The Vanishing Women

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The little city I have lived in for the past sixteen years, Chillicothe, Ohio, has been featured in a six-part documentary on the Investigation Discovery cable channel called The Vanishing Women. I wish it was for a happier reason. I probably should have started this thread back in June when the series began. It is available on Amazon’s streaming service and various online sources.

Between May 2014 and May 2015, six women from Chillicothe disappeared or were found dead. Two are still missing. One death was ruled a suicide by drowning, but many in town doubt that finding. One was a straight-forward murder with no preceding disappearance. A guy is on trial right now for that one. Two were dumped in a river. All were or had been drug addicts and at least occasional prostitutes.

Lots of people in town are convinced that a serial killer is responsible for all of the deaths and disappearances. The police and coroners don’t seem to agree, although they seem to think a few of the cases might be related. It is pretty clear that all of the women were acquainted with each other.

The lifestyles of these women are right out of the serial killer’s handbook; they were just incredibly vulnerable to trafficking, abduction, or murder. Our little city has a serious drug problem, like a lot of small Appalachian cities. I spent my first forty-six years in Baltimore, which has massive drug issues, but I was quite removed from those problems both geographically and socially. In Chillicothe it’s different. The small scale of the place means that my middle class house is a mile from the drug and prostitution hotspot described in the documentary. Two rental properties I own are two blocks from it.

Watching the series has been a strange experience. I attend church with the newspaper editor who is on screen in every episode. My primary care physician is the coroner who is interviewed several times. I know the police chief and the sheriff. I kayak in the creek where two bodies were found. I watched The Wire and saw lots of familiar places and even an acquaintance or two, but seeing my small town on television in this way seems very strange.

I don’t know if this thread will turn into a discussion of the show or the cases of the women, or any discussion at all. I put it in MPSIMS assuming more people would be interested in the cases than the show. I’m not an expert on the situation, I’m just interested and a bit closer to it than most dopers.

2

The national homicide average is 4 or 5 per 100,000 people per year. It looks like Chillicothe has a population of about 20k, so we should expect about 1 death per year. It sounds like you’ve had three times that amount (or more, if there are any other homicides in town beyond these ones).

Certainly questionable, but not completely outside the realm of possibility that it was just a statistical blip.

Women working as prostitutes or who are hard drug users are more likely to be murdered, in general, not just by serial killers. A serial killer could have decided to start taking out women, but it’s just as possible that as the economy improved, alcohol became cheaper and that has let off a damper that was keeping homicides low for a while (for example).

3

Good lord, Crotalus, I can only imagine what that proximity might feel like.

I can’t comment on the crimes or the series as this is the first I am hearing about them. I will check them out.

4

Sage Rat, my impression in the years that I have lived here is that there is about one homicide a year. A chat with the newspaper editor and a look at this siteseems to bear that out. This series of cases had people marching in the streets.

5

I am from Mansfield and have several friends from Circleville and Chillicothe, so I’ve been watching this story closely from afar. (I live about 1,000 miles away from there now.) I’ve not much to add except that this is relatively alarming to me. I’m torn between: A) This is a function of most major industries leaving Ohio, which leaves meth as the last remaining revenue stream for far too many, and B) There is a serial killer in Chillicothe. And he might be a cop or something – someone everyone trusts and would never suspect.

Also, I read way too many horror novels.

6

Me too, and true crime stuff, too. When I moved to southern Ohio in 2000, meth was the main local drug. Now there is a cycle of OxyContin prescriptions leading to addiction to cheap heroin that has pushed meth out of the picture.

Chillicothe is actually in pretty good shape jobs-wise because of a paper mill, the Kenworth truck plant, two prisons, and a regional hospital. Of course, these jobs involve drug tests.

7

It’ll give you a someone slanted view of my little town, but a lot of the good is in there, too.

8

Did they talk about Neal Falls? He’s the guy who was killed by a prostitute in nearby W. VA. who was probably a serial killer. I figured after his discovery it would be case closed. Did nothing come of that?

9

Crotalus, have you ever read Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson?

If yes, skip this. If no, Sherwood Anderson was one of those Lost Generation writers in the early 20th century. He wrote about a small town in Ohio, which was based upon the real town of Clyde (up there by Fremont/Toledo/Upper Sandusky, sort of in the NW quadrant of the state). He used an unusual structure in that novel, where there were only about a dozen chapters and each one was a little slice-of-life vignette of a single character. About half of the characters had grown up in the little town and lived their entire lives there and died there. The other half were born there, and maybe grew up there, but eventually struck out into the world to, you know, be something. His point was that the people who were born, lived, and died in the same place never really grew or expanded their minds at all and ended up as “grotesques” – sort of empty shells of people who once had potential but had squandered it through a series of circumstance and choices. And the people who all left their little town all blossomed and learned and grew and were presented as these whole, complete, self-actualized people, who were all beautiful and successful and deliriously happy.

The people of Clyde did not take this book kindly. And I think it was published at a time when people weren’t so quick to leave the family farm and strike out to, you know, be something. Taking over the family farm was a perfectly respectable and reasonable aspiration; why would one move to another state for college or whatever? Nowadays, aspiring to take over the family farm would be tantamount to committing to just live in a cardboard box under the freeway. But anyway, the small-town people were outraged that Anderson viewed them as grotesques.

Sometimes, though, I think he was right, or at least had a point. I go back to Ohio to visit now and again and I nearly always run into someone I knew from high school or earlier, who seems to be exactly the same person and who thinks exactly the same way they did when they were 15 or whatever and I think to myself “You really should have gotten out of town a little. At least taken more vacations or something.”

All that to say, whenever I read about the missing women in Chillicothe, Sherwood Anderson’s book pops into mind and I have to wonder if there isn’t some serial killing grotesque running around town committing mayhem.

10

One of the great achievements of my life was learning how to correctly say “Chillicothe” :smiley:

I lived in St. Clairsville, OH, (north of Chillicothe across the border from Wheeling) for a few years. The day I moved there a double “meth murder” happened a few blocks from my new house; it’s a small, charming town, but the oxy/meth/heroin and related violence issues in the area were astounding. Especially in West Virginia.

I need to watch this doc! Thanks for the heads-up.

11

Mermeith, I can’t remember if Falls came up in the series or if I know of him from other sources, but the task force eliminated him from suspicion somehow.

Dogzilla, I have read that book, long before I moved to Chillicothe. One of the things I have learned while living here is that lots of people here can’t conceive of leaving, even when everything in their lives says they should.

Jennshark, I pronounced it chilly coath in my head before I met my wife, who is the reason I moved here.

12

To anyone who cares, I recommend listening to the latest Planet Money podcast about heroin and the latest True Crime Garage podcast for more insight into the drug problem in small-town USA and this particular set of disappearances.

13

I was saying it in my head as “chilly - coat - the” until I got educated. It’s actually one of my favorite place names! I wanted to name my puppy Chillicothe, but realized no one would ever say it right and puppy would be that dog in obedience class whose parents named him something weird :dubious:.

I also had to learn how “Lancaster” is pronounced in Ohio/Mid-Atlantic states. In California it’s “Laaahn - caaaster.” Here it’s “Lahn -custer,” with “custer” as the long syllabification.

14

*No you don’t! *

I sat through one episode. Most boring and pointless hour wasted in nearly my whole life!

Six episodes? Good Lord! I’m guessing the whole series could be boiled down to a tidy half-hour with a little editing.

Can’t recommend.

15

Apropos of nothing, 21000 soldiers at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe got together in 1918 and made a mosaic of President Woodrow Wilson.

16

Ah yes, the world before entertainment was invented. Glad I missed it.

17

Interesting and grim story. Makes me flash back to something that happened in my small city (in NY state, not Ohio) twenty or so years ago, though I’m not sure anybody ever made a documentary about it.

As in your story, several women—I think it was six—vanished over the course of a year or two. These women were at the margins of society—streetwalkers, drug addicts, police records, the works—and came and went a lot. Few if any had a fixed place of address. So it wasn’t as though the police were told of their disappearance right away. And when officials did get around to asking friends, family, and associates, they mostly got vagueness: “She said she might be going to Albany.” “Didn’t she move in with her sister in Kingston?” “There was this guy, I forget his name, and she said she might be moving down to Brooklyn with him.” “She wanted to get to Florida before the snow flew, but that was back in the summer.”

Anyway, the police eventually realized that all six really had disappeared. To their credit, they put up billboards, talked to local reporters to get the story out, pressed their informants to see if anybody knew anything. The case dragged on, and on, and on…until finally they announced that they’d arrested this local guy in his twenties who lived with his parents in a nice-enough house in a nice-enough neighborhood. Over time he had picked the women up, one by one, brought them back to his house for sex, killed them, and stuffed the bodies in a wall of the family’s basement. Somehow, no one noticed, though several neighbors had apparently complained from time to time about the smell.

The street was closed for six months or so as the police painstakingly pulled the house apart to gather evidence. They eventually found five or the six if memory serves, plus a corpse of another woman who they hadn’t known was missing; the sixth, it developed, had been killed as well but in an unrelated case by a guy a couple of counties away. The whole thing was tremendously, tremendously sad.

I didn’t have any direct connection with any of the victims or with the murderer or his family, didn’t even really know *of *them the way that often happens in a smallish community, but I knew lots of people who did: one friend worked with the murderer’s mom, another knew the dad, a colleague remembered one of the women from elementary school, the murderer had worked for a while as a hall monitor in a local high school…”It could have been my daughter,” people said if they had girls at the school, and while they were wrong—his conduct at the school had been just fine—I knew what they were saying.

I lived about a mile away at the time, but a few years later we moved to a new place around the corner from the scene. The house is gone now, of course, replaced by a new one that looks just a little out of place in an older neighborhood, a new house with new owners, and except for a small display along the boulevard that might or might not be a memorial to the women who died there, there’s no indication of the awful events that happened at that address; no markers, no plaques, no psychic disturbances; the street looks much the same as any other around here. I routinely walk my dog past the house, I walk by it when I go to the post office, to the restaurants on the next block, to the college campus just beyond. I drive past it sometimes on my way to work, to the ballpark, to the mall. Sometimes when I pass by the place I remember to remember the victims, but mostly I don’t. Thanks to your post—and I hope there’s a happier ending in Chillicothe than there was here—I’ll try to remember them better.

18

[quote=“Dogzilla, post:5, topic:759912”]

I am from Mansfield

As in “home of the Leaning Tower of Pizza”? Mmmm. (Sorry; not trying to hijack)

19

Ulf, your town actually had what a lot of people here feared. My gut feeling is that no more than three of the cases here are directly related, and that the deaths are the result of extreme attempts to control trafficked women rather than whatever drives serial killers.

Justin McCrary was convicted for the murder of Timberly Claytor yesterday. She was the woman mentioned in the OP who never went missing, but was found shot dead.