The Circleville Letters_ Creepy Unsolved Mystery

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
He, along with his friends John Smith and Anthony Vaughan,
began to dig a hole. Again. This is seventeen ninety five.
We don't have this on a vlogger anything, guys. Okay,
this is a fucking pit in the ground. You just
made an animal digging a hole for its family or
something that they saw. But according to the story, it
looked clearly like a dig site, like somebody had buried

(00:21):
something there.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
Hello, everyone, welcome back to my channel, and welcome to
another creepy video. This one's really weird. This is an
unsolved mystery that's pretty old, such an interesting story that
I'm sure a lot of you haven't heard of. But
before we get started with that, this video was kindly
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Speaker 3 (01:37):
So big thank you to Shudder for sponsoring this video.

Speaker 2 (01:40):
Now let's get right into the story of the Circleville Letters.
So Circleville, Ohio is about twenty five miles outside of Columbus, Ohio,
and its population is thirteen thousand, so it's definitely considered
a small town. The town is pretty quiet and doesn't
have very many outside visitors.

Speaker 4 (01:57):
Driving around Circleville today would be much like diving around
Round Town in the late nineteen seventies. Nothing changes much.
In fact, the population continues to go down, there would
be one major change though. Back then there were the letters.

Speaker 2 (02:11):
And in nineteen seventy six, people living in this town
started receiving letters from an anonymous source. The letters didn't
contain a return address, however, many of them were postmarked
in Columbus. Few of these letters were even postmarked with
circle bill itself. They were sent to a bunch of
different people. We're going to focus on one particular case,
but they were sent to politicians, people in the town,

(02:32):
and they claimed to know very specific details and secrets
of the recipients. They were often very threatening, very hateful,
and just scary, and a lot.

Speaker 5 (02:41):
Of it was vindictive in tone, I mean nasty in tone.
There was sexually oriented material or accusations.

Speaker 2 (02:48):
Whoever was writing these letters also said that I'm watching you.
Anyone who's receiving these letters, I am watching you, which
definitely leaves anyone who got one completely creeped out. These
letters were mostly handwritten, but some were typed as well.
The handwriting is very boxy kind of blog handwriting. It's
honestly really good handwriting, and it's in all caps. But
there were also notes that included handwriting that looks nothing

(03:10):
like the boxy handwriting, which makes people wonder if there's
another person writing letters or if this person change their
handwriting in order to kind of throw people off the trail.
One thing that's important to note about this is there
were literally thousands of letters. However, there are only a
few that we can see that are talked about. So
one of the first people to start receiving these letters
was a school bus driver named Mary Gillispie. The author

(03:32):
of the letter talked about how he'd been watching Mary
and he knew that she had a husband and kids.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
They said that her home.

Speaker 2 (03:38):
Was being watched at all times, and the letters also
claimed to be aware that.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Mary was having an affair with.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
The school superintendent, Gordon Massey, and whoever wrote this letter
was extremely angry about the affair and was telling her
that she had to come clean about it. And there
were several letters that Mary received. It wasn't just like
a one time thing, and most of the letters talked
about her affair.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
And how she needed to come clean.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
Whoever wrote them was obviously really upset that she was
having an affair. But whenever Mary would receive a letter,
she would just hide it and hope nothing ever came
out of it, and she did a pretty good job
of keeping these letters a secret until one day a
letter came in that was addressed to her husband, Ron.
The letter to Ron basically said that his wife was
having an affair and it was now his responsibility to announce.

Speaker 3 (04:24):
It and the affair, and if he didn't, he would
be killed.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
Mary told Ron that she had no idea what this
person was talking about, and she was not having any
affair with the superintendent. But for the next few weeks,
Mary and Ron decided to just keep the letters hidden
ignore them pretty much. However, the affair became kind of
a talk of the town and they couldn't really ignore
it anymore, and two weeks later they received another letter,
and this time the letters stated, Gillipsy, you have had

(04:49):
two weeks and done nothing.

Speaker 3 (04:51):
Admit the truth and inform the school board.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
If not, I will broadcast it on posters, signs and
billboards until the truth comes out. Well, Mary and Ron
decided that this is probably someone that's like in their family,
someone they know, so they called a little meeting with
their family to kind of go over these letters, and
eventually they came to a conclusion that it was some
family member. They didn't disclose who and they wrote them
a letter telling them to stop, and they thought that's

(05:15):
where it is, and it seemed to work for a
short period of time there were no letters, but then
on August nineteenth of nineteen seventy seven, Barry was actually
on a trip when Ron received a.

Speaker 3 (05:24):
Phone call at his house.

Speaker 2 (05:25):
According to Ron's kids, he was extremely upset with whoever
was on the phone. However, we've never found out what
was even to this day. I mean it was nineteen
seventy seven, but while he was on the phone, he
eventually lost his temper, grabbed a gun, and left the house.
Before he left, he looked at his kids and told
them that he is going to go confront the person
who was writing the letters. However, not long after this,

(05:48):
Ron crashed his car into a tree and was found
dead at the scene. And at the scene police also
found that one bullet was shot from his gun, but
they were never able to figure out where the it went,
what he was shooting at, or when.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
It was fired.

Speaker 2 (06:03):
It's possible that it was fired on a completely different
day and he just didn't have his gun filled up
all the way, so we don't even know if he
actually shot the gun that day or really what happened.
And when they took Ron's body to the hospital for testing,
his blood alcohol level was one point five times over
the legal limit. Ron was not an alcoholic or a
big drinker. Everyone around him thought this was such a

(06:24):
strange thing. People said it was completely out of character
for Ron to be drunk, and then especially to be
drunk and then get in a car. And even though
he told his kids that he was going to go
confront the author of the letter, there's no way to
prove that that's what he was doing or that's who
was on the phone. And police came to the conclusion
that this was an accident. I mean, he was drunk
driving and did hit a tree. And this did not

(06:46):
stop the letters. The letters kept on coming in. They
kept on threatening Mary about her affair, and finally Mary
decided to come clean. She said she did have an
affair with Gordon, the superintendent.

Speaker 3 (06:57):
However, she did not.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Start this affair until after after some of the letters
had been written.

Speaker 3 (07:01):
That just seems like such bullshit to me.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
I mean, why would you start an affair with someone
after someone accuses you of doing it like, Hey, I
know you're having an affair with Jack over there, and
it's like, if you weren't, why would you go start one,
Like it.

Speaker 3 (07:15):
Just doesn't make sense. It's not adding up.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
So it seems like she really did have an affair,
and whoever was writing this letter knew about it.

Speaker 3 (07:22):
A lot of.

Speaker 2 (07:22):
People think that she basically tried to confess so that
the letters would stop, but they did it. February seventh
of nineteen eighty three, Mary was doing her normal school
bus route. It was then that she saw a sign
that was attached to a fence post, and this sign
said something that was threatening to her daughter. Mary was
so freaked out she stopped the bus, pulled over and

(07:43):
went and took the sign down. And while she was
taking it down, she noticed that there was another box
tied to the other fence post. So she grabbed the
sign and the box and took it back onto the
school bus. Didn't open the box yet, finished the route
to school, dropped the kids off at school, and she
went back home, where she decided she would open the box.
Inside the box, she found a pistol and the string

(08:05):
was wrapped around the trigger of the gun. This was
designed so if someone picked it up or opened the box,
that it would somehow pull the trigger and shoot her
like it was booby trapped. She wasn't sure if the
gun was real or fake and just thought the whole
thing was so creepy, so she just brought the whole contraption.

Speaker 3 (08:22):
Into the police station.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
And police looked around the area where it was found
and they weren't able to find anything. They did find
a shoeprint, but they weren't able to match it to anyone,
and they couldn't even confirm that the shoe print had
anything to do with the person who said the trap. Now,
whoever had this gun trying to get the serial number
off of it tried to like scrape it off, but
thanks to lab testing, they were able to know the
exact numbers that were on the gun and trace it

(08:45):
back to the owner. The serial number on the gun
matched a guy named Paul, and Paul happened to be
Ron's brother in law, but Paul claimed that he was
innocent and that the gun had been missing from his
garage for a while. Now.

Speaker 6 (08:57):
I don't know we're gonna come up mission. I really
don't know what happened to it, and I told them, man,
and that's you know, that's the truth. That's how it was.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
So police decided to give Paul a handwriting test and
compare his handwriting to the letter. After the test, they
determined that the writing was similar enough that they determined
that he was the killer and arrested him and charged
him and Paul's child. Took place in October of nineteen
eighty three.

Speaker 3 (09:20):
One of the.

Speaker 2 (09:20):
Sheriffs said that Paul had admitted to writing at least
fifty of the letters. However, Paul denied this, said that
they were making things up and that if they had
proof that he said that, why wouldn't they have some
type of document stating it, or a recording of him
or anything. They had no way to prove that he
even said this, and Paul's fingerprints were not found on
the booby trap, any of the letters, or at the fence,

(09:42):
and they weren't on the gun. And remember the shoe
print that they found at the scene, Well that was
not even close to Paul's size. And when they searched
Paul's house they didn't find any evidence. But Paul was
ultimately found guilty of the murder and was sentenced to
twenty five years in prison, even though most of the
evidence showed it wasn't him, and Paul ended up being

(10:02):
in prison until nineteen ninety four, and he continued to
claim that he was innocent until he had passed away.

Speaker 3 (10:07):
In June of twenty twelve.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
In that ten years that he was in prison, the
letters did not stop. The letters were even going to
the sheriff and to Paul while he was in jail.
One of the letters to Paul said, 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 him up, they stay set up.

Speaker 3 (10:25):
Don't you listen at all?

Speaker 2 (10:26):
So some people think that Paul was writing himself these
letters in jail.

Speaker 3 (10:30):
However, this is pretty much.

Speaker 5 (10:31):
Impossible, and the focus of the concern was, well, if
he's doing this, how could he be getting letters out
of prison? How could he be responsible in a secure facility?
And this happened doesn't seem.

Speaker 7 (10:45):
To fit the profile of the writer. The writer seemed
to be very involved in Pickaway County politics. Paul Fresher
wasn't even from Pickaway County. He's a real general, soft
spoken guy. I think he was framed.

Speaker 2 (11:01):
First of all, when you are in jail, you have
zero privacy, and someone is checking everything that goes in
and out of the jail mail wise, like reading it
over and checking it. And they even put Paul in
solitary confinement, which is horrible to see if the letters
would stop, because you can't write any letters from there,
and they did it. Paul was even given a polygraph test,
and in this test he was asked if he had

(11:22):
anything to do with the letters. He said no, and
he passed, So authority started to think Paul had nothing
to do with these letters and he's just sitting in jail.

Speaker 3 (11:30):
For no reason.

Speaker 4 (11:31):
The Sheriff of Pickaway County, Dwight Radcliffe, is convinced fresh
Hour was the man and guilty of both the attempted
murder of which he was convicted and of being the
letter writer.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
But by the time Paul had gone out of prison
in nineteen ninety four, the letters had pretty much stopped.

Speaker 8 (11:45):
To this day, he maintains his innocence, and he's sure
that the real criminal is still.

Speaker 6 (11:51):
A large reopen the letter part of it and get
in and find out who wrote the letters. I'd also
like to see someone look into this to my former
brother in law's deaf. Look, you know that's not my
family anymore, and you know that's my past. I'm not
even gonna look back at it. I've got a new
family and a new future. But i still would like
to see someone look at that accident real close. In

(12:12):
the letters and.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Years later, there are still so many unanswered questions, and
no one has been able to figure out where the
letters came from. A journalist named Martin Yant spent a
lot of his time researching this case, and he even
made a new discovery that was never included in the
original trial. There is research he discovered that Mary Gillipsy
told the sheriff that one of the other bus drivers
told her that she had been driving the same road

(12:34):
about twenty minutes before Mary found the booby trap.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
When she drove through that intersection, there was.

Speaker 2 (12:39):
A yellow El Camino that was parked there, and the
woman described a large man that had sandy hair just
kind of chilling by the car. She said that she
thought it was weird because when she was going by,
he turned around and act like he was like going
into the bathroom or something to avoid contact with her.
And she thinks it was because he didn't want to
be identified. This description does not fit Paul at all,

(13:01):
and because no one ever pursued this, it was never
brought up in court. But what's really interesting is that
once Martin started posting about the El Camino, he himself
started receiving letters and threats. So several years after the
letters kind of had stopped, they started again. However, we
don't know if these letters are written by the original
Circleville writer or if it's someone else. Maybe someone was

(13:23):
just interested in the story and wanted to pick up where.

Speaker 3 (13:26):
The other guy left off.

Speaker 2 (13:27):
Person writing the letter claimed to know that there were
more booby traps around that hadn't been set off. Fortunately,
police were never able to find out who wrote these
letters or if they were connected to the old letters.
And in nineteen ninety the show Unsolved Mysteries did a
segment on this case, and before they released the episode,
they received a letter of their own.

Speaker 8 (13:46):
We've received lots of mail from our viewers. Well, one
postcard stands out from the rest. In fact, it was
a threat designed to keep us from telling this story.
It reads, forget Circleville, Ohio. If you come to Ohio,
ul sickles will pay it signed the Circleville writer.

Speaker 3 (14:09):
We don't scare that.

Speaker 2 (14:10):
Easily, so we really don't have any answers. But there
are a few theories that people have come up with.
A lot of people believe that the first round of
letters was written by a man named David Longberry. He
was a bus driver that worked with Mary and apparently
had some type of romantic interest in her.

Speaker 3 (14:25):
However, she did not have the same.

Speaker 2 (14:27):
Feelings for him, and in nineteen ninety nine David actually
became a fugitive for raping a little girl and he
actually committed suicide while on the run from police. Or
maybe it was someone else who was interested in Mary,
maybe she was even having more than one affair, or
maybe the son of the superintendent wrote the letter.

Speaker 3 (14:45):
Superintendent son was named William.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
And the reason people think this is that some of
the letters were signed with W but no one was
able to figure.

Speaker 3 (14:53):
Out like who that was.

Speaker 2 (14:54):
Some people think that it was even Paul's ex wife
and this would be Ron's sister. People believe that the
person standing next to the El Canino was actually her boyfriend.

Speaker 3 (15:03):
And it's really interesting because this.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Is actually what Paul believes happened, and he spent ten
years in jail for this. This is also what Martin
believes who was the researcher that spent so many years
doing this. Karen was one of the only people that
knew that his gun was hidden in the garage, and
when he finally went to prison, she regained custody of
her house and her children because she had lost it
in the divorce, so she'd kind of have motive there.
And it was really good handwriting, maybe female handwriting.

Speaker 3 (15:27):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (15:28):
It is a giant mystery, but it is so interesting.
I would love to know what you guys think about
this one. I feel like it had to be someone
that was involved with the school or someone that was
interested in her romantically. It seems kind of obvious if
you'd want to expose an affair, but I don't know.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
It's just one of those things. This is so interesting.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
But if you have any other information that I missed,
definitely let me know in the comments below and any
other theories that you guys have.

Speaker 3 (15:51):
But that's it for me today. Guys. I hope you're
having a great day and I'll see you next time.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
S