This is just heartbreaking and a sad insight into how messed up things are out there for some people, in this case Ohio, a state with an economy that’s almost completely f*cked: two murderous dudes posted an ad on Craigslist offering a job — $300 per week to basically oversee a piece of land. Housing, a trailer, would also be provided, according to the ad, and the person who was hired could ostensibly fish on the land all they wanted in exchange for merely watching over “a 688 acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a few cows.”
The killers, one a teenager and the other a man in his 50s, then took to hunting the respondents who visited the location listed in the ad for sport. Seriously, the whole thing sounds like the plot of a Coen brothers movie.
They were men thrown hard against the rocks of bad fortune — out of work, their marriages broken, their youth, with its possibilities, behind them.
To their eyes, the advertisement on Craigslist, offering $300 a week, a free trailer and unlimited fishing to “watch over a 688 acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a few cows,” may have seemed like a sign that their luck was finally turning.
Instead, in a scheme so macabre that residents here are already speculating on when it will be turned into a movie script, three of the four men, one from Virginia, one from the Akron area and one still unidentified, were lured to their deaths, their bodies buried in shallow graves. The fourth man, from South Carolina, who was hired and driven to the property in rural southern Ohio, was shot in the arm but escaped and alerted the authorities. The “farm” was in fact land owned by a coal company.
More bodies may still be found, as the bogus advertisement, which was picked up by online job aggregators, drew more than 100 responses from Ohio and other states.
The guy who got away offered a glimpse into how things went down…
Before the gag order was issued, Sheriff Stephen S. Hannum of Noble County had said that his office had responded to a call on Nov. 6 and found “a white middle-aged man” with a gunshot wound to the arm and a story about answering an advertisement on Craigslist.
Mr. Davis told the sheriff that he had met two people for breakfast in Marietta, Ohio, and after leaving his car in Caldwell, was driven to the nearby “farm.”
While walking through the wooded area, Mr. Davis reported, he “heard what he thought was a gun being cocked. He turned to see a gun pointed at his head. He deflected the gun and ran,” hiding in the woods and finally seeking help at a house two miles away.
Welcome to the dark side America in 2011, everyone.