Chapter 1

THE DISCOVERY

A tall,  gaunt-looking man, 49, and  his wife, 38, stood near the police command post located next to  the trestle crossing  the meandering Hocking River outside Logan.

This  rural,  county  seat  of southeastern Ohio’s Hocking County, with a population of about 10,000, was the scene of  a grisly double murder—murders with possible satanic overtones.

On  Oct. 14,  1982,  the  mutilated bodies  of two local   teenagers   were   found.   Their   naked, dismembered,  torsos  were  discovered  along  the  north bank of the murky river.

The tall man approached  a police captain offering the  authorities  his  assistance.  He asked Steve Mowery whether “it was  them.” Mowery was not able  to identify  the torsos at that  time, yet the man asked him “whether their heads, arms and legs were cut off.”

As Mowery  spoke to the couple  on the trestle, he thought their “reaction to  finding two torsos was kind of  strange. It was not  the kind of reaction you  would  normally expect  from  parents;  the  possibility  that  these  torsos  we  found in the  river  could be  their children.  They just hugged each  other without  any verbal  reaction.” Mowery said the  stepfather, Dale Johnston,  told him, “I  used to  work in a  funeral home and  that sort of thing doesn’t bother me.”

Why were the Johnstons  at the river? Dale claimed that  he had  seen “visions  of trees  and running water.”

And two  days later on  Oct. 16^th, at  5 p.m., one victim’s arms, legs and heads  were found buried in seven  small,  shallow  graves  in  the West Logan cornfield  bordering the  river’s bank--400  yards from where the first torso had been discovered.

A passerby had found a sock on the nearby railroad track.  Inside  were  small  body parts. Authorities  said  it  contained  parts  of Todd’s  penis.

Sheriff Jim Jones told the press that blood on the ground  in the  cornfield indicated  the teenagers had  been dismembered  there and  later dragged to the river.

A VHS or DVD video documentary, “Reasonable Doubt,” is available    from   Land of Canaan Communications. The award-winning  program is only  $19.95 postpaid. It can be ordered  by sending a money order  for $19.95 to Don Canaan, 611 St. Andrews Blvd., The Villages, FL 32159 or via PayPal to dcanaan@israelfaxx.com