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Melvin Young Went to the Church Boathouse. The Padlock Was Not Theirs.
Published 2 months, 3 weeks ago
Description
Every Tuesday, Melvin Young took the same seat at Patsy's Diner and the owner put in his ticket without asking. Beef soup, grilled cheese, sweet tea. On a Saturday morning in January 2017, a volunteer at the youth basketball clinic set out the balls and waited for him, and he never came. Three weeks earlier Melvin had paid cash for a padlock and told nobody what it was for. That padlock is how he was found.
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This is an original fictional case written for this show; the people, places, and investigation are invented. Within the story: Melvin Young, 32, a carpenter in Draper's Mill, was found dead on the morning of January 9, 2017, in the boathouse of Calvary Fellowship Church, shut in behind a padlock that was not the church's. A medical examiner found two areas of blunt-force injury to his head and placed his death roughly two days earlier.
Glenn Fisher, a handyman from the north shore of Lake Harmon who had been taking materials from a job site Melvin worked on, first told detectives he had not seen Melvin since the holidays and had never been inside the church's storage building. He changed that account after a neighbor placed Melvin's truck at his house, and he was arrested on January 15 once Melvin's blood was identified in his garage and in the seam of his boat. In a recorded interview on February 11, with his lawyer present, he admitted striking Melvin twice with a heavy metal tool and carrying him across the lake. He disputed the prosecution's position that he had invited Melvin over in order to kill him, saying the decision came during the argument. He was convicted of murder in 2018 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The weapon and Melvin's phone were never recovered. A second death in Kellam Township, inside a locked fishing shed whose padlock had also been replaced, was reviewed for a connection to Glenn; no connection was established, and that investigation remains open.
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There is no case file behind this one. The story, the witnesses and the evidence were written for True Crime 24 Hours, and the episode says so in its first minute.
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Children take part in the youth basketball clinic in this story and are not named.
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This is an original fictional case written for this show; the people, places, and investigation are invented. Within the story: Melvin Young, 32, a carpenter in Draper's Mill, was found dead on the morning of January 9, 2017, in the boathouse of Calvary Fellowship Church, shut in behind a padlock that was not the church's. A medical examiner found two areas of blunt-force injury to his head and placed his death roughly two days earlier.
Glenn Fisher, a handyman from the north shore of Lake Harmon who had been taking materials from a job site Melvin worked on, first told detectives he had not seen Melvin since the holidays and had never been inside the church's storage building. He changed that account after a neighbor placed Melvin's truck at his house, and he was arrested on January 15 once Melvin's blood was identified in his garage and in the seam of his boat. In a recorded interview on February 11, with his lawyer present, he admitted striking Melvin twice with a heavy metal tool and carrying him across the lake. He disputed the prosecution's position that he had invited Melvin over in order to kill him, saying the decision came during the argument. He was convicted of murder in 2018 and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. The weapon and Melvin's phone were never recovered. A second death in Kellam Township, inside a locked fishing shed whose padlock had also been replaced, was reviewed for a connection to Glenn; no connection was established, and that investigation remains open.
---
There is no case file behind this one. The story, the witnesses and the evidence were written for True Crime 24 Hours, and the episode says so in its first minute.
---
Children take part in the youth basketball clinic in this story and are not named.