Residents in a sleepy suburb of Ohio woke to an otherwise average fall morning, some taking notice of a new Halloween display in a neighbor’s yard. While walking his dog down the street later that morning, a man noticed something wasn’t quite right about the decorations and quickly called police.
A woman police say was killed and then hung by her sleeve from a fence in Chillicothe, Ohio, has been identified as 31-year-old Rebecca Cade, the Dayton Daily News reports.
Articles of clothing were strewn about the neighborhood in a sloppy path that went for yards, leading to a chain fence near a Chillicothe home. Hanging by a sleeve, of what clothing was not removed in an apparent chase, was the woman’s body, tethered to the person’s fence. She was dead there for hours, despite being seen by a number of passersby and fence contractors, all who assumed it was a frightfully festive decoration for the upcoming holiday.
The Chillicothe Gazette reports that the victim, later identified as 31-year-old Rebecca Cade, was only discovered for what this really was, a crime, not a lawn ornament, when a man walking his dog decided to get a closer look. Before he came along, all others in the area who saw it didn’t call police, not recognizing that it was a real scene of terror.
Rebecca was killed by blunt force trauma to the head and neck, using a grapefruit-sized rock found near her body. She was then by her sleeve to the fence, left as a gruesome display for all to see, according to the Dayton Daily News.
Police noted in a news conference that women have been killed and gone missing at a rather remarkable rate in Chillicothe over the last year.
Her murder is still unsolved.
