Reader discretion: this story contains details of violence some readers may find distressing.
On the afternoon of Saturday, December 9, 2017, Howie Eubank and his cousin came back to the house on Linda Street in Coventry Township, just south of Akron, Ohio, and realised they had locked themselves out.
It should have been nothing. Howie, 23, had moved back in with his parents that summer. They found a ladder in the garage and went around the house checking windows. Only one would open: a window on the south side, into a small room his mother used as an office.
Howie climbed in. In the corner, under blankets, were two large plastic storage totes. Maggots and flies covered them and the floor around them.
The top tote, a grey one, was empty. He carried it outside to the trash cans. The one underneath was blue, and so heavy that Howie and his cousin had to drag it. He later told detectives it was “bursting on the bottom.”
Howie had not seen his father in six months. As far as he and the rest of the family knew, Howard Eubank, 54, had walked out in June, left Ohio with a buddy from rehab and was living somewhere in Texas.
The records in this story, including the detective’s case report, crime scene photos and the interrogation video, were obtained by Wicked Crime directly from law enforcement. You can watch Marcia Eubank’s full interrogation here.
“What the f*** is this”
Howie photographed the blue tote, first with the lid on and then with it off, and sent the pictures to the one person who used that room: his mother, Marcia Eubank. She was at work at a nursing home in Canal Fulton.
At 1:17 p.m. he texted her: “What the f*** is this.”
Three minutes later, according to her employer’s time records, Marcia clocked out. She had been scheduled to work until 4 p.m. She left the building and later phoned her supervisor to say she was quitting.
While Howie waited, he and his cousin dragged the tote across the front yard and around the side of the house to the backyard. Then they tipped it over. Neither of them could tell what was inside. Whatever it was, it was rotting.
At 1:34 p.m. his mother’s answer arrived in two parts.
“It is part of year fathers body. The other parts are in the basement under two boxes in crates. Call the police and tell them I killed dad and stored his body. Don’t dig crates out let police do that. I killed him on june 13th.”
Howie called 911 at 1:38 p.m.
A drag path across the lawn
Deputies arrived within minutes and found the blue tote on its side in the middle of the backyard with its contents spilled onto the grass. Even the medical examiner’s office, shown photos, could not say at first whether the remains were human.
Detective Jason Kline traced a path of freshly churned soil leading from the front porch, across the front yard, along the west side of the house and straight to the tote. A grey tote crawling with maggots sat next to the trash cans by the driveway.
Nobody went inside. Deputies sealed the property and waited for a judge.
Meanwhile, Marcia had vanished. Her sister arrived at the scene and told deputies she feared Marcia might be suicidal. Howie agreed. The sheriff’s office put out a lookout for her across Northeast Ohio and asked her phone carrier for an emergency location ping every time the phone came on.
Two boxes, upside down
At 5:51 p.m. a judge signed the search warrant. Detectives, crime scene deputies and the medical examiner’s team went in through the kitchen door and down to the basement.
Along the east wall was a folding table piled with junk: old computer parts, pots, a microwave. Next to it stood two cardboard boxes, one tall and one short. Both had been turned upside down.
When investigators lifted them straight up, each box came away from a plastic tote that had been hidden underneath it. On the left was a blue tote, taped shut. On the right was a red one, also taped shut.
The blue tote held two white kitchen trash bags. The red one held three. The medical examiner’s team confirmed what was in them.
The office
Upstairs, the room Howie had climbed into told the rest of the story.
The blue carpet was bleached pale everywhere except a single rectangle in the corner, the outline where the big tote had stood. Bleach streaks ran down all four walls from ceiling to baseboard, as if someone had poured it along the tops of the walls and let it run. The closet carpet was stained the same way. Under the carpet, a stain had soaked through the wooden floorboards and down into the basement rafters.
In the bottom drawer of a dresser in Marcia’s bedroom, in its original wooden box, was a Heritage Rough Rider .22 caliber revolver. It was loaded with six live rounds.
“It’s been a hell of a six months”
At 6:39 p.m. the carrier’s ping came through: Marcia’s phone was at the Walmart on South Arlington Road in Akron.
The first officer there was Summit County Sheriff Steve Barry himself. He found her maroon Mercury Sable parked at the south end of the lot, empty, and waited.
A woman walked up and unlocked it with a key fob. The sheriff, in a marked jacket, told her not to move. She said, “Ok.” He asked whether she was hurt. She didn’t answer.
“It’s been a hell of a day,” Barry said.
“It’s been a hell of a six months,” Marcia Eubank answered. “I’m just glad it’s over.”
Then she asked if her son was OK.
Her account
At 7:14 p.m. Marcia, 49, sat down with Detectives Larry Brown and Brian Breeden, waived her rights and talked. She said she had planned to turn herself in by the end of the night.
She told them her husband had been an abusive drunk for most of their 24 years of marriage, and that she had stayed for the children. She said he had once banged her head into the floor when Howie was a baby.
On June 13, she said, she got up around 4 a.m. and made coffee for Howie before he left for work. Around 5:45 her husband got up, had coffee and a cigarette and sat down at the computer in the office with his back to the door. They had argued the night before about car repairs.
She said she “just snapped.” She got the revolver, walked up behind him and fired once into the back of his head. Then she left the room.
A few minutes later she heard him moaning and saw him moving his head. She went back and fired three or four more rounds.
She said she put his body in the office closet and left it there for eight days, pouring bleach over it to cover the smell. When Howie asked about the odour, she told him a dead animal had crawled under the porch. That, she said, was when she knew she had to turn herself in or deal with the body. “Then I had to cut him up,” she told the detectives, “which I didn’t plan on doing.”
She said she dismembered him in the office in a single day, using an electric grinder, which burned out and was thrown away, and hand saws that were still in the garage. Nothing ever left the house.
That night an X-ray at the medical examiner’s office showed four bullets in his head.
The texts from a dead man’s phone
Over the following weeks, detectives pulled the phone records, the bank records and every email account they could find. What they showed was that from the morning Howard Eubank died, his phone never went quiet.
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