Massacre on Prospect Hill: The True Crime of Francis Lloyd Russell

By Richard O Jones

Although it wasn't yet summer, the temperature climbed into triple digits on June 3, 1925, and Lloyd Russell could not sleep that night. He lived with his mother and his brother's family in a modest three room bungalow on Progress Avenue in a neighborhood call Prospect Hill. Despite the bountiful implications of the place names, Lloyd worried about a mortgage coming due. Despite two jobs, he couldn't keep up, and he couldn't get that off his mind. Before daylight, the temperature still in the 80s, he got up from his sweat-soaked bed, loaded two pistols and shot and killed his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and five of his brother's six children. Only 10-year-old Dorothy escaped, and if the shots didn't wake the neighborhood, her screaming in the terrible hot night did. One of those neighbors was local war hero and deputy sheriff Wesley Wulzen, who kept the man calm while more help arrived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard O Jones
• Release date: Sep 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310079979

Richard O Jones

About Richard O Jones After 25 years writing the first draft of history as a writer and editor for his hometown newspaper, the Hamilton Journal-News, Richard O Jones left the grind of daily journalism in the fall of 2013 for a life of true crime. He is the author of two books on the History Press imprint, Cincinnati’s Savage Seamstress: The Shocking Edythe Klumpp Murder Scandal (October, 2014) and The First Celebrity Serial Killer: Confessions of the Strangler Alfred Knapp (May, 2015). In 2016, he began a twice-weekly podcast "True Crime Historian" (www.truecrimehistorian.com) where he tells stories of the scoundrels, scandals and scourges of the past through newspaper accounts in the golden age of yellow journalism. He created the Two-Dollar Terror series of novella-length ebooks. Mr. Jones, a creative writing graduate of Miami University, Ohio, spent most of his career as an arts journalist and has won numerous awards for his reviews and profiles. In 2004, he was named a Fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts Theatre and Musical Theatre program at the Annenberg School of Journalism. The Ohio Associated Press named him Feature Writer of the Year in 2011. Since leaving the newspaper world, Mr. Jones has become an active member of his local history community as a board member of the Butler County Historical Society, a member of the History Speakers Bureau and a regular presenter at Miami University in a program titled “Yesterday’s News.” The Michael J. Colligan History Project of Miami University presented Mr. Jones with a Special Recognition for Contributions to Public History for his coverage of the Centennial Commemoration of the Great Flood of 1913. Photo by Sandra M. Orlett

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