Slaughter on North Lasalle (23 page)

Fingerprints taken by the coroner identified the body as that of sixteen-year-old Shanna Sheese. As a part of a murder investigation, the assigned detective will usually attend the autopsy, which most often takes place the next day. The assigned detective needs to be there in order to see the wounds and to see exactly what caused the death. This can become extremely important in a murder case because it can often help narrow the investigation by telling the detective what kind of murder weapon to look
for, or even what sort of suspects to pursue (if the manner of death could have been caused only by a certain type of person, such as someone very tall or someone with a lot of strength). When West attended the autopsy of Sheese, he found that she had died from blunt force trauma to the head. No helpful information about the weapon or her attacker was forthcoming, though; it was unknown what had been used to strike her, and anyone could have done it. The autopsy didn’t give West much to work with.

For the next few weeks, West canvassed the neighborhood where Sheese’s body had been found, looking for clues and talking to dozens of people about the victim. West also talked to Shanna Sheese’s family. He learned from Sheese’s mother that Shanna had recently given birth (her baby was a month old) and that she had left home on October 12, 1998, the day her father died, apparently distraught over his death. That was a week before her body was found, and they hadn’t heard from her again after that.

Sheese’s sister showed Detective West some of the locations Shanna had been known to frequent. West visited these areas over and over, handing out fliers about Sheese and hoping to find someone who could give him any information about her or about who would want to kill her. Sometimes the picture of a victim can jog people’s memories of an event they had forgotten. Additionally, West put out media alerts for a car that had been seen in the area where Sheese had been found, and even had aerial photographs taken of the area. (Aerial photographs
will often show information not always visible from the ground; for example, dropped evidence or access routes to the crime scene, such as a footpath that leads through adjoining property.)

Despite these efforts, West could come up with very little evidence and only very scant information about Sheese. He did, however, uncover the fact that the victim had apparently been a crack addict and had engaged in prostitution in order to pay for her drug habit. This was why the sixteen-year-old’s fingerprints had been on file. West also discovered that Sheese had performed most of her prostitution out of a run-down house at 1529 East Michigan Street, on Indianapolis’s near east side, less than a mile from where the homeless man had found her body. This brought up the possibility that one of her customers had killed her. However, the only individuals West found in that area who could give him any information about Sheese were the homeless people, drug addicts, and prostitutes who frequented the vicinity, and none of the information they provided proved helpful in his investigation of Sheese’s murder.

One day West received information about a large amount of dried blood on Arsenal Avenue, a few blocks from where the homeless man had found Sheese’s body. West dropped what he was doing, hurried to the scene, and located this blood, but then tracked it back to an injured animal. West shook his head. Another dead end. It seemed that nothing would come together on this case. Everyplace he turned he came up empty.

“Even though I really worked hard on the Sheese
case,” West said, “I couldn’t come up with anything substantial at all. I kept drawing a blank.”

West’s lieutenant, after seeing weeks of fruitless work, finally decided to deactivate the Sheese murder case. This meant that, even though the case was still unsolved, no more active work would be done on it. Homicide branches have to do this with some murder cases, particularly those without substantial leads, in order for their detectives to give more time and attention to new cases, or to cases that do have substantial leads. Of course, if new leads do come up in the deactivated case, it can always be reopened. Often in murder investigations detectives will uncover leads to other murders. Sometimes the same person committed both murders, and sometimes individuals will tell about other murders as part of a plea deal. But until something like this occurs, a deactivated case stays on the shelf. West, however, as was typical with him, couldn’t quite make himself give up just yet on the Sheese case.

Although assigned new murder cases to work on, West continued to work the Sheese case whenever he could. Whenever he was close by on another case he would stop in the areas he had earlier canvassed and check for new information or for witnesses he had missed. He also contacted the uniformed officers and the vice and narcotics detectives who worked around 1500 East Michigan Street, letting them know that he was interested in any information they came across concerning Sheese or her murder. While it would seem logical to contact the vice and narcotics detectives (since Sheese had been a known
crack addict and a prostitute), West, because of his thoroughness, knew that the uniformed officers could also be great sources of information. They patrol the same areas every day and know most of the people like Sheese who cause them problems. West always believed in tapping every source of information possible.

West also talked several times to his superiors about reopening the case so that he could give it more attention. However, since West had no leads or suspects, he was uniformly told that the case was a dead end and that he needed to let go and move on.

But West’s persistence paid off. On January 22, 1999, three months after Shanna Sheese was found and after West had made several follow-up contacts to be certain that both the uniformed officers and the vice and narcotics detectives knew he was still interested in information about Sheese, narcotics detectives brought to Detective West a man who had told them that he had information about the Sheese murder. Individuals regularly involved in criminal activity will hang on to and then use information such as this as currency to buy their way out of jail. There was an expression at the Homicide Branch, “We’ll always trade a weenie for a ham,” meaning they were always open to dropping or reducing charges on lesser crimes for information on more serious crimes. That was what this man was looking to do.

Ray Harber,
¹
a crack addict, told West that he had
recently been at a crack house where he overheard two brothers talking about a murder. Harber said that during the conversation he heard them claim that they had beaten a woman to death with a brick and then left her on a vacant lot, stripping off all of her clothing so that it would look like a john/prostitute murder. The brothers, Harber told West, were named Malcolm and Darrell Wilson. West immediately remembered Malcolm, whom he had talked to right after the Sheese murder. Malcolm had admitted to West that he knew Sheese, but also claimed that he hadn’t seen her on the day she died, nor had any information about her murder.

Harber’s information, of course, wasn’t enough for West to make an arrest, but it did finally give him a suspect and a direction for the investigation. He now became more committed than ever to solving this case.

A month later, on February 22, 1999, after West had also been in touch with the uniformed personnel at the jail and told them that he was interested in any information about Shanna Sheese, Teresa Sessile,
²
who had been incarcerated in the Marion County Jail, contacted him. She told West that while in jail she had talked with a woman named Vanessa Thompson. Thompson, according to Sessile, had bragged that she and Malcolm Wilson had killed Sheese by repeatedly hitting her in the head with a brick.

Then on February 26, 1999, another inmate at the
Marion County Jail, Beverly Hudson,
³
contacted West. She also had information. Hudson told him that a cellmate of hers, Alexa J. Whedon, had confided to her that on the day of the Sheese murder she had been at a party with Vanessa Thompson, Malcolm Wilson, and Shanna Sheese. According to Whedon, Thompson had previously been Wilson’s lover, but he had recently dumped her in favor of Sheese, which had infuriated Thompson. Apparently, Whedon said, Thompson, already angry at Sheese over some drugs she had supposedly stolen, became so incensed when she saw Wilson and Sheese together that she suddenly smashed Sheese in the head with a brick.

Alexa Whedon additionally confided to Hudson that, although in the past she, too, had been involved with Malcolm Wilson, at the time of the murder she was actually in a lesbian relationship with Vanessa Thompson. Because of this, Whedon said, she joined in and also struck Sheese with a brick. She told Hudson that after she and Thompson thought they had killed Sheese, Wilson took her bloodied body to the vacant lot, but as he was getting ready to dump her he found that Sheese was still alive and gasping. So Malcolm Wilson bashed her several more times in the head with a brick and killed her.

Even with all this new information, Detective West knew that it still wouldn’t be enough for the staff of the Prosecutor’s
Office, since it involved only overheard conversations and unsubstantiated claims. He didn’t have enough yet.

“All I had,” West said, “was a lot of ‘he said, she said.’ I knew I needed some hard evidence.”

Now that he felt he knew what had actually happened, West began collecting more statements and searching for more evidence. In any free time he had between his other cases, he would visit the murder site and interrogate everyone he could find who might have any knowledge at all about the case. And as will often happen when a person refuses to give up, West’s persistence paid off and he soon began accumulating small bits of evidence. Finally, when West felt that he had collected enough evidence, he brought everything he had, including many additional statements he had taken, to the Prosecutor’s Office, which then filed murder charges against Wilson, Thompson, and Whedon. In three separate trials, juries found all of the defendants guilty of the murder of Shanna Sheese. Malcolm Wilson received sixty-five years in prison, while Vanessa Thompson and Alexa J. Whedon each received fifty-five years.

This one case, however, was by no means the only time that Detective Roy West demonstrated exceptional ability as a homicide detective. Another investigation that showcased his extraordinary intuitive abilities was West’s investigation into the murder of eleven-year-old Lashonna Bates.

On April 5, 1994, a man who said he was searching for a runaway dog in a large wooded area on the northeast side of Indianapolis stumbled onto the extremely decomposed body of Lashonna Bates, who had been reported missing a month and a half earlier from her home over five miles away. According to police reports, Bates had last been seen waiting for a school bus on February 15, 1994. During the autopsy, the pathologist found that Bates had died from blunt force trauma to the head. Although the body was badly decomposed, and later there would be conflicting testimony, the pathologist stated that he didn’t believe Bates had been sexually molested.

Steven Guthier, the homicide detective initially assigned to the investigation, worked intensely on the case, interviewing dozens of people and repeatedly canvassing the areas where Bates lived and where she had been found. After hundreds of hours of investigative work, and the assistance of several other homicide detectives, Guthier wasn’t able to turn up much evidence or information about what had happened to the little girl. The chief suspect in the case was a relative of Bates, one who had allegedly been sexually molesting her. In fact, Bates’s mother had reportedly been planning to turn the relative in to the police on the same day her daughter disappeared. However, the relative had a solid alibi for the time Bates disappeared, and consequently, the case stalled. Eventually, when no arrest was made, Guthier’s lieutenant took a look at the investigation, and after reviewing the case status, decided to deactivate it.

Five years later, in 1999, the cold case squad reopened the Bates murder investigation. The cold case squad is a team of homicide detectives who look into old deactivated murder cases in the hope of perhaps finding new witnesses or maybe clues and evidence overlooked in the original investigation. Sometimes, along with trying to find new witnesses and evidence, this unit can also try using new technology that was not available when the original detective investigated the case. In the Bates investigation, however, the cold case squad was unable to find any new evidence or witnesses. They, too, saw the relative as the key suspect and unsuccessfully tried to break down his alibi. After two years of fruitless investigation, the cold case squad was about to deactivate the Bates murder case once more.

Before they could, however, Major Richard Crenshaw, the commander of the Crimes against Persons Bureau, asked that a detective who hadn’t been involved in the original case or in the cold case investigation take a fresh look at the file just to be absolutely certain nothing had been missed. Since this crime had involved such a young and totally innocent victim, he didn’t want to let it be shelved again if there was any chance at all of solving it. Roy West was the detective assigned this responsibility.

West’s uncanny ability as an investigator soon demonstrated itself again. All of the other detectives who had looked into the case, both originally and during the cold case investigation, had focused on the relative who had been molesting Lashonna Bates. West, however, apparently
saw something in the file that the other detectives didn’t that made him suspect the man who had found the girl’s body.

“I saw some things in his statement that struck me as odd,” West explained. “Whenever he talked about Lashonna [Bates], he personalized it too much.”

West contacted the man and explained to him that he was taking one last look at the case. He didn’t want to alarm the man or frighten him into running, so he acted as though everything he was doing was just routine. He asked the man if he would mind coming down to the Homicide Office and answering just a few questions. In addition to being an exceptional detective, West was naturally also a skilled interrogator, and he eventually got the man to confess to the crime and reveal information that had never been released to the news media and would only be known by the murderer.