A 2013 study found a high rate of cancer among those who worked at the former Fernald Feed Materials Production Center, also known as the National Lead Company of Ohio (NLO).  Many of the stricken believe that an employee had learned of hazardous materials released at the plant nearly three decades earlier.

All indications are that thirty-nine-year-old Dave Bocks died in the early morning hours of June 19, 1984, while working at the NLO facility. Because the investigation into his death found no evidence of foul play, the manner was ruled a probable suicide. If so, the method by which he ended his life was most uncommon and, one would be hard pressed not to argue, most awful.

Dave Bocks

Administered by the United States Department of Energy from 1953-89, the 1,050-acre NLO facility was the main employer of the small rural communities in southwestern Ohio. Located near New Baltimore, approximately twenty miles northwest of Cincinnati, the NLO plant was one of the few in America processing high grade uranium for nuclear weapons.

An Aerial View Of The Former Fernald NLO Factory

Dave Bocks, a divorced father of three, began working as a pipe fitter at NLO in 1981. His primary responsibilities were inspecting and maintaining the equipment throughout the factory. This included making sure the safety pumps and dust collectors used in the uranium processing were working properly. It was a major task as many of the devices at the over thirty-year-old plant were showing their age.

Residing in Loveland, twenty-five miles east of the factory, Dave was considered a good worker who was friendly but reserved.

A Good Employee 

At 11:00 p.m. on June 18, 1984, Dave met his friend and co-worker Harry Easterling at the White Castle restaurant in Sharonville. The two worked the graveyard shift at the NLO plant and regularly grabbed a quick bite before carpooling to the plant a few miles outside of town. That evening, it was Harry’s turn to drive. He sensed nothing amiss with Dave as they made small talk en route to work.

At approximately 4:00 a.m., on June 19, a worker saw Dave and his supervisor, Charlie Shouse, in a parked truck. The morning was hot and humid, and the two men appeared to be engaged in a heated conversation. The worker found it odd that the truck’s windows were rolled up in the scorching weather. An hour later, the same worker observed Dave walking, oddly, toward Plant 4, not Plant 8, where he had been assigned.

Two hours later, at 7:00, a safety meeting was called in the Plant 4 Conference Room. Harry was surprised that Dave was not in attendance. Following the meeting, Harry returned to the maintenance building and put away his tools. When he saw that Dave’s toolbox was still open, he concluded his friend was probably working overtime.

Harry made a few phone calls around the factory but still could not locate Dave. He then left the facility, telling the desk security guard Dave was still inside the factory and asking the guard to tell Dave he was going home and would meet him the following evening at the restaurant.

Harry Easterling

Dave Bocks’ Co-Worker

Around 7:30 a.m., shortly after Harry left the factory, a furnace operator in Plant 6 smelled an unusual odor emanating from the molten salt furnace. Upon closer inspection, he saw that the casings in the oven were covered with a strange, sticky residue. He also saw a strange object protruding from the oven. He thought it appeared to be a human leg.

The furnace operator expressed his concerns to supervisor Charlie Shouse. He and other NLO supervisors began an investigation into the strange occurrences in the ten-by-twelve foot oven approximately five feet off the ground, used to heat uranium ingots and rearrange the metals grange structure.

Problems At Plant 6

Records show that at 5:15, just over two hours earlier, the temperature in the furnace, which was kept at a constant 1350°, had briefly dropped 28°. This sudden change suggested that something foreign had been dumped inside.

Dips Detected In The Salt Vat’s Temperature

After a worker found what appeared to be a piece of bone on the lip of the furnace, Plant 6 was shut down and drained. The Hamilton Country Sheriff’s Department was called to the facility, but there was little they could do as the furnace would take several days to cool down and be searched.

Plant 6 Is Drained

At 11:00 p.m. that evening, Harry arrived at the White Castle expecting to meet Dave to again carpool to work. He found his friend’s car parked in the same spot as the previous evening and thought Dave was probably in the restaurant waiting for him. When he touched the car, however, he found the fender and hood were both cold.

None of the restaurant workers had seen Dave; some recalled his car had been parked there all day.

Harry went to the plant and learned about what had occurred in Plant 6 that morning. He had a security guard pry open Dave’s locker, where all of his clothes were found.

It took three days for the molten liquid inside the furnace to cool enough for investigators to sift through the waste material.  Police found a set of keys: one to Dave’s car, three to his padlocks. Another key was believed to be to his home, but it was too bent and burned to conclusively be determined. The keys had fallen along with the foreign body into the furnace at 5:15 a.m.

The finding of the keys left Harry confused. He is certain he saw them in Dave’s box when he left to go to the maintenance shop at 7:30 a.m., over two hours after Plant 6 had registered the temperature drop.

When Harry returned to the plant that evening, he is also certain Dave’s keys were still in his box and says he saw the supervisor close and lock the box with his own keys. Harry does not know what happened to the keys afterwards.

Dave’s Charred Keys and Lock

In addition to the keys, investigators also found a steel toe from a boot, part of an eyeglass frame, fragments of Dave’s walkie-talkie, and a stainless steel wire that was looped together in three oddly connecting circles. They also found residue and fragments of which the nature could not be determined.

Also recovered were several pieces of human bone, presumably Dave’s, but they were too badly burned for a positive identification to be made.

Fragments And Residue Found In The Furnace

Investigators could not determine how Dave Bocks had seemingly ended up in the furnace. After completing their investigation, they found no evidence of foul play and concluded he had committed suicide.

Dave had struggled with depression, alcoholism, and hallucinations. He had also previously expressed suicidal thoughts and may have actually attempted to take his life after his wife, Carline, divorced him in 1979, five years earlier. He soon rebounded, however, and maintained a good relationship with his former wife, who allowed him to see their children, sons Tony and Matt and daughter Casey, as he wished.

A psychiatrist whom Dave had been seeing does not believe he was showing suicidal signs, nor do his family and coworkers, to whom he had expressed excitement over his upcoming vacation, during which he planned to take his kids to Florida.

The Bocks Family

Even if Dave were suicidal, many found it hard to believe he would willingly end his life by jumping into a 1350° oven. Most who commit suicide want to end their lives as painlessly as possible. It is hard to imagine a more gruesome death than boiling in an inferno.

Dave’s family and coworkers believe an accident is also unlikely. He would have had to climb a ladder to the opening on top of the four-foot tall furnace and drop through an only nine-inch by twenty-two inch hole. The rest of the furnace was covered with a heavy steel lid and there were no scaffoldings or catwalks around the furnace from which he could have fallen.

The Lid Covering The Furnace

In the fall of 1984, several months after Dave’ Bocks’ death, a factory accident at NLO released massive amounts of radioactive smoke into the atmosphere. A subsequent investigation revealed that NLO had released over two-hundred tons of radioactive dust particles into the air and local water sources during the previous few years.

These particles had been released from Plant 8, the plant to which Dave was assigned. His family believes he learned of the release of the hazardous materials and was murdered and lowered into the furnace before he could blow the whistle.

In May 1985, eleven months after Dave Bocks’ death at the NLO plant, another employee, thirty-three-year-old Larry Hicks, died of a heart attack at age thirty-three. He was regarded to be in excellent health and his widow, Diane, believes his death was brought about by exposure to radiation poisoning from uranium testing at the plant.

Other theories offered in the death of Dave Bocks involve drugs and a grudge.

Several former Fernald employees say narcotics were distributed and used inside the plant. They theorize Dave may have threatened to report the rampant drug use.

Several months before his death, Dave reported finding a coworker, Earnie Gipson, sleeping on the job. As a result, Gipson was suspended without pay and had expressed anger toward Dave. A coworker believes he saw Gipson’s motorcycle at the facility that evening, but police say it was inoperable when they went to his home. They found nothing suggesting he was involved in Dave’s death.

The employee who had seen Dave and his supervisor, Charlie Shouse, talking in the car just over an hour before Dave somehow wound up in the furnace, told police he believed Shouse was hiding something. I could not find anything regarding the nature of the conversation, but police cleared him of involvement in Dave’s death.

Was Dave Wiped Out

For Being A Whistleblower?

In March 1986, a probate court declared Dave Bocks legally dead, allowing his children to collect his estate. The investigation into his death is officially closed with a ruling of probable suicide. Whether the motive for his demise was his own or that of another, we can only hope he was already dead or at least unconscious when he was placed in the furnace, from which only a few bone fragments of his remains were recovered. They were deemed too toxic to be buried underground and are instead sealed in a drum stored at a Nevada test site with other radioactive materials.

Three-and-a-half years after Dave Bocks’ demise, his family endured another tragedy and still unresolved mystery. In January 1988, his forty-five-year-old brother, Peter, was killed by an unidentified hit-and-run driver.

https://www.findagrave.com/…/58284414/david-anthony-bocks

Death Ruled A Probable Suicide

Camp Ross Trails, a Girl Scout Camp near the NLO facility, closed its doors in 1988 due to concerns about the plant’s uranium activity.

Fort Scott Camp, then America’s oldest Roman Catholic summer camp, followed suit in May 1989, even though tests showed no soil or water contamination near the campground.

Fernald’s Testing Forces the Closing Of Fort Scott Camp

Several years after the closure of NLO, the area was cleaned and turned into a nature preserve. The site is unlikely to ever be clean enough for anyone to live.

The Former Fernald Factory Is Now A Nature Preserve

SOURCES:

• Cincinnati Enquirer
• Cincinnati Post
• Sandusky Register
• Unsolved Mysteries
• Xenia Daily Gazette