Almost seven years after 29-year-old medical student Anthony Proviano was found dead on an abandoned Ohio road, a Washington County couple were arrested yesterday and charged with the Baldwin Borough native's murder.

Baldwin Borough and Pennsylvania State Police officers arrested Douglas Ray Main, 43, early yesterday afternoon in rural Washington County, and his wife, Marlene Smith, 49, in Allegheny County. A special Belmont County grand jury meeting yesterday in St. Clairsville indicted the pair for the Dec. 23, 1997, murder.

Main was held in the Washington County Correctional Facility and Smith in the Allegheny County Jail to await extradition to Ohio. Both are charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

The arrests climax an investigation which ranged through four states, Mexico and Europe, involved numerous polygraphs and called on the skills of artists and hypnotists. As recently as this summer it appeared hopelessly stalled.

Main and Smith had long been considered suspects in the case, according to law enforcement officials, particularly after a Pennsylvania prison inmate five years ago claimed Main told him about shooting someone in Ohio around Christmas 1997.

However, the investigation didn't pick up speed until May 2003, when three retired Pennsylvania law enforcement officers asked the Belmont County sheriff's office and Proviano's parents if they could take a new look at the case.

One of those investigators, along with Baldwin Borough Police Chief Chris Kelly, the parents, Carmen and Maryann Proviano, and Belmont County sheriff's investigator Bart Giesey, who has led the investigation for the past 26 months, held a news conference yesterday in St. Clairsville to announce the arrests.

A medical student at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Proviano ranked 21st out of 150 students. He was known by professors and peers there for maturity and perseverance.

Proviano had been expected at his parents' Baldwin Borough home on Dec. 23, 1997, to join the family for its traditional holiday gathering. The couple first reported their only son and oldest child missing on Christmas morning.

On Sunday, Dec. 28, two Baldwin Borough police officers persuaded KDKA-TV to use its Jet Ranger II helicopter to try to locate Proviano's burgundy Z-28 Camaro. Flying 400 feet above the ground along the route they believed Proviano would have driven from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, the officers spotted the car about 11:45 a.m. in the parking lot of the St. Clairsville Days Inn in Belmont County, Ohio, about 75 minutes west of Pittsburgh along Interstate 70.

The car contained Christmas gifts for Proviano's family. Both the interior and exterior had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

Proviano's body was found about an hour later, more than 100 yards down an abandoned township road near the Days Inn. There was a single gunshot wound from close range that had pierced his left lung. The body appeared to have been outside for several days.

A flashlight belonging to Proviano, his knit cap and right shoe were found 20 feet north of the body. Proviano's coat, twisted into a ball, was near his face-down body. His .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol loaded with two rounds of ammunition, a spent bullet casing and Proviano's leather gloves -- laid neatly on top of one another -- were 100 feet south of the body.

Then-Belmont County Coroner Manuel A. Villaverde refused to order an autopsy, and ruled Proviano's death a suicide. Belmont County sheriff's Chief Deputy Olen Martin, who has since left the department, and other law enforcement officials were stunned, maintaining that there were enough questions about the manner of death to warrant an autopsy.

A private autopsy was ordered by the Proviano family and performed by Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril H. Wecht's office. At a mid-January 1998 news conference announcing the autopsy results, Wecht said "more of the known facts and physical evidence in terms of our experience ... leans toward the involvement of another person."

Police discovered that Proviano had checked into the hotel on Dec. 23 about 6 p.m., paying for his room in cash. When a hotel maid entered Room 125 the following day, she found that the bed had been turned down but not slept in, and that none of the towels had been used. Plus, several personal articles that investigators say belonged to Proviano, including a navy blue backpack, a nearly empty bottle of Crown Royal whisky, a brown leather shaving kit, a box of bullet shells and an empty black plastic case for the .25-caliber pistol were found in the room.

This February, Main told the Post-Gazette in an interview that he "had nothing to do" with Proviano's murder, but Main has failed a lie-detector test.

Prosecutors have maintained that forensic evidence is lacking in the case, and potential prosecution witnesses all have credibility problems because of previous arrests or their connections with Main and Smith.

The investigation of Main and Smith reaches back to 1998, when Main was sentenced to nine to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to several charges stemming from his involvement in a heroin ring run by Charles Dailey Jr. that operated out of Graysville, Greene County. The ring sold up to 1,000 packets of heroin a week in southwestern Pennsylvania.

In March 1999, Richard Mraz, a member of the ring who was serving an 18- to 36-month sentence at the State Correctional Institution Camp Hill in Cumberland County, wrote a letter to the Greene County district attorney's office implicating Main and Smith.

Mraz wrote that the couple told him they met Proviano at a Belmont County bar or restaurant.

"Main said he shot [and] killed a guy in Belmont County, Ohio [in the] St. Clairsville area with the guy's own gun" around Christmas 1997, the letter read. "The guy had x-mas gifts in his car. [It occurred in a] deserted area by a motel, and no money or gifts were taken ..."

In a 1999 interview with Belmont County sheriff's department investigators, Dailey said Main told him "Me and 'Slim' [a nickname for Marlene Smith] was gonna rob this guy and I shot him with his own gun." Dailey said Main also told him "he hit the guy so hard he knocked him out of his shoes." Proviano's right shoe was found several feet from his body.