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THE PLAIN DEALER
Painter: Give Me Polygraph In Spirko Case Sunday, October 16, 2005
Bob Paynter The former house painter who divulged a 15-year-old secret in 1997 about who might have killed an Elgin, Ohio, postmaster is challenging federal authorities to give him a lie-detector test. John Willier told a Wyandot County investigator eight years ago that the man he painted houses with in Findlay in the sum mer of 1982 was involved in Betty Jane Mottinger's murder that August and threatened to kill him if he ever told. But federal officials have never contacted him about the allegation. With death-row inmate John Spirko set to be executed next month for Mottinger's murder, Willier told The Plain Dealer on Friday that he is just as willing to talk to officials now as he was in 1997. He said he's just as convinced that the shroud Mottinger's body was wrapped in is the very tarp that his boss, Dale Dingus, used on a painting job about the time of the murder. And he's just as troubled as Jim Bedra - a member of the Ohio Parole Board - that law enforcement officials have never followed up on his assertions about Mottinger's death. Last week, at Spirko's second clemency hearing before the parole board, Bedra pressed state officials about why they have never reached out to Willier, even though the information he provided about a possible killer has been known for more than eight years. It's "very strange," Willier agreed on Friday in a telephone interview. "Nobody has got ahold of me." Mottinger was kidnapped from her tiny, rural post office on Aug. 9, 1982, and was stabbed at least 13 times. Her body, wrapped in a paint-splattered shroud, was found six weeks later in a soybean field a few hundred yards from the rented house trailer where Willier lived. He was considered a suspect early in the investigation, but investigators lost interest in him in late 1982, as they focused on Spirko. Dingus, Willier's boss that summer, was running his painting business out of a barn on U.S. 224, also less than a quarter-mile from the spot where Mottinger's body was found.
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