John Spirko Serving Life Sentence for Crime He Didn’t Commit

Max Van Dyke
Sep 9, 2018 · 3 min read

In the rural town of Elgin, Ohio on a summer day in 1982, a Post Office was robbed of stamps and money orders, and the Postmaster, one Betty Jane Mottinger was abducted from the scene and later murdered.

Home to about 50 people, Elgin would soon be the epicenter of a murder case and the story of a wrongly convicted man, John Spirko, who lied his way onto Death Row for 20*** years. Physical evidence including DNA testing has failed time and again to match Spirko to the murder. The case against him presented by the state of Ohio has been demonstrated to be false, replete with errors and half-truths, with one legal observer calling it “built on sand.” After having his execution stayed by then-Governor Ted Strickland, Spirko was sentenced to life in prison for a murder that he did not commit and that evidence has demonstrated he could not have commited.


On August 9th of 1982 at aproximately 8:30 in the morning, Jane Mottinger, the Postmaster in the town of Elgin, Ohio was abducted after the post office was robbed. Two eye witnesses, one a local resident, the other a truck driver who happened to pass by prior to the incident describe a man wearing glasses standing by his car just minutes before the crime. Both their descriptions contradict each other with the former describing a clean-shaven man with a long sleeved blue shirt and dark hair, while the latter described a man with a mustache with sandy-brown and a short-sleeved green and orange striped shirt.

Six weeks later, Mottinger’s body was found in a bean field, fully-clothed and with over a dozen stab wounds.

One month prior to the events in Elgin, John Spirko was paroled after serving 13 years in Kentucky for a murder (as an acomplice). Upon being paroled, Spirko went to live with his sister in Swanton, Ohio, aproximately 120 miles out from Elgin.

Spirko has contended that he could not have possibly committed the murder of Jane Mottinger because on the morning of the murder, he was in Swanton. Both his parole officer, who he met with that day and his sister attest to his being in Swanton on the day that Ms. Mottinger was murdered in Elgin. Though his parole officer could not remember the exact time of the meeting, he stated that Spirko’s sister was present at the meeting as well and she testified that the time of the meeting was 9:30am.

Further, phone records and a signed pick up slip from the Swanton Post Office place Spirko in Swanton the afternoon of August 9th 1982. That, combined with the lack of physical evidence including a negative DNA match stack up to conclusion that Spirko is not guilty.


How then, if he was nearly 2 hours away from the scene of the crime did he come to be a suspect and ultimately given a death sentence? According to Spirko, his involvement in the murder case began while he was in prison for another crime. While in jail, he convinced his girlfriend at the time, LuAnn Smith to bring him a hacksaw so that he could escape. Spirko’s escape plan was unsuccessful and he never made it out. Upon his capture he was transfered to Lucas County jail and was eventually transferred to a high security area. It was there that he discovered his girlfriend had also been arrested for aiding in the escape.

Feeling guilty that he had implicated LuAnn and gotten her arrested, Spirko began an elaborate scheme to feed information to law enforcement that he got from newspapers regarding the murder of Mottinger. Believing that if he pretended that he had information about the case, he could bargain with it in exchange for reducing Smith’s sentence. As has been confirmed by several reports, all the information he presented was derived solely from existing newspaper articles he had access to. Other information he offered up was incorrect and did not match the evidence the police had, meaning he simply made it up.

In the subsequent posts of this series, I’ll more thoroughly layout the case for why Spirko is innocent of the crime he currently serving a life sentence for using evidence from his case file, paper reports, and his own written account on the matter. To be continued…

Max Van Dyke

Written by

I like politics, comics, gin, and history. #PizzaOverEverything.

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