Gunmen

By Frank Tirico

Thomas Dillon was a draftsman with a side hobby...he liked shooting people. He would kill five people over a three-year period which required the involvement of the FBI to gain his capture. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, he had a similar counterpart in Anatoly Onoprienko who was one of the most prolific serial killers in European history. Taking advantage of the fall of the Soviet Union, Onoprienko roamed from village to village, randomly murdering people for sport and pleasure. He would be nicknamed the "Terminator."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trellis Publishing
• Release date: Jul 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201941802

Book preview

GUNMEN

FRANK TIRICO

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THOMAS LEE DILLON

ANATOLY ONOPRIENKO

THOMAS LEE DILLON

Thomas Lee Dillon’s story is not one of the more well-known in the history of serial killers, but it is a convoluted and sometimes bizarre tale that kept people guessing for four years during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Like many serial killers, Dillon’s past was not an incredibly unique one, up until the time of his first murder. He was born in July of 1950, and lived in the town of Magnolia in Ohio. He was married, had a son, and worked at the Canton Ohio Waterworks for over a decade of his adult life. Although he was often given to flights of fancy, friends of Dillon’s would never have suspected that he was the mastermind behind a series of murders that took place in Ohio over the course of four years.

Some of the people who knew Dillon the best, however, began to notice disturbing patterns in his behavior after his later murders. What might have seemed to be simply an unnecessarily cruel streak eventually became undeniable proof that Dillon was actually a much darker individual than he appeared on the surface. The more he murdered, the more he began to feel an insatiable desire to continue killing. Over time, his violence turned toward animals, and he began to destroy innocent pets in between taking human lives. He started setting fires and imagined himself as some sort of hero as he made his way across the farmlands of Ohio, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. In fact, Dillon was prone to many different forms of imagination, many of which pitted him as some sort of underdog against a difficult foe, and all of which led to real world violence.

One of Dillon’s favorite fantasies involved imagining himself as a special ops soldier, sent on some sort of secret mission to hunt down military targets. The more he thought about this, the more he found himself wanting it to become a reality. One day, the line between his imagination and the real world blurred a little too much, and Dillon became a murderer for the first time. As a part of the same delusional behavior, he would eventually go on to kill four other people, for a grand total of five sniping murders by the time of his eventual arrest.

It was very difficult for police to pinpoint the source of the murders. Over time, Dillon earned a serial killer profile, which described him as someone who actually enjoyed committing crimes and did not perform them out of some sense of obligation alone. The profile also specified that the murderer was a white male with a college education, which described Dillon perfectly. However, it mistakenly pegged him as a man in his late 20s, when in fact he was in his late 30s and early 40s during the times when he committed the murders. The profile was also incorrect in that it believed Dillon to live near all of his victims, when in fact he lived over a hundred