A Small Town Got Hundreds of Letters Exposing Its Secrets. They Kept Coming After a Man Went to Prison.

On the morning of February 7, 1983, a school bus driver in rural Ohio spotted a sign tacked to a fence post along her route. It had an obscene message on it about her daughter.

She stopped the bus and pulled the sign down.

Attached to the post was a small box. That evening, she opened it.

Inside was a loaded handgun. It had been rigged with string so it would fire at whoever pulled the sign down.

It had not gone off.

That bus driver had been receiving anonymous letters for almost seven years. So had her husband, before he died. So had, it seemed, half the town.

And here is the part that has kept people arguing for more than forty years. A man went to prison for the booby trap. And the letters kept coming.

Circleville

Circleville is a small city in Pickaway County, about thirty miles south of Columbus. It is famous mostly for one thing: the Circleville Pumpkin Show, a huge festival every October that draws visitors from all over the state.

It is the kind of place where people know their neighbors, go to the same churches, and send their kids to the same schools.

Which made what happened there even more painful.

The first letters

In the summer of 1976, a woman named Mary Gillispie, who drove a school bus for the Westfall school district near Circleville, received a letter.

It had no return address. It was postmarked in Columbus. And it accused her of having an affair with the school superintendent.

It was the first of many.

The letters were handwritten, mostly in block capitals. They told her to end the affair. One of the early ones said, "I know where you live."

Then her husband, Ron, started getting letters too. They told him about the supposed affair and demanded that he take it to the school board. If he did not, the writer said, he would be killed.

Mary insisted there was no affair. But the letters kept coming. And the writer seemed to know things. Details about their lives, their cars, their schedules.

August 19, 1977

On August 19, 1977, Ron Gillispie got a phone call at home.

According to accounts of that night, the caller said he was watching the house and knew what Ron's truck looked like. Ron took a gun and drove off to confront the caller.

A short time later, Ron's truck crashed into a tree. He was killed.

A shot had been fired from his gun. Investigators found no shell casing. Tests showed his blood alcohol level was well over the legal limit. The county sheriff concluded that Ron had been drinking and had driven into the tree by accident.

Ron's family did not accept that. They said he was not a heavy drinker. They believed he had been run off the road, or worse.

And after Ron's death, the letters did not stop. Some of them now suggested that the sheriff was covering up what had really happened to him.

A town full of letters

Over the following years, the letters spread.

They went to people all over Circleville and the surrounding area. Business owners. Officials. Neighbors. They accused people of affairs, of corruption, of lies. Some were about local politics. Some were cruel and personal.

According to later accounts, over a thousand letters were sent across southern Ohio. Nearly everyone in town either got one, or knew someone who did.

And it seemed that whoever was writing them could see into everyone's private lives.

The booby trap

Then came February 7, 1983.

The sign was posted at a rural intersection on Mary's bus route. It had an obscene message about her daughter. Mary took the sign and its post onto the bus. That evening, she opened the small container attached to the post and found the gun. A small .25 caliber handgun, rigged with string to fire when the sign was pulled down.

Whoever made it had filed the serial number off the gun. Investigators traced it to its owner anyway.

He was a member of Mary's own family. Her brother-in-law, the husband of Ron's sister.

He worked at an Anheuser-Busch facility in the area. A co-worker testified that he had sold him the gun. His work records showed he had taken that day off.

He told investigators he had bought the gun, but that it had been stolen from his garage weeks before.

The trial

He was charged with attempted murder.

At his trial in October 1983, there was no physical evidence directly tying him to the device, and he had an alibi for much of the day. But handwriting experts testified that the letters could have been written by him. According to later reporting, handwriting from his employment file was compared to hundreds of letters and postcards. His estranged wife told investigators she believed he was the letter writer.

He was never formally charged with writing the letters. But dozens of them were put in front of the jury as evidence.

The jury deliberated for a few hours and found him guilty of attempted murder. He was sentenced to seven to twenty-five years in prison.

He said he was innocent. He never stopped saying it.

The letters keep coming

And then something happened that made the town question everything.

The letters did not stop.

Even after the man was in prison, people in and around Circleville kept getting anonymous letters in the same style. According to reporting, authorities at one point put him in solitary confinement. The letters still came.

He even received one himself in prison. After a parole hearing denied him early release, a letter arrived that mocked him for thinking he would get out.

Authorities suggested he must have had an accomplice on the outside. But no accomplice was ever identified or charged.

In 1994, he was paroled. He kept insisting he had not written the letters, and had not set the trap. He died in 2012.

The letters stopped around the early 1990s, around the time he was released.

New looks at an old case

In recent years, the case has been reexamined.

For a CBS News 48 Hours investigation, a former FBI profiler, Mary Ellen O'Toole, reviewed the case. She said she doubted the convicted man fit the profile of the letter writer. And she suggested the booby trap might have been placed by someone else, who took advantage of the situation.

A forensic document examiner, Beverley East, compared dozens of the letters to the convicted man's handwriting. She said she was confident she knew who had written them, and that she would swear to it in court.

According to reporting, the man's fingerprints were also found on some letters sent while he was in prison. Nobody has explained that.

Officially, the case is considered closed. But many people in Circleville, including members of his own family, believe the wrong person went to prison. And many others believe the right one did.

What we still don't know

So who wrote the Circleville letters?

There are three main possibilities.

One: the man who was convicted wrote them, and someone helped him keep sending them from outside while he was in prison.

Two: he was framed. Someone else wrote the letters, and set the trap with his gun, knowing it would be traced to him.

Three: there was more than one person involved all along. A letter writer, and someone else who escalated things to violence.

And underneath all of it is Ron Gillispie, who drove off one summer night in 1977 to confront a caller who said he was watching the house, and never came home.

What do you think? Did the right person go to prison? Who kept sending the letters?