postmortem.
After reading through Patrick’s autopsy, I spoke with his older sister, Erin Ryan, a geneticist. She alerted me to a study that showed that extended use of sertraline caused the drug to be stored in different tissues of patients’ bodies. Upon death, the sertraline is then released by those tissues into the fluids of the body. This phenomenon is called redistribution.
So, it’s possible that the official cause of death—combined alcohol sertraline toxicity—can be discredited by the studies that show that redistribution of sertraline happens postmortem. Certainly, though perhaps not specifically, Dr. Vey admits as much when in the last sentence of his opinion he states that there could have been some trauma that killed Patrick. In Dr. Vey’s defense, much of Patrick’s body had decomposed, erasing evidence that could have been present in the soft tissues. And Dr. Vey did leave open the possibility that Patrick was murdered when he chose “could not be determined” as Patrick’s manner of death.
© Erin Ryan. Patrick Ryan with cousins, Charmaine and Matt, at the Ryan cottage on Moody Beach, Maine.
So, what happens now?
It has been seventeen years since Patrick Ryan died. Over the years, there have been several articles published both in the Clarion and Coudersport areas reminding the public that the mystery of Patrick Ryan’s death remains exactly that. A mystery.
Since her son’s death, Debbie Ryan has been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia with primary progressive aphasia. Debbie remembers very little of her son, if anything at all. Pete thinks that stress and anxiety stemming from her son’s disappearance and death were contributors to her condition. Doctors have told him it doesn’t work that way. Pete is now retired from his profession as a general dentist and is a full-time caregiver to his wife. The first time we spoke, he seemed comfortable living the rest of his life not knowing what happened to his son.
“He’s an alcoholic. That’s what he died from,” Pete told me. “If he wasn’t drinking, he wouldn’t have been hurt.”
The second time we spoke, Pete was a little more energetic about the idea of somebody looking into the death of his son other than the police. While he’s complimentary of Chief Peck and grateful for the work he put in and the compassion he displayed, he was disappointed that the case was taken away from the Clarion Police Department due to the fact that Patrick’s body was found outside of Clarion. Over the years, the case file has been handed from the Clarion PD, to the State Police at the Clarion Barracks, to the State Police at the Tionesta Barracks, and then back to the State Police at the Clarion Barracks.
The murder of Patrick Ryan (yes, I’m calling it a murder) is a case that needs new life. Investigators can only follow the leads they have. Once their leads are exhausted, they stop until new leads come in. I wonder how many years it’s been since a new lead was discovered in this case. Probably about seventeen.
Pete and Erin have provided me with some of the documents they have in this case. Specifically, I’ve seen Patrick’s death certificate and autopsy report. But recently, Pete called me up and told me that his wife had collected much more. He invited me up to Coudersport to go through everything that Debbie has. That’s my next step. But there’s a step you can do, too.
Murders don’t happen in a small community like Clarion without people eventually finding out the details. People get drunk or high and share things that they wouldn’t share sober. Rumors circulate. Whisper chains grow long.
If you believe you know what happened to Patrick Ryan—maybe you’ve heard something or were a witness—please contact the State Police at the Clarion Barracks. If you’re not comfortable talking to the police, or if you want to remain anonymous, use this form on my website to tell me what you know and I’ll forward it to the Police. They need your leads. Help them figure out exactly what happened and bring justice to Patrick’s family.
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