Horror in Hocking County (Chapters 1 & 2)
By Don Canaan
A tall, gaunt-looking man, 49, and his wife, 38, stood near the police command post located next to the trestle crossing the meandering Hocking River outside Logan. This rural, county seat of southeastern Ohio's Hocking County, with a population of about 10,000, was the scene of a grisly double murder-murders with possible satanic overtones.
On Oct. 14, 1982, the mutilated bodies of two local teenagers were found. Their naked, dismembered, torsos were discovered along the north bank of the murky river.
The tall man approached a police captain offering the authorities his assistance. He asked Steve Mowery whether "it was them." Mowery was not able to identify the torsos at that time, yet the man asked him "whether their heads, arms and legs were cut off."
As Mowery spoke to the couple on the trestle, he thought their "reaction to finding two torsos was kind of strange. It was not the kind of reaction you would normally expect from parents; the possibility that these torsos we found in the river could be their children. They just hugged each other without any verbal reaction." Mowery said the stepfather, Dale Johnston, told him, "I used to work in a funeral home and that sort of thing doesn't bother me."
Why were the Johnstons at the river? Dale claimed that he had seen "visions of trees and running water."
And two days later on Oct. 16th, at 5 p.m., one victim's arms, legs and heads were found buried in seven small, shallow graves in the West Logan cornfield bordering the river's bank--400 yards from where the first torso had been discovered.
A passerby had found a sock on the nearby railroad track. Inside were small body parts. Authorities said it contained parts of Todd's penis.
Sheriff Jim Jones told the press that blood on the ground in the cornfield indicated the teenagers had been dismembered there and later dragged to the river
Dale Nolan Johnston, his wife Sarah and her teenage daughters, Margaret Annette Cooper and Michelle Cooper, lived in a mobile home on Dale's property at 20320 Trowbridge Road in New Plymouth, seven miles south of Logan, Ohio.
Todd Schultz, 19, Annette's fiancé, lived with his mother, Sandra, in their house on the outskirts of Logan. Don, Todd's father, a fire department lieutenant, lived in an apartment in Logan.
An 11-month investigation into the murders of Annette Cooper Johnston and Todd Schultz was about to unfold.
Logan residents speculated that the killings were either perpetrated by a cult, the work of professionals or the act of drug dealers upon whom the couple had inadvertently stumbled.
On Sept. 29, 1983, a Hocking County grand jury, after three days of testimony, indicted Dale Johnston for the two murders. When asked whether he would make the arrest himself, the sheriff said, "Are you kidding? After 12 months I want some action one way or another."
Eight deputies, led by Jones, as well as members of Logan's police department converged on the Johnston farm.
Dale and Sarah stood outside their mobile home as authorities pulled onto the property to arrest him. He surrendered quietly, was handcuffed and read his Miranda rights. As the cars were about to leave, Sarah asked for permission to approach one cruiser. She kissed her husband, lifted her hand and tearfully returned to an empty home.
The arraignment courtroom was crammed with friends of the teenagers. Johnston, wearing a western-cut, blue print shirt and brown, double-knit polyester trousers, pleaded innocent to two counts of aggravated murder. He was denied bail.
As he was being led to a waiting police car for transfer to the more secure Pickaway County jail, somebody spit in Johnston's direction. One onlooker explained, "Everyone has been kind of tense around here."
This article may be freely reprinted with the provision that this entire section is also used with the article.
Don Canaan is a retired print and television journalist who can't keep away from words. And now daily news and features from Israel and the Middle East comes alive on his web site at http://www.IsraelFaxx.com
The site includes the world-famous Dry Bones political cartoon, more than 1,700 links to sites of Jewish, Christian and Muslim interest, as well as complete, searchable archives 1994-to the present.
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