Become an Apple Subscriber or Patron to listen!
During the summer of 1992, 17-year-old Angel Ormston was on summer break from Mentor High School in Mentor, Ohio when she suddenly vanished.
Angel was a blond haired girl & those who knew her often saw a radiant smile on her face; she was well-liked & loved driving around with friends & playing music. She had her own car which allowed her the freedom to come & go as she chose. Angel had a part-time job at a burger restaurant in the local Great Lakes Mall that earned her the cash she needed.
On Friday, July 31, 1992, Angel told her mom Jackie that she was heading to the mall to grab her paycheck & run some errands. When she wasn’t home the next day, Jackie just assumed that her social daughter was spending the night at a friend’s house as she often did. Since Angel was a good kid, Jackie wasn’t overly strict & didn’t have set rules in place in terms of when her daughter should check in. She had always been a very self-sufficient, fiercely independent person so Jackie wasn’t initially worried. Angel’s father was often away from home, working as a long-haul trucker.
On Sunday, August 2, two days after Jackie last saw her daughter, Angel’s brother headed to the mall & was surprised when he saw his sister’s 1981 white Honda Civic parked in the lot. When he looked inside the car, he noticed that her purse & a hair brush were sitting on the seat. After he called his mom to let her know what was going on, Jackie drove to the mall to retrieve Angel’s car. At this point, Jackie still assumed that Angel was hanging out with her best friend, Stacie since they were two peas in a pod. When they weren’t together, the two would be chatting on the phone, however, when Jackie called Stacie, there was no answer.
Beginning to worry, Jackie decided to contact the police to report Angel missing. After she explained that she hadn’t seen her daughter in two days, she was asked why she’d waited so long to call & Jackie indicated that she was under the impression that she needed to wait 48 hours.
Jackie called Stacie a second time & this time, she answered. Her worry skyrocketed when Stacie explained that she had been at her sister’s house baking cookies all weekend & hadn’t seen Angel. Jackie’s heart dropped when she realized that Stacie had no idea where Angel was since all along she assumed her daughter had been with her.
The Mentor police launched an investigation & a search for Angel began. When they inspected her car, there were no indications of foul play & it didn’t appear as if anything had been stolen. It looked as if Angel had driven to the mall & simply walked away from her car.
Those that were close to Angel did not believe she would ever voluntarily run away from her life. She was an outgoing, down-to-earth girl who had many ambitions for her future & planned to attend college after high school.
Despite the fact that there was no sign of struggle in Angel’s car, police began to wonder if she’d been abducted. When her car was dusted, many fingerprints were located, but each were traced back to her family & friends. This automatically made those close to Angel a potential suspect.
When authorities looked into Angel’s father’s schedule within the trucking company, dispatch sheets proved that he had been states away at the time of his daughter’s disappearance so he was quickly cleared as a suspect.
When Jackie was asked to take a polygraph test, investigators were taken aback when she refused. When they began to take a closer look at her behavior, they started to more deeply question why she’d waited two days to report her teenage daughter missing. They also wondered why she would have moved Angel’s car from the mall parking lot if she questioned foul play as she could have potentially disturbed evidence. However, there was no hard evidence against Jackie & they couldn’t force her to take a polygraph test.
Jackie told police that on the Friday she last saw Angel, she was heading to the mall to pick up her paycheck from the burger restaurant. When investigators spoke with her co-workers, they learned that they never saw Angel that day, which was backed up by the fact that her paycheck remained there. Her co-workers also told investigators that they worked with a male manager who often made the young female employees extremely uneasy. He was often lurking around as they went to change into their uniforms. On top of that, he seemed to have a particular fixation with Angel & often showed her unwanted, extra attention. He would find any & every reason to interact with her within the cramped confines of the kitchen.
The manager had actually been terminated for sexual harassment after he had inappropriately touched some of the employees. When investigators began to look into this man, they realized that he had a record for having contact with underage girls.
When the former manager was tracked down, he told investigators that he had nothing to do with Angel’s disappearance. He indicated that not only had he been nowhere near the mall on the day in question, but he had not seen Angel since they last worked together. He elaborated that he had been working at a different fast food chain that day & had the logs to prove his alibi.
During the investigation, investigators learned something that Angel’s family had been completely unaware of; she had been fired from the fast food restaurant for frequently clocking in late. When she told her mom that she was going to get her paycheck, she failed to mention that it was to be her last paycheck. When each employee within the restaurant was cleared, detectives found themselves back at square one.
No one could possibly imagine who would have wanted to cause Angel harm since she was a sweet girl who had no known enemies. However, she did have a very trusting nature which police believe could have potentially led her into the wrong hands. They wondered if someone took advantage of her trust & vulnerability.
Police were aware that Stacie was Angel’s best friend & likely knew more about her than even her own family as sometimes teenagers are known to hide parts of their lives from their parents. When police asked Stacie to come into the station, they ended up speaking with her for about four hours. Stacie was cleared as a suspect as detectives confirmed that she had been at her sister’s house as she said she was.
Stacie told investigators about a boy they went to school with, 19-year-old Mark Sotka, & suggested they speak with him. Mark had recently graduated with honors from Mentor High & Angel had been very interested in pursuing a relationship with him. The two had been spending time together over the summer, something that only Angel’s friends were aware of. During her conversation with investigators, Stacie eventually dropped a bombshell when she told them that Angel was pregnant with Mark’s baby.
According to Stacie, before Angel vanished, she intended to tell Mark about the baby & ask him if he would be willing to raise the child with her.
When investigators brought Mark in for questioning, he seemed surprised that he was being considered a suspect in the case. He indicated that not only were he & Angel not together, but he questioned that she could possibly be pregnant with his child as they had only slept together once & he hadn’t seen her in some time. According to Mark, he was in a long-term relationship with another girl for the previous two years & he was getting ready to attend Akram University in the fall.
When Mark was asked about his whereabouts on the night of Angel’s disappearance, he said that he worked until 5 pm, went to the mall to pick up a gift for his girlfriend & met up with friends for pizza in the evening.
In order to verify his alibi, police went to the car dealership where Mark worked & verified that he had worked until 5 pm that Friday. His shopping trip at the mall also seemed believable & his friends verified that he met up with them at about 9 pm for pizza & a movie. His alibi for working & dinner were rock solid, but it was the time in the middle when Mark said he was shopping that couldn’t be proved as no witnesses could attest to seeing him. Investigators spoke with employees at the stores where Mark claimed to have entered & no one recalled seeing him.
When Mark was asked to take a polygraph test, he passed with flying colors & indicated that he was not being deceptive in his answers. Because of the results of Mark’s polygraph test, paired with his cooperation, police cleared him as a suspect.
Investigators were back at square one & began to question if maybe Angel had run away in order to avoid revealing her pregnancy to her parents. However, there was still the question if she’d been abducted by an unknown person.
Police hit a dead end until they received a tip a few weeks later from a prisoner at the Lake County Detention Center. The caller indicated that there was a sex worker in Cleveland that went by the name Angel. She was somewhere between 17-20-years-old, with blond hair & a pretty smile. His description of the girl seemed to match Angel Ormston. The caller indicated that Angel was working for a man who went by the name Pimp Daddy & he recalls seeing Angel just before he was arrested.
When the detective contacted investigators in Cleveland, they confirmed that they were aware of the man known as Pimp Daddy who ran his business out of a two-story building on the outskirts of town who was known to work with runaways & troubled teens.
Police made the decision to raid Pimp Daddy’s building on a Friday night after they obtained a search warrant. Here, they tracked down the girl named Angel, but she refused to talk. Since they were unable to gain any information from the girl, they called Jackie & asked her to drive to Cleveland to confirm if the girl was her daughter. When she arrived, Jackie sadly verified that the girl was not her daughter. However, police were able to track the girl’s parents down & she was returned safely to her family. With this, investigators were back at square one.
In the meantime, Jackie turned to the media to spread the word of her daughter’s disappearance as she pleaded for help in finding her. Angel’s friends went around, hanging flyers throughout the town & contacted local businesses to pull together a reward fund of $10,000 for information that could lead to finding her. Thousands of tips came through the Mentor Police Department & police tirelessly followed each & every lead, each coming to yet another dead end.
Nearing November, when three months had passed since Angel disappeared, Jackie refused to give up hope. Believing that the police weren’t moving quickly enough, the Ormston family decided to hire a private detective, but this also turned up nothing.
Police began to notice a fiance of one of Angel’s friends who barely knew Angel, yet appeared to frequently insert himself into the investigation, talking to both police & the media. He often voiced potential theories as to her whereabouts. The man was 29-years-old, eleven years older than Angel’s friend who he intended to marry. They questioned if maybe the man made a sexual advance toward Angel, she refused & he retaliated in anger.
When police brought the man in for questioning, he provided an alibi & indicated that he was working at a shoe store within the mall. They learned that during his shift, he would have had plenty of opportunities to step away & commit a crime. When his car was searched, no incriminating evidence was located & police decided he was likely just a busy-body & he was eliminated from the case.
On December 15, 1992, nearly five months after Angel vanished, the search for Angel came to a tragic end when two men, Victor Vantassel & William Kemp, were out raccoon hunting with Kemp’s dog, Rose. At about 10 pm, an hour & a half after they set out, Rose began tracking a scent that led them to a drainage ditch on the north side of Clark Road. It was here that the men noticed a large shape wrapped in a sheet & tied with a rope. When they moved the fabric away, they were horrified at the sight of a human hand so they immediately ran down the street to contact the police.
The following day, the men learned that the body they’d discovered belonged to the missing teen, Angel Ormston which caused them to feel sick with grief & unable to sleep. Angel’s body was identified with the use of dental records. Vantassel was a father himself & couldn’t imagine the pain her parents must be feeling, but at the same time, he was also relieved that they were able to find her.
Angel’s body was lying face down in the ditch & her remains were badly decomposed & had likely been at that location the same length of time she’d been missing. Her body had been bound with green duct tape & an old clothesline.
Investigators combed the area where Angel’s body was located, hoping to find evidence that would lead to her killer. The autopsy determined that she had died from blunt-force trauma to her head & she’d also been stabbed twice in the chest by a sharp object. Her cause of death were the stab wounds & it was clear that her killer had stabbed with force which appeared to be driven by anger.
Investigators were able to locate blue carpet fibers adhered to the duct tape around Angel’s body. They compiled a list of all the homes that were connected to Angel, including neighbors, family & friends in search of one that might contain blue carpeting. One of the homes included that of the parents of Mark Sotka, the 19-year-old that Stacie indicated Angel was seeing & even more importantly, pregnant with his child.
At the time of Angel’s murder, Mark’s parents had their home for sale & the house was empty, but Mark was staying there. At the time, only two individuals had the key to the home, Mark & his mother. After Angel’s body was discovered, the home had been sold, but investigators reached out to the new owners who gave them permission to conduct a search. By this time, the current owners had renovated the entirety of the house with the exception of two rooms, one being the basement.
As police made their way down the stairs toward the basement, they immediately noted blue carpet squares on the steps. Samples of the fibers were taken for comparison to what was found on Angel’s remains & they also came across a section of a clothes line in the laundry room that had been cut out.
The items were rushed to the lab for processing & the results came back with exactly what police expected, they were a match. While searching the home, investigators also came across tiny blood spots on the carpets, stairs & walls as well as a bloody thumbprint which was lifted.
One day after police entered Mark’s former basement & five months to the day that Angel disappeared, Mark Sotka was arrested & charged with her murder. He was adamant that he had nothing to do with her murder & in the meantime, investigators began examining his car. It was clear that he’d attempted to scrub it clean, but managed to miss some areas. There were still traces of blood inside his trunk as well as a roll of green duct tape in his car.
When confronted with this physical evidence, Mark began to crack & admitted that he’d done something stupid. When he was asked to elaborate on this statement, he confirmed that he murdered Angel.
According to Mark, he invited Angel to the house that Friday with the intention of having sex with her, but when she informed him of her pregnancy & the fact that he was the father, he lashed out in anger. He insisted that Angel have an abortion, but she refused which only escalated his anger. He said that in a fit of rage he punched her several times, causing her to fall down. He then ran up the stairs to grab a knife, came back downstairs & stabbed her twice. Mark confirmed that at the time he stabbed Angel she was still alive since he could see that she was breathing.
Mark wrapped Angel’s legs with the clothes line & dragged her up the stairs, placed her into his car & drove to the location where her remains were ultimately found. After, he came back home, washed up & met his friends for dinner where he ate pepperoni pizza as he chatted & laughed, despite the fact that Angel’s body lay in a shallow grave.
With his confession, Mark was charged with Angel’s murder which was a great relief to her family. Mark took police to the location where he’d thrown Angel’s car keys & then to the remote location where he disposed of the knife, but it was never recovered. Mark indicated that he murdered Angel because he had no feelings for her & no intention of paying child support.
In order to avoid the death penalty, Mark pleaded guilty to aggravated murder & kidnapping in February 1993. He was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years.
Because Mark had zero remorse for what he did to Angel, he was able to pass the polygraph test & managed to fool authorities when they initially cleared him as a suspect.
After serving only twenty of his thirty year minimum sentence, Mark was eligible for release due to an older law that enabled inmates to have their first parole hearing after serving only two-thirds of their minimum sentence. It was Angel’s family’s mission to ensure that he remained behind bars at the Grafton Correctional Institution & this initial parole was denied.
Ten years later, in July 2023, now after serving thirty years, he was again eligible for parole. In September of 2023, the Ohio Parole Board announced their decision to deny Mark’s release. Angel’s family was thrilled that the monster who removed her from their lives will remain behind bars for at least another ten years, his next eligibility in 2033.
According to the Justice for Angel Ormston Facebook page, in September 2024, they announced the Angel Ormston Scholarship fund in honor of Angel. Students who have been impacted by domestic violence and/or those pursuing studies in criminal justice or law, will be eligible.
References:
