There's been a shooting.
That's what Jimmy Ruppert calmly told the operator when he called the police
around 9:30 PM on Easter Sunday in 1975.
When the first officer arrived,
there was no obvious sign that anything was wrong in the little white house in
Hamilton, Ohio.
The only sign of trouble was Jimmy waiting for him at the front door.
When he got closer,
he could make out two small bodies on the living room floor behind Jimmy.
Jimmy didn't say anything. He just watched as the officer called for backup.
Then he moved aside so he could come in.
Five children lay dead on the living room floor.
The youngest was lying on the floor at the foot of the couch,
in his outstretched right hand, he was still holding his chocolate Easter egg.
He was only four. That gruesome scene was just the beginning. In the kitchen
there were six more dead. The Easter dinner was still on the stove.
The body's crowded the small house, making it almost impossible to walk.
Jimmy murdered his entire family that day. His mother,
his older brother, his brother's wife and their eight kids.
The youngest was only four years old. He shot each of them twice.
Once in the head, once in the chest. He said later,
it took him less than 10 minutes to kill all 11 people.
After he massacred them all,
he changed his clothes and then waited three hours before he called the police.
I'm Chris. And this is True Crime Recaps.
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In an interview with the Cincinnati Post in 1975,
as reported by wcpo.com,
the prosecutor described the scene at the Ruppert house as "carnage" saying "it
was so bad that when I went into the basement,
you had to be careful because the blood would seep through the floorboards and
drip on you." The blood stained the floorboards in the basement and can still be
seen today. At first, they didn't know why he'd snapped.
Jimmy was known as a loner, bookish. He was smart,
but he didn't have a lot going on. He was two weeks shy of his 41st birthday.
He had no job, no money to speak of and he was living with his mother.
His older brother, Leonard was the family's golden boy. He went to college,
graduated with an engineering degree and got a high paying job.
Then he married Jimmy's ex-girlfriend and together they had eight
kids. Jimmy flunked out of college after only two years.
He couldn't hold a job.
And he lost what little savings he had when the stock market crashed in 1973.
By 1975,
his only reasons for getting up in the morning were drinking
and target shooting with his four guns.
His childhood wasn't exactly a Disney movie either. He'd been sick as a kid.
When he was arrested, he was 5' 6",
and weighed only 135 pounds growing up.
His mother never missed a chance to let him know she had wanted a girl instead.
His father wasn't any better.
He tormented him up until the day he died when Jimmy was 12.
Then his older brother took over. At 16, Jimmy had had enough.
He tried to hang himself with a bed sheet, but failed.
Mentally he spiraled. For years,
he became more and more paranoid.
He thought his mother and brother were secretly sabotaging him.
He was sure his brother was tampering with his car, an old Volkswagen.
He was convinced the two of them were trying to quote,
"discredit him by telling the FBI he was a communist and a homosexual."
He claimed the feds were tapping his phones at home and at his favorite bar,
The 19th Hole. A month before the Easter massacre,
he bought more bullets and silencers.
On March 29th, 1975, the day before the massacre,
a witness saw him target practicing with tin cans near the river. Later,
he went to The 19th Hole like he did most nights and started complaining to the
bartender about his mother.
She was trying to evict him because he didn't have a job.
And he was going to do something about it, he said.
The bartender said he left around 11, but came back later.
She asked him if he solved the problem. No, not yet,
he said and kept drinking until closing time at 2:30 AM. The next afternoon,
his brother,
his wife and their eight kids came over to grandma's house for Easter.
Everything seemed normal. Even the fact that Jimmy was upstairs in his room,
like he always was. Downstairs it was happy chaos. You know,
the big family is all together for a holiday kind of noise,
except even louder because the house was so small, only a thousand square feet,
two bedrooms upstairs and the living room and kitchen downstairs.
At 4:30 that afternoon,
the kids had just come inside after their Easter egg hunt in the yard.
Their grandma was in the kitchen making Sloppy Joes since the family had already
had a formal dinner at their other grandparent's house after church.
Around five o'clock, Jimmy came downstairs.
He went into the kitchen to say hello and with what he later called a mocking
smile his brother said, "how's that Volkswagen,
Jimmy?" And with that sentence,
every paranoid thought in Jimmy's head was validated.
He turned around and went back upstairs. An hour later,
he came back carrying his three shotguns and a rifle.
He went to the kitchen and shot his brother Leonard first.
Then he shot Leonard's wife, Alma, his mother charity,
and three of the children, Michael, Thomas and Carol Ruppert. They were 16,
15 and 13. Jimmy leaned his rifle up against the fridge.
He grabbed another gun and started for the living room. His 17 year old nephew,
Leonard Jr., tried to stop him, but he didn't stand a chance.
Then he sat on the couch and one by one murdered, the remaining four kids.
David, Theresa, and little John.
They were 12, 11, nine, and four.
When their bodies were on the floor around him,
he got up and walked around the house and shot each of them again,
just to be sure. Insane? Definitely. But clinically so?
According to the prosecutor, he was crazy like a fox.
There was about $300,000 in life insurance and investments coming to him
if he was found not guilty for any reason,
even by reason of insanity. Today,
that would be the equivalent of more than a million dollars.
Was the whole thing premeditated so he could inherit his family's money?
His first trial ended in a mistrial.
At the second trial he pleaded guilty by reason of insanity and was convicted
on all 11 counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
But that's not quite the end of Jimmy's story.
On appeal he was granted a third trial where mental health professionals from
both the defense and the prosecution argued about his state of mind.
Was he actually insane and had just snapped? Finally,
in 1982,
he was found guilty of only two counts of first degree murder in the
deaths of his mother and brother.
He was found not guilty by reason of insanity for shooting the other nine
family members. And because evil people just never seem to die,
Jimmy is currently still alive.
He's serving his two life sentences at the Franklin medical center in Columbus,
Ohio. He's been denied parole three times.
His next parole hearing is in 2025. He will be at 91 years old.
To this day the Ruppert family massacre is still one of the deadliest
shootings inside a private residence in U.S. history.
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