There is absolutely nothing good about the James Ruppert murders that occurred on Easter Sunday, 1975, where 11 people, from aged 4 to grandma aged innocents, were killed ruthlessly by a jealous younger brother who snapped shortly after all the kids had enjoyed an Easter Egg hunt. But somehow, in the new book by Karen Holcomb, ‘The Easter Sunday Massacre,’ the surviving daughter-in-law of the prosecutor John Holcomb managed to write a book about that horrendous enterprise that found a spark of humanity I never expected. I was seven years old at the time, and this murder, along with a few other significant events, such as the terrible rape and murder of poor 73-year old Mrs. Ruth Dench at her Taylersville home, very close to my home and well on the way to my grandparents farm that I traveled all the time, and the Beverly Hills Supper Club arson by mobsters that killed 165 innocent people and injured many others, these were events that shaped me in so many ways, that my 7 to 9-year-old self observed and asked a lot of questions of the grown adults at the time, but that I internalized and positioned for my 50 something tools and intellect. I was not a usual kid; I remember details from that period of my life extremely well, including what it smelled like in our kitchen as I watched press coverage of the Ruppert murders in 1975 at the little house in Hamilton, Lindenwald, on 635 Minor Ave. I wasn’t looking for another book to read, but while visiting my parents for Mother’s Day, a day late because I had just returned from a competitive firearms shoot in northern Ohio, my dad gave me a signed copy of Karen Holcomb’s new book that he had received at an event she had at the local library. I knew the story of the Rupperts well, but through some interesting form of quantum entanglement with myself, I had asked many questions as a young person of my older self that still required answers. So this book was something that caught my attention quickly. I grabbed it from him and read it in a few days, putting everything else on hold over that duration, including sleep.
What’s interesting about this case is that I know so many people who were involved, some still alive, such as Michael Gmoser, our current Butler County prosecutor. But there are politics where I get asked several times a week why Gmoser and Sheriff Jones aren’t harder on pedophilia and that they select their cases in oddly political ways. I like Gmoser personally; he was with me at a Trump meeting at Lunken Airport not very long ago, and I like knowing that people like him are part of our legal system in Butler County. But it’s people like him who are part of our political noise that I like, without knowing the details, and I was very interested in it. I also remember the reputation of John Holcomb and several of the judges who have come and gone since then. So Karen’s book was a real treasure for me. As I grabbed it to see who published it, which is something I always do first when obtaining a new book, I immediately recognized that it was from the Chilidog Press out of Milford, where all of Peter Bronson’s books are published, which I am a tremendous fan of. So much so that I think I’m ready to talk about them in more relevant detail. Some of the information in those books is so personal to me that I felt some background noise needed to be filtered through reality, and these last four years of Biden have been just such a contextual faculty, to say it nicely. Good people who want to take care of their kids and live their lives need to understand how much mob and organized crime, in general, have impacted their lives, even today. But needless to say, when I saw that Karen’s book was a “Chilidog” book, it became an instant priority for me.
Jim Ruppert, the 41-year-old who fell off the rocker in life, was jealous of his older brother and a mother’s love that did not go in his direction, and the wife of his brother and their eight kids that were constant reminders of his life’s bad decisions, so he grabbed three of his guns and loaded them up entirely, and proceeded downstairs to shoot them all in cold blood multiple times in the chest and head. It’s a tiny house, so there was no way not to have bodies lying over most of the floor with blood pooling up and dripping into the basement in grotesque ways. Ruppert had been ping-ponging aimlessly through life with an above-average IQ but had no success matching it. He had apparent guilt over a homosexual experience that, at that time, was a real stigma since people knew about it, and he had lost a lot of money in the stock market, only to be constantly reminded about it through debts he had with his older brother. And at 15 years old or so, he found himself in bed with his naked mother, with her putting his hand on her in obvious sexual ways. Lots of things happen to people over a lifetime, but sometimes social stigmas and the expectations of performance can crush a personality, and Jim Ruppert was one of those lost people who did a horrendous thing to innocent people who didn’t deserve it.
Reading this book took me down memory lane; I had never been to the house, but I spent much of my early life around that location, especially at Chester’s Pizza, just a few blocks east of the Lindenwald home. My family used to get a large pepperoni, sausage, and onion pizza from Chester’s almost every Sunday night before watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom as a family. Chester’s Pizza also sponsored my famous soap box derby car, which I ran against Brent Dixon, the current commissioner, Don Dixon’s son. So I found it interesting that the Rupperts liked the nearby Chester’s Pizza, which is still there. So, I returned to get a pizza this past week; it was the first time I had tasted it in over 30 years. And the building still looks the same. While waiting for them to make the pizza, I went to the house where the murders happened and was surprised to see it was still there. The pizza was good, and there was a lot to think about. Mainly how much Pete Rose was mentioned in the book, which reminded me how vital the Big Red Machine was to Cincinnati back then. Even from a jail cell, knowing his life was over as he knew it, Jim Ruppert would ask the guards what the latest Reds score was. Just as the prosecutors sifted through this messy case, they filled their time with standard everyday stuff, such as Reds games, to manage their stress. There is a surprising humanity in this book about one of the most grotesque murders in American history that Karen managed to capture. It helped that she married into the Holcomb family and that John had given her a diary of his time on that case, which she could use to tell this story about the Ruppert Murders that was different. And I think it started a process I had been looking for to answer those questions from my 7-year-old self. Karen Holcomb wrote a good book, and I’m happy she did. The world is far better off because of it because she captured something in it that is difficult to do. And it’s undoubtedly well worth the read.
You can get a copy of The Easter Sunday Massacre at:
Rich Hoffman
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