The first name on this list dates to 1852. The most recent is still in court. Between them is more than two centuries of Lancaster County history that includes: a mountain gang, a college student, a rural crime ring, a popular DJ, a market thief, and a man accused of robbing graves.
Abe Buzzard
Abe Buzzard was born in a mountain cabin on Christmas Day, 1852. He and his brothers were raised in poverty after their father died. They turned to crime at a young age and became known as the Buzzard Gang.
Their criminal record is long: store robberies, safecracking, post office raids, shootouts with posses, and in 1883, the largest jailbreak in Lancaster County history. “They’d always retreat to the Welsh Mountains after a job,” said local historian Michael Zimmerman.
The bounty on Abe reached $1,000. The local paper called him the “Terror of the Welsh Mountains.” Late in life, he worked as a traveling preacher, reportedly carrying a revolver in the same bag as his Bible.
The Buzzard story is usually told as a Wild West adventure. The people he robbed and frightened were Lancaster County residents, and the romance was added later by people who never had to deal with him.
Edward Lester Gibbs
Marian Louise Baker worked at Franklin and Marshall College where Edward Lester Gibbs was a student. Gibbs knew her, and had driven her on errands before..
On January 10, 1950, he offered her a ride, drove her to a cottage in West Lampeter Township, and killed her. Gibbs confessed eight days later and gave no motive.
He was convicted of first-degree murder and executed. Local reporter and historian Jack Brubaker notes that Gibbs was the last Lancaster County resident the state put to death.
Bruce Alfred Johnston Sr. and the Johnston Gang
The Johnston Gang operated in Lancaster and Chester Counties, but two of its boldest jobs happened here. Bruce Alfred Johnston Sr. ran it with his brothers David and Norman through the 1960s and 1970s.
In 1971, the gang hit Dutch Wonderland for tens of thousands in cash and property. In 1975, it used dynamite to open the safe at the Meadia Heights Golf Club. “They were damn good at what they did,” a retired officer who tracked them told LNP.
The burglaries are not what makes the case chilling. When Bruce Sr.’s teenage son agreed to cooperate with police after learning his father had raped his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, the gang tried to kill him. He lived, but his girlfriend, Robin Miller, did not. Bruce Johnston Sr. was convicted of five murders, plus the killing of an informant, and died in prison.
Raymond Rowe, “DJ Freez”
For twenty-six years, the murder of Christy Mirack was a cold case. She was a twenty-five-year-old elementary school teacher, found murdered in her home days before Christmas in 1992.
Raymond Rowe was among the best-known DJs in Lancaster, working under the stage name “DJ Freez.” In 2018, investigators ran the crime-scene DNA through genetic genealogy, matched it to a relative who had uploaded their profile to a public ancestry site, and arrived at Rowe. Undercover detectives collected his discarded gum and a water bottle at a school event where he was performing. It matched.
District Attorney Craig Stedman called the killing an ambush: “She was surprised and actually fought for her life.” Rowe pleaded guilty in 2019 and drew life without parole.
Hung Phuoc Nguyen
Not every notorious Lancaster crime ends in a courtroom. One recent criminal received national attention thanks to a bad drawing.
In early 2018, a man walked into Central Market, posed as a vendor and stole cash. A witness sketched the suspect by hand. The crude drawing was closer to a cartoon than the work of a sketch artist, and it spread online as a joke.
But it worked. Police conceded the sketch “appeared amateurish and cartoonish” but said it jogged an investigator’s memory, and they identified Hung Phuoc Nguyen, then forty-four, and charged him with theft.
Jonathan Gerlach
The newest name on the list is also among the strangest, and the case is still in court.
In January 2026, a police search in Ephrata uncovered more than a hundred full and partial sets of human remains: skulls on shelves, skeletons hung from the ceiling, bags of bones. They then found a storage unit that held more, including several corpses. Jonathan Christian Gerlach, thirty-four, a Warwick High graduate known in the local music scene, was charged with hundreds of counts, among them burglary and abuse of a corpse. Prosecutors say he stole the remains from old cemeteries and sold bones online.
A friend from Gerlach’s music days could not reconcile it with the man he knew: “Good people can do bad things.”
A Note About True Crime Stories
It’s important that we don’t turn criminals into folk heroes. A common response to true crime stories is to make the offender the main character and to lose sight of the people he harmed. Marian Baker was twenty-five. Christy Mirack had a class waiting for her. Robin Miller was a teenager trying to pull a boy out of a bad life.
Knowing a place means knowing all of it. Lancaster County is a great place to live, in part because most people watch out for one another and stand against men like the ones covered here.
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