A Dusty Typewriter at an Estate Sale Had Been Sitting on a Murder Confession for 31 Years
Photo by Photo by Andrew Seaman on Unsplash on Unsplash
Most people who buy old typewriters are looking for a conversation piece. Something to sit on a shelf next to some succulents and look like they've read a lot of Hemingway. Karen Delacroix was no different when she paid $18 for a battered 1960s-era Royal Quiet De Luxe at an estate sale in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2022.
She wasn't looking for a mystery. The mystery found her anyway.
The Typewriter That Wouldn't Behave
Within a few weeks of bringing the machine home, Delacroix — a hobbyist who enjoyed typing letters to friends the old-fashioned way — started noticing something strange. The lowercase 'e' printed slightly higher than the baseline. The 'r' key left a faint double impression, like a ghost letter trailing every word. And the capital 'M' had a hairline crack running through its left leg that gave it an unmistakable lopsided look.
These weren't just quirks. To anyone trained in forensic document examination, these are what's known as typewriter fingerprints — the unique, identifying characteristics that develop as a machine ages, wears, and sustains damage. No two heavily-used typewriters print exactly alike.
Delacroix didn't know any of that. She just thought the machine was charming in a broken sort of way.
What changed everything was a true crime podcast.
A Cold Case Nobody Could Close
In the fall of 1991, a 44-year-old insurance adjuster named Robert Tully was found dead in his Zanesville home. The cause of death was poisoning — a slow-acting compound introduced into his food over what investigators believed was a period of several weeks. There were no signs of forced entry. No obvious suspects were ever charged. The case went cold inside of three years.
What detectives did have, however, was a single typewritten note recovered from Tully's kitchen counter. It was addressed to no one in particular, referenced a financial dispute, and contained a thinly veiled threat. Investigators had always believed it was connected to the killing — but without a matching typewriter, the note was just paper.
For 31 years, that note sat in an evidence box.
Delacroix heard the case discussed in detail on a podcast episode she stumbled across while doing laundry in early 2022. The host read portions of the note aloud and described the document examiner's original findings: a misaligned lowercase 'e,' a doubling effect on the letter 'r,' and a distinctive capital 'M' with visible damage to one strike arm.
Delacroix stopped folding laundry.
Forensic Typewriter Analysis Is a Real Thing
It sounds like something from a 1940s detective novel, but forensic typewriter analysis is a legitimate and well-established discipline. Document examiners have been using it in courtrooms since at least the 1930s. The most famous example is probably the Lindbergh kidnapping trial, where ransom notes were traced to a specific typewriter found in the suspect's possession.
Modern analysis goes even further. Examiners can identify the make and model of a machine, estimate its approximate age, determine whether a document was typed all at once or in separate sessions, and — when they have a physical machine to compare — match documents to a specific unit with a high degree of certainty.
When Delacroix contacted the Muskingum County Sheriff's Office, she half-expected to be dismissed. Instead, a detective who had re-opened the Tully case six months earlier took her call seriously. The typewriter was collected, examined by a certified forensic document analyst, and compared against the 1991 note.
The misaligned 'e.' The ghost 'r.' The broken 'M.'
All three matched.
What the Typewriter Knew
Tracing the typewriter's ownership history led investigators back through the estate sale, through a storage unit, and eventually to the former home of a woman who had been a business partner — and, it emerged, a creditor — of Robert Tully in the early 1990s. The woman had died in 2019, which meant no prosecution was ever going to happen. But the identification allowed the case to be officially closed, gave Tully's surviving family members an answer they'd spent three decades without, and confirmed a theory investigators had quietly held for years.
The woman had never been formally questioned. She had moved out of state within a year of Tully's death, and without the typewriter, there had simply been nothing to connect her.
The Object That Outlasted Its Secret
What makes this story genuinely strange — even by the standards of cold case investigations — is how mundane the object at the center of it all really is. Not a hidden diary. Not a buried weapon. Just a second-hand typewriter that a woman bought because she thought it looked nice.
It had been sitting in storage, then at an estate sale, then on a shelf in Zanesville, Ohio, holding onto a 31-year-old secret without anyone asking it the right question.
Detectives will tell you that cold cases often break not because of new technology or brilliant detective work, but because the right object ends up in front of the right person at the right moment. In this case, that person was doing laundry and half-listening to a podcast.
The typewriter is currently held in the county's evidence archive. Delacroix says she's in the market for a different one — preferably one with a cleaner history.
