Slaughter on North Lasalle (11 page)

As a part of the investigation, the detectives also brought in a certified public accountant and asked him to look through the Records Security Corporation paperwork given to them by Uland. In this paperwork, the accountant found what he believed to be at least nine forged checks drawn up and signed by Gierse in amounts from $30 to $140. When contacted by the detectives, the men these checks had been made out to stated that they hadn’t seen the checks or endorsed them. This piqued the interest of the detectives, who’d heard from several sources that Gierse might have been stealing money from Records Security Corporation.

Was this, they wondered, how Gierse had financed his lifestyle and new business start-up? By stealing money and equipment from his former employer? The incident Louise Cole had spoken about, in which Gierse suspected that Uland had come into the house on North LaSalle Street to take canceled checks, suddenly took on new relevance. Had Uland, the detectives also wondered, suspected or known that Gierse was writing phony checks and wanted evidence? This, if true, would certainly move Uland up on the suspect list, particularly since he hadn’t mentioned anything about the checks to the detectives.

The detectives then talked with a Sharon Bidwell, who worked at the Executive Health Club in downtown Indianapolis and had dated Jim Barker. The three victims had all been members of the club. She told them that when Gierse and Hinson formed B&B Microfilming, Barker had acquired an expensive piece of microfilming equipment and gave it to them. Bidwell didn’t know
how Barker had come to obtain this piece of equipment. The detectives found this particularly interesting because, of the three men, Barker seemed to have had the most money problems. Bidwell also mentioned in passing that Bob Hinson had once dated a married WAC (Women’s Army Corps) officer from nearby Fort Harrison, who might be on the men’s scorecard.

Hinson seemed to have had no problem dating married women—the report also tells of a police officer who brought his sister-in-law, who had dated Hinson for several weeks, into the Homicide Office. Even though she was married, she said she didn’t think dating Hinson had bothered her husband because she had dated other men in the past and he hadn’t been upset about it then.

Bob Hinson’s own ex-wife, Geraldine Hinson, wasn’t much help, either. She told detectives that she and Hinson had been married for six years and were on good terms, visiting each other often. She did say that Hinson always seemed to be short of money.

Another witness the detectives spoke to, the owner of a liquor store, also said he’d heard that Gierse and Hinson had swindled Uland out of some money—though he also brought up the possibility of Gierse and Hinson being involved in industrial spying or spying on the government agencies whose documents they microfilmed. (He admitted to detectives, however, that he had no proof or evidence of any of this. It was only what he had heard or suspected.)

The detectives told in their report of having gone to the Idle Hour Tavern in Indianapolis to speak with another
one of Hinson’s girlfriends, a Norma Jean Duran, who threw a further complication into the case. She told the detectives that a male friend of Barker’s had dated a female FBI employee who would sometimes get information on people for Barker. Duran didn’t know who Barker wanted information on or what he needed the information for, but she said that the three men had told her several times that they had been involved with some kind of syndicate while living in Chicago, and that they had to be very careful. Was this the truth or just empty boasting that the men hoped would impress young ladies, particularly young ladies at the type of taverns they frequented? The detectives didn’t really know.

In the course of their investigation, the detectives also learned that April Lynn Smoot’s husband had moved back to Indianapolis from New Orleans, and that he and his wife were now living together. When called, April’s husband, David Lynn, said that he didn’t feel like coming into the Homicide Office right then. Detectives went out and picked him up. At that moment, considering his reported level of jealousy—and the fact that he’d left town on the day the murders had been discovered—David Lynn still stood high on the suspect list. The detectives questioned him extensively but couldn’t find any serious inconsistencies in his story. When asked, he voluntarily took a lie detector test and passed it. The detectives ultimately eliminated him as a suspect.

Adding another bit of good news, the detectives said
in their report that they felt they could also eliminate another one of their key suspects: Louise Cole’s husband, James T. Cole, who had come into the office and taken a lie detector test, which showed that he had no knowledge of the crime. At last, the detectives thought, the case was moving forward. With Mr. Lynn and Mr. Cole removed, the detectives felt that they were finally eliminating from, rather than adding to, the suspect list.

The detectives ended their report with the comment that they had interviewed many people not talked about in the report but hadn’t mentioned them because these individuals didn’t contribute anything to the case. They also said that they had many more people yet to interview. The case was still very much open.

After three weeks, the detectives realized that, even with all of the work they’d done so far, they hadn’t found the kind of evidence yet that could point them toward any one suspect. While they had finally eliminated several key suspects, many possible ones still remained. But no one suspect stood out as more likely than the others. The detectives knew that they needed to find some more physical evidence that could tie one person to the case.

And so, on December 20, 1971, the Indianapolis Police Department sent the bedsheets, pillowcases, and cloth strips used to tie and gag the men to the FBI Laboratory in Washington, D.C. (In the early 1970s local police departments seldom had the laboratory facilities to do much more than rudimentary science. If extensive scientific testing needed to be done, the materials were often sent to the FBI Crime Laboratory.) The Indianapolis
Police wanted the federal investigators to see if they could recover any fingerprints from the fabric, and also asked the FBI to have a study done on the knots used to tie the cords around two of the victims’ hands. The knots had appeared unusual, and the detectives hoped they might be able to provide a clue.

Unfortunately, on January 19, 1972, the police department received notice from the FBI that they couldn’t recover any usable fingerprints from the materials sent and didn’t have any information about the knots. Another dead end.

And as if McAtee and his team didn’t already have enough wrinkles in the case, the detectives, when talking to people who knew the three men or knew people who knew them, began picking up rumors that the three victims might have been killed because they’d been involved in pornography trafficking. In the 1970s, long before the advent of the Internet, pornography was circulated in printed or film form. Because pornography was illegal in many communities, pornographic photos, magazines, movies, and books were often distributed much like drugs were, through criminal networks. Dealing with these networks, like dealing with drug cartels, could be dangerous, so these tips struck the detectives as worth checking out.

One of the people who had given the police this information about pornography trafficking was Elwood Rogers, a man who’d done microfilm business with Gierse.
He told the police that a couple of years before the murders, Gierse had given him the telephone number of a man who lived in Avon, Indiana, and who was supposedly involved in pornography. Rogers said that he believed Gierse and this man might have been partners in trafficking pornography. Like dealing in drugs, dealing in pornography in the early 1970s could be very profitable. The detectives wondered if this was how Gierse and Hinson had gotten the money to start up B&B Microfilming.

Rogers told the detectives that he knew about the sex contest and that Gierse was in second place with twenty women. He said Gierse told him, “And you should see number twenty!”

To check out the rumors about pornography trafficking, the police brought back in several of the three victims’ girlfriends and questioned them about it. Wava Winslow, who had dated Jim Barker, was brought in on December 21, 1971, and asked about this. She told them that she had met Barker through Diane Horton, who had been dating Bob Gierse, and that while she and Barker had had a very full sex life, she hadn’t witnessed any of the men having an unusual interest in pornography. She also corroborated what Paula Palmer, Barker’s ex-wife, had told Sergeant Stark: that Barker had become very unhappy at Bell and Howell because they were cutting his salary, and that he was planning to leave there and go in with Gierse and Hinson at B&B Microfilming.

However, as was becoming par for the course with this investigation, when the police requestioned Winslow they also developed yet another possible suspect. She told
them about a run-in Barker and Gierse had had with a man named Frank Salonko, a former boyfriend of hers. Winslow told them that Barker and Gierse had had a confrontation with Salonko at the Idle Hour Tavern. Salonko apparently didn’t like Winslow hanging around with Barker; Salonko was very possessive, and Winslow said he’d often threatened to kill her if she went out with another man. She also said he had bragged to her about shooting a man in Oklahoma. The detectives checked and found that Salonko did indeed have a police record and apparently hung out with a very rough crowd. The detectives reluctantly added him to their lengthy list of suspects.

On December 21, 1971, the police also reinterviewed Bob Gierse’s girlfriend Ilene Combest. She told them that she had met Gierse about five years earlier through a girlfriend, and that she had dated him on and off ever since. Combest told the detectives that she and Gierse had had a decent sex life, though nothing to brag about, but that it had stopped completely eight months before the murders. She said that suddenly he was no longer interested in having sex with her, and he told her that it was because he was working out and lifting weights. Combest obviously didn’t know about Gierse’s involvement in the sex contest.

Combest additionally told the detectives that the three men didn’t seem to have any special interest in pornography. Along with this, she said she had never seen any of the three men involved with or taking narcotics. (The detectives were still attempting to find out where
the extra money the victims were spending was coming from, and another rumor the detectives had picked up involved the three men dealing in narcotics.) Combest did tell the police, though, that Gierse used to regularly buy stolen items from people. She said that he had bought a typewriter from a guy who often came into Records Security Corporation peddling hot items. During their investigation, the detectives had also heard from several people that the color console television set in the house on North LaSalle was stolen property, and Combest confirmed that Gierse had bought it from a guy in a Zionsville tavern.

She added that when the three victims went out somewhere they liked to throw their weight around and really enjoyed embarrassing and ridiculing people.

The conversation with Combest then turned to Gierse and Hinson’s September trip to Bloomington to meet Ted Uland, a trip she had accompanied them on. She told the detectives that she had been instructed to wait in the car while Gierse and Hinson went into the Big Wheel Restaurant to talk with Uland, and that after about five minutes Hinson came back out and waited in the car with her. Uland had tried to convince Hinson to stay on at Records Security Corporation and, when he wouldn’t, Uland excused him from the meeting because he said he wanted to talk to Gierse in private. When Gierse finally came out about two hours later, he told her and Hinson that Uland had offered him $10,000 to stay on at Records Security through the first of the year. But, Gierse told them, the offer was ridiculous because
Uland didn’t have that kind of money. And besides, Gierse told them, no matter what, he was going to leave soon and have his own company.

However, Combest also said that both Gierse and Hinson agreed that Uland could be a dangerous man if he got backed into a corner financially. And, she said, Gierse was worried about Uland having a key to his house on North LaSalle Street because he was afraid that Uland might go down into the basement and see the equipment he planned to use in his new business. He apparently feared that Uland would recognize it.

When asked who she thought might have committed the murders, Combest said it could have been someone the men had ridiculed or pushed around in a bar, which they liked to do regularly. But, she also said, she wouldn’t put it past Uland to have hired someone to do it.

Following their interview with Combest, the detectives finally located two more women on the men’s scorecard of sexual conquests. One was a lady named Virginia France, who, like many others, told detectives that she had met the three victims through a girlfriend. She also denied any knowledge of the men having been involved with pornography or drugs, but did add that she had an ex-husband from whom she’d only been divorced a little over a month, and that he had serious mental problems and a violent temper. The detectives added another name to their suspect list.

On December 23, 1971, the police interviewed the second woman, Ruth Ellen Lochard. Her ex-husband,
whom she had divorced in 1970, had once worked with Jim Barker, which was how she’d met him. She told the detectives that she had suspected some type of contest was going on because she said that Barker had told her she was “number thirteen.” She told the detectives that she hadn’t seen the men have or use any drugs, and that they hadn’t shown any unusual interest in pornography.

By this point, the detectives realized that the pornography and drug-running angles were dead ends. They had just been rumors.

Although their investigation seemed not to be going anywhere, the detectives were still not ready to give up. They interviewed a Mr. Bernard M. Faust, the bookkeeper for B&B Microfilming. He gave the police an interesting bit of information. He said that Gierse instructed him not to keep a record of how much money he was paying out at B&B, an unusual request to give a bookkeeper. In a memo about the interview, though, one of the detectives noted that Faust appeared extremely nervous, had conferred with an attorney before coming to talk with the police, and could not be ruled out as a suspect himself. But interestingly enough, Faust also gave the police a new suspect, a man with a beautiful blond wife who had at one time been involved with the three victims.