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A Smokey Trail
By
Bonnie M. Wells
517 & More Cops
It was May 17th, 2003 and I'd just spoken with yet another Washington County deputy at my kitchen table. That old table had seen a lot of cops over the years .... especially for a table that was owned by someone who was really not affiliated with the police, but who always seemed to end up with information that they needed.
Sindee and I joked about it because in recent months her life had been pretty much the same. Always something going on.
We'd been talking for awhile about "our" murdered girl cases. Then, the subject turned to the three cops that Washington County had lost, over the years, in the line of duty.
I'd said for years that I felt a strong "connection" to each one of them, even though the first one, Charlie Ross was gunned down two years before I was born.
Still, I knew the Ross case pretty well since I'd grown up hearing about it. Officer Ross had been gunned down at the home of Ott Gilliand on October 5th, 1947. The shooting occurred along State Route 555 in Little Hocking, in a house that is located about two miles from my home.
The murder of Deputy Ray Clark had occurred on February 7th, 1980, and although I never knew officer Clark, never even met him, I've always felt a close connection to the case. Perhaps it came from being raised on the old Clark farm ..... or perhaps it was the fact that years later, when I returned to Little Hocking with my own family, we purchased a piece of property on State Route 555 from a lady named Clark. One never knew why I felt "connected," for sure, but the fact remained that I did.
And then there was Deputy Rod Kinsey. I'd met Kinsey only a few weeks before he was shot and killed while serving as backup for the sheriff's department in Noble County.
Why I failed to recall the date of Rod Kinsey's death, I honestly do not know. I was usually quite good with death dates, but not in his case. It was almost like I didn't want to recall it. Maybe if I didn't remember, it wouldn't be true. I don't know what my subconscious reasoning was.
Sindee said she'd been in the sheriff's department a few days earlier and she was pretty certain the plaque on the wall said that Officer Kinsey had died on April 17th. If so, that would be another "connection" to me .... well, me and a couple other people.
Doodling ....Again
I don't think Sindee and I have ever spoken over the phone but what we didn't both have a pen and paper at our finger tips. We were forever writing things down and then trying to determine if there was a connection or any common denominators that we'd previously over looked.
"Bonnie, have you noticed that Charlie Ross's initials are Ray Clark's initials reversed? And, really, Rod Kinsey sounds like R.C." .... Sindee voice trailed off ...
"Yes, I noticed, just like Patsy Sparks and Sheree Petry....but the Petry case is solved, and if R.S. killed Patsy and D.R. killed Sheree, then the two cases are not connected in any way, except the fact that both girls were murdered." I replied.
I could tell she was working on something. We always knew when one or the other was working toward something, but sometimes it took us awhile to get there because quite often we weren't sure where we were headed to begin with! Yeah, it got a little confusing at times, but eventually we figured out the trail and then it was clear sailing.
The Cop Connection
"Dead cops and dead women .... The Cop Connection" ..... Sindee mumbled.
"Yeah, talk to me," I encouraged.
"Okay .... we have Charlie Ross killed in Little Hocking .... and the murdered Jenifer McCrady brought to Little Hocking and dumped."
"Then, we have Ray Clark murdered in his own home just outside Marietta .... and then Terri Roach is murdered and dumped on the next hill from where Clark lived.
"And finally, we have Rod Kinsey who was killed in Noble County, and Patsy Sparks who lived in Marietta, was murdered and dumped in Noble County."
"All were Washington County cops .... worked out of Marietta, and each woman was also connected to Marietta. Jenifer worked there, Patsy lived there and Terri was dumped there."
"Does this sound a little strange to you?"
Perfect Sense
A lot of things sounded strange to me, as far as the cases were concerned.
If Jackie McCrady had murdered his wife ..... which as far as I was concerned was still an awfully big IF ..... then our theory was of no value what so ever.
But, if Jackie McCrady was an innocent man, and if someone else murdered his wife and brought her to Little Hocking, then it appeared we may have uncovered yet another strange twist to our unsolved cases.
"So, are you thinking that we have a killer that's following dead cops around and dumping dead women where they were killed? That's a little stranger than most of the stuff we've came up with, but it would make perfect sense to a cop hating psychopath." I said.
Some Day
"You know," I said, "we don't have much to work with in the Clark/Roach case.... except it is the same distance from Clark's home to Terri's body as it is from Terri's body to where Patsy lived. That always seemed peculiar to me.
Some day I'll have to drive out to the house where Ross was killed and see if it's the same distance from my house as the spot where Jenifer McCrady was dumped.
That sure would be a coincidence, if it is, wouldn't it?"
"Yeah ....another coincidence ..... that's all we need." Sindee replied.
Another Coincidence
It had to be another coincidence, didn't it? Already, I'd uncovered hundreds.....if not thousands, of coincidences within these old murder cases.
In the beginning I'd not believed in this many "coincidences," but as the years rolled by and there were few answers in most of the cases ..... like who killed Ray Clark; who killed Terri Roach and Patsy Sparks .... eventually I came to believe in coincidences because that's all that was left to believe in.
The answers to the questions never came, and there were more cases, more murders with no answers, in fact every once in a while I received information on an unsolved murder that I wasn't even aware existed. How many there actually were within a fifty mile radius was anybodies guess. How far back they reached in time was also anybodies guess.
We had no news papers or other news media that were interested enough to do even a yearly update ..... or even a five year update. It seemed that no one wanted to talk about the murdered people, not even their family members in most cases. I didn't understand it, but finally, I had accepted it.
And eventually I came to accept the idea that I just had an over active imagination when it came to killers and how they thought and the reasoning for their actions.
A killer wouldn't deliberately haul dead women and place them close to dead cops. That was a figment of my {or Sindee} imagination, wasn't it? And then, even if one considered the possibility of one warped mind carrying out such a feat, we had to consider that not one, but possibly three different killers had all came up with the same idea in the cases of Terri Roach, Patsy Sparks and Jenifer McCrady.
No, that was virtually impossible. That took us back to the "serial killer" theory that I started out with some twelve years ago. Jackie McCrady was sitting in prison for murdering his wife, and R.S. had all but been named a suspect in the Sparks case, so it all had to be wrong. There was no serial killer here. Everyone was killed by a "first strike, one time only" killer ..... which meant we had something in the neighborhood of 25 killers walking our streets (within that same fifty mile radius!).....which was a very comforting thought.
Or, it had to be coincidence.
I choose coincidence ..... and if you will all excuse me, I'm now going out on our perfectly safe streets and do a little window shopping! Anyone want to join me?
Before I Go
Before I leave for my shopping trip .....
I ran across the following article a day or so ago, and I thought since it wasn't my words....my thoughts, and since it came from a man, perhaps my readers would like to see it....
Forensic Psychologist Says Childhood
Is Key To Killers' Motivation:
The Associated Press - 5/18/03 3:33 PM
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) --
A forensic psychologist who has studied the lives of hundreds of convicted killers says most of them were severely emotionally abused as children.
Jeffrey Smalldon, who was driven to enter the field by the slayings of two of his co-workers in Columbus two decades ago, says the cases he has studied include 180 killers sentenced to death.
Smalldon has looked into the minds of some of the nation's most notorious killers, including John Wayne Gacy, whom he met twice, Ted Bundy and Ohio serial sniper Thomas Lee Dillon.
Killers develop an "extraordinarily impoverished ability to feel empathy toward other people," he said.
Smalldon, 49, told The Columbus Dispatch in a story published Sunday that serial killers, in particular, "cultivate this incredibly elaborate fantasy life, often at a young age," and are exhilarated by the thought of killing.
"The act never measures up to the fantasy," he said. "There's this impulse to do it better. So they do it again."
Smalldon has become a nationally sought expert to comment on cases such as the sniper shootings in suburban Maryland.
But after 20 years of research, he said he still hasn't satisfactorily answered why people kill.
"We've spent a lot of time guessing about their motivations and actions," he said, adding that he wants to "find a more direct avenue into their minds."
Smalldon grew up as an FBI agent's son near Buffalo, N.Y., and said he always was fascinated by psychopaths.
As an English major at Valparaiso University in Indiana in the 1970s, he corresponded with serial killer Charles Manson and his imprisoned "family" of followers.
The correspondence "went on in stops and starts for a few years," Smalldon said.
"It was certainly unsettling in college to sort through the mail and see a letter from Charles Manson," said Smalldon's college roommate, John Spear, now a real-estate lawyer in Florida.
Smalldon eventually became an administrator at Riverside Methodist Hospital and put aside his interest in criminals.
His feelings changed after Dec. 30, 1983, when someone walked into one of the laboratories he oversaw, stabbed two researchers 36 times and disappeared. There were no witnesses and the killer never was found.
"He felt it much more than I did, though all of the employees were freaked out by it," said his wife, Betsy, who worked at the hospital at the time.
The killings reawakened his curiosity about what makes people killers, so he quit his job and enrolled in a doctoral program in psychology at Ohio State University.
Three years after the hospital killings, William Matix, the husband of one of the two dead researchers, was killed in a gun battle in Florida with FBI agents. There still are competing theories about whether Matix was involved in his wife's slaying.
"It shone a bright light on how difficult it is to assess what somebody is capable of," Smalldon said.
Some of Smalldon's psychological evaluations have persuaded judges and juries to spare killers from execution.
But even when explaining their abusive upbringings might help persuade a jury to spare them from execution, he said, many killers refuse to tell the truth, instead idealizing their childhoods.
"Most of them would rather take their chances with the death penalty than shatter that illusion of a loving family," he said.
Smalldon, who opposes the death penalty, said he believes the psyches of serial killers are damaged beyond repair.
"Anyone who would have the impulse to commit serial murder and the cunning to pull it off ... can't be cured," he said. "They need to be incapacitated and managed."
Forty-Two Days & Holding
www.starlightinnerprizes.com
Lookin' For A Killer Series
Dreams Panned-Out Series
Without A Trace Series
Pure Coincidence - Page One
Pure Coincidence - Page Two
Pure Coincidence - Page Three
Posted - Updated:
5-20-03 / 2-15-04 / 6-07 // BMW
Midi = I Fought The Law
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