1838
Founded in 1838 as the seat of the newly formed Chattooga County.
about 0:05:47The story
His father served 19 years in the US Army before settling in Ohio to work at the Ford plant in Sandusky, and the family lived in New London. In 1979 he enlisted in the Army in Cleveland, trained as a motor transport operator and joined the 102nd Quartermaster Company, earning a citation for delivering aviation fuel to the 101st Airborne Division. He was honourably discharged in August 1985.
On 11 October 1985 he married Sherry Jane Brown, and their daughter Crystal was born in February 1986. The marriage turned violent.
He lived on disability and Social Security, mostly around Norwalk and Greenwich, Ohio, and passed through at least nine mental hospitals and clinics in about a decade. He checked himself in voluntarily and left when he chose, so doctors told his family they could not hold him. He said his apartment was bugged, that satellites controlled his alarm clock and his mind, that a banshee beamed thoughts into his head, that federal agents had set fire to his apartment, that his sperm was being extracted and implanted in women around the world, and that people in town were trying to bite off his penis. In November 1998 he told Greenwich police chief Randall Kilgore that something evil had a hold of him; the same day he had been found sitting in the mayor's new Lincoln Town Car. On Christmas Day 1998 he followed a driver from Utica to Nick's Saloon in Newark, Ohio, and told officers the reason was top secret.
In the summer of 1999 he dated Cheryl Jones for about three months. She broke it off in July, and in late August or early September she introduced him to Patricia Ann Booher, who was born in 1975 and lived in the same complex at Firelands Village in Norwalk. Patricia had grown up in a trailer near Olena, Ohio, had been repeatedly molested as a child, and was under the care of Huron County Human Services, classified as mildly retarded. She volunteered at the Salvation Army, a soup kitchen and a food bank, and in January 2000 she was five weeks pregnant.
They broke up and reconciled repeatedly in the last two weeks of 1999. She gave the ring back on 13 January 2000, and three days later he told his aunt that an angel was talking to him. On 19 January he sold a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun for $150. On 20 January he visited Norwalk police sergeant David Light, a friend, and said a doctor had taken him off some medication; the drugs stopped included Haldol, Cogentin and Prozac, all of which had been taken three times a day. On 21 January Patricia learned at a clinic that she was pregnant and was happy about it.
At three o'clock on the morning of 22 January he visited a cousin of his ex-wife and said the government had planted a bug in his head, that he had great demonic powers and that the police were trying to take them away. Hours later he and Patricia left Ohio for Winter Haven, Florida, to visit his parents. She took only a coat and purse; he had a few dollars and two long knives in the back seat. They spent the night of 22 January in the car in a motel car park in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in freezing rain.
On the morning of Sunday 23 January 2000 they crossed into Georgia. He then followed a woman in a green Nissan Maxima to her driveway and told her they were lost.
On County Road 641 near Mentone, Alabama, he rammed the back of a pickup driven by Rhea Perch. Her husband Donald, 52, who had broken three ribs on New Year's Day, got out to exchange insurance details. Rhea ran to the highway for help. He stabbed James in the abdomen without warning, grabbed Sue by the collar and stabbed both of the couple's chocolate Labradors to death. James survived a five-inch wound.
Mentone police chief Jeff Bain spotted the Lincoln, and at the junction of U.S. Highway 11 and Alabama 117 officers Johnny Ferguson and Wayne Wooten boxed it in at gunpoint. Wooten found Patricia's body in the passenger seat, seatbelt fastened, her clothing arranged over a gaping chest wound. Her throat had been cut from ear to ear, her heart and liver removed, her eyes taken out, her left hand cut off at the wrist and her right leg cut off at the knee. Her hand, heart and liver lay on the floorboard.
He told investigators that he was a Secret Service agent with badge number 666, on a top secret mission to terminate a double agent and black witch, that he had cut off her hand and leg so that she could not come back at him, and that voices from a satellite implant behind his left ear had directed the whole rampage. A surveillance tape placed the couple in a discount food mart outside Trion, Georgia, at 2.24 p.m.; the killing is thought to have happened in the car park there at about 2.36 p.m. The car was covered in blood, with 12 cuts in the front seat upholstery.
He lost more than half his body weight in custody. In 2003 a deputy bought the Lincoln at the county auction.