The murder of John Myers ended his life, but not his legacy. Meanwhile, the question of who murdered him remained unknown.
John Myers, the man senselessly murdered outside a tavern in Zoar in November 1947, was on his way home to his wife and daughter in Bolivar, Ohio. A simple stop at a local watering hole to purchase tobacco placed him in the sights of criminal intent on, at least, robbing him of whatever meager money he may have had. Unfortunately for Myers, that robbery escalated to the point where the criminal snuffed our Myers’s life. Myers’s legacy, however, did not die in that parking lot that night.
John and Clara Myers’s daughter married a Bolivar man who worked at a steel mill as a crane operator. They welcomed a total of nine children into their family, five sons and four daughters. Those children then had children of their own, thirty-seven in all by the time that John and Clara Myers’s daughter died in 1977. John Myers’s legacy lived on in the lives of his descendants who continued to live in Tuscarawas County long after his murder in 1947.
Excerpt from the obituary of John and Clara Myers’s daughter, recording the names of their descendants, January 1977. (Source: newspaperarchive.com) 
Tuscarawas County Sheriff John McIntosh, c. 1948. (Source: newspapers.com) 
New Philadelphia, Ohio newspaper reporting on the death of Sheriff John McIntosh, February 1948. (Source: newspapers.com) 
New Philadelphia, Ohio newspaper article on Bolivar Town Hall that mentions the Myers murder, December 1949. (Source: newspapers.com)
Tuscarawas County Sheriff John McIntosh was convinced, by the end of December 1947, that Delbert Sizemore was the man who pulled the trigger and killed John Myers. When the new year of 1948 arrived, McIntosh was eager to petition the prison authorities in Illinois to be able interview Sizemore personally or have him transported to Tuscarawas County for interrogation. Unfortunately, Sheriff McIntosh was fatally injured in a car accident at the end of January 1948, and died in early February. It appears that no further follow-up was done on the Myers case after McIntosh’s death.
Delbert Sizemore, despite the belief by the FBI at the time of his arrest in December 1947, was paroled, released, and rearrested a number of times throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Mostly for armed robberies he committed, though he remained in the state of Indiana for most of them. There were also occasions where he was arrested or suspected in cases that involved assault and battery as well. That Delbert Sizemore was a career criminal and serial robber was well illustrated throughout his lifetime. A lifetime capped off by one last robbery.
Delbert Sizemore walked into the Merchants National Bank in Muncie, Indiana a little before 10:00 am on Friday, May 17, 1974. Carrying a shopping bag, he walked up to the bank counter and showed the tellers the pistol he carried in his hand. Sizemore then ordered the two tellers to empty their cash drawers into his shopping bag. The tellers stuffed around $13,000 into the bag and Sizemore then took the bag and calmly walked out of the bank. Sizemore was arrested two days later and died three months after in the county jail from a heart attack at the age of 60. His life of crime over.
A newspaper report about the town of Bolivar needing a new town hall appeared in the New Philadelphia newspaper in December 1949 and mentioned then Mayor Bernard Christman. Christman’s status as a witness in the case of John Myers’s murder was also reported. The article went on to state that the murder was “a crime not yet solved”. The Myers case was not mentioned in later newspaper accounts, nor were any suspects ever arrested, tried, or convicted of John Myers’s murder. Whether a sixty-year old career criminal who died in an Indiana jail cell in 1974 was responsible, we will never truly know.
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© Noel B. Poirier, 2025
Tuscarawas County Stories 