Neal Bradley Long

Victims

7 attributed - 4 KILLINGS COVERED BY GUILTY PLEAS, and the total is genuinely disputed. He was linked to at least twenty-one attacks on Black men in Dayton between 1972 and 1975, in which sources place the deaths at between four and seven and the wounded at fourteen. Dayton police recorded three confirmed deaths at the time. He told a detective he had shot twenty-five or thirty people, and later told a federal court psychologist he had fired at about a hundred and might have killed twenty; NEITHER FIGURE IS CORROBORATED and he is a suspect, never charged, in at least one further unsolved Dayton killing

Years active

1972 - 1975

Location

Dayton, Ohio, USA

Method

Shooting

Status

Arrested on September 19, 1975, minutes after shooting Dr Charles A. Glatt, the court-appointed consultant who was drawing up Dayton’s school desegregation plan, inside the downtown federal building. He confessed and said he was angry about desegregation. FEDERAL CONVICTIONS for the first-degree murder of a federal employee and for interference with a federally provided activity resulting in death, and OHIO CONVICTIONS for two counts of aggravated murder and one of murder, all entered by GUILTY PLEA. He received several life terms, the archive’s own record naming two consecutive ones, and served them in prisons outside Ohio UNDER AN ASSUMED NAME because the notoriety of the case made him a target. He died on June 12, 1998 at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, aged seventy.

Long was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1927 and worked as a labourer. He was, on the record of the case, a committed racist, and that is the whole of the motive.

Between 1972 and 1975 he shot Black men in Dayton, from his car and on the street, choosing them at random. Seven died. In the same period he fired into the home of a local civil rights leader and set fire to Black-owned property.

He was arrested on September 19, 1975 and convicted, receiving two consecutive terms of life imprisonment in 1975.

The killings were racially motivated murders of strangers, and the entry says so plainly rather than reaching for another explanation. He selected people who had done nothing and whom he did not know, on sight, by their colour.

The case is little known outside Ohio, which is worth noting alongside the attention given to other American series of the same decade with the same number of victims.