Parole hearing set for serial killer

Eugene Gall was convicted of rape and murder of 14-year-old Oakwood girl.


Eugene Gall Timeline:

April 12, 1977: Gall, known as the Friday Night Rapist in Middletown, is paroled from Lebanon Correctional Institution after serving less than five years in prison for assaults on five women in Butler and Warren counties, including the rape at knifepoint of a 15-year-old.

Oct. 20, 1977: Beth Ann Mote, 14, is abducted while walking to school. When she doesn't come home that evening, an intensive search ensues. In the days that follow, her bloody clothing and school books are found in Dayton and, a week after her disappearance, her body is found in a Miami Twp. field.

March 7, 1978: A 13-year-old Dayton girl is abducted on her way to Huffman School and raped.

April 3, 1978: Four Beavercreek school children are abducted at gunpoint from their bus stop and taken to the nearby home of one of the children.

April 5, 1978: Lisa Jansen, 12, of Cincinnati is abducted on her way to school, raped and murdered. Her body was found in Boone County, Ky. Eugene Gall is arrested that day after he robbed a convenience store and shot and wounded a state trooper. After Gall's arrest, local detectives link him to the Oakwood, Dayton and Beavercreek crimes.

In the 1970s, Eugene Williams Gall Jr. personified a parent’s worst nightmare: He was the creepy stranger who stalked little girls, his twisted mind bent on rape and murder.

Next month, 36 years after he snatched 14-year-old Beth Ann Mote of Oakwood off the street, raped her and stabbed her to death in one of the most high-profile local crimes of the ’70s, Gall is to have his first chance at parole.

“He should never be released. Ever,” said Assistant Montgomery County Prosecutor Mary Montgomery. “He’s like the man of my scary childhood. He’s the man our parents told us to watch out for.”

The Ohio Parole Board is to conduct a victim conferencing on Nov. 20, at which it will hear the viewpoints of Montgomery, former Oakwood police detectives on the case, and Beth Ann’s mother, the Rev. Doris Mote, an Episcopal priest. Board members will meet with Gall via videoconferencing from prison on an as-yet-unscheduled date in December before issuing a decision on parole.

“It would be a travesty for a serial killer like him to be released, especially one that involves kids,” said one of those retired detectives, Lance West.

Gall, now 67, was sentenced to death by the state of Kentucky in the April 1978 murder of a 12-year-old Cincinnati girl, a case with striking similarities to the Mote homicide. That was at a time when Ohio had not yet enacted capital punishment legislation that passed constitutional muster.

But through a series of legal challenges, Gall was successful in having his capital murder conviction in Kentucky not only overturned, but expunged from his record, and he was able to get his first parole hearing on his Ohio life sentence for the Mote killing eight years early.

‘Permanently dangerous’

Gall, who was living in Hillsboro at the time of the murders, is a “permanently dangerous” psychopath diagnosed with paranoic schizophrenia, the worst psychiatric disorder on the books, according to expert testimony in his case.

He was working at Armco Steel in Middletown in 1970 when he committed a series of rapes in Warren and Butler counties, West said. In one instance, a 15-year-old was raped at gunpoint. “He was known as the Friday Night Rapist,” West said. “He’d clock in and go out and rape (his victims) then he’d sneak back in and clock out.”

Gall served 19 months in a state mental hospital and five years in prison for assaults on five women before being paroled in April 1977. Being under parole supervision, however, did nothing to prevent him from committing even more violent acts.

By autumn 1977, Gall was working for a nursing home in Hillsboro. One of his duties was to bring an elderly woman to Miami Valley Hospital every Monday and Thursday for kidney dialysis. Police later learned he trolled for rape victims while the woman was in treatment.

Ninth-grader Beth Ann Mote, standing 4 feet 10 inches tall and weighing 75 pounds, was walking on Greenmount Boulevard to Oakwood Junior High School the morning of Thursday, Oct. 20, when Gall asked her for directions, then forced her into his car at knifepoint, Gall later admitted to authorities. She recited the 23rd Psalm — “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” — as he drove her to the field in Miami Twp. where he raped and fatally stabbed her.

Doris Mote called police that evening, when Beth Ann didn’t come home after school. The following day, a sweater with a cut in it and blood of the same type as Beth Ann’s was found near the Dayton home of Journal Herald columnist Mickey Davis. “We knew it wasn’t good,” West said.

Three days after Beth Ann’s disappearance, a man phoned Doris Mote, demanding $6,000 in exchange for the girl’s safe return. With police involvement, Doris Mote arranged with the man to drop the money, but the man didn’t show up. They arranged a second drop for the morning of Oct. 28.

On Oct. 27, a week after the disappearance, Beth Ann’s body was found by hunters in a wooded area off Medlar Road. Local news organizations agreed to hold the story because police feared the news of the discovery would spook the extortionist. The following day, police arrested Henry Trussell, a 33-year-old Frigidaire worker. He was convicted in the extortion and served prison time, but police never felt he was Beth Ann’s killer.

Detectives pursued hundreds of tips in the months that followed, but they didn’t find their killer until Gall was arrested the following April in Boone County, Ky., where 12-year-old Lisa Jansen of Cincinnati was murdered. After he abducted, raped and shot Jansen, Gall robbed a Kentucky convenience store in a crime that ended in a shootout with police in which a state trooper was wounded.

While Gall was in jail, West traveled to Kentucky and was permitted to look through Gall’s wallet. He found a note bearing the name of a Dayton girl who’d been abducted and raped the previous month. Gall eventually was convicted of Jansen’s murder and sentenced to death. He also got life in prison for Beth Ann Mote’s kidnapping, rape and murder, and additional sentences for previously unsolved rapes in March and early April of schoolchildren in Dayton and Beavercreek.

Conviction overturned

Even though Gall admitted killing Mote in statements to police, he pleaded not guilty and his case went to trial. But 10 days into the trial, he pleaded guilty after police proved the time card for his dialysis job was doctored to give him an alibi.

For years, it appeared that Gall would be executed by Kentucky. But his conviction was overturned by the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals court on Oct. 30, 2000. The court found that even though “it is evident that Eugene Gall was the man who cut (Lisa Jansen’s) life short,” his constitutional rights were violated in his trial.

In his appeal, Gall’s attorneys with the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy said jurors at his trial didn’t properly learn that Gall is brain damaged and suffers from severe mental illness, was sexually abused as a child and grew up in a dysfunctional family. They said Gall functioned “peacefully and productively” in the structured environment of the maximum-security Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville.

“Eugene’s brain damage, paranoid schizophrenia and emotional disturbance led to the commission of this tragic crime,” according to the January 2000 edition of the department newsletter The Advocate.

After his Kentucky conviction was overturned, Gall was extradited to Ohio to begin serving his life sentence in the Mote slaying.

Gall wasn’t to be eligible for parole consideration until Nov. 13, 2021, assistant prosecutor Montgomery said, but he sought and was granted credit for the time he served in Kentucky.

Doris Mote, who lives and works as a priest in another state, will come to Ohio later this month to argue against Gall’s parole, even though she opposes the death penalty and didn’t want him to be executed, Montgomery said.

Montgomery was just 5 years old when Beth Ann Mote was murdered, “but I’ve really sunk my teeth into this case,” she said. “(Gall) is a person who does not deserve to walk the streets of this community. I don’t know how anybody could look at Eugene Gall and think he ever deserves parole.”

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