Despite these expectations and him being in his high school's wrestling team, Wickline's grades fell drastically and he became known as a small-time delinquent whose most egregious offense was egging his principal's car.

After spending several years in different prisons around the state, Wickline would eventually be released yet again in November 1979, and after a temporary break-up with his girlfriend, he started displaying increasingly violent tendencies.

[2] On November 11, 1979, the body of a 34-year-old construction worker from Columbia, South Carolina, Charles Morgan Marsh, was found on his bed at a hotel room in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Deciding that he needed to get rid of Peggy as well, as she could be a potential witness, Wickline threatened to harm Kemp if she did not help him out by holding the sleeping woman's legs while he proceeded to strangle her to death with a rope.

[2] Shortly after the Lerches' disappearances, Wickline was arrested for breaking into a drug store in Nelsonville, for which he was given a year and a half sentence at the Pickaway Correctional Institution in Orient.

Before he could even be officially charged, Wickline was additionally linked to the Marsh murder in West Virginia, and was proposed as a suspect in several other violent crimes involving dismemberment.

[9] In 2020, authorities identified Muncy's killer as Daniel Alan Anderson, a violent sex offender with past convictions for abusing young boys, who had died in 2013.