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Thomas Levinson | DISPATCH
Tom Mongitore and his extended family rent this Knox County house near Apple Valley Lake that a few years ago was a crime scene. A mortgage company cleaned and refurbished the property and turned it over to the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
By
Lori Kurtzman
HOWARD, Ohio — The Mongitores knew what had happened in the house, and why no one wanted to buy
it. They’d seen photos of the blood-soaked carpet. They could point to where each victim had been
killed. Back then, Tom Mongitore had volunteered to search for the bodies.
“To be honest with you, at first, I was a little leery,” said Bonnie Mongitore, 43. “It was
weird the first night.”
The Mongitores moved into the house on King Beach Drive last month, more than two years after
Tina Herrmann, her 11-year-old son, Kody Maynard, and their neighbor, Stephanie Sprang, were killed
there.
The new family’s presence has become both a relief and a curiosity to residents who slow when
they drive past the Apple Valley house, offering tiny waves. One neighbor stopped by with
brownies.
“We want to make that a happy place again,” Mrs. Mongitore said. “I think once everybody gets
adjusted to it, I think it’s going to be OK.”
For months, the three-bedroom home sat empty, a cold, quiet reminder of the eight days in
November 2010 when Knox County residents searched in vain for their missing neighbors. It already
was too late.
Matthew Hoffman, who’s serving a life sentence in prison, had broken in and stabbed the women
and the boy before dismembering their bodies and stuffing them inside a hollow tree at a state
wildlife area on the other side of the county. He spared only Herrmann’s teenage daughter, Sarah
Maynard, though she suffered her own horror: Hoffman held her captive for four days, tied up on a
bed of leaves in the basement of his home near Mount Vernon.
Real-estate agents say some clients can’t separate a home from the crime committed there, and
this seemed to be one of those cases. Despite a thorough hazmat cleaning, new paint and carpets,
the 1,600-square-foot house drew little interest from prospective buyers. Martha Edelblute, who
listed the property for owner CitiMortgage, said the bank ultimately decided to turn the house over
to the local Habitat for Humanity chapter.
Habitat, meanwhile, had to decide whether it even wanted what some were calling the “murder
house.” Some in the community were calling for it to be town down.
“We could have said no,” said Linda Michaels, who manages the office and serves on the board of
Habitat for Humanity of Knox County.
But it was still a beautiful house, with a big front deck and a wide-open living room that
blended into a sparkling kitchen. The bank had put so much money into the rehabilitation that
Habitat needed to replace only the original furnace, some rusted bathroom fixtures and broken
lights. Habitat, which sells its homes at low cost with no-interest loans, decided to try to find
the house a family.
“There’s nothing wrong with the house. It’s a very nice house,” Michaels said. And besides: “
Terrible things happen in houses all the time.”
Their first choice, a single woman, said she’d take it. Then she changed her mind. Michaels
approached the Mongitores, who were living in a run-down farmhouse nearby, and explained the
situation. The couple jumped on it, moving in with their adult niece and toddler granddaughter, of
whom they have custody.
They are renting from Habitat until they fulfill their sweat-equity commitment. Then they have
an option to buy.
“I’ve had a lot of people ask me, ‘How could you live there?’ ” Mrs. Mongitore said. “It’s not
the house’s fault. It was the guy that was just so mean and hateful and awful that did this.”
So now the home no one wanted is theirs. It’s warm and tidy and surprisingly welcoming, the
walls of the living room covered in pictures of the Mongitore children and grandchildren.
On a recent day, Mr. Mongitore, 42, stood inside with his granddaughter and his three big dogs
and said the family couldn’t be happier with its decision.
lkurtzman@dispatch.com