White supremacist killer Neal Long committed 21 attacks against black men in Dayton, Ohio in the 1970s, killing seven and injuring 14. He was born in Campton, Kentucky on September 19, 1927 but not much is known about his childhood. Long moved to Dayton when he was 17 and made it his permanent home. He got married in 1948 and went on to father seven children. In the mid-1960s as the civil rights movement was reaching its climate, Long began to experience a psychotic breakdown and anger towards African-Americans. On Halloween 1966, he went to police and claimed that in 1944, shortly after he arrived in Dayton, he and a friend were attacked by some black men on Washington Street. Long stabbed one of the men in self-defense and ran. Dayton police took the 38 year old father of seven into custody but he was soon released as there were no records of any such confrontation occurring on Washington Street on August 2, 1944, the date Long claimed the incident took place.
Long sought psychiatric help in 1968 and agreed to undergo therapy at Dayton Mental Health Center, where he stayed for three months and was diagnosed as having psychopathic personality disorder. He was also obsessed with firearms and military memorabilia. Long is suspected to have been the killer of Lester Mitchell, a black man gunned down in a drive-by shooting on September 1, 1966 and whose unsolved murder triggered the destructive 1966 Dayton Race Riot.
On September 19, 1975, Long walked into the Federal Building in downtown Dayton and requested sociologist Dr. Charles Glatt. Glatt came out into the lobby and asked what he could do for him. He was immediately greeted with four gunshots to the abdomen, neck, and chest. Long was quickly arrested by security; Glatt died on the way to the hospital. Glatt, a professor at Ohio State University, was considered one of the foremost planners in designing and implementing desegregation busing programs in major American cities. In the final year of his life, the 46 year old Glatt had been approached by the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to help draft a busing program for Dayton, to be finished on November 3. Long would later admit that he targeted Glatt for this very reason and believed that forced integration of schools would result in violent confrontations between whites and blacks, including his own 12 year old son Mark.
After being taken into custody, Long confessed to at least 30 attacks on blacks in Dayton over the last three years while under the influence of alcohol and drugs, all shot with a pump-action shotgun from his '66 Ford Fairlane. Several of the victims died, a $10,000 reward was put out for information leading to the shooter's capture, and civil rights leaders wanted the city to declare a state of emergency.
He was charged with the non-fatal shooting of Eddie Freson on August 21, 1972, the fatal shooting of Edward Tillman and wounding of James Watts on September 26, 1973, an incident on May 23, 1975 when he fired at several blacks gathered outside at a block party, wounding one, the murders of Larry Romine and Robert Hoard in July, and the non-fatal shootings of Leonard Goff and Glenda Gay a few days later. Long admitted the motivation was his racial animosity against African-Americans.
A psychiatric evaluation of Long deemed him sane and fit to stand trial. He was tried in US District Court in Dayton for the murder of Charles Glatt, as it took place on Federal property; Long confessed in full and said he was sorry for what he did. He pled guilty in November 1976 and received life in prison. The State of Ohio was also prepared to file charges for the other murders; to avoid the death penalty, Long pled guilty in Dayton Superior Court to three counts of murder and received three more life sentences. The plea deal was accepted due to issues with witness testimony; one of the victims, Leonard Goff, had died of a drug overdose since.
For his own safety, Long spent the rest of his life being moved around various Federal prisons and psychiatric hospitals outside Ohio under an assumed name. He died in the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota on June 12, 1998 at the age of 70.