On November 4, 1991, six days before the first anniversary of her son's death, The Times Leader in Martins Ferry, Ohio, received a typed, unsigned letter addressed to it and signed "The murderer of Jamie Paxton." It contained details of the killing that had never been published. "I knew when I left my house that day that someone would die by my hand," the writer said. "I just didn't know who or where." He blamed drink and a voice inside his head that told him to do it, said he would kill again and felt no remorse, and called himself a serial killer. The letter was an answer. Jamie's mother, Jean Paxton, had been writing to her son's killer for a year, pinning some letters to a wooden frame in the field where he died and publishing others in the paper. In one she asked whether he had noticed anything different about his hands: "they are the hands of a murderer. You can't wash Jamie's blood from them."
Jamie Paxton, twenty-one, of Bannock, a steelworker with a good-natured grin and a perfect attendance record at the Bannock United Methodist Church, had been shot three times on November 10, 1990, while going out to bowhunt for deer in Belmont County; his compound bow was still in his car. Eighteen days later Kevin Loring, thirty, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, was shot in the face while deer hunting in Muskingum County; he failed to meet his friends at their cars and was found the next morning. Some accounts give his first name as Keith. The first killing had come nineteen months earlier, in April 1989, when Donald Welling, thirty-five, of Strasburg, was shot while jogging about half a mile from his home in Tuscarawas County.
Each death was in a different county, and each county handled its own. Fred Thompson, then an investigator for the Belmont County sheriff, was working Paxton's death as a single homicide when he learned of a fisherman killed in Coshocton County and a jogger shot in Tuscarawas. He set up a task force that grew to include the FBI and the Ohio Division of Wildlife. The FBI's analysts read the newspaper letter closely and profiled its author as a white man over thirty with at least a high school education, a drinker with a history of vandalism, arson and killing animals. The killer struck twice more. On March 14, 1992, Claude Hawkins, a Mansfield man in his late forties with four children, stopped to fish below the Wills Creek dam after a midnight shift at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass plant and was killed with a high-powered rifle round. On April 5 Gary Bradley, forty-four, of Williamstown, West Virginia, was shot twice while fishing in a remote spot in Noble County.
In August 1992 investigators went public with the profile and a warning as deer season approached. On August 26 Richard Fry, forty-three, called a Tuscarawas County detective about a high school friend. Thomas Lee Dillon, born in Canton on July 9, 1950, was a draftsman for the Canton water department who lived with his wife and teenage son in Magnolia, some seventy-five miles from where Paxton died, and on weekends he drove the back roads shooting out signs, windows and cars. Under surveillance he was seen setting fires and killing animals. A dog shot in Tuscarawas County yielded a .25-caliber slug; Fry bought Dillon's .25-caliber rifle from him at the detective's request, and it matched. Dillon had also fired at a hunter named Larry Ohler, who escaped unhurt, and he was already facing charges for possessing a silencer. On November 27, 1992, with hunting season about to open, agents arrested him on a federal weapons charge.
A search of his home and vehicles turned up none of the rifles. Investigators asked anyone who had bought a gun from him to come forward, and on December 4 a Stark County dealer brought in a Swedish Mauser he said Dillon had sold him on April 6, 1992, at a gun show in Massillon, the day after Bradley was killed. Ballistics tests matched it to the Hawkins and Bradley killings, and on January 27, 1993, Dillon was indicted on capital charges in both. Facing a possible death sentence, he accepted a plea: guilty to five counts of aggravated murder in exchange for his life. Talking to investigators, he recalled that Welling had said "What's up?" just before he fired, and said of Paxton that he felt bad about the kid and had not known from a distance how young he was. He was sentenced in July 1993 to five consecutive life terms. His wife and son attended the proceedings.
When his wife tried to sell his story to Hollywood, Jean Paxton and State Senator Bob Ney pushed through the Paxton Bill, barring Ohio killers and their relatives from profiting from their crimes. Thompson, by then Belmont County sheriff, called Dillon a Jekyll and Hyde who looked like an ordinary family man during the week and went out hunting people on Saturdays. Dillon was held at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville until he fell ill, and he died on October 21, 2011, aged sixty-one, in the prison wing of the Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus. Thompson and Jean Paxton agreed that it brought final closure. The Times Leader's obituary gave the jogger's name as Donald Wells and Hawkins's age as forty-eight; other accounts give Welling and forty-nine.