Slaughter on North Lasalle (18 page)

Schultz, along with talking daily to Horton, was also continuing to speak regularly with Chastain every Saturday afternoon, long-distance from his prison in Florida. During these conversations, Chastain continued to implicate Horton in more and more crimes. He told Schultz that Horton had bragged to him about killing a young
girl named Connie and burying her body at his house. Chastain also claimed that he knew about another murder Horton had committed, this one of an elderly woman. Chastain told Schultz that she ought to have the police get a search warrant and dig up Horton’s property. He bet they’d turn up a lot of bodies.

However, a little later in Schultz’s investigation, a columnist for the
Indianapolis Star
wrote that he had talked to two acquaintances of Chastain, and they both said that Chastain had a habit of telling tall tales. One of the acquaintances also claimed that Chastain had once abducted and tried to rape her. Another said that Chastain, after making his accusations of murder against Horton, had then tried to shake Horton down for $50,000 from prison. Chastain allegedly said that for $50,000 he would tell the authorities he had lied and that Horton really wasn’t involved in the North LaSalle Street murders.

Carol Schultz had been very happy when Sheriff McAtee took an active interest in her claims, and although Lieutenant Popcheff had earlier only assisted her in an advisory capacity, meeting and talking with her at the Waffle House, he eventually joined forces with McAtee to investigate her claims about Horton and the North LaSalle Street murders. One day, she said, Popcheff even took her to the police department property room and allowed her to see and smell the bloody clothing worn by Gierse and Hinson. She said it repulsed her, but when she recounted the experience to her bounty hunter friend, he told her that it was a shame they didn’t
have the investigative technology then that they have today. He told her they could probably have solved the case right away. This started Schultz thinking about whether these same scientific advances could still be used on the case. After conferring with a friend about this, Schultz contacted the very prestigious Vidocq Society.

This organization, based in Philadelphia, is made up of former homicide detectives, forensic scientists, medical examiners, and others involved in homicide investigation. This group will lend assistance to police departments and other organizations involved in extremely difficult murder investigations, and particularly in cold cases (murder cases that have been inactivated and shelved because of a lack of evidence or witnesses). The group sent an investigator to Indianapolis, who conferred with the sheriff and took a look at the evidence. After this, he flew back to Philadelphia to present the case to the society. Because only a few cases the society sees every year actually have a chance of solution, and because the cost of an investigation is so high, the society typically declines most of the cases presented to it. However, the society voted to look into the North LaSalle Street case and lend Carol Schultz a hand. The society would later question whether this had been a good decision.

According to an article in the September 1996 issue of
Indianapolis Monthly
magazine, several members of the society said they didn’t know when they accepted the case how emotionally involved Carol Schultz was in the investigation. They soon found out, however. These members said that they continuously warned Schultz that
she needed to distance herself from the case, but apparently she couldn’t. Consequently, the members soon began feeling very uncomfortable about the investigation. According to the magazine article, one of the members said, “Dealing with her is like trying to herd a group of cats down a driveway.” Nevertheless, despite their doubts, several members of the society came to Indianapolis to investigate. Alas, however, though they looked at all aspects of the case, they were unable to come up with much more than the police already had.

Meanwhile, because of the information Carol Schultz had supplied, Sheriff Joe McAtee, Lieutenant Michael Popcheff, and Jim Strode (by then retired) flew to Florida and spoke with Floyd Chastain. They apparently believed that Carol Schultz had uncovered clues they had missed in 1971. The men returned cautious, but encouraged. They didn’t know at that time, however, how much of the information Chastain had given them he had gotten from Carol Schultz in the first place.

Eventually, two other detectives, Lieutenant Charles Briley and Lieutenant Louis Christ (who would later become the deputy chief of investigations), also traveled to Florida to follow up on the earlier questioning of Chastain. They weren’t nearly as impressed.

“We interviewed Chastain twice and we couldn’t decide if he was telling us the truth or not,” said Briley. So he decided to try a new tactic. “When we interviewed Chastain a third time, I told my partner that I was going to tell him some silly things, and to just go along with whatever I said. So I told Chastain some things about the
crime scene that weren’t true, and I found that they would become a part of his story. This proved to me that he wasn’t there. For example, I mentioned a vacant lot next door to the crime scene, and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s where we parked.’ There was no vacant lot next door.”

Lieutenant Christ agreed with Briley’s assessment. “Floyd Chastain made up everything he said about that case,” said Christ. “He had no direct knowledge of any of that. There was nothing he said that he could substantiate.”

At the conclusion of his interviews, Chastain apparently realized that Briley and Christ knew he was lying, and he panicked. Lying to police officers or prison officials is a violation that can result in a revocation of privileges. “The last thing Chastain said to us was ‘Please don’t tell the warden that I lied,’” said Christ. “He knew he was going to lose all of his phone privileges. The guy had absolutely nothing of his own as far as knowledge of that crime.”

Eventually, though, another person who claimed to know something about the North LaSalle Street murders also surfaced. On March 9, 1993, at around 5:30
P.M.
, the Indianapolis Police Department received a call from a woman named Mary Cavanaugh.
¹
Cavanaugh said she wanted to report an attempted burglary at her house.

Officer Tony Lorenzano arrived to take the report and
discovered that someone had definitely tried to get in. He found pry marks and fresh wood chips at her side door, but also found that entry hadn’t been gained and nothing had been taken. As is standard police procedure, he explained to Cavanaugh that he would make a report and try to keep an eye on her house, and then he started to leave. However, as he did so, Lorenzano said Cavanaugh suddenly became very upset and started asking him what he knew about the North LaSalle Street murders. She claimed that she had recently been in contact with Sheriff McAtee about it. Cavanaugh then also told Officer Lorenzano that a man named Carroll Horton had been trying to contact her through her daughter. Cavanaugh said she hadn’t heard from Horton in over twenty years.

Cavanaugh then began telling Officer Lorenzano about being at the North LaSalle Street house on the night of the murders. She told him that when she walked into the house there was blood everywhere, that two of the men were already dead, and that they were getting ready to kill the third, who was begging for his life. She said she started screaming, and Carroll Horton, who was supervising the murders, slapped her and told her to shut up. She claimed that Horton then made her go to a typewriter in the house and type a message that said, “This is what happens to people who cross me.” (There is no mention in the original 1971 homicide case file of there even having been a typewriter in the house on North LaSalle Street, let alone of the police finding any note such as the one Cavanaugh claimed she typed.)

Although Officer Lorenzano hadn’t been a member of the police department when the North LaSalle Street murders occurred, he clearly still knew about them. So he immediately contacted the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in an attempt to verify that Cavanaugh had spoken with Sheriff McAtee about the case. He wasn’t able to raise anyone at the Sheriff’s Homicide Office but did finally manage to get ahold of one of their homicide run cars. The deputy in the run car said that he had heard that McAtee, Popcheff, and Strode had flown down to Florida recently to talk with a man in prison there about the North LaSalle Street killings, but that was all he knew about it.

Officer Lorenzano then called Lieutenant Popcheff at home. When he told him what Cavanaugh had said, Popcheff told Lorenzano that he would be there as soon as he could. Within thirty minutes, both McAtee and Popcheff had arrived at Cavanaugh’s home and had taken over.

Unfortunately, what McAtee and Popcheff apparently didn’t know was that Carol Schultz would also soon be in contact with Mary Cavanaugh and her family, and possibly taint anything Cavanaugh would tell the police. Schultz said in her book that Sheriff McAtee called and told her about Mary Cavanaugh. Schultz somehow obtained Cavanaugh’s unlisted telephone number and called her. Although Cavanaugh wouldn’t talk with Schultz and told her to never call her back, Schultz talked to Cavanaugh’s daughter, and told her about the murders. Schultz gave her some pictures of the North LaSalle Street victims
and asked her to show them to her mother and see if they stirred up any memories. When Cavanaugh’s daughter showed her mother the photographs, she said her mother didn’t show any signs of recognition, and indeed said that she didn’t know the men. Only later did she seem to start remembering things.

Since Mary Cavanaugh had made some very damning statements against Carroll Horton, however, the police department realized that they needed to investigate whether or not Cavanaugh was a reliable witness. They assigned this task to Detective Sergeant Don Wright. On March 30, 1993, about three weeks after the initial break-in call, Detective Wright wrote a memo about the various interviews he had conducted concerning Cavanaugh. He said he met first with a man named Sam Gibson, who had lived with Cavanaugh from 1976 to 1987. Gibson said that Cavanaugh had a serious drinking problem the whole time they had been together. But he also said that she had never once during the time he knew her mentioned the North LaSalle Street murders. Gibson added that in 1978 or 1979 Cavanaugh introduced him to Carroll Horton, who she said was an excellent mechanic. She didn’t seem frightened or intimidated by him, and in fact Gibson told Wright that Cavanaugh and Horton appeared to be very good friends, and that he suspected they might have been even closer than that.

Gibson then told Wright about how in the early part of 1993, long after he and Cavanaugh had parted ways, he saw Horton come into a bar he was in. He said he watched Horton walk over and ask the bartender for information
about Cavanaugh, specifically her address. The bartender couldn’t help him, but Gibson said he stopped Horton and told him that he could get Cavanaugh’s telephone number for him, which he did.

Although Horton originally told Gibson that he needed to talk to Cavanaugh about some tax problems he was having with a house he had bought from her, Gibson said that Horton later told him he really needed to contact her because Floyd Chastain was trying to pin some murders on him, and he needed to talk to her about it.

Detective Sergeant Wright, in his report, also mentioned speaking with a man named Bert Cavanaugh,
²
Mary Cavanaugh’s first husband. Like Gibson, he said that Mary had never once mentioned anything to him about the North LaSalle Street murders during the time they were together.

Lieutenants Louis Christ and Charles Briley also assisted in attempting to verify Cavanaugh’s reliability as a witness. They weren’t impressed with what they turned up.

“Mary Cavanaugh’s memory was so bad that she couldn’t even tell us where she used to live,” said Christ. “We drove her down there and she let us drive right past her old house. She had no idea where it was.”

The Prosecutor’s Office wasn’t impressed with Mary Cavanaugh’s recollections, either. There were far too many inconsistencies, enough to make them very wary of issuing a murder warrant
based on them. Also, they worried about reports that she had a serious drinking problem, which they feared would further damage her credibility if the case went to court.

On November 3, 1993, the Identification Branch of the Indianapolis Police Department said that Cavanaugh’s fingerprints didn’t match any of the unidentified fingerprints the crime lab technicians had found in the house.

Still, despite the reluctance of the Prosecutor’s Office to issue a murder warrant, the Indianapolis Police Department—because of the information supplied by Carol Schultz, Floyd Chastain, and Mary Cavanaugh—did decide to officially reopen the North LaSalle Street case. The police department felt that they needed to take a fresh look at the case, so veteran homicide detective Jon Layton was assigned to head up the reopened investigation.

Layton, of course, had to start from the beginning and read the entire 1971 case file. Then he had to look at what Carol Schultz claimed were fresh leads that would solve the case once and for all.

¹
Denotes pseudonym

²
Denotes pseudonym

On April 11, 1994, Indianapolis homicide detective Jon Layton, after reading through the 1971 homicide case file and reviewing the recent statements from Carol Schultz, Floyd Chastain, and Mary Cavanaugh, typed up a probable cause affidavit and submitted it to the Prosecutor’s Office. A probable cause affidavit basically tells the prosecutor what evidence a detective has in a case, listing the witnesses and what they said. It also details the physical evidence available, which can not only support what the witnesses said, but also tie a suspect to the crime. In addition, it contains any other information available that the detective feels can support his or her assertion that a certain person committed a crime. The prosecutor, after reading the probable cause affidavit, can then decide whether or not to issue arrest warrants based on this information and evidence.