Trevor Snider, Hamilton fire investigator, said one person was home at the time and they got out because someone “banged on the door.”
He said the cause is under investigation, but it started on the patio. There were no injuries.
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“It does not look like it was intentional,” Snider said.
Muriel Armentrout, owner of the residence that once housed her real estate business, said the downstairs suffered water and smoke damage.
“Thank God no one was hurt,” she said.
The house was the site 24 years ago of a homicide that claimed the life of a young mother, Tina Mott.
Mott, 21, disappeared on June 4, 1996. Two months later, two boys fishing in Hamilton’s Linden Lake discovered a skull missing its lower jaw.
DNA tests comparing material from the skull with that of Mott’s 2-year-old son helped authorities positively identify the skull as the missing woman.
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Timothy Bradford, father of Mott’s son, was arrested and investigators learned the details of the crime that occurred at the Minor Avenue residence.
According to Hamilton police and newspaper records, Mott and Bradford, then 24, had been arguing on the night she went missing and he used a knife to slit her throat.
After killing Mott, Bradford tried to break apart her body and make it unidentifiable. He skinned her down to the bones, dismembered her, sawed her bones into smaller pieces and extracted her teeth with needle-nosed pliers, according to police.
Bradford plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, gross abuse of a corpse, and other charges in September 1997 in Butler County Common Pleas Court. He is serving a 25-year prison that ends in December 2023.
Also in the Minor Avenue block is the house were on Easter Sunday 1975, James Ruppert, killed 11 members of his family.
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