People You’ll See In Hell

30-year-old Jason Michael Ritzert had never applied for a driver’s license, had never earned a paycheck. He made some spare money with odd jobs that he did for friends and neighbors, who were happy to let him work for them.

Does that make him slothful? No, on the contrary, most of the odd jobs that he did weren’t for money. He plowed snow or chopped wood because he couldn’t stand to sit around and do nothing, and didn’t like to be alone. Jason, was developmentally disabled and had the mental abilities of a slow 12-year-old, but he had a great heart.

One of the odd jobs that he did was picking up trash in the parking lot of a country western bar where he went to play pool at times. During one of his visits to that bar, he met Timothy James Caldwell, who worked as a bouncer at the bar.

With the jobs that he worked and the little amount of money that he earned himself, Jason Ritzert decided that he should try and live on his own, maybe with some friends. He asked Timothy Caldwell if he knew a place Jason could stay for a while to try living on his own.

Timothy said that he did, and invited Jason to stay in a room in Timothy’s duplex.

That was back in 2005, when Jason Michael Ritzert thought that he had the best friends in the world and loved the fact that he was nearly “on his own,” living in a duplex with friends that were about his age.

But it didn’t take long for those friends, 29-year-old Timothy James Caldwell and his cousin, 24-year-old Melissa Adams, to take advantage of the fact that they had an easily-manipulated person on their hands, a person who went to great lengths to please anyone around him and who would cower and hide behind his hands if an adult so much as looked at him in anger.

First came the cell phone bill. Jason Ritzert’s parents gave their son a cell phone to use to call them. Melissa Adams and Timothy Caldwell, both cousins, managed to run the bill up on that cell phone to over a thousand dollars, while convincing Jason that since he was on his own now, he shouldn’t call home as much.

At all, really.

Then came the Social Security fraud, as Melissa Adams and Timothy Caldwell somehow managed to not only get Jason Ritzert qualified for the checks, which he never had been collecting before, but also conveniently cashed them for him and kept the proceeds. It’s easy to steal when the person you’re taking money from doesn’t understand money and can’t write anything but his own name - in a scribble.

Then the abuse started.

Accusing Jason of stealing some spare change from him, Timothy Caldwell slapped Jason around a little bit, hitting him on the face a few times and sending a couple punches at Jason’s body, while Jason cowered.

Once the gates of abuse were opened, they were never closed again.

The torture of Jason Ritzert continued as Melissa and Timothy kept up the beating and added a new element - fire.

Putting lighter fluid on Jason’s hands, they set him on fire.

This happened over a period of several weeks, as Melissa Adams and Timothy Caldwell abused a man who was undoubtedly frightened, scared and completely docile and whose whole reason for living was to make people happy

The pair continued the abuse until one day in November of 2005, they soaked Jason’s shirt in lighter fluid, put him into the duplex bathtub and set him on fire.

Painful as it was, Jason didn’t die and Adams and Caldwell pulled him out of the tub and put him onto a mattress in his room, where they left him suffering and crying for about a week.

On the 10th of November, Adams and Caldwell finally decided that they had to get rid of Jason, so Timothy walked over, kicked their victim a few times in the ribs and then stood on Jason’s neck for between five to ten minutes.

That was enough to bring Jason’s tortured existence to an end.

As Melissa Adams called her boyfriend, 36-year-old Russell Hilliard, to come help dispose of the Jason’s body, Timothy Caldwell wrapped it in a sheet.

Russell Hilliard stole a meat truck, met them at the duplex and helped them load Jason’s body into the back. They all hopped into the truck and drove to a place Russell Hilliard knew they could get rid of the body - a warehouse that regularly burned trash in a bin behind the building.

Once they arrived, Jason’s body was thrown into the bin, dowsed with lighter fluid again and set on fire.

Then they left.

Interestingly, when employees of the warehouse arrived to work the next day, they thought Jason’s body was a mannequin that had been mixed into other discarded items and set it on fire once again.

How exactly they figured out they had a body on their hands, we’ve been unable to figure out, unless it had something to do with the stench a burning human body produces differs more than slightly from the stench a mannequin produces when it is burned.

Either way, the police were called and an investigation was conducted. For a while, authorities couldn’t identify who the victim was, but with the extensive media coverage, Jason’s parents realized that they hadn’t heard from their son in a while and told the police that the body might be that of their son.

With dental records provided by Jason’s parents, the body was identified and the police had their suspects.

Timothy Caldwell took a plea bargain and plead guilty to first degree murder, for which he will spend life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 21 to 42 months for abusing a corpse and tampering with evidence.

Melissa Adams, described as borderline retarded by her lawyer, was sentenced to between 30 and 60 years in prison after taking an offered plea deal and pleading guilty to third-degree murder. She had initially been charged with first-degree murder, but the plea took the death penalty off the table.

Russell Hilliard will face a minimum of 16 years in prison. He was supposed to be sentenced on the 23rd of October, but we’ve been unable to find out how that’s turned out for him. If anyone knows, please let us know.

Update:

Russell Hilliard was sentenced in December of 2007 to 20 to 40 years in prison.

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