The Circleville Letters

In February 1983, a school bus driver named Mary Gillispie found a handmade sign along her route outside Circleville, Ohio. The sign targeted her teenage daughter. When she tried to tear it down, she discovered it was rigged to a loaded pistol inside a cardboard box. The gun was meant to fire when she pulled the sign. The mechanism had malfunctioned. She survived without knowing it had just tried to kill her.

The gun led investigators to her former brother-in-law, Paul Freshour — a manager at Anheuser-Busch, a U.S. Army veteran, a man who maintained his innocence for the rest of his life. He was convicted of attempted murder and sent to a prison ninety miles from Columbus. The anonymous letters that had been terrorizing Circleville since 1977 — threatening, sexually explicit, mailed to hundreds of residents with apparent insider knowledge of local affairs — kept arriving after he was locked up. The prison warden personally confirmed it was impossible for Freshour to be sending them. Freshour's first parole hearing was denied, in part, because of the volume of letters still arriving. Days later, he received one in his cell. It read, in part: when we set em up they stay set up.

Paul Freshour was paroled in May 1994. The letters stopped. He died in June 2012, still insisting he had not written them. The case has never been formally solved.

This episode traces the full eighteen-year span of the Circleville Letters — from the first threatening postmark in March 1977 through Ron Gillispie's suspicious death that summer, the 1983 booby trap, the trial's compromised handwriting evidence, the prison paradox that divided everyone who looked closely at the case, and the 1994 Unsolved Mysteries broadcast that appeared to end the campaign. Along the way, we examine what the physical evidence at the fencepost actually showed, what behavioral and forensic experts found when they independently reviewed the letters in 2021, and why the question of who wrote more than a thousand anonymous letters to a small Ohio town remains, as of today, unanswered.