STAN HYWET HALL & GARDENS
Stroll the grounds and enjoy 15 outdoor sculptures inspired by Gertrude Seiberling’s paintings
June to October Included with a Gardens and Grounds Tour Or upgrade to a Self-Guided Manor House Tour and see original paintings by Gertrude Seiberling
Cleveland Press 1980
the Plain Dealer about a cleanup effort he organized on Train near the site of a murder that year, said, “The ultimate goal I’d like to see is everyone going out and trying to save their neighborhood,” he said. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood all my life and I don’t want to move to Parma. I want to live here.”
*** THE BODIES On Aug. 20, 2018, a security guard called 911 and told dispatchers a resident in his complex named Michael Thompson wanted to speak to police. He could not tell them why. When they arrived, Thompson, a 64-year-old former truck driver suffering from an undisclosed illness, told them that twenty years ago he had killed a prostitute and buried her body off Train Ave. and Richner Ave. just east of West 41st St. Investigators from the FBI and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office joined police as Thompson led them to the shallow grave. If the ever-present detritus is the most common visible sign of minor crime on Train, the bodies are the more infrequent yet serious reminders of the gruesome history of the street. It was almost exactly four years earlier to the day when the body of 31-year-old Michaela Diemer was recovered from a field near the same intersection in August of 2014. Ronald Hillman, a 47-year-old who worked with Diemer at Progressive
Field through Minutemen staffing, had raped and murdered her before dumping her body. After her family had filed a missing persons report, someone spotted Hillman, who was on parole from a previous rape conviction, driving her car. He confessed to the crime and directed police to the body before they even completed the drive downtown after picking him up. While in those cases suspects have been caught and sentenced to life in prison, the case of Christine Shook remains open with a reward offered by Crime Stoppers. Shook, a 23-year-old dancer who worked at a bar on Clark, was discovered dead, wearing only a black jacket and white socks, near the tracks on Train on Jan 4, 1990 by some children who were collecting cans. The coroner reported she died from blows from a blunt object to her head, chest, and extremities — in other words, a vicious, grisly full-body beating — and that she had been dead for more than a week before being found. And where there were memorials and remembrances in modern cases, there was that plus vociferous outrage and mobilized protest in 1976 after one of the city’s most brutal and unsettling murders. It’s a case that has evaporated into the backpages of Cleveland’s memory, but it’s one that at the time struck a citywide nerve, even during a decade as bloody and tumultuous as the bombing era of 1970s Cleveland. On a Saturday in late June 1976, the body of a young girl was found behind a vacant building that was once part of Standard Brewing’s mini empire between 58th and 61st
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| clevescene.com | August 7 - 13, 2019
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