Jo Ann Wiblin
Mrs. Wiblin’s book is titled Brothers in Murder.Wiblin and her husband have lived in Newark, Ohio, for fifty-five years. She spent approximately four of these following a series of murders in Licking County and the Columbus area. Occasional bar fights and assaults resulting in murder are rare there, but a series of murders was sensational business.Wiblin was working on her second master’s degree shortly after the murders began. She took to driving to the murder locations just for curiosity. One of the victims, Jenkin Jones, lived in Granville; and her husband knew him slightly. Her husband was, at the time, a supervisor at the local vocational school at the time and often took tools to Jones for sharpening for the school. Once, he took their four-year-old son with him, and Mr. Jones asked Dan if he wanted to see how he sometimes slept in the shop. Dan said yes, and Mr. Jones lay down on the cot there, and his three dogs curled up around him. Dan was fascinated.Later, Mr. Jones was murdered as he sat watching TV in his living room, and several of the dogs were also killed.Wiblin couldn’t get these crimes off her mind. Newspapers said the murderers used the freeway to get to their victims, and she would try to get that out of her mind as she traveled them.When the arrest finally came, one brother had been captured, and the other had not. The author and her husband learned that police and other officials had gathered at the State of Ohio Highway garage on their road, just two miles away from Charles Lewingdon’s house. That put him about five miles from the author’s home.The book is a synopsis of the crimes, the brothers’ personal lives, and the final capture of both men.The brothers have since both died in prison.
