1772
Settlers began arriving in 1772, claiming land around where Clarksburg is and building cabins.
about 0:05:54The story
After leaving school he moved to Clarksburg, in Harrison County, where he worked a string of blue-collar jobs: construction, handyman work, painting neighbours' porches and washing down the sides of houses. In the late 1990s he began to show signs of depression and started drinking and using drugs, and he had treatment at the time. Neighbours described him as a friendly, helpful, articulate man who walked the streets day and night talking to everybody and who was on good terms with the local police. He had no criminal record. Others called him a screwball and slippery; he always claimed to have money but was seldom seen working, and he would disappear for days at a time. By the summer of 2009 he was behaving strangely: he offered to sell his house to his next-door neighbour Ed for $5,000, then came back the next day and offered $3,000, saying he was fed up with the neighbourhood and wanted out.
On 1 June 2009 a Clarksburg police lieutenant, Robert Mathini, received a package in the mail. Inside were several letters and a two-hour audio tape. He began with arson: he said he had burned his own house and three other buildings on his street, with his brother John and a neighbour, Tom Rhodes, acting as lookouts. He said he had matches in his pocket when a police officer stopped him on Chestnut Street after one of the fires and never noticed. He called the Clarksburg police impotent and appalling over their arson investigation, and he named Jack Cecil, a man he described as a slum landlord with no morals, as having paid him $5,000 for the house and offered him another $2,000 to burn it down so that he could collect the insurance.
Carrie Lynn Baker was 26 and from Clarksburg; the episode describes her as a prostitute. She disappeared in 2008. He and John drove the body out State Route 57, past the Green Hills Methodist Church and over the Braxton County line, and threw it over the hill, just far enough that it could not be seen; the plastic and bag went into a bin at a car wash in Nutter Fort. He kept getting her first name wrong on the tape, calling her Sherry and then Carol, though he knew her surname.
The second woman was Carolyn Sauerween, 40, of Philippi. She was reported missing in the last week of May 2009. Her body was later found in a shallow grave on the family farm; she had been killed by blows to the head with a blunt object.
He also threatened a woman named Joan Post, saying he intended to go to Locust Avenue, force one of her neighbours to tell him where she lived, kill that neighbour, then kill Post and her mother. And he said there were four bodies buried on the family farm, hundreds of yards apart, buried naked with no identifying jewellery or clothing, in ground he had made to look natural and topped up with more dirt after it sank. He said he had been killing women for four years.
He then admitted to an older killing. In 2004 Cecil Ralph Hill, his friend and former boss, had died of a gunshot. The death was ruled a suicide, though police thought there might be foul play.
A warrant was issued on 2 June 2009 and a manhunt began. He was last seen at the Townhouse Motel in Clarksburg. During the search he went back to his house to cut some tree branches a neighbour had complained about.
After his death police found a hit list under a bed in the burned-out remains of his house, naming three local women and saying he had also considered killing three police officers; the women were traced and were all alive. They searched the farm. Baker's remains were found where he had said, along Route 57, and Sauerween's in the shallow grave. No other bodies were found. Fifteen months after the suicide the investigators still had nothing else.