Thomas Lee Dillon pleaded guilty in 1993 to five counts of aggravated murder in Ohio. Over about three years, from 1989 to 1992, he shot five men who happened to be outdoors alone in the rural counties of eastern Ohio: a jogger, two deer hunters and two fishermen. None of them knew him. He chose them, by his own account, because they were there.
At home he was a married man with a son, a college graduate who worked as a draftsman for a local water department. On weekends he drove the back roads in his pickup, sometimes a hundred miles or more, and shot animals, set fires and, in the end, shot people. The case was broken by a friend who went to the police and by a gun dealer who recognized his photograph in the newspaper. He accepted a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty and served the rest of his life in Ohio prisons. He died in state custody in 2011, aged 61.
Years after his death his name came up again in Michigan, where a file naming him as a suspect in the 1990 deaths of two hunters had never been given to the defense of the man convicted of those killings. That conviction was thrown out in 2023.
Little has been published about Dillon's early life. CBS News, reporting in 2002 for 60 Minutes II and 48 Hours, described him as college educated, married, with a son, and employed for two decades as a draftsman, the 48 Hours account placing that work with the local water department. The Times Leader of Martins Ferry described him as a Stark County resident, and the Associated Press has given his hometown as Magnolia, Ohio.
The psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon, whom the defense later hired to examine him, put his IQ at about 135, in what Smalldon called the superior range. Smalldon told CBS News that Dillon had fantasies of fame and power: of being president of the United States, of playing in a rock band such as the Doors or the Beatles, of leading the Cleveland Browns to a Super Bowl, and of fighting in a war.
He liked to hunt, and people who knew him took that at face value. What they did not know, CBS News reported, was what he was hunting. By the account he later gave, and by what investigators found, he had set more than 100 fires and killed more than a thousand pets and farm animals. Tom McCort, who was Belmont County sheriff when Jamie Paxton was killed, told The Times Leader in 2011 that Dillon started with small animals, went on to shooting cattle and burning barns, and then turned to people. CBS News's 48 Hours described him as a man known to enjoy shooting things, including cows, small animals and other people's pets.
Dillon's method, as he described it to investigators, was simple. He drove rural roads on weekends, alone in his pickup, until he saw someone by himself: a hunter, a fisherman, a man out jogging. Then he turned the truck around, took aim and fired. He told investigators he never missed.
He left almost nothing behind. The prosecutor Michael Miller told CBS News that there were no spent casings and that no one ever saw his vehicle. Police reports quoted by the Michigan Attorney General in 2023 say he drove long distances to commit his crimes and collected his shell casings afterward. "You never knew when they were going to happen," Miller said.
Each killing took place in a different Ohio county, and each county at first handled its own case.
The first killing to which Dillon pleaded guilty took place in 1989 in Tuscarawas County. The victim was a 35-year-old man from Strasburg who was shot while he was out jogging. The Times Leader, in its 2011 report on Dillon's death, gave his name as Donald Wells.
Jamie Paxton was 21 and lived in Bannock, in Belmont County. In November 1990 he was killed while deer hunting in Belmont County, near Uniontown. His compound bow was still in his car.
His mother remembered him for his good-natured grin and for his perfect attendance at the Bannock United Methodist Church. She wrote of both in letters after his death, quoted in 1993 by People magazine and again by The Times Leader in 2011. "We knew absolutely nothing," she told CBS News years later, describing how the family waited without a witness, a weapon or a motive.
Eighteen days after Jamie Paxton died, Kevin Loring, 30, was shot while hunting in Muskingum County. He lived in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and, according to CBS News, he had come to Ohio on a family trip to visit relatives and to hunt. Dillon later told investigators that he had gone to the library in Loring's hometown to read about him, and that he had visited the graves of the men he killed.
The killing of Jamie Paxton drew a response that the others did not. In the months after his death his mother wrote letters addressed to the person who had killed him. Some she posted on a wooden frame in the field where he died; others were published by The Times Leader, the daily paper in Martins Ferry. In one she wrote that someone out there would know the letter was meant for them. In another she told the killer that his hands were "the hands of a murderer" and that "you can't wash Jamie's blood from them." The People magazine writer Joe Treen, quoted by The Times Leader, described the letters as a key early break.
On November 4, 1991, six days before the first anniversary of Jamie's death, The Times Leader received a typewritten letter. Its author identified himself as the person who had killed Jamie Paxton and signed it "The murderer of Jamie Paxton." He wrote that when he left his house that day he knew someone would die by his hand, though not who or where. He blamed drink and an inner voice: "I was very drunk, and a voice inside of my head said, 'Do it.'"
CBS News quoted other lines from the same letter. The writer described a "compulsion that has taken over my life" and wrote that "the motive for the murder was the murder itself." He said he had thought no more of shooting Paxton than of "shooting a bottle at the dump." The FBI's behavioral sciences unit at Quantico, Virginia, found the letter very useful for its analysis, The Times Leader reported.
Smalldon later told CBS News that Dillon had admitted the voice he wrote about was his own. He also said Dillon was drawn by an urge to insert himself into the investigation.
There were two more killings in 1992. Claude Hawkins, 48, of Mansfield, was shot while fishing in Coshocton County. Gary Bradley, 44, of Williamstown, West Virginia, died while fishing in Noble County.
Fred Thompson was working the Paxton case for the Belmont County Sheriff's Office when he received a call about the unexplained killing of a fisherman in Coshocton County and learned of a jogger shot in Tuscarawas County, The Times Leader reported. He put together a task force that came to include the FBI and the Ohio Division of Wildlife. Thompson later served as Belmont County sheriff himself.
As another deer season approached, investigators warned the public. A friend of Dillon's then came forward to say that his behavior had been suspicious, The Times Leader reported. CBS News said the friend knew that Dillon liked to drive those back roads, owned guns and had killed animals.
The task force followed Dillon for months, according to CBS News, and he was then arrested on a weapons charge.
After his arrest, Dillon's photograph appeared in the newspaper. A gun dealer who had bought a Mauser rifle from him recognized the picture, CBS News reported, and called the task force; he still had the rifle. The FBI laboratory confirmed that the Mauser had been used in one of the killings. The Times Leader recorded that a friend's tip and the work that followed led to his arrest, and that animal killings across southern Ohio were linked to him in the course of the investigation.
The evidence against Dillon now included a murder weapon. The prosecutor, Michael Miller, offered a bargain: if Dillon pleaded guilty and confessed, the state would not seek the death penalty, CBS News reported. He accepted.
His confession was videotaped and lasted nearly four hours. He asked to see the autopsy photographs, and investigators showed them to him. Asked how he felt about the men he had shot, he said he had "no feelings whatsoever." They were, he said, "just there," in "the wrong place at the wrong time." Of Jamie Paxton, he said he had taken him for a man of 30 or 35 and felt bad on learning how young he was. "I felt sorry for him," he said. Asked whether there would have been more victims if he had not been caught, he answered, "Probably."
In 1993 he pleaded guilty to five counts of aggravated murder and was sentenced to five consecutive life terms, The Times Leader reported. The Michigan Attorney General's office and the Associated Press, writing in 2023, describe the pleas as five counts of first-degree murder entered to avoid the death penalty. His wife and their then-teenage son attended the court proceedings, according to The Times Leader.
The defense hired Smalldon to determine whether Dillon was legally insane. He concluded that Dillon was not, because Dillon knew what he was doing was wrong. Smalldon described him to CBS News as narcissistic and driven by a need for recognition, a man who often asked whether he was "hard to understand" and whose statements should be taken "with a grain of salt." He thought Dillon was holding things back because "he wants to remain a puzzle."
Smalldon also offered a view of what drove him: "You have to have more and more intensity, more and more risk, more and more stimulation." Miller told CBS News that Dillon "felt he was something special," that he was proud of his fame, and that "he would have done it again."
Dillon served his sentences in the Ohio prison system. Before his last illness he was held at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, The Times Leader reported. From prison he wrote to Smalldon. In those letters, CBS News reported in 2002, he said he wished he had sought help earlier and that he was sorry for how the killings had affected his family.
Dillon died in 2011, aged 61, after an illness of three weeks. The Times Leader reported his death on October 25, 2011, saying he had died the previous Friday in the prison wing of The Ohio State University Medical Center in Columbus. The Michigan Attorney General's office, in 2023, gave the place of death as the medical wing of the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus.
Fred Thompson, by then a former Belmont County sheriff, told The Times Leader that he had spoken with Jamie Paxton's mother and that they agreed Dillon's death brought "final closure." He compared Dillon to Jekyll and Hyde: an ordinary family man during the week who hunted people on Saturdays. "Tom Dillon has caused enough grief and heartache in southeastern Ohio that he'll never be able to pay for his debt," Thompson said.
Tom McCort, the sheriff in 1990, remembered the victims as "innocent, good people." There was never a motive, he said: "it was just a thrill. He had no remorse."
On November 17, 1990, two hunters, Doug Estes and Jim Bennett, were found shot dead in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. There were no witnesses and no physical evidence. A local man, J.T., was at first ruled out as a suspect; he has said he was hunting deer about 27 miles away at the time. The case went cold. A county cold-case unit reopened it in 2000, and in 2002 J.T. was convicted of two counts of first-degree premeditated murder and sentenced to life without parole.
The University of Michigan Law School's Innocence Clinic had pursued J.T.'s innocence claim for years, and producers of the Undisclosed podcast pointed his lawyers to Dillon. The Attorney General's Conviction Integrity Unit agreed in 2019 to review the case, the Associated Press reported. The clinic's David Moran then found, in the Kalamazoo County Sheriff's Office's original files, a file of about 30 pages on an alternate suspect: Thomas Dillon of Magnolia, Ohio. It had been marked "serial killer" in pencil. Neither J.T.'s trial lawyer nor the prosecutors had been given it.
According to the Law Quadrangle, Ohio authorities contacted the Kalamazoo County sheriff in 1993, and two witnesses were taken to Ohio, where they identified Dillon as the man they had seen in a car in a ditch near the scene on the day of the killings; one of them had made a sketch in 1990 and described a car like one owned by Dillon's wife. Police reports cited by the Attorney General's office add that two of Dillon's co-workers said he had borrowed a gun from each of them for hunting on November 17, 1990, and the two Michigan victims were killed with two different types of ammunition. The same release noted that Dillon had confessed to killings about a week before and a week after the Michigan deaths. A man held with Dillon in prison told the FBI that Dillon had bragged about killing two hunters at once, in a county where no one could prove he had been. The Michigan Law School's Quadrangle magazine reported that the original sheriff had dismissed Dillon because of a math error about whether he could have reached Michigan in time.
Michigan Public noted that the documents do not prove Dillon committed the Michigan killings. He was never charged with them.
On February 24, 2023, U.S. District Judge Paul Borman granted J.T. a new trial and ordered his release, with the agreement of the Attorney General's office, which said the withheld evidence meant he had not received a fair trial. On June 1, 2023, the Kalamazoo County prosecutor, Jeff Getting, dropped all charges. In May 2026 J.T. agreed to a $5.25 million settlement of a lawsuit accusing police of withholding evidence, the Associated Press reported; that suit did not center on Dillon.
In 2018 the Pennsylvania State Police appealed for information about the death of John Joseph Harvat, a hunter shot on November 28, 1984, in Wetmore Township, McKean County, while on a post-Thanksgiving hunting trip with relatives and friends. In that appeal the state police said that in 1993 the Coshocton County Sheriff's Department in Ohio had contacted them about similar shootings and a suspect it had developed, Thomas Lee Dillon, who had confessed to five killings with a high-powered rifle. Dillon refused to speak with Pennsylvania investigators. The release does not say that Dillon was connected to Harvat's death, and the case was still unsolved at the time of the 2018 appeal.
Proven by his own guilty pleas, and final: five counts of aggravated murder covering the five Ohio killings from 1989 to 1992.
Never charged, suspected only: the November 17, 1990, deaths of Doug Estes and Jim Bennett in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. The evidence pointing to Dillon comes from a 1993 sheriff's file, two eyewitness identifications, co-workers' statements and a fellow prisoner's account. No court has found that he killed them.
Raised but not linked: the 1984 death of John Joseph Harvat in Pennsylvania. Ohio investigators contacted Pennsylvania State Police about similar shootings; Dillon would not talk to them.
Unconfirmed claims by Dillon himself: CBS News reported that he told investigators his first victim was a man sitting on a sofa watching television, shot through a window about 13 years before his confession. No victim, place or date has been confirmed for that claim, and he was never charged with it. Smalldon told CBS News he thought there was "a good chance" Dillon had killed others.
Details that vary between accounts: the formal description of the 1993 pleas (aggravated murder in The Times Leader; first-degree murder in the Michigan Attorney General's release and Associated Press reports); the year of his arrest (Associated Press and the Michigan Attorney General say 1993); the place of his death (the prison wing of The Ohio State University Medical Center, or the Corrections Medical Center in Columbus); and the name of the first victim, given as Donald Wells in The Times Leader's 2011 report.
1989: a 35-year-old jogger from Strasburg is shot and killed in Tuscarawas County.
November 1990: Jamie Paxton, 21, of Bannock, is killed while deer hunting in Belmont County.
November 1990, 18 days after Paxton's death: Kevin Loring, 30, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is killed while hunting in Muskingum County.
November 17, 1990: two hunters, Doug Estes and Jim Bennett, are killed in Kalamazoo County, Michigan (Dillon later a suspect; never charged).
After Paxton's death: his mother writes public letters to his killer.
November 4, 1991: The Times Leader receives a typed letter signed "The murderer of Jamie Paxton."
1992: Claude Hawkins, 48, is killed while fishing in Coshocton County; Gary Bradley, 44, is killed while fishing in Noble County.
Before a deer season: a task force including the FBI and the Ohio Division of Wildlife warns the public; a friend of Dillon's comes forward; he is followed for months and arrested on a weapons charge.
After the arrest: a gun dealer recognizes his photo and hands over a Mauser rifle; the FBI laboratory ties it to one of the killings.
1993: Ohio authorities contact Pennsylvania State Police and the Kalamazoo County sheriff about Dillon.
1993: Dillon pleads guilty to five counts of aggravated murder under a deal sparing him the death penalty; sentenced to five consecutive life terms.
2002: J.T. is convicted of the Michigan killings.
October 2002: CBS News reports on Dillon's videotaped confession and his psychologist's findings.
2011: Dillon dies in state custody in Columbus, aged 61; The Times Leader reports his death on October 25.
July 6, 2018: Pennsylvania State Police renew their appeal in the 1984 Harvat case, noting the 1993 contact about Dillon.
February 24, 2023: J.T.'s convictions are vacated and he is released, after the withheld file on Dillon comes to light.
June 1, 2023: Kalamazoo County drops all charges against J.T.
May 2026: J.T. agrees to a $5.25 million settlement.