January 11, 2022 • 51 mins
For 20 years, a tiny town in Ohio was held enrapt by the prolific author of a series of unhinged letters. By the time they abruptly stopped, the letters – which revealed terrible secrets – had claimed a life and sent a possibly innocent man to prison.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles to Be, Chuck Bryant, and we
can hear Jerry Clear's a bell so she's here with us.
And this, of course it's Stuff you should know. True crime. Yeah,
(00:24):
let's mud say sort of, but it really is true crime.
It's just it's not necessarily murder. E No, but it's
stocky and I hadn't really realized it until I saw
it spelled out a few times that this is a
huge stalk in case, one of the weirdest, creepiest, most
mysterious stalking cases of all time. Yeah, but I think
(00:45):
I know who did it, So hold it, wait, save it,
because we'll definitely have that combo. Okay, Yeah, I think
this is one of those it's uh, what is it
OCAM's razors at the the most obvious thing. We did
an episode on that, remember, yeah, a zillion years ago.
But this, I think this is one of those where
it is a lot less mysterious when you kind of
(01:07):
just look at it at its face. So, in other words,
you think the cat did it. The cat did do it,
So we're talking about this mystery UM usually calling it's
full title the Circleville, Ohio Poison Pen Letters, And it
is a weird unsolved mystery case. In fact, it came
(01:28):
into the widest um public awareness thanks to that TV
show Unsolved Mysteries back in the early nineties, and UM
a lot of their info was based on this journalist
and private investigator named Martin Yant, who had already been
investigating it by then. But it is a really weird,
odd true crime mystery. And yes it is true crime,
(01:52):
even though you're right, it doesn't have murder involved. There's
no serial killer or anything like that. But it is
bizarre and it is weird, and it is still unsolved
to this day. Yeah there's a death. Uh it's not
a murder though. Well I don't want to ruin it,
so before we get too far into I want to
give some shout outs to some of the sources for
this one. Unsolved Mysteries their website, a couple of CBS websites,
(02:16):
Mental Floss, Thought Catalog, Historic Mysteries List first had some
good stuff, and then True Crimes Times UM had some
good stuff. And then also there are a couple of
podcast sites UM that have already covered this that if
this floats your boat, go check out the Whatever Remains
podcast UM coverage of this. And there's also one called
(02:37):
Invisible Ships podcast that covered this too, and we UM
use some of their info from their sites too. Yeah,
and this is one of those UM that's a little
frustrating to research because there's a lot of different conflicting
information and it's kind of hard to get to the
real facts. UM. But some of it's not the biggest
(02:59):
d ill It is just like, oh, well I saw
that this was this, and I mean right off the bat.
For instance, in Circleville, Ohio, these mystery letters started coming
to Mary Gillespie Gillizpie. But then I saw sites that say,
oh no, the superintendent received letters before Mary Gillizpi even
is there, right, Yeah, so who knows. It doesn't really
(03:21):
damage the main storyline, like nothing contradicts it such to
where I was like, well, I don't even know what
I've just read then, right, I don't even know what's
true anymore. But all this just as a way of
setting up, like if there are things that are slightly off,
is because it's just hard to get the real you know,
Like we didn't have the case file in front of us.
So most of the coverage of this mystery does start
(03:44):
with Mary Gillizpi receiving her first letter. And Mary Gillizpi
was a local bus driver in Circleville, Ohio. And Circleville,
Ohio is a tiny little town about twenty miles south
of Columbus, Ohio, the capital of Io. A school bus driver,
by the way, which is very key. Yes, thank you
for that. Um. And so this is a small town,
(04:07):
and Mary Gillespie was a small town person who just
kind of typically minded her own business, was from what
I could tell, generally well thought of if she was
ever thought of it all by other people. Um. And
she got this first letter, and it was written in
this kind of weird blocky handwriting, and it was a
rather alarming letter UM for anybody to get, because it
(04:29):
basically said, I know that you're having an affair with
the superintendent of the West Fall School District, which you're
an employee of, and if you don't stop, bad things
are going to start happening to you. Right. His name
was Gordon Massey, said they were watching her, the superintendent
was Gordon Massey, that she was having an affair with
(04:50):
right yes to the letter writer, there would be no
mystery if we need to let it write. Hey, if
I were listening to this podcast, I would have been
confused just then. So I was looking out for that
version of me that's out there listening. Oh goodness, I
hope that person isn't listening. Uh. So they said that
(05:11):
they were watching it, and quote, this is no joke.
So these letters start coming in. Uh, almost all of
them had that same blocky letter meaning basically capital letters. Uh.
Some did not, though, and we'll get into that a
little bit more later. But the lion share of them
had this one kind of writing style that was very signature,
(05:32):
clearly kind of written by the same person. And so Mary,
you know, she hides these letters for a little while,
obviously didn't even tell her husband at first, and then
eventually says Ron, and there are a bunch of just
norm core names in here, so it might get a
little confusing with like the Ron's and the Mary's and
the polls. But she told her husband Ron, she said, listen,
I've been getting these letters, and here's what they say.
(05:55):
And the letters are saying that I need to tell
the school board about this or they will out me
basically on you know, how would you would out someone
in the seventies, which is on the radio CB by
putting up billboards and signs. This would be your modern
like social media threat. I guess yeah. And so Ron
uh said well, I think Mary said listen, I think
(06:16):
I know these are coming from this other guy, uh David.
He's another uh school bus driver, David Longberry, and he
he tried to come onto me and I rebuffed him,
and I think that's who's writing these. So and from
what I could tell, Mary kept the letters to herself
until Ron started getting letters himself that basically said your
(06:36):
wife was having an affair with Gordon Massey and you
better make him stop where else I'm gonna tell everybody.
And so that's when she turned to to David was like, oh, yeah,
I forgot to tell you about these letters and that
I've been accused of having an affair. I'm totally not
having an affair, though, But what are we gonna do
about these letters? Huh? So they loop in as you
(06:56):
would do some family members. Ron's sister Karon, who will
become a key player, and her husband Paul uh fresh
Hour was their last name. Married last name. He would
become a key player. Uh. He was a prison guard
and not uh just a little side factoid about him
as the prison movie Brewbaker with Robert Redford. He was
(07:19):
in that movie. He was They filmed it nearby and
he was cast as an extra as a prison guard
because he was a real prison guard. He was a
real prison guard. And another fun fact about Paul fresh
Hour is in the late sixties at the prison he
was a guard at um it was overrun by an
eMate riot and he was held prisoner for like thirty
(07:39):
hours by the inmates. Well, he was a natural for Brewbaker.
Then he was so um. By the time these letters
started coming through, he was no longer a prison guard.
He was a quality inspector at the local Anheuser Busch
bottling plant. But I took from the fact that he
was a former prison guard that they they and to
(08:00):
get some muscle involved and they went to him to
ask him to write the letters. That was That was
how I took it. Yeah, and he worked and this
kind of becomes key later on. He worked about fifty
to sixty hours a week and had a pretty decent
commute to and from so the long and short of
that is is he was gone at work a lot
of the time. Right, So Paul said, okay, of course
(08:23):
I'll help you guys out. And he sent a letter
at least one to David Longberry, the other bus driver
that had made advances on Mary and who they suspected
was the writer of these letters, and said, hey, Buster,
we know what you're doing. You better stop. Uh. If
you don't, bad things are gonna happen to you, so
cool off. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing here in the seventies kind
(08:45):
of way, and um, it seemed like it worked because
for a few weeks the letters that have been started
to come like hard and fast, just dry it up
at first, Yeah, because he said stop what you're doing
because I'm about to ruin go on what the image
in the style that you're used to and who wouldn't
stop writing letters with received with that threat, Yeah, because
(09:09):
they thought that they had this anonymous letter writer, you know,
dead to rights, and he was going to going to
be scared off now because ultimately, if it was this
guy who from like Ron Gillispie's point of view, what
he was being told by his wife that she wasn't
having an affair. This guy was making this up because
she had resisted his advances. If you, if you tell somebody,
(09:33):
look stop, we know that you're doing this, of course
they're going to stop. The jig is up. So they
did think that had handled it, especially when those letters
dried up for a few weeks, but um, not too
long after that they were rather just made because um,
rather than just letters. Now there were signs being posted
around town that we're saying essentially the same thing. Yeah,
(09:54):
they were saying not only that, but they were saying
that Gordon Massey, superintendent not letter writer, was uh involved
romantically with the Glissapees twelve year old daughter Tracy. So
of course Dad sees this ron starts driving around tearing
these signs down, you know, before the break of dawn,
so no one would see these things. And this just
(10:14):
sort of went on for a while. There were these
letters that would come and go. I think about a
a little more than a year went by, uh, and
in August of seventy seven, Mary's like, I gotta get
out of here. I'm gonna go to Florida with UH,
with your with my sister in law, with your sister
Karen and a couple of other friends. Later on, people
said that was a cover up for maybe going down
(10:36):
to meet Gordon Massey in Florida. But I don't think
that's true. I think she went down with her friends. Yeah,
do you think that's true. I think we might have
different uh people in mind on who did this, and
we'll get to that though. That'll be the exciting reveal
at the end. I can't wait. Man. So the letter
(10:57):
writer back at home on answers the phone. Uh, it
was a person claiming to be the letter writer on
the other end. He said that he recognized the voice.
He got mad, he got his gun and tells the kids,
I'm going to take care of this problem once and
for all. And a few hours later Ron is dead,
(11:19):
dead D E A D. But he wasn't dead like
from a stab wound or no one had broken his
neck or anything like that. He was dead from a
car accident he had run into I believe a tree.
He'd run off the road, driven about thirty ft at
a high speed and run into a tree. It was
the seventies, so he very well might not have even
had a seatbelt installed in his car. But at the
(11:42):
very least he didn't have it on. He was half
thrown from the cab, which is grizzly um and he
died at the site. Like he wasn't pronounced dead at
the hospital. Around the way of the hospital, they pronounced
him dead on the site. He was super dead of
massive internal injuries. And so there were a couple of
really fishy things about all this. Number one, the intersection
(12:05):
where he died at it was not far from his house,
so he knew this intersection very well. The weather was fine,
it was nighttime, but it wasn't like raining out or
anything like that. And he his gun had was found
to have had one um round missing, and it had
been fired. It wasn't just missing like the gun had
been fired, and no shell casing was found. So in
(12:26):
between the time that he stormed out of his house
to apparently confront the letter writer and the time he
was found dead, he had discharged his gun and they
had no idea at whom, where it was discharged, under
what circumstances. They just knew that he had shot his
gun once. Oh, so it was not a revolver, not
that I know of, because they've seen multiple places that
(12:48):
they did not find a shell casing. So it sounds
like it was an automatic or semi automatic all right.
Uh so that some people might say is fishy. The
other thing that other people say is fishy. I don't
find any of this fishy. But way is that he
was they ruled a drunken driving accident. Other people friends
would say, like heron didn't even drink that much. We
(13:10):
didn't see him drinking that day. But you can't argue
with science. And he had twice the legal limit of
in his blood alcohol content. Um, I don't think he
in his Officially, I think he drank up some courage
to go confront someone and wrecked his car and died. Yeah, yeah,
I mean that's something that that gets left out of
this is like this was a really dark period in
(13:32):
ron Um Gillispie's wife life. Like he was driving around
for hours before work every day, finding these signs at
the very least looking for him. If like he couldn't
find him, Like he didn't sleep very well. It makes
a lot of sense that he would have taken up
drinking when he was otherwise a teetotler. He was being
told by this person that his wife was having an affair,
(13:54):
even though she swore that she wasn't. It was a
bad time for him, so he he had like a
rough last year or so of his life, and then
he died badly as well too. It was not a
good end for Ron Gillispi. Um. And there was a
bit of a scandal after that because apparently Paul fresh
Hour said that he suspected it was foul play and
(14:15):
that the sheriff on the case, basically the local law
enforcement guy who would see this case through the entire
its entirety, was a guy named Dwight Radcliffe used the
sheriff and um. Paul fresh Hour claims that at first
Sheriff Radcliffe agreed with him that it seemed like there
was something fishing in that foul play might have been involved,
but then after that he suddenly changes his story. Sheriff
(14:36):
Radcliffe does, and like you said, it gets ruled an accident,
especially after the coroner comes back with a point one
six blood alcohol content for Ron Gillispi That's right, uh,
And Radcliffe said there was initially some kind of suspect
that and I know you did too, looked high and low.
I don't think it's literally ever been released to Sheriff
(14:57):
Radcliffe initially had in for questioning, but apparently this person
even went so far as to take a polygraph test
and got away with it. I don't I don't know
if it was one of the who knows. I don't
know if it's any of the key suspects that we'll
talk about later or not. Uh, And I don't think
we'll ever know who that was. But uh, there was
a suspect and that was sort of dismiss out of
(15:18):
hand once the d Y alcohol reading came back and
the polygraph test was passed. Yeah, the the one person
I saw floated as potentially who it was was David Longberry,
that bus driver. That's why I figured. Yeah, um, but yeah,
it's never been documented. I'm not even positive that it's
documented that Sheriff Francliffe actually did any of this, like
(15:38):
a polygraph and all that stuff only said he did. So.
Ron is dead, Chuck, the Circleville letter writer has claimed
a life. A human life has been snuffed out that
otherwise probably wouldn't have been had the Circleville letter Writer
not started writing this terrible letter campaign. That's right, you
want to take a break and pick back up afterward,
(15:59):
Let's do it, Okay, Alright, so Ron's gone and it's
(16:25):
about the same time that, uh, you know, Karen and
Paul are having a rough go of it as well. Uh,
And I just the feeling I got was they didn't
have a great marriage. It wasn't because of the Circleville stuff,
but they began to divorce and Karen had cheated on him.
Karen is uh, you know, she didn't get the house,
(16:47):
she didn't get the kids, and ended up living on
a trailer on Mary's property after Ron was gone. And
this was like, m Karen was not She didn't take
any this well, right, Everything I saw was that Karen
was u lived in a constant state of upset and
(17:07):
anger at Paul because of this divorce, even though she
was the one that she did right. Um, so you
just just put that in your hat, like put a
pain in that and save it for later. Put in
your hat and smoke it. Right. So one of the
things that came out of this um this close contact,
where Karen was living on a trailer in Mary's property,
(17:29):
is that supposedly during this time after Ron died, Mary
admitted that she actually was having an fair with Gordon Massey.
But but but don't judge her too harshly yet, because
it didn't start until after the letter writing campaign started.
The letters were bs all along you know what. I
(17:51):
think she had had it an affair with him before
and stopped and then started back up. Okay, that's possible.
That's my feeling. I think she had an affair with him.
Maybe it was off and on, who knows, Maybe it
was pretty much constant. And then at some point, um,
Gordon Massey left his wife or his wife left him.
(18:12):
I got the impression his wife might have left him,
and that Mary was not necessarily his only fling, his
only mistress, and that um, after that and after Ron died,
she felt comfortable saying that they were having an affair. Um,
but it started after the letter writing campaign. That's my
(18:33):
take on it. Well, supposedly the superintendent had uh I
don't know if it was verified or not, but was
accused of having affairs with quite a few of the
female bus drivers. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Yeah,
not just Mary, no, but I mean specifically bus drivers.
I got you, Okay, Yeah, I think that the Circleville
letter writer basically intimated that or outright said it in
(18:54):
in some of the letters. Right, Yeah, okay, um so okay.
So Gordon just think it's interesting that he has the
thing for bus drivers, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah,
it is. It is a real thing, isn't it. So
those yellow busses he can't he can't turn them down?
Maybe so um so okay. So we've got Mary admitting
that she is having or has had an affair with
(19:16):
Gordon Massey, um Bron's dead, Paul and Karen are splitting up,
and we start to reach into the nineteen eighties, and
not only were the signs continuing, the letters were continuing,
the postcards were continuing. People um who were had who
had nothing to do with like Mary or Karen or
Paul Um or Gordon had We're getting letters, Like the
(19:39):
businesses were getting letters. I saw one that was addressed
to a barbershop and it said dear public, and then
it went into this tirade about Gordon and Mary. So
a lot of people are getting letters in this town
about this stuff. Um. And then things kind of stepped
up tremendously in February of three. Yeah, and by the way,
(20:01):
I think all of these letters were still being postmarked
from Columbus, Ohio and that's Uh, that's kind of a
key detail that um that we can't overlook is that
they're all being mailed in Columbus's what like half hour
away or so. Okay, so like they weren't being mailed
from that town. Uh. So Mary is doing her job.
(20:23):
She's still a bus driver six years later, despite all
this stuff. She's still taking those kids to school, bless
her heart. And she sees a sign on her route that, uh,
I have seen And this is one of those dumb
details I've seen. It was on a post I've seen,
it was attached to offense, but either way, there was
a sign that had incriminating stuff about her. Once again,
(20:45):
it threatened the life of her daughter, which was a
big one. So this is when she actually got out
to to take down and she she took down the
whole thing because it was kind of an odd looking
set up. And what she realized when she got home
was that it was a booby trapped sign that had
a gun, its twenty five caliber handgun and a little
container that allegedly was supposed to go off if someone
(21:07):
were to come by and kind of yank that sign
down without much care. Yeah, Like I think maybe some
string was connected to the back of the sign and
it went to the trigger maybe or something like that,
but it was designed to elicit an angry response, and
apparently she didn't take it down in anger and it
saved her life. But there's a there's a gun now
(21:28):
there's so Ron died probably from his own you know,
um accidental driving. This is totally different. This is attempted
murder um. And it's like, this is like an entirely
new ball game. This isn't just like, you know, harassing
somebody or stalking somebody. This now is attempted murder. There's
(21:49):
a loaded gun that was set up to go off
on on Mary. So of course the police get ahold
of this gun, and they see pretty quickly that somebody's
attempted to to file the serial number off of it,
but they haven't done a very good job of it,
and they handed over to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation,
the state investigators, and they say, oh, yeah, this is easy.
(22:12):
Watch this, and they get a piece of blank paper
and a nice cranon and they rub it over it
and sure enough, there is the serial number that wasn't
properly filed down and they can now trace the gun,
that's right, And they traced it back to a guy
who worked at a higher antizer bush and he said,
you know what, that was my gun, but I sold
(22:33):
it for thirty five bucks to Paul fresh Hour. Yep,
my co my co worker. UM, I guess we'll sort
of reveal what we think as we go since we're
doing that. I don't think that sign was supposed to
go off and kill anyone. I think it was a
a rigged booby trap, like a fake booby trap. I
(22:54):
know who you think it was, all right, I know
who you think, but depend on your hand. So, Paul
fresh Are, the guy who was Mary and Ron's brother
in law, Karen's ex husband. His gun has now been
found in a booby trapped sign from the Circleville letter writer.
(23:14):
That is a big deal. And so the police start
asking Paul some questions like why why is your gun
in a booby trap that was attached to a sign
from the Circleville letter writer. And Paul says, hey, man,
I have no idea anybody could have put that there.
That gun was stolen a long time ago. And they say, well, Paul,
did you report this to our local sheriff's department? And
(23:37):
Paul says, now, I never got around to and they say, Paul,
you should probably come downtown with us. That's right, And
he went downtown with Sheriff Radcliff, and the sheriff said, hey,
I've seen a few got TV shows in my day.
I've seen McCloud. So let's let's uh, let's get a
handwriting test going. And he was like, well, okay, where's
your forensic expert and he has We don't have one. So,
(24:01):
like I said, I've seen TV. So I'm gonna make
up some of my own tests, and I'm gonna tell
you to write some of this stuff. I'm gonna tell
you to copy these letters. I'm gonna read some of
them to you until and you you need to write
down what I'm saying. Uh, and that's gonna be the proof. Um.
And that's basically what happened. He was He basically said,
you know what, it looks like a match to me
(24:21):
at least pretty much. And and so I'm gonna arrest
you on charges of attempted murder. And he was released
on bond and interestingly checked himself into a mental health
center to get like proactively to get examined because I
think at first he thought about using a reason of
insanity plea and wanted to I guess support that lay
(24:44):
some groundwork. Yeah, but he he got out of that.
He changed his mind later on. Yeah. So. UM. One
other thing that I think pushed Sheriff Radcliff into arresting
Paul in addition to that Jannkee handwriting test was UM.
Karen fresh Hour, Paul's a strange wife, during an interview,
told the sheriff, not only do I think that Paul
(25:09):
is the Circleville letter writer, I actually found letters before
hidden in our house addressed to other people in that
same weird handwriting. UM. And sheriff said, did you keep
these letters? Can I see him? And She's like, no,
I didn't keep them. You know, I don't like clutter
or whatever. Um. But that definitely helped push the sheriff
into into arresting Paul. So before Paul knows it, he's
(25:32):
on trial in October of n for attempted murder because
of that booby trapped gun. And at the trial, one
of the things that really sunk him was that they
allowed the letters to be introduced, not in any kind
of like criminal capacity, like he wasn't charged with harassment
or stalking or anything like that. They just basically used
(25:53):
it to paint him as a weirdo and a harassing
crack pot, and that the letters gave some sort of
roundabout motive or at least suggested that he was the
person who, um, who booby trapped that sign, because the
letters were connected to the sign, were connected to the gun,
(26:14):
were connected to Paul fresh Hour, and without the letters,
it was just the gun and Paul fresh Hour. So
it was a huge coup for the prosecutors to be
able to introduce that, um that those letters, and then
the handwriting analysts took over, right, Yeah, the handwriting analysts
confirmed two of them that they at least believed, and
you know we I think we did a full episode
(26:36):
on that, didn't we on handwriting analysis that he wrote those.
The other bad thing that he had going against him
was that he had taken the day off of work, Uh,
the day that the booby trap sign was discovered. A
little bit fishy for someone who worked so much, or
at the very least if he was innocent, which I think, uh,
very bad luck for him that he had happened to
(26:56):
take that day off of work. Yeah, it's very incidental,
don't you think. Well, sure, okay, you know, of course
you can't say it's not a coincidence. Uh but he
either took the day off to do the booby trapp
or just that was just a bad coincidence. Wait, he
just said, you can't say it's coincidence. I'll tell you.
(27:17):
I'm not. I said you can. You can. You have
to say it's coincidence unless he did it. Okay, I
got you, I got you. I serious. I don't think
he did it, all right. I think there's a third
there's a third alternative that we'll talk about later. All'm
so excited, man. Uh So he said in court, like, hey, listen,
(27:37):
this sheriff gave me this test. He told me to
copy the letters and and I just took that to
me and to try and imitate the writing and and
none of this was even above board. He's like, he's
no letter writing expert. He shouldn't have been conducting this
junk science test. And here was some other interesting tidbit.
(27:57):
Mary said that, uh, hey listen. Another bus driver said
that she went past that intersection where that sign was
booby trapped earlier that day, and there was a dude
there who did not look like uh, Paul at all,
and there was an el Camino there, yellow yellow el Camino,
and Paul doesn't drive that, and so like, I don't
(28:20):
think it's him because look, I mean, look, look, look
what's going on here. He's getting railroaded by the supposed
handwriting and the fact that it was his gun. And
that's really just circumstantial evidence. So not only was it
fishy that there was a strange man spotted twenty minutes
before um Mary found this booby trap sign at the
very spot the booby trap sign was put up, but also, Chuck,
(28:42):
it turns out that um, if you see, there's a
there was a suspect, a possible suspect who um whose
brother had a yellow el Camino, and that person turned
out to be Karen fresh Hour. Yeah, I see, I
saw other places. It was not a brother, oh, a
boy friend I saw that. Well, No, it was another
relative who had the al camino, because the brother would
(29:06):
have been Roy's. I mean, I guess you could have
two brothers, right, yes, and a brother or a relative
could have been a boyfriend who we're talking about Central Ohio.
What I think, and this is Furthering my case here
a little bit is because this guy, I don't think
we mentioned when he was when the school bus went by,
he apparently like turned around real quick and acted like
(29:27):
he was peeing or something to to not be identified.
I think that that was Karen's boyfriend driving her relatives.
Uh oh, gotcha, Okay, okay, okay, I like, where are
you going with that? Throw him off the case or whatever.
I got him off the case, that's right. So that
(29:47):
was never introduced, right, No, not in court, I don't think, right. Yeah,
So the fact that that wasn't introduced the fact that
they had Paul's gun. They introduced the letters. His coworker
at Anheuser Busch said, yeah, I saw him the g
on the personnel records that Anheuser Busch said he wasn't
there that day. That the jury took two and a
half hours and came back with a guilty plea and
(30:08):
Paul fresh Hour, who may not have ever written one
of these letters or booby trap this this gun or
this side no motive. That's another one too, we'll just
we'll talk about in a second. He was He was
sentenced to seven to twenty five years in Ohio State
Prison for attempted murder in in three he was convicted
(30:32):
and sentenced, that's right, and he remained there for many years.
He was denied. I mean, he's a great prisoner. When
that seven years came up, he was eligible for parol
in ninete and these letters kept coming while he was
in jail, even though there's no way that he could
have written these and had them postmarked from Columbus from prison.
He was even putting solitary for a while because they
(30:54):
said these letters are coming, and they clearly weren't coming
from him, but that was still the fact that they
were still coming. At his parole hearing, they said, no,
these letters are still coming, so we're gonna keep you
in here. Imagine that. Imagine being like I'm innocent and
somebody else out there is proving that I'm innocent because
these letters are still coming. But you're taking is that
(31:15):
somehow I'm doing? You still got a letter in prison? Yeah,
so you're gonna keep me in And then after he
was denied parole that first time he was up for it,
after seven years in prison, he got a letter from
the Circleville Um letter writers saying, now, what are you
gonna believe you aren't going to get out of there.
I told you two years ago when we set them up,
they stay set up, don't you listen at all? So
(31:37):
we got a taunting letter after he was denied parole
because the letters were still going on. Yeah, I wonder
who wrote that. So he finally did get out in
after eleven years in prison, ten to eleven years in
prison for attempted murder. And he set up a website.
And this is like the mid nineties, so that was
like a big deal. He probably your Crystal links or something,
(32:00):
but he set up a website that was dedicated to
this case and you know, professing his innocence and everything. Um,
and you said something, uh that that I want to
circle back to, and that was motive and that it
is just he didn't really have one. No, that is
something that everyone has struggled with, even like the prosecutors
couldn't quite say why he would have done this. That
(32:23):
it doesn't make any sense that there's really nothing. He
didn't have anything to gain from Mary being found out
or whether she had an affair or not. He had
nothing to gain from her dying if he if he
set up that booby trap um and yeah, it just
didn't make any sense. And when you have like you
(32:43):
have motive, opportunity and means, and he had opportunity and
he had means, but he never had motive. And that
was a really big deal. And the fact is he
had a really good alibi despite all of that for
almost all of the day. Um. And yet he was
still convicted and spent more than ten years in prison
for it. Very sad. Uh. We should also mention that
(33:04):
there was a letter sent not only to Paul in prison,
but while he was still in jail, there was a
letter sent to Unsolved Mysteries, the TV show, and they
were doing a segment about it. And uh, it said,
forget Circleville, Ohio. Do nothing to hurt Sheriff Radcliffe. If
you come to Ohio, U L sickos will pay, signed
(33:26):
the Circleville writer, I believe. I don't know if it's
the first time it was signed as such. Uh, well,
we'll get we'll get to it. Some of the letters
are signed w over the years, and those are the
ones that weren't written quite in that blocky style. But
that'll that'll come back. That letter demonstrates something that's really um.
(33:47):
Characteristic of the Circleville letters, and that the almost the
only punctuation in them are colon's, not simmy collins, not periods,
now even ellipses, you know, that annoying thing that people do.
We're rather think commas or periods. They just use ellipses,
and sometimes like multiple ellipses at once. The people this
person used colons like that, So like in a in
(34:09):
a single letter, there could be scores of colon's just
just littering the letter. And they did this in this
in this um, this letter to Unsolved Mysteries as well,
which I just that's just you don't see people doing
that with colon So I feel like that suggests that
every single letter that used colon's was definitely written by
the same person. The only issue I will take with
(34:31):
any of that is that I like to use the ellipsus.
I've never seen you want to use ellipsus. I may
not have used them with you. Okay, Wow, that's it's
like you're a whole different person that I never knew before. Yeah,
like ellipsus, I think it'd be very I think it
says a lot. It can be a very effective tool. Uh,
And I like it, Okay, do like eight dots in
(34:52):
a row. I use like the standard three. Okay, No,
I know what you mean. So you're using it as
a device to basically say, just pause and think about
what I just said, or in your court or yeah,
something like that. Okay, that's not at all what I'm
talking about. I'm talking about using an ellipse rather where
a comma should be, where a period should be, where
even a hyphen should be. Using an ellipse for that
(35:13):
is it's your bleedingly bad to read my mom, does it? Okay? Well,
I don't mean to insult you or your family. No, no, no,
I no, you don't. It's it's it's it's definitely weird,
and it's a thing because it's not just one. My
mom will put like eight or nine dots in between
phrases and sentences and emails. I don't know. Maybe I'm
not sure what it is. And if you were while
(35:34):
she was typing it, each dot would be like um
um um, what am I gonna say next? Alright, let's
take our final break here and we will talk a
little bit more about these darn letters right after this. Okay,
(36:12):
So one thing about this mystery, Chuck, is it would
be like remarkable and noteworthy even if it were just
limited to Marry and her family receiving these threatening letters
and there being some signs hundreds. Yeah, that's not at
all what it was like. Yeah, as a matter of fact,
I saw more than a thousand letters in multiple places.
More than a thousand letters, postcards, and signs were mailed
(36:35):
or put up around Circleville and even central Ohio in
general over the years. And um, the whole letter writing
campaign lasted for almost twenty years, more than eighteen years
of these letters, and they were they alleged everything from
murder to affairs to um complaints about the Ohio, Ohio politics. Um,
(36:58):
they just were all over the play. So it's a
really weird case, even more so than like the core
case that we're talking about. It's even stranger and more
rambling than that. Yeah, and you know, they were, like
you said, they expanded far beyond the Gillispie family. Some
accused the sheriff of being um involved in a cover
(37:21):
up about Ron's death. Some were about just other noteworthy
people in town or not noteworthy people who just uh,
you know, you had an affair with this person and
you're the local doctor or you're the local county coroner. Um,
you've been abusing children. And the weird thing is a
lot of this stuff was actually true, right, So it
(37:41):
was like, is someone just really attentive and exposing these things,
Like what's going on there? Yeah? And I think the
town lived a bit in a bit of a state
of fear that like they were going to get targeted
next and all of their war secrets were going to
come out because, like you said, the Counting Corner, a
guy named Dr Ray Carroll, he apparently had previously been
a used of, um, inappropriate contact with children and in
(38:05):
a letter right, no in general, okay, but most people
didn't know about this. It was like a secret from
his past. And this letter writer brought this up and
years later, um, he actually I think he may have
lost his medical license. Um. The state medical board charged
him with eight counts of gross immorality, including stuff that
involved children. So this letter writer seemed to be correct
(38:29):
about that. There's another one that they were never proven
correct about. That was just maybe the most scandalous accusation
they ever made, and it was directed at the prosecutor
in Paul fresh Hour's case. A guy named Roger Klein. Yeah,
they said that, Um, I know you killed that woman
who was pregnant. She's a school teacher, and I'm going
(38:50):
to dig up their body and mail the bones to
the cops unless you admit it. And I think this
was never sort of went anywhere, right. It was just
one of those accusations. Now, And Roger Klein ended up
continuing along the career path up to being an appeals
court judge when he retired a few years back. Um.
But the accusation was that he was having an affair
with the school teacher, got her pregnant, and then killed
(39:11):
her and by proxy her their their unborn child. Um.
And the there was a school teacher named Vicky Cooke
who was murdered and whose murder was never solved. UM.
And I I've seen in a couple of places that
Roger Klein was proven to have had an affair with her,
but I could not find that, like roundly um proven.
(39:33):
The upshot of all of this is this was exposed
in one of the letters. So the coroner in Ron
Gillispie's death is exposed in a letter and targeted Roger Klein.
The prosecutor in Paul fresh Our's case, gets a letter
of his own and he's targeted. So it wasn't just
Mary and her affair with Gordon Massey that was the
(39:55):
full subject of these letters. Other people were targeted as well.
That's right. So there's a couple of more people we
should mention, I guess before we get to our final
verdicts um, and they were both children of key players.
One was um William Massey. This is Superintendent Massey's son.
He was I've mentioned some of those earlier letters were
(40:17):
written in a kind of different style of handwriting, and
they were signed with a W. Some people say it
could have been William Massey writing these and actually signing them.
He was a grade school I'm sorry, I think high
school student at the time. Teenager and uh so, just
throwing that out there. And then there is Mark fresh Hour,
who was Karen and Sue's son, who um who went
(40:42):
with you know, he he the dad got custody. So
I'm not sure what kind of say they had, but
I know that Mark did not go see his dad
in prison one time and generally is sort of believed
to have been on mom's side through all this. Yeah,
so I'm glad. Do you line those up? Because, like
I get think Christie um book, we're just basically introducing
(41:03):
characters who are now suspects at the very end of
this whole thing. Yeah, and interestingly, Mark, in September two
thousand two was found dead from a self inflicted gunshot
wound floating in a river. So, uh, some people say
that this was guilt because he was a part of
this thing. His mom Karen said no, he had been
(41:24):
battling depression. Nothing to see here, So let's talk about
the person that that brings up. Then, Um that that
has related Mark fresh Hour having to do with with
the case against his father is Everyone says that he,
if he did this, it was at the behest of
his mother, Karen mark Um, Paul's ex wife, and that
(41:46):
it was Karen who was actually the Circleville letter writer
Um who was who basically used this whole campaign to
set her ex husband Paul up. Right, Well, what do
you think? Are you getting into what you think? I'm
just going over one of the us. What do you think? Well,
here's what I think. If that's where we are, sure,
(42:09):
all right? Well, I mean we have other suspects to
talk about. Well, it'll all come out in this and
I think that the original letter was sent, in fact
by David Longberry, the bus driver who Mary Gillispy refuted,
and I think he got jealous. I think he wrote
quite a few of those first letters, because they are
all about other bus drivers, and they are all about
(42:31):
the school system, and it's a lot of inside baseball
knowledge he wrote the first one. Then I think Karen
used that uh skin to uh start writing letters of
her own when she became obsessed with getting back at
her husband soon to be ex husband. And I think
(42:54):
she did enlist her son Mark. I think she enlisted
her ex boyfriend or I'm sorry, her boyfriend, uh who said,
you know, supposedly match the description of the guy in
the El Camino. I think that it was all her,
uh the that Martin Yant guy, the investigator said. In
my twenty two years as a journalist, I've never I
(43:14):
don't think I've ever met an individual so consumed with
so much irrational hatred for another and a willingness to
say anything, no matter how provably false, to defame him
about her ex husband. And I think it was all her.
And then I think all these other weird letters, I
think people of of of Ohio just started writing these
as as ways to expose people. Okay, Okay, that's what
(43:38):
I think. Like you said, that's Martin Yance take on it.
He knows probably more than anybody about this case, aside
from Paul fresh Hour, who, by the yeah, he thinks
that it started out as David Longberry and was followed
up by Karen fresh Hour to set up Yeah. Yeah,
that was Martin Yance theory. So you're in good company.
They you're in good company. You and Martin Yann agree
on that. Um, And I mean there's a lot to
(44:02):
base it on. Like Karen and or her son um
had access to Paul's gun. Um, she had them so
that she had the means, the opportunity, and the motive.
For sure, she definitely hated Paul fresh Hour. Happened to
throw away all those other letters that get found supposedly. Yeah,
I think even if she wasn't the letter writer, at
the very least, she was doing what she could to
(44:24):
set Paul up or make sure Paul went to jail
for this, even if she hadn't gone to the trouble
of being been the letter writer. Okay, And my final
piece is she didn't come out with any of this
stuff until after that divorce was started. Yeah, like that
all all would have come out during the divorce proceedings
because it was bitter and acrimonious, so she would have
(44:45):
used anything she could have against him. So the fact
that she didn't mention those those things during the divorce
proceedings is extra FICII Is that what you're saying? No,
no, no no, she did mention him. I'm saying, none of
this was mentioned like this whole time these letters were
going on. None of it was mentioned until she started
to get divorced. Okay, that's not what I saw. I
(45:05):
saw she didn't mention it until Paul was starting to
be railroaded toward prison, and the fact that she didn't
talk about it during their divorce proceedings made it fishy.
M So I saw. The other way is that she
conveniently didn't mention any of this stuff until the divorce
started to get ugly, and then all the not mentioned it.
But that's when that's when she got involved. I think
I got you, Okay, all right, so do you want
(45:28):
to know who? I think here's a really good chance
that what you just said is correct. I think it's
entirely possible. I want to hear your take. I think
it's also just as possible that the Circleville letter writer
was Paul fresh Hour. Mm hmmm. And here's why he um,
(45:49):
I saw that a motive for him to write these
initial letters some someone's floated I don't remember who that
it was. He was loyal to his wife at the time,
and that his wife was this ster of Ron who
was being hurt by his wife Mary having an affair.
So it's possible, whether it was his own idea or
with Karen Um, he would have written these letters as
(46:11):
a weird, roundabout way to get her to stop having
this affair, Okay, So that it is possible he did
have motive, and then from that point on he possibly
had motive to keep it up um to to as
a as a way of grinding an axe. He accused
Sheriff Radcliffe of covering up Ron's death. The circle Villar
(46:31):
letter writer accused Um the sheriff, of covering up Ron's death.
The the prosecutor in the case, got his own letter.
The the guy who prosecuted Paul fresh Air got his
own super scandalous letter. The coroner who ruled it was
an accident. Ron Gilespie's death got a super scandalous letter.
These people were people that Paul fresh Air would have
(46:52):
had a problem with, and no one else, none of
the other suspects would have had a problem with. So
it's also apparently there was a letter UM a handwriting
analyst who was on episode of forty eight Hours who
said this, these are written by one person, and that
person was Paul fresh Our based on his handwriting UM.
And apparently the UM Whatever Remains podcast turned up apparently
(47:19):
somebody got fingerprints off of some of the letters that
were sent while Paul was in prison, and they had
Paul's fingerprints on them. So there's a lot of stuff
that incriminates Paul as well. It's entirely possible it was
him and the other The last thing is the moment
he got out of prison. Um, the right right around
the time he got out a prison, the letters just
(47:39):
stopped altogether. Yeah, I don't know that. I don't know
what that means. So yeah, I mean a lot of
it's up for subjective interpretation. I think it's either multiple
people mainly UM, David Longberry and Karen, or it was
all Paul. That's might take well, I mean, who else
could it have been? It could have in um, Gordon
(48:01):
Massey obviously, right, the original guy. You got anything else?
I got nothing else. Well, if you like this, there's
a little bit more of this case, so there's probably
a rabbit hole for you to jump down and go
search it on the internet. Uh and listen to those
other podcasts whatever Remains and Invisible Ships and see what
you think about there's two. And since I said that,
it's time for a listener mail or get on Reddit
(48:24):
man that sometimes I'm not on Reddit hardly at all,
but sometimes stuff like this is a lot of fun
because you get to see all these different people's takes
and opinions. I saw this one guy who literally read
the entire hundred and sixty something page thing that Paul
had put out in the early nineties, like, man, you've
(48:45):
got more time than I do. Yeah, it's really detailed.
I was looking through and it is. Yeah. I didn't
make it through the whole thing. But if you're if
you're into that, go to um their Unresolved Mysteries subreddit
that will be up your alley. All right, gonna call
this Flann and Aisles Wave explained this is Uh. This
(49:06):
is from Allison from Toronto, but I have to say
that we got so many letters that said basically the
same thing almost immediately after that episode kid that I
think it's probably what happened, and it seems pretty possible
to be. Hey, guys, love the podcast. You're the best
with regard to planning aisles mystery. I'd like to share
how I envision it. How about this the box and
(49:28):
the cranes banging around. The two keepers down their weather
gear and set off to secure it. The other stays
behind from the elevated advantage point of the lighthouse. Maybe
while skinning the horizon with binoculars. Who knows, he spots
that rogue wave coming towards the island, and in an
attempt to warn and save his friends, bolts from the
lighthouse without weather gear, maybe even knocks over that chair,
only to be swept away with his friends in an
(49:50):
attempt to save them. One wave, all three gone. I
think he saw it coming and thought he had enough
time to save them. All that as from Allison from
Toronto and many many other people who said basically the
exact same thing. Uh, And it sounds pretty good to me,
It really does. It's super plausible, and I it didn't.
It didn't dawn on me at all. If that's a possibility,
(50:10):
one wave or another, it's gonna get you. Sometimes when
you're sitting in front of the microphone, you don't have
time to ruminate like you people do at home. The
people want our defense. They want some more jokes, they
want some more pithy insights, you know. Yeah, they want
another piece of us. Yeah, but thank you. I mean,
without the rest of everybody, we would be incomplete. So
(50:32):
everybody else completes us, right right, that's right. If you
want to send us a an email that completes us,
we would appreciate that. You can send it to us
at stuff podcast. Wait hole on, Chuck, Who was that?
They wrote in Allison from Toronto, Thank you Allison from
Toronto and everybody else who wrote into You can send
(50:53):
your email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
Stuff You Shouldn't is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the I heart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark. There's Charles to Be, Chuck Bryant, and we
can hear Jerry Clear's a bell so she's here with us.
And this, of course it's Stuff you should know. True crime. Yeah,
(00:24):
let's mud say sort of, but it really is true crime.
It's just it's not necessarily murder. E No, but it's
stocky and I hadn't really realized it until I saw
it spelled out a few times that this is a
huge stalk in case, one of the weirdest, creepiest, most
mysterious stalking cases of all time. Yeah, but I think
(00:45):
I know who did it, So hold it, wait, save it,
because we'll definitely have that combo. Okay, Yeah, I think
this is one of those it's uh, what is it
OCAM's razors at the the most obvious thing. We did
an episode on that, remember, yeah, a zillion years ago.
But this, I think this is one of those where
it is a lot less mysterious when you kind of
(01:07):
just look at it at its face. So, in other words,
you think the cat did it. The cat did do it,
So we're talking about this mystery UM usually calling it's
full title the Circleville, Ohio Poison Pen Letters, And it
is a weird unsolved mystery case. In fact, it came
(01:28):
into the widest um public awareness thanks to that TV
show Unsolved Mysteries back in the early nineties, and UM
a lot of their info was based on this journalist
and private investigator named Martin Yant, who had already been
investigating it by then. But it is a really weird,
odd true crime mystery. And yes it is true crime,
(01:52):
even though you're right, it doesn't have murder involved. There's
no serial killer or anything like that. But it is
bizarre and it is weird, and it is still unsolved
to this day. Yeah there's a death. Uh it's not
a murder though. Well I don't want to ruin it,
so before we get too far into I want to
give some shout outs to some of the sources for
this one. Unsolved Mysteries their website, a couple of CBS websites,
(02:16):
Mental Floss, Thought Catalog, Historic Mysteries List first had some
good stuff, and then True Crimes Times UM had some
good stuff. And then also there are a couple of
podcast sites UM that have already covered this that if
this floats your boat, go check out the Whatever Remains
podcast UM coverage of this. And there's also one called
(02:37):
Invisible Ships podcast that covered this too, and we UM
use some of their info from their sites too. Yeah,
and this is one of those UM that's a little
frustrating to research because there's a lot of different conflicting
information and it's kind of hard to get to the
real facts. UM. But some of it's not the biggest
(02:59):
d ill It is just like, oh, well I saw
that this was this, and I mean right off the bat.
For instance, in Circleville, Ohio, these mystery letters started coming
to Mary Gillespie Gillizpie. But then I saw sites that say,
oh no, the superintendent received letters before Mary Gillizpi even
is there, right, Yeah, so who knows. It doesn't really
(03:21):
damage the main storyline, like nothing contradicts it such to
where I was like, well, I don't even know what
I've just read then, right, I don't even know what's
true anymore. But all this just as a way of
setting up, like if there are things that are slightly off,
is because it's just hard to get the real you know,
Like we didn't have the case file in front of us.
So most of the coverage of this mystery does start
(03:44):
with Mary Gillizpi receiving her first letter. And Mary Gillizpi
was a local bus driver in Circleville, Ohio. And Circleville,
Ohio is a tiny little town about twenty miles south
of Columbus, Ohio, the capital of Io. A school bus driver,
by the way, which is very key. Yes, thank you
for that. Um. And so this is a small town,
(04:07):
and Mary Gillespie was a small town person who just
kind of typically minded her own business, was from what
I could tell, generally well thought of if she was
ever thought of it all by other people. Um. And
she got this first letter, and it was written in
this kind of weird blocky handwriting, and it was a
rather alarming letter UM for anybody to get, because it
(04:29):
basically said, I know that you're having an affair with
the superintendent of the West Fall School District, which you're
an employee of, and if you don't stop, bad things
are going to start happening to you. Right. His name
was Gordon Massey, said they were watching her, the superintendent
was Gordon Massey, that she was having an affair with
(04:50):
right yes to the letter writer, there would be no
mystery if we need to let it write. Hey, if
I were listening to this podcast, I would have been
confused just then. So I was looking out for that
version of me that's out there listening. Oh goodness, I
hope that person isn't listening. Uh. So they said that
(05:11):
they were watching it, and quote, this is no joke.
So these letters start coming in. Uh, almost all of
them had that same blocky letter meaning basically capital letters. Uh.
Some did not, though, and we'll get into that a
little bit more later. But the lion share of them
had this one kind of writing style that was very signature,
(05:32):
clearly kind of written by the same person. And so Mary,
you know, she hides these letters for a little while,
obviously didn't even tell her husband at first, and then
eventually says Ron, and there are a bunch of just
norm core names in here, so it might get a
little confusing with like the Ron's and the Mary's and
the polls. But she told her husband Ron, she said, listen,
I've been getting these letters, and here's what they say.
(05:55):
And the letters are saying that I need to tell
the school board about this or they will out me
basically on you know, how would you would out someone
in the seventies, which is on the radio CB by
putting up billboards and signs. This would be your modern
like social media threat. I guess yeah. And so Ron
uh said well, I think Mary said listen, I think
(06:16):
I know these are coming from this other guy, uh David.
He's another uh school bus driver, David Longberry, and he
he tried to come onto me and I rebuffed him,
and I think that's who's writing these. So and from
what I could tell, Mary kept the letters to herself
until Ron started getting letters himself that basically said your
(06:36):
wife was having an affair with Gordon Massey and you
better make him stop where else I'm gonna tell everybody.
And so that's when she turned to to David was like, oh, yeah,
I forgot to tell you about these letters and that
I've been accused of having an affair. I'm totally not
having an affair, though, But what are we gonna do
about these letters? Huh? So they loop in as you
(06:56):
would do some family members. Ron's sister Karon, who will
become a key player, and her husband Paul uh fresh
Hour was their last name. Married last name. He would
become a key player. Uh. He was a prison guard
and not uh just a little side factoid about him
as the prison movie Brewbaker with Robert Redford. He was
(07:19):
in that movie. He was They filmed it nearby and
he was cast as an extra as a prison guard
because he was a real prison guard. He was a
real prison guard. And another fun fact about Paul fresh
Hour is in the late sixties at the prison he
was a guard at um it was overrun by an
eMate riot and he was held prisoner for like thirty
(07:39):
hours by the inmates. Well, he was a natural for Brewbaker.
Then he was so um. By the time these letters
started coming through, he was no longer a prison guard.
He was a quality inspector at the local Anheuser Busch
bottling plant. But I took from the fact that he
was a former prison guard that they they and to
(08:00):
get some muscle involved and they went to him to
ask him to write the letters. That was That was
how I took it. Yeah, and he worked and this
kind of becomes key later on. He worked about fifty
to sixty hours a week and had a pretty decent
commute to and from so the long and short of
that is is he was gone at work a lot
of the time. Right, So Paul said, okay, of course
(08:23):
I'll help you guys out. And he sent a letter
at least one to David Longberry, the other bus driver
that had made advances on Mary and who they suspected
was the writer of these letters, and said, hey, Buster,
we know what you're doing. You better stop. Uh. If
you don't, bad things are gonna happen to you, so
cool off. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing here in the seventies kind
(08:45):
of way, and um, it seemed like it worked because
for a few weeks the letters that have been started
to come like hard and fast, just dry it up
at first, Yeah, because he said stop what you're doing
because I'm about to ruin go on what the image
in the style that you're used to and who wouldn't
stop writing letters with received with that threat, Yeah, because
(09:09):
they thought that they had this anonymous letter writer, you know,
dead to rights, and he was going to going to
be scared off now because ultimately, if it was this
guy who from like Ron Gillispie's point of view, what
he was being told by his wife that she wasn't
having an affair. This guy was making this up because
she had resisted his advances. If you, if you tell somebody,
(09:33):
look stop, we know that you're doing this, of course
they're going to stop. The jig is up. So they
did think that had handled it, especially when those letters
dried up for a few weeks, but um, not too
long after that they were rather just made because um,
rather than just letters. Now there were signs being posted
around town that we're saying essentially the same thing. Yeah,
(09:54):
they were saying not only that, but they were saying
that Gordon Massey, superintendent not letter writer, was uh involved
romantically with the Glissapees twelve year old daughter Tracy. So
of course Dad sees this ron starts driving around tearing
these signs down, you know, before the break of dawn,
so no one would see these things. And this just
(10:14):
sort of went on for a while. There were these
letters that would come and go. I think about a
a little more than a year went by, uh, and
in August of seventy seven, Mary's like, I gotta get
out of here. I'm gonna go to Florida with UH,
with your with my sister in law, with your sister
Karen and a couple of other friends. Later on, people
said that was a cover up for maybe going down
(10:36):
to meet Gordon Massey in Florida. But I don't think
that's true. I think she went down with her friends. Yeah,
do you think that's true. I think we might have
different uh people in mind on who did this, and
we'll get to that though. That'll be the exciting reveal
at the end. I can't wait. Man. So the letter
(10:57):
writer back at home on answers the phone. Uh, it
was a person claiming to be the letter writer on
the other end. He said that he recognized the voice.
He got mad, he got his gun and tells the kids,
I'm going to take care of this problem once and
for all. And a few hours later Ron is dead,
(11:19):
dead D E A D. But he wasn't dead like
from a stab wound or no one had broken his
neck or anything like that. He was dead from a
car accident he had run into I believe a tree.
He'd run off the road, driven about thirty ft at
a high speed and run into a tree. It was
the seventies, so he very well might not have even
had a seatbelt installed in his car. But at the
(11:42):
very least he didn't have it on. He was half
thrown from the cab, which is grizzly um and he
died at the site. Like he wasn't pronounced dead at
the hospital. Around the way of the hospital, they pronounced
him dead on the site. He was super dead of
massive internal injuries. And so there were a couple of
really fishy things about all this. Number one, the intersection
(12:05):
where he died at it was not far from his house,
so he knew this intersection very well. The weather was fine,
it was nighttime, but it wasn't like raining out or
anything like that. And he his gun had was found
to have had one um round missing, and it had
been fired. It wasn't just missing like the gun had
been fired, and no shell casing was found. So in
(12:26):
between the time that he stormed out of his house
to apparently confront the letter writer and the time he
was found dead, he had discharged his gun and they
had no idea at whom, where it was discharged, under
what circumstances. They just knew that he had shot his
gun once. Oh, so it was not a revolver, not
that I know of, because they've seen multiple places that
(12:48):
they did not find a shell casing. So it sounds
like it was an automatic or semi automatic all right.
Uh so that some people might say is fishy. The
other thing that other people say is fishy. I don't
find any of this fishy. But way is that he
was they ruled a drunken driving accident. Other people friends
would say, like heron didn't even drink that much. We
(13:10):
didn't see him drinking that day. But you can't argue
with science. And he had twice the legal limit of
in his blood alcohol content. Um, I don't think he
in his Officially, I think he drank up some courage
to go confront someone and wrecked his car and died. Yeah, yeah,
I mean that's something that that gets left out of
this is like this was a really dark period in
(13:32):
ron Um Gillispie's wife life. Like he was driving around
for hours before work every day, finding these signs at
the very least looking for him. If like he couldn't
find him, Like he didn't sleep very well. It makes
a lot of sense that he would have taken up
drinking when he was otherwise a teetotler. He was being
told by this person that his wife was having an affair,
(13:54):
even though she swore that she wasn't. It was a
bad time for him, so he he had like a
rough last year or so of his life, and then
he died badly as well too. It was not a
good end for Ron Gillispi. Um. And there was a
bit of a scandal after that because apparently Paul fresh
Hour said that he suspected it was foul play and
(14:15):
that the sheriff on the case, basically the local law
enforcement guy who would see this case through the entire
its entirety, was a guy named Dwight Radcliffe used the
sheriff and um. Paul fresh Hour claims that at first
Sheriff Radcliffe agreed with him that it seemed like there
was something fishing in that foul play might have been involved,
but then after that he suddenly changes his story. Sheriff
(14:36):
Radcliffe does, and like you said, it gets ruled an accident,
especially after the coroner comes back with a point one
six blood alcohol content for Ron Gillispi That's right, uh,
And Radcliffe said there was initially some kind of suspect
that and I know you did too, looked high and low.
I don't think it's literally ever been released to Sheriff
(14:57):
Radcliffe initially had in for questioning, but apparently this person
even went so far as to take a polygraph test
and got away with it. I don't I don't know
if it was one of the who knows. I don't
know if it's any of the key suspects that we'll
talk about later or not. Uh, And I don't think
we'll ever know who that was. But uh, there was
a suspect and that was sort of dismiss out of
(15:18):
hand once the d Y alcohol reading came back and
the polygraph test was passed. Yeah, the the one person
I saw floated as potentially who it was was David Longberry,
that bus driver. That's why I figured. Yeah, um, but yeah,
it's never been documented. I'm not even positive that it's
documented that Sheriff Francliffe actually did any of this, like
(15:38):
a polygraph and all that stuff only said he did. So.
Ron is dead, Chuck, the Circleville letter writer has claimed
a life. A human life has been snuffed out that
otherwise probably wouldn't have been had the Circleville letter Writer
not started writing this terrible letter campaign. That's right, you
want to take a break and pick back up afterward,
(15:59):
Let's do it, Okay, Alright, so Ron's gone and it's
(16:25):
about the same time that, uh, you know, Karen and
Paul are having a rough go of it as well. Uh,
And I just the feeling I got was they didn't
have a great marriage. It wasn't because of the Circleville stuff,
but they began to divorce and Karen had cheated on him.
Karen is uh, you know, she didn't get the house,
(16:47):
she didn't get the kids, and ended up living on
a trailer on Mary's property after Ron was gone. And
this was like, m Karen was not She didn't take
any this well, right, Everything I saw was that Karen
was u lived in a constant state of upset and
(17:07):
anger at Paul because of this divorce, even though she
was the one that she did right. Um, so you
just just put that in your hat, like put a
pain in that and save it for later. Put in
your hat and smoke it. Right. So one of the
things that came out of this um this close contact,
where Karen was living on a trailer in Mary's property,
(17:29):
is that supposedly during this time after Ron died, Mary
admitted that she actually was having an fair with Gordon Massey.
But but but don't judge her too harshly yet, because
it didn't start until after the letter writing campaign started.
The letters were bs all along you know what. I
(17:51):
think she had had it an affair with him before
and stopped and then started back up. Okay, that's possible.
That's my feeling. I think she had an affair with him.
Maybe it was off and on, who knows, Maybe it
was pretty much constant. And then at some point, um,
Gordon Massey left his wife or his wife left him.
(18:12):
I got the impression his wife might have left him,
and that Mary was not necessarily his only fling, his
only mistress, and that um, after that and after Ron died,
she felt comfortable saying that they were having an affair. Um,
but it started after the letter writing campaign. That's my
(18:33):
take on it. Well, supposedly the superintendent had uh I
don't know if it was verified or not, but was
accused of having affairs with quite a few of the
female bus drivers. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Yeah,
not just Mary, no, but I mean specifically bus drivers.
I got you, Okay, Yeah, I think that the Circleville
letter writer basically intimated that or outright said it in
(18:54):
in some of the letters. Right, Yeah, okay, um so okay.
So Gordon just think it's interesting that he has the
thing for bus drivers, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah,
it is. It is a real thing, isn't it. So
those yellow busses he can't he can't turn them down?
Maybe so um so okay. So we've got Mary admitting
that she is having or has had an affair with
(19:16):
Gordon Massey, um Bron's dead, Paul and Karen are splitting up,
and we start to reach into the nineteen eighties, and
not only were the signs continuing, the letters were continuing,
the postcards were continuing. People um who were had who
had nothing to do with like Mary or Karen or
Paul Um or Gordon had We're getting letters, Like the
(19:39):
businesses were getting letters. I saw one that was addressed
to a barbershop and it said dear public, and then
it went into this tirade about Gordon and Mary. So
a lot of people are getting letters in this town
about this stuff. Um. And then things kind of stepped
up tremendously in February of three. Yeah, and by the way,
(20:01):
I think all of these letters were still being postmarked
from Columbus, Ohio and that's Uh, that's kind of a
key detail that um that we can't overlook is that
they're all being mailed in Columbus's what like half hour
away or so. Okay, so like they weren't being mailed
from that town. Uh. So Mary is doing her job.
(20:23):
She's still a bus driver six years later, despite all
this stuff. She's still taking those kids to school, bless
her heart. And she sees a sign on her route that, uh,
I have seen And this is one of those dumb
details I've seen. It was on a post I've seen,
it was attached to offense, but either way, there was
a sign that had incriminating stuff about her. Once again,
(20:45):
it threatened the life of her daughter, which was a
big one. So this is when she actually got out
to to take down and she she took down the
whole thing because it was kind of an odd looking
set up. And what she realized when she got home
was that it was a booby trapped sign that had
a gun, its twenty five caliber handgun and a little
container that allegedly was supposed to go off if someone
(21:07):
were to come by and kind of yank that sign
down without much care. Yeah, Like I think maybe some
string was connected to the back of the sign and
it went to the trigger maybe or something like that,
but it was designed to elicit an angry response, and
apparently she didn't take it down in anger and it
saved her life. But there's a there's a gun now
(21:28):
there's so Ron died probably from his own you know,
um accidental driving. This is totally different. This is attempted
murder um. And it's like, this is like an entirely
new ball game. This isn't just like, you know, harassing
somebody or stalking somebody. This now is attempted murder. There's
(21:49):
a loaded gun that was set up to go off
on on Mary. So of course the police get ahold
of this gun, and they see pretty quickly that somebody's
attempted to to file the serial number off of it,
but they haven't done a very good job of it,
and they handed over to the Bureau of Criminal Investigation,
the state investigators, and they say, oh, yeah, this is easy.
(22:12):
Watch this, and they get a piece of blank paper
and a nice cranon and they rub it over it
and sure enough, there is the serial number that wasn't
properly filed down and they can now trace the gun,
that's right, And they traced it back to a guy
who worked at a higher antizer bush and he said,
you know what, that was my gun, but I sold
(22:33):
it for thirty five bucks to Paul fresh Hour. Yep,
my co my co worker. UM, I guess we'll sort
of reveal what we think as we go since we're
doing that. I don't think that sign was supposed to
go off and kill anyone. I think it was a
a rigged booby trap, like a fake booby trap. I
(22:54):
know who you think it was, all right, I know
who you think, but depend on your hand. So, Paul
fresh Are, the guy who was Mary and Ron's brother
in law, Karen's ex husband. His gun has now been
found in a booby trapped sign from the Circleville letter writer.
(23:14):
That is a big deal. And so the police start
asking Paul some questions like why why is your gun
in a booby trap that was attached to a sign
from the Circleville letter writer. And Paul says, hey, man,
I have no idea anybody could have put that there.
That gun was stolen a long time ago. And they say, well, Paul,
did you report this to our local sheriff's department? And
(23:37):
Paul says, now, I never got around to and they say, Paul,
you should probably come downtown with us. That's right, And
he went downtown with Sheriff Radcliff, and the sheriff said, hey,
I've seen a few got TV shows in my day.
I've seen McCloud. So let's let's uh, let's get a
handwriting test going. And he was like, well, okay, where's
your forensic expert and he has We don't have one. So,
(24:01):
like I said, I've seen TV. So I'm gonna make
up some of my own tests, and I'm gonna tell
you to write some of this stuff. I'm gonna tell
you to copy these letters. I'm gonna read some of
them to you until and you you need to write
down what I'm saying. Uh, and that's gonna be the proof. Um.
And that's basically what happened. He was He basically said,
you know what, it looks like a match to me
(24:21):
at least pretty much. And and so I'm gonna arrest
you on charges of attempted murder. And he was released
on bond and interestingly checked himself into a mental health
center to get like proactively to get examined because I
think at first he thought about using a reason of
insanity plea and wanted to I guess support that lay
(24:44):
some groundwork. Yeah, but he he got out of that.
He changed his mind later on. Yeah. So. UM. One
other thing that I think pushed Sheriff Radcliff into arresting
Paul in addition to that Jannkee handwriting test was UM.
Karen fresh Hour, Paul's a strange wife, during an interview,
told the sheriff, not only do I think that Paul
(25:09):
is the Circleville letter writer, I actually found letters before
hidden in our house addressed to other people in that
same weird handwriting. UM. And sheriff said, did you keep
these letters? Can I see him? And She's like, no,
I didn't keep them. You know, I don't like clutter
or whatever. Um. But that definitely helped push the sheriff
into into arresting Paul. So before Paul knows it, he's
(25:32):
on trial in October of n for attempted murder because
of that booby trapped gun. And at the trial, one
of the things that really sunk him was that they
allowed the letters to be introduced, not in any kind
of like criminal capacity, like he wasn't charged with harassment
or stalking or anything like that. They just basically used
(25:53):
it to paint him as a weirdo and a harassing
crack pot, and that the letters gave some sort of
roundabout motive or at least suggested that he was the
person who, um, who booby trapped that sign, because the
letters were connected to the sign, were connected to the gun,
(26:14):
were connected to Paul fresh Hour, and without the letters,
it was just the gun and Paul fresh Hour. So
it was a huge coup for the prosecutors to be
able to introduce that, um that those letters, and then
the handwriting analysts took over, right, Yeah, the handwriting analysts
confirmed two of them that they at least believed, and
you know we I think we did a full episode
(26:36):
on that, didn't we on handwriting analysis that he wrote those.
The other bad thing that he had going against him
was that he had taken the day off of work, Uh,
the day that the booby trap sign was discovered. A
little bit fishy for someone who worked so much, or
at the very least if he was innocent, which I think, uh,
very bad luck for him that he had happened to
(26:56):
take that day off of work. Yeah, it's very incidental,
don't you think. Well, sure, okay, you know, of course
you can't say it's not a coincidence. Uh but he
either took the day off to do the booby trapp
or just that was just a bad coincidence. Wait, he
just said, you can't say it's coincidence. I'll tell you.
(27:17):
I'm not. I said you can. You can. You have
to say it's coincidence unless he did it. Okay, I
got you, I got you. I serious. I don't think
he did it, all right. I think there's a third
there's a third alternative that we'll talk about later. All'm
so excited, man. Uh So he said in court, like, hey, listen,
(27:37):
this sheriff gave me this test. He told me to
copy the letters and and I just took that to
me and to try and imitate the writing and and
none of this was even above board. He's like, he's
no letter writing expert. He shouldn't have been conducting this
junk science test. And here was some other interesting tidbit.
(27:57):
Mary said that, uh, hey listen. Another bus driver said
that she went past that intersection where that sign was
booby trapped earlier that day, and there was a dude
there who did not look like uh, Paul at all,
and there was an el Camino there, yellow yellow el Camino,
and Paul doesn't drive that, and so like, I don't
(28:20):
think it's him because look, I mean, look, look, look
what's going on here. He's getting railroaded by the supposed
handwriting and the fact that it was his gun. And
that's really just circumstantial evidence. So not only was it
fishy that there was a strange man spotted twenty minutes
before um Mary found this booby trap sign at the
very spot the booby trap sign was put up, but also, Chuck,
(28:42):
it turns out that um, if you see, there's a
there was a suspect, a possible suspect who um whose
brother had a yellow el Camino, and that person turned
out to be Karen fresh Hour. Yeah, I see, I
saw other places. It was not a brother, oh, a
boy friend I saw that. Well, No, it was another
relative who had the al camino, because the brother would
(29:06):
have been Roy's. I mean, I guess you could have
two brothers, right, yes, and a brother or a relative
could have been a boyfriend who we're talking about Central Ohio.
What I think, and this is Furthering my case here
a little bit is because this guy, I don't think
we mentioned when he was when the school bus went by,
he apparently like turned around real quick and acted like
(29:27):
he was peeing or something to to not be identified.
I think that that was Karen's boyfriend driving her relatives.
Uh oh, gotcha, Okay, okay, okay, I like, where are
you going with that? Throw him off the case or whatever.
I got him off the case, that's right. So that
(29:47):
was never introduced, right, No, not in court, I don't think, right. Yeah,
So the fact that that wasn't introduced the fact that
they had Paul's gun. They introduced the letters. His coworker
at Anheuser Busch said, yeah, I saw him the g
on the personnel records that Anheuser Busch said he wasn't
there that day. That the jury took two and a
half hours and came back with a guilty plea and
(30:08):
Paul fresh Hour, who may not have ever written one
of these letters or booby trap this this gun or
this side no motive. That's another one too, we'll just
we'll talk about in a second. He was He was
sentenced to seven to twenty five years in Ohio State
Prison for attempted murder in in three he was convicted
(30:32):
and sentenced, that's right, and he remained there for many years.
He was denied. I mean, he's a great prisoner. When
that seven years came up, he was eligible for parol
in ninete and these letters kept coming while he was
in jail, even though there's no way that he could
have written these and had them postmarked from Columbus from prison.
He was even putting solitary for a while because they
(30:54):
said these letters are coming, and they clearly weren't coming
from him, but that was still the fact that they
were still coming. At his parole hearing, they said, no,
these letters are still coming, so we're gonna keep you
in here. Imagine that. Imagine being like I'm innocent and
somebody else out there is proving that I'm innocent because
these letters are still coming. But you're taking is that
(31:15):
somehow I'm doing? You still got a letter in prison? Yeah,
so you're gonna keep me in And then after he
was denied parole that first time he was up for it,
after seven years in prison, he got a letter from
the Circleville Um letter writers saying, now, what are you
gonna believe you aren't going to get out of there.
I told you two years ago when we set them up,
they stay set up, don't you listen at all? So
(31:37):
we got a taunting letter after he was denied parole
because the letters were still going on. Yeah, I wonder
who wrote that. So he finally did get out in
after eleven years in prison, ten to eleven years in
prison for attempted murder. And he set up a website.
And this is like the mid nineties, so that was
like a big deal. He probably your Crystal links or something,
(32:00):
but he set up a website that was dedicated to
this case and you know, professing his innocence and everything. Um,
and you said something, uh that that I want to
circle back to, and that was motive and that it
is just he didn't really have one. No, that is
something that everyone has struggled with, even like the prosecutors
couldn't quite say why he would have done this. That
(32:23):
it doesn't make any sense that there's really nothing. He
didn't have anything to gain from Mary being found out
or whether she had an affair or not. He had
nothing to gain from her dying if he if he
set up that booby trap um and yeah, it just
didn't make any sense. And when you have like you
(32:43):
have motive, opportunity and means, and he had opportunity and
he had means, but he never had motive. And that
was a really big deal. And the fact is he
had a really good alibi despite all of that for
almost all of the day. Um. And yet he was
still convicted and spent more than ten years in prison
for it. Very sad. Uh. We should also mention that
(33:04):
there was a letter sent not only to Paul in prison,
but while he was still in jail, there was a
letter sent to Unsolved Mysteries, the TV show, and they
were doing a segment about it. And uh, it said,
forget Circleville, Ohio. Do nothing to hurt Sheriff Radcliffe. If
you come to Ohio, U L sickos will pay, signed
(33:26):
the Circleville writer, I believe. I don't know if it's
the first time it was signed as such. Uh, well,
we'll get we'll get to it. Some of the letters
are signed w over the years, and those are the
ones that weren't written quite in that blocky style. But
that'll that'll come back. That letter demonstrates something that's really um.
(33:47):
Characteristic of the Circleville letters, and that the almost the
only punctuation in them are colon's, not simmy collins, not periods,
now even ellipses, you know, that annoying thing that people do.
We're rather think commas or periods. They just use ellipses,
and sometimes like multiple ellipses at once. The people this
person used colons like that, So like in a in
(34:09):
a single letter, there could be scores of colon's just
just littering the letter. And they did this in this
in this um, this letter to Unsolved Mysteries as well,
which I just that's just you don't see people doing
that with colon So I feel like that suggests that
every single letter that used colon's was definitely written by
the same person. The only issue I will take with
(34:31):
any of that is that I like to use the ellipsus.
I've never seen you want to use ellipsus. I may
not have used them with you. Okay, Wow, that's it's
like you're a whole different person that I never knew before. Yeah,
like ellipsus, I think it'd be very I think it
says a lot. It can be a very effective tool. Uh,
And I like it, Okay, do like eight dots in
(34:52):
a row. I use like the standard three. Okay, No,
I know what you mean. So you're using it as
a device to basically say, just pause and think about
what I just said, or in your court or yeah,
something like that. Okay, that's not at all what I'm
talking about. I'm talking about using an ellipse rather where
a comma should be, where a period should be, where
even a hyphen should be. Using an ellipse for that
(35:13):
is it's your bleedingly bad to read my mom, does it? Okay? Well,
I don't mean to insult you or your family. No, no, no,
I no, you don't. It's it's it's it's definitely weird,
and it's a thing because it's not just one. My
mom will put like eight or nine dots in between
phrases and sentences and emails. I don't know. Maybe I'm
not sure what it is. And if you were while
(35:34):
she was typing it, each dot would be like um
um um, what am I gonna say next? Alright, let's
take our final break here and we will talk a
little bit more about these darn letters right after this. Okay,
(36:12):
So one thing about this mystery, Chuck, is it would
be like remarkable and noteworthy even if it were just
limited to Marry and her family receiving these threatening letters
and there being some signs hundreds. Yeah, that's not at
all what it was like. Yeah, as a matter of fact,
I saw more than a thousand letters in multiple places.
More than a thousand letters, postcards, and signs were mailed
(36:35):
or put up around Circleville and even central Ohio in
general over the years. And um, the whole letter writing
campaign lasted for almost twenty years, more than eighteen years
of these letters, and they were they alleged everything from
murder to affairs to um complaints about the Ohio, Ohio politics. Um,
(36:58):
they just were all over the play. So it's a
really weird case, even more so than like the core
case that we're talking about. It's even stranger and more
rambling than that. Yeah, and you know, they were, like
you said, they expanded far beyond the Gillispie family. Some
accused the sheriff of being um involved in a cover
(37:21):
up about Ron's death. Some were about just other noteworthy
people in town or not noteworthy people who just uh,
you know, you had an affair with this person and
you're the local doctor or you're the local county coroner. Um,
you've been abusing children. And the weird thing is a
lot of this stuff was actually true, right, So it
(37:41):
was like, is someone just really attentive and exposing these things,
Like what's going on there? Yeah? And I think the
town lived a bit in a bit of a state
of fear that like they were going to get targeted
next and all of their war secrets were going to
come out because, like you said, the Counting Corner, a
guy named Dr Ray Carroll, he apparently had previously been
a used of, um, inappropriate contact with children and in
(38:05):
a letter right, no in general, okay, but most people
didn't know about this. It was like a secret from
his past. And this letter writer brought this up and
years later, um, he actually I think he may have
lost his medical license. Um. The state medical board charged
him with eight counts of gross immorality, including stuff that
involved children. So this letter writer seemed to be correct
(38:29):
about that. There's another one that they were never proven
correct about. That was just maybe the most scandalous accusation
they ever made, and it was directed at the prosecutor
in Paul fresh Hour's case. A guy named Roger Klein. Yeah,
they said that, Um, I know you killed that woman
who was pregnant. She's a school teacher, and I'm going
(38:50):
to dig up their body and mail the bones to
the cops unless you admit it. And I think this
was never sort of went anywhere, right. It was just
one of those accusations. Now, And Roger Klein ended up
continuing along the career path up to being an appeals
court judge when he retired a few years back. Um.
But the accusation was that he was having an affair
with the school teacher, got her pregnant, and then killed
(39:11):
her and by proxy her their their unborn child. Um.
And the there was a school teacher named Vicky Cooke
who was murdered and whose murder was never solved. UM.
And I I've seen in a couple of places that
Roger Klein was proven to have had an affair with her,
but I could not find that, like roundly um proven.
(39:33):
The upshot of all of this is this was exposed
in one of the letters. So the coroner in Ron
Gillispie's death is exposed in a letter and targeted Roger Klein.
The prosecutor in Paul fresh Our's case, gets a letter
of his own and he's targeted. So it wasn't just
Mary and her affair with Gordon Massey that was the
(39:55):
full subject of these letters. Other people were targeted as well.
That's right. So there's a couple of more people we
should mention, I guess before we get to our final
verdicts um, and they were both children of key players.
One was um William Massey. This is Superintendent Massey's son.
He was I've mentioned some of those earlier letters were
(40:17):
written in a kind of different style of handwriting, and
they were signed with a W. Some people say it
could have been William Massey writing these and actually signing them.
He was a grade school I'm sorry, I think high
school student at the time. Teenager and uh so, just
throwing that out there. And then there is Mark fresh Hour,
who was Karen and Sue's son, who um who went
(40:42):
with you know, he he the dad got custody. So
I'm not sure what kind of say they had, but
I know that Mark did not go see his dad
in prison one time and generally is sort of believed
to have been on mom's side through all this. Yeah,
so I'm glad. Do you line those up? Because, like
I get think Christie um book, we're just basically introducing
(41:03):
characters who are now suspects at the very end of
this whole thing. Yeah, and interestingly, Mark, in September two
thousand two was found dead from a self inflicted gunshot
wound floating in a river. So, uh, some people say
that this was guilt because he was a part of
this thing. His mom Karen said no, he had been
(41:24):
battling depression. Nothing to see here, So let's talk about
the person that that brings up. Then, Um that that
has related Mark fresh Hour having to do with with
the case against his father is Everyone says that he,
if he did this, it was at the behest of
his mother, Karen mark Um, Paul's ex wife, and that
(41:46):
it was Karen who was actually the Circleville letter writer
Um who was who basically used this whole campaign to
set her ex husband Paul up. Right, Well, what do
you think? Are you getting into what you think? I'm
just going over one of the us. What do you think? Well,
here's what I think. If that's where we are, sure,
(42:09):
all right? Well, I mean we have other suspects to
talk about. Well, it'll all come out in this and
I think that the original letter was sent, in fact
by David Longberry, the bus driver who Mary Gillispy refuted,
and I think he got jealous. I think he wrote
quite a few of those first letters, because they are
all about other bus drivers, and they are all about
(42:31):
the school system, and it's a lot of inside baseball
knowledge he wrote the first one. Then I think Karen
used that uh skin to uh start writing letters of
her own when she became obsessed with getting back at
her husband soon to be ex husband. And I think
(42:54):
she did enlist her son Mark. I think she enlisted
her ex boyfriend or I'm sorry, her boyfriend, uh who said,
you know, supposedly match the description of the guy in
the El Camino. I think that it was all her,
uh the that Martin Yant guy, the investigator said. In
my twenty two years as a journalist, I've never I
(43:14):
don't think I've ever met an individual so consumed with
so much irrational hatred for another and a willingness to
say anything, no matter how provably false, to defame him
about her ex husband. And I think it was all her.
And then I think all these other weird letters, I
think people of of of Ohio just started writing these
as as ways to expose people. Okay, Okay, that's what
(43:38):
I think. Like you said, that's Martin Yance take on it.
He knows probably more than anybody about this case, aside
from Paul fresh Hour, who, by the yeah, he thinks
that it started out as David Longberry and was followed
up by Karen fresh Hour to set up Yeah. Yeah,
that was Martin Yance theory. So you're in good company.
They you're in good company. You and Martin Yann agree
on that. Um, And I mean there's a lot to
(44:02):
base it on. Like Karen and or her son um
had access to Paul's gun. Um, she had them so
that she had the means, the opportunity, and the motive.
For sure, she definitely hated Paul fresh Hour. Happened to
throw away all those other letters that get found supposedly. Yeah,
I think even if she wasn't the letter writer, at
the very least, she was doing what she could to
(44:24):
set Paul up or make sure Paul went to jail
for this, even if she hadn't gone to the trouble
of being been the letter writer. Okay, And my final
piece is she didn't come out with any of this
stuff until after that divorce was started. Yeah, like that
all all would have come out during the divorce proceedings
because it was bitter and acrimonious, so she would have
(44:45):
used anything she could have against him. So the fact
that she didn't mention those those things during the divorce
proceedings is extra FICII Is that what you're saying? No,
no, no no, she did mention him. I'm saying, none of
this was mentioned like this whole time these letters were
going on. None of it was mentioned until she started
to get divorced. Okay, that's not what I saw. I
(45:05):
saw she didn't mention it until Paul was starting to
be railroaded toward prison, and the fact that she didn't
talk about it during their divorce proceedings made it fishy.
M So I saw. The other way is that she
conveniently didn't mention any of this stuff until the divorce
started to get ugly, and then all the not mentioned it.
But that's when that's when she got involved. I think
I got you, Okay, all right, so do you want
(45:28):
to know who? I think here's a really good chance
that what you just said is correct. I think it's
entirely possible. I want to hear your take. I think
it's also just as possible that the Circleville letter writer
was Paul fresh Hour. Mm hmmm. And here's why he um,
(45:49):
I saw that a motive for him to write these
initial letters some someone's floated I don't remember who that
it was. He was loyal to his wife at the time,
and that his wife was this ster of Ron who
was being hurt by his wife Mary having an affair.
So it's possible, whether it was his own idea or
with Karen Um, he would have written these letters as
(46:11):
a weird, roundabout way to get her to stop having
this affair, Okay, So that it is possible he did
have motive, and then from that point on he possibly
had motive to keep it up um to to as
a as a way of grinding an axe. He accused
Sheriff Radcliffe of covering up Ron's death. The circle Villar
(46:31):
letter writer accused Um the sheriff, of covering up Ron's death.
The the prosecutor in the case, got his own letter.
The the guy who prosecuted Paul fresh Air got his
own super scandalous letter. The coroner who ruled it was
an accident. Ron Gilespie's death got a super scandalous letter.
These people were people that Paul fresh Air would have
(46:52):
had a problem with, and no one else, none of
the other suspects would have had a problem with. So
it's also apparently there was a letter UM a handwriting
analyst who was on episode of forty eight Hours who
said this, these are written by one person, and that
person was Paul fresh Our based on his handwriting UM.
And apparently the UM Whatever Remains podcast turned up apparently
(47:19):
somebody got fingerprints off of some of the letters that
were sent while Paul was in prison, and they had
Paul's fingerprints on them. So there's a lot of stuff
that incriminates Paul as well. It's entirely possible it was
him and the other The last thing is the moment
he got out of prison. Um, the right right around
the time he got out a prison, the letters just
(47:39):
stopped altogether. Yeah, I don't know that. I don't know
what that means. So yeah, I mean a lot of
it's up for subjective interpretation. I think it's either multiple
people mainly UM, David Longberry and Karen, or it was
all Paul. That's might take well, I mean, who else
could it have been? It could have in um, Gordon
(48:01):
Massey obviously, right, the original guy. You got anything else?
I got nothing else. Well, if you like this, there's
a little bit more of this case, so there's probably
a rabbit hole for you to jump down and go
search it on the internet. Uh and listen to those
other podcasts whatever Remains and Invisible Ships and see what
you think about there's two. And since I said that,
it's time for a listener mail or get on Reddit
(48:24):
man that sometimes I'm not on Reddit hardly at all,
but sometimes stuff like this is a lot of fun
because you get to see all these different people's takes
and opinions. I saw this one guy who literally read
the entire hundred and sixty something page thing that Paul
had put out in the early nineties, like, man, you've
(48:45):
got more time than I do. Yeah, it's really detailed.
I was looking through and it is. Yeah. I didn't
make it through the whole thing. But if you're if
you're into that, go to um their Unresolved Mysteries subreddit
that will be up your alley. All right, gonna call
this Flann and Aisles Wave explained this is Uh. This
(49:06):
is from Allison from Toronto, but I have to say
that we got so many letters that said basically the
same thing almost immediately after that episode kid that I
think it's probably what happened, and it seems pretty possible
to be. Hey, guys, love the podcast. You're the best
with regard to planning aisles mystery. I'd like to share
how I envision it. How about this the box and
(49:28):
the cranes banging around. The two keepers down their weather
gear and set off to secure it. The other stays
behind from the elevated advantage point of the lighthouse. Maybe
while skinning the horizon with binoculars. Who knows, he spots
that rogue wave coming towards the island, and in an
attempt to warn and save his friends, bolts from the
lighthouse without weather gear, maybe even knocks over that chair,
only to be swept away with his friends in an
(49:50):
attempt to save them. One wave, all three gone. I
think he saw it coming and thought he had enough
time to save them. All that as from Allison from
Toronto and many many other people who said basically the
exact same thing. Uh, And it sounds pretty good to me,
It really does. It's super plausible, and I it didn't.
It didn't dawn on me at all. If that's a possibility,
(50:10):
one wave or another, it's gonna get you. Sometimes when
you're sitting in front of the microphone, you don't have
time to ruminate like you people do at home. The
people want our defense. They want some more jokes, they
want some more pithy insights, you know. Yeah, they want
another piece of us. Yeah, but thank you. I mean,
without the rest of everybody, we would be incomplete. So
(50:32):
everybody else completes us, right right, that's right. If you
want to send us a an email that completes us,
we would appreciate that. You can send it to us
at stuff podcast. Wait hole on, Chuck, Who was that?
They wrote in Allison from Toronto, Thank you Allison from
Toronto and everybody else who wrote into You can send
(50:53):
your email to Stuff Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.
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