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Aftermath: Requiem To A Tragedy In Ohio! Speak No More, It's Over With!

By John Kays

"The grim information, announced from church pulpits, distributed over telephone wires, publicized by Garden City's radio station, KIUL ('A tragedy, unbelievable and shocking beyond words, struck four members of the Herb Clutter family late Saturday night or early today. Death, brutal and without apparent motive...'), produced in the average recipient a reaction nearer that of Mother Truitt's than that of Mrs. Clare's: amazement, shading into dismay; a shallow horror sensation that cold springs of personal fear swiftly deepened." The Last To See Them Alive-from In Cold Blood by Truman Capote-The New Yorker

My final Testament on this Tragedy In Ohio:

There's calm, peace and blue skies in my photograph of Tina Herrmann's house. At the trunk of the tree there are bouquets of flowers and a bundle of balloons that honor the three who lost their lives here. Here's another thing I notice about my photo. The wooden-framed house is isolated and solemn; once it was a home, now it's just a house. The silence will never go away. Only finality remains.

Tina Herrmann's house looks peaceful and still with blue skies, in my photograph.

For those who care to learn every painful detail about this sad case, I would recommend you open up my link that I'll place at the end of my placid statement. I say that because I feel remorse today about the way this catastrophe played out. No matter, WBNS-10TV, Central Ohio News is your best bet if you missed something. But I advise caution when playing back too many of these components of dread. (An example is the slideshow of the horrendous tree in question.)

At the bottom of New Details Released On Discovery Of Bodies are sixteen stories from Central Ohio News, beginning with November 12th. You might recall that Wednesday, November 10th was when this whole ordeal began. Please be sure to watch the video news coverage of WBNS-10TV too, which is mostly archived over at their web site. Please beware, some things are better unknown. The Knowledge Tree undid Adam and Eve, my friend!

If you're hard enough, one report is a simulation of how Matthew Hoffman, a trained tree-trimmer, dragged the bodies down a secluded path in Kokosing Wildlife Preserve, which is near Fredericktown, Ohio. The newscast tells how he came upon that now infamous tree, which he used as a makeshift grave for these pitiable gudgeons. Matt also nixed the Herrmann's dog and deposited it in this tree. As I type this, I put my hand over my mouth, as I gasp for air. Help me! Horror most foul! I'm drowning!

Matthew Hoffman deposited the bodies in this tree.

These dispatches are unspeakable, unimaginable. I wonder if Matt has ever done this sort of thing before. If so, that would make him a serial killer, not just a mass murderer, which is not necessarily a virtue, unless he considers Gary Ridgeway to be a role model. No doubt, the authorities are reviewing other missing persons' cases with Hoffman in mind as a potential suspect. But I have no particular interest in attending his graduation ceremonies.

As I said before, there are lots of important details to be had from these Central Ohio News stories. I kept trying to figure out how the Knox County Sheriff's Office was able to trace Sarah Maynard to Hoffman's house in Mount Vernon, Ohio. You will need to read Suspected Kidnapper Bought Trash Bags, T-shirt, Tarps, posted on Tuesday, November 16th. The items were purchased at a Walmart in Mount Vernon.

I'm putting two and two together, but I recall that the tarp was found at the crime scene, the Herrmann house near Howard. Deductive reasoning allows me to understand how the tarp was traced back to the Walmart. I must speculate here, but why would Hoffman go to so much trouble to hide the bodies at that Kokosing Wildlife Preserve, but haphazardly leave the traceable tarp back at the crime scene. I sense that he wanted to get caught. I know he told his mother that he was relieved when the police raided his house last Sunday; this meant that Sarah could get away, the apparent object of his affection.

I was always sketchy on how this whole situation was first discovered. I knew that it was a Dairy Queen employee who first entered the Herrmann household and stumbled upon the quantities of blood and empty beer cans strewn about. An article, Family, Community Mourns County Tragedy from Friday brings me back into this chilling origination.

Valerie Hawthorne is the Dairy Queen employee in question. She had to enter a back window in order to get into the house that Wednesday. I am sickened by this entire affair! Just brood for a minute on what Valerie has to endure. And the Knox County Sheriff David Barber has done a commendable job, given the circumstances. Catching Hoffman and getting a confession from him, as far as the whereabouts of the bodies, is good police work.

One only hopes that they didn't enter into a plea bargain with this animal. I hope Matt gets lethal injection, even if it takes many years of legal wrangling. He is not insane, he carefully planned out this crime well before he actually carried it out. The fingerprints of premeditation are all over this crime. I'm just learning today that he was a member of a gym where Stephanie Sprang worked as a cleaning lady.

This is how Stephanie can be connected to Hoffman; and yet it is still unclear just what transpired on that Wednesday, the 10th of November? I do sense that Matt must have been stalking Stephanie, as well as Sarah; he must have followed Ms. Sprang when she went over to the Herrmann home. This is speculation, but how else does Sprang connect to Tina? A great deal of time and effort was committed to this sickening endeavor.

Stephanie Sprang's son, Michael Kupiec, remains surprisingly strong through this ordeal.

I grieve for the families and for the detectives too who must toss around these grizzly scenarios in search of answers that provide truthful pictures of what happened up in Ohio. I can't take it anymore myself! I don't care to read any further about this morbid chronicle, but the families must live with it forever, and forever is a very long time! And I grieve for Matt's mother as well. Hell is this horrid offspring of a son, her own little Jeffrey Dahmer.

I must turn the channel if another news story comes on about this Hoffman idiot. I've often wondered how Truman Capote could have spent six years in the writing of his masterpiece, In Cold Blood? All the time he spent in Holcomb, Kansas, and then all the time he spent with the killers, Perry and Richard. What does that say about Truman's methods? But the book wouldn't have been so flawless if he had neglected to put such exquisite care and consideration into every paragraph, into every word pecked out on his typewriter.

Yet I wonder whether the price he paid for all his painstaking effort for art, the invention of the 'true crime novel,' or non-fiction fiction, as it is sometimes called, was not the ultimate sacrifice of death. That's the price he paid. It looks as though Capote drank himself to death, and never measured up afterwards to this perfect non-fiction novel.

Once again, here's a photo of Tina, Cody and Stephanie. Let's only hope that they will be remembered, and what's-his-name will be forgotten!

This case of Hoffman is an interesting one, but cannot compare to the famous one that Truman first took notice of, in The New York Times from November of 1959. It seems as if a rich Kansas Farmer, Herb Clutter, and his three family members were senselessly slaughtered in their isolated farm house.

A deeper, second level of tragedy for this incomprehensible atrocity in Ohio is its transience. Come another week we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. By then people will store away (compartmentalize) these gruesome nitty-gritty's in the back of their flighty minds. But don't expect it to ever return to their memory, folks! It's gone.
New Details Released On Discovery Of Bodies-WBNS-10TV, Central Ohio News
Read More:
Did Matthew Hoffman Murder Tina Herrmann, Stephanie Sprang and Kody Maynard?
Is Matthew Hoffman a Killer Or Just a Collector of People?

John Kays identifies timeless remnants from our past that will endure, or be admired by future generations.