Stuff You Should Know - The Circleville Poison Pen Letters Mystery

Episode Date: January 11, 2022

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to

believe. You can find in Major League Baseball, International Banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and we can hear Jerry clears the bell. So she's here with us and this of course is Stuff You Should Know.

True crime. Yeah. I was about to say sort of, but it really is true crime. It's just, it's not necessarily murdery. No, but it's stalky and I hadn't really realized it until I saw it spelled out a few times that this is a huge stalking case, one of the weirdest, creepiest, most mysterious stalking cases of all time. Yeah, but I think I know who did it. Let's hold it, wait, save it because we'll definitely have that combo, okay? Yeah, I think this is one of those. It's, what is it, Occam's Razors at the most obvious thing? We did an episode on that, remember? Yeah, yeah, a gazillion years ago, but this, I think this is one of those where it is a lot less mysterious when you kind of just

look at it at its face. So in other words, you think the cat did it. The cat did do it always. So we're talking about this mystery, usually called in its full title, the Circleville Ohio Poison Pen Letters. And it is a weird unsolved mystery case. In fact, it came into the widest public awareness thanks to that TV show Unsolved Mysteries back in the early 90s. Now, they loved it. And a lot of their info was based on this journalist and private investigator named Martin Yant who'd already been investigating it by then, but it is a really weird, odd, true crime mystery. And yes, it is true crime, 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. It's not a murder, though. Well, I don't want to ruin it. So before we get too far into it, I want to give some shoutouts to some of the sources for this one. Unsolved Mysteries, their website, a couple of CBS websites, Mental Floss, Thought Catalog, Historic Mysteries, Listverse had some good stuff, and then True Crimes Times had some good stuff. And then also, there were a couple of podcast sites that have already covered this that if this floats your boat, go check out the Whatever Remains podcast coverage of this. And there's also one called Invisible Ships podcast that covered this, too. And we use some of their info from their sites, too. Yeah, and this is one of

those 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. But some of it's not the biggest deal, it's just like, oh, 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. But then I saw sites that say, oh, no, the superintendent received letters before Mary Gillespie even. Is that right? Yeah. So who knows? It doesn't really 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, it's 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 with Mary Gillespie receiving her first letter. And Mary Gillespie was a local bus driver in Circleville, Ohio. And Circleville, Ohio is a tiny little town about 20, 25 miles south of Columbus, Ohio, the capital of Ohio. A school bus driver, by the way, which is very key. Yes. Thank you for that. And so this is a small town 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. And she got this first letter and it was written in this kind of weird blocky handwriting. And it was a rather alarming letter for anybody to get because it basically said, I know that you're having an affair with the superintendent of the Westfall 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. He said they were watching her. The superintendent was Gordon Massey that she was having an affair with, right? Yes. Okay. As opposed to who? The letter writer. There would be no mystery if we knew the letter writer. 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. So they said that they were watching and quote, this is no joke. So these letters start coming in. Almost all of them had that same blocky letter, meaning basically capital letters. 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, clearly kind of written by the same person. Yeah. 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 Paul's. But she told her husband, Ron, she said, listen, I've been getting these letters. And here's what they say, 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 you would out someone in the 70s, which is on the radio CB, by putting up billboards and signs. This would be your modern like social media thread, I guess. Yeah, I guess so. And so Ron said, well, I think Mary said, listen, I think I know these are coming from this other guy, David, he's another school bus driver, David Longbury. And he tried to come on to 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 wife was having an affair with Gordon Massey, and you better make him stop, or else I'm going to tell everybody. And so that's when she turned 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 going to do about these letters, huh? So they loop in, as you would do, some family members, Ron's sister, Karen, who will become a key player. And her husband, Paul, fresh hour was their last name, married last name, he would become a key player. He was a prison guard and not just a little side factoid about him is the

the prison movie Brew Baker with Robert Redford. He was in that movie, he was a 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 60s, at the prison he was a guard at, it was overrun by an inmate riot and he was held prisoner for like 30 hours by the inmates. Well, he was a natural for Brew Baker then. He was. So 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 wanted to get some muscle involved and they went to him to ask him to write the

letters. That was how I took it. Yeah, and he worked and this kind of becomes key later on. He worked about 50 to 60 hours a week and had a pretty decent commute to and from. So the long and short of that is he was gone at work a lot of the time. Right. So Paul said, okay, of course, I'll help you guys out. And he sent a letter, at least one, to David Longbury, 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. If you don't, bad things are going to happen to you. So cool off. Essentially, I'm paraphrasing here in the 70s kind of way. And it seemed like it worked because for a few weeks, the letters that had been started to come,

like hard and fast, just dried up at first. Yeah, because he said, stop what you're doing because I'm about to ruin. Go on. The image and the style that you're used to. That's right. Right. And who wouldn't stop writing letters received with that threat? Yeah, because they thought they had this anonymous letter writer, you know, dead to rights, and he was going to be scared off now because ultimately, if it was this guy who from like Ron Gillespie'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 tell somebody, 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 not too long after that, they were rather dismayed because rather than just letters, now there were signs being posted around town that were saying essentially the same thing. Yeah, they were saying not only that, but they were saying that Gordon Massey, superintendent, not letter writer, was involved romantically with the Gillespie's 12-year-old daughter, Tracy. So of course, dad sees this, Ron starts driving around, tearing these signs down before the break of dawn, so no one would see these things. And this just sort of went on for a while.

There were these letters that would come and go. I think about a little more than a year went by and in August of 77, Mary's like, I got to get out of here. I'm going to go to Florida 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 to meet Gordon Massey in Florida, but I don't think that's true. I think she went down with her friends. Oh, really? Yeah. Do you think that's true? I think we might have different people in mind on who did this. Okay. We'll get to that though. Okay.

That'll be the exciting reveal at the end. I can't wait, man. So, Ron... It was Gordon Massey, the letter writer. Back at home, Ron answers the phone. 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. Dead. DEAD. But he wasn't dead 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 30 feet at a high speed and run into a tree. It was the 70s, so he very well

might not have even had a seat belt installed in his car, but at the very least, he didn't have it on. Yeah, the pickup truck. He was half thrown from the cab, which is grisly, and he died at the site. He wasn't pronounced dead at the hospital or on the way to the hospital. They pronounced him dead on the site. He was super dead of massive internal injuries. There were a couple of really fishy things about all this. Number one, the intersection 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. His gun was found to have had one round missing, and it had been fired. It wasn't just missing. The gun had been fired,

and no shell casing was found. In 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 I've seen multiple places that they did not find a shell casing. It sounds like it was an automatic or semi-automatic. All right. That, some people might say is fishy. The other thing that other people say is fishy, I don't find any of this fishy, by the way, is that he was, they ruled it a drunken driving accident. Other people, friends would say, like,

he didn't even drink that much. We didn't see him drinking that day, but you can't argue with science, and he had twice the legal limit of his blood alcohol content. I don't think any of this is fishy. I think he drank up some courage to go confront someone and wreck his car and died. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, something that gets left out of this is like, this was a really dark period in Ron Gillespie's life. Like, he was driving around for hours before work every day, finding these signs, at the very least looking for him if he couldn't find them. 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 teetoler. He was being told by this person that his wife was having an affair, even though she swore that

she wasn't. It was a bad time for him. So, he had a really rough last year or so of his life, and then he died badly as well, too. It was not a good end for Ron Gillespie. And there was a bit of a scandal after that, because apparently Paul Freshauer said that he suspected it was foul play and that the sheriff on the case, basically the local law enforcement guy who would see this case through its entirety, was a guy named Dwight Radcliffe. He was the sheriff. And Paul Freshauer claims that at first, Sheriff Radcliffe agreed with him that it seemed like there was something fishy and that foul play might have been involved. But then after that, he suddenly changes his story, Sheriff Radcliffe does. And like you said, it gets ruled an accident,

especially after the coroner comes back with a 0.16 blood alcohol content for Ron Gillespie. That's right. 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 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 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. And I don't think we'll ever know who that was. But there was a suspect and that was sort of dismissed out of hand once the DUI alcohol reading came back and the polygraph test was passed.

Yeah. The one person I saw floated as potentially who it was was David Longberry, that bus driver. Well, that's who I figured. Yeah. But yeah, it's never been documented. I'm not even positive that it's documented that Sheriff Radcliffe actually did any of this, like a polygraph and all that stuff. I 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? Let's do it. Okay.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general

can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody you everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in

and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So Ron's gone and it's about the same time that Karen and Paul are having a rough go of it as well. And 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, she didn't get the house. She didn't get the kids and ended up living in a trailer on Mary's property after Ron was gone. And this was like Karen was not, she didn't take any of this well. Everything I saw was that Karen lived in a constant state of upset and anger at Paul because of this divorce, even though she was the one that cheated. Right. So just put that in your hat. Like put a pin in that and save it for later. Put it in your hat. And smoke it, right? Uh-huh. So one of the things that came out of this close contact where Karen was living on a trailer and Mary's property is that supposedly during this time, after Ron died, Mary admitted that

she actually was having an affair 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 think? What? I think she had had 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. 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. But it

started after the letter writing campaign. That's my 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 the, the Circleville letter writer basically intimated that or outright said it in, in some of the letters, right? Yeah. Okay. Um, so, okay. So Gordon, I 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? I guess so. Those yellow buses, 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 Gordon Massey. Um, Ron's dead. Paul and Karen are splitting up and we start to reach into the 1980s and not only were the signs continuing, the letters were continuing, the postcards were continuing. People who were, who had nothing to do with like Mary or Karen or Paul or Gordon had, were getting letters. Like the businesses were getting letters. I saw one that was addressed to a barber shop and it, it, it said, dear public. And then it went into this tirade about Gordon and Mary. So a lot of people were getting letters in this town about this stuff. Um, and then things kind of stepped up tremendously in February of 1983. Yeah. And by the way, I think all of these letters were still being postmarked from Columbus, Ohio. Yeah. 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. Something like that. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, like they weren't being mailed from that town. Right. Uh, so Mary is, uh, doing her job. 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 a fence. But either way, there was a sign that had, uh, incriminating stuff about her once again, it threatened the life of her daughter, which was a big one. So this is the one she actually got out to take down. And she, she

took down the whole thing because it was kind of an odd looking setup. And what she realized when she got home was that it was a booby trapped sign that had a gun, a 25 caliber handgun and a little container that allegedly was supposed to go off if someone were to come by and kind of yank that sign down, uh, without much care. Yeah. Like I think maybe some string was connected to the back of the sign and, 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, there's a gun now. There's, so Ron died probably from his own, you know, accidental driving. This is totally different. This is attempted murder. Um, and it's like,

this is a, 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 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 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. Watch this. And they get a piece of blank paper and a nice crayon 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 Anhyzer Bush and he said, you know what, that was my gun, but I sold it for $35 to Paul Freshauer, my co-worker. 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 know who you think it was. All right. I know who you think it was. Hold on to that. Put a pin in your hat. So Paul Freshauer, 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. 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 Paul says, no, 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 Radcliffe. And the sheriff said, hey, I've seen a few cop TV shows in my day. I've seen McLeod. So let's, let's, let's get a handwriting test going. And he was like, well, okay, where's your forensic expert? And he goes, oh, we don't have one. So like I said, I've seen TV.

So I'm going to make up some of my own tests. And I'm going to tell you to write some of this stuff. I'm going to tell you to copy these letters. I'm going to read some of them to you and you need to write down what I'm saying. And that's going to be the proof. And that's basically what happened. He was, he basically said, you know what, it looks like a match to me at least. Pretty much. And so I'm going to 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. Play some groundwork.

Yeah. But he got out of that. He changed his mind later on. Yeah. So one other thing that I think pushed Sheriff Radcliffe into arresting Paul in addition to that janky handwriting test was Karen Freshauer. Paul's a strange wife. During an interview told the sheriff, not only do I think that Paul is the Circleville letter writer, I actually found letters before hidden in our house addressed to other people in that same weird handwriting. And Sheriff said, did you keep these letters? Can I see them? And she's like, no, I didn't keep them. You know, I don't like clutter or whatever. But that definitely helped push the sheriff into arresting Paul. So before Paul knows it, he's on trial in October of 1983 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 it to paint him as a weirdo and a harassing crackpot and that the letters gave some sort of roundabout motive or at least suggested that he was the person who booby-trapped that sign because the letters were connected to the sign, were connected to the gun, were connected to Paul Freshhauer. And without the letters, it was just the gun and Paul Freshhauer. So it was a huge coup for the prosecutors to be able to introduce 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 on that, didn't we? I'm 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. The day that the booby-trapped 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, very bad luck for him, that he had happened to take that day off of work. Yeah, it is very coincidental, don't you think? Well, sure. Okay.

You know, of course, you can't say it's not a coincidence. Right. But he either took the day off to do the booby-trap, or just, it was just a bad coincidence. Wait, you just said you can't say it's coincidence. I'll tell you, I'm not, I'll... No, no, no. I said you can, you have to say it's coincidence. Okay. Unless he did it. Okay, I got you, I got you.

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 right. He's all building something. I'm so excited, man. So, he said in court, like, hey, listen, this sheriff gave me this test. He told me to copy the letters, and I just took that to mean to try and imitate the writing. 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. Mary said that, 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 Paul at all. And there was an El Camino there, a yellow El Camino, and Paul doesn't drive that. And so, like, I don't think it's him because, I mean, 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 20 minutes before Mary found this booby-trapped sign at the very spot the booby-trapped sign was put up, but also, Chuck, it turns out that if you see there's a suspect, a possible suspect, whose brother had a yellow El Camino, and that person turned out to be Karen Freshauer. Yeah, I see. I saw other places. It was not a brother. Oh, a boyfriend? I saw that too. Well, no, it was another relative who had the El Camino because the brother would have been Roy's, I mean, I guess she could have two brothers, right?

Yes, and a brother or a relative could have been a boyfriend too. 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 he was peeing or something to not be identified. I think that that was Karen's boyfriend driving her relatives El Camino. Oh, gotcha. Okay, okay, okay. I like where you're going with that though. Throw him off the case or whatever. I gotcha. Sniff him off the case.

Sniff him off the case, that's right. So that 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 co-worker at Anheuser-Busch said, yeah, I sold him the gun, the personnel records at Anheuser-Busch said he wasn't there that day. The jury took two and a half hours and came back with a guilty plea, and Paul Freshauer, who may not have ever written one of these letters or booby-trapped this gun or the sign. He had no motive. That's another one too, which we'll talk about in a second.

He was sentenced to seven to 25 years in Ohio State Prison for attempted murder in 1983. He was convicted 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 parole in 1990. 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 put in solitary for a while because they 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 going to 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 somehow I'm doing you still. He got a letter in prison. Yeah. So you're going to 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 letter writer saying, now, when are you going to 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 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 1994 after 11 years in prison,

10 to 11 years in prison for attempted murder. And he set up a website and this was like the mid 90s. So that was like a big deal. Netscape. He probably your crystal links or something. But he set up a website that was dedicated to this case and, you know, professing his innocence and everything. And you said something that I want to circle back to and that was motive. And that 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 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 set up that booby trap. And yeah, it just didn't make any sense. And when you have like, you 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 the day. And yet he was still convicted and spent more than 10 years in prison for it. Very sad. We should also mention that 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. That's right. And they were doing a segment about it. And it said, forget Circleville, Ohio. Do nothing to hurt Sheriff Radcliffe. If you come to Ohio,

UL Sickos Will Pay signed the Circleville writer. I don't know if it's the first time it was signed as such. Well, we'll get to it. Some of the letters were signed W over the years. And those are the ones that weren't written quite in that blocky style, but that'll come back. That letter demonstrates something that's really characteristic of the Circleville letters. And that almost the only punctuation in them are colons, not semicolons, not periods, not even ellipses. You know that annoying thing that people do where rather than commas or periods, they just use ellipses and sometimes like multiple ellipses at once. This person used colons like that. So in a single letter, there could be scores of colons just littering the

letter. And they did this in this letter to Unsolved Mysteries as well, which you don't see people doing that with colon. So I feel like that suggests that every single letter that used colons was definitely written by the same person. The only issue I will take with any of that is that I like to use the ellipses. I've never seen you want to use ellipses. I may not have used them with you. Oh, okay. Wow. It's like you're a whole different person that I never knew before. Yeah, I like ellipses. I think it says a lot. It can be a very effective tool. And I like it. I don't do like eight dots in 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 wait for it or yes, 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 is, it's ear-bleedingly bad to read. Yeah. My mom does that. Okay. Well, I don't mean to insult you or your family. No, no, no. I know you don't. 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. I'm not sure what that is. And if you were in the room while she was typing it, each dot would be like, what am I going to say next? All right. Well,

let's take our final break here and we will talk a little bit more about these darn letters right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush

boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if

the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So one thing about this mystery, Chuck,

is it would be like remarkable and noteworthy, even if it were just limited to Mary and her family receiving these threatening letters and there being some signs. Hundreds and hundreds. Yeah, that's not at all what it was like. 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 or put up around Circleville and even central Ohio in general over the years. And the whole letter writing campaign lasted for almost 20 years, more than 18 years of these letters. And they were, they alleged everything from murder to affairs to complaints about the Ohio politics. They just were all over the place. 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 Gillespie family. Some accused the sheriff of being involved in a cover up about Ron's death. Right. Some were about just other noteworthy people in town or not noteworthy people who just, you know, you had an affair with this person and you're the local doctor or you're the local county coroner. Right. You've been abusing children. And the weird thing is, is a lot of this stuff was actually true. Right. So it was like, is someone just really attentive and exposing these things? Like, what's going on there? Yeah. And I think the town lived in a bit of a state of fear that like they were going to get targeted next and

all of their worst secrets were going to come out. Because like you said, the county coroner, a guy named Dr. Ray Carroll, he apparently had previously been accused of inappropriate contact with children. And in a letter, right? No, in general. Oh, 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, he actually, I think he may have lost his medical license. The state medical board charged him with eight counts of gross immorality, including stuff that involved children in 1993. So this letter writer seemed to be correct 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 Freshauer's case, a guy named Roger Klein. Yeah, they said that, I know you killed that woman who was pregnant. She was a school teacher. And I'm going 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. No. And Roger Klein ended up continuing along the career path up to being an appeals court judge when he retired a few years back. But the accusation was that he was having an affair with a school teacher, got her pregnant and then killed her and by proxy, their unborn child. And there was a school teacher named Vicki Koch who was murdered and whose murder was never solved.

And 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 proven. The upshot of all this is this was exposed in one of the letters. So the coroner in Ron Gillespie's death is exposed in the letter and targeted. Roger Klein, the prosecutor in Paul Freshauer'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 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. And they're both children of key players. One was William Massey. This is Superintendent Massey's son. I've mentioned some

of those earlier letters were 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. Yeah. And so just throwing that out there. And then there is Mark Freshauer, who was Karen and Sue's son, who went with, you know, 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 you lined those up because like an Agatha Christie book, we're just basically introducing characters

who are now suspects at the very end of this whole thing. Yeah. And interestingly, Mark in September 2002 was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound floating in a river. So some people say that this was guilt because he was a part of this thing. His mom, Karen, said no, he had been battling depression, nothing to see here. So let's talk about the person that that brings up then. That is related to Mark Freshauer having to do with the case against his father. Everyone says that he, if he did this, it was at the behest of his mother, Karen, Mark Paul's ex-wife, and that it was Karen who was actually the Circleville letter writer 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? No, I'm just going over one of the suspects. Okay. What do you think? Well, here's what I think. That's where we are. Sure. All right. I mean, we have other suspects to talk about, but sure. Well, it'll all come out in this. Okay. And I think that the original letter was sent, in fact, by David Longbury, the bus driver who Mary Gillespie 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 the school system. And it's a lot of inside baseball knowledge. Okay. And he wrote the first one. Okay. Then I think Karen used that skin to start writing letters of her own when she became obsessed with

getting back at her husband soon to be ex-husband. And I think she did enlist her son, Mark. I think she enlisted her ex-boyfriend, or I'm sorry, her boyfriend who supposedly matched the description of the guy in the El Camino. I think that it was all her. That Martin Yant guy, the investigator, said, in my 22 years as a journalist, I've never, I 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 Ohio just started writing these as ways to expose people. Okay. Okay. That's what I think.

Like you said, that's Martin Yant's take on it. He knows probably more than anybody about this case aside from Paul Freshhauer, who by the way... Is that who he thinks did it? Yeah. He thinks that it started out as David Longberry and was followed up by Karen Freshhauer to set up Paul. Did not have that. Yeah. Yeah. That was Martin Yant's theory. So you're in good company. Well, that's Chuck's theory. You're in good company. You and Martin Yant agree on that. And I mean, there is a lot to base it on, like Karen and or her son had access to Paul's gun. She had the means, the opportunity and the motive for sure. She definitely hated Paul Freshhauer. She just happened to throw away all those other letters that she had found, supposedly.

Yeah. I think even if she wasn't the letter writer, at the very least, she was doing what she could to 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. Right. Yeah. Like that all would have come out during the divorce proceedings because it was bitter and acrimonious. So she would have used anything she could have against him. So the fact that she didn't mention those things during the divorce proceedings is extra fishy. Is that what you're saying? No, no, no. She did mention them. 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 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 the divorce proceedings made it fishy. See, I saw the other way is that she conveniently didn't mention any of this stuff until the divorce started to get ugly. I got you. And then all the, I'm not mentioned it, but that's when she got involved, I think. I got you. Okay. All right. So do you want to know who, I think there'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 Freshauer. And here's why. He, 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 the sister 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, he would have written these letters as a weird roundabout way to get her to stop having this affair. Okay. So it is possible he did have motive. And then from that point on, he possibly had motive to keep it up to, as a way of grinding an ax, he accused Sheriff Radcliffe of covering up Ron's death.

The Circleville letter writer accused the sheriff of covering up Ron's death. The prosecutor in the case got his own letter. The guy who prosecuted Paul Freshauer got his own super scandalous letter. The coroner who ruled it was an accident, Ron Gillespie's death got a super scandalous letter. These people were people that Paul Freshauer would have 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, a handwriting analyst who was on a 2021 episode of 48 hours who said, these were written by one person and that person was Paul Freshauer based on his handwriting. And apparently, the Whatever Remains podcast turned up. Apparently, 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, is the moment he got out of prison, right around the time he got out of prison, the letters just stopped altogether. I don't know what that means though. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it's up for subjective interpretation. I think it's either multiple people, mainly David Longbury and Karen, or it was all Paul. That's my take. I mean, who else could it have been? It could have been Gordon Massey, obviously. Okay. Right. The original guy. Yeah. 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. Go search it on the internet and listen to those other podcasts, Whatever Remains and Invisible Ships and see what you think about theirs too. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Or get on Reddit, man. 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 160-something page thing that Paul had put out in the early 90s. Right. I was like, man, you 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 into that, go to their Unresolved Mysteries subreddit that will be up your alley. All right, I'm going to call this Flannan Isle's Wave Explained. Yeah. This 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. That I think it's probably what happened. It seems pretty plausible to me. Hey, guys, love the podcast. You're the best. With regard to Flannan Isle's mystery, I'd like to share how I envision it. How about this? The box and the cranes banging around. The two keepers don their weather gear and set off to secure it. The other stays behind. From the elevated vantage point of the lighthouse, maybe while skinning the horizon with binoculars,

who knows? He spots that rogue wave coming toward the island 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 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 is from Allison from Toronto and many, many other people who said basically the exact same thing. And it sounds pretty good to me. It really does. It's super plausible and it didn't dawn on me at all that that's a possibility. One wave or another is going to get you. Sometimes when you're sitting here in front of the microphone, you don't have time to ruminate like you people do at home. No, the people want, they want some

more jokes. They want some more pithy insights. Yeah, they want another piece of us. Yeah. But thank you. I mean, without the rest of everybody, we would be incomplete. So everybody else completes us. Right, Chuck? That's right. If you want to send us an email that completes us, we would appreciate that. You can send it to us at Stuff Podcast. Wait, hold on, Chuck. Who was that that wrote in? Allison from Toronto. Thank you, Allison from Toronto and everybody else who wrote in too. You can send your email to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band or each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Munga Chauticular and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even

the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.