On a bitterly cold night in Newark, Ohio, on December 10, 1977, Joyce Vermillion, a 38-year-old female barmaid, finished her shift at the Forker's Café. A friend and patron, Karen Dodrill, who had been celebrating her own birthday, offered Joyce a ride home to spare her from the frigid -4 degree Fahrenheit weather. In a prelude to the tragedy that would unfold, Karen went to warm up her car.
As Karen was heading back toward the café, she was ambushed and fatally shot by an assailant
hiding in the nearby bushes. The killer used a homemade silencer, tragically preventing Joyce from being alerted to the immediate danger. Unaware of the horrific event that had just transpired, Joyce exited the café and was also shot and killed. When Joyce did not return home from work, her husband reported her missing.
The initial investigation into the double homicide of Joyce Vermillion and Karen Dodrill yielded few leads. However, the shell casings recovered from the scene would later become a crucial piece of evidence. This evidence linked their murders to a string of other homicides that terrorized central Ohio between 1977 and 1978. The perpetrators were eventually identified as brothers Gary and Thaddeus Lewingdon, who came to be known as the ".22 Caliber Killers."
Following his arrest on an unrelated matter, Gary Lewingdon confessed to a total of ten murders, implicating his brother Thaddeus in nine of them. The brothers were both sentenced to life in prison for their violent crime spree. Thaddeus Lewingdon died of lung cancer in prison in 1989, and Gary Lewingdon died of heart failure in 2004.
