Gary Bradley heard the low rumble of the gray Chevy pickup truck as it crawled along the deserted country road and looked up from his fishing hole to wave.
He had no way of knowing that the man who smiled and waved back had come to kill him.
Tommy Dillon, the man in the truck, didn’t know Bradley. That was the way Dillon liked it. He didn’t want the killing to be personal.
Dillon was a serial killer, a man who derived macabre pleasure from taking the life of another human being. Bradley was to be his fifth victim–the second in three weeks.
So far, Dillon had managed to stay ahead of a team of local police and federal agents investigating the murders. Although he bought and sold his murder weapons legally, gun laws provided him with the anonymity he craved.
Serial killers are rarities, but there was little unique about the way Dillon obtained and sold the guns he used to kill. He worked the gun-show circuit, buying and unloading weapons without paperwork or government surveillance.
While he was illegally disposing of murder weapons, he was breaking no specific gun laws.
Although Dillon committed his murders between 1989 and 1992–before the Brady law, assault-weapons ban and the Uniform Crime Bill were passed–all of what he did could be done today by just about any criminal seeking to acquire guns or hide them from police.
The last to die
On the chilly Ohio morning of April 5, 1992, Gary Bradley was about to become a statistic–one of thousands of people Justice Department surveys show who are killed or injured each year with guns bought at gun shows and private sales.
Perhaps assuming Dillon was just another fisherman, the 52-year-old Bradley watched the pickup drive by, then returned to his fishing.
The details of what happened next are taken from Dillon’s confession, public records and interviews.
Dillon pulled over several hundred yards down the road and scrambled up a small hill. In his hand Dillon carried a Swedish Mauser, a powerful rifle he had bought a year and three months earlier at a Canton, Ohio, gun show.
The Mauser is a particularly accurate weapon. Variants of the Mauser have been a popular military weapon around the world for more than a century.
As Dillon made his way up the hillside, he was careful to remain hidden behind the trees and shrubs. Settling in behind a small ash tree, he adjusted the telescopic sights on the weapon.
Nearly 150 yards away, Bradley, who had no idea that he was being lined up in the cross hairs of the rifle scope, started back to his truck.
Dillon’s first shot caught him in the middle of his back. Bradley’s body folded, as if his legs were suddenly too weak to support his frame, and he fell face down in the soft mud.
As Bradley lay unmoving, Dillon fired again. From the incline, he could see the man’s body jerk as the second bullet struck it, and Dillon knew he hadn’t missed.
Then Dillon carefully retraced his steps, stopping to gather the two spent shells. An inner voice he claimed that had told him to “get that guy” was quieted.
Dillon then did two things that for him were routine after a killing. One was to go home and grab a sandwich. The other was to go to a gun show.
It hadn’t always been this way. After his first killing on April 1, 1989, Dillon threw the murder weapon away, afraid that if he was ever accused of the murder, police could use the gun to link him to the crime.
By the time of his second murder, six months later, Dillon hit on a more profitable way to ditch the murder weapon–he sold it at a gun show to a perfect stranger. That weapon, too, was never found.
Dillon would do the same with the other murder weapons. Each time he was careful to sell to someone who couldn’t be linked to him, thus lessening the likelihood of the gun ever being recovered. And because Dillon wasn’t a licensed firearms dealer, there was no requirement that he or the buyer keep a record of the sale.
So just hours after killing his fifth victim, Dillon headed to a gun show at the Knights of Columbus hall in Massillon, Ohio. The show, 82 miles from the murder scene in Noble County, was in its second day.
The man who would play a critical role in Dillon’s capture, gun dealer Alford Cope, was there. Cope, 49, was an electrician at a steel mill who sold weapons on the side.
But Cope’s role in helping bring Dillon to justice had nothing to do with the federal or local firearms rules and regulations–which he followed to the letter. His role was simply one of happenstance.
Once at the show, Dillon tried to trade the murder weapon for a pistol and cash at one table, but the dealer wasn’t interested. As Dillon browsed the tables, he caught Cope’s attention.
Nothing about Dillon made him stand out in the crowd.
What caught Cope’s attention was the gun. He called Dillon over, and the ensuing conversation–confirmed by Dillon’s recorded confession and by Cope in an interview–was not unusual for a gun show. But in light of what had transpired earlier that day, it was chilling.
“Say, what have you got there?” Cope asked as Dillon approached.
“It’s a Swedish Mauser.”
“I know, I used to have one of them,” Cope replied, taking the gun in hand.
There was nothing about the weapon that hinted at its use just four hours before in a cold-blooded slaying.
“It’s accurate, real accurate,” Dillon said, adding, “I have shot groundhogs with it.”
Cope quickly cut to the chase. “What do you want for it?”
“Oh, a hundred and seventy five,” Dillon replied.
“That’s pretty steep,” Cope haggled. “I don’t know.”
“I’ve got some ammo that goes with it. It’s out in the car.”
“Well, maybe.” Cope, who was still holding the weapon, appeared hesitant. “Go get it, and I’ll see if we can make a deal.”
They did.
Dillon settled for $135 in cash and a .25-caliber Lorcin pistol. Because Cope bought the rifle for his personal collection and not for resale in his dealership, he wasn’t required to keep a record of the transaction and didn’t.
The murder weapon was no longer in Dillon’s possession. Once again a gun show provided him with a ready market. And thanks to the loose rules governing private gun sales, he had gotten rid of the rifle without a paper trail and had broken no federal or state gun laws.
A chance arrest by a game warden, who caught Dillon with an unlicensed silencer, piqued the interest of investigators probing the serial murders. There was still no evidence, but the fact that he fit an FBI profile of the killer made him a prime suspect.
Here the gun laws and policies were working against investigators. Although recovered bullets indicated that the serial killer had used a Swedish Mauser in the Bradley slaying, investigators had no way of checking to see if Dillon ever bought or owned such weapons.
So once again, Tommy Dillon was shielded by the deficiencies of federal gun laws and policies. Emboldened by his ability to evade capture, he even taunted police in an anonymous letter to a newspaper about one of his victims. He promised he wouldn’t be caught.
He was wrong.
Dillon, who pleaded guilty to the silencer charge, avoided serving time by promising not to keep or use any guns. But Dillon couldn’t stay away from gun shows.
Finally, FBI agents and local sheriff’s deputies followed him to a Cleveland gun show, watched while he purchased a gun and arrested him.
Investigators confronted Dillon, accusing him of being the serial killer. But they still didn’t have a single piece of physical evidence to make the charges stick.
Then investigators got a big break–not from gun records, but the memory of the gun dealer, Alford Cope.
When local newspapers learned that Dillon was a suspect, they printed his picture.
Alford Cope turned to his wife, showed her the photo of Dillon and said, “That’s the man who sold me the Mauser.”
That very day Cope called the police hot line. They picked up the weapon.
Ballistic tests on the rifle confirmed that it was the weapon used to kill Bradley. Faced with the mounting evidence of his guilt, Dillon pleaded guilty on July 12, 1993, to five murders and was sentenced to life in prison.
In correspondence from prison earlier this year, Dillon blamed the murders on an undiagnosed mental illness, not the firearms he owned or gun shows he so frequently attended.
“The exact opposite is true,” he wrote. “I received a lot of enjoyment by attending gun shows, trading and selling guns.”
