CIRCLEVILLE LETTERS

Opening

In 1976 anonymous letters began to arrive in Circleville, Ohio, accusing townsfolk of affairs, crimes, and secrets they thought were closed. The writer knew too much and wrote in block print. Mary Gillespie, a school-bus driver, got letters about an affair with the superintendent. Her husband Ron went out with a gun to watch a sign the writer had told him to watch and was found dead of a gunshot the writer had, in a way, predicted. A trap on Mary's bus later held a gun. The sheriff's brother-in-law, Paul Freshour, went to prison for attempted murder. Letters kept coming while he sat in a cell.

Freshour was released years later. The letters did not stop when they should have if he were the only hand. No conviction ever named the writer of the whole campaign. Circleville lived with the postmark for a generation.

Timeline

1976Letters in Circleville, personal, vicious, informed. Mary Gillespie is a central target. On 19 August 1977 Ron Gillespie takes a phone call from a man who says he is watching the house, goes out with a gun, and is found dead in his truck, which has hit a tree. A shot has been fired from his gun. The sheriff rules it an accident; the family never accepts that.

Early 1980sA booby-trap on Mary's bus: a box, a gun, a string. Paul Freshour, once a sheriff's employee and Ron's brother-in-law by a tangle of marriages, is tried for the trap and convicted. He says he is clean of the letters.

While he is inside, letters continue, including some that could not easily have come from his cell without help. Handwriting fights. Freshour serves years, comes out, and the campaign still does not have a public author.

Documentaries and Unsolved Mysteries keep the town on a map. No trial closes the writer. The last letters fade rather than confess.

Key figures

The writer is the record and has no tried name that covers the whole span.

Mary Gillespie is the living target who kept driving a bus through a town that read her mail.

Ron Gillespie is the dead husband. His night with the gun is the first blood in the paper.

Paul Freshour is the man the county put in prison for the bus trap. He is not a proven author of every page that arrived before and after.

Physical and documentary trail

What exists:

One: the body of anonymous block-print letters showing local knowledge.

Two: Ron Gillespie's death after going out on the writer's information.

Three: the bus trap and Freshour's conviction for that attempt.

Four: letters that continued after that conviction.

There is no fingerprint the county kept as the writer's. There is no confession that accounts for the full run. There is no second conviction.

Things you might not know

• There were more than a thousand letters. They went to people across southern Ohio, many complaining of local corruption, and some reportedly contained arsenic.
• The sheriff blamed drink. Ron's blood alcohol was twice the legal limit, no bullet casing was found, and the sheriff concluded he had driven into the tree by accident.
• The bus trap was set with an obscene sign. On 7 February 1983 a sign about the Gillespies' daughter went up on Mary's route. When she took it down, she found a box holding a .25 handgun rigged to fire.
• The gun's serial number was filed off. Investigators still traced it to Freshour, and a co-worker testified he had sold it to him for $35.
• Freshour said he was made to copy the letters. Experts matched his handwriting to 391 letters and 103 postcards, but he said the sheriff had asked him to copy samples of the letters, which produced the match.
• A man in a yellow El Camino was never found. A bus driver reported seeing him near the sign that day, and said he looked nothing like Freshour.
• Freshour served about eleven years. Sentenced to 7 to 25 years, he was paroled in 1994, maintained his innocence, and died in 2012.

Competing explanations

One writer with a long grudge, Freshour or not. Fits the voice. Struggles with mail from a cell.

More than one hand, a family war using the same print. Possible in a small county. Not proved.

A frame on Freshour and a writer still walking. This is his reading. The continuing letters give it air.

Later life of the case

Circleville reached a national audience through Unsolved Mysteries and later documentaries and podcasts, and Freshour's conviction has been argued over ever since. The question that keeps the case alive is the same one the town had in the 1980s: who kept writing after he was locked up. For another anonymous writer who taunted a community and was never named, see the Zodiac Killer.

Finding

Someone in Circleville spent years putting other people's secrets on paper, Ron Gillespie died after going out on that paper, and letters kept arriving after Paul Freshour was locked up for a bus trap.

What still will not resolve: a name that covers the whole campaign, or a print match the county will stand on for the late letters.