It was midnight, and John Hartman really wanted a cup of coffee.

The date was July 9, 1998. Hartman had just finished his shift with the North Franklin police and was getting ready to pick up a second shift, with the nearby North Belle Vernon police, that wouldn’t end until 8 a.m.

“Just as I was getting started, I get a call to back up one of our patrolmen on a suspicious vehicle report,” Hartman said. “All I wanted was my coffee.”

Luckily, Hartman skipped a stop at the nearby gas station, because his investigative instincts led to the apprehension of Michael Drasher, who had sexually assaulted and killed 8-year-old Jessica Dee Ann Price in Oklahoma only a few days before.

Hartman, a Murrysville resident who has returned to private investigation work after retiring from the Southwest Regional Police a few years ago, is working with North Huntingdon writer Michael Durkota on a book about the incident.

Hartman said it turned out to be one of the most important cases of his career — and it began with the type of innocuous neighborhood complaint that police handle all the time.

“You get suspicious vehicle calls on a police radio all night,” Hartman said. “The couple who called the police had the nickname ‘the park rangers.’ If there was an errant squirrel, they’d call 911. But hearing that the patrolman wanted backup got my attention.”

Anything but a routine call

When Hartman arrived, several other things got his attention.

“This van had no license plate, it was in bad shape, hunkered back on its left haunch, and there was junk everywhere where you could see in the window,” he said.

As Hartman approached the driver, things became more bizarre.

“He was dressed like he should’ve been on a sailboat in Cape Cod,” Hartman said. “Not that a well-dressed person couldn’t drive a busted-up van like this, but these are things you start to notice that just don’t add up.”

The driver, Michael Drasher, said he was a Pennsylvania native who had lived in Oklahoma and was headed back to Philadelphia where his mother lived. He provided a Pennsylvania identification card.

“He told us he’d pulled off the highway to get some rest. Well, there’s a BP station right off the exit, which is where I would’ve stopped to get my coffee. I’d see people parked there all the time resting. So why did he come into town, make a U-turn and end up parking against traffic by the park? Something was not right about this,” Hartman said.

And as Hartman’s fellow officer began checking the van’s vehicle identification number, a thought entered the back of Hartman’s mind: The clock was ticking.

“The generally accepted case law out of New Jersey at the time was you could hold someone at the roadside for 28 minutes before you start potentially violating their rights,” he said.

‘The clock was ticking’

Hartman knew he had to keep Drasher friendly and talkative, and leaned on his previous experience as a private investigator.

“As a PI, you don’t have the ability or authority to push someone for information the way police do, and I don’t want this guy to clam up or get combative,” he said.

Hartman told Drasher not to worry about the lack of plate or, as they’d discover shortly thereafter, a lack of insurance for the van. He asked Drasher to wait in his police vehicle while they sorted things out, and got Drasher’s permission to search the van.

Hartman found a designer purse on the driver’s-side floor with ID from Stilwell, Okla., and tucked under the passenger’s seat, a small green child’s purse with a drawing inside.

Alarm bells started ringing in Hartman’s head.

“This is deep water now,” he said. “Where are the people who belong to these purses? Can we get someone to check on this woman’s address in Stilwell? And in the meantime, we had checked for warrants and nothing initially came back, so finally I asked 911 to run a ‘triple-I’ search (in the FBI’s Interstate Identification Index).”

That final search came back with two hits. The first was a warrant for a commercial burglary out of Stilwell.

“I said, ‘Bingo. Whatever else happens now, we can hold him,’ ” Hartman said.

What happened next made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

“They came back over the radio with a second call about a warrant, and said he was wanted for questioning by the FBI for the murder of an 8-year-old girl from Stilwell,” he said.

Drasher was placed under arrest and taken to jail in Monessen, where the FBI would eventually pick him up and extradite him to Oklahoma. He pleaded guilty in 2001.

Case is used in training

Today, Hartman uses the case as a training tool in his police academy class at Beaver County Community College, and it is easy to see why it intrigued Durkota.

“We’re losing a lot of career experts to retirement these days, and there’s an expert model here,” Durkota said. “You don’t just become a good cop who’s able to recognize a situation like this overnight. It takes years to build that.”

Hartman gave credit to hanging around his father, a former Monroeville police officer, at the breakfast table.

“I’d be sitting there as a kid eating my Count Chocula, and he’d be telling stories about his calls from the night before, what went right, what should’ve happened,” he said. “Little did I know, he was already teaching me how to be a cop.”

His father cried when Hartman showed him the commendation he’d received for the work on the Drasher case.

“I told him I was just in the right place at the right time, and he said, ‘No, you were a good cop,’ ” Hartman said. “So we’re using ‘Good Cop’ as the working title of the book.”

Durkota said there is still plenty of work to do before the book is finished.

“There are some folks in Stilwell we’d like to talk with,” he said. “And we’d like to go back along his possible travel path and see if there are any other missing kids. But it was 1998, so you almost have to just go town by town and check the local newspapers.”

Hartman said he felt Price’s story needed to be told.

“As a father of two daughters, it profoundly impacted me, and in the face of all the criticism police get nowadays, I want to tell the story of what good police work can do,” he said. “Because I know that night, there wasn’t a police officer in the United States who was better than me. I did everything I was trained to do, and that turned out to be a big part of why this guy was caught.”

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