Kelly and Lemmon Management Company

Kelly and Lemmon Management Company managed Channingway Apartments and the adjacent Williamsburg Square Apartments, linking apartment maintenance, rental-office administration, and the interests of the complexes’ investors. In 1977, the company hired Billy Milligan for outdoor maintenance. That ordinary employment relationship became the setting for a chain of secretive actions: Tommy installed telephone recording devices in company offices, Allen copied a confidential investor list, and Allen later accused the company of fraud and illegal electrical connections. The allegations are presented through Allen’s account, not as findings independently established in the narrative.

Management and Hiring

The company’s properties included Channingway Apartments and neighboring Williamsburg Square Apartments. Its management responsibilities put a rental office, maintenance work, and investor interests within the same organization, although the narrative does not describe its full structure or identify its owners. A list in the front office referred to the investors in the two complexes as blue-chip investors, and Allen understood that these stockholders employed Kelly and Lemmon to manage the properties.

The company’s hiring process brought Milligan into that workplace. On August 15, 1977, personnel manager John Wymer interviewed him for a maintenance position. Milligan described experience in groundskeeping, carpentry, electrical maintenance, and plumbing, presenting himself as capable of fixing equipment that worked electronically or by combustion and of figuring out unfamiliar repairs. Wymer considered him the most qualified and personable of the applicants he had interviewed, but said he would contact him after meeting the others.

Wymer checked the employer listed on Milligan’s application. Del Moore gave a favorable reference, describing Milligan as a fine, dependable worker and explaining that he had left because meat cutting was not suited to him. Moore recommended him as a maintenance worker. Wymer could not verify two personal references, Dr. Steinberg and Bob Reinert, because their addresses were missing, but he accepted Moore’s report and instructed his secretary to run the standard police check used for new employees. The account does not give the result of that check.

At a second interview, Wymer’s favorable impression held, and he hired Milligan for outdoor maintenance at Williamsburg Square, where he could start immediately. The paperwork contained a small irregularity that Wymer did not notice: on the application and W-2 form, Milligan had entered day-and-year combinations but omitted the month of August. Wymer passed the forms to his secretary for filing. Although Wymer made the hiring decision, Sharon Roth was Milligan’s supervisor.

Surveillance and the Investor List

The company’s offices became targets of covert information gathering after Tommy found a telephone recording device while buying materials for his own blue box at an electronics supply shop. The device could be activated by a ringing telephone. By calling a company office, pretending to have reached the wrong number, and hanging up, Tommy believed he could make the recorder capture office conversations. He thought recordings from Roth’s or Wymer’s office might reveal illegal activity and could be used to pressure them if they tried to fire him.

Tommy charged the recording devices, along with other electrical supplies, to Kelly and Lemmon. That night he entered the rental office and planted a device in Roth’s telephone, then installed another in Wymer’s office. The operation was intended to collect leverage, but it also shows the company’s ordinary business infrastructure being used against it: a work-related expense account paid for the equipment, and the phones of both a supervisor and a personnel manager were secretly monitored.

After the devices were in place, Allen searched filing cabinets in the office for useful information. He found a folder listing the complexes’ blue-chip investors, a list normally kept secret, and made copies of the names. With the recordings in the telephones and the copied list in his possession, Allen felt his job was secure. His sense of security depended not on a formal employment safeguard but on privately obtained material he believed could give him power over the company.

Allen’s Accusations

Allen eventually confronted Wymer with allegations about how the company operated. Over the course of an hour and a half, he described what he said were manipulated rental-office records and fraud against the investors in Channingway and Williamsburg Square. His account focused on apartments recorded as vacant but allegedly occupied by employees’ friends, who collected the rents and kept the money. He also said he could prove that Kelly and Lemmon was tapping illegally into power lines to avoid paying the electric company.

Allen did not accuse Wymer of participating in the alleged fraud and embezzlement. Instead, he told him that he believed almost everyone else in the company was involved, particularly a rental-office supervisor whom he accused of letting friends occupy apartments. The account does not explicitly identify that supervisor in Allen’s accusation, so the allegation should not be treated as an established finding about Roth. Allen gave Wymer time to investigate and bring those he considered responsible to justice; otherwise, he threatened to make the matter public by reporting it to the Columbus Dispatch.

Narrative Significance

Kelly and Lemmon serves as more than the setting for Milligan’s employment. Its hiring procedures show how he entered the apartment complex workforce through an interview, a positive reference, and a routine police check. Its rental offices and records then became the objects of an operation that crossed from workplace maneuvering into covert surveillance and allegations of financial wrongdoing. The company’s relationship with its investors also matters: the copied list gave Allen access to names that the office normally kept secret, while his accusations framed the supposed misuse of rents and electricity as harm to those investors and the utility company.

The episode turns on competing claims to information and control. Wymer assessed Milligan through interviews and references; Tommy sought recordings to protect himself from dismissal; Allen searched files, copied investor names, and used his claimed knowledge to demand an investigation. The narrative establishes the surveillance and the confrontation, while leaving the truth and ultimate resolution of Allen’s accusations unconfirmed in the evidence presented here. Kelly and Lemmon therefore appears as a property-management business caught between its formal hiring and administrative routines and the private struggle for leverage that unfolds inside its offices.