Downtown Canton, Ohio (David Lohr)

Thomas Lee Dillon was born in Canton, Ohio, on July 9, 1950.  His father succumbed to Hodgkin’s disease and died when Dillon was just 15 months old.  Psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon said that Dillon viewed his mother as a cold woman who never praised or punished him.  "Dillon … has no memories of his mother ever hugging him, kissing him or telling him she loved him," he said. 

Classmates from Glenwood High School in Plain Township remembered Dillon as extremely intelligent but a loner. His 1968 senior yearbook lists no extracurricular activities.

"Tom was removed from the group," said classmate Ronald Skelton. "He was a person who marched to the beat of a different drummer, separated from the mainstream."

Another classmate, Thomas Breit, said that Dillon was quiet, especially in a group. "I always liked him," Breit said. "I got a kick out of him. He made me laugh."

Dillon loved to hunt.  He simply liked to kill and enjoyed watching animals suffer.  As a teenager, Dillon began keeping count of the animals he killed on a calendar in the bedroom of his home on 37th Street Northwest in Canton.  He also kept a separate calendar listing all of the girls he'd had sex with.

Following high school, Dillon attended Kent State University's Stark campus and later Ohio State University.

"In the summer months, we would all hang out at Willow Springs swimming pool on 55th Street," said a man who remembers Dillon. "I just ran around with him a couple years. We all drank together.  I never saw him shoot a gun. But I heard other people talking about him ─  'Ah, crazy Dillon went out drinking and he was shooting a pistol out the window or he shot the windows out of a school.' I heard things like that a couple times."

Dillon graduated from Ohio State in 1972 and went to work as a draftsman for the Canton Water Department. In 1978, he married Catherine Elsass, a nurse from Alliance, Ohio.

By the early 1980s, Dillon began boasting to friends that the count on his death calendar had reached 500.  He had also attended Ohio Peace Officers Training in Lawrence Township in Stark County, where he graduated with expert marksmanship.

In the mid-1980s, several of Dillon’s neighbors complained to police because Dillon was killing their dogs.

"Dillon was a bad hunter," said a man who hunted with Dillon for several years.  "He would shoot at farmers’ cats after getting permission to hunt on their land. He just didn't care.  He once boasted of killing a deer caught in high water while crossing a river.  He brought the deer home without field dressing it.  He gutted the carcass in his yard and made a mess of it," the hunter said.  “Dillon didn't seem to understand the concept of friendship.  He never offered to do a favor or asked for one.  It was always a trade," he said.  "I'll do this, if you do that … he never talked about women, he never mentioned his wife and love in the same sentence," he said.  “He was always changing guns and carried weapons even when he rode a bike." The hunter estimated that Dillon fired approximately 1,000 rounds a year in target practice.  Dillon shot so often that he had permanently damaged his hearing.  “He seemed to get a physical thrill out of killing,” the hunter said. “He once used a knife to finish off a wounded groundhog.  He was shaking. He was in a frenzy, wild-eyed."