“We lost contact with her the past seven to 10 years,” Rideout said. “We’ve often wondered what happened to Aunt Take?”
Rideout’s mother Alice Fischbach said she tried to find her former sister-in-law many times over the years, and was shocked to find out she’d been murdered.
“I just can’t believe it. I tried to find her for so many years and to find her this way it’s terrible,” Fischbach said.
Gangloff was found shot to death on the sidewalk near a Greater Dayton RTA bus stop on Norwood Avenue Sept. 13. Police arrested a 17-year-old male suspect over the weekend, who they say shot Gangloff in the head during a robbery gone wrong.
That teen is being held in juvenile detention pending possible charges of aggravated murder, aggravated burglary and criminal damaging. A three-prosecutor panel will meet, possibly on Friday, to decide what to charge him with and if he should be charged as an adult.
That teen has been charged with aggravated murder, aggravated burglary and criminal damaging in juvenile court and will make his initial court appearance next week.
A funeral service for Gangloff on Thursday is being put on by members of the Okinawa Tomonokai of Ohio who stepped in when Montgomery County authorities could not locate any family in the United States. That service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Thursday at Georgetown Village. Calvary Cemetery donated a plot and headstone for Gangloff.
Rideout said she is glad Gangloff’s full history is now able to be told. “She has a story. It’s a beautiful one,” she said.
Gangloff was married to Fishbach’s brother, Albert Gangloff, in the 1970s.
The story goes that Al Gangloff was stationed in Japan as a Marine when he witnessed a waitress he liked being jumped by several men as she left work and he saved her. During their courtship he found out that she was working in servitude at the restaurant to pay off a family debt. Al Gangloff reportedly payed that debt so she could move out of slum housing. The couple soon married and moved to the U.S.
Rideout remembers her Aunt Take teaching her Japanese phrases while living with the family in the Cincinnati area. “She raised me for several years,” Rideout said. “She was family, whether or not she divorced my uncle.”
Fischbach remembers Gangloff as happy-go-lucky. A beauty with hair so long she could sit on it.
While her English was still poor, Gangloff was told that a friend quite smoking by going “cold turkey.”
“She ate cold turkey for two weeks,” Fischbach recalled. “She laughed with you when she realized.”
“I regret that I didn’t try to find her or look for her sooner,” Rideout said. About a decade ago she offered to have Gangloff come live with her, but she declined. The family suspects the rift had something to do with Gangloff dating Fischbach’s ex.
“When my brother and her divorced I promised my brother I would take care of her… and she disappeared,” Fishbach said.
The family said they would like to ask the person who killed Gangloff, why?
“I hope they charge him as an adult,” Rideout said.
“Take wouldn’t hurt anybody. Take was a very loving person. She would give you the shirt off her back if she thought you needed it,” Fishbach said.
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