With thirty-eight kills to his name, LONGLEGS has torn apart the lives of eleven different families throughout the Beaver State. His victims were good people: honest fathers, decent mothers, innocent little children. They were church-going, god-fearing, upstanding members of their community. These families did not deserve their awful fate, and it behooves us to take a moment of silence to honor their memory...

Along with their nine-year-old daughter Theresa, Harland and Patricia Applewhite of Damascus, Oregon appeared to be a prototypical American family. Harland, a certified public accountant with the firm of Chesney & Seifert, and Patricia, a homemaker, first met while attending Easter services at St. Boniface’s Roman Catholic Church. They married in 1955, and shortly thereafter, Patricia gave birth to their one and only child. Little Theresa was said to have a smile that could light up a room. A student at Primrose Lane Elementary, Theresa was fascinated by butterflies and caterpillars. She hoped to be an entomologist when she grew up. Unfortunately, she would never have the chance.

On the night of July 14th, 1966, the Applewhites were killed in their home on the 3400 block of Rhododendron Street. Initially, there didn’t appear to be any mystery as to the circumstances. Clackamas County Sheriff Roy Wicker ruled the killings a murder-suicide committed by Harland. Yet no one – friends, family, co-workers – could imagine Harland would do such a thing. They characterized him as a loving husband and father, a model of stability and sanity.

Harland’s sister, Mrs. Ivalene Dahl stated, “I never believed he did it, not for a minute, not for a second."

What made the crimes even more inconceivable was their grisly nature. Patricia and Theresa were killed with an eight-inch carving knife. According to Medical Examiner Dr. Hugo Portis, “the perpetrator completely severed Patricia’s jugular, then proceeded to stab her more than 20 times in the chest and abdomen.” The little girl was tortured before she was killed; her internal organs were removed post-mortem.

Sheriff Wicker is on record saying, “this was the goriest crime scene I’ve ever witnessed,” adding, “whoever did this was ruthless.” Law enforcement authorities determined that Harland had acted alone, slaying his wife and daughter, before fatally turning the family’s 12-gauge shotgun on himself.

“The thing that didn’t add up was the letter,” Wicker recalled.

Police found a letter inscribed with sigils affixed to the refrigerator. The note was written in a cipher of strange, exotic symbols. “We didn’t have any luck cracking it, that’s for sure,” Wicker remembered. “The handwriting didn’t match Harland’s... or anyone else’s, for that matter.” The only part of the message that wasn’t written in code was the neatly handwritten signature at the bottom...

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Frustrated in their attempts to decipher the letter, law enforcement officers assumed it wasn’t important. Years later, when the case was re-opened by the FBI, the coded message would turn out to be a key piece of evidence.

Marshall Clover and his wife Carol, lived in Echo, Oregon with their ten-year-old daughter, Miranda. According to all who knew them, they were a happy family. On June 20th, 1968, their happiness would come to an end. Their white shingle house on Waxcap Way had always been kept in immaculate condition; neighbors called Carol a first-class homemaker.

“The house was so drenched in blood, they had to tear it down,” said next-door neighbor Merlin Bloch. “Couldn’t get the stains out the floor and walls.”

Umatilla County Sheriff John Squires ruled the killings a murder-suicide perpetrated by Marshall, a successful travel agent. “There was something about it that didn’t sit right with me,” stated Squires years later. “I knew Marshall personally, and I just couldn’t reconcile him doing such a thing. Not as brutal as all that, certainly.” The murders were committed with the same savagery as the Applewhite killings, though this time there was an additional element: Satanic imagery indicative of a devil-worshipper.

“The signs were all there,” Squires commented. “The pentagram written in blood, the number of the beast. It was some pretty demonic business.” Yet, Father Melvin Childress of St. Casimir’s Church affirmed that Marshall had always been “a good catholic” and added that he had served as a sexton for several years. Everything about the case baffled authorities.

As with the Applewhite case, a letter was left on the refrigerator, written in coded characters. At the bottom, the message was signed in ink...

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“We didn’t know about the Applewhite case,” Sheriff Squires recalled. “No one put them together until years later when the feds got involved.”

Thomas Pendergast had been “acting strangely for a few days before it happened,” according to his employee, Arlene Stanhouse. “He was nervous and kept mumbling something about his youngest daughter not really being his daughter.”

Pendergast, a grocer, and his wife Loretta were the parents of two young girls, Rhonda (10) and Louise (9). They lived in a white two-story house on Beaverton Road in the town of Sisters, Oregon. According to all who knew them, they were a “quiet, happy family.”

Thus, it came as a shock when Thomas decapitated his wife and daughters with a cleaver on the evening of August 9th, 1969. Deschutes County Sheriff Scott Wampler called the crime scene “a horror-show, one of the bloodiest I’d ever seen.” The bodies were lined up next to each other on the floor in the dining room. The cause of death in each case was determined to be exsanguination, or severe loss of blood. After killing his family, Thomas walked into the garage, where he shot himself in the head with a Remington model 1100 12-gauge shotgun. “It seemed pretty cut-and-dried,” Wampler said of the case. “The only thing that stood out was that damn note.”

A letter in a pink envelope was found on the refrigerator. It was written in a coded alphabet. The message was signed...

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“If we had known about the other letters, maybe we could have put something together. Maybe we could have stopped him,” Wampler said regretfully. Instead, his office ruled the killings a murder-suicide carried out by Thomas Pendergast.

As with the Clover murders, pentagrams were found on the walls of the house. “Yeah, that was some weird, diabolical mess,” stated Wampler, recalling the harrowing scene. “The extreme carnage and well... all that devil stuff was pretty disturbing.”

On the night of April 18th, 1970, Lester Wormwood called authorities to report finding his brother Curtis and his family murdered in their home on Marigold Drive in the town of Gaylord, Oregon. Curtis (39), a technician with the Multnomah County Waste Management Division, and Eugenie (38), a nurse practitioner at Grosvenor Hospital, had been married 15 years. They met while undergraduates at Oregon State University in Corvallis. College sweethearts and best friends, they married shortly after graduation. They would go on to have three daughters: Julia (14), Patricia (11), and Cynthia (9).

The Wormwoods were remembered as “the wholesome family next door.” Curtis, a native of the Umpqua River Valley, loved to hike the Calapooya Mountains. Eugenie was known to volunteer at the local Humane Society. No one saw it coming when Curtis butchered his wife and daughters with a carving knife. After murdering his family, Curtis killed himself with a single shot to the head. Lester Wormwood, who found the bodies, took his own life six months later.

“We knew we were dealing with something none of us had seen before,” recalled Coos County Police Sergeant Garth Franklin. All of the victims had been stabbed to death, with their throats “filleted open all the way across,” according to Franklin. The killings contained a “particularly brutal level of cruelty.” Detectives found themselves puzzled over who would have wanted to cause harm to any of the victims.

The walls of the house were covered in pentagrams painted with blood. The number 666 was drawn on the floor. The Satanic connection was unmistakable.

A coded letter was discovered attached to the refrigerator door with a plastic magnet shaped like a tiger. The letter was signed...

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“That cryptogram made me think of the Zodiac thing,” Franklin stated, referring to the Zodiac killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. “But this wasn’t like that at all.”

“At the time, we believed whoever killed them was let into the house. Either that or it was someone who lived there.” It didn’t take long for law enforcement to determine that Curtis Wormwood was responsible for the murder of his family, before he took his own life. “We had no reason to think it was done by anyone other than Curtis. No other suspects, no accomplices.”

Jack Fimple, an animal control officer working in the area, recalled seeing a white station wagon – possibly a Chevrolet Nomad – in the vicinity. “It’s a pretty quiet neighborhood,” he declared. “Anyone who doesn’t belong there tends to stand out.”

On the morning of March 12th, 1971, police responded to the white Dutch Colonial house of Eldritch Hesse and family in Oysterville, Oregon, after Eldritch failed to show up for work the previous day. When officers arrived, they described smelling “a distinct foul odor emanating from the house.”

Inside, they found the bodies of Eldritch, wife Ruberta, and nine-year-old daughter Mary Kathleen, each stabbed over 30 times with a long, serrated bread knife taken from the family’s kitchen.

Eldritch, an air traffic controller, had been a reliable employee. He hadn’t reported for his shift on March 11th, nor did he call to inform his supervisor that he would be unable to come in. Calls to his house went unanswered all day. What the police found shocked them.

Ruberta, a hairstylist at the Razzle Dazzle Salon in Sunnyridge, had been beaten so badly, her face was unrecognizable. Mary Kathleen’s hands and feet had been removed. The bodies were discovered in the family’s basement. Eldritch was found in the master bedroom, the victim of a self-inflicted knife wound. Forensic examination showed he had killed himself within an hour of his wife and child. The family’s pet parakeet was found decapitated in its cage.

In the following weeks, the neighbors on Siuslaw Road became fearful. Many decided to arm themselves; some suffered adverse psychological effects. Reports circulated of a tall man with long hair loitering in the neighborhood. Rumors held that a Satanic cult had been involved. Police soon ruled that out, as well as several other bizarre theories. In the absence of any solid leads, the crime was ruled an apparent murder-suicide.

Eldritch Hesse was presumed to have killed his family and himself in a fit of sudden, unexplained rage. No clear motive could be established. “We don’t know why he did it,” said next-door neighbor Earl Pomeranz. “It just didn’t make any sense.” Eldritch and his family were “good Christian people,” claimed Father Benedict McComas of Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church. “Hundreds of mourners attended their burial service,” he added, “and none of them could understand why Eldritch committed such a heinous act.” McComas told the Oysterville Gazette, “It may have been a devil thing. That’s the only way I can make sense of it.”

The front door of the house had been adorned with a large inverted triangle, carved directly into the wood. The mark of the beast – 666 – was etched into the back door. On the refrigerator, a coded message was found in a pink envelope by local police. The letter was signed..

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