Blood On The Corn

In the autumn of 1982 Annette Cooper Johnston was eighteen and living in Logan, Ohio. She was a high school senior taking college-level courses and a student at Hocking Technical College, where she was learning computer programming and planned to go on to Ohio State University. She had been a semi-finalist in the Miss Parade of the Hills and was remembered as a perfectionist who cried over a mark of 98. She was engaged to Todd Schultz, nineteen, a quiet young man who had restored a 1967 Pontiac LeMans, had worked at a print shop until a hernia cost him the job, and lived with his mother Sandra and three younger siblings in a trailer on welfare. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it The move cut the family's food stamps to sixteen dollars a month. this part of the story is covered for now Sarah later said Annette would say anything to get her own way. Annette's friends noticed in the weeks before she vanished that she had stopped dyeing her hair and dressing neatly and seemed troubled.

On 4 October 1982 Annette got an A in her computer programming class. She went back to the Schultz trailer and argued with Todd about marrying, moving out and selling her car. She walked out and Todd ran after her. Two neighbours, Clara Anderson and George Groves, watched them talk for ten minutes and then walk away hand in hand. A driver, Melody Moorehouse, saw them near Gallagher and Motherwell Streets at about 4.30, not long after General Hospital finished. Charles Blosser, who slept in the cornfield by the Hocking River, saw them having sex on the riverbank. They walked the C&O tracks towards West Logan, were seen by Scott Cothan, and stopped at a garage sale, where they put down five dollars on a coffee table for their first flat.

At about 5.45 that afternoon Charles Bartow, a security guard at Armco Steel, heard three shots, a pause, then four or five more, which he took to be a .22. Shirley Fraser, watching from her mother's house on Homer Street, saw the couple on the tracks with a taller, older man in dark green coveralls and a hat. The man went down the embankment into the cornfield, Todd followed, and Annette went after them. Minutes later Fraser heard shots and a woman scream, 'Oh my God, you shot him', then more shots and silence. The man in coveralls came back up, looked around, stared at her, and she drove off. Later that night Janice Moyer saw three vehicles cross the access road into the cornfield: a dark pickup with a white roll bar, another pickup carrying a trail bike, and a van.

For more than a week the police did not search. They treated the couple as adults who had run off. A CB radio club, the REACT group, organised a search on 14 October. A volunteer saw something in the Hocking River; the next day deputies recovered a torso with no arms, legs or head. A sock containing fleshy material, a bloodstained feed bag and graves in the cornfield followed. In the graves were four arms, four legs and two heads. Both bodies had been dismembered and their genitalia removed. Todd's torso carried an eight-by-eight-inch cross-shaped knife wound and smaller punctures; six of Annette's fingernails were missing. The autopsy found that both had died of gunshot wounds. details of the account remain covered until revealed

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He had a history of alleged abuse, had been seen with the couple, and gave police three nude photographs of Annette aged twelve, posed with a shotgun. He also told police he was psychic, that Annette would send him a mental message, and that he had seen the couple beside water and in a car. this part of the story is covered for now A bootprint, bloodstained household items from a strip mine pit behind the Johnstons' home, a feed bag, a pair of suede shoes and a cancelled cheque dated 4 October were assembled. A ballistics expert said the bullets did not come from the .22 seized on the farm.

details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it His wife's testimony, including her remark that she had told him she did not care if he raped Annette every day of the week so long as she got her baby back, was struck out as privileged. Michelle, seventeen, was his alibi but contradicted herself. A witness, Steve Rhine, had been hypnotised and described a man with shoulder-length brown hair and a moustache, not the balding grey-haired Johnston. The defence argued that Satanists had killed the couple; their expert was not called. Johnston admitted one sexual contact with Annette when she was about eleven. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He always maintained his innocence and later received $775,000 from Ohio's fund for the wrongly imprisoned.

this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now The four went to the river to party. details of the account remain covered until revealed He said the drugs and alcohol did the thinking. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now Sarah Johnston was later treated in a psychiatric hospital. The murders remain among the worst in the town's history, and Logan changed its Halloween that year.