The Circleville Letters

A small town terrorized by an anonymous penman.

Back in 1976, residents of Circleville, Ohio began receiving threatening handwritten letters detailing personal information about their lives. The letters then continued for 25 years all the while resulting in a suspicious death, an attempted murder, and a possible wrongful conviction. After all, our culprit was in jail for a decade, and the letters never stopped. So, who really wrote the infamous Circleville Letters?

The first piece of mail was received in 1976 by bus driver, Mary Gillispie. It was mailed from Columbus, Ohio, and accused Mary of an affair with the superintendent of schools, Gordon Massey. The writer told Mary that they had been observing her house and knew she had children, threatening exposure to her family. There was no return address on this letter, which was entirely handwritten, but written in large and inconsistent block lettering. You’ll have to check out the images to really understand, but the letters were meant to all look capitalized even though the a’s were lowercase — — just adjusted to the height of the other capital letters. That is until just the second half of the letter where the A’s turn entirely capitalized. It was very inconsistent style wise — and im torn between thinking it was accidental versus entirely planned just to throw us off. Within eight days, Mary…