On October 20, 1968, Jimmy Stevens, a teenage male employee at a dairy bar in Columbus, Ohio, was brutally murdered during a violent robbery. Stevens, a white male, was working alongside another teenage employee, Susan Pack, and their manager, Phyllis Crowe, when a lone gunman entered the establishment near closing time. The assailant, later identified as Richard Lee Tingler Jr., stole $562 from the register and forced the three employees into a back room.
After binding their hands, Tingler initially appeared ready to leave, but then paused in the doorway, overcome by rage. He reportedly snarled, “What the hell, I ain't got nothing to lose. I'm gonna kill you all.” He then ripped the door off a safe and launched into a frenzied attack. Stevens and Pack were both shot in the back of the head, while Crowe was strangled with a coathanger and left unconscious. Miraculously, Crowe survived and later identified Tingler from a police mugshot.
Ballistics tests confirmed that the bullets used in the murder of Jimmy Stevens matched one of the firearms used in a separate quadruple homicide in Cleveland just a month earlier. That incident involved the execution-style killings of a tavern proprietor, two bartenders, and a young female prostitute, all believed to be witnesses to a robbery.
Following the Columbus murder, Richard Tingler was added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list on November 8, 1968. He fled Ohio and assumed the alias “Don Williams,” securing work on a farm in Dill City, Oklahoma. Despite his suspicious behavior and frequent gun use, he remained at large for several months. Tingler’s erratic conduct eventually drew attention, and on May 19, 1969, federal agents and local deputies arrested him without resistance.
Tingler was indicted on six counts of murder, including the killing of Jimmy Stevens. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1969. However, his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment in 1972. The murder of Jimmy Stevens, a young white male, remains one of the most chilling examples of senseless violence during a robbery in Columbus’s history.
