On her 24th birthday, January 28, 2018, Rachael Anderson was killed in her Columbus apartment.
Rachael’s path
Rachael Nicoletta Anderson was born in Warren, Ohio, on January 28, 1994, to Bill and Trish Anderson. She graduated from Warren G. Harding High School in 2012.
Anderson planned to become a funeral director. She attended Youngstown State University for mortuary science prerequisites and made the Dean’s List. She then studied at the Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science and earned a bachelor’s degree in mortuary science in 2016.
While in school, she worked at the Naegele-Kleb-Ihlendorf Funeral Home. After graduation, she moved to Columbus and began an apprenticeship at Shaw Davis Funeral Home. She was close to finishing that apprenticeship, and her manager planned to hire her.
Anderson spent the weekend of her twenty-fourth birthday with family and friends. On January 26, 2018, her brother John came from Warren. The next day, they went to the home of their friend John Kennedy for a birthday gathering and stayed there overnight before returning to her apartment on January 28.
Anderson worked on both January 26 and 27. During those shifts, she gave John her apartment key so he could come and go. On January 28, he returned to Warren and accidentally took the key with him.
At about 1:00 p.m., Anderson texted the Kennedys, who also had a key, and arranged to get it after they returned from taking a friend to Athens, Ohio. At 6:17 p.m., she said she would leave in twenty minutes.
She spoke with her mother at about 6:30 p.m., picked up the spare key, stopped at an Arby’s on the East Side at about 7:30 p.m., and then drove home. Her door could be locked only from outside with a key, so it was unlocked when she returned.
Pardon’s record
Anthony Pardon had a criminal record before Anderson was killed. He was a repeat violent offender and registered Tier III sex offender in Ohio.
In 1979, when he was fourteen, he raped an eight-year-old girl. That year, he was committed to the Ohio Youth Commission, made a ward of the court, and placed in foster care.
In 1980, at age fifteen, he raped a nine-month-old child, the son of his foster parents, while babysitting. He later told police he committed that crime after an argument with his girlfriend.
On November 13, 1981, when he was sixteen, he entered his girlfriend’s mother’s home to use the telephone. He pulled a butcher knife, raped her, stole one hundred dollars, tied her hands and feet, gagged her, and placed her in a car trunk.
He drove her to Alum Creek, threw her into the water, and held her head under when she stayed afloat. She survived after a passerby intervened.
Tried as an adult, he was convicted in May 1982 of aggravated robbery, rape, and attempted murder. He served more than twenty-four years in Ohio prisons and was declared a sexual predator in 1999.
After his release in 2006, he moved to Georgia and applied for a maintenance job under a false name. In 2007, he was convicted there of forgery and failure to register as a sex offender. He served nine more years in prison and was placed on twenty years of probation.
Pardon returned to Ohio in June 2017 under an interstate compact agreement. He had to report to authorities every ninety days, but Ohio did not give him a monitor despite a judge’s request.
On August 21, 2017, police found him with a prostitute in his car. At 4:00 a.m. on January 27, 2018, he was stopped for driving without a license and was found carrying a pocket knife, a kitchen knife, and a pellet gun. He was not arrested.
The attack
At about 8:00 p.m. on January 28, Pardon entered Anderson’s apartment. He forced her from the downstairs area to the upstairs bedroom.
He tied her ankles with the cord from her hair dryer, bound her hands with her belt and cords from her blinds, and tightened the restraints with the cord from her curling iron, leaving her hogtied. He gagged her, forced her to give him her PIN number, raped her, and tortured her.
Pardon then strangled Anderson with the cord from an electric blanket. She also suffered blunt-force injuries and a stab wound to the head and neck. After the attack, he placed her in the bedroom closet. She was left naked from the waist down, with the electric blanket cord around her neck and attached to the doorknob.
He then drove away in Anderson’s car and took her debit card and credit card. He gave the debit card to his sister and went shopping with her.
He also handed it to Anthony Sleets, a homeless man, said a girlfriend was trying to take his money after an argument, and offered to pay for a hotel room if Sleets used the card. He gave him the PIN and drove him to several ATMs.
On January 29, Anderson did not report to work or answer her phone. A supervisor at Shaw Davis Funeral Home asked a co-worker to check on her.
The co-worker got no response at the apartment and contacted the rental office. Because neither he nor the staff could enter, he called police. Officers arrived and had a rental agent inspect the unit, but Anderson was not found.
The case
Later that day, Anderson’s former roommate gave Johnathan Kennedy permission to go inside. He saw the bedroom had been disturbed. When he tried to open the closet door, it resisted.
After pulling it open, he found Anderson’s body and alerted Officer Sclafani. Investigators found her body wrapped in a comforter, with a shirt around her head and a black clothing item tied around her neck and pushed into her mouth.
The autopsy showed that Anderson had been strangled and stabbed. She had fractures at the base of her skull and a wound that passed through the back of her neck into the left side of her brain.
Bruising on her wrists and ankles showed she was alive when she was restrained. The coroner who performed the autopsy ruled that the fatal injury was the stab wound, while another coroner said he might have ruled the death a ligature strangulation.
Investigators found Pardon’s DNA on Anderson’s body, at the scene, and inside her during a sexual assault exam. Phone location data placed him at the apartment from 7:59 p.m. to 9:25 p.m. on January 28.
Detectives also matched his movements to the use of Anderson’s debit card and credit card. Surveillance video showed him using the cards and driving Anderson’s car. Two weeks later, Anderson’s mother found the nine-inch steak knife used in the attack in a box in the apartment.
SWAT officers arrested Pardon on February 9, 2018. A grand jury indicted him on February 15, and he pleaded not guilty. At trial in February 2020, the defense called no witnesses.
The jury convicted him on all charges, later recommended life without parole, and on March 16, 2020, Judge Stephen McIntosh imposed life without parole for aggravated murder, a second life-without-parole term for rape, and sixty-three additional years, all consecutive.
