Slaughter on North Lasalle (26 page)

Following this interview, Sergeant West then headed back north to Indianapolis to begin his investigation. He knew he had a lot of work to do, but he also knew that he would have to do it only in any free time he could find. As a cold case, it wasn’t his top priority. At that
moment, West had several much more current murder cases assigned to him, cases that he knew simply couldn’t wait and would require him to often put the North LaSalle Street case aside. This case, now almost thirty years old, simply couldn’t claim priority over the more recent cases. Nevertheless, he was determined to thoroughly investigate the information he had received from Palma, Pankake, and Smith. He would somehow find the time.

At this point, it was decided to let the Prosecutor’s Office know about what West had found out. Just like the police department, the Prosecutor’s Office had been embarrassed by the North LaSalle Street case. The prosecutor had promised in the midst of all of the huge publicity surrounding the grand jury indictments back in 1996 to prosecute the case with all of the resources of his office. Then he had been forced to call a press conference and say that he was dropping all the charges.

The day after New Year’s 2001, West contacted the Marion County Prosecutor’s Office and advised them of the information he had and that he intended to pursue it further. After what had happened in the Carroll Horton debacle, it was expected that the Prosecutor’s Office would be skittish about wanting anything to do with the case, but it still made sense to keep them fully advised, particularly since if the information proved true, West would be asking for the case to be cleared. As expected, one of the deputy prosecutors told West that, after the Carroll Horton incident, it was unlikely that Prosecutor Newman would want anything to do with the case. Still, West scheduled a meeting with them for January 8, 2001,
so that he could show them what he had uncovered so far.

The police department was also leery, with good reason, and Detective Roy West was called into a meeting with the top brass, who were worried about another blast of publicity over solving this case, only to be followed by them having to meekly say, “Never mind, we were wrong.” It was their jobs on the line, too: Unlike merit ranks (such as sergeant, lieutenant, and captain, which are permanent and attained through competitive testing and interviews), appointed ranks (such as major, deputy chief, assistant chief, and chief of police) can be taken away at any time and for any reason, and there is no appeal. The deputy chief and chief of police certainly didn’t want to see their ranks ripped away over a thirty-year-old murder case that had already bombed twice.

At the meeting with the chief of police, who read the letter, it was agreed that the best thing to do was not to release any information at all to the press, but to thoroughly investigate the case and have some really hard proof before anything was announced.

And so West went back to work on the case whenever he could. From everything he had heard and seen, this appeared to be the best clue the police department had ever received about the North LaSalle Street murders.

Sergeant Roy West realized that, before he could decide on the relevance of what he had found out from Angel Palma, he had to go get the old case file on the North LaSalle Street murders and read through every piece of it. Although he had been peripherally involved in the case in the mid-1990s and had a general knowledge of what had happened, he didn’t have an in-depth understanding of it. West knew that if he was really going to be able to use Palma’s new information, he needed to be intimately acquainted with every detail of the case so that he would understand how everything he had heard so far would fit into it. He had to know every fact that the detectives in 1971 had known.

But if he was going to
really
understand the case, West also knew that he had to get the evidence the detectives had collected in 1971 out of the property room and examine
it firsthand. He needed to look at the paperwork the original detectives had taken from B&B Microfilming, examine any paperwork from Gierse and Hinson’s time at Records Security Corporation, look at the bloody clothing and bedding material, and he especially needed to examine the coroner’s exhibits.

Before doing this, though, West sent to the crime lab six knives that had belonged to Fred Harbison, which Palma had allowed him to take. She said that her father had always had plenty of knives, and, as Pankake had also stated, he had always carried at least one with him. West asked that the crime lab check the knives for traces of human blood. It had been almost thirty years since the murders, and West knew it was a long, long shot, but at least he would know he had tried. (Unfortunately, however, as expected, the crime lab would later report that they could find no traces of human blood on them.)

After sending the knives to the lab, West went to retrieve the case files. Old homicide case files are kept in the subbasement of Indianapolis police headquarters, stored in boxes stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves. These shelves sit behind heavy gauge metal fencing and a locked door. Only homicide detectives and specially authorized personnel are allowed access to them. West took the elevator down, unlocked the door to the storage area, and after a small search found the box with case number 786420-D, the North LaSalle Street murders, written on it. West grabbed the box and then stopped one floor up at the police department property room to get the evidence in the case.

There he discovered a gut-wrenching problem, however: To West’s shock, when the clerk checked the computer, West was told that there was
no
evidence. It had all been destroyed. When West had the property room clerk check the computer again, and then even manually search for the evidence, he found that indeed all of the evidence the detectives had collected in 1971, every bit of it, had been inadvertently destroyed. There was absolutely nothing left from the 1971 investigation.

Although there had been the mix-up in 1984 that had resulted in the evidence from the North LaSalle Street murders being wrongly marked to be destroyed, at least that error had been discovered in time for some of the evidence to have been found and recovered. Now, it appeared, even this rescued property had been disposed of.

West pulled up the paperwork and found that on April 28, 1999, a uniformed superior officer (not someone working homicide) had authorized the destruction of the remainder of the evidence from the North LaSalle Street murders. This evidence, according to the paperwork, had been destroyed on October 10, 2000, just over a month before Angel Palma first walked into the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office.

That was impossible, West thought. Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, the police department should never get rid of evidence on open murder cases.

However, in reality, mistakes do happen. Again, as with the destruction of evidence in 1984, this wasn’t part of any conspiracy of the murderer in league with the police, but simply an attempt by the property room personnel
to clean out old evidence in order to make room for new evidence. At the Indianapolis Police Department, a property disposition form for evidence (on which an officer can check either “destroy” or “retain”) is sent to the investigating officer of old cases every few years. But if the officer who handled the case is no longer employed by the police department, through retirement or resignation, the form is then sent to that officer’s former supervisor.

This is apparently what happened in the North LaSalle Street case. The property disposition form had originally been sent in April 1999 to Lieutenant Michael Popcheff (Chief Joe McAtee and Lieutenant Jim Strode had retired years earlier). However, in April 1999, Popcheff had also just retired a couple of months earlier, and so they sent the form to one of his superior officers, who signed off for the evidence to be destroyed, apparently without knowing anything about the case.

Though in no way malicious, it was sloppy of this officer not to have researched the homicide casebook to check on the status of the investigation before authorizing such a thing. The officer who signed off to dispose of the North LaSalle Street evidence could have easily called the Homicide Office and had someone check the homicide casebook for him. Why he didn’t bother to do so is unknown.

Immediately following his discovery that the evidence had been destroyed, West used the telephone in the property room to call the Identification Branch. He wanted to be certain they at least still had the unidentified fingerprints
from North LaSalle Street (minus, of course, the one lost fingerprint that the fingerprint technician had carried around with him). Thankfully, they did, so West told them about the evidence problem and asked that they be absolutely certain to retain the fingerprints. Since there was nothing he could do about the destroyed evidence other than write a memo to the deputy chief of investigations, West left the property room and went back up to his desk on the third floor of police headquarters and began reading the homicide case file, which was hundreds of pages long.

The case file took some time to read, but to be certain he felt intimately acquainted with the investigation, West not only read the entire file, but also retyped several hundred of the most important pages of it. He felt this would help him remember critical details. After he had done this, West was confident that he knew all he could about the case. He felt certain he knew enough now to work on the new leads he had.

Along with her father’s knives, Angel Palma had also given Detective West a box of Fred Harbison’s personal papers. Harbison appeared to have been a very careful man, who likely wouldn’t leave any incriminating papers lying around, but West also knew it was worth checking them out. He examined the papers, but, as expected, didn’t find anything of value to the case. West then went back to work, again realizing how the letter from Fred Harbison would be much more persuasive if he had the original rather than just the fax of a scan.

Fortunately, on December 5, 2000, Palma located
the original letter and the copy that she had gone to the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office about, though she didn’t say where they had been or how she found them. (Some speculated that perhaps Palma had had the letters all along but had been torn emotionally between exposing her father as a cold-blooded killer and showing compassion for the families of the victims.)

On December 11, 2000, West met a Captain Bottoms from the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in Plainfield, Indiana, just west of Indianapolis, and took possession of the original letter and copy. When West examined them, he found that they matched exactly the scanned/faxed version Jeff Pankake had sent him, and that they indeed looked years old. Suddenly, a case that had been very questionable at first now appeared much more solid.

“I was skeptical about the letter at first,” admitted West. “But once I saw the envelopes they had been in, which were old and yellowed, and once I read the letter and spoke with Angel Palma I felt comfortable that there really was something to this.” While the letters alone weren’t enough, they were more of a break than the case had ever had before. For the first time, it seemed possible that the police would be able to finally solve this case. But West had much more confirmation to do before the case could be designated as closed.

Coincidentally, around the same time West received the original typed letter and photocopy and was ready to
begin his investigation in earnest, the police received a tip through Crime Stoppers that an anonymous caller had named a suspect never heard of before in the North LaSalle Street murders. The suspect had apparently told a female friend of his that he had been the one who had killed the three guys on North LaSalle Street. The woman told Crime Stoppers that she didn’t know if his story was true or not, that maybe he’d just been trying to impress or scare her, but she said she knew he was perfectly capable of doing such a thing. She said she had called Crime Stoppers because she knew she could do it anonymously, and feared what the man would do if he found out that she was the one who had reported him.

Based on the man’s arrest record, it certainly appeared that he had the background for it. In the early 1970s a judge had sentenced him to fifteen to twenty-five years in prison for beating a child to death. The man also had a number of firearms convictions on his record. However, with just a little questioning and investigation, he was easily dropped as a suspect. He didn’t know any of the things he should have. He was just trying to impress someone.

Because that sort of bragging had happened so often in the thirty years since the murders, West hadn’t been disturbed by it, but had kept on with his investigation of the Harbison letter. After he had finished reading and retyping the case file on the North LaSalle Street murders, West found a number of factors in the case that led him to believe that Ted Uland had certainly been a viable suspect. Two of the victims had stolen equipment and
money from him, and they were also putting him out of business by taking his best customers. But most important, Uland had collected $150,000 from New York Life Insurance Company after their deaths.

The original detectives had listed Uland as a suspect right away but couldn’t get past his alibi. He had called Gierse and Hinson from southern Indiana at 9:00 and 9:30
P.M.
on the night of the murders. That had been checked out thoroughly by the detectives. He had also been seen that night in southern Indiana by reliable witnesses. In 1971, it would have been a three-hour drive each way. The original detectives had thought it possible that Uland might have hired someone to do it, but no one had had any idea whom. Uland was known to have a lot of rough people working for him, but no one had a record indicating anything like this. (Fred Harbison, as West would later find, had a clean police record.)

West also found through his research that although Uland had been scheduled to take a lie detector test about the murders and had shown up for it several times, various circumstances (such as he and his lawyer spending hours going over stipulations for the test) had prevented him from ever actually going through with it. Consequently, Uland stayed a viable suspect for a long time. Still, in 1971, Uland had been just one of several dozen possible suspects. The three victims had made so many enemies that the list of suspects had simply kept growing, and in 1971 some of these other suspects had also looked very viable.