Town note
Settlers first named the city Newport, a name shared by about a hundred other places.
about 0:08:07The story
Parkersburg, West Virginia, lies in Wood County in the north-west of the state, about an hour and fifty minutes from Columbus, Ohio, and it is where this story begins on 20 November 1979. Charles Morgan Marsh, a thirty-three-year-old Vietnam veteran from Georgetown County, South Carolina, who had drifted into Parkersburg and into the drug trade, was living with his girlfriend Debbie Hannah in a house on Dry Run Road, a gravel road out in the hills beyond the city. Marsh, known to everyone as Swampy, had served in the Air Force, called himself a wholesale antique dealer in his obituary and worked as a marijuana and cocaine mule between South Carolina and West Virginia. Debbie worked part-time at the DMV. That morning she left for work at nine and came home for lunch around noon. She could not find him, then walked into the bedroom and found him handcuffed on the bed with his head cut off and placed on the nightstand beside the lamp. His hair had been combed. On the wall were the words: I came, you weren't home, I love you. She ran three miles to a bar and burst in screaming that they had killed him and cut his head off.
Police found the house ransacked, $30,000 in cash under the mattress and a quantity of cocaine and marijuana. Parkersburg police, the Wood County Sheriff's Office and the West Virginia State Police all attended. There were no fingerprints, no signs of forced entry, no hair and no physical evidence at all. Marsh's green pickup was found days later, neatly parked in stown across the Ohio River, also without a fingerprint. The case went cold. A fortnight later divers searched the muddy Ohio River for the knife.
His father drove a truck and worked as a mechanic and drank heavily; his mother waited tables in a roadside diner. He fought constantly in junior high, once beat a smaller boy with a shoe hard enough to put him in hospital, and was suspended for three days. He wrestled, had the potential to wrestle in college, then began failing classes, using drugs at sixteen and committing petty crime. His juvenile record included shoplifting, theft, assault, a knife pulled at a skating rink, curfew and drinking offences and a September 1969 breaking and entering at Bur Oak. A probation officer wrote that he dominated other youths, lacked remorse and enjoyed inflicting fear. A teacher said he was the kind of boy who would stab you with a pencil just to see you bleed and then ask for another pencil. Psychological testing later put his IQ at 124 and found no thought disorder or psychosis.
By the time he came out he was six foot three, heavily built and known on the street as the Mechanic, a man who could take a person apart the way a mechanic takes apart a car. He collected knives, cleaned them obsessively and practised slicing in front of a full-length mirror. He also told people that a body had to be dismembered and disposed of, because no body meant no crime. Women were drawn to him and stayed loyal long after the relationships ended; one of them, Lawana Joyce Norton, known as Pixie, was his girlfriend at the time of the Marsh murder and had been born on 27 May 1947 in Merced, California.
Pixie also described another murder. He disappeared in 1978 or 1979 and failed to appear at a federal court hearing on his gambling business on 11 February 1980. No missing persons report was ever filed. Informants said he had been killed and dismembered and his parts left in landfills around Fairfield County.
An argument began over a six thousand dollar cocaine debt. He then decapitated both bodies, dismembered them in the bath, bagged the parts and, with another man, drove around Franklin County putting the bags in dumpsters. She later said he held up Peggy's severed head and said: look what I've done.
Chris's parents reported the couple missing on 25 August 1982. Police found the house empty, the car in the garage and a half-drunk glass of iced tea beside a lawn chair on the porch. The case stayed open. She was given immunity and became the star witness.
The panel gave him life for Christopher Lurch and death for Peggy Ann Lurch. The clemency board voted nine to zero against him.
A fifteen-year-old Columbus boy, John Anthony Munsey, known as Tony, disappeared in October 1983 and was found dismembered in garbage bags beside South Galena Road in Delaware County.