My Brush With Serial Killers

When I lived in Granville, my neighborhood butted up to an apple orchard where my friend and I used to go to liberate fruit from the trees in the summertime. I mentioned this to my parents during their visit, and somehow we got to talking about the large house right next door to the orchard - an enormous rural farmhouse with an equally-large guesthouse right next door. The house was empty most of the time I lived there, and it was only occupied in the last year or so I was in Granville. I saw it on my trip back in 2001, and it looks great - nothing like the decrepit structure it had become while I was there.

I knew vaguely from stories that the person who lived in the house was killed by someone shooting him while he slept on the couch, and then robbing him. After that, the house sat empty.

But it wasn't until I Googled it this afternoon that I realized that killing was part of the late-1970s string of serial murders called the .22-caliber murders. Two brothers apparently killed people as a pair, robbing them afterwards. The person who lived in this house was Jenkin T. Jones, who was killed April 8, 1978.

And it seems that the last of the two killers died in prison last year.

I wish I had a picture of the house, it was an amazing structure and beautiful in that sinister, Midwestern-gothic sort of way.