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Outgoing St. Marys network administrator and U.S. Army veteran Kim Reiher, left, was recently awarded a plaque of appreciation for his work at the Veterans Foundation and Museum of St. Marys.
Picture via City of St. Marys
ST. MARYS - In 40 years, a lot can change - technology, job titles, coworkers and even the way a city operates. For Kim Reiher, one thing remained constant: a desire to serve the City of St. Marys.
The city's network administrator is set to retire on Sept. 1, after a 37-year career with the city in a multitude of roles - including police officer, investigator, and now, network administrator.
Reiher was first hired by the city as a police officer on July 5, 1989. He was eventually assigned as the department's investigator in early 2004 where he served until his first retirement on Sept. 30, 2014. In his 25 years with the department, Reiher solved some of the city's biggest crimes, including multiple murders and a bank robbery.
He was then rehired as the city's network administrator on Oct. 1, 2014; in that role, Reiher built and oversaw the entirety of the city's computer, network and cybersecurity infrastructure.
Outside of his career with the city, Reiher has written multiple books on area veterans; helped found the city's veterans foundation and museum; and worked extensively with the city schools' alumni foundation. He's also a skilled photographer and artist.
"He's one of these guys that has a ton of skills that most of us guys hate, because he can do things that we can't," St. Marys city safety service director Greg Foxhoven said. "He can draw. He's a fantastic photographer. He makes calendars with his pictures that he takes of wildlife. He can draw, and, the monument in our park over here from the Armory, he designed it. He helped build it. Some of that he built in his garage. That's pretty incredible. That's something that he spearheaded to give because of his commitment to our local veterans."
Kim Reiher was hired as a patrolman in 1989.
After 15 years at the police department, Reiher was promoted to investigator in 2004 by Foxhoven, who was then the police chief. It didn't take long after that for him to encounter some significant cases - and solve them.
One of the first of those was a bank robbery in 2006. Just three days after the Community First Bank & Trust on Celina Road was robbed at gunpoint on May 9, 2006, Reiher helped to secure the arrest of Celina native Travis Smith on May 12.
At the time of his arrest Smith was also wanted by the FBI for a string of armed robberies that started in January 2005 and ultimately ended after his capture.
Smith was sentenced to 30 years in prison in August 2006 after he pleaded guilty to aggravated robbery and two counts of kidnapping, first- and second-degree felonies that included gun specifications. He remains incarcerated at the North Central Correctional Institution in Marion.
Most notably, upon his promotion to investigator, Reiher helped reopen, and ultimately solve, the then cold case murder of 72-year-old Marcellus J. Reineke from 1981.
Reineke was found dead in his home at 229 S. West St., St. Marys, on Oct. 15, 1981. The retired farmer died of a puncture wound to his chest and heart, according to a report from the Lucas County Coroner's Office. Officials believed he was murdered two days before his body was found by a concerned relative. Reineke was living alone at the time of the murder.
"It was very satisfying," Reiher said. "I don't know how to express that, but, there's always those cases out there that are disappointing, and this just wasn't one of them. I can tell you that the family thought that it was long forgotten about. No. It was never forgotten about. They thought it was just long done for, and no one was going to work on it, which turned out, was never true."
From 2014 to 2015 - following a decade of renewed investigation by Reiher and his colleagues at the police department - Brian Guggenbiller, then 52, of Lima; Paul Hoover, then 54, of Florida, and formerly of St. Marys; and Tracy Mabry, then 52, of Celina, were all sentenced to seven to 25 years in prison after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter in Auglaize County Common Pleas Court.
It was later determined that Reineke was stabbed and cut 39 times by Guggenbiller, per court records.
Guggenbiller and Hoover have since died in prison, while Mabry remains incarcerated at the London Correctional Institution.
Investigating the decades-old case was not an easy task, but was instead arduous, unpredictable and, at times, boring.
"It's very sporadic. There were times when it would be two weeks straight (of work) and then there would be times when, (it was) hurry up and wait. You're waiting on a lab test to be done, we had evidence in Columbus at the crime lab, we had evidence in Bowling Green at the crime lab. We had evidence in the FBI lab out in Quantico," Reiher said. "Not just that, but we had all of the media, all of the photographs and recordings and things like that. The Ohio Organized Crime Task Force converted all that stuff into digital media for us. A lot went into it."
While he was working daily on a host of cases, Reiher also earned an associate degree in computer science from Edison State Community College, and underwent extensive advanced training and certifications from Ohio Peace Officer Training Academy in London, as well as the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
"I know a lot of officers have great careers, but he's had what I would consider a pretty distinguished career. (It's) pretty remarkable when you think of all the things that were solved," Foxhoven said. "When we talked about (his career), all these cases come up. It's like, man, where do you draw the line? These are just some huge cases."
Outgoing city network administrator Kim Reiher celebrating his first retirement as an investigator with the St. Marys Police Department in 2014.
Picture via City of St. Marys
Toward the end of his time at the police department, Reiher gradually began helping out with computers at the St. Marys municipal building.
As technology evolved and the city's IT needs increased, that work naturally evolved into Reiher's second gig at the city: network administrator.
"(At the time) there was really no infrastructure. We had email and we had a guy that worked in the electric department that was good with computers," Foxhoven said. "Every time someone had a problem, he would be called off his job to come do the computer, and (at the time) it worked."
It took Reiher about six to seven years to establish the city's current IT infrastructure, he said.
"In 2014, everything was computerized. It had been computerized for 30 years, but the city really did not have any kind of a system back then as far as, how do you store your data? How do you protect it, how do you retrieve it, how do you back it up? How does one computer talk to the other computer?" Reiher said. "We spent six or seven years rewiring every single building, getting proper workstations for all the employees, building a data center - which we have a couple of them now - building those and building redundant systems so you can't lose data, and firewalls. It was a lot.
"We installed somewhere around 8 miles of fiber-optic cable around the city, so fiber-optic cable connects all of our buildings and all of our assets. Then we also have redundant capability, so if something were to fail in the fiber-optic network, we have a wireless link that will pick up the slack. We also have a backup in place with the phone company that would take a little more work, but we could switch over to if we lose an asset somewhere because of a broken fiber or cut fiber or something. Our other redundant systems will take over, and you may not know what even happened. We built all that stuff over the years."
Since then, he's been tasked with overseeing everything, which includes anything from servers, network switches and data centers to security cameras, fiber-optic networks, radio systems and cybersecurity.
Prior to his professional career with the city, Reiher achieved the rank of sergeant in the U.S. Army, 6th Cavalry Regiment, from 1975-78, and was awarded the Army Presidential Unit Citation Ribbon and the Army Efficiency Honor Good Conduct Medal.
In his free time, Reiher has worked to help his fellow area veterans and keep their stories alive. He first wrote a book on the Ohio National Guard and Company K in 2022, and more recently, he helped found the Veterans Foundation and Museum of St. Marys.
Reiher then co-authored "Hometown Heroes of St. Marys, Ohio, Vol. 1" the first in a planned series of books celebrating the city's long list of war veterans, with VFMSM treasurer Dianna Dominguez.
Their 200-page book, released in the fall of 2025, highlighted a variety of different veterans, some that saw combat and some that didn't, from wars as far back as the Civil War.
Reiher and Dominguez first met when he was working on a book on the Ohio National Guard, as she had been researching stories on veterans as part of a banner project in St. Marys for several years.
"I shared some of those stories with Kim and others and suggested putting the stories together in a book. Kim was 100% on board because he had also researched and collected stories on local veterans," she said. "Our work complemented each other's. It was important to both of us to publish the book because we wanted to share the incredible stories we discovered - of sacrifice, honor, duty, endurance, courage and patriotism. These stories were being lost over time, as many of our WW II veterans had already passed away, and we were losing so many Korean and Vietnam veterans as well. We wanted to preserve their stories to share with future generations."
One special story the pair bonded over was that of WWII pilot Richard Bushong, who is alive and well at age 102.
"I came across his story researching old newspaper articles and started calling around to places mentioned in more recent stories - and lo and behold - I found him alive and volunteering at the 390th Memorial Museum in Arizona," Dominguez said. "Kim immediately wanted to fly to Arizona to meet him and get his story. Imagine - we had read so many news articles about WWII and now we were finally going to hear what it was like firsthand from someone who flew a B-17 Flying Fortress in 28 combat missions."
Volume 2 of their series on St. Marys vets is set to be sent to the publisher any time, Reiher said, adding that the two have already begun the third book.
"I'm trying to get a minute to proofread one more time," he said. "It's been proofed a bunch of times, but it's hard to send it off."
In addition to his work with the veterans foundation and museum, Reiher is also on the advisory committee of the St. Marys Memorial High School Alumni Foundation.
Whether he was investigating a decades-old cold case, building the city's computer infrastructure or preserving the stories of local veterans, Reiher approached each job with the same sense of responsibility.
"Well, it's always the same. You just hope you left it better than you found it, that's the bottom line," he said. "I've always done the best job I could, for my own conscience."
