It's just an ordinary old cemetery on Plain City-Georgesville Road, a mile or so west of Columbus, just across the county line in Madison County. It's shady and pleasant and nicely laid-out, with a gravel cul-de-sac surrounding a flagpole and a central monument.
Historically, its claim to fame is the grave of Jonathan Alder, the first white person to live in Madison County. He was captured by Indians at the age of seven from his family in Virginia and brought here. After the Treaty of Greenville ended the Indian Wars, he went back to his family, and then returned to central Ohio to serve as an interpreter for settlers moving into the area.
Although any isolated farm field cemetery like this is creepy enough at night, this one has something particularly dark about it. If you go past the gravestones into the back right corner, you'll find a thin wooden cross wired to the rear fence.
Written on the handmade cross in reflective address stickers are two things. Horizontally it says JESSICA LYNN KEEN; top-to-bottom it says KILLED HERE MARCH 17, 1991.
Jessica Lynn Keen was indeed killed at this very spot in 1991. A fifteen-year-old girl from Columbus, she was an honor student and a cheerleader until she met eighteen-year-old Shawn Thompson. Dating Thompson apparently led her to quit cheerleading and skip school frequently to see him. Her parents, in a move that seems a little extreme to me, had her placed in a group home for troubled teens on March 4, 1991.
After a phone argument with her boyfriend, Jessica left the home on March 15, saying she was going to the City Center Mall. The last time anyone saw her alive she was waiting for a COTA bus at Weinland Park.
It wasn't until March 17 that Jessica Keen's body was found in Foster Chapel Cemetery west of Columbus. She had been raped and beaten to death. Her pendant, with the word "TAKEN" carved on it, was missing, but her watch and ring were still on her hand. Apparently she escaped from her captor or captors and was caught up with at the back of the cemetery, where she was murdered. Police initially suspected the boyfriend, but DNA testing quickly ruled him out as a suspect.
This left police empty-handed, and to this day no one has ever been brought to trial for Jessica's murder. It's a well-known cold case around Columbus and was even featured on the TV show Unsolved Mysteries on August 2, 2001.
Although I have never heard that this cemetery is haunted, it seems a likely candidate. The events that took place here one March night more than a decade ago are certainly dark enough to mark Foster Chapel Cemetery.
On a personal level, it's shocking to me because I think I knew Jessica Keen. I say this tentatively because it's the pieced-together memories of a child, but I always recalled a teenaged girl who lived in one of the other apartments in our breezeway at Weston Gardens, on Norton Road, who was killed. I had some vague awareness that she was rebelling and had a boyfriend picking her up; we used to pass her in the mornings on our way to the parking lot, me a nine- or ten-year-old following my mom, her a quiet, pretty girl hugging her books to her lap while she sat on the breezeway steps. We would say hi; she would smile. I know I had a bit of a little-boy crush on her.
Later on I heard on the news about a west side girl who was found dead in a cemetery, naked but for socks. Those two details stuck with me, the cemetery because she was incongruously dead among the dead who belonged there, and the socks because it was such a shocking detail. She was a girl from Westland High, who had lived near us in our apartment complex, or so my parents told me. It wasn't until I was told about Foster Chapel for this website that I put one and one and one together, remarkable coincidences all in a row. I was only eleven when she was murdered, and I don't think I ever really talked to her, but I do remember her--waiting there all alone in the mornings, perfumed and with her bangs teased up high, sophisticated and beautiful in my eyes.
I wish I had talked to her. I wish somebody could have reacted properly to what she was doing--"rebelling." I wonder if she was miserable at that "group home" for "troubled teens." I hope she had some happiness before things ended for her in a waking nightmare.
UPDATE: May 2008--a cold case no more. Because of an Ohio law that took effect in 2005, many felons were required to provide DNA samples to the state database, and this spring (2008) one was found to match semen found at the Keen murder scene. Now they have a suspect, already charged with corrupting a minor and in the process of being tried for first degree murder: Marvin Lee Smith, Jr.
Marvin Lee Smith, Jr.
I am a firm believer in the concept of presumed innocence, so I hasten to state that this most certainly does not have to be the person who really killed Jessica. There are a million ways that those presented to us in conversation, the media, even courtrooms, can be made to seem very guilty when in fact their only crime is being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or catching the fancy of some police officer or group of officers with a terrifying level of confidence in their own "intuition." Mr. Smith, who was picked up last month in North Carolina, once served nearly nine years in Ohio for rape, kidnapping, and robbery, so there's a good chance he's no angel. He may even be guilty of this crime. But I hope we don't condemn him until we're truly certain beyond any reasonable doubt--and that's all from my soapbox. (Read Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld's Actual Innocence sometime, or John Grisham's The Innocent Man; or watch Paradise Lost and its sequel, or The Thin Blue Line, or Murder on Sunday Morning...it's enough to chill your blood.)
The Dispatch--whose article about the case as of May 6, 2008, can be read here--has put forth the scenario that Smith may have abducted her from that Weinland Park bus stop, driven her to this isolated graveyard, and caught her in the back corner. Now Marvin Smith is facing the death penalty, according to the Madison County DA. Events continue to unfold and I'll keep the website posted with everything I find out. In the meantime, keep an ear to the news to see what comes of this case.
