CLARK COUNTY — A woman in Clark County was found by firefighters following a house fire 17 years ago.
Police said someone killed the woman and then set the house on fire to cover up her murder. Now, investigators said they are getting close to finding Alia Hartman’s killer.
Alia’s mother, Kay Poor, has lots of things in her house that remind her of her daughter.
“I went 13 years trying to get pregnant,” Poor said. “I had never had children, so it was a really special time for me.”
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Hartman died in 2008. She had just filed for divorce from her husband and was living in a house on Sweetbriar Lane South with their young son.
That May, Springfield firefighters found Alia’s body in her house during a fire. Police were called and determined that someone had killed her and then set the fire to cover up her death.
Poor was in shock.
“When they said they were going to bring her body out of the house, I said I don’t want to see that, then went home and spent three days sleeping on the couch,” Poor said.
Detectives have been going through the pages of Alia’s case file for the past 17 years.
Sgt. James Byron said, “For the family’s sake, we would love to make an arrest in this case. Just got to get to the last piece of evidence.”
In May 2025, News Center 7 talked with Sgt. Bryon about Alia. Her case had gone cold. News Center 7’s Gabrielle Enright asked, “How many times do, you think you’ve been out here or your detectives over the course of the last 17 years?”
Byron replied, “I could say hundreds of times.”
He also said this past summer, detectives looked at the evidence again. “That new second look has given us some information to pursue something on this, and we’re very close to a suspect in this case,” Byron said.
Enright asked, “Can you discuss the evidence or the new developments?” Byron responded by saying, “I’ll just say it was revisiting evidence that we had collected early on.”
The coroner ruled Hartman’s death a homicide. The result of blunt force trauma.
Police believe people, not technology, will be the key to solving her murder.
“I’d like to think someone knows something that would help us,” Byron said.
“I mean, she lived in a neighborhood. You would have thought someone would have saw something,” Poor said
Hartman’s mother said she agrees with the police. She is convinced her daughter knew her killer.
“It had to be somebody she knew because she had an English Mastiff, big, horse, gentle, sweet dog, and somebody came and let him out of the backyard. He would have taken someone down if it were somebody he did not know,” Poor said.
Poor hopes detectives really are close to finding the person who killed her daughter.
“I’d like to see whoever did it get punished for it. I mean, whoever did it has been walking around for 17 years, and I don’t think that’s fair,” Poor said.
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