GEORGETOWN, Ohio — Ten years ago, 22-year-old Brittany Stykes was on her way to her father's home to celebrate his birthday, her daughter secured in the back seat of a bright yellow Jeep. Brittany was pregnant at the time.
Sometime between when surveillance footage caught Brittany driving past a nearby McDonalds and her parents' home three miles away, she was shot to death on U.S. Route 68 in Brown County. The yellow Jeep was found parked just off the side of the road, in an embankment. Her daughter was found bleeding from a gunshot wound in her head, still strapped into her car seat in the back of the Jeep.
Brittany's daughter pulled through, but the child she was pregnant with did not.
"We didn't sleep very good last night," Brittany's mother Mary Dodson said on Monday, the 10-year anniversary of her daughter's death. "She's still not here she's not with us. And she's never going to be."
The Brown County Coroner's Office determined two bullets hit Brittany and at least three struck the driver's side door of her vehicle. One bullet hit her neck, the coroner said. If that had been it, the wound would have been superficial. But the second bullet hit the side of Bittany's chest, puncturing her lungs and traveling through her body and into her arm.
Brittany's daughter underwent multiple brain surgeries to heal from the bullet that entered her head, just above her eyebrows.
"She's amazing. Very, very smart," Brittany's father David Dodson said. "(She reminds us of Brittany) from the comments she makes sometimes to the attitude."
The coroner did not find gunshot residue at the site of the murder, indicating Brittany was not shot at close range. She also had several abrasions to her face, right arm and fingers, as well as abrasions to her right leg. Toxicology results reported no drugs or alcohol in her system.
When Brittany's body was brought to the coroner’s office, authorities said she had all of her jewelry and about $125 in cash on her.
Since then, the case has taken many twists and turns though one thing has stayed constant: The person who shot and killed Brittany Stykes remains uncaught, ten years later.
"We've not gotten a lot of information lately from the sheriff's department or anything," Mary said.
"It makes it a little rough because 10 years later you're starting to question how active are they working on the case," David said.
Brittany's parents worry the case has gone cold but Brown County Sheriff Gordon Ellis stresses the truth is far from that.
"Until there's an arrest there's no resolution, so to us it's still an active open case," he said.
He's worked many homicide cases in his career in law enforcement, Ellis said, but this case is different. There's a surprising lack of evidence, he said.
"It's always an interesting challenge when you pick up a case that is already started. There's been multiple investigative entities that we've cooperated with throughout this case and it's a very difficult case in the fact that the evidence — we've run down multiple leads and it always is a challenge sometimes, particularly when you move further away from the event to run down those leads," he said. "A lot of times like today there are a lot of cameras, there's a lot of opportunity where people are seeing it but it didn't occur here."
In the beginning, Dave and Mary Dodson pointed to their daughter's husband, Shane. Shane claimed he was working out at a gym just 15 minutes away when his wife and child were discovered just after 8 p.m.
He's maintained his innocence through the years and police have never named him as a formal suspect in the case. In fact, investigators said they cleared Shane of any involvement in the case after questioning him and testing his hands for gunpowder residue.
Shane claimed he'd actually pointed investigators in the direction of a different person — one he was certain had been involved in his wife's murder.
"You know a lot of people think this is about closure but it's more about answers as to what happened that day and why," David said.
In 2015, two years into the investigation of Brittany's murder, a search warrant affidavit filed in the case detailed statements made by a woman who claimed to know who'd pulled the trigger that day.
The woman had come forward in June 2015 with information about a suspect, a motive and knowledge of the case that went "well beyond that of the general public," investigators said.
In her statements to detectives, the informant said she was in the passenger seat of a car with her ex-boyfriend on August 28, 2013, when he spotted a yellow Jeep Wrangler at a gas station and started following it.
After about 25 minutes, she said he plugged a portable blue police light into the car’s cigarette lighter and waved Brittany down off U.S. Route 68 near Gooselick Road.
He knew exactly who she was, the witness said.
“The (informant) stated that the victim was ‘Brit’ and (shooting her) was payback for her ‘old man’ not paying (him) money that he owed,” the affidavit stated.
The informant told police someone paid Brittany's killer two payments of $10,000 to perform the hit, and that the killer was a man with a lot of experience and secrets.
The statements led Brown County Sheriff's deputies and the Kentucky State Police to search a home in Falmouth, Ky., roughly an hour-and-a-half drive from where Brittany was murdered. In all, investigators documented 19 different pieces of evidence collected from the home and called the search a success.
The suspect identified by the informant was in jail on unrelated charges at the time — but that person was never charged with Brittany's murder, or with shooting her daughter.
Then, in 2017, the Brown County Sheriff's Office held a press conference about the case, announcing a renewed effort to solve it. At the time, officials said Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation was collaborating with the Brown County Sheriff's Office, the prosecutor's office and the county's task force.
Months after that, the sheriff's office announced the reward for information leading to a conviction in the case had been raised to $20,000, following a pair of anonymous donations. Now, that reward is up to $50,000.
Despite that, no one has ever faced formal charges in connection with the case.
"I am surprised that we haven't gotten more activity on the elevation of a tip," Ellis said. "I firmly believe there are individuals or people out there who know more about this case so I would encourage anyone to come forward and help us solve this case."
Brittany's parents have worked over the years to keep their daughter's name and memory alive, often speaking out during the anniversary of the murder.
This time is no different; the Dodsons had a vigil for Brittany Monday night.
"Someone does know something and even if it's the person that had a hand in doing this, they need to come forward," Mary said. "They've had 10 years of freedom, I've had 10 years of heartache and my daughter not being here."
