Raymond Homer, a 26-year-old man, was one of four people whose bodies were discovered in Cleveland’s Rockefeller Park on the morning of September 16, 1968. Early-morning joggers encountered the victims lying side by side, turning a quiet area of the park into the scene of an execution-style multiple homicide. Raymond had been shot several times and died alongside 54-year-old tavern owner Joseph Zoldan, 22-year-old Ronald Mahone, and 21-year-old Martha Lancaster.
Investigators
determined that the four victims had been fired upon with two different weapons. Joseph owned a Cleveland tavern, while Raymond and Ronald reportedly worked there as part-time bartenders. Martha was described in historical accounts as a young woman who had been with the men before the killings. Detectives believed the victims had not simply encountered their killer in the park. Instead, authorities developed the theory that they had been taken captive during a robbery at the tavern, forced to travel to Rockefeller Park at gunpoint, and then killed so they could not identify those responsible.
The placement of the bodies and the use of multiple firearms suggested a deliberate, controlled attack rather than a spontaneous confrontation. The victims appear to have been robbed of any opportunity to escape or seek help. Their deaths became part of a wider investigation after another robbery and multiple shooting occurred in Columbus approximately one month later.
On October 20, 1968, a gunman entered a Columbus dairy bar near closing time, stole $562, and forced manager Phyllis Crowe and teenage employees Susan Pack and Jimmy Stevens into a back room. The employees were restrained and attacked. Susan and Jimmy were fatally shot, while Phyllis was strangled with a coat hanger and left unconscious. She survived and later provided investigators with information about her attacker.
Ballistics testing connected bullets from the Columbus murders to one of the firearms used to kill Raymond and the other three victims in Cleveland. Phyllis subsequently identified Richard Lee Tingler Jr., an ex-convict with a history of burglary and parole violations, as the man who had attacked her and killed the two teenagers. The forensic connection made Tingler the principal suspect in the Rockefeller Park killings as well.
Tingler was indicted on six murder counts covering the four Cleveland victims and the two Columbus victims. He was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on November 8, 1968, but had already fled Ohio. Using the alias Don Williams, he found employment on a farm near Dill City, Oklahoma, where he reportedly carried a pistol and attempted to conceal his identity.
Federal agents and local sheriff’s deputies arrested Tingler on May 19, 1969, while he was working in a field. Officers disarmed him and took him into custody without resistance. He was returned to Ohio, prosecuted for the six murders, convicted, and sentenced to death in 1969. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 following changes affecting capital punishment in the United States.
Although the presence of bullets from two different weapons raised the possibility that another person may have participated in the Cleveland killings, available accounts do not identify a second person who was charged or convicted in connection with Raymond Homer’s death. Tingler remained the person held legally responsible for the murders, including the calculated killing of Raymond and the three other victims left beside him in Rockefeller Park.
