48 Hours - The Circleville Letters - Encore

Episode Date: January 1, 2023

An anonymous letter writer threatens to expose a town’s rumored secrets. Is anyone safe? "48 Hours" correspondent Erin Moriarty reports.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to this podcast ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app today. Even if you love the thrill of true crime stories as much as I do, there are times when you want to mix it up. And that's where Audible comes in, with all the genres you love and new ones to discover. Explore thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. thousands of audiobooks, podcasts, and originals, with more added all the time. Listening to Audible can lead to positive change in your mood, your habits,

and even your overall well-being. And you can enjoy Audible anytime, while doing household chores, exercising, commuting, you name it. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30-day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.ca. In 2014, Laura Heavlin was in her home in Tennessee when she received a call from California. Her daughter, Erin Corwin, was missing. The young wife of a Marine had moved to the California desert

to a remote base near Joshua Tree National Park. They have to alert the military. And when they do, the NCIS gets involved. From CBS Studios and CBS News, this is 48 Hours NCIS. Listen to 48 Hours NCIS ad-free starting October 29th on Amazon Music. Something pretty disturbing happened in Circleville. Starting small and flourishing over decades, residents began to receive letters that accused the citizens of being involved in some pretty terrible things.

Embezzlement, domestic violence, affairs, and even murder. The Circleville letter writer knew everything about everyone and knew everyone's secrets. They were vicious and ugly. Somebody with some severe psychological problems I would hazard to guess. The threatening anonymous letters kept coming, hundreds of them. Most were postmarked from Columbus, Ohio, about 30 miles north, which is where I grew up and where I was living in March of 1977. When small town Circleville began to feel under siege,

when just a walk to the mailbox could trigger terror, especially in the case of one woman who lived here, a school bus driver by the name of Mary Gillespie. Mary Gillespie goes out to her mailbox. She receives a letter. She opens it. It's an anonymous letter, distinct handwriting. And it's telling her

to end the affair with the superintendent of the school there, Gordon Massey. Mrs. Gillespie, stay away from Massey. I've been observing your house and I know you have children. It's your daughter's turn to pay for what you've done.

I shall come out there and put a bullet in that little girl's head. These letters were being sent to newspapers, elected officials, private citizens. And they're all saying the same thing, that basically Gordon Massey, the superintendent, he needs to be exposed, he needs to be fired. Her husband, Ron, begins to receive them as well. Mr. Gillespie, your wife has seen Gordon Massey. You should catch them together and kill them both. He doesn't deserve to live.

Well, he got letters saying that if he didn't do something about this affair, his life would be in danger. We know what kind of car you drive. We know where your kids go to school. By August of 1977, everything changes when Ron Gillespie gets a call late one night. Enraged, he picks up a gun, gets in his truck, and drives off. And told the daughter that he was going to confront the letter writer. He was traveling at a high speed, lost control of the truck.

Went off the road, hit a tree, and was killed. The letter writer had made threats to Ron Gillespie that he could end up dead. Then he ended up dead. Was Ron Gillespie's death an accident, or was he murdered? Murdered. This case has really left its mark. Yeah, and it's destroying a lot of people.

I think there was a big cover-up. It turned out to be quite a mystery. Do you think you know who wrote those anonymous letters? Yes, I do. A.I.M. Circleville, Ohio has the look and feel of a quaint Midwestern town. In many ways, it's sort of an all-American town. It still has a pretty rural character to it, and some families have been there for decades. Its major attraction, says journalist Martin Yant, is the annual pumpkin show. Let's give a big hand and applause, guys.

Well, it was a good place to live. Fairly peaceful till all this stuff started. Janet Cassidy is talking about that barrage of anonymous poison pen letters that began arriving in mailboxes all over Circleville in 1977. Small towns have big secrets buried deep under those freshly mowed lawns. It caught the attention of Marie Mayhew, who researched the story for her podcast,

Whatever Remains. This anonymous author was hell-bent to expose every little ugly secret in Circleville. At first, the writer seemed fixated on the married school district superintendent. Gordon Massey was a well-thought-of man in Circleville. And his rumored relationship with a school bus driver. Mary Gillespie was a wife and a mother. They were accusing her of adultery. You've got the superintendent possibly having an affair

with a school bus driver? Wasn't that kind of the talk of town? Yeah, it was, definitely. June Whitehead grew up in Pickaway County with her sister Janet. Have you seen Mary's picture? She was Miss Jackson. She looks really attractive there. Yes, she was. Mary married her high school sweetheart, Ron Gillespie.

And you wouldn't find a better person than Ronnie Gillespie. The couple had two children and settled in Circleville. I mean, this had to be very awkward for Mary Gillespie, for her children, for Gordon Massey, for his wife, for his son. It must have been awful. I mean, it was just sort of this all-invasive poison. There was nobody that was off-limits to this letter writer. And it wasn't just a campaign of letters.

There were phone calls and offensive signs that began appearing along Mary's bus route. Ron would have to go out, and he would have to find and pick up all the signage about his wife and kids around Circleville. Determined to stop the rider, the Gillespie's brought their letters to the sheriff's office. There was an ongoing investigation. They were tapping phones.

They were watching houses. They tried to work with the USPS to check the mail. But the letters continued, and small-town Circleville was consumed with speculation. Was the writer male or female? Did the writer live in town? Was the writer male or female? Did the writer live in town? Then, in August 1977, Mary left her husband and children at home and drove to Florida with her sister-in-law.

Ron had told her he knew who the letter writer was, and he was going to take care of this problem while they were in Florida. They were en route when they learned that Ron had crashed his truck into a tree after getting that mysterious phone call. The coroner ruled his death an accident, but Ron's brother-in-law, Paul Freshour, believed he had been murdered. Although a number of people told me that he was not a heavy drinker, he had almost twice the legal limit of alcohol in his blood. Also suspicious, under Ron's body, police found a.22 caliber revolver. The gun had been fired once.

So then the question was, was he shooting at the letter writer? The sheriff didn't give that any credence at all. But Paul Freshour kept pushing the Pickaway County Sheriff to take a closer look. Pam Stanton was close to the Freshours. He wanted the truth about Ron's death. He wanted to know who was writing the letters too. The attacks on Mary Gillespie and Gordon Massey didn't stop. Now letters were also being sent to local businesses, government offices, schools, and people who lived in the area. This person was, at that point, pretty unbound. Not afraid to say anything.

And it scared a lot of people. You know, is he coming after me or is she coming after me? Mary had always denied having an affair with Massey, but after Ron's death, she says they began seeing each other. And that's when the threats against her became even more vicious. Everyone knows what you have done. If you don't believe us, just make them mad and find out for yourself.

Robin Yoakum writes mysteries, but back in the early 1980s, he was a crime reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. There were obscenities and threats to do harm to Mrs. Gillespie's daughter. It's your daughter's turn to pay for what you've done. On February 7, 1983, Mary Gillespie was driving her empty school bus heading to pick up kids.

heading to pick up kids. It's 3 30 p.m. She's about to turn left here on Five Points Pike when she looks over there and sees a handmade sign on a fence. It talks about her 13 year old daughter and it's obscene. So she pulls the bus over here but when she goes over there to try to pull the sign off the fence, she realizes that it's rigged to twine in a box. She says she takes that box home. She then opens it and gets a shocking surprise. It was a gun and it was ready to go off. When Mary brought the box to the sheriff's office, investigators quickly realized it was a booby trap. Yoakum was in the newsroom when word got out. And I remember the excitement from a newspaper perspective. It's a great story. A woman who had been the target of all these letters finds a booby trap with a.25 caliber handgun rigged to it,

all reporters would want to cover that story. Especially if there was a dramatic twist. And when did Paul Freshour become the suspect? Pretty quickly. Hot shot Australian attorney Nicola Gaba was born into legal royalty. Her specialty? Representing some of the city's most infamous gangland criminals. However, while Nicola held the underworld's darkest secrets, the most dangerous secret was her own.

She's going to all the major groups within Melbourne's underworld, and she's informing on them all. I'm Marsha Clark, host of the new podcast, Informants Lawyer X. In my long career in criminal justice as a prosecutor and defense attorney, I've seen some crazy cases, and this one belongs right at the top of the list. She was addicted to the game she had created. She just didn't know how to stop. Now, through dramatic interviews and access, I'll reveal the truth behind one of the world's most shocking legal scandals. Listen to Informant's Lawyer X exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify,

and listen to more Exhibit C true crime shows early and ad-free right now. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge? Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast from Wondery and T-Boy about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the bolder risk takers who brought them to life. Like, did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye? Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's

Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala? From Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans. Discover the surprising stories of the most viral products. Plus, we guarantee that after listening, you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It's just the best idea yet. There's small-town intrigue. A seemingly omnipresent, unknown villain extracting revenge on the people of Circleville by uncovering their secrets. A mysterious death.

An elaborate attempted murder. To this day, there's a fierce debate about who that villain is or was. So we'll take you back through the evidence and the theories, and you can decide. So we'll take you back through the evidence and the theories, and you can decide. This sounds like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, doesn't it? It does. There's a cast of characters, the letters would keep coming, and then the inevitable attempted murder, but it is very much an Agatha Christie feel to it.

And just like one of Christie's mysteries, the gun found in the booby trap provided the first clue. Firearm examiners at BCI, Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, were able to restore the partially filed off serial number. And when they traced the gun, it came to a co-worker of Paul's. And he said, yeah, I sold that to Paul Freshour. On the surface, says Martin Yant, it was shocking because Paul Freshour and his wife Karen Sue had been close to Mary Gillespie and her late husband Ron, Karen Sue's brother.

It was kind of an extended family that seemed to socialize together. But by 1983, when Sheriff's investigators went to talk to Karen Sue, the fresh hours were in the midst of a contentious divorce. Karen Sue gave them quite an earful. She told investigators that Paul had become infuriated with Mary. Karen said that Paul had thought the world of Ron and Mary before Ron died. But after his death, Paul hated Mary, hated her over the Massey deal. And then Karen Sue told them that her estranged husband was behind Circleville's anonymous letters. She had found one letter torn up in a commode. And she had found a couple of other letters hidden in the house.

When investigators went to see Paul Freshour, Marie Mayhew says he was very cooperative. Did he demand to have a lawyer? No, he answered all of their questions. And readily admitted the gun belonged to him. Well, they asked him how the gun ended up in the booby trap, and he said, I don't know. Freshour told investigators his gun had been stolen weeks earlier and allowed them to search his house and his car. He even gave them samples of his handwriting. It definitely does seem like he has absolutely nothing to hide at that point. He denied being the letter writer

and said he had nothing to do with the booby trap, but he failed a polygraph. So Paul Freshour was arrested for the attempted murder of Mary Gillespie. of Mary Gillespie. Were you surprised when he was charged with attempted murder? Yes. Yeah, I was. This was the man Pam Stanton called Uncle Paul and says their families were so close,

she thought of him as a second father. I mean, was he worried? His life was on the line, his freedom. Yeah, he was scared anybody would be. Freshour was never charged with sending any of the threatening, harassing letters. But in Circleville, there was an assumption that the letter writer was finally behind bars. On October 24, 1983,

Paul Freshour went on trial at the Pickaway County Courthouse in Circleville. It was a big deal. Robin Yoakam didn't cover the trial, but he followed all the news coverage. You know, he was the mastermind behind this alleged booby trap, but almost everything focused on the letters.

First up was the intended victim, Mary Gillespie. She testified about finding the booby trap and then, over defense objections, she was asked about the anonymous letters she had received. How damaging was that to Paul Freshour at his trial? That was very, very damaging. The defense argued there was no direct threat to Mary's life in the letters, so they weren't relevant to the case. But the judge allowed in 39 of them. It was a break for the prosecution, who claimed the writing on the booby trap shared similarities to those letters.

The letter and the writing that was on the 2x4 was the same block handwriting, sort of the same cadence and the same message as the anonymous letter writer. The state brought in the BCI handwriting analysts who compared the writing on the booby trap to the letters sent to Mary, and then to samples of Paul Freshour's handwriting. They had handwriting analyses that indicated that the letters could have been written by Paul Freshour. And a second expert, originally a defense witness, agreed. I mean, that's pretty damaging, isn't it? When a witness hired by the defense ends up testifying for the prosecution. I can only imagine it was something you'd want to avoid.

It was far more difficult for the prosecution to prove Freshour made the booby trap. Was Paul Freshour's fingerprints found on the gun or the box that held the gun? No. And they didn't have a whole lot of evidence about the booby trap other than he admitted that it was his gun. There was circumstantial evidence. Freshour had taken the day off from work the same day the booby trap was found. And that box that held the gun an industrial sized chalk box

like this one was easily found at anheuser-busch where Paul worked they had his gun in the booby trap and they had the chalk box so they thought they had plenty of evidence but no one saw fresh our near the buoy trap. He had a pretty good alibi for most of the day. Paul Freshour didn't take the stand, but multiple defense witnesses testified to seeing him at home. He was having work done on his house, the reason he said he took the day off. As the trial progressed, I'm thinking,

a lot of this stuff just doesn't add up. You know, where are the fingerprints? Where's the physical evidence? But it was enough evidence for the jurors. They found Paul Freshour guilty of attempted murder. How did you hear the verdict? Even after all this time, it's still hard, isn't it? I got home and everybody was just a basket case. They were crying.

Everybody was upset. He received the maximum sentence, seven to 25 years in prison. When Paul Freshour was convicted, did everybody in town breathe this sigh of relief? The letter writer is caught. It's over. I think that's a fair assessment. They've linked him to the letters. They linked him to the booby trap. We're going to get this guy out of our community, get him in prison. Everything will kind of go back to normal. Except it didn't, because the letters never stopped. As a kid growing up in Chicago, there was one horror movie I was too scared to watch.

It was called Candyman. The scary cult classic was set in the Chicago housing project. It was about this supernatural killer who would attack his victims if they said his name five times into a bathroom mirror. Candyman. Candyman? Now we all know chanting a name won't make a killer magically appear. But did you know that the movie Candyman was partly inspired by an actual murder? I was struck by both how spooky it was, but also how outrageous it was. We're going to talk to the people who were there, and we're also going to uncover the larger story. My architect was shocked when he saw how this was

created. Literally shocked. And we'll look at what the story tells us about injustice in America. If you really believed in tough on crime, then you wouldn't make it easy to crawl into medicine cabinets and kill our women. Listen to Candyman, the true story behind the bathroom mirror murder, early and ad-free with a 48-hour plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. Halfway between Peru and New Zealand lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn, and it harboured a deep, dark scandal.

There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reached the age of 10 that would still a virgin. It just happens to all of us. I'm journalist Luke Jones, and for almost two years, I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse

and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction. Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Paul was living a pretty good life. Had never had any problems with the law. Basically, he lost everything. Lost his home, lost his job, went to prison. It was inconceivable to Paul Freshour's family and friends that the man they so admired could be convicted of attempted murder.

It's just preposterous. There's no way. He wasn't dumb enough to put his own gun in a booby trap. And anybody could have gotten that gun. And even today, former investigative journalists Martin Yant and Robin Yochum question whether Freshour's verdict was fair. Can I tell you I'm 100% sure that he didn't do it? No, I can't. I can tell you, had I been sitting on that jury,

I would have never sent a guy to prison based on that flimsy evidence. The more I got involved in the case, the more I saw there were just too many question marks. At trial, the prosecution had branded Paul Freshour the Circleville letter writer. But once he was locked up, how did menacing anonymous letters keep coming? I'm not talking about one or two letters. There were hundreds of letters that went out after he was in prison.

The Pickaway County Sheriff couldn't say how Freshour was able to write and send those letters, but he was certain Paul was responsible. The prison warden disagreed. His warden insisted that would be impossible. They kept him in isolation. They did not allow him to have pens or paper. He was strip-searched. All his incoming and outgoing mail was inspected.

There is absolutely, positively, no way Paul Freshour was writing those letters and smuggling him out from prison. No way. After Yochum and Yant wrote articles about Paul Freshour, they also received letters. And inexplicably, so did Paul Freshour, behind bars. The letter writer bragged about setting him up. He said, when we set him up, we set him up good. And who did Paul think had set him up? Karen Sue.

His ex-wife? His ex-wife. Paul Freshour's lawyer raised that very possibility during his closing argument. Who hated Paul enough to try to get him into trouble? If you read the divorce decree, who stands to profit financially if Paul is convicted, goes to prison? Pam Stanton says that during that divorce battle, Karen Sue lost her home, custody of their daughters, and was living in a trailer on Mary Gillespie's property. Uncle Paul's out of the picture. She got it all.

And Karen Sue was one of the first to link Paul to the anonymous letters. Remember, she told investigators that she found some at their home, including that one in the commode. Karen tried to piece it back together when Paul was not at home and said she could make the name of Gillespie out on the letter. Could she show them these letters? No. She didn't keep the letters. Does that make sense? Not to me. Why wouldn't she run off right away to the sheriff's office and say, look, this is from my husband. He's the letter writer. She didn't do any of that until after the booby trap was found.

Do you believe that Paul Freshour did set up the booby trap and tried to kill Mary Gillespie? Nope, I don't. I think somebody stole his gun to set him up and it worked. In the early 1990s, when Martin Yant began investigating Fresh Hour's case, he discovered evidence in police reports of an alternate suspect. There was another bus driver who saw what I think is very significant. It was something that never came up at trial, and it points in a whole different direction. Investigators never followed up, but Yant did. The female bus driver told him that 20 minutes before Mary found that booby trap,

she had driven by the same spot. She said she saw a man standing beside an El Camino. a man standing beside an El Camino. That looked like this one. But the man turned away from her and acted like he was going to the bathroom, so she didn't get a good look at him. The description didn't seem to match Paul Freshour. She said he was a large man with sandy hair, and Paul was not large, and he had very dark hair. And wasn't Karen Sue at that point dating a man who was large with sandy hair?

Yes. And what about the El Camino? There's no evidence that any inquiries were made about who might have an El Camino. Didn't, in fact, Karen Sue's brother have an El Camino? That's what I've been told. But Marie Mayhew believes trying to connect the booby trap to Karen Sue is tenuous at best. There's someone who looks like the man she was dating driving a car that looked like it could have been her brother's. None of that points

back to Karen Sue. I don't believe that she framed her husband for this or was responsible for it. Ten years after Paul Freshour went to prison, the intrigue surrounding the case caught the attention of the television series Unsolved Mysteries. But in december 1993 before filming even began the show received a postcard with an ominous threat forget circleville ohio if you come to ohio you el siccos will pay the circleville writer it didn't deter the show from going to circleville even paul freshour who had just been released on parole, agreed to talk. I'd really like to see someone really look at this case on the letters, reopen the letter part of it, and get in and find out who wrote the letters. Pam Stanton says Karen Sue was not happy

that Unsolved Mysteries was in town, or that Pam agreed to be interviewed. I got a phone call and her telling me it would be in my best interest not to go. Karen Su didn't participate in the program, but according to Pam, she kept track of everyone who did. She sat in a car on the other side of the intersection and took pictures of everybody going in and out for the interviews. If true, Marie Mayhew says that doesn't prove anything. What's more, Karen Sue has never been considered a suspect by police. I think she's a very convenient villain. We reached out to her, but she did not respond to our request for an interview.

There are so many twists and turns in this case. All of a sudden something will surface, makes you rethink what you were thinking. Martin Yant is right, and there's another twist to come. After Paul Freshour went to prison, how do you think the letters continued? It took nearly 20 years, but in 1994 the Circleville letters abruptly stopped when Paul Freshour was released from prison. Did people, when he got out, still think he was the letter writer? Yeah. Yeah.

He was very hurt, and he was hurt with what it did to his family. A very uncivil war had been raging for years between Paul Freshour and his ex-wife, Karen Sue. Even their two daughters were divided over their dad, and caught in the middle was their son, Mark. He was so loyal to his mom, but he loved his dad too. But with Sue, you were going to be her son or his son. Pam Stanton says Mark chose his mom and never once visited his father in prison.

He wouldn't tell me why. He just said he couldn't. It was Paul Freshour's gun discovered in the booby trap that helped land him behind bars. He did tell some people that the gun had been stolen. According to Martin Yant, Freshour strongly suspected that the thief was his own son. And I did interview one man that said he specifically told him that he thought it was Mark, the son. And this was before there was any talk of a booby trap. Before the booby trap.

Freshour kept his suspicions about his son to himself, says Yant. Family loyalty meant more to him, even though his son had totally rejected him. Why didn't he say more? Why didn't he point the finger at his son? Paul get his son in trouble? No. Uncle Paul never done that. But he knew he could go to prison. I don't care. Uncle Paul would have died before he'd have seen Mark go to jail. All this destroyed

Mark. The divorce, the letters, it all destroyed him in a way that could never be fixed. Just before sunrise on September 11, 2002, in Portsmouth, Ohio, a man's body was found floating in the Scioto River. It was 39-year-old Mark Freshour. He had shot himself.

His mother, Karen Sue, later told police her son had suffered for years from depression. And I firmly believe when Mark took his life, he could not deal with the guilt any longer. If Paul Freshour actually had nothing to do with the booby trap, is it also possible he had nothing to do with the booby trap. Is it also possible he had nothing to do with the letters? As he told me, I didn't write the letters. I didn't do this. Even after he got out of prison,

he approached the FBI and asked them to investigate the case. The FBI never responded, says Jant, but today, nearly three decades later, one of its former star profilers agreed to examine the Circleville letters for 48 hours. Mary Ellen O'Toole has explored some of the darkest criminal minds, from the Green River Killer to the Unabomber. Whoever the writer is, they're flying under the radar screen, coming across as very normal, and people would not suspect them. Who was the Circleville writer, or were there multiple writers? O'Toole believes one solitary author churned out every letter. When you have one person and one person only who has that secret, One solitary author churned out every letter.

When you have one person and one person only who has that secret, that person can take the secret to the grave. Number one, do you think it's male or female? Can you tell? And I knew that would be one of your first questions. When it comes to a letter writer, gender is very difficult to discern. That's because the writer was clever, consistently deceptive, and manipulative, says O'Toole. You see the manipulation continue throughout these letters. She went all the way back to the writer's first letters in 1977, hunting for hints about gender, and found some. The letter writer kept referring to, I'm the boyfriend of a woman.

They wanted to make you believe, I'm not a woman, I'm a man. And seeing how they were trying to hide who they were makes me think there could be a good possibility it's a female. Altogether, O'Toole inspected 98 letters, finding the word choices and the grammar revealing. How educated is this writer, can you tell? I would say this is not a highly educated person because of the quality of the sentences and how they were put together. Significant, says O'Toole, considering that Paul Freshour had a job as a manager at Anheuser-Busch and a master's degree.

She says there were other identifying clues from the anonymous writer. And as you read these letters, you can see the letter writer is really having a good time. What does that say about that person? The letter writer is pretty callous, and this person would have to know I'm hurting people, and that's okay with me. A sign the writer might have been suffering from a personality disorder, says O'Toole, meaning that he or she knew the difference between right and wrong, but simply chose wrong. So that would suggest to me that in their regular everyday life, they sought ways to be a bully, to be intimidating. If that's the case, Pam Stanton says that does not sound like her Uncle Paul.

Did he have a, like, a dark side to him or anything? Never. Uncle Paul was never bitter, never angry. Do you think the letter writer was Paul Freshour? Right now, I have my doubts. Sitting here today, I'd say I can't rule them out but I'm looking at other reasons that tell me it it might in fact be somebody different. And O'Toole does not believe the secretive writer would risk exposure by setting a booby trap in a public place. That suggests to me that may have been done by somebody else who took advantage of the situation. The mystery seemed to only deepen,

but one expert is convinced she does know the identity of the Circleville rider. 100% sure. Could there have been copycat letter writers? See the letters for yourself on Facebook at 48 Hours. When the 1980 Robert Redford prison drama Brubaker needed extras in the Columbus area, Paul Freshour channeled his experience as a former prison guard to play one on the big screen. Please! Little did he know he'd eventually serve a decade for attempted murder.

And although never charged with terrorizing Circleville with the letters, he had to live with people believing he was the writer, but not sisters Janet Cassidy and June Whitehead. What is one thing that you really want to see corrected? I don't think Paul's guilty. I think he served those 10 years in prison. I don't think he was guilty of the attempted murder. And I don't really think he was the letter writer. And with former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole believing the writer could be someone other than

Paul Freshour, it calls into question the testimony of those two handwriting experts at his trial, linking him to the letters. So 48 Hours turned to forensic document expert Beverly East, looking for her independent analysis. I don't want to hear the story because the documents tell me the story. That story, says Ease, begins by identifying distinct writing patterns in Paul Freshour's known writing. In this case, letters he wrote to a friend. The G in Grimmer is a very unusual G. Looks like a six, a number six. And that's unusual? That's very unusual.

And that's unusual? That's very unusual. She then studied a selection of 49 of the anonymous letters, spanning from when they first started in 1977 through the 1990s, and found that unusual G shaped like a number 6 in several of the Circleville letters, including one sent while Paul was in prison. So Gillespie, Gillespie, getting Gillespie and Gordon, you've got that number six. He says numbers can tell a story of their own. Numbers don't lie. Numbers don't lie. Pointing to this zip code written by Paul,

there's this ambiguous number three that might also be a two. It's like he's not sure if it's 42112 or 43113 in the anonymous letters on the zip code. I found the same mistake. While East admits that there are writing patterns in the anonymous letters that don't look like Paul's, after showing us almost 100 examples of his distinct works that she was able to identify, she's convinced one person was responsible. I would go into court and swear on the Bible on the evidence that I found. And when you say you'd swear on the Bible, what would you say?

I would say one person wrote all of these, and the one person is this person. Paul Fresher. Paul Fresher. And if you saw that a document examiner today thought, in fact, he did write those letters, would that change your mind? No. And there is historical basis for skepticism. You know that some document examiners have been

wrong in the past. I cannot speak for others. There are always going to be times where people are inaccurate and it's not because the science is not accurate, it's because that particular examiner has not done due diligence to arrive at the opinion that they should do. You can't be wrong, because somebody's life and livelihood is at the end of your opinion. So I am not wrong. While studying the thousands of pages in the case file, Marie Mayhew made a discovery that supports these findings. Investigators have found Paul

Freshour's fingerprints on about a dozen letters postmarked while he was incarcerated. Those fingerprints are there and they're his. Do you think that Paul Freshour is the Circleville letter writer? Yes, I honestly do. Former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole says she cannot explain those letters, but she also cannot ignore that during Freshour's decade in prison, the phantom writer mailed hundreds of letters. If a crime continues on and you have someone in custody for a long period of time, you have to say somebody else is sending these letters. They're not happening by

magic. Somebody else is writing the letters. If in fact Paul Freshour was the letter writer, is it possible that he mass-produced letters, went to prison, and then had somebody else send them while he was in? Anything is possible that would have to be investigated and ruled out. Paul Freshour died June 28, 2012, at age 70, still fighting to prove his innocence. Instead, what's left behind is an unfinished portrait. Was Paul Freshour the successful, loving family man he appeared to be? Or a cruel, even dangerous criminal mastermind whatever your conclusion paul freshour predicted when interviewed by writer robin yocum 35 years ago that his notoriety as the circleville letter writer would long outlive him when i'm dead and in my grave, people are going to believe I'm sending those

letters. Unfortunately, Paul died, and we'll never know. We'll never know. I'm Erin Moriarty, and this is my life of crime. Listen to My Life of Crime from 48 hours, wherever you get your podcasts. 60 Minutes. 60 Minutes. This is 60 Minutes. The Emmy Award winning 60 Minutes Sunday on CBS. If you like this podcast, you can listen ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a quick survey at wondery.com slash survey.