Early one chilly morning in March of nineteen seventy seven, the sun was just starting to rise over the town of Circleville, Ohio. Most windows were still dark, the suburban streets empty of traffic. But despite the early hour, Mary Gillespie was wide awake. She was used to getting up before dawn. She'd been doing it for years, ever since she started working as a school bus driver, and had grown to appreciate the time she had to herself first
thing in the morning, before anybody else was awake. That morning, she closed the front door quietly behind her as she left the house, not wanting to wake her family. As she headed down the driveway towards her part car, she took a sudden detour to check the mailbox. Inside was one single envelope and addressed to Mary. Curious, she picked it up and briskly tore it open, finding a single sheet of lined paper inside. She pulled it out and
unfolded it and immediately felt unnerved. It was a note written to her in large menacing block capitals, the letters so tall and narrow they looked distorted. It read stay away from Gordon Massey, don't lie when questioned about meeting him. I know where you live. Mary stared down at the letter, the blocky writing swimming before her eyes. Gordon had been her colleague for years. He was the superintendent at the school whose she drove, and just like her to the
outside world, at least, he was happily married. And yet whoever had written this letter was clearly accusing Mary of adultery. And it didn't stop there. The letter went on, I've been observing your house and I know you have children. This is no joke. Please take it serious. Everyone concerned has been notified. It will be over soon. Mary felt a chill run down her back. She glanced up and looked furtively about, but the street was empty and silent.
She blinked, half expecting the scene to fade away like a bad dream. But the cold breeze against her face, the rustling of the paper in her hands told her otherwise. Mary read the letter back one more time, then she folded it up, put it in her pocket, and continued on to her car. You're listening to Unexplained, and I'm Richard mclin smith. Circleville is the definition of an all American small town. It's in the heart of the Midwest, surrounded by farmland on all sides, but just a short
drive from the major city of Columbus. Its biggest claim to fame is its annual pumpkin show, which draws thousands of tourists every year. It's a quaint, sleepy kind of place, a safe place to raise a family. Mary and Ron Gillespie were high school sweethearts, and after getting married and having two children, they settled in Circleville. For years, they
led a peaceful and happy life there. They were well liked in the community, friendly with their neighbors, and as the school bus driver, Mary was on first name terms with many of the local kids. They had no enemies, or so they thought, But the arrival of that shocking poison pen letter made it clear that somebody had a grudge against Mary, and that letter was just the beginning. Over the next few months, the letters kept coming, the
subject never changed. The writer seemingly fixated on a supposed love affair between Mary and Gordon Massey, the local school superintendent, and with each letter the tone grew ever more menacing. Lady, They wrote, this is your last chance to report him. I know you're a pig and will prove it and shame you out of Ohio before the author began writing to Mary's husband Ron as well, mister Gillespie, your wife is seeing Gordon Massey read one especially vicious letter. You
should catch them together and kill them both. He doesn't deserve to live. Then one morning, as she drove her usual bus route, Mary noticed a sign on the side of the road with mounting horror she recognized her own name written on it. It was an obscene message, calling her a word she would never dream of saying out loud. When she told Ron about it, he got straight into his car and troed the local roads on a grim
scavenger hunt, searching for any more signs. Much to his horror, there were others which he promptly tore down, but it was too late. The damage was already done. Mary and Ron hadn't told anybody about the letters. They were too embarrassed for one thing, and they also hoped that if they ignored them for long enough, whoever was responsible would get bored. Not only did they not stop, but with the addition of the signs propping up all over the town, the cat was well and truly out of the bag.
Word travels fast in a place like Circleville and by that evening, half of the town knew what Mary was being accused of. Humiliated and scared, the Gillespies knew they couldn't bury their heads in the sand any longer. They gathered up the stack of letters they'd reluctantly held onto and went straight to the sheriff's office. The police promptly launched an investigation to determine at least where the letters
had come from. All had been postmarked in Columbus, about thirty miles north of Circleville, but given the size of the city, that wasn't much to go on. Both Ron and Mary, as well as a number of their friends and neighbors, were interviewed in the hope of trying to narrow down who on earth would want to publicly hound them like this. They tapped phones, surveiled houses, and worked with the postal service to try and track down the sender, all to no avail, and through it all, the letters
just kept on coming. By the summer of nineteen seventy seven, Mary was at breaking point. She needed a break from the relentless abuse, the stairs, from neighbors, the whispers at the grocery store. So when her sister in law Karen Sue suggested they'd take a road trip to Florida. She didn't. Despite the hurtful accusation, Ron stood by his wife and supposedly believed her when she insisted that there was nothing
to the rumor about her and Gordon Massey. On the morning she left for Florida, the couple asserted their love for each other and kissed each other goodbye. That evening, in the family home, alone with his children, Ron got a mysterious phone call. He told his children he was going out and left the house. A couple of days into their trip, on August nineteenth, Mary received an urgent call from the Circleville Sheriff's office. She picked up the
receiver eagerly. Surely they wouldn't be calling her unless they'd finally cracked the case, she thought, But the Sheriff's voice was solemn. He asked Mary if she was sitting down, and then he told her that her husband, Ron was dead. Doctor Ray Carroll was no stranger to grisly sights. He'd been the Pickaway County coroner for long enough that not much phazed him. But as he pulled up to the scene just off Route three that evening, he had to
take a moment to steal himself. The pickup truck was almost unrecognizable, twisted and warped and upside down, its remnants wrapped around a tree on the side of the freeway. He could just barely make out the silhouette of the driver, crumpled on the ground a few feet from the truck. He'd been ejected through the windshield as the vehicle flipped over, and the ground surrounding him was covered in shattered glass. The paramedics at the scene had done all they could.
Everybody there knew it was a lost cause, but it was doctor Carroll's job to confirm the ugly truth. It didn't take him long. After checking for a heartbeat, respiration, and corneal reflex, he pronounced Ron Gillespie, husband and father of two, dead at the age of thirty five. During the full autopsy, doctor Carroll established that Ron had suffered massive internal injuries in the crash, so severe that he'd likely died within minutes. He also found that Ron's blood
alcohol level was almost twice the legal limit. So there was the explanation he thought tragic, entirely preventable, but easy to understand. When he filled out his official report, doctor Carroll marked the cause of death as an accident caused by driving under the influence. As far as the authorities were concerned, that was the end of it. Perhaps Ron didn't believe his wife after all when she said there was no truth to the rumors of her affair and
it had all been too much for him. To Ron's loved ones, however, this version of events made no sense whatsoever. In the aftermath of Ron's death, Mary leaned on her in laws for support. Karen Sue, Ron's sister, had been with her in Florida when the terrible news came in. Meanwhile, Karen Sue's husband, Paul fresh Hour, was becoming increasingly suspicious about the official narrative. The two couples socialized often, and Paul knew that Ron was not a heavy drinker. Getting
behind the wheel of a truck intoxicated. It just didn't add up, and that wasn't the only thing driving Paul's doubts. At the scene of Ron Gillespie's crash, underneath his body, police found a point twenty two caliber revolver. Analysis later showed that the gun had been fired. To Paul. This was a literal smoking gun. He was adamant that Ron's death was no accident and that it was somehow related
to the vicious letter campaign. He went to the sheriff and begged him to re examine the case, insisting that he knew what had really happened. Clearly, Ron had fired that revolver in a last desperate attempt to defend himself seconds before he was murdered. Though the Pickaway County sheriff had been investigating the poison pen letters for months, he saw no connection between that mystery and Ron's tragic death. He certainly didn't buy the idea that he'd been murdered.
To him, Paul fresh Hour seemed like a loon, but he did feel terrible for poor Mary Gillespie, who'd been through more trauma in a year than anyone should suffer in a lifetime. And it wasn't over yet. Despite Ron's death, the letters kept on coming. Clearly the author didn't care that they were tormenting a newly widowed mother of two. As far as they were concerned, Mary was an adulterer
and deserved to be punished. And there was only one person alive who really understood what Mary was going through. Local school superintendent Gordon Massey. Although Gordon hadn't received any letters himself, he'd been openly named as Mary's alleged lover, and just like Mary, he'd had to deal with the relentless small town gossip the way conversations seemed to mysteriously stop as soon as he walked into a room, not to mention having to explain himself to his own partner.
Up to that point, both Mary and Gordon always denied that they'd ever had an affair. It'll never be known if that was true, but what is known is that after Mary's husband, Ron's death, things changed. The Circleville letters had seemingly become a self fulfilling prophecy, as Mary and Gordon did then start to see each other. Unsurprisingly, this
only added fuel to the fire. When this salacious revelation started doing the rounds, more and more venomous letters were sent to Mary's friends and family, to local businesses, even to her children's school. Some letters even included direct threats to Mary's children. It's your daughter's turn to pay for what you've done, said one, while in another the writer openly threatened to put a bullet in the child's head.
The police investigation into the letters had petered out by this point with no solid leads at all, so Mary had little option but to do her best to ignore them and try and get on with her life. But as it soon turned out, the author of the letters didn't take kindly to being ignored. By February of nineteen
eighty three were looking up for Mary. It had been almost six years since the first of what would come to be known as the Circleville letters were sent to her, and five and a half since she'd lost ron Through it all, she'd somehow managed to remain sane now. Whenever an envelope showed up in her mailbox with that familiar blocky scrawl, she didn't entertain it at all. She simply threw it away without reading its contents, and over time
their power over her dwindled. She could go entire days without thinking about the letters at all, and so it was when in the afternoon of February seventh, Mary climbed into her empty school bus and set out to do her usual afternoon pickups. She'd been serving the same local schools for so many years now that she could probably
drive this route blindfolded. But just as she was approaching a left turn, something caught her eye, a flash of white in her peripheral vision, an object that shouldn't be there. A cold knot of dread formed in her stomach as her body reacted fiscerally to a sickeningly familiar sight. It was another sign written in that unmistakable aggressive handwriting, pinned onto a nearby fence. The message was obscene, violent, and this time it wasn't about Mary. It was about her
thirteen year old daughter. Gripping the steering wheel hard to keep her hands from shaking, Mary pulled the bus over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. She clambered out onto the sidewalk, looking nervously about to see if anyone else was there. As her mind raised, she walked brit over to the sign and was just about to wrench it down when she felt the weight of something solid behind it. After a confused moment, she realized that there was a wooden box behind the sign,
attached to it with twine. When she finally got the contraption off the fence, she tried to pry it open, but the twine was heavy duty and wound too tightly around the box. As Mary wrestled with it, she heard the sound of a car approaching. Terrified at the thought of being seen next to the sign, she quickly hid the box under her coat and hurried back into the bus. When Mary made it home later that evening, she was
finally able to get into the mysterious box. With her heart pounding, she grabbed a pair of scissors and cut through the twine, then yanked open the lid. Looking down, her eyes widened in terror at the sight of a loaded pistol primed to go off. There was no denying what she was looking at. The box was a booby trap designed to kill her. When she took the box
to the Sheriff's office, the officers there confirmed it. The gun had been clumsily rigged up to a spring mechanism seemingly designed to make it fire as soon as the sign was pulled down from the fence. Fortunately for Mary, the trap had failed. Though the Circleville Letter's investigation had lain dormant for years, this dramatic new piece of evidence revived it instantly. The sheriff sent the trap to Ohio's
Bureau of Criminal Investigation for expert analysis. The serial number on the gun had been partially filed off to prevent it from being traced, but it was a shoddy job, so investigators were able to restore it, and when they ran it through their system, the name of the owner came up right away. The gun belonged to none other than Mary's beloved brother in law, Paul fresh Hour, husband to Karen Sue. Mary was flabbergasted at first when police told her the gun belonged to Paul. She refused to
believe it. There must have been a mistake. She insisted. Paul and his wife, Karen Sue, had been her rocks after she'd lost Ron, karen Sue's brother, and though she hadn't seen as much of them lately, she still considered them family. The idea that he could have set such a cruel trap for her, never mind that he might have been behind the letters all along, was unthinkable, but the authorities confirmed it with the seller of the gun,
Paul fresh Hour was undoubtedly its owner. As it turned out, the fresh Hours were in the middle of an acrimonious divorce at the time. This was a stroke of luck for the police investigation. If the couple did have something to hide, maybe they'd be more inclined to turn on each other now that their marriage was over, and when the police went to interview Karen Sue, she was more
than willing to talk. According to Karen Sue, she and Paul had been very close with the Gillespies when they were first married, but back in nineteen seventy seven, Paul became convinced that Mary was having an affair with Goaudon and Massey and was furious at her for it. Incredibly, according to Karen Sue, Paul had been the writer of the letters all along. She told investigators that she first knew it was him after finding one of the letters
torn up in their bathroom. Soon after that, she said, she searched the house and found two more letters among Paul's things. But when investigators spoke to Paul, he denied any wrongdoing. Yes, the gun was his, he said, but according to him, it had been stolen weeks before Mary found it. He had nothing to do with the letters, he insisted, and would never dream of trying to harm Mary.
Paul allowed the police to conduct a thorough search of his house and his car, and gave them samples of its handwriting to prove that he hadn't written the letters. He also agreed to take a polygraph test, but he failed. Though such tests have been widely discredited as a means of establishing guilt. On top of owning the gun and Karen Sue's testimony, this proved to be the final nail in his coffin for the police. Shortly after he failed the polygraph test, Paul fresh Hour was arrested for the
attempted murder of Mary Gillespie. Although Paul fresh Hour was never charged with writing any of the Circleville letters, they played a central role in his trial. The prosecution clearly figured that in order to convince a jury that Paul had tried to kill Mary, they first had to establish that he was the one who'd been tormenting her for years.
Paul's lawyers tried to exclude the letters from the trial, arguing that because they didn't contain any explicit threats to Mary's life, they were irrelevant to the charge at hand. The judge agreed in part, but still allowed more than thirty of the letters to be admitted as evidence. A handwriting expert for the prosecution testified about three different pieces of evidence the letters, the sign attached to the booby
trap and a sample of Paul's handwriting. He stated that there were significant similarities between them all and that in his expert opinion, Paul was the sole writer. Paul's fingerprints weren't found anywhere on the gun or the box, and he had a decent alibi for most of the day that Mary had found the trap. But in the end,
these glaring holes in the prosecution's case weren't enough. The jury found him guilty of attempted murder, and he was given the maximum sentence of seven to twenty five years behind bars. Mary testified against Paul at the trial, and as painful as the whole process had been, she no doubt felt a sense of relief when the verdict was read out. At last, She thought the nightmare was finally over. But after Paul went to prison, the letters didn't stop,
not even close. In fact, during the decade that Paul spent behind bars, hundreds more anonymous creeds were sent. Journalists who'd covered Paul's trial received letters, as did Paul. Fresh hour, Now, when are you going to believe you aren't getting out of there? The taunting letter read, no one wants you out.
The joke is on you. Some have suggested that Paul could have simply sent a letter to himself as a way to cover his tracks, but according to the prison warden, it would have been physically impossible for him to send any letters from prison. All of his communications were closely monitored, and he had no access to pens or paper. Some reports indicate that he was even kept in isolation for large stretches of his sentence. So there are three logical possibilities.
Either Paul was the writer of the letters and somehow found a way to post them from prison, or somebody else to cup the mantle after he was sent away, or he was entirely innocent. Incredibly, since the Circleville letters were not part of Paul's conviction, the fact that they continued after his arrest had no bearing on his case. After serving ten and a half years in prison for attempted murder, he was finally released in nineteen ninety four.
In one final bizarre twist, the letters abruptly stopped for good as soon as Paul was free. For his part, Paul maintained his innocence and accused Karen Sue of framing him. His defense lawyer even raised this possibility at the trial arguing that she was the only person who had something to gain by Paul going to prison, but she was
never considered an official suspect. Paul spent the rest of his life trying in vain to clear his name, writing multiple times to the FBI about his conviction, the letters, and the mysterious circumstances of Bron Gillespie's death in twenty twelve at the age of seventy, he died, taking with him any hope of a genuine, concrete answer to the mystery.
As compelling evidence both for and against Paul. The fact that the letters continued while he was in prison strongly suggests to many that he couldn't possibly have been the author. But recently, the American CBS program forty eight Hours conducted a new independent analysis of the letters. Forensic document expert Beverly East examined forty nine of them alongside samples of Paul's handwriting, looking for distinctive traits that they had in common.
She concluded that he was beyond any shadow of a doubt the writer of the letters, but to this day, the true culprit behind them has never been conclusively identify it. This episode was written by Emma Dibden and produced by Richard mc clain Smith. Unexplained is an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard mc lain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by
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