On September 24, 1977, three teenage girls told police that a man had picked them up, driven them to a rural area outside Cincinnati and raped them. On November 15 police arrested Larry M. Ralston, twenty-eight, of Carter Avenue in Norwood, a high school dropout who had worked at the Hamilton County morgue and a state mental hospital. Detectives in several jurisdictions had been working through the unsolved deaths of young women in the area, and over two weeks of grueling interrogation Ralston confessed to five killings that had gone unsolved for more than two years.
He was born in Norwood on July 5, 1949. The women and girls he confessed to killing had been picked up while hitchhiking or waiting at bus stops, and they were strangled. Mary Ruth Hopkins, twenty-one, of Cincinnati's East End, was found on June 30, 1976, off Five Mile Road in Anderson Township, naked, with a T-shirt wrapped around her neck. Linda Kay Harmon, seventeen, was taken from a bus stop in Anderson Township and found a month later in Felicity. Nancy Grigsby, twenty-three, was from Withamsville. On January 15, 1977, Elaina Marie Bear, fifteen, of Northside, and a friend, Debbie Whitt, hitched a ride home from Clifton with a stranger; he dropped Elaina near her sister's home in Winton Place and then took Debbie home, asking how far Elaina lived from there. Elaina's naked body was found on February 28 in a creek bed in Clinton County, about fifty miles away; she had been strangled on the morning of January 16. Diane Sue McCrobie, sixteen, went out on a date on July 17, 1977, and never came home; her skeletal remains were found on October 22 near East Fork Reservoir.
He was indicted for Elaina Bear's murder on November 29, 1977, while held on three counts of rape and three of kidnapping. A Clermont County jury convicted him on May 4, 1978, after more than seven hours of deliberation, swayed by his confession, and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair, with execution set for October 31, 1978. That July, after the United States Supreme Court struck down Ohio's death penalty statute, the sentence was commuted to life. He was convicted of Diane McCrobie's murder on July 6, 1978, Linda Harmon's on August 2 and Nancy Grigsby's on August 24, and was sentenced for the rapes that September. The Grigsby conviction was overturned on November 7, 1979, because the prosecution had not established how she died, and the Ohio Supreme Court dismissed the charge in February 1980. In 1984 he pleaded guilty to killing Mary Ruth Hopkins and received another life sentence.
The case rests almost entirely on what he said in those two weeks. "There just wasn't very much evidence to tie him to these other than the confessions," his lawyer, Doug Mansfield, said later. "Not one of the confessions has any evidence in it that can be confirmed." Mansfield has said he remains unconvinced of his client's guilt in most of the deaths.
He became eligible for parole in 1999, and every application has been refused, most recently after hearings opposed by the victims' families; a bid in 2018 was his third. Ohio prison records list him as held at Madison Correctional Institution, with his next parole hearing due in July 2028.