The Creepy Letters That Exposed A Town’s Juiciest Secrets — And Ended In Murder



In the late 70s someone started terrorizing the small town of Circleville, Ohio by spreading gossip and revealing the townspeople’s sexual secrets through the mail. It was a very analog Gossip Girl, but with divorce, murder and false imprisonment. The identity of the Circleville writer is one of the most bizarre mysteries in true crime history. It started in 1976 when people in Circleville began receiving letters that contained information about their personal lives. Many of these letters were about the recipients private sex lives. The letters were postmarked from Columbus, Ohio.

The first letter recipient was Mary Gillespie, a local bus driver who was accused in several letters of having an affair with local school superintendent Gordon Massie. At the time, Mary said the affair never took place. The letter writer said they were “watching” Mary’s house and her children and told her to stop the affair. Later, Mary’s husband Ron Gillespie also received a letter saying Mary was in danger if he could not stop her affair. Another letter said the writer would Kill Ron unless Ron told the school board about the affair. One of Ron’s letters read: “Gillespie, you have had 2 weeks and done nothing. Make her admit the truth and inform the school board. If not, I will broadcast it on CBs, posters, signs, and billboards, until the truth comes out.”


From the beginning, Mary had a suspicion a fellow bus driver named David Lingberry was the letter writer. Mary had previously rejected David romantically and he still acted resentfully toward her.

Mary and Ron Gillispie asked Ron’s sister and her husband, Karen and Paul Freshour, for help. Paul’s sister was also informed of the existence of the letters, but no one else knew what was happening. The five people decided that Paul would write the David Longberry a letter of their own. In the letter, Paul said he knew David was writing threatening letters to Mary and Ron. They believed the plan worked as the letters stopped coming for a few weeks.

On August 19, 1977, Ron Gillispie received a call and became angry. He got his gun and told his kids he was going to talk to the person who was writing the letters. A few hours later, Ron Gillispie was found dead as the result of crashing his truck into a tree. Before he died, he had fired his gun. The official police report from Sheriff Dwight Radcliff says that he died as a result of a drunk driving accident, despite Ron’s friends and family saying he rarely drank and hadn’t been drinking that day.

After Ron’s death, other residents in Circleville began receiving letters alleging that Sheriff Dwight Radcliff was involved in a cover-up relating to Ron Gillispie’s death. Sheriff Dwight Radcliff said he thought foul play was involved at first, however, the other person “involved” (unfortunately, there aren’t details about how this other person was involved in the accident or who they were) passed a polygraph test and Ron’s autopsy showed a BAC of .16, so he thought the cause of death was drunk driving.

After all of this, it turns out, Mary Gillispie was having an affair with Gordon Massie, though she claims it started after the letters.

In February 1983, the letter writer had resorted to placing inflamatory signs around Circleville, especially along Mary’s bus route. Many of the signs accused Gordon Massie of raping the Gillispie’s 12-year-old daughter. When Mary Gillispie stopped the bus to tear one of the signs down, she was almost killed. The sign had been crudely booby-trapped to shoot whoever tried to take the sign down. Police discovered the gun in the boobytrap was registered to Paul Freshour.

Paul Freshour said the gun had been stolen, but he had not reported it stolen so there was no evidence of this. He was asked to perform handwriting samples so that his handwriting could be compared to the Circleville letters. The test he was given is not standard and involved him emulating one of the letters, rather than simply being given the words to write in his own handwriting. Paul Freshour was arrested and tried for the attempted murder of Mary Gillispie. During his trial, a handwriting expert testified under oath that he believed Paul Freshour was the writer of the Circleville letters. By that time Paul was divorced from Mary’s sister-in-law Karen and they both believed he was the writer as well.

Imagine the shock and fear of finding in your mailbox a poison pen letter from someone who claims to know your deepest secrets. And what happens when the letters continue, and your friends and neighbors begin receiving them too? It may sound like a plot from a thriller, but, in fact, a very real flood of anonymous letters terrorized a small town in Central Ohio for nearly 20 years.  And the letters didn't stop even after a man went to prison.

Today, the question of the identity of the mastermind behind the poison pen letters continues to divide the town of Circleville, where many people still believe the wrong person went to prison. I take a look at the case that is the subject of numerous podcasts in "The Circleville Letters."

I grew up in Columbus, Ohio, just 30 miles north of Circleville, a quaint town best known for its annual Pumpkin Show that attracts, according to the town's website, more than 400,000 visitors a year. Nowhere on that website, however, is a mention of the other event that also put a spotlight on the town: the campaign of menacing letters that began sometime in the late 1970s.

The mainly handwritten, anonymous letters initially focused on Gordon Massie, the married Westfall School superintendent whom the writer accused of having an affair with a school bus driver by the name of Mary Gillispie. But soon, Gillispie herself, her husband, Ron, and even their children became the target of letters that grew in number and in vitriol. In time, nearly everyone in town either received a letter or knew someone who did. 

The vicious tone of the letters seemed out of character for Circleville, a Midwestern community where many residents place family, faith and football above everything else. The Pickaway County Sheriff's Office investigated but turned up nothing. People began to wonder who would take the time to crank out letter after letter to frighten friends and neighbors? Was it more than one person? Male or female? Could the writer be that person behind you in the grocery line or at the post office? And would the letters lead to violence? 

Life and the letters went on for years in Circleville. Then the writer began supplementing the letters with signs posted in town and along Mary Gillispie's bus route. On the afternoon of February 7, 1983, Gillispie was driving her empty school bus on the way to pick up students when, as she told police, she saw one such sign posted on a fence. She stopped, tugged at the sign, and discovered it was attached to a box trailing twine. After taking the box home, she says she looked inside and was shocked to discover a loaded gun. Sheriff investigators determined the handmade device to be a booby trap that failed to fire. 

The alleged attempted murder of the school bus driver became a huge story in the area. And even bigger news was the man who was arrested and charged with the crime: Mary Gillispie's brother-in-law, Paul Freshour. The arrest shocked his family and friends. Freshour, a manager at the Anheuser-Busch facility, had no criminal history and lived outside Circleville. Pam Stanton, a longtime family friend, thought investigators had the wrong man. "Uncle Paul was not this cruel, callous, want-to-be a murderer," she said. "It's just preposterous." 

Freshour, however, had become a suspect after the gun was traced to him. And although he denied setting up the device and told investigators that his firearm had been stolen weeks earlier from his garage, his fate was sealed after investigators spoke with his estranged wife, Karen Sue. She told them that she believed Freshour was, in fact, the Circleville letter writer.

In October of 1983, Freshour went on trial for attempted murder.  It was not a strong case. There was no physical evidence that tied Freshour to either the gun or the device it was found in and Freshour had an alibi for much of the afternoon when the alleged booby trap would have been placed on the fence. Yet, after two document examiners testified that the handwriting found on those anonymous letters sent to Mary Gillispie could be Freshour's handwriting, he was convicted and sent to prison. 

Although Freshour was convicted of attempted murder, investigators believed he was the man behind the poison pen letters and that the long reign of terror was finally over. They were wrong. The letters didn't stop.

Paul Freshour was locked away, but the onslaught of anonymous threats continued. And continued even after a frustrated prison warden put Fresher in solitary confinement. One letter was even sent to Paul Freshour himself. Still, authorities continued to insist Freshour was behind the letter campaign, suggesting he had an accomplice outside the prison. It was another 10 years before the letters finally ceased, around the same time that Paul Freshour was released from prison. 

So, was he the Circleville letter writer? Until his death, Freshour insisted he was neither the writer nor the person who put up the booby trap. An analysis done by former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O'Toole, as part of a "48 Hours" investigation, raises new doubts about whether the case was solved with Freshour's conviction. 

O'Toole, who in her career with the FBI helped profile notorious criminals like the Unabomber, describes a person who doesn't appear to fit Freshour's public persona. She believes that the anonymous Circleville writer had a serious personality disorder and enjoyed hurting others. She suggests that those around the writer would have seen the callousness. "That the need for that kind of power, control. The need to dominate," she says, "… the need to scare people preexisted these letters."  

More importantly, O'Toole believes the person behind the letters, who went to so much trouble to stay anonymous, likely would not have taken the risk to set up the booby trap. Instead, she says, "I think there's certainly a possibility that — that booby trap was put up by somebody else … who took advantage of the situation." 

O'Toole's belief that the writer could be someone other than Paul Fresher calls into question the testimony of those two handwriting experts at trial that linked Fresher to the letters. So "48 Hours" asked forensic document expert, Beverly East, to do a new analysis.