BRYAN, Ohio - In a tiny home, a 10-year-old girl sat cross-legged on her bed, twirling stringy brown strands of hair between her fingers and intermittently chewing her nails.

"Do you want to see what Don gave me?" she whispered, suddenly tossing aside her hair and pushing back a comforter covered with pink ballerinas.

She reached under her bed.

"You'll like 'em," she promised as she tugged out a pair of pumps with spiked, chrome-like heels and studded crystals.

She plays princess in them, she said with a grin. Maybe one day she'll wear them to a prom.

"They're real diamonds, you know, and real glass," she said. "Know how much [Don] paid for them? Seventy-five dollars."

The "gift" came at a price: Donald Sallows was raping her.

One spring day last year, Sallows, who was then 53, stopped at the girl's tiny home where she lived with her single father. Sallows owned two black Labradors and chatted about the weather, cars, and broken marriages. The family grew close to Sallows - taking walks with him and eating together.

"He cussed here and there," the father said, "but other than that, he seemed real nice."

What he and other folks in this toy-strewn neighborhood didn't know was that Sallows had once slipped his hands inside the pants of a 4-year-old girl.

Or that he was accused of fondling a child in a prison visiting room as she sat on his lap - her unknowing parents across the table with the home-baked goods they'd brought him.

Or that he'd killed a man.

Sallows' life, in fact, has been marked by second chances. In 2003, he moved here to begin life anew, taking college classes, finding a job, and attending church.

Even those in Bryan who knew about the 1977 murder in Toledo for which Sallows was convicted - an extraordinarily brutal case in which Sallows beat the victim - said Sallows told them he only drove a vehicle in the crime.

His employer, his landlord, his pastor, and police in this Williams County city never knew of Sallows' past as a sex offender.

"He comes across as very articulate. His very appearance and his general attitude is of a guy you sit across the table and have lunch with him and think nothing of it," said the Rev. Mike Kelly, pastor of Grace Community Church and founder of The Sanctuary homeless shelter.

Though the church and the shelter, of course, will continue their missions of helping those in trouble, the pastor said he feels deceived by Sallows, whom he helped find an apartment.

"If Don walked in today and said the sky was blue," he said, "I'd walk out to see."

Sallows' past stunned even veteran detectives and Williams County Common Pleas Judge Anthony Gretick, who recently sentenced Sallows, now 54, to life in prison for raping the girl. Another girl also told police that Sallows had raped her, but investigators declined to prosecute, knowing he'd already be sentenced to life imprisonment in the first case.

"The sooner we get him into prison and back where he belongs, the better," the judge said in an interview after the hearing.

Sallows skirted the death penalty in the murder case and twice has convinced a parole board to let him go. Even though he had confessed to molesting a 4-year-old girl, he was not a convicted sex offender and was able to move just down the street from an elementary school.

"You know how the system is," said now retired Toledo police Lt. Charlie Hunt, who helped gather confessions in the 1977 murder case for which Sallows was convicted. "You keep bringing them in [to prison], and you've got to let some out. The cup overflows."

Just consider, he said, Joe Spitzman's five killers.

Thick like a wrestler and six feet tall, 26-year-old Don Sallows sat in the interrogation room on March 27, 1977, politely confessing to murder.

Days earlier, Joe Spitzman, a Dayton man who'd come to work in Toledo, had been lured into a dark parking lot to face 26-year-old Terry "Red" Williams. A disgruntled ex-employee at the Reynolds Road Vacuum Cleaner Center, Williams blamed the store manager, Mr. Spitzman, for costing him his job.

Sallows told police that Williams had for weeks been telling acquaintances he'd kill Mr. Spitzman, and he'd recruited Sallows and others to help.

Once in the parking lot, Mr. Spitzman was punched by Williams and chased in a truck driven by Sallows. Joined by 24-year-old Ralph Boykin, Sallows and Williams then forced Mr. Spitzman into a nearby apartment. Bound and blindfolded, Mr. Spitzman was then assaulted by the three men, one-by-one.

According to a police transcript, Sallows confessed to punching the 150-pound Mr. Spitzman three times. Sallows said his blows to his chest and face left Mr. Spitzman bloodied but conscious.

"Why are you doing this to me?" Sallows remembered Mr. Spitzman asking him.

Using a strip of bed sheet, Boykin then choked Mr. Spitzman. Finally, Williams stormed into the room: "I will kill him myself," Boykin and Sallows recalled him saying.

Boykin and Sallows left the room. Williams emerged minutes later, covered in blood and carrying a foot-long butcher knife. He mumbled: "Joe Spitzman is a hard guy to kill."

"It was so bizarre," Lieutenant Hunt recalled. "This guy, Terry Williams, controlled these people like [Charles] Manson. He had these eyes that would stare right through you, and they all did what he told them."

Boykin, Williams, and Sallows pleaded guilty to aggravated murder. Judges sentenced each to prison "for the rest of his natural life."

Today, 28 years later, only one of Mr. Spitzman's killers remains behind bars. Sallows was the first paroled in 1995 after serving less than 18 years. Boykin was released eight years later. Two men who helped destroy evidence spent less than two months in prison for involuntary manslaughter.

Only Williams remains incarcerated, and he will be considered for parole in July. Ironically, though he orchestrated the crime, it's unclear who inflicted Mr. Spitzman's fatal injuries, according to 16 yellowed pages of a coroner's report.

The choking injuries were unremarkable and a slash across his neck missed vital organs, the report states. Although all three men offered statements, only Sallows confessed to police to beating Mr. Spitzman.

The cause of death, the coroner concluded, was "blunt trauma to the head."

In Bryan, plenty of people had "heard" about the murder but admittedly didn't know much.

"Maybe I'm too naive. I believe in people," said Tony Weckerham, who met Sallows at church and rented him a Butler Street apartment. "He told me he just got framed."

What concerns people such as Mr. Weckerham even more was that no one knew of Sallows' sex-offense confession: fondling a 4-year-girl in 1998.

In fact, Sallows had pleaded guilty in 1971 to corrupting a minor after an inappropriate relationship with a 15-year-old girl.

"It's uncalled for," said Bryan police Sgt. Jeff Arnold. He interviewed the two Bryan girls who said that Sallows raped them. "We should have known."

Starting in the 1980s, Sallows' brother, Ronald, an Ottawa Hills police dispatcher and a Lucas County special deputy, lobbied the Ohio Parole Authority and Govs. Richard Celeste and George Voinovich for his brother's release. The requests were denied.

On May 30, 1995, parole board members finally released Sallows, in part, because he had no disciplinary problems while behind bars, said Gary Croft, chairman of the parole board.

The son of a quarry worker and a waitress, Sallows made contact again with his sister, Sandy Sallows Cutcher, his brother, and a daughter, who was just 2 years old when he'd gone to prison.

His father was dead; his mother was dying.

"I think we all wanted to give him a second chance," said a 33-year-old medical assistant who said that she'd been abused by Sallows when she was a young girl.

Her family, who had known the Sallows family for years, would sometimes pack a picnic lunch and make the four-hour trip to a southern Ohio prison where Sallows was held.

There, in a visitation room surrounded by guards, the medical assistant said Sallows asked her to sit on his lap, and he touched her as her parents sat nearby. The Blade does not normally identify victims of sexual assault.

"It seems unbelievable now," said the woman, now a mother herself.

In 1998, the woman allowed Sallows' sister, Ms. Sallows Cutcher, to baby-sit her 4-year-old daughter. There was one condition: Never, ever leave Don Sallows alone with the girl.

"I knew what he could do," the young mother said.

Indeed, Ms. Sallows Cutcher said allegations of sexual abuse in her family weren't new. According to court records, their father, Don Sallows, Sr., was indicted in 1984 for allegedly raping a 10-year-old girl.

He pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of sexual battery and served more than a year in jail.

But while caring for their dying mother one August afternoon in 1998, a distracted Ms. Sallows Cutcher allowed her brother to take the child to a nearby park.

"It's all out in the open, very public," she said. "And I told them, be back in 15 minutes. I didn't think anything could happen."

But when the girl returned, she stared at the floor. Sallows, she said, "touched" her.

In the sterile, stark hospital room hours later, the 4-year-old wept as a medical team administered a rape kit and her mother held her hand.

The mom seethed: "I didn't really hate him until he hurt [my daughter,]" she said.

With little evidence and a child who most likely would not have been able to testify in court because of her age, police opted to send Sallows back to prison for breaking parole rather than charge him with a sex crime. At the parole hearing, Sallows confessed to touching the child.

It was a relief, recalled investigator Sandy Miller. "It was a toss of the dice if we took it to court."

Still, that meant that Sallows' record would show no sexual misconduct other than the 1971 corruption of a minor case, a misdemeanor. He wouldn't fall under Ohio's law that mandates that sex offenders register their residences with authorities.

Less than five years later, two brothers sat in a Columbus conference room in front of a full parole board.

John Spitzman, the murdered man's brother, recalled escorting his grieving mother to Toledo to pick up her son's bloody belongings. Ronald Sallows, the brother of Mr. Spitzman's killer, assured the board that he'd care for Sallows if he were released.

The board again weighed Sallows' "institutional adjustment" and "parole readiness." Members noted that he had participated in anger-management, substance-abuse, and other prison programs.

"His institutional behavior was very good, exceptional," said Mr. Croft of the parole board.

Even though his official record did not include a sex-offense charge, Mr. Croft said the parole board was aware of his earlier confession to molesting the 4-year-old child.

Nevertheless, Sallows was released again on April 7, 2003.

Months later, Bryan residents suspected little when he moved into a two-story house on Butler Street, a working-class neighborhood with an elementary school nearby.

On a December evening last year, the Bryan father was sitting in front of the television set eating dinner when his daughter stepped in front of him. She paused, then spoke: "Don touched me."

"I threw the plate on the floor," the father recalled. "She thought I was mad, but I said, 'No, I'm going to go down and beat the living crap out of him.' I was halfway to the house. ... I thought, 'I'm not going to jail for him.'●"

Instead, he went to police.

Sallows was picked up Dec. 3 at Kimco, a tool catalogue company where he had worked for three months taking phone calls from customers checking on the status of their orders.

By the end of the day, Sallows sat in an interrogation room at the Bryan police station, where he wrote a letter to the then-9-year-old girl and her young friend, who also told police that Sallows had touched her.

"I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me, but if not, I understand."

When Sallows reported for a recent court hearing, he was confronted by faces from his past: The 33-year-old medical assistant and Sallows' own daughter were among those who planned to demand that the court classify him as a dangerous sexual predator.

"I don't think there's any help for him. He's not sorry," the medical assistant said after the hearing. "He doesn't believe what he's doing is wrong."

Ultimately, they didn't have to testify.

Sallows offered no argument as the judge pronounced him a sex offender. Should he be released again, he would have to register with the local sheriff.

Elsewhere in Ohio, Joe Spitzman's family continues to struggle with his brutal end. His parents are dead.

His siblings, still consumed by grief, speak of Joe rarely, said John Spitzman.

"Bottom line is that the system failed, and it's failed three times," he said. "I feel for the parents of these [Bryan] girls. But it's up to them to keep him in jail. I've done what I can."

Blade Staff Writer Jane Schmucker contributed to this report.

Contact Robin Erb at: robinerb@theblade.com or 419-724-6133.

First Published March 20, 2005, 3:06 p.m.