Slaughter on North Lasalle (5 page)

Although not as smooth a talker as Gierse, Hinson had no problem finding plenty of women to sleep with—unfortunately, often to the chagrin of their husbands and boyfriends. Like his two friends, Hinson was divorced and loved to drink and party. He’d served in the navy
from 1961 to 1965, and like Gierse, his employers described him as knowledgeable and a hard worker.

James Barker, twenty-seven years old, was the youngest of the trio (five months younger than Hinson, but an inch taller and fifteen pounds lighter). Originally from West Virginia, he had played football in high school and graduated from Wright Junior College in Chicago. He had also come to Indianapolis through Chicago, but, unlike Gierse and Hinson, he still worked for Bell and Howell, based in Indianapolis as a service manager, making $220 a month plus bonuses. Friends would say that in the months before his murder he had talked about leaving Bell and Howell, which was considering cutting his salary, and going into business with Gierse and Hinson at B&B Microfilming.

Barker had served in the army as a military policeman from 1966 to 1968. Very much like Gierse and Hinson, Barker liked the ladies and had plenty of feminine company. Barker also liked to drink and party, and did a lot of it with his two friends.

While Lieutenant McAtee and his team were inside the house conducting their investigation, outside on the street in front of the house, a crowd of spectators had congregated. Because the murders were so unusual and horrific, the news media coverage of them began almost immediately. The breaking television and radio broadcasts drew dozens of curious people there. A tactic the police often used in cases like this was to have several plainclothes
police officers walk through the crowd, trying to pick up what the people were saying about the crime. Leads to suspects could often be developed this way.

In this case, however, it wasn’t a police officer but a reporter who overheard two women talking. Bill Anderson of the
Indianapolis Star
, the city’s morning newspaper, heard a woman say, “Do you think J.T. did this?” and the other respond, “I don’t know. He may have. He was mad.” The women, as it turned out, were talking about a man named James T. Cole, whose wife, Louise, worked as the secretary at B&B Microfilming. The police would later receive reports from witnesses that Mr. Cole suspected his wife of having an affair with one of the three men.

Other detectives assisted McAtee and his team by interviewing people about the case and compiling a list of persons of interest who would be taken downtown for further questioning. This list included several girlfriends of the three victims. The detectives also began compiling a preliminary list of possible suspects, including James T. Cole and a man named Bob Romine, whom witnesses told detectives they’d seen driving Gierse’s Cadillac. Another of the suspects was Carroll Horton, whose ex-wife, Diane Horton, had been dating Gierse at the time of his murder.

“While we were in the crime scene an officer came in and said that a man had to see me right away,” said Popcheff. “I went out, and standing on the other side of the crime scene barrier was Carroll Horton. He told me that
these guys were working with some kind of secret papers. We kept hearing that they were supposed to have been microfilming secret documents. But we never could find any.” This idea of the victims being involved in microfilming secret documents, though it wouldn’t be connected to the murders in 1971, would resurface some years later.

While talking to witnesses at the scene, the assisting detectives also discovered a tidbit about the three men that they felt warranted further investigation. Witnesses told the police how the murdered men, on the night before their deaths, had gotten into a heated argument with three other men at the Idle Hour Tavern, allegedly over a woman one of them had flirted with. Later that night, witnesses told the detectives, Hinson had also administered a beating to another man at the Hi Neighbor Tavern, again allegedly over a woman. The detectives recorded this information as good leads for McAtee and his team to follow up on.

Once the murder scene had been photographed and processed, and all of the available evidence recovered by the crime lab, McAtee had a coroner’s seal put on the house on North LaSalle Street, as well as on the business office of B&B Microfilming Service Company on East 10th Street, and on Barker’s home on North Rural Street. This crime scene had taken an extraordinarily long amount of time to process, but finally the detectives requested what was called in those days a B.I.D. (Brought in Dead) Wagon to take the bodies to the county morgue for autopsies.

The detectives sent the bodies to the morgue as they found them, still fully clothed and with their hands and feet still bound. They also called for wreckers to tow the men’s vehicles to police headquarters so that they could be processed in a controlled location before being towed to a secure lot for storage.

After the crime scene, the next most valuable source of clues and evidence in any murder case is the autopsy, which in this case the coroner’s office conducted on Thursday, December 2, 1971. Many times what looks like the cause of death actually isn’t. This was true in the North LaSalle Street case. Anyone who had viewed the crime scene would likely have believed that the three men had died from a loss of blood. There were large puddles and spatters of it everywhere. That, however, wasn’t the case. The coroner instead found that the injuries to the men’s necks had been so severe that they had actually died from asphyxiation when their windpipes were severed.

“They didn’t bleed to death,” Marion County coroner Dennis Nichols would later state. “They asphyxiated when their windpipes and spinal columns were severed.”

At the autopsy, the coroner discovered that Gierse, coroner’s case #71-1215, in addition to the severe neck wound, also had three deep, straight-line lacerations—one of them 1 inch long, one of them 2½ inches long, and a third 3
inches long—all on the right side of his head toward the rear. The coroner believed that these had come from him being struck with a tire iron or similar object. The homicide detectives would later theorize
that the killer or killers had tried to knock Gierse unconscious before cutting his throat. This would explain how he had been tied up. Rather than meekly submitting, which seemed unlikely at best, he had been knocked unconscious, only to regain consciousness too late.

Gierse’s throat, the coroner found, had one smooth and deep laceration 10¼ inches long. According to the postmortem report, Gierse suffered a transection of the larynx; carotid arteries, both sides; jugular veins, both sides; and his esophagus. In addition to these injuries, Gierse also had pressure marks on his stomach and wrists, and a small laceration on his left knee. These last injuries, the detectives theorized, may well have come from him struggling after he came to and realized what was going to happen.

Hinson, coroner’s case #71-1214, had two straight-line lacerations to the right side of his head, one 3½ and the other 2½ inches long, and a laceration 1½ inches long on the back of his head, again believed to have been made by a tire iron or similar object. The coroner’s examination found that the cut on Hinson’s throat was also smooth and deep, and 7 inches long, situated ½ inch below his Adam’s apple. According to the postmortem report, Hinson suffered a transection of the larynx, right carotid artery, right jugular vein, and right sternocleidomastoid muscle. The coroner also noted in his report that Hinson had two tattoos, one on each shoulder: flowers on his left shoulder and the name Geri (his ex-wife) on his right shoulder.

Like the other two men, Barker, coroner’s case #71-1216,
had three straight-line lacerations on his head, in his case all of them on the back, one of them 1¾ inches long, one 1½ inches long, and the other 1¼ inches long. But, unlike the others, Barker had been hit so hard that it fractured his skull. Also different from the other men, Barker had three lacerations to his throat, one 7½ inches long, one 5½ inches long, and the other 3 inches long. And rather than smooth cuts like the other two victims had, the coroner found that these lacerations were jagged, meaning that either the cutting instrument had dulled or that Barker had been struggling as it happened. The coroner also noticed two cuts on Barker’s upper chest, one of them 4 inches long and the other 2 inches long, and a 2-inch-long cut on his stomach, again indicating that he had been struggling with his murderer. Barker additionally had deep ligament markings on his wrists and an abrasion over his right eye. According to the postmortem report, Barker suffered a transection of the pharynx; carotid arteries, both sides; and jugular veins, both sides.

The coroner in his examination could also see that all three of the men had been gripped by the hair to stretch their necks taut. In addition, as a part of his examination, the coroner took nail scrapings from each man in the event he had struggled with his assailant and scratched him, and took hair samples in the event other hairs would be found either on the men or at the crime scene.

All of this information from the coroner, of course, went into the homicide case file to be used in the ensuing
investigation. But even this early in the case, when the detectives were just beginning to collect evidence and testimony, they quickly discovered that these three men, in their short lives, had made an amazing number of enemies. Their shared lifestyle of drinking, partying, and womanizing had angered hundreds of people, both male and female.

But the question was, who had been angry enough to kill them so brutally? This hadn’t been an ordinary murder. It had been a massacre.

When Joe McAtee and his team of detectives arrived back at the Indianapolis Homicide Office the night of December 1, 1971, they felt more than optimistic about solving the murders on North LaSalle Street. The crime had certainly been violent and gruesome, but they knew that this fact could actually work to their advantage. The killer (or killers) had exhibited an intense rage against these three men that had burst loose and exploded into a bloody massacre, and that kind of uncontrolled anger isn’t easy to hide. The killer would have to have shown some signs of this rage before the murders. The detectives felt confident that someone out there knew or suspected that a certain person was the killer. This person, they also felt confident, would likely soon tell someone else. Eventually, someone would tell the police, and the murderer would be uncovered.

Also, the murders had been so bloody that the killer had to have been covered with blood when he left. Very likely, the detectives knew, someone could have seen the killer with blood all over him, or the bloody clothing and shoes the killer wore. The detectives just needed to find this person.

In this case, the detectives had already drawn up a list of possible suspects whom they needed to bring in and question, either for a possible connection to the crime or to eliminate them as suspects. The detectives would also use this questioning as a means of gathering information and evidence that would point them toward more likely suspects.

In addition to conducting these interviews, homicide detectives needed to study the evidence recovered from the crime scene and during the autopsy. In this case, though, the crime scene and autopsy had provided very little physical evidence that could point toward the killer or killers. While the crime scene technicians had recovered a large number of fingerprints from the house, the detectives soon learned that there had been numerous parties held at the house, which meant that the fingerprints recovered could easily belong to one of the partygoers. And if the murderer or murderers had been in the home at one of these parties, then finding their fingerprints in the house would be of little or no value in the case.

The crime scene technicians had also recovered a large amount of blood from the house, as would be expected
with murders so brutal, but since it was just the victims’ blood, it didn’t hold much evidentiary value. The only real piece of physical evidence the detectives had that could point specifically to one person as the killer was the bloody footprint in the hallway. The cigar in the dining room could at best only add a bit more support to the theory that a certain person was the killer. Detectives knew that they had to quickly narrow down their suspect list before the killer realized he needed to get rid of the footwear that had made the track in the blood.

While McAtee, Popcheff, and Strode had been busy at the crime scene, Detective Sergeants Pat Stark and Bob Tirmenstein, who were not yet assigned to the case but were still only assisting at this point, had brought in a group of people to be interviewed at police headquarters. This group included Louise Cole, the secretary at B&B Microfilming; her husband, James T. Cole; and John Karnes, the man who had reported the murders. Along with these individuals, the detectives also brought in the women each of the men had most recently been seeing: Bob Gierse’s girlfriend, Diane Horton; Bob Hinson’s girlfriend, Aleene Marcum; and Jim Barker’s girlfriend, Wava Winslow. Someone in the group, the detectives believed, should have an idea of who would want to commit such a crime, or maybe would know of someone who had made a threat.