Slaughter on North Lasalle (22 page)

Schultz said in the book she wrote about her investigation that when she brought the notebooks and diaries to the Prosecutor’s Office, she sensed hostility among the staff. She said that when she handed over the materials, a female prosecutor ordered an aide to make a copy of every single page. Schultz also recalled that on the same day she turned in her notebooks and diaries, she had to attend a meeting with two deputy prosecutors and Horton’s defense attorney. Schultz claimed that as the defense attorney questioned her about her relationship with Horton, the prosecutors became alarmed by the questions and her answers, and cut the meeting short. The prosecutors said that they’d have to reschedule it for another day.

After Horton’s defense attorney left, Schultz said that the two deputy prosecutors came back and had a closed-door meeting with her, during which they began yelling at her about her appearances on various news media programs. They said that every time they turned on the news there she was, and they ordered her not to talk to any more reporters or to the police. They then asked her about the information concerning the North LaSalle
Street murders she had sent to Chastain (which would, of course, taint any information he gave to the police). Schultz said she admitted to sending him a newspaper article about the murders.

Also, at least according to Schultz, the meeting got uglier when one of the prosecutors grabbed and started searching her purse, reportedly looking for any information she had about the North LaSalle Street case besides the notebooks and diaries. Then, Schultz said, they accused her of sleeping with the various police officers involved in the case in order to get information from them. Following this, according to Schultz, they began screaming at her about the book she was writing and the reported movie offers. Schultz said she left the meeting in tears.

Once the charges against him had been dropped, Carroll Horton filed a lawsuit against the city of Indianapolis for false arrest, seeking $300,000. Although he presumably had a good case, on January 1, 1999, Horton died before it could come to court. Carol Schultz, when she heard the news about Horton’s death, said she was overcome with grief. She couldn’t believe it. While Horton had reportedly died of natural causes, Schultz said she couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he had been murdered because of what he knew about the North LaSalle Street killings. Or, Schultz theorized in 2005, maybe Horton had even faked his own death and was still around.

Along with Schultz, Floyd Chastain also continued with his belief in conspiracy theories. He wrote a letter to the
Indianapolis Star
on
April 3, 1997, in which he claimed he had proof that the North LaSalle Street murders were linked to the murder of Jimmy Hoffa and to the Nixon White House. Chastain said he was writing the letter because he wanted to have a meeting with prosecutors so that he could give them the information he had. Not surprisingly, the Prosecutor’s Office didn’t give much credibility to this claim.

To the end, Carol Schultz held on to the belief of Carroll Horton’s guilt. In 2005, she said that a source she had inside the Indianapolis Police Department told her that the Homicide Branch had actually received a confession from Carroll Horton, and that because of the confession the case had since been designated as cleared and closed.

Carol Schultz’s information was not entirely wrong. The Indianapolis Police Department did eventually receive a confession about the North LaSalle Street murders.

But it wasn’t from Carroll Horton.

On September 11, 2001, the United States suffered the most deadly terrorist attack in its history when two jet airliners, piloted by Al Qaeda operatives, smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The impacts not only killed all of the people on the airplanes, but the resulting fireballs also instantly incinerated hundreds of people in the building. Thousands of New York City emergency workers, when they heard of the attack, dropped what they were doing and with no thought for their own safety, raced to the scene. Of the almost 3,000 people who died in these attacks, 403 were emergency workers trapped inside when the towers, weakened by the collision and resulting intense fire, eventually began collapsing. The New York City Police and Fire Departments had never in their history suffered tragedies of this magnitude.

When Detective Sergeant Roy West of the Indianapolis Police Department’s Homicide Branch heard about the terrorist attack in New York City, he, like most people, felt shaken and sad. It was a tragedy of a magnitude never experienced before on American soil. However, West, a police officer with almost thirty years of experience, and a veteran of both the Marine Corps and the Air Force Reserve, didn’t feel that just giving blood or donating money was enough. He felt he had to do more. He knew it would be a tremendous undertaking in New York City to clear the wreckage and attempt to recover the bodies, which would be in such a shape that identification of them would take a massive effort. The local authorities would need lots of people trained in this area, probably more than they had in New York City.

“I couldn’t just sit here in Indianapolis when it was obvious these people needed help,” West said. He knew that with his years of work as a homicide detective he could be of assistance in New York City. And so, he asked that he be allowed to take all of his remaining leave time for 2001, a little over five weeks. Upon receiving approval of his leave request, West then called the New York City Police Department, told them of his background as a homicide investigator, and said that he wanted to help in the World Trade Center recovery process. He was told that New York City would be glad to have the assistance of someone with his expertise. They had plenty of work for him to do.

Without worrying about booking a room, West left
Indianapolis for New York City on September 22. The next day, he appeared at the New York City Police Department’s Command Center, and soon found himself working at Ground Zero. The cleanup and recovery process was a huge undertaking at Ground Zero, but West’s talents would soon be needed elsewhere.

“After a couple of days one of the guys at the Command Center asked me if I had a strong stomach,” West recalls. “When I told him I’d been working homicides for fifteen years, he said, ‘Good, because we need some help at the morgue.’”

For the next five weeks West worked twelve hours a day at the New York City Morgue, where he assisted the personnel there in identifying the bodies recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, but more often identifying just body parts. The initial explosion of the two aircraft hitting the buildings and the eventual collapse of the two towers had naturally mangled most of the bodies. Some of the victims were so incinerated and mutilated that chances were they would never be identified. But the recovery team had to try. Fortunately, his years of working in homicide had steeled Roy West for this gruesome task.

When West left Indianapolis for New York City, he had made no arrangements for living quarters, figuring he’d find something when he got there. West, however, found that the New York City Police Department took very good care of him. “They at first put me up in a hotel,” West said. “But the authorities had been asking New
Yorkers to open their homes to us, and so for most of the time I was there I stayed with some really nice people. The people there were just wonderful.”

By the time West had to return to his job in Indianapolis, he found that in the short time he had been in New York City he’d made many friends and had earned the gratitude of everyone he met during the World Trade Center recovery process. The enormity of the tragedy and the dedication of the people involved in the recovery process became a strong bonding mechanism for those involved.

“I’ve never become so close to a group of people in such a short time as I did in New York,” West said.

He recalled how, whenever the recovery teams would bring the body of a slain emergency worker to the morgue, the police would line both sides of the street and salute as the body passed. It was their way of recognizing the devotion to duty the person had shown. On the night he left to go back to Indianapolis, someone contacted his driver and told him to return to the morgue because West had forgotten something. When the car pulled up to the morgue West saw that police officers had lined up on both sides of the street and were saluting him as he passed. He said he had never in his life received as great an honor.

When Detective West finally returned to Indianapolis, news of his sacrifice and service in New York City circulated around the police department. Soon, his story also reached the ears of several members of the local news
media, who recognized a great human-interest story and contacted West, asking for an interview. To their surprise, however, they found that West refused to talk to them about the five weeks he had spent in New York City.

While the news media could understand West’s motives for wanting to go to New York City to offer his help, they couldn’t fathom his reluctance to talk about it, particularly since he had been on television and in the newspaper dozens of times before as a homicide detective. They simply couldn’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to receive recognition for extraordinary services. But anyone who knew Roy West wasn’t surprised at all.

Roy Steven Francis West joined the Indianapolis Police Department in 1972, and after graduation from the Police Academy served for several years as a uniformed street officer, and then with the Motorcycle Division. In 1983, West asked for and received an assignment to the Narcotics Branch as an undercover officer, and then in 1986, two years after being promoted to sergeant, he transferred to the Homicide Branch to become a homicide unit supervisor. In this assignment, which he held until his retirement at the end of 2007, West directed the activities of four homicide detectives, while also investigating murder cases himself. Even after his retirement from the Indianapolis Police Department, West still continued as an investigator, working for the Marion County Grand Jury.

At first glance, West appeared a very average and
ordinary person: average height, average build, average looks. But as a homicide detective, West stood out as anything but average and ordinary.

Along with the drive to give of himself to those in need and his tremendous modesty (both of which he demonstrated during the World Trade Center recovery process in New York City), West also possessed a number of other personality traits that, while perhaps not as endearing, served him well as a homicide investigator. He never settled for simply doing his job, or even just doing his job well—he routinely took every task he was given over the cliff edge and into the abyss of “doing it to death.” The files of his murder investigations were so detailed that they routinely filled up several storage boxes, and he regularly turned in three-page, single-spaced reports on suicide cases (which were typically given only a paragraph or two).

West was so meticulous that his desk and surrounding area became strictly off-limits to everyone in the office. This came about because everything in his work area sat in a specifically designated spot. Nothing was ever scattered about or out of order. At a crime scene, West would not allow anyone, not even his superiors, to cross the crime scene tape until after he had finished searching the area over and over, often driving the crime lab technicians to near madness with the amount of evidence he wanted them to process and collect.

While some of West’s personality traits have likely driven his wife and three children to distraction, they also made Roy West arguably the best homicide detective
the Indianapolis Police Department had ever seen. There were never questions left unanswered in his cases, no evidence uncollected, no suspects or witnesses not interrogated. West never abandoned cases because they looked unsolvable. Because of his work habits, most of the prosecutor’s staff loved working with West. They loved it because they knew that with West, they would get a case as thoroughly investigated as humanly possible, with absolutely no detail left out or any task uncompleted. They wouldn’t have to, as they did with many other detectives, draw up a list of further items that needed to be investigated or further people who needed to be talked to. It was already done.

Detective Roy West not only solved the ordinary murder cases that came across his desk every year, but also managed to solve the kind of murder cases that other detectives would have labeled unsolvable; cases other detectives would have shelved. One notable instance was his investigation into the murder of sixteen-year-old Shanna Sheese, a case that demonstrated West’s persistence, determination, and extraordinary ability to close a case other detectives would have given up on.

On October 19, 1998, a homeless man scavenging for aluminum cans stumbled onto the nude body of a woman hidden in the high weeds of a vacant lot in the 900 block of East Market Street in Indianapolis, just a few blocks from the downtown area. The body, in such a state of decomposition that the cause of death wasn’t immediately
obvious, appeared to have been dumped there, as the uniformed officers responding to the call couldn’t find any of the woman’s clothing other than a single sock.

At the Indianapolis Police Department, homicide detectives caught assignments on a rotating basis. Once a detective received a murder investigation, he or she wouldn’t receive another one until all of the other detectives on the shift had each received one. Sergeants were the exception. Since they were also responsible for supervising the shift, they received a case assignment on every second rotation. As it turned out, Detective Sergeant Roy West received the case assignment for this murder.

Very little evidence was found at the scene on East Market Street, adding to the belief that the victim had been murdered elsewhere and simply dumped there. The search was no easy task because the area where the body had been dumped had knee-high weeds everywhere. Yet still, West meticulously searched every inch, unfortunately with no success.