Authorities Recall Horrific, Brutal Stabbing
On June 12, 1988, the dead body of 32-year-old Richard A. Gibson was found lying face down around 8:30 a.m., less than two feet from the front door of his 138 Center Street home.
On June 12, 1988, the dead body of 32-year-old Richard A. Gibson was found lying face down around 8:30 a.m., less than two feet from the front door of his 138 Center Street home.
His 31-year-old wife, Kay, found him.
Authorities said Gibson had staggered around his yard after being stabbed repeatedly in his stomach, neck and arm with an unusually large knife. It was a brutal killing. Autopsy reports said Gibson died from “approximately 14 stab wounds to his face, chest, neck, arm and abdomen” caused by a knife exceeding 4 inches in length.
Gary Calhoun, a then 37-year-old Fairport Harbor man who allegedly was romantically involved with Kay, pleaded guilty to the murder and was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility of parole after serving 20 years.
Thirty-three years after that horrific murder in the then Village of Chardon, the events Richard’s family cannot escape are again approaching: Another hearing to determine if Calhoun will be released from prison on parole.
Now 70, Calhoun is scheduled to appear before the Ohio Parole Board for a hearing sometime in November to determine if he is “suitable” to be freed from incarceration. He currently is incarcerated at Marion Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison in Marion.
Friends of the Gibson family, Richard’s siblings and community leaders are determined to once again prevent that from happening.
“You know, it was such a brutal murder, it was such a brutal murder,” said Robert Gibson, the youngest of the eight siblings who grew up in Chardon, with Richard being the second youngest. “The fact that it was such a brutal murder, after 32 years in prison, I mean, are you rehabilitated? It was such a brutal murder.”
Robert said every time Calhoun is up for parole, his brothers and sisters are retraumatized.
“My brother does not get a chance to come up every five years to say whether he is going to live or not. For him, it’s done, his life is over,” he said.
“Every time we get a letter that says there’s a parole hearing, we have to go through all of this again. And it goes on and on, and just when you think you can put it in the past, it comes forward again. Why are we still dealing with this?”
Robert worries about running into Calhoun in a store or restaurant, or passing him on the street.
“We are always looking around the corner,” he said. “We’re always worried about running into him in a store. I mean, if he gets out and he stays in the area where he lived, am I going to walk into a restaurant one night and see him sitting there? It will never, ever, ever for the family rest. It never rests.”
Geauga County Prosecutor Jim Flaiz said he strongly opposed parole for Calhoun five years ago and will be strongly opposing it again.
“If a full parole hearing is scheduled, I plan on attending along with the sheriff so we can voice our opposition directly to the parole board,” Flaiz said.
“I was at the scene of the horrific crime that Gary Calhoun planned and committed,” said Geauga County Sheriff Scott Hildenbrand, who was as a Chardon police officer when Gibson was murdered.
“In no way should he ever be released from prison,” Hildenbrand said. “He has no respect for human life and should never be on the streets of our county or any other. I will strongly oppose his release at his parole hearing.”
Romantic Liaison and Murder
Authorities said Gibson was last seen with a friend around 2:30 a.m. Earlier in the night he had stopped at the Chardon Fraternal Order of Eagles on Water Street for the weekly cash drawing.
“It appears an unknown assailant stabbed him in his yard as he was getting out of his car around 2:30 a.m.,” then Chardon Police Chief Fred J. Heyer said.
There were no motives, no suspects and no weapons found at the crime site, he added. “It’s all under investigation.”
Hildenbrand remembers the investigation well. He was at home when he was called in to investigate a homicide. Already at the scene was Tom Rowan, Hildenbrand’s current chief deputy who also began his law enforcement career as a Chardon police officer.
“It was a horrific scene because he had been laying there for several hours,” Hildenbrand said. “You could see where he got out of his car and was attacked and then ran around the car to get away.”
Blood splatter was found all around the car and throughout the yard, on wood piles in the back yard, on a picnic table, on a turtle sandbox and on a pair of pants hanging on the clothesline. There also were defensive wounds on Gibson’s arms.
Investigators also found human excrement during a perimeter search, with a Newport menthol cigarette in the excrement.
It was the first murder case for former Geauga County Prosecutor David Joyce, now a U.S. congressman.
“I remember getting a call on Sunday morning to go out there and Gibson’s just lying there on the ground,” Joyce said. “He (Calhoun) gutted him like a deer in the front yard. It was really sick.”
One of the first things investigators learned was that Gibson, who was unemployed at the time, had been at the Eagles club.
“So, that was the first thing we thought, that maybe he had won the money and somebody attacked him to steal it,” Hildenbrand said. They later learned Gibson had not won any money.
Rowan interviewed Richard’s wife, Kay, tracing where he husband had been the night before and who he was with. According to police reports, she also admitted to having an extramarital affair that ended more than a year earlier.
A team of investigators, including former City of Chardon Police Chief Tim McKenna, searched a nearby pond with metal detectors. Nothing was found.
As investigators began interviewing possible suspects, a supervisor at Channel Products in Chester Township called police and told them of romantic liaison between Kay and two men, including a six-month affair with co-worker Calhoun, whose name she had failed to mention in her interview with Rowan.
Investigators met with the supervisor and two other employees, one of whom said Calhoun had “always talked” of killing Richard and had even asked what would be a good poison to use, according to police reports. The employee said Calhoun had changed his mind about poisoning Richard, instead deciding to take Richard “out in a field or the woods, tie him up, and cut him . . . until he died — ‘you know, torture him.’”
During the interview, all three Channel Products employees said Calhoun smoked Newport menthol cigarettes.
Authorities executed a search warrant at Calhoun’s home in Fairport Harbor, where police seized, among other things, a knife from the bottom drawer in a downstairs bedroom dresser, according to a Lake County News-Herald news story.
Calhoun also was asked where he was Saturday night and said fishing with a friend. When asked if he was in Chardon between 12 midnight and 3 a.m. Sunday, and was told his car was seen there, Calhoun said “’so’.” Calhoun was arrested and taken to Chardon Police Department, where a search warrant was signed authorizing police to gather blood, saliva and hair samples from him.
Another executed search warrant turned up love letters and cards Kay had written to Calhoun between December 1987 and March 1988. In one letter, dated Jan. 27, 1988, Kay thanked Calhoun for giving her a single rose. The letter also said in part, “Oscar is being his usual rotten self. I definitely need an exterminator — if you know what I mean!”
Court records identified “Oscar” as Richard.
Later in the same letter Kay wrote, “If just say an ‘accident’ would happen to a certain someone I could get out again, like a new person, not suffocating under bills.
“Don’t mind me, but I guess I can tell you these kinds of things cause you seem to understand how I feel. At least I hope you do.”
Then, on June 21, investigators received a tip from an informant describing an area west of Calhoun’s Fairport Harbor home where his blood-stained clothes were buried. Rowan and Hildenbrand searched the area and found a pair of heavily blood-stained jeans in the heavy brush. The next day, Calhoun was indicted on five felony counts, including aggravated murder.
Three months later, on Sept. 30, 1988, Calhoun entered a plea of guilty to aggravated murder and four days later he was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility of parole after serving 20 years.
Twenty-six years after his sentencing, in 2014, Calhoun sought to appeal his sentence.
“I never filed an appeal or any motion in my entire prison time served because I ‘was’ satisfied with the sentence given by the court which specified in the entry that I would be ‘eligible’ for release after serving 20 years, however the parole board, despite the contract entry, is continuely (sic) flopping me based on my crime and not based on my good behavior I have shown, which violates my plea and denied me rights, which include an appeal had I known I was going to be kept in prison despite my end of the contract (good behavior) being upheld and now serving [to date] 26 years,” Calhoun said in court documents.
His attempt was denied.
Wife Charged, Acquitted
About three weeks after her husband’s murder, Kay was charged with aggravated murder and obstruction of justice. She pleaded not guilty to all charges and in 1989 was acquitted — declared not guilty — following a bench trial before the late Geauga County Common Pleas Court Judge Hans R. Veit.
During her trial, Calhoun — as part of his plea deal — testified for the prosecution. He claimed Kay had told him she had been physically and emotionally abused by Richard. He also alleged the two had discussed divorcing their spouses and getting together, but later decided that wouldn’t work. It was then Calhoun claimed they decided the only alternative was for Richard to disappear, i.e., end up dead.
David Joyce asked Calhoun if the murder occurred as planned.
“It was supposed to be clean and simple (but) he made me have to chase him down . . . it ended up being a bloody mess,” Calhoun testified, according to an April 4, 1989, story in the Geauga Times Leader.
Calhoun also testified he had to leave Richard’s body at the scene because he could not find anything to wrap the body in.
Joyce explained at the time a defendant had a right to waive a jury.
“If we’d have had the ability to have a jury, I know she would have been convicted,” Joyce said. “If I remember correctly in the trial, I said Gary Calhoun was not firing on all six cylinders, but it was this lady, Kay Gibson, who put him into overdrive.”
