98\. The Circleville Letters
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Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I am your host Peyton Moreland and I am so glad that you are here and listening to Into the Dark. If you don't know, this is a true crime show that also dives into dark, spooky ghost stories, UFO stories, tinfoil tales, everything spooky and dark is what is over on this channel. So if you are into that, you are in the right place. If

If you are watching on YouTube and can give this video a thumbs up real quick and also leave a comment, maybe just tell me what your favorite Thanksgiving dish is in the comment. Okay, leave it down below. It just really helps with the algorithm. And if you are listening on podcasts, can leave me a review. That would be so, so helpful and a great way to support the show.

So I am actually recording a little ahead right now because Garrett and I are about to leave out of town for my birthday, which is coming up and it's very exciting, but I kind of had to bank some episodes. So it's a little early from the time I'm recording this to the time you're listening to this.

for my 10 seconds this week, like I said, Garrett and I have been busting out episodes. And yesterday we recorded a two hour episode for our other true crime show murder with my husband. And we finished and we went to upload the audio and there was nothing on the SD card. And I know that doesn't sound that tragic, except for we have recorded so many episodes this week that after sitting down and doing two hour episode and then being like, oh, it's not there.

That was very disheartening, if I might say. Garrett was like, hey, let me try to open up this super duper expensive fancy card content recovery thing that they have basically on the deep web. And we ran the card through it and were able to actually recover the episode, even though there was no episode on the card when you plugged in. Don't know how that happened, but we were able to recover it. It took a while, but we got it.

So yes, that was very great news last night and no harm, no foul, except for maybe a little bit of discouragement in the Moreland household, but everything ended up okay. And with that, let's jump right into today's episode. Okay, so I know not everyone listening to this has watched the TV show Pretty Little Liars before.

I happened to just grow up in the time period where that show was all the rage and I feel like a good chunk at least know what the show is. It definitely had this fascinating mystery at its core. Someone was sending threatening letters, texts, messages, trying to expose everyone's secrets, but nobody knew who that person was. Obviously, if you watch the show, they had a name.

And it's exactly what you'd want out of a twisty, soapy show. But if Pretty Little Liars were to happen in real life, it probably wouldn't be fun and exciting. It would be terrifying. Imagine if someone knew all of the deepest, darkest, hidden truths about you.

and then used that information against you. Well, for one small town in Ohio, that exact scenario came true. Pretty little liars IRL, if you will. A mysterious unknown person began a letter writing campaign around 1976 and 1977, and

And they exposed all the skeletons in their victims' closets, the receivers of these letters. And if some rumors are to be believed, this unidentified person might have actually set a series of events into motion with these letters that culminated in a possible unsolved murder.

It is a wisty triangle web that we are about to get into. So sit down and buckle up. This story starts one day in late 1976 or early 1977, depending on who you talk to. A woman named Mary Gillespie is checking her mail just like any other day in the 70s. Mary lives in a small town called Circleville, Ohio, which...

Feels like your pretty typical Midwestern small town at this time. Its main claim to fame is that they throw a big pumpkin festival every year. But like any other small town, the people have their secrets there. As for Mary, she is a bus driver for the local school district. And for the most part, her life is reportedly quiet and uneventful. Just what you would expect. But that day, when Mary opens her mailbox and opens her mail...

She sees an anonymous letter that's addressed to her. She has no idea who wrote it, but the handwriting does stand out to her. It's a little eerie. The letters are blocky and the words are in all caps. So when she opens the envelope to read the note inside, Mary is stunned.

The unknown letter writer says that they know a huge secret she has been keeping. That she has been cheating on her husband with the superintendent of the school that she drives bus for. And that man is named Gordon Massey.

Now, for what it's worth, Mary has always denied having an affair. According to her, these allegations in the letter are false. And even though the language in the note is very threatening and aggressive, she decides to just ignore it. She doesn't tell anyone about what she got in the mail and she tries to go back to her ordinary life.

which doesn't work out. Eight days later, Mary gets another letter in the mail, and it has the same handwriting, and it's full of similar accusations and threats. But again, she shrugs it off and ignores it. Maybe she hopes that if she doesn't acknowledge the sender, they'll get bored and find someone else to bother. But instead, she keeps getting more and more letters, and eventually, Mary's husband, Ron, receives one too.

And it says, Mr. Gillespie, your wife is seeing Gordon Massey. You should catch them together and kill them both. He does not deserve to live.

Now, of course, Ron reads this and then he's like, Mary, what's going on? Why is this person writing to me claiming that you're cheating with Gordon? And Mary's like, no, this is a lie. I'm not having an affair. She and Ron had actually been together since high school. And Mary says she's not going to throw away everything that they've built together like that. So far as I can tell, Ron believes his wife and the two of them decide that whoever's behind this, they're just harassing the two of them for whatever.

No good reason. Well, the letters keep coming and somewhere along the way, Ron and Mary decide to get the police involved and the authorities loop in the local post office to see if they can figure out where these letters are coming from. But they don't learn anything concrete and they can't stop the anonymous writer. The notes keep coming and the threats become more overt and more disturbing.

In one letter, the writer tells Mary, Lady, this is your last chance to report him. I know you are a pig and will prove it and shame you out of Ohio. A pig sneaks around and meets other women's husbands behind their backs, causes families and homes and marriages to suffer.

In another marriage, the sender says that they're going to punish Mary and Ron's daughter for this supposed affair. Specifically, they write, quote, I shall come out there and put a bullet in the child's head. There are also threats against Ron's life, too. Even though whether the affair is real or not, Ron and his children are innocent. So basically, the writer just seems to be angry at Mary and saying that they'll hurt everyone in her life.

One especially upsetting message actually said, I know where you live. I have been observing your house and know you have children. This is not a joke. Please take it serious. Everything will be over soon.

So at this point, Ron decides the only way to stop these letters is to figure out who's writing them. Then he'll go to that person and force them to leave him and his family alone. And since the police aren't much help, he launches his own investigation. He studies the letters he's received and determines that most of them were sent from Columbus, Ohio, which is 30 miles away from Circleville.

The majority of them have a Columbus postmark, but not all of them. But even the letters that came from other places have the exact same handwriting. It is very recognizable. So it's not too hard to conclude that one person is behind all of these notes. And after looking into everything, Ron comes up with a theory. He thinks the letter writer is Gordon, the man who the sender identified as Mary's affair partner.

So Ron goes out one day and confronts Gordon in person and he asks the superintendent why he's harassing his family, threatening to hurt them and falsely accusing his wife of cheating. But Gordon's not surprised to hear that they've been receiving letters, but not because he's the sender. He says, I didn't write the letters, but.

I've been getting threatening notes too alluding to my own secrets. And these messages are a lot like the ones Ron and Mary have been getting. They're accusing him of having an affair with Mary and the sender says they want to hurt or kill Gordon. But the story is actually even bigger than that.

As it turns out, the letter writer isn't only focused on Ron, Mary, and Gordon. A lot of people in town have been getting these deliveries, and those other letters also expose people's secrets. Now, there aren't many people who have come forward with details about what their notes said, which to me, if the details in the note were fake, it probably wouldn't matter.

what the note contained, but there were a lot of people who were like, I got a note. I'm not going to say what it said. But I do know some individuals were being accused of stealing money or being abusive. I have seen the text of one letter. I'm not sure who it was sent to, but it said, you have been watched. No one can protect you. Obey, obey. Now we can't say exactly how many letters get sent or who all receives them.

But I need you to know, it's said that there are about 1,000 letters total. And some of them actually have arsenic poisoning folded up inside the envelope. So this person is literally sending people a deadly poison with threatening messages. Most are delivered to people who live in Circleville and the surrounding area, which is why they've come to be known as

as the Circleville letters. There were literally so many letters being sent out to residents in this area that this phenomenon got a name.

But even though lots of people are receiving them, Mary and her affair actually seem to be the writer's main focus. Mary, her husband, and her supposed lover are all being contacted way more frequently than anyone else who has come forward saying they were sent a letter. And the threats against them are especially pointed.

So Ron still thinks this is personal and he's still obsessed with trying to find out who's behind all of this.

At one point, he gets a note from the same sender, and this one tells him he needs to stop investigating, that if he keeps trying to solve the mystery, he will be killed. But this doesn't discourage Ron. It honestly just makes him even more resolved to figure out who's behind this. What is going on in this small town? And by August of 1977, after this has been going on for roughly a year,

Ron claims that he's figured out who the sender is once again, except he won't tell anyone what he's learned about the suspect's identity. All he says is that he's going to confront this person and bring the harassment to an end. Well, that same month when Ron's like, no, no, no, I'm just going to handle this. Mary goes out of town to Florida to visit some family. And while she's gone, Ron is watching the children on his own.

And on the night of the 19th, while Mary is still away, the phone rings and Ron answers. He has a tense conversation, but before he can tell anyone who's on the other line or what they discussed, he hangs up and he announces to his daughter that this is it. Tonight, he is going to go talk to the Circleville letter writer and bring this all to an end once and for all.

To drive the point home, he grabs his gun and marches out the door. Again, this is according to the kids. And then he hops into his car and drives away.

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your husband ron is dead he has been in a fatal single car collision he's hit a tree and died before he could even be taken to the hospital now the police are telling mary that the crash was an accident he just happened to drive off the road accidentally and hit this tree but the more mary and her family learn about this accident the more they start to have their doubts i mean

Take away the fact that he was going to confront the Circleville letter writer. Ron's autopsy comes back and says he has a very high blood alcohol content, about double the legal limit. But Ron doesn't drink. And he especially wouldn't get that inebriated when he's supposed to be watching the girls all on his own.

and he never get behind the wheel of a car if he was that intoxicated at least not if he had any say in the matter but maybe if someone had slipped him something or possibly if he was killed somewhere else and then someone put his body in the driver's seat and staged a car accident

It's a little easier for his loved ones to believe those scenarios, as outlandish as they are, than it is for them to accept that Ron was driving drunk and crashed and died. And I also think it's important to note that Ron had his gun with him in the car at the time of the crash, and when police check it, they discovered that it had been fired once. Nobody knew who or what he'd tried to shoot, when or where,

But it seems pretty obvious that there was some kind of maybe violent confrontation before he drove into that tree. I mean, even just taking the phone call into matter, which is all very suspicious. And it's enough for a lot of Circleville residents to actually believe that Ron was murdered.

maybe by the same person who had been sending those letters. And even though rumor is going around that this writer has potentially taken a life at this point,

The mail doesn't slow down. People keep getting upsetting, disturbing messages. In fact, to all appearances, one of their allegations is proven true not long after Ron's death. Well, maybe. It's up for interpretation. But shortly after Ron's funeral, Mary starts dating someone new. Can you guess who?

Gordon Massey, the school superintendent who she's been accused of cheating on Ron with. She still insists, no, we were never having an affair. We didn't become involved until after Ron's death. But it's a small town, people gossip. And as you can expect, this now official relationship is like

My gosh, are all these letters true? And it also enrages the letter writer. They send Mary and Gordon more notes than they ever have. And around this same time, someone starts putting up crude handwritten signs all over town saying terrible things about Mary and her children. The language is obscene. And again, there are threats to hurt all of the surviving family members.

These signs are in the same handwriting as the letters. So it's clear that whoever's the original writer is escalating. They're desperate to shame or intimidate Mary and Gordon for some reason. And this goes on for years. I mean, we go into the 1980s. And on February 7th, 1983...

Another bus driver who works in the district is driving down a road called Five Points Pike. It is actually just after 3:00 PM and she's about to start her afternoon route. Now around this time, she spots something odd in a ditch. It's a man that she doesn't recognize. He's large with a solid build and light colored hair.

Now, when the bus driver sees this man, oddly standing in a ditch in the middle of the day, he immediately squats down. It looks like maybe he needs to use the bathroom. He can't get to an actual building with a toilet. So she assumes maybe he's just taking care of his business right there in the ditch. His car in El Camino is actually parked nearby. Now, at the moment, the bus driver doesn't think much of what she sees. But just 20 minutes later,

Mary drives down that same stretch of road as part of her route. And she sees not a man in a ditch, but a sign. And it's another message publicly from the letter writer. And it includes some very graphic and obscene comments about Mary's 13-year-old daughter.

So she knows that she's going to have to pass this road again with a bus full of kids. She doesn't want to embarrass her daughter that way by letting her classmates see this sign. So she pulls over, she climbs out of the bus and she takes it down. Except while she's standing there in the ditch, she sees something odd.

The sign has a wire connected to it and the wire is actually attached to a box. Mary can't make heads or tails of what she's seeing. This whole setup is just confusing, but either way, Mary carefully takes everything apart. And when she opens the box, there's a 25 caliber handgun inside. The safety is off, it is loaded and ready to fire.

Now, this is obviously very scary. A child could have opened this box. So Mary hands all of this over to the police and they have a theory about what it's supposed to be. They say it's a booby trap. The investigators believe the gun in the box was rigged up in a way that it was supposed to shoot when Mary was standing in the ditch. That the sign was bait to get Mary to walk into the gun's line of fire.

And theoretically, when she went to take the sign down, she would have tugged the wire in a way that it would have pulled the gun's trigger. Now, the good news is, is that this booby trap is very poorly put together and there's no way it was ever going to actually work right. The gun never fired and Mary was never actually in any real danger. But still, someone might want Mary dead if they thought that she was the one who was going to remove this sign.

And it's not too much of a leap to assume that the person who set this trap up is still the Circleville letter writer. So the police decide to throw themselves into the investigation. And they actually get a break pretty early on. The gun in the box has its serial numbers partially filed off, but the number hasn't been completely removed. And there's enough there for detectives to identify the firearms owner. It's actually a local man named

named Paul Freshour. Now, Paul actually was very good friends with Ron before his death. I mean, Mary knows Paul. Paul is actually married to Ron's sister. It's a brother-in-law. And he has been outspoken about his belief that Ron was murdered. He's one of those people who thinks that the car accident was not an accident.

And now he wants to solve the crime and get justice for Ron. And he's also talked a lot about how he needs to figure out who the Circleville writer is and hold them responsible. I mean, he's buying into this theory. But the police think now that it's all a front. Instead, they figure that Paul felt very loyal to Ron and that the whole time they were friends, he had Ron's back no matter what.

And somewhere along the way, he began to suspect that Mary was cheating on Ron. And Paul allegedly took this personally. He hated that she would do something like that. The theory goes that Paul started writing the letters just to harass Mary. And then when that didn't get whatever outcome he wanted, he wrote to more people, maybe trying to get a reaction, get people to take him seriously. And finally, his plan culminated in this attempted murder.

Maybe that car accident really was an accident and Paul has to go along with the family members to not draw suspicion. And then he put his gun in the box and left the sign for Mary to find. Now, the only problem was he didn't have the technical knowledge to actually rig it up correctly and his weapon never fired.

So to support this theory, the police ask for Paul's alibi. And as it turns out, he took the day off of work on February 7th, that day when Mary found the gun, his gun. Paul says it was because he needed to fix some things around his house. And he also tells the police that they can call the different repairmen who were at his house for several hours that day, that they'll confirm that he was home all day and he never had a chance to sneak away into that ditch and set up that trap.

I don't know if the police ever do reach out to those repairmen, but I know they make Paul take a lie detector test and he fails. They also ask him to provide a handwriting sample so they can compare it, except they kind of screw this process up because they start by showing Paul the letters and ask him to copy the letters,

So his handwriting sample actually comes out pretty similar to the notes, but it might just be because he was actually trying to mimic the writer's style because he was confused when police were like, hey, can you copy this? He genuinely copied it. Usually when people give handwriting samples, they don't get to see what it's being compared to. Now, the next piece of evidence against Paul actually comes from his soon-to-be ex-wife, Karen Sue.

And this evidence also has some problems with it. See, Paul and Karen Sue are going through a very contentious divorce right now during this story. And things are getting ugly between them. Anyway, Karen Sue claims that one day she was home with Paul when she had to use the bathroom. But before she could, she noticed there was something in the toilet bowl. It was torn up bits of paper. She didn't want to get too close of a look given where the paper was floating.

But from the little she could see, it looked like there was handwriting on the paper. Specifically, she thought this was a Circleville letter and that it was addressed to Mary. One of Mary's Circleville letters is in Paul's toilet, according to his ex-wife. And after that incident, she found another note hidden in the house. And here's the thing.

None of them had been sent to her or Paul. It's not like Paul was secretly getting letters and hiding them. They weren't addressed to either of them. They were all messages for other people. Notes that had been written for other people.

So when Karen Sue saw them, she concluded that Paul was probably writing these and they were either letters that he hadn't gotten around to sending yet or maybe early drafts. And then he wrote another one. Either way, when her soon to be ex-husband comes under suspicion, she goes to police and says, hey, I have evidence that it really is Paul.

Except when the detectives are like, okay, Karen, can you give us these letters? She's like, I can't because when I found them in the house, I just saw them, but I didn't keep them. I didn't collect them. So all the detectives have is her word. And since Karen Sue, again, is in the middle of a very contentious divorce with Paul, she's not really an unbiased witness. So she could genuinely be making it up.

So there isn't much hard evidence connecting Paul to the letters, and he's never charged with anything related to them.

That still is his gun in the box, though. So Paul actually goes to trial on charges of attempted murder. Police are like, hey, it's your gun. It was rigged to fire. We're charging you. And even though he hasn't been charged with actually writing the letters, the lawyers do focus a lot on the messages while in court and basically say, not only did he rig up this box, he's also the Circleville writer.

Paul even makes a shocking confession at trial. He says, okay, okay, I'm going to admit I did write some letters, but only four or five of them. And he only sent those four or five notes to people he suspected of being the real Circleville letter writer. He's like, I wasn't writing as the Circleville writer. I was writing to accuse people of being it.

According to Paul, he and his wife, Karen Sue, were still trying to solve the mystery at that time. And whenever they had a suspect, they would write a message to that person urging them to just stop. But that's it. He says, that's all I wrote. He never threatened anyone or tried to expose their personal secrets because he wasn't the Circleville writer. And Paul insists that he had nothing to do with the gun in the box that was set up maybe for Mary.

Still, he's found guilty and sentenced to seven to 25 years in prison. It's safe to say that in the history of this story, this ruling is very controversial. Lots of people think that Paul didn't do it and that he was just an innocent man that had been wrongfully sent to prison. Maybe the Circleville writer somehow got ahold of his gun to frame him. Paul also claims publicly to this theory. He's like, I was framed.

Even if he'd wanted to torture his neighbors by sending them letters, he didn't have the time. He didn't know their secrets. Speaking of, now he's saying, I think I was framed by my wife, my ex-wife. I already talked about the problems with her story about finding letters hidden all over the house, but it's also worth touching on the man with the light colored hair, the one who the bus driver saw in that ditch before Mary got there that day.

According to her, he did not resemble Paul at all. Paul has a slim build and dark hair. However, the man in the ditch could kind of be similar to Karen Sue's new boyfriend who she had started seeing after the split from Paul. Her new boyfriend had a large build and blonde hair, which has some people wondering.

Did Karen Sue tell her boyfriend to set up the trap with Paul's gun because she had easy access to it and knowing that it would be traced back to him?

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You heard me, free croissants in every box and $30 off your first box when you go to wildgrain.com slash dark. That's wildgrain.com slash dark, or you can use promo code dark at checkout. On top of that, Karen Sue has a lot to gain from Paul's conviction. Originally, the terms of their divorce were not very favorable to her. She lost custody of their children, and she was essentially homeless because Paul was keeping the house and their money.

With Paul now going to jail, she gets the kids, the house and all of their shared assets. I mean, that is pretty big motive.

In fact, get this, even after Paul goes off to jail, the letters do keep going out over the course of the next 10 years. The people of Circleville still get letters. They're all still postmarked from Columbus, which is nowhere near the prison where Paul is being held. So there's actually no physical way Paul could have been sending the Circleville letters after he went to prison.

In fact, Paul even receives at least one letter while he's behind bars. Now, even though this all seems to suggest that Paul isn't responsible, the guards actually blame him for writing the letters and they throw him into solitary confinement thinking that this will stop him from being able to send these out, except people keep getting them and no one can explain how he'd be able to pull this off.

It's enough that even more people start to think Paul might be innocent and was framed as being the Circleville writer. So the question still, after almost 20 years, is who's writing the Circleville letters? Is it multiple people? Is it one person?

The TV show Unsolved Mysteries even decides to do an episode on the case in 1993, hoping to maybe get to the bottom of it. But not long after they start setting up interviews and putting their footage together, they get a letter too. And it says, forget Circleville, Ohio. If you come to Ohio, you sickos will pay.

Now the producers on the show aren't that easy to intimidate. They move forward with the episode and even read the letter aloud on air. And they also show interviews with the impacted people. And this includes Paul, who was recently paroled at this time. It was after 10 years. So the segment airs and then something interesting happens. The letters just stop. And it's hard to say why.

If the writer feels like their work is done now that they're getting national attention, maybe they would have stopped or maybe they're afraid of getting caught now that there's this huge spotlight on them. It has been almost two decades. So maybe the writer had passed away at this point or just got tired of writing. We'll probably never understand what made the letters stop because the fact of the matter is to this day, nobody actually

actually knows who or what the Circleville letters even were.

But there are a lot of theories. I already talked about the evidence against Paul and then the theory that Karen Sue maybe was framing Paul, maybe jumped on the bandwagon of the Circleville letters to frame him or just from the get-go was the Circleville writer. But some people also think the culprit could be a man named Dwight L. Bowman.

Now, Dwight was a school superintendent who worked in Circleville until he got fired. And you'll remember the earliest letters accused his own replacement, Gordon, of having an affair with one of the bus drivers. So maybe Dwight was disgruntled about losing his job and being replaced. And so he lashed out at the people he blamed most, the new superintendent, his acquaintances and neighbors and the whole community until things got out of hand.

Maybe there really was no affair and he was making up rumors to try to get the new superintendent fired. It is an interesting explanation, but honestly, there's no hard evidence to back it up. More just like a pretty good motive.

One other compelling theory involves a man named Thomas Lee Dillon, and he was a violent criminal who eventually was convicted of murder, actually. And Thomas, unlike the other suspects, actually at one point confessed to being the Circleville letter writer. He came forward from prison and said, okay, I was the one who wrote everything, except it's unclear, again, how an inmate would have known so many intimate secrets about the people living in this small town.

It's possible he just took credit for the letters for attention and fame because at this point the letters were pretty infamous around town. After all, he didn't come forward until 1993 when that Unsolved Mysteries episode aired. According to handwriting analysts, he could have written the letters, but there's nothing definitive. So again, it's hard to say for sure if we should believe Thomas's confession. I mean, there are so many possibilities, but none that can be conclusively proven.

Now that said, quite a few people do think the courts got it right and that Paul was responsible. There were problems with the handwriting sample the police got from him, but later on, analysts looked at other samples, personal letters that Paul had written to his loved ones,

And they were honestly kind of a match too. Still, if Paul was the writer, then after he went to prison, how did letters keep going on? Did he have a copycat? Did he hire someone to do it in hopes of making him look innocent? We'll never know for sure because Paul actually passed away in 2012 at the age of 70. So that's where things stand today. It has been almost 50 years since

since the first Circleville letter was sent. And most of the people who were impacted by the notes have passed away now. All we have to go on by now are a few pieces of evidence that remain. The letters, the box with the gun, and police reports. And frankly, it's hard to make the evidence fit with any one person narrative or theory. This has led some people to think that

Maybe there was a tinfoil tell at play here? Multiple people working together to write threatening letters hurt and maybe even kill their neighbors? Or maybe the person who set the trap with the gun is not the same person who wrote the letters. Honestly, we don't know for sure if all of this is even connected at all. And sadly, we'll probably never learn the real answer.

And we'll also probably never figure out what the writer's motive was, what they were even trying to accomplish, which is kind of ironic. We know so little about the Circleville letter writer, but they seem to know or claim to know everyone else's business. And sadly, they use that knowledge to harm people. It really does feel like an IRL Pretty Little Liars, but

We never figured out who A was. And that is the mystery behind the Circleville letters. I actually didn't know about these until I started researching. So if you've never heard about this, it is like 100% a real thing. There are police reports. And honestly, it's kind of strange that for two decades, residents of a small town just researched

received threatening letters in the mail. Like that is actually pretty crazy. I hope you enjoyed this story and I will see you next time as we dive further into the dark together. Goodbye.

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