This week: Who wrote the Circleville letters? Edited by: Arakun the Twisted Raccoon  
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"Mystery spread its cloak across the sky.
We lost our way.
Shadows fell from trees.
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For nearly two decades, many residents of the small town of Circleville, Ohio were tormented by an anonymous letter writer. The situation eventually led to a suspicious death and a man going to prison for attempted murder, but the letter writer was never identified.
The first letter was sent to Mary Gillespie, a school bus driver, in 1976. The letter accused Mary of having an affair with the school superintendent, Gordon Massie. The writer threatened to go public about the affair unless Mary ended it immediately. Mary's husband, Ron, also began receiving letters threatening him with retaliation if he didn't force his wife to end the affair. Mary and Ron eventually went to the police, but the writer could not be identified and the letters kept coming. Mary suspected that the letters were coming from David Longberry, a fellow bus driver, but was unable to prove it. She believed that Longberry was writing the letters because he had made romantic advances to her that she had rejected.
Other members of the community, including businesses and organizations began receiving threatening letters as well. The letters often contained private details that the receivers believed very few people would know. The threats usually involved retaliation unless the receiver did something the writer wanted, such as insuring that a certain candidate won a local election.
The Gillespies eventually turned to Ron's sister Karen Freshour and her husband Paul for help. The four of them were convinced that David Longberry was responsible for the letters, so they wrote him a letter of their own, stating that they knew it was him and demanding that he stop. For a time, it seemed as if they had been right because no letters came for a few weeks.
On August 19, 1977, Ron Gillespie received a phone call that seemed to make him angry. He got his gun and told his children that he was going to meet with the person responsible for the letters. Ron died later that night from injuries sustained when his car crashed into a tree. The gun was inside the car and had been fired.
Since Ron's blood alcohol content at the time of his death was .16, his death was ruled a drunk driving accident. His family insisted that this could not be right because he was not known to drink, and they had not seen him drinking the night of his death. Later some members of the community received letters accusing the sheriff of being part of a coverup surrounding Ron's death.
In February 1983, the letter writer started placing signs containing accusations around the community. Many of the signs were located along Mary's bus route. One morning, Mary noticed a sign containing accusations involving her 12 year old daughter. When she got out of the bus and attempted to tear the sign down, she was nearly killed. The sign had been booby trapped with a gun that was rigged to go off when anyone attempted to remove it. The gun was registered to Mary's brother in law, Paul Freshour.
Paul Freshour insisted that the gun had been stolen, but since he had never reported it, he had no proof. Paul was put on trial for attempted murder, and a handwriting expert testified that his writing was similar to that in many of the letters. Although Paul's defense lawyers attempted to show that the handwriting analysis was done in a questionable manner, he was convicted of attempted murder and was believed to have written the letters as well.
At first the community believed the mystery of the letters had been solved with Paul's conviction. However, the letters kept coming even after Paul went to prison. Some were even sent at times when Paul was in solitary confinement and couldn't have sent a letter himself. Paul received a few letters himself while he was in prison, bragging that the writer had set him up and he would never get out. Paul was eventually paroled in 1994.
The last letters came in 1993, around the time "Unsolved Mysteries" did an episode on the case. The show actually received a message from the letter writer, warning them to leave the case alone.
While many people still believed that Paul Freshour was the writer, he insisted on his innocence until he died in 2012.
Other suspects include Mary Gillespie herself. Many people believed that she had to be involved in some way. She eventually admitted that she had been having an affair with Gordon Massie, but that it started after the letters began. Although the letters resulted in the death of her husband, some believed that this was what she wanted.
David Longberry, the person Mary initially accused, died of suicide when he was on the run after being accused of rape of a young girl. He was probably the most questionable character of all the suspects, but there was no real proof he was ever involved with the letters.
William Massie, the son of Gordon Massie, was also suspected, since many of the letters involved the affair between Mary and his father.
Karen Freshour, Paul's former wife, was also a suspect, because she would have had access to his gun. By the time of Ron's death, Karen and Paul had gotten divorced, and the divorce was not a friendly one. A man in a yellow El Camino was seen in the vicinity of the booby trapped sign shortly before it went off. Karen was rumored to be seeing a man who drove that type of vehicle.
It is possible that several people were responsible for the letters. After the initial letters became known to the public, others may have decided to write similar messages to air their own grievances or just cause trouble.
Here are some sites with more information about the case:
https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Circleville_Writer
https://thoughtcatalog.com/christine-stockton/2021/06/who-wrote-the-circleville-...
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/48-hours-investigates-anonymous-letters-...
Something to try: Write a mystery story that involves anonymous letters.
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Mystery: May 31, 2023 Issue [#11992]
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