Larry M. Ralston, born in Norwood, Ohio in 1949, picked up young women and girls who were hitchhiking or waiting at bus stops around Cincinnati between 1975 and 1977, and strangled five of them. He was arrested on November 15, 1977 and, during two weeks of interrogation, confessed to killings that had gone unsolved for more than two years.
The five named in the record are Linda Kay Harmon, seventeen; Nancy L. Grigsby, twenty-three; Elaina Marie Bear, fifteen; Diana Sue McCrobie, sixteen; and Mary Ruth Hopkins, twenty-one.
Four trials followed in 1978. He was convicted of killing Elaina Bear and sentenced to death; that sentence was commuted to life in July 1978 after Ohio's death penalty statute was struck down. He was further convicted in the deaths of Diane McCrobie, Linda Kay Harmon, 17, and Nancy Grigsby, 23, and pleaded guilty to two counts of rape involving teenage girls. The Grigsby conviction was later overturned on appeal because the prosecution had not established how she died. He is held at Madison Correctional Institution on four life sentences, and every parole application has been refused.
The convictions rest substantially on his own confessions. His trial lawyer has said publicly that he remains unconvinced of his client's guilt in four of the five deaths, on the grounds that no detail in any of the confessions was independently corroborated. The recorded toll is given here as four to five for that reason.