The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
Rural Ohio was a relatively safe place to grow up in the ’60s and ’70s. Sure, there was petty crime like shoplifting, and occasionally one of my relatives someone would get busted for drag racing on Lockwood Road, but violent crime, at least that which was reported, was rare and gun violence almost nonexistent.
When I was 11, though, Gretchen Musser, the owner of a bait & tackle store in the neighboring town of Oak Harbor, was shot and killed in a botched robbery attempt. It was front-page news for months, so noteworthy that my whole family piled into the car one Sunday afternoon and drove past the “murder store.” Yeah, that’s a touch on the macabre side, kind of a pre-internet form of doom scrolling.
Similarly, the rural stretch of highway between Perrysburg and Bowling Green where my wife and I bought a small house in the mid-80s was basically crime-free until one day in 1989.
On Sept. 14, 1989, an 18-year-old college student named Leslie Keckler applied for a job at a Bowling Green restaurant. A few days later, she received a call from someone identifying himself as Jeff Bennett, the regional manager for a restaurant supply company. Bennett said that the restaurant manager had given him her name and number, suggesting she might be a good candidate for a sales representative job. They agreed to meet on Sept. 26 at a Bowling Green motel, ostensibly since Bennett did not have an office in the area.
With the benefit of hindsight, that all sounds pretty fishy. Why would a restaurant manager forward the name of an applicant he had never met to a vendor? Why not just meet at the restaurant? But young and perhaps a bit naive, Leslie agreed to the interview and told her boyfriend she would be back in two or three hours. When she didn’t return, her boyfriend became worried and contacted the police. The next day, they found her car in the parking lot of the Woodland Mall, and her body in a drainage ditch a few days later.
That drainage ditch was about a mile from my house.
In the grand scheme, a murder victim being found a mile from your house isn’t that big of a deal. But in a small rural community unaccustomed to crime, it felt like someone had dumped a body on my back porch. Although we were a little too far away to be part of the investigation, the police came by and asked some of our neighbors just down the road a few rudimentary questions: Seen anything unusual? Anyone out of place hanging around? It all hit just a little close to home.
The police got a break in the case very quickly and arrested a local man for the crime. The break came in the form of another young woman who, astonishingly, told virtually the same story. She had applied for a job at a different restaurant six months earlier, received the same offer of an interview from Jeff Bennett, and had gone to the interview only to find there was no job. When the man made unwanted sexual advances, she ran away.
The police reviewed the employment records at the two restaurants and found one name, Richard Fox, common to both. Fox confessed almost immediately but characterized the encounter as a “date gone wrong” and the murder as an “accident.” Leslie Keckler was stabbed four times in the back and then strangled. The jury found Fox guilty and sentenced him to death. The state of Ohio executed him on Feb. 12, 2003.