#27: The Circleville Letters
"Serial Mom," but in real life
Howdy, angels of the new year! How is 2024 for your lil soul?
These past ten days have been clicking for me. On Saturday, Rhody and I met up with a new friend at the flea market, a hodgepodge of tables and blankets where antiques rub elbows with mom’s reject immersion blender. The market circles the Église St Aubin (which I just learned is built on an ancient cemetery - it’s like these 1800s architects never watched Poltergeist).
Almost immediately, I found a two-foot sculpture of people feeding each other fruit/taking a fully-clothed sponge bath (don’t ask, cuz I’m not sure). One of the figures was missing a head.
I was in love. To the tune of 10€, I lugged that baddie home to sculpt a flower-shaped plant holder in lieu of a head. 2024 is already shaping up to be weird - and with this zest for the bizarre coursing through me, I can’t fathom better letters to kick off with than the ones y’all voted for. They’re twisted, they’re weird - and best of all, they’re juicy as hell.
Introducing the Circleville letters. Today we’ll…
💌 talk about thousands of letters that terrorized the quaint town of Circleville, Ohio,
💌 how Unsolved Mysteries got involved,
💌 and the ultimate question: can we still send truly anonymous mail in 2024?
Welcome to the new year. Now let’s get weird.
The Circleville Letters
Like any good story, it started with hot goss.
In 1976, a letter arrived in the mail for Mary Gillispie, school bus driver for the small town of Circleville, Ohio (population 11700, known for their pumpkin festival, a cardboard cutout of any Hallmark movie setting).
Driving the school bus in a town so quaint probably meant knowing dang near every family in Circleville. The letter had no return address, but was postmarked from Columbus just thirty miles away. In those last moments of peace before she opened it and changed her life forever, who knows what she thought the letter was. An invite from a friend, maybe, or a relative’s tired musings. Certainly something friendly.
Imagine instead the jolt of fear that coursed through her when she read this letter:
Mrs. Gillispie
Stay away from Massie:
Don’t lie when questioned about meeting him. I know where you live: I’ve been observing your house and know you have children. This is no joke: please take it serious, everyone concerned has been notified and everything will be over soon.
The letter implies she’s having an affair with Gordon Massie, the (married) superintendent. In an act of either bravery or Midwestern denial, she ignored it, figuring the problem would solve itself.
But the Circleville Writer was just warming up.
Another arrived a few days later.
Lady:
This is your last chance to report him. I know you are a pig and will prove it and shame you out of Ohio: a pig sneaks around and meets other womens husbands: behind their backs only: causes familys: homes and marriages to suffer: you are such a pig and I will prove it
why doesnt he come to your rescue: or has he to much to loose: his wife in which pigs like you take advantage of: his 28,500 dollar a year job: or his kick backs: hows your little girl: will she grow up to be like you?
For the second time, Mary Gillispie ignored the unhinged ramblings.
But two weeks after the first letter, her husband Ron received a note himself and Mary finally faced the truth: shit was going down.
Mr Gillispie:
Your doing a lot for her: no one cares that musch for anyone this day: make him come to her rescue: but he won’t: he’s being awful good lately: he knows what he must do: but he wont: make her admit the truth: call the school board: his affairs must stop
Everyone will know soon:
Think of yourself.
Mary and Gordon Massie vehemently denied the affair. Salty as hell, Mary, Ron, Ron’s sister, and their then brother-in-law Paul Freshour put together a list of local suspects. In a bold power play, the quartet sent letters to every suspect, saying something to the effect of, “I know what you’re doing, so stop it - or else.”
(Can you imagine being one of the normal-ass people who got that letter?)
This tactic worked - at first. But by mid-1977, the letters began again, and this time, they were more frequent and violent than ever. One even claimed that "if Mary Gillispie did not inform the School Board of her affair…a bullet would be put in her little girl's head.”
To escape the madness, Mary took a much-needed vacay to Florida in August 1977 - and Ron Gillispie made his move. He’d had his private suspicions about the Circleville Writer’s identity. While home alone with the kids, Ron received an anonymous phone call and had a heated exchange with the mystery caller. When he hung up, he was pissed. He told his kids he knew who the Circleville Writer was, grabbed his gun, and headed out to confront them once and for all.
Ron Gillispie was dead by the end of the night. Not a big drinker and stone cold sober when he left the house, an autopsy clocked Ron’s BAC count at over twice the legal limit. He crashed his pickup, dying at the scene.
His gun was found under his body. One shot had been recently fired.
To this day, nobody’s not sure where or how Ron got as drunk as he did, or what made him fire that single shot.
Booby trapped
After Ron’s death, the letters went off the ding-dang rails.
While Gillispie and Massie were the Circleville Writer’s favorite victims in town, soon almost the whole town was receiving notes. Over a thousand letters terrorized residents between 1977 and 1983, claiming all kinds of wild gossip, from fraud to covering up a murder.
It’s worth noting that the Circleville Writer was onto something re: the affair. After Ron’s death, Mary Gillispie and Gordon Massie admitted to an affair, one they swore kicked off after the letters, which feels too convenient, like when Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt promised they didn’t get together on the set of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Sure, Jan. Paul Freshour himself alleges that the Massie/Gillispie affair began well before the first letter, with the two regularly meeting at a bar one town over run by Gordon Massie’s friend.
So these illustrious claims in the other letters may well have had morsels of truth, too.
The whole thing is reminiscent of John Waters’ masterpiece Serial Mom. Kathleen Turner’s brilliant (obscene) performance looped in my mind as I researched the Circleville letters.
A treasure.
A dark turn
Ramping up their attacks, the Circleville Writer started posting signs targeting Gillispie’s tween daughter along her bus route. In 1983, Gillispie was driving the bus bus route when she passed a vulgar sign suggesting her twelve-year-old was involved with Gordon Massie, too.
Mary Gillispie’d had enough. She stopped the bus and stomped over to the sign to tear it down. However, she hesitated. The sign was nailed to a post, which was attached to a box and a string. Curious - and probably hoping for evidence to lay the whole mess to rest - Gillispie removed the structure and (yikes) lugged the entire contraption onto the bus to investigate later. Imagine this mystery thing rattling along beside her as she bumped down county roads to pick up school kids.
After she finished her route, Mary opened the box. Inside sat a gun, rigged to go off when she tore the sign down. Gillispie and the kids were lucky as hell that the booby trap sucked - and that she chose to dismantle the whole trap instead of yanking the sign from the post.
From here, there are a million fine details in this aspect of the case - wild speculation about whodunit, conspiracy theories, the works. But I’m not a true crime junkie; I’m a mail fiend. The skinny is that, in a wild plot twist, the gun belonged to none other than Ron’s former brother-in-law, Paul Freshour.
When questioned about it, Freshour claimed someone stole the gun several weeks prior. While in custody, a corrupt Sheriff named Radcliff coerced Freshour into copying the handwriting in the letters as best he could for an almost comically unethical handwriting analysis. Afterward, the sheriff read letters aloud to Freshour and had him copy them as best he could. A handwriting expert thought Freshour’s transcriptions of the letters the sheriff read aloud matched the writing of the Circleville Writer.
And just like that, with 39 of the thousand-plus letters submitted as evidence against him, Paul Freshour was found guilty of the attempted murder of his former sister-in-law and sentenced 7 to 25 years in prison.
Case closed?
Not quite.
Once Paul landed in prison, the madness escalated.
For a decade after his arrest, thousands of letters continued to terrorize the residents of Circleville. Paul was in prison several hundred miles away, but letters arrived from just up the road in Columbus, OH, same as always.
I’ve searched high and low for scans of some of these letters, but I think because they weren’t directly part of a criminal investigation like the thirty-nine included in the case against Paul Freshour, they’re not easy to come by online. Understandably, most people don’t want their highly specific family gossip to end up in the public eye.
However, we do have Paul Freshour’s manifesto to go on. It’s a wild time capsule preserved on Wordpress. Interacting with it feels intimate, like you’re talking to him directly. According to him - and, regardless of if he’s the Circleville Writer or not, I trust his firsthand account, considering his involvement in the case - some “letters had arsenic poison in them.”
He also refers to letters sent to one of the chief prosecutors, which claim that “Prosecutor Kline had a school teacher pregnant and [then] murdered [her] so it would not affect his career.”
For years, the cops thought Freshour was somehow writing and mailing these letters in prison. They sent him to solitary confinement, strip searched him regularly (isn’t the justice system so, I don’t know, just?), and limited his access to mail. Glossy stamps weren’t allowed in prison, but those were the ones used by the Circleville Writer. No matter what the handwriting analysis said, there was no feasible way Freshour was the one responsible for the letters after he went to prison.
Even Freshour himself received taunting letters while behind bars:
Freshour: now when are you going to believe you arent getting out of there: I told you two years ago: when we set em up: they stay set up: dont you listen at all: noone wants you out: noone the joke is on you: ha: ha: tell no one of this letter: I saw the paper: great news: great: the sheriff loved it: ha: ha: do you believe it now: do you:
This reign of postal terror continued into the nineties, with the show Unsolved Mysteries famously receiving a threatening note after the Circleville Writer learned the show was investigating the letters:
Forget Circleville Ohio: do nothing to hurt sheriff Radcliff: if you come to Ohio you el sickos will pay: The Circleville Writer:
Paul Freshour maintained his innocence until his death in 2012.
In a final plot twist in 2022, an independent analyst looked at Freshour’s handwriting again for 48 Hours and said, definitively, that she believed the Circleville Writer was Freshour.
The mail - an anonymous service
How does something like this happen? In our surveillance culture, could someone get away with anything to this scale today?
If you ask me, it’s actually than ever easier to send untraceable mail now. Despite the fact that Freshour couldn’t have sent letters from jail, the handwriting analysis pinned the letters onto him.
But what if the Circleville Writer had had a laptop? Handwriting analysis wouldn’t help you then. These days, everyone has access to Google Docs, a thumb drive, and good old cash. To send a truly anonymous letter, all you have to do is print a typed letter at a print shop and pop it in a dime-a-dozen envelope.
The rest of it is shockingly identical to what the Circleville Writer must have done: buy stamps in cash, wear gloves as you handle the letter, pop it in a public mailbox (preferably a town or two over). Just like that, you’ve sent an anonymous letter into the void.
Sending a package anonymously is also easier than you might think (a horrifying thought). In the US - and from my experience mailing packages in France and Russia - the postal worker doesn’t cross verify your ID with the return name and address you provide. So long as it’s an address in the system, you can tell the postal worker anything you want.
It shouldn’t be a horrifying thought. It should be exciting to think we can send gifts without a return address, or little platonic love notes to someone who could use a boost. But that’s not how humans work. We’re secretive about negativity, often intoxicated by shitty gossip? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard of the Great Circleville Complimenter, who spent fifteen years anonymously telling thousands of people how amazing they were.
We love to hide our judgments but jump to take credit for positive doings. I wonder how things might be different if we were more honest about our judgments, and could be kind without waiting for applause to follow.
As a writer, I can’t help but gobble up this whole saga as one helluva character study. Before violent escalations landed the Circleville Writer firmly into monster territory, they had a choice to confront Gillispie directly about the affair. Instead, they chose the letters. No matter who it was, some real human spent decades writing thousands of letters by hand. Maybe they always wanted to send people arsenic and this was as good a place to start as any. Do you think they ever knew they were crossing a line? Did it bring them glee?
I’m curious what y’all think.
Vote city - ten days hence!
In ten days we’ll be voting for the microfiction prompt and next month’s topic. Each month, I write my readers a related short story small enough to fit on a postcard. If you wanna get in on the fun, now’s the perfect time to refer your friends :). When three pals sign up, you’ll get yourself a month of voting - and what’s better than that?
All my anonymous love forever,
Your Circleville Complimenter Snail Mail Sweetheart
PS, want more Circleville?
Read the story and peep the art today:
#29: your monthly microfiction
Two days ago I turned thirty-three. Don’t ask why, but I love a number divisible by 11, so I’ve been extra hyped.
This is wild! Grew up an hour and a half south of Circleville, driven through there a thousand times. I never heard about any of this! Also, happy belated birthday!
I mean Karen fits the m.o. but she was living in a beat up rv on Mary's property on her charity.how is she mailing letters 30 - 40 miles away? How would she find out people's secrets. She was looked down upon by the most of the people in the documentary.
The sheriff was a powerful man :with powerful friends that alot of people loved and hated. But he would have a lot to lose if it was him. His job was his whole life.
Massie could have sent them to himself and orchestrated all of this to get Mary . They ended up together. The letters stopped shortly before he died. Whoever They were outed and stopped a child molester anyway. It's a weird case .