Slaughter on North Lasalle Read online

  A few steps into the hallway, though, he stopped suddenly, as if attached to a short tether. Karnes could see a pair of feet on the floor sticking out of the bathroom, a trail behind them of what he now admitted to himself was definitely blood. It looked to him as though someone bleeding pretty seriously had been dragged across the floor. After a second of confusion, Karnes crept over and peeked into the bathroom.

  Karnes felt as if he had been suddenly transported into an especially gruesome horror movie. What he was seeing couldn’t be real. He would later say of his discovery, “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I couldn’t believe it. It just wasn’t human—I still can’t believe it.”

  Lying faceup on the red and pink shag rug, hands and ankles bound, was the body of James Barker. A huge pool of blood, from what appeared to be gaping cuts across his throat, circled his head. Spatters of more blood, looking like some grotesque modern art exhibit, covered the toilet, sink, bathtub, and nearby walls.

  Horror etched on his face, Karnes quickly backed away from the bathroom and then stumbled down the hallway. In the back bedroom at the northwest corner of the house he found another grotesque sight: Robert Gierse, lying faceup on the bed, also bound at the hands and ankles, and also with a slit throat that had gushed blood all over his dark pink shirt and onto the bed around him. As in the bathroom, large spatters of blood covered the walls, while a dark red pool of congealed blood surrounded Gierse’s head. Gierse, he could see, wore a gag made of what appeared to be torn cloth.

  His stomach lurching, Karnes turned and again stumbled back down the hallway, trying to get away from the gruesome sights. But when Karnes looked into the bedroom at the northeast corner of the house, at the other end of the hallway, the nightmare continued. Although he had already seen similar sights twice, seeing it a third time didn’t make it any less horrific. Sprawled facedown on the bed, pieces of a torn cloth binding his hands behind him and his ankles together, lay Robert Hinson. Karnes gulped for air as he stared at the splatters of blood on the pink walls and then looked unbelieving at the huge pool of congealed blood that surrounded Hinson’s face and had soaked his blue shirt and suede jacket.

  The brutality of what he had found seemed unbelievable, and at first, Karnes didn’t know what to do. He had no life experiences to show him how to deal with this. Nothing in his life thus far had prepared him for this kind of situation. He only wanted to get away, to escape from the horror he had stumbled into, and so finally he turned and simply ran. But when he reached the front door, Karnes stopped. He knew he needed to call the police. They would know what to do. With numb, fumbling fingers, he turned around and picked up the house telephone, calling the Indianapolis Police Department.

  Yet, when Karnes, in a frightened, stammering voice, told the police dispatcher what he had found in the house on North LaSalle Street, the dispatcher initially didn’t believe him. Even though in 1971 Indianapolis had a population of nearly three quarters of a million people, it didn’t have crime like this. Nothing so horrible and brutal had ever happened there. Indianapolis had had plenty of murders over the years, but nothing as gruesome as this. Crime like that only happened in other cities. Karnes, the dispatcher thought, was probably just a crank caller. For a moment, the dispatcher considered simply disregarding his call. However, realizing what would happen if he was wrong, and thinking better of it, the dispatcher decided to be safe. He contacted Indianapolis police officer Michael Williams, who patrolled the area around North LaSalle Street, and told him to Signal Three (call the dispatcher by telephone). When Officer Williams did, the dispatcher told him what the caller had claimed. Even though the dispatcher said it was likely just a crank call, he asked Officer Williams to drive by and check out the situation.

  A few minutes later, Officer Williams pulled his blue and white police car up to 1318 North LaSalle Street. He saw Karnes standing on the porch. Karnes was waving frantically and shouting, “In here! In here!” Officer Williams began to suspect that perhaps the dispatcher was wrong, that maybe something bad had happened after all.

  Less than a minute later, Officer Williams raced out of the house and back to his patrol car. Gasping for breath, Williams shouted into his radio microphone, “Send me Car Eighty-three! Send me Identification! Send me a coroner! Send me a superior officer! We’ve got a triple murder!”

  Officer Larry Summers was nearby and would answer the call. Because it was his assigned beat, he would make the original Teletype report on the triple murder, which would be designated 786420-D.

  As is common with incidents of a particularly gruesome or spectacular nature, the police began to arrive in droves, crowding the street with their patrol cars. Nothing like this had ever happened in Indianapolis before, and they all wanted to see it. Firemen at a nearby firehouse, hearing the call and thinking that perhaps the officer could be wrong and that someone who needed medical help might still be alive inside the house, rushed over in their fire engine.

  News reporters also picked up the call and hurried to the scene, cameras and notebooks in hand. Following them were crowds of curious people who began collecting in front of the house, having heard about the incident over their police scanners or on the local radio and television news. Others came, too: individuals who knew or had worked with the three men, such as their secretary, Louise Cole, and Diane Horton, who was dating Gierse at the time. As might be expected from all of this, a circuslike atmosphere soon enveloped the neighborhood.

  Deputy Chief of Investigations Ralph Lumpkin, who also came to the scene, couldn’t believe what he saw when he looked around inside the house. He immediately called and ordered police department technicians to bring out the video equipment to record the murder scene. Video recording was brand-new technology in 1971, and this incident became the first murder scene ever videotaped by the Indianapolis Police Department.

  Taking charge of the crime scene, Chief Lumpkin quickly assigned Detective Lieutenant Joseph McAtee to head up the homicide team that would investigate the murders. He knew this incident would gather lots of media attention, and he wanted the best people possible to investigate this case. McAtee, a tall, thin man whose features seemed to be all sharp angles, was a top detective who always surrounded himself with competent, dedicated, and hardworking people—a quality that would eventually carry him up through the ranks of the police department to the chief of police’s job, then on to becoming the sheriff of Marion County. McAtee selected Detective Sergeants Michael Popcheff and James Strode to work with him on the North LaSalle Street case.

  Popcheff, young, athletic, with dark hair, liked to play golf and dress well. But he was also known as an excellent and hardworking investigator. Strode, a redhead a bit older than Popcheff, took homicide investigation as seriously as any man in the police department. He was known to throw himself totally into cases. Both men, McAtee knew, were tough, experienced investigators he could depend on.

  Strangely enough, when Popcheff and Strode arrived at the scene, they remembered having been to the house on North LaSalle Street on a murder case before. Six months earlier, they had come to see if Gierse and Hinson had any information about the murder of a salesman who had provided microfilm and equipment to them. The twenty-five-year-old salesman, John Terhorst, had been shot twice in the head at close range in March 1971, and then dumped into Eagle Creek on the northwest side of Indianapolis. Terhorst had worked for E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company out of Chicago, and had first met the three murdered men when they were living and working in Chicago. On the day of his murder, Terhorst told a close acquaintance that he was headed to the Woodruff Place neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis to see a man named Bobby, who was interested in buying his 1966 black Corvette. Although the police found Terhorst’s body, they never found his Corvette. As of December 1, 1971, the Terhorst case was still unsolved.

  “We were at the house six months earlier on the John Terhorst investigation,” said Popcheff. “They were having a cookout and saw us coming. Gierse told every
one that he would do the talking, which he did.”

  As the investigation into the triple murder progressed and became more complex, McAtee would later add Detective Sergeants Pat Stark and Bob Tirmenstein to the investigative team. Stark, middle-aged and totally bald, was a veteran homicide detective who eventually became the National Fraternal Order of Police president from 1975 to 1979. Tirmenstein, also older and a veteran detective, would work his way up to the rank of captain and was in charge of the Special Investigations Branch before succumbing to cancer in the 1990s.

  After McAtee, Popcheff, and Strode had heard from Officer Williams concerning what he’d found inside the house, they realized this wouldn’t be a pretty case, but likely an easily solvable one. Anyone who would kill three men so brutally obviously had a terrible grudge against them. That kind of rage typically couldn’t be suppressed or hidden for long. And so, with just a little investigation, they figured, they ought to be able to locate this person and close the case. The killer, they assumed, would have to have made his anger known to someone. With this thought in mind, McAtee and his team mounted the front steps of 1318 North LaSalle and got ready for their initial walk-through of the crime scene.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Oh my God!” were the first words uttered by most of those who visited the crime scene on North LaSalle Street. The Indianapolis Star would call them “the most vicious crimes ever committed in Indianapolis.”

  Throughout their careers, Lieutenant Joe McAtee and his team of homicide investigators had been to the scene of hundreds of homicides—but none of them had ever seen anything like this. Although there had been many murders in Indianapolis in the years before, no one could recall a case even close to as brutal as this one. Everywhere one of the detectives turned in the house, it seemed, there lay a body, its head yanked back at an unnatural angle, blood settling around the head in huge coagulated puddles.

  “The scene was the worst I’d ever seen because of the way they killed them,” said Popcheff. “They cut their necks all the way through. Another cut and their heads would have come off. That bothered me for quite a while, thinking about it.”

  While the detectives would have liked to have started their investigation with a pristine crime scene, that didn’t happen. Because the crime had been so unusual and so gruesome, other officers, mostly high-ranking ones, had wanted to see what had happened—so despite protocol, these other officers had wandered through the house and looked around before the homicide detectives could get there and take control of the scene.

  “Jim Strode and I were meticulous about securing the crime scene,” said Popcheff. “But when we got there we found there’d already been people in the house before us, and that really disappointed us.”

  They were especially disappointed because later in their search the detectives would find that they had to be extremely careful where they stepped or what they brushed against. Surfaces everywhere had blood spattered on them. There was blood on the floors, on the walls, on the furniture, on the curtains, on the fixtures, and on the clothing that lay scattered all around the house. The detectives doubted that those in the house before them had been that careful. They could only imagine how much evidence had been trampled on, brushed against, or displaced. But there was nothing they could do about it by then. It was too late.

  At any homicide scene, the homicide investigators’ first step—as it was even in 1971—is to conduct a very careful initial walk-through to evaluate the scene, attempt to develop a working theory about what happened, and mark any evidence that the crime lab needs to process and collect. These walk-throughs aren’t intended to solve the crime, though that does occasionally happen. Rather, they’re simply meant to acquaint the detectives with what they have and what they will need to properly process the crime scene and, unless they have already received reliable information about what happened, to allow them to develop a working, tentative theory about what occurred. This theory must be very flexible, however, so that it can be changed if necessary with each new discovery of evidence. A more solid theory about what happened won’t come until after all of the evidence has been collected and preliminary interviews conducted.

  The detectives began their initial walk-through on North LaSalle Street in the living room, and they could see right away that the home had all the markings of a bachelor pad. No woman, they knew, would have decorated a house like this. The room was unorganized; the furniture was all mismatched. As they looked around, the detectives saw a plaid padded chair with clothing lying draped across a worn ottoman sitting in front of it, a flowery wingback, and two couches that didn’t match anything else. On a beat-up and scarred coffee table sat a collection of empty Stroh’s beer bottles, while under the table rested several empty pizza boxes. Shoes and clothing lay scattered all around the living room. But notably, the messy living room didn’t show any signs of a struggle: no overturned or broken furniture.

  The living room also had two televisions—a color console television and a smaller portable one sitting on top of it (the console would later be reported to be stolen). Between the front door and the plaid chair sat a large roll of Owens Corning fiberglass insulation with a newspaper resting on top of it, looking like a makeshift end table. Friends would tell the police that Gierse had had plans to install it soon, though it had been sitting there for a while.

  During the initial look at the room, the detectives found both Gierse’s and Hinson’s wallets. Gierse’s lay on the floor and Hinson’s on the coffee table. The detectives would also later find a watch belonging to Gierse stuffed down into the cushions of a couch. Was this just an accidental drop, they wondered, or had he put it there to keep it from being taken? The possibility of robbery as a motive suddenly found its way into the working theory. On the floor in front of one of the couches the detectives spied a set of keys. They also noticed a tape recorder in the living room. It had a tape in it, so the detectives marked it to be taken as evidence. Although the detectives knew it was unlikely, it might contain evidence of the crime.

  As they continued their initial walk-through of the house, Popcheff and Strode discovered a drop of blood on the floor in a dining area that sat between the living room and the kitchen, showing that the killer had likely passed this way afterward, possibly to leave by the back door. They marked the blood for processing by the crime lab technicians. The detectives also found a potential clue in the dining area, a cigar in an ashtray, a clue that they never released to the public. (It is common practice to keep a few details from public knowledge, to help separate true culprits from those who, for various reasons, falsely confess.)

  “There was a big ashtray in the dining room that had a cigar butt in it,” said Popcheff. “Someone had laid a cigar in the ashtray and none of the three guys smoked cigars.”

  The detectives, after passing through the small dining area, stepped into the kitchen, where they saw that the counter held numerous liquor bottles and a box that had once contained a thirty-two-piece glass tumbler set. The ironing board and iron were still set up as if someone had just used them. The trash can sat filled with empty beer containers and whiskey bottles. It didn’t take much of a detective to figure out that either the people who lived here liked to entertain a lot or were some really heavy drinkers. The police would later discover that both were true.

  Walking over to the back door, which led out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, the detectives found that the door sat slightly ajar, but hadn’t been forced. The working theory now included the murderer or murderers possibly entering and likely leaving this way. As a part of their investigation, the detectives would later examine all of the windows in the house, and although several of them were unlocked, the dust patterns around them hadn’t been disturbed, indicating that no one had entered or exited through them. A much more thorough search of the house, including the full attic and half basement, showed no signs of a forced entry anywhere. The detectives now added another question to be answered about the murders: How did th
e front and rear doors get unlocked? This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people would have left their doors unlocked at night.

  McAtee and his crew left the kitchen, passed back through the dining area, and then walked through a door that led to a hallway that ran along the north side of the house. The hallway, they found, ran from a bedroom on the east to another on the west, with a bathroom between them. The sheared-copper smell of blood was so bad on the north side of the house that it made the detectives’ eyes water. When the detectives reached the bedroom at the northeast corner of the house, they looked in to see Robert Hinson lying facedown on the bed, his arms and legs bound with a piece of torn cloth, later found to be part of a bedsheet, a gag made of the same material tied across his mouth. Hinson, the detectives could see, wore blue-and-gray-checked slacks and a blue shirt. But more important to the detectives was the tan imitation suede jacket he wore, indicating to them that he had just come in from the outside when attacked. Blood from his severe throat wound soaked the sheets and quilt he lay on.

  As their gaze moved around the room, the detectives spied a set of blood-spattered clothes draped across a chair next to Hinson’s feet. But then they also noticed that two drawers of a dresser next to the chair stood open, again bringing up the possibility of robbery as a motive.

  The detectives, upon closer inspection of the room, found that the dresser, along with the blue window curtains, had been spattered with blood. They also found blood on the floor next to the dresser and on the east and south walls. Also on the floor, they discovered, lay a pillow with a large glob of blood on it. The victim, they figured, had apparently put up a struggle before being killed. While the science of blood spatter analysis wouldn’t be fully developed until years later, the detectives could tell that the violence in this room had been tremendous.