'THE NUMBER YOU HAVE DIALED HAS BEEN DISCONNECTED ...'

If you dial 384-3595 today, you will get a message from the phone company telling you the number has been disconnected.

There’s a reason for that.

About a year ago – actually on Monday, Dec. 18, 2006 at 8:03 a.m., the harassing telephones calls began.

There were a number of them – I have all of them recorded, and there are police reports for all.

Here’s the deal: all of the calls came from the offices of the Linton newspaper - and I can prove that claim, legally.

Every time someone would call with a harassing phone call, I would call Randy List, who is the absentee owner of the newspaper – spending most of his time and efforts in Greenfield and Brazil (He's in Greene County maybe once a week, at most).

His answer on each and every occasion was that I could not prove the calls came from the newspaper’s offices and that even if I could, there is no way he could figure out who was making them – even though I could supply recordings, dates and exact times.

They even went so far as to write a 'news' story basically saying we were lying about the harassing phone calls from their office.

The last time, I called within three minutes after the call. It would have been awfully easy for him to call his underling in Linton – Pruett – and tell him to look around the building and see who was there. But he did not.

As for proving the phone calls came from the newspaper’s offices, the Greene County Sheriff’s Department recently got the results of a phone records subpoena back and they show conclusively the calls came from the Linton paper’s offices.

The only reason someone has not been criminally charged is that the Sheriff's Department can't conclusively prove who in the building made the calls, and List is unwilling to give up any of his employees.

So, since List can’t seem to manage or control his employees, we simply had the phone at the house disconnected.

Basically, we had to alter our lives because a giant conglomerate newspaper chain doesn’t have the testicular fortitude to start firing people for breaking the law.

So, my solution to this situation was simply to take away the temptation for them to call.

And, by the way, I have a pretty good idea who was placing the calls – since I had my son run all of them through Vincennes University’s million-dollar sound equipment and clean up the recordings to make them absolutely distinguishable.

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