Circleville, Ohio, is the kind of town that is famous, when it is famous at all, for its annual Pumpkin Show. In the mid-1970s it had around twelve thousand residents, and one of them began writing letters. The first, postmarked Columbus and printed in crude block capitals, arrived in 1977 in the mailbox of Mary Gillispie, a school-bus driver. It accused her of an affair with the school superintendent, Gordon Massie, demonstrated detailed knowledge of her house, her family and her movements, and warned her to end it. Letters soon followed to her husband Ron, telling him the affair was common knowledge and that his life was in danger if he failed to stop it. Over the following years thousands of letters, all postmarked Columbus, landed in mailboxes across Pickaway County — targeting school officials, the sheriff, the local paper and ordinary residents, each displaying an informer's grasp of Circleville's private business. Crude signs about the alleged affair began appearing along Mary's bus route.
On 19 August 1977 the campaign appeared to claim a life. Ron Gillispie took a telephone call, told his children he was going out to confront the letter-writer, picked up his pistol and drove off. Minutes later his pickup left the road and struck a tree, killing him. His gun had been fired once. The sheriff ruled the crash a drink-driving accident, and tests were reported to show a blood-alcohol level around one and a half times the legal limit — but family and friends insisted Ron had not been drinking that day, and nobody has ever explained the phone call or the spent round. The letters, far from stopping, turned on the investigators, accusing the county of a cover-up. Mary later acknowledged that she and Massie did have an affair — beginning, she said, only after the letters had started accusing them of one.
The booby trap
In February 1983 the signs along Mary's bus route turned viler still, now targeting her young daughter. One day Mary stopped the bus to tear one down and discovered it was rigged: behind the sign sat a box containing a pistol set to fire when the sign was pulled. The trap failed to go off. Investigators traced the gun — its serial number filed down but recoverable — to Paul Freshour, Mary's brother-in-law, whose marriage to Ron's sister Karen was collapsing. Freshour said the gun had been stolen from his home. At trial the prosecution leaned on the weapon and on a contested handwriting comparison; he was convicted in October 1983 of attempted murder and sentenced to seven to twenty-five years. He was never charged with writing a single letter.
Letters from nowhere
Then came the twist that keeps the case alive. The letters continued — same block capitals, same Columbus postmarks — while Freshour sat in prison, including during a stretch in solitary confinement when his mail was monitored and prison staff indicated he had no means of producing them; the prison superintendent reportedly concluded he could not have been the writer. Freshour even received one himself, jeering that he would never get out: "When we set 'em up, they stay set up." He served about ten years, was paroled in 1994, and maintained his innocence until his death in 2012.
In 1994 the American television programme Unsolved Mysteries came to town — and the letter-writer wrote to them too. A postcard warned the production to forget Circleville, Ohio, and promised that "you el sickos will pay" if they came. The segment aired anyway. And at around that time, after nearly two decades, the letters simply stopped.
Who wrote them? Every theory has a hole in it. If Freshour was the writer, who kept the campaign running from Columbus while he was in solitary? His ex-wife Karen has long been a favourite alternative suspect, and the investigative journalist Martin Yant, who championed Freshour's innocence, argued the evidence pointed away from him from the start; others suggest there was more than one writer, with later letters piggybacking on the fear the first ones created. No confession, forensic breakthrough or deathbed note has ever settled it. What remains is the memory of a town where, for the better part of eighteen years, everyone opened the mailbox with dread — and where the one person who demonstrably knew everybody's secrets is the one person nobody has ever been able to name.
Quiz nuggets
- The Circleville letters began arriving in 1977, postmarked Columbus, first targeting school-bus driver Mary Gillispie.
- Ron Gillispie died on 19 August 1977 when his truck hit a tree after a mysterious phone call; his gun had been fired once.
- A booby-trapped pistol found on Mary's bus route in 1983 was traced to Paul Freshour, convicted of attempted murder that October.
- Letters with Columbus postmarks kept arriving while Freshour was in prison — he even received one himself.
- In 1994 Unsolved Mysteries received a postcard telling the show to forget Circleville; the letters stopped around that time.