Slaughter on North Lasalle (14 page)

False confessions, however, weren’t the only information the police department would receive about the case in the years afterward. While the local news media may have moved on to other news, and the police detectives on to new murder cases, the North LaSalle Street murders continued to hold the attention of many people in Indianapolis, even years later. For example, Indianapolis police Sergeant Darryl Churchill sent an interdepartment communication on February 3, 1975, to the Homicide Branch saying that he had an informant who told him that the men on North LaSalle Street had been killed over a woman. In addition, he said, his informant told
him that a woman the police had recently found murdered near Greenfield, Indiana, had been killed because she knew the truth about the North LaSalle Street murders and was going to talk.

In 1978, Marion County Prosecutor James Kelley passed on information from a confidential informant about three men possibly involved in the North LaSalle Street case. However, two of the men had already been suspects but had been cleared. The third man was an enforcer for the Teamsters Union, but the police could find no connection between him and the North LaSalle Street murders. Detective Sergeant Popcheff asked Prosecutor Kelley if he could have the name of the informant so that he could talk with him, but Kelley wouldn’t release the name. In the years following the murders, the police department received many tips such as this from criminal informants, but nothing came of them.

In 1980, the North LaSalle Street case was temporarily reopened when the police located a woman who had stayed at the North LaSalle Street house on November 29, 1971, the day before the murders. The police found out about her through her boyfriend, who, upon discovering this nearly decade-old piece of information, became bitterly jealous and called the police. Detectives brought the woman in for questioning, but she had nothing useful to tell them. She said that everything had seemed peaceful and normal at the house while she was there. The police department deactivated the case again.

And while the news media’s interest in the North LaSalle Street murders had naturally waned, they also never
totally forgot the case. For a number of years, on the anniversary of the murders, the media would revive the events and bring them back to the public’s mind. For example, on December 1, 1983, the twelfth anniversary of the murders, a columnist for the
Indianapolis Star
wrote an article about them, noting that although Ted Uland was the only person of interest to never take a lie detector test, lead detective Joe McAtee (who by 1983 was the chief of police) said he felt that the murders were connected to the men’s sexual contest, and that the reason the police department hadn’t solved the case was because they were never able to get a complete list of these women. (Apparently, the men had been murdered before they could finish entering in November’s sexual conquests.)

Another resurrection of the case occurred in 1984. A woman called the police in July of that year and said that a man she knew by the name of David LaFever had come by her house the night after the murders in 1971 and told her that he had just completed a job for some people and that it was one of the worst things he could have done. He told her he had been instructed to get back something these people had, and that he had been paid very well, but now he had to disappear for a while. He said he wouldn’t have to worry about money for a long time.

The woman said that LaFever called her two weeks later, and from time to time afterward, always asking her what the police had found out about the murders on
North LaSalle Street. She said he would kind of chuckle about it. The woman told the police that LaFever would have her save and read him articles out of the paper about the murders. She also said that LaFever and Bob Hinson had been friends, and that LaFever had brought Hinson over to her house a few days before the murders. The woman said she didn’t know Hinson, but that LaFever had later told her that’s who it had been.

This woman also told the police that though LaFever never came out and admitted he had actually committed the murders, he liked to hint that he had. He would, for example, explain to her how one person could manage to kill all three of these men by himself. She also said that LaFever had always been fascinated by martial arts and stealth killing. The police, though certainly looking into this report, didn’t attach much importance to it. Since the murders, they had received reports of many men who had bragged to women they wanted to either scare or impress that they had committed the North LaSalle Street murders.

In early July 1985, however, the Coconino County Superior Court in Flagstaff, Arizona, sentenced David LaFever to twelve years in prison for sexually molesting his twelve-year-old adopted daughter. His wife Margaret received a two-year sentence for “Facilitating the Sexual Exploitation of a Minor.” Soon after the sentencing, David contacted the authorities and told them that he wanted to discuss the triple murder on North LaSalle Street in exchange for a more lenient sentence for Margaret.
The police in Indianapolis were getting ready to fly out to Arizona to talk with David when he suddenly changed his mind about wanting to discuss the case. At the end of the day, the police believed he’d probably been hoping to fabricate a story that would help his wife but then realized he would either have to come up with facts he didn’t have or implicate himself in it. But just in case, the police compared David’s fingerprints with the unidentified fingerprints from the North LaSalle Street case. No match was found.

Most distressingly, on June 8, 1984, a sergeant from the Homicide Branch—for some unknown reason—signed off to have much of the evidence in the case destroyed, including microfilm, address books, the bloody bedsheets, large quantities of written material, several knives, pieces of cord, checks, and bank statements. He did this despite the fact that evidence in murder cases is supposed to be held until the case is finally solved, the defendant convicted, and the appeals exhausted. How this oversight could have happened was baffling, especially since the words murder case were stamped in large, bold letters on the property room form specifically to prevent such a thing from occurring.

Naturally, the original detectives in the case, though they had long since moved on to new cases, had never given up hope of being able to perhaps one day solve the North LaSalle Street case. Detective Sergeant Strode, when he heard the news about the evidence destruction, fired off a memo to the chief of police asking how this could have happened on an open murder case and pointing
out how this action could cripple any future attempts to solve the case.

Although this incident upset many people, no one in the police department considered it an act of corruption or collusion with the killers. Police department property rooms routinely become so full of evidence and confiscated property that the officer in charge of the property room will send out disposition notices to the officers, telling them to come down and either dispose of the evidence or signal that it is still needed. Apparently, the North LaSalle Street evidence simply got mixed up with the wrong cases.

Fortunately, a small amount of the evidence, two of four original boxes of clothing and some of the blood and autopsy samples, had not yet been destroyed, and the detectives managed to recover them. They also recovered some of the microfilm and several pieces of microfilm equipment.

In 1987, sixteen years after the murders, an employee of the state parole board received information that a former go-go dancer by the name of Margo (or possibly Margaret) had information about the triple murder on North LaSalle Street. This woman, the man said, now worked at the Golden Palace Bar.

It was enough of a lead for the police department to detail Popcheff, now working as a lieutenant in uniformed patrol, back to the Homicide Branch. Popcheff, still hopeful of solving the North LaSalle Street murders, located Margo, who told him that at the time of the murders she and her boyfriend had been managing Tommy’s
Starlight Palladium Bar, then owned by a local crime figure named Norman Flick. Margo told Popcheff that she believed Flick had possibly been involved in the North LaSalle Street murders. Local burglar Bobby Atkinson, a cousin of hers, she said, was a suspect in the John Terhorst murder and was then murdered himself. She thought that Atkinson had sold Gierse and Hinson some stolen microfilm machines. She had no proof of this but still believed it. Margo said that right after the triple murder two men from out of town came into Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar and talked with Flick for some time, but then soon left town. She believed they may have been involved in the North LaSalle Street murders. Again, she had no proof, only her belief that it was so. One of the men, Margo said, had “dark, hateful eyes.” Popcheff had the Identification Branch compare the fingerprints of the men Margo mentioned as possibly being involved in the North LaSalle Street killings against the unidentified fingerprints from North LaSalle Street. The technician found no match.

Margo said that when she heard of the murders she called the Homicide Branch, but they thought she was crazy and wouldn’t talk to her. Margo said she also called the local newspaper, which sent out two reporters. However, since no news stories about her had appeared in 1971, Popcheff suspected that they hadn’t believed her. Indeed, when contacted later, one of the reporters said that he hadn’t considered her a very reliable source, because she was so weird, making wild claims with no proof.

Following this, Popcheff lost contact with Margo. He
said in his report that she had agreed to meet with him again, but then never did. Popcheff wrote of his meeting with Margo that while she might have been of some help in 1971, he felt that she had forgotten too many details in the years since then. Popcheff sent his report in to the deputy chief of investigations and then went back to his assignment as a uniformed street lieutenant.

This case, however, simply wouldn’t let go of him. In an article in the
Indianapolis News
in 1992, more than two decades after the murders, Popcheff would say that the crime had stumped police because it had had no eye-witnesses and far too many possible motives. He said they’d tried to find nearly one hundred women who had been involved with one or all of the three men. Despite the optimism of the detectives in 1971, the North LaSalle Street case sat unsolved in the cold case file for twenty years.

In 1991, however, a beautiful young reporter took an interest in the murders. She began her own investigation and soon brought the case back into the media spotlight.

In 1991, a very attractive journalist in her late twenties named Carol Schultz wrote a feature article for the
Indianapolis News
about bounty hunters. The article went on to garner Schultz a journalism award and high praise from her editor. Naturally, she wanted a repeat of this.

Schultz knew, however, that she had to come up with a really good subject if she was going to follow up on her earlier success. After quite a bit of thought and investigation, Schultz found out that the television program
Unsolved Mysteries
was filming in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a town about 125 miles northeast of Indianapolis. And so, she decided to write a piece for the newspaper about the person they were profiling on the program.

As she became involved in writing that article, Schultz also began to wonder about whether there were any unsolved mysteries closer to home, in Indianapolis. What,
she asked herself, was Indianapolis’s greatest unsolved mystery? Eventually, a librarian at the Indianapolis Marion County Public Library pointed Schultz toward the North LaSalle Street murders, still unsolved, and whose twentieth anniversary would be coming up in December of that year. The librarian told Schultz it was a fascinating case and that she should read up on it.

Schultz began researching the murders and soon found herself indeed fascinated by the case. It had everything she needed for a feature article: sex, death, and mystery, wrapped in the story of three handsome, virile men who were brutally murdered. The case, she found, had enthralled the public for some time in the early 1970s, and everyone she talked to confirmed that the North LaSalle Street murders were definitely the biggest unsolved mystery in the history of Indianapolis. With just a little reading on the case, Schultz found that the police had committed thousands of man-hours to the investigation, but no solution had materialized. Schultz also discovered that theories about the perpetrators had numbered in the dozens, making the case even more complicated and mysterious. With its twenty-year anniversary in the near future, Schultz knew she could get some good play from her editor on the idea of a feature article about the murders; once she got approval, she knew she needed to begin some really in-depth research on the case.

In a book she later wrote, Schultz said that one of the first things she did when she started her research was to call and arrange a meeting with Lieutenant Michael Popcheff,
one of the original detectives who had investigated the North LaSalle Street murders in 1971. Popcheff had then been a detective sergeant in homicide, but in 1991 he was a lieutenant working in uniform on the south side of Indianapolis. Popcheff agreed to meet with her at a Waffle House restaurant on East Washington Street, about six or seven miles from the original murder scene.

Popcheff later said he regretted agreeing to that meeting. “Carol Schultz called me at roll call and said she would like to do a story about the LaSalle Street case,” he said. “I said okay, no big deal. That was a mistake.” Popcheff regretted meeting with her because Schultz eventually began subscribing to an extremely elaborate conspiracy theory in the North LaSalle Street killings that didn’t fit any of the information or evidence the detectives had uncovered in 1971.

Popcheff said that during their meeting at the Waffle House, they discussed what the detectives had seen and done at the murder scene, and then they talked about how hard all of the detectives had worked on the case. Popcheff told her about the detectives missing Christmas and New Year’s with their families to stay on the investigation, and about how he had even missed his sister’s wedding because he wanted to stay on the case. He also told her about chasing down the hundreds and hundreds of leads that came into the police department, almost all of which led nowhere.