It’s been almost 35 years since the decomposing body of 18-year-old Tim Cline was pulled from the Hocking River near Guysville.

Authorities ruled the Columbiana County man’s death an accidental drowning, triggered by drug use.

Family members have never believed that. Among other doubts, they question why Cline - who they say had no connections to Athens County and had never been here before - would suddenly jump in his car late at night, and travel some 150 miles to die in the Hocking River.

“This boy didn’t drive three hours to jump in the creek,” insisted Thomas L. Edgell, a private investigator who Cline’s brother, Mark Cline, has hired to investigate the case. Edgell also points to physical evidence and what he calls inconsistencies in the accounts of those who were last to see Cline alive.

After Cline’s parents failed to interest law enforcement in pursuing a criminal investigation, not much happened on the case for many years.

Then in late 2001, Mark Cline got an anonymous phone call from a woman suggesting that with the death of Cline’s parents - who had been trying to keep interest in the case alive - Tim Cline’s killers would feel safe.

“She said that now that my mom and dad had both passed away, ‘these people know they’re off scot-free,’” Mark Cline recalled Saturday.

This, plus a class project on the case done by his daughter at Ohio University, revived Mark Cline’s interest in probing his younger brother’s death. Now he has hired an Athens attorney to try to clear the way for law enforcement to investigate the death as a possible homicide.

On Nov. 9, attorney K. Robert Toy filed a complaint in Athens County Common Pleas Court, seeking a hearing to reconsider the cause-of-death finding on Tim Cline, issued by then-county Coroner Robert Butts in 1973. On Friday, Toy amended the complaint, adding a wealth of detail.

The first line of the new filing states: “Tim Cline was murdered.”

It goes on to recount circumstances surrounding Cline’s death in April 1973.

Cline lived in Wellsville, a small town in northeast Ohio near the Pennsylvania and West Virginia borders, and worked at a pottery business. He was dating a woman who had recently split with her husband; the man was still around town.

On the night of April 15, 1973, Cline paid a visit to the home of a local couple. The couple reportedly were there, as was Cline’s girlfriend and her ex-husband. The people at the house have reportedly said that Cline drove away around 11:30 p.m., never to be seen alive again.

According to Mark Cline, the witnesses all said his brother had passed out for some period of time during the night, then woke up and left. Why he lost consciousness - apparently no one present reported him drinking or taking drugs - is unclear.

His parents reported him missing the next day. On April 17, the Athens County Sheriff’s Office found his 1967 Camaro on U.S. Rt. 50 East, a little outside the current Athens city limits. The key was in the ignition, the gas tank was half full, and Cline’s wallet, with $29, was in the vehicle.

Around 10 days later, Cline’s body was fished from the Hocking River near Guysville. A June 25, 1973 autopsy report from the Franklin County Coroner’s office called his death an “apparent” drowning, linked to “possible” drug abuse.

When Coroner Butts filled out a medical certificate, however, that finding became more definite - death by drowning, due to drug intoxication.

No drugs of abuse were found in Cline’s system. What the autopsy did find were isopropyl alcohol and toluene, a chemical solvent. These might have been decomposition products; the autopsy wasn’t definitive.

Mark Cline, Edgell and Toy argue that this and other evidence suggest Tim Cline didn’t die by drowning.

“I think he was (already) dead when he hit the water,” Edgell said Saturday.

One clue is a letter to Butts dated June 1, 1973, from a forensic pathologist at Ohio State University.

In the letter, Nobuhisa Baba, M.D., noted that no alcohol or barbiturates were detected in Cline’s system. Other drugs were not tested for.

Baba informed Butts that based on the autopsy, “I believe that this patient was intoxicated with toluene and isopropanol, both of which have an anesthetic effect. There is a definite possibility that the body was immersed while under the anesthetic influence of these organic compounds, or even after death.”

Edgell learned of three samples of lung tissue, still in existence from the 1973 autopsy. He had the slides examined by the renowned forensic pathologist Miles J. Jones, who issued opinions in 2002.

Jones found that while the state of the tissue didn’t completely rule out drowning, it didn’t clearly indicate it either.

“A reasonable pathologist could conclude that the cause of death was other than drowning,” Jones’ report stated, adding that as solid proof of any particular cause of death, the tissue slides are “woefully inadequate.”

Jones recommended: “It is inappropriate to classify the manner of death as accidental. The most appropriate classification would be undetermined.”

Toy has already asked the current Athens County coroner, Scott Jenkinson, to make this change. This would allow a law-enforcement agency, if it chose, to open a “cold case” homicide investigation.

Without such a ruling, Toy said, “either or both sheriff’s departments (in Athens and Columbiana counties) would take the position that the way it’s written now, it’s a closed matter… If they had a little push, perhaps it would result in some investigation at this point.”

Jenkinson has refused - a decision that Toy, Mark Cline and Edgell say they find baffling.

“Where’s the harm?” Edgell wondered.

Jenkinson said Friday that he can’t see any justification for changing the official cause of death at this late date.

“There’s been no new evidence or information brought forth that would warrant that,” he explained. “There’s been lots of speculation and discussion of it by family members and investigators, and I even got a phone call from a TV producer. They were encouraging me to open the case back up so they could videotape it, but that didn’t seem like a good reason to do that.”

(Reportedly, the TV show “48 Hours” has expressed an interest in doing a program on Cline’s death.)

Jenkinson said he would consider changing the ruling if he heard solid evidence - his example was a confession from a killer - but said he hasn’t seen it yet. He said he wasn’t aware of Jones’ conclusions based on the lung tissue.

“Is it possible that (Cline) was murdered? Absolutely,” Jenkinson said. “But there’s no evidence to indicate that he was.”

In 2002, Mark Cline tried to get the Athens County Sheriff’s Office to look into the case, but with little success. Officer Alan Flickenger said he looked at the case file, but told Cline and his family there wasn’t much he could do for them.

“I felt bad for them, but I couldn’t (help them),” Flickenger recalled Friday. “They came to me with a lot of facts, that I reviewed. I told them they had to start in their home county.”

The officer noted that “this was 30 years before my time… There just wasn’t enough physical evidence.”

Jenkinson has been urged to change the cause-of-death finding by Edward L. Freyer, a former FBI special agent who is consulting on the case. In a letter in January 2004, Freyer drew the coroner’s attention to Jones’ opinions on the lung tissue, suggesting that “these new findings should justify a re-classification of cause of death.”

Freyer noted that new forensics methods developed over the last three decades make Cline’s death ideal to re-open as a “cold case.” He concluded by stating, “I strongly believe that Tim Cline was murdered on the evening of April 15, 1973.”

Edgell and Mark Cline admit they have a theory of who killed Tim Cline, how, and why, but are careful to make no public accusations. Edgell said he’s convinced that at least one person who was with Cline the night he disappeared was not involved.

At any rate, they noted Saturday, they’re not asking Jenkinson to rule Cline’s death a homicide, only to say its cause is still open. Without that ruling, Toy said, no police force will launch an investigation.

“They’re not going to move without it,” he said.