On the afternoon of September 19, 1975, a man walked into the federal office building in Dayton, Ohio, and asked for Dr. Charles A. Glatt. When the forty-six-year-old sociologist answered, the man shot him four times in the neck, chest and abdomen with a pistol. Guards arrested him minutes later. Glatt died of complications three hours after the shooting. He worked at Ohio State University and was one of the country's leading designers of school desegregation busing plans; he had drawn them up for districts in eighteen states, and that year the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals had appointed him to prepare one for Dayton by November 3. The gunman, Neal Bradley Long, said he had killed him because of the desegregation programs, which he believed would bring conflict, crime and attacks by Black children on his twelve-year-old son.
Long had a long record of hostility toward Black people. On October 31, 1966, he walked into a police station and said that in the summer of 1944, when he was seventeen, he and a friend had been attacked by two Black men on Washington Street and he had stabbed one in self-defense and left him bleeding; he was held briefly and released when no record of any such incident could be found. In 1968 he went voluntarily to the Dayton Mental Health Center, where in three months he was diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorder. He collected pistols, shotguns and military gear. When he was arrested he was going through a divorce and working at a service station in Kettering.
After his arrest he admitted between twenty-five and thirty attacks on Black people in Dayton from 1972 to 1975, made under the influence of alcohol and drugs, firing a double-barrel shotgun from his Ford Fairlane. The shootings, several of them fatal, had caused panic in the city; the unknown gunman was called the Shotgun Slayer or the Midnight Slayer, a $10,000 reward was posted, residents patrolled the streets at night, civil rights groups asked the city to declare an emergency, and Dayton police asked the FBI for help without result. At first his account was doubted, but within weeks survivors and witnesses identified him, and police found shotguns and pistols wrapped in pillowcases in his apartment.
Matching his statements against dates and places, investigators charged him with six murders besides Glatt's and with a string of shootings: the wounding of Eddie Freson on August 21, 1972; the murder of Edward Tillman and wounding of James Watts on September 26, 1973; a shotgun blast into a party crowd on May 23, 1975, that wounded George Ingram; the July 1975 murders of Larry Romine, twenty-seven, in Dayton View and Robert Hoard, twenty-one, on Cincinnati Street; and the attempted murders of Leonard Goff and Glenda Gay a few days later. In 2016 the Dayton Daily News published a former Dayton police officer's claim that Long had also killed Lester Mitchell, the Black man whose unsolved death in 1966 set off the Dayton race riot of that year. He was never charged in that case.
A psychiatric evaluation released on November 4, 1975, found him sane. At his trial, which began in late 1976, he admitted his guilt and expressed remorse. In November 1976 he pleaded guilty in federal court to civil rights charges and first-degree murder in Glatt's killing, and on December 27 was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. In 1977 he pleaded guilty in state court to three counts of murder to avoid a possible death sentence and received three more life terms and twenty-two to eighty-five years; prosecutors took the pleas partly because of concerns about witnesses, one of whom, Leonard Goff, had died of an overdose. For his own safety he served his sentences in federal institutions outside Ohio under an assumed name. He was moved in the mid-1990s to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, where he died on June 12, 1998.