SERIAL KILLERS

Gary (top) and Thaddeus (bottom) Lewingdon killed Jenkin Jones in his house (right) on Lancaster Rd in Granville.

The late 1970s saw many notorious serial killers. Ted Bundy terrorized women in Oregon and Utah, the Son of Sam struck fear into the people of New York, the Zodiac Killer preyed on young couples in California, and John Wayne Gacy gruesomely killed young men in Chicago. From 1975 to 1979 everyone in America was in fear, and few people know that there was a serial killer team threatening our town.

Few people in our small midwestern town know that 43 years ago a sibling serial killer team terrorized Granville and the surrounding areas committing ten grisly murder robberies from Dec. 1977 to Dec 1978.

They were named the .22 Caliber Killers, this nickname was given because the only evidence the police had were the ballistics of the guns they used: .22 caliber pistols with silencers.

The two brothers, Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon, were born and raised in Kirkersville, Ohio. In 1977, They killed two women outside a 12 blueprints FALL 2021

Two brothers' reign of terror over central Ohio

SIBLING SERIAL KILLERS

BY CADEN MCDERMOTT

Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon were a 1970s American sibling serial killer team who murdered and robbed people all over Ohio including Granville and Newark.

The .22 caliber pistols (above) used by the Lewingdon brothers along with their homemade silencers are on display at the Columbus Police Department. Photos courtesy of Kevin Bennett

Newark café, a priest, a husband and wife, a nightclub owner, his mother, and his girlfriend, and they went on to kill an old wealthy Granville citizen, Jenkins Jones.

The murder of Jenkin Jones took place on Apr. 8, 1978, in his home on Lancaster Road. Jenkin Jones, a Denison alumn, became a target when he came into Rockwell Manufacturing, where Gary worked, to buy some sharpening equipment. Jones flashed large sums of cash to Gary, which unluckily was a fatal decision.

The brothers went to his house, fired one bullet through the window which grazed the sleeping Jones. He immediately got up and was shot two more times. The brothers broke windows to get in and once inside Gary fired 5 more shots into Jones.

While robbing the place, the brothers were interrupted by the four dogs that Jones owned. The dogs were subsequently shot for their loud barks. The brothers feared the barking would cause suspicion so they left before fully searching the place. They made away with $300, however, they missed $6,000 that the police discovered in their investigation.

Much like Son of Sam, another infamous killer during this time, the .22 Caliber Killers did not have a specific type of victim that they went after. This left many people on edge and fearful because they had no way of knowing if they could be next.

“The randomness of it really spooked people, there appeared to be no rhyme or reason for what was going on,” long time Granville citizen and former member of the Granville Historical Society Kevin Bennett said. “People were unnerved by it, this isn’t exactly something normal for our town”

One would expect that news of a serial killer in a town like ours would spread like wildfire through the news and be talked about everywhere, but this was not the case. Everyone knew about the killings, and yet few talked openly about it.

“People whisper about it, but no one wants to discuss it. There’s a feeling that it’s always somebody else who’s going to get hurt, you know? It’s not going to be me,” Arnold Anderson, a local farm equipment salesman, told The New York Times in 1978.

Over 40 years have passed since the killings, and the case of Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon seems to be almost forgotten. During my research for this I found that almost everyone who I had spoken to had never heard of the sibling serial killer team that terrorized Granville and the surrounding areas.

Father time is most to blame, according to Bennett. “Time passes, things get forgotten, people pass away,” he said. All of the detectives who worked the original case have since passed away and only a handful of people who lived in Granville at the time still recall the “year of fear” as Bennett called it.

“Living in a small town like this we really do not see violent crime like this, and when we do we try to forget it."