In little over a year, at least six women have disappeared from Chillicothe, Ohio, a town of only 21,000 people. (The Washington Post) 
 
 For years, Chillicothe, Ohio, was known as just another notch on the Rust Belt, afflicted by the same old problems of drugs, poverty and unemployment. If the town ever made national news, it was because a presidential candidate stopped by vowing to fix things, only for those promises to evaporate after Election Day. 
 
 But in the past couple of months, Chillicothe has crept back into headlines for something other than a stump speech. Something much darker. Something evil. 
 
 Chillicothe is no longer just another Rust Belt town. Now it’s the place where women go missing and wash up dead. 
 
 In little over a year, at least six women have disappeared from the town of only 21,000. Four of their bodies have been found, almost all of them dumped in creeks or streams flowing away from the town. 
 
 The women have similar stories. Most of them were hooked on drugs, and many moonlighted as prostitutes to fund their addictions, police say. Some of them even knew one another. 
 
 The similarities between the victims and the crime scenes have Chillicothe terrified that a serial killer is on the loose. Local police, several county sheriffs’ offices and state investigators have banded together to solve the spiraling murder mystery. 
 
 Even FBI analysts are assisting with the investigation, busy compiling a profile of a possible serial killer. 
 
 “I don’t want to come out and say ‘yes, we have a serial killer,’ but it’s a small community that we live in … and the number of females who have come up missing, and then the bodies that we’ve found, that’s quite a bit for our community,” Staff Lt. Mike Preston of the Ross County Sheriff’s Department told The Washington Post. 
 
 “The community is starting to get concerned,” he said. “Everyone just wants answers.” 
 
 In the absence of answers — and arrests — residents are getting scared. The fear that a serial killer is stalking prostitutes swirls around Chillicothe. 
 
 “Obviously there has to be something going on,” said Jessica Sayre, whose older sister, Tiffany, was the latest victim. Her body was found in a drainage pipe Saturday after she had been missing for more than a month. 
 
 “Apparently my sister was the next target,” Jessica Sayre said. 
 
 The women began disappearing a year ago from Chillicothe, a town about an hour south of Columbus. Ohio’s first capital more than 200 years ago — a title still boasted on city signs — Chillicothe has fallen far. 
 
 “We are battling a problem with heroin in our community,” Preston said. Prostitution is on the rise as well, he acknowledged. 
 
 Charlotte Trego was the first to vanish. In her late 20s with wavy brown hair and glasses, the mother of two young kids had fallen on hard times. “She started taking pain pills and graduated to heroin,” according to the Columbus Dispatch. In the spring of 2014, Trego told her mother that she was ready to get clean. Her mom found a rehab center. 
 
 But then Trego was evicted by her roommate, according to the Chillicothe Gazette. She was last seen May 3, 2014. It was as if Chillicothe’s increasingly dangerous streets simply swallowed her whole. 
 
 That same day, a friend of Trego’s, Tameka Lynch, also vanished. Like Trego, Lynch had drug problems. 
 
 “She used and she kind of was struggling, especially after she was diagnosed with lupus,” Lynch’s cousin, Chasity Lett, told the Huffington Post. “Once that happened and she lost her place, it kind of triggered the whole drug thing.” 
 
 Lynch, a 30-year-old mother of three, financed her deepening addiction by selling her body, the Huffington Post reported, citing Chillicothe police and a local prostitute. 
 
 “I knew her,” said the woman, whom the Huffington Post did not identify. “It was around midnight when she went to turn tricks and disappeared.” 
 
 Lynch was the first of “Chillicothe’s missing women” — as the six have been called — to be found. On May 24, three weeks after her disappearance, a kayaker spotted Lynch’s body on a sandbar in Paint Creek outside town. The Ross County coroner’s office determined that she had died of a multiple-drug overdose. 
 
 But Lynch was afraid of the water, her mother told the Dispatch. “Somebody needs to pay for this,” Angela Robinson said, speculating that her daughter had been murdered. “She was already dead when she was put in the water,” she told the Huffington Post. 
 
 In the year since, four more women have vanished. Three of them have come home in coffins. 
 
 On Nov. 3, 2014, six months after Trego and Lynch disappeared, another local woman went missing. Wanda Lemons is a 37-year-old mother of five. 
 
 “She just disappeared out of thin air,” her daughter, Megan Hodges, told the Huffington Post. “I just want them to find out what happened to her.” 
 
 “I think her disappearance might be related to sex trafficking, but if it were drugs I don’t think it would be related,” Hodges added. 
 
 Two months later, Shasta Himelrick’s body was found floating in the Scioto River outside Chillicothe. In December, she had gleefully told friends that she was “eating for two,” according to the Chillicothe Gazette. On Christmas Day, the pregnant 20-year-old blonde had received a text message while visiting her grandmother. Himelrick left, promising to return, but never did. 
 
 A Chillicothe gas station surveillance camera recorded her ducking inside. Hours later, her abandoned car was found on a bridge south of town. The doors were open, the tank was empty and the battery was dead. Himelrick’s body was fished from the water eight days later. The coroner ruled the death a suicide, but Himelrick’s friends are convinced it was murder. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Tiffany Sayre, 26, went missing on May 11. On June 20, her body was found wrapped in a bed sheet. (The Sayre family) 
 
 
 
 Tiffany Sayre with her two children. (The Sayre family) 
 
 Tiffany Sayre went missing under similar circumstances. It was around midnight on May 11, and Sayre and her friend Jessie Sanford were working at a local motel. 
 
 “She was doing business at the Chillicothe Inn,” Sanford told the Huffington Post. “She left to run to her grandmother’s house and was going to go back to the hotel to meet the same people so she could make some more money. I don’t know what happened. I think somebody took her.” 
 
 Like the other women, Sayre had gotten involved in drugs and prostitution, according to police and family members. 
 
 Kenneth Buell, Sayre’s ex-boyfriend and the father of their two children, told The Washington Post that the couple had done heroin and crack cocaine together. “For a couple of years we were both on drugs,” he said. Buell said he got clean a year ago, but Sayre couldn’t, and the couple broke up. 
 
 “She couldn’t kick it,” he said. “It just had a hold of her.” 
 
 Jessica Sayre said her sister had met another man and tried to go straight. But when her new boyfriend died in April from a blood clot, Tiffany went back to drugs and the vices that funded her addiction. 
 
 “It hit my sister really hard. She really loved him,” Jessica Sayre said. “They had planned on moving, going to this other place, actually getting married and having a life together. I think she did the drugs a little more to help with the pain. She didn’t want to be in her right mind because she didn’t feel like it was the right thing.” 
 
 “The night she apparently went missing, she talked about how she wanted to get her life straight and go clean,” Sayre added. “My sister did these things that we did not approve of to get money for drugs, because we didn’t want to be the source of money for those types of things. She did what she had to do.” 
 
 “Did she have a problem? Yes, everybody’s got problems,” Buell said. “Hers got a hold of her and didn’t let go.” 
 
 // 
 
 I know everyone is probably getting sick and tired of me sharing the pictures of my cousin and all the other ladies that… Posted by Courtney Willett on Tuesday, June 9, 2015 
 
 Sayre’s family put out missing-person fliers and held candlelight vigils but heard nothing. While they were waiting, another woman, Timberly Clayton, was found dead: shot in the head three times and left in a ditch near another creek. (Authorities named Jason A. McCrary, a 36-year-old convicted sex offender, as the prime suspect in the killing but have not yet charged him with the crime.) 
 
 Finally, last Saturday, Sayre became the latest victim in the string of deadly disappearances. 
 
 A couple out for a Saturday evening walk through a nature preserve south of Chillicothe spotted something white at the edge of a drainage pipe running underneath the road. Sayre’s naked body had been wrapped in a bed sheet and hidden inside the culvert with a crown of duct tape around her strawberry blond hair. 
 
 “She’s wrapped up in a blanket and you can see her breasts, her stomach, duct tape, a white blanket,” the female passerby told a 911 dispatcher. 
 
 “We were hoping that she was still alive,” Jessica Sayre said. “You’re wishing and hoping and then all of a sudden you get a phone call saying that your loved one has been found, but not the way you wanted to find her.” 
 
 “She got murdered,” Buell said more bluntly. “Somebody took her away and it was intentional.” 
 
 Authorities have ruled Sayre’s death a homicide. The grisly discovery helped launch the task force, which now includes more than a dozen members, including the FBI analysts, according to Preston. The task force is investigating the cases of all six women, even those formerly considered suicides. According to media reports, the investigation could also expand to at least three other women who went missing from nearby Portsmouth and Columbus. 
 
 A serial killer is a possibility, Preston admitted. He said officials were studying the apparent pattern of the dumping of the bodies along waterways outside the city. 
 
 “This wasn’t just a simple overdose,” Jessica Sayre said of her sister’s death. “They could have called the police. We didn’t have to find her like this.” 
 
 “These motherf—— are gonna get done,” Buell said, promising vengeance. “What would you do if somebody took your life away?” 
 
 Tiffany Sayre, 26, went missing May 11. On June 20, her body was found wrapped in a bed sheet. (The Sayre family) 
 
 The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is analyzing the forensics found at the scene for traces of a suspect, Preston said. He added that the task force had received more than 100 tips in just a few days but is still searching for a witness. 
 
 “A lot of those people may be afraid to come forward,” he said. “If they are afraid, they can let us know anonymously. We just want the information. Somebody saw something.” 
 
 But as authorities delve into the growing number of deaths and disappearances, some locals say the police are part of the problem. 
 
 “The day I reported her missing was very upsetting to me,” Trego’s mother, Yvonne Boggs, told the Huffington Post. “The cop said, ‘Women like your daughter take off because they don’t want to be bothered.’ It was like they looked into it up to a certain point and then quit looking.” 
 
 “The police didn’t take it serious and just blew me off,” Lynch’s mother, Angela Robinson, told the same Web site. 
 
 Sayre’s family said they had also been kept in the dark. Buell even blamed the authorities. 
 
 “These police down here are pieces of s—,” he said. “They even go around and pick up the prostitutes.” 
 
 Both he and Jessica Sayre said police and authorities had long ago abandoned Chillicothe. 
 
 “It’s not safe,” he said. “The last five, six, seven years it’s gone to hell. You can’t walk around by yourself, especially females.” 
 
 “I feel like Chillicothe has turned for the worst,” Jessica Sayre said. “Now they are going to start picking up the pieces, but this town has really gone down with drugs. It’s got pretty bad.” 
 
 She said that despite the discovery of her sister’s body, her family would continue to hold vigils for Trego and Lemons. 
 
 “It’s been a nightmare for us,” she said of Tiffany’s death. “Nothing is going to bring her back, but we are going to get justice. And we are going to pray for these two other women who are missing in Chillicothe. 
 
 “This town has beauty,” she said. “This town can come together.” ||||| Authorities made a public appeal on Thursday for help to determine why four women have died and two disappeared from a small southern Ohio county in little more than a year. 
 
 At least some of the women, all Chillicothe, Ohio-area residents, were believed to be drug users, possibly drawn into prostitution to support their addiction, authorities said. 
 
 The latest one to be found dead was discovered in a creek on Saturday, according to law-enforcement officials, who said six women dead or missing is an unusually high number for Ross County, which has a population of less than 80,000. 
 
 "We are putting every resource that we have available, all the manpower that we have available to find out what's going on," Lieutenant Mike Preston, spokesman for the Ross County Sheriff's Office, said in a telephone interview. 
 
 The cases have raised fears among residents of a possible serial killer, according to the Chillicothe Gazette. Authorities have not ruled out the possibility, or confirmed it in the county 50 miles south of Ohio's capital of Columbus. 
 
 "The investigation has not produced any evidence that one person or persons are responsible," Preston told Reuters in an email. "Heroin addiction and prostitution to support the addiction has come up in the investigation." 
 
 Since May 2014, Tameka Lynch, Shasta Himelrick, Timberly Claytor and Tiffany Sayre have been found dead after being reported missing. Charlotte Trego and Wanda Lemons were reported missing and remain unaccounted for. 
 
 Authorities circulated a flyer with pictures of the six women on Thursday, asking for any information about them. 
 
 The deaths of Sayre and Claytor are being investigated as homicides. Sayre was last seen in Chillicothe in May and her body was found on Saturday in a creek in an adjoining county, while Claytor's body was found in May in Ross County. 
 
 A man being held on separate charges has been identified as a suspect in Claytor's death and is not suspected in the deaths or other disappearances, Preston said. 
 
 A task force looking into the cases includes investigators from the Chillicothe police, Ross County, state agencies and the FBI, Preston said. 
 
 While the deaths of Lynch and Himelrick have not been classified as homicides, officials said the women had some things in common with the others. They did not elaborate. 
 
 (Reporting by Steve Bittenbender in Louisville, Kentucky; Editing by David Bailey and Mohammad Zargham) ||||| CHILLICOTHE, Ohio -- One-by-one, at least four women have disappeared or turned up dead in this small city, where family and friends fear a serial killer or sex traffickers are on the loose, and authorities are ruling nothing out. 
 
 "There is something going on," Yvonne Boggs told The Huffington Post. "It seems strange that all these girls knew each other and are now missing. Someone is taking these girls for some reason." 
 
 Boggs' daughter, 27-year-old Charlotte Trego, was the first of the women to go missing in the small city roughly 50 miles south of Columbus. 
 
 CHARLOTTE TREGO 
 
 
 
 "She was last seen by us on May 3, 2014," Boggs said. "I knew right away something was wrong because it's not like Charlotte not to get in touch with me at all." 
 
 Trego has two children, ages 4 and 13. 
 
 "The day I reported her missing was very upsetting to me," Boggs said. "The cop said, 'Women like your daughter take off because they don’t want to be bothered.' It was like they looked into it up to a certain point and then quit looking." 
 
 Boggs acknowledges her daughter has battled drug addiction, but argues that affliction entitles her child to no less attention than any other missing person case. 
 
 VISIT: Find Charlotte Trego 
 
 "She is a very loving, caring person," the distraught mother said. "She didn't always make the best decisions, but she wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone. She is a mommy's girl." 
 
 May 3, 2014 is also the day Trego's friend, 30-year-old Tameka Lynch, was last seen in Chillicothe. 
 
 TAMEKA LYNCH 
 
 
 
 "The police didn't take it serious and just blew me off," Lynch's mother, Angela Robinson, told HuffPost. 
 
 Lynch was found dead on May 24, 2014. Kayakers found her naked body on a sandbar in Paint Creek, roughly 20 miles downstream from where it passes through Chillicothe. 
 
 PAINT CREEK 
 
 
 
 According to the autopsy report, Lynch's cause of death was "likely multiple drug overdoses." The manner of death is listed as "undetermined circumstance." 
 
 "She was already dead when she was put in the water," Robinson said. 
 
 Lynch's cousin, Chasity Lett, told HuffPost Lynch was battling drug addiction at the time of her disappearance. 
 
 VISIT: Missing Chillicothe Women 
 
 "She used and she kind of was struggling, especially after she was diagnosed with lupus," Lett said. "Once that happened and she lost her place, it kind of triggered the whole drug thing." 
 
 Chillicothe police said Lynch had ties to prostitution, which she likely used to support her drug habit. 
 
 DOWNTOWN CHILLICOTHE 
 
 
 
 A prostitute from Second Street in Chillicothe -- a street where much of the city's illegal sex trade occurs -- told HuffPost the word on the street is that Lynch disappeared on her way to meet a client near Water Street. 
 
 "I knew her," said the woman, who did not wish to be identified. "It was around midnight when she went to turn tricks and disappeared." 
 
 The woman said it is unlikely that anyone will ever know what happened to Lynch. 
 
 "Maybe someone killed her or maybe she overdosed and someone dumped her body," she said. "Nobody knows and probably nobody ever will." 
 
 Lynch was the mother of three children, ages 5, 6 and 11. 
 
 On Nov. 3, 2014 -- six months to the day that Trego and Lynch were last seen -- 37-year-old Wanda Lemons was last seen in Chillicothe. 
 
 "She just disappeared out of thin air," Lemons' daughter, 19-year-old Megan Hodges, told HuffPost. "I just want them to find out what happened to her." 
 
 WANDA LEMONS 
 
 
 
 Authorities have yet to find any trace of Lemons, who is the mother of five children, ages 7, 13, 19, 21 and 23. 
 
 "I think her disappearance might be related to sex trafficking, but if it were drugs I don't think it would be related," Hodges said. 
 
 VISIT: Missing Wanda Lemons 
 
 It was around midnight on May 11, some six months after Lemons' disappearance, that 26-year-old Tiffany Sayre disappeared in Chillicothe. She was last seen by her friend, Jessie Sanford. 
 
 TIFFANY SAYRE 
 
 
 
 "She was doing business at the Chillicothe Inn," Sanford told HuffPost. "She left to run to her grandmother's house and was going to go back to the hotel to meet the same people so she could make some more money. I don't know what happened. I think somebody took her." 
 
 It remains unclear if Sayre went back to the hotel. Her cellphone, police said, was last active by a tower near Marietta Road. It has not been powered on since then. 
 
 CHILLICOTHE INN 
 
 
 
 It's also unclear if the men Sayre met with at the hotel have been cleared of suspicion. 
 
 "All the videos and everything have been turned over to our detective bureau," Chillicothe Police Sgt. Ron Meyers told HuffPost. "They haven't indicated to me that they've even contacted [the men]." 
 
 VISIT: Find Tiffany Sayre 
 
 Like Boggs and Robinson, Sayre's family is critical of the police department. 
 
 "We have been provided no information whatsoever," Mike Bloomfield told HuffPost. 
 
 CHILLICOTHE POLICE 
 
 
 
 Bloomfield has been with Sayre's mother, Connie Sayre, for the past nine years and said he considers Tiffany Sayre one of his own children. 
 
 "No one will talk to us and when they searched the river last week, we had to read about it in the paper," Bloomfield said. "The media knows more than we do." 
 
 Tiffany Sayre's mom said her daughter has two children, ages 2 and 6. 
 
 "I want her home," Connie Sayre told HuffPost. "We all love her and miss her." 
 
 TIFFANY SAYRE VOLUNTEER SEARCH 
 
 
 
 According to Meyers, each of the cases has been assigned to a detective who is actively investigating. 
 
 Meyers said that while missing person cases are not uncommon in Chillicothe, which has a population of about 21,000, the timing and circumstances of these cases stand out as "peculiar." 
 
 "They all ran in the same circle -- the drug scene and things like that," Meyers said. "In my 23-year career, I have handled 30 to 40 cases of missing people and generally those cases are quickly solved. These cases, where people have been gone this long, are odd." 
 
 Every family member HuffPost interviewed said they suspect the cases in Chillicothe are linked. Some even think cases in other nearby areas, including the 2013 disappearance of 26-year-old Megan Lancaster, could be connected. 
 
 MEGAN LANCASTER 
 
 
 
 "These girls all knew the same people," Lancaster's sister-in-law, Kadie Lancaster, told HuffPost. "I think it's possible these and other cases, as far off as Michigan, are all connected." 
 
 Megan Lancaster, the mother of a 9-year-old boy, was last seen in Portsmouth on April 3, 2013. Her vehicle was later found abandoned at an area business. Portsmouth is a city located about 45 miles south of Chillicothe. 
 
 "When Megan disappeared, they all started disappearing," said Kadie Lancaster. 
 
 VISIT: Finding Megan Lancaster 
 
 "There's something going on here and it's scary," Lett said. 
 
 While it is possible the women took off of their own accord or met their tragic ends as a result of drug overdoses, there is no mistaking that the lives most of them lived put them in danger every single day. 
 
 "My friend, who has been on streets longer than any of these girls, got pulled into a van and got the f--k beat out of her a few days ago," a registered nurse and Second Street prostitute told HuffPost. "But she didn’t call the cops because they don’t do s--t. If you're an addict or a prostitute, they don’t care." 
 
 Sanford said the unexplained disappearances have prompted her to give up prostitution for good. 
 
 "I'm done," she said. "I'll never go back to it again." 
 
 While the search for answers continues, at least one of the missing women's family members considers Tameka Lynch's family lucky. 
 
 "Honestly, I hate to say it, but her family is the luckiest because they have closure," Hodges told HuffPost. "For the rest of us, there are no answers." 
 
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– Chillicothe was the capital of Ohio some 200 years ago. Things have gone downhill from there. But amid poverty and heroin woes, the city of 21,000 has "turned for the worst," Jessica Sayre tells the Washington Post. Her 26-year-old sister, Tiffany, a sex worker battling a drug problem, went missing from a local motel on May 11. Her naked body was found wrapped in a sheet in a drainage pipe on Saturday, making her the fourth woman to turn up dead near Chillicothe's waterways in the last year. At least two more women have vanished, leading some to fear a serial killer is on the loose. "I don't want to come out and say 'yes, we have a serial killer,'" says an officer, but he admits it's possible. The location of the women's bodies isn't the only evidence linking the cases. Most of the victims had drug issues and some were prostitutes; some even knew each other, reports the Post, which rounded up coverage from the Columbus Dispatch and Huffington Post. Friends Charlotte Trego, 27, and Tameka Lynch, 30, were the first to disappear, separately, on May 3, 2014. Lynch was found dead of a suspected drug overdose in a creek weeks later; her mom told the Dispatch she was afraid of water. Wanda Lemons, 38; Shasta Himelrick, 20; and Timberly Claytor later vanished; the bodies of the latter two were ultimately found. Himelrick was pregnant; the five other women all had children. Sayre's death, ruled a murder, helped launch a task force now investigating all six cases; the cases of three missing women from nearby Portsmouth and Columbus may also get a look. For more, head to the Post.