Slaughter on North Lasalle (24 page)

And so, when in late 2000, a person came forward claiming to have knowledge about who had committed the triple murder on North LaSalle Street, Detective Sergeant Roy West, because of the abilities he had shown in dozens of murder cases, and particularly because of his ability to see things unapparent to other detectives, became the obvious choice to investigate it. With his usual enthusiasm and vigor, West went right to work.

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Denotes pseudonym

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Denotes pseudonym

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Denotes pseudonym

On November 17, 2000, the Indianapolis Police Department Homicide Branch received a telephone call from Deputy Deborah Borchelt of the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office. She called to pass along the news that a young woman named Angel Palma had come into her office and said that she had some very important information about a triple murder that had taken place up in Indianapolis. The young woman, however, only had scant information about the murders. Palma told Borchelt that she thought the murders may have occurred in 1971 and that three men had had their throats cut. She went on to tell the deputy that she suspected the killer might have been her father, Fred Robert Harbison, and that he had been hired by another man to kill the three victims.

Police officers often hear stories like this, about someone suspecting someone else of a crime. Usually, the
information comes from hearsay or an overheard conversation. Seldom is it based on fact. And so, when Borchelt asked Palma how she knew all of this, expecting to hear a typical story about how someone had told someone else who had told her, Palma instead said that her father had left a letter confessing to the crime in his safety deposit box, only meant to be opened after he died (which he had in 1998). In the letter he told about his involvement in the murders. Now Deputy Borchelt was interested. Deathbed confessions of this sort often contain information about actual crimes.

Consequently, Deputy Borchelt excused herself, told Palma that she would be right back, and then went and contacted the state police post in Indianapolis, where she talked with a Trooper Brooks. In smaller rural counties, such as Gibson, the Sheriff’s Office is much more used to dealing with the state police involving murder investigations than with the local police. She told Brooks what Palma had said and asked if there had been such a case in Indianapolis in 1971. Gibson County is about 145 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The news in this area comes more from Evansville (Indiana) and Louisville than from Indianapolis. After a bit of thought, Brooks said he believed Palma must be talking about the North LaSalle Street killings, but that he wasn’t positive the date was 1971. He thought it might be later. At any rate, the trooper told Borchelt, it wasn’t the state police who had investigated that case. It hadn’t fallen within their jurisdiction. The case had been investigated by the Indianapolis Police Department. He gave Borchelt the telephone
number of the Indianapolis Police Department Homicide Branch. Borchelt thanked him and then hung up and called the Indianapolis Police Department.

As luck would have it, Deputy Borchelt talked to Sergeant Roy West when she called into the Homicide Office. West listened to her story and then asked the deputy to get a recorded statement from Angel Palma. After she sent him the tape, West told her, he would listen to the interview and, if it seemed like the statement had any veracity to it, an investigator, depending on who got the case, would come down and speak with Palma.

West was well aware of the North LaSalle Street murders. Although they had occurred in the year before he joined the police department, everyone who had lived in Indianapolis during that time knew about them. They had filled the newspapers and television news broadcasts for weeks. But in addition to this, West also had a much closer connection to the case—when it was resurrected in the early 1990s by Carol Schultz, West had been detailed to assist Detective Jon Layton. Although only peripherally involved in the case at that time, doing mostly “gofer” work, West was nevertheless well aware of the major aspects of the case.

When, at West’s request, Borchelt went back to speak with Palma, she found the young woman to be very reticent. Palma didn’t want to go into much detail about the letter, and seemed particularly nervous about giving a recorded statement. Palma said that right then all she really wanted was just to be certain that a crime such as this had really occurred. Palma said she wasn’t 100
percent sure that the information in the letter was true, but she felt she had to check it out.

“Initially she [Palma] was scared,” West said. “When she originally brought this information to the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office, she was fearful of giving them too much information.”

After confirmation from Deputy Deborah Borchelt that such a case had occurred, Angel Palma finally began talking. She said that, according to the letter, her father had been hired to kill the three men so that another man could collect on an insurance policy. When asked by Deputy Borchelt, Palma refused to give the name of the man who had hired her father but said that she would possibly give it later if the information in the letter proved accurate. At this time, Palma said she wasn’t totally certain that the letter wasn’t just a hoax or joke. She wanted to be absolutely sure that the facts in the letter were true before she gave out too much information. Also, she believed that the man her father claimed had commissioned the killings still lived in nearby Jasper, Indiana, and so Palma said that she was worried about the safety of herself and her two children if she accused him of murder.

In the letter, Palma continued, her father stated that the reason he was writing it was because he had been cheated out of the money he had been promised for the killings. He said in the letter that he had warned the man who hired him that he was going to write the letter and put it in his lockbox at the bank. If he wasn’t paid by the time he died, his wife would send the letter to the police.

This was all the information that Palma wanted to
give at the time. However, she left promising to come back in and bring the letter.

“Naturally, I was skeptical about the letter in the beginning,” said West, “given the amount of time that had passed and the publicity the case had gotten.” West had not forgotten the huge amount of publicity—not just local, but also national—that Carol Schultz had generated with the case.

Three days later, Angel Palma again showed up at the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office, this time upset and disheveled. She told the deputies that earlier that day she had been involved in a disturbance with her uncle, Jeff Pankake, and that two officers who had been called to the scene had taken her to the local hospital in handcuffs, but that the hospital had later released her. Palma said that she had intended to come to the Sheriff’s Office that day and bring them the letter from her father, but that it had disappeared from her purse during all of the ruckus surrounding her being handcuffed and taken to the hospital. It had been in her purse, she said, when she arrived at her uncle’s house, but then it wasn’t there when the police gave her the purse back later. She didn’t know what had happened to it.

Deputy Borchelt, after listening to Palma’s story, contacted the police department in Princeton, Indiana, where the disturbance with Palma had occurred. The officers involved in the incident said that when they arrived at the scene they had spoken with Jeff Pankake. He showed the officers where Palma, during the disturbance, had apparently broken several windows in his car.
She had been so upset that Pankake asked the two officers to take her to the local hospital for observation. Pankake would later tell West that Palma was having a very difficult time dealing emotionally with the revelations about her father, a man she had adored, and that she apparently took her frustration out on his car windows.

When the officers who had responded to the disturbance call spoke with Palma, she told them about the letter she was bringing to the Sheriff’s Office. She told the officers that she had come over and shown the letter to her uncle. The officers said that they then went and asked Pankake about the letter, and he showed them a scanned copy of it on his computer. Pankake, apparently having realized that in Palma’s emotional condition anything could happen to the letter, had scanned it as a precaution. After scanning it, Pankake said he gave the original back to Angel Palma. Palma apparently still had the original in her purse, but in her excited condition the officers likely wanted to speak with someone calmer, so they went to Jeff Pankake. The officers verified to Borchelt that the letter had talked about some murders in Indianapolis, where the victims had had their throats cut.

While at the Sheriff’s Office, Palma spoke further about the letter from her father’s safety deposit box. She said that when she had shown the letter to her uncle, Jeff Pankake, he, like her, had been shocked by the contents. Palma had apparently been so upset when she arrived at her uncle’s house that Pankake at first didn’t believe her when she told him about the letter. She had to show it to
him to make him believe her. She was apparently hoping that Pankake would tell her that it wasn’t true; it was just a hoax. But he didn’t.

“Pankake at first had some reservations about Palma and thought she was making the story up,” said West. “Until he saw the letter.”

Palma told Deputy Borchelt that after Pankake had scanned the letter into his computer, she didn’t know what happened to it. She swore she had put it back into her purse, along with a photocopy of the letter she had found in the same area where she had found the original. They were both gone when she got her purse back after the hospital released her. She told Deputy Borchelt that she had finally decided that she wanted the police to know everything about the letter because if it was true, then the families of the victims deserved to know what had happened to their loved ones. Borchelt tried to question Palma again about the man who had hired her father, but Palma said she couldn’t talk about it right then. She was too upset. The deputy suspected that Palma still feared what the man might do if he found out that she had informed on him. Palma promised she would come into the Sheriff’s Office the next day.

The following day, Angel Palma did show up at the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office and once more talked with Deputy Deborah Borchelt. Palma had apparently gotten over her fear of naming the man who had hired her father, because she had just found out that he had died a number of years before. She went on to tell Deputy Borchelt that in the letter her father said that he had
been hired to do the killing by a man named Ted Uland. Her father, she said, had worked for Uland’s oil drilling company, performing various jobs around the oil wells.

She told Borchelt that her father hadn’t gone far in school and didn’t speak grammatically correct English. The letter, she said, was worded just as her father would have spoken. In it, Palma said, her father had stated that he was only supposed to kill two men, but then had been forced to kill a third because he had shown up unexpectedly. Her father also talked in the letter about how the police said that there had been a yellow Oldsmobile seen at the murder site, but that it had actually been his yellow Plymouth Road Runner. Her father went on to tell how he buried the boots he had worn that night because he knew that he had left tracks in the blood and that the police could match them to him.

Palma told Deputy Borchelt that the original letter had been in a sealed envelope addressed to the “Chief of Police, Police Dept., Indianapolis, Ind.” She also said that a photocopy of the letter had been in another envelope addressed to the
Indianapolis Star
newspaper.

She had found the letters, Palma told Deputy Borchelt, when she was going through her father’s stuff, reminiscing. She and her father had been extremely close, and she was looking for photos or other remembrances of him. Both letters had sat for years in a safety deposit box, but after her father died, her stepmother had emptied the box and taken the contents home, apparently without going through them. Palma said she found one of the letters stuffed into a larger envelope containing an insur
ance policy and a few other items of her father’s personal belongings. She added that, after reading it, at first she didn’t believe it could be true. She thought it must be some kind of hoax. This wasn’t the father she knew. It had to be some kind of joke.

Palma said that she and her uncle had searched the computer for any information about a triple murder in Indianapolis in 1971 in which three men had had their throats cut but couldn’t find anything. (In 2000, Google was still only a small company, and computer search engines did not have the power they do today. And Pankake and Palma didn’t have any names, exact dates, or addresses to go on, either.) But still, Palma said, she felt she had to be certain, and that was why she came to the Sheriff’s Office. She added that the letters had been sealed when she found them and that her stepmother didn’t know about their contents. Her stepmother told her that her father had talked about the letters—not what was in them but what to do with them—a number of times over the years, but that after he died she had forgotten about them.

During the interview, Palma also added that her biological mother had once told her a story that she had never believed was true about another murder that her father had supposedly committed. She said her mother told her that her father had been hired to kill a man, and that he was supposed to make the killing look like a revenge murder for messing around with another man’s wife. Her father, according to Palma’s mother, had killed the man and then cut off his penis. Palma finished by
telling the deputy that when she was growing up, her father had had a reputation as being a man who would kill you if you messed with him. But she said she’d never really believed it. To her, he was always a kind, loving man.

When, on November 21, 2000, Sergeant Roy West received all of this information from the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office, he immediately asked to be assigned to the case, and wanted authorization to travel to southern Indiana to look into this supposed letter.