Slaughter on North Lasalle (7 page)

The two detectives then drove to Jim Barker’s house on North Rural Street to take another look around for any evidence they might have missed. But again, they didn’t find anything of value. Barker’s parents showed up while Popcheff and Strode were there, and after talking with them for a bit, the detectives called the coroner’s office and had the house and its contents released to Barker’s parents. The detectives had already searched the house twice, and since the murders had been committed somewhere else, they couldn’t see any reason to keep the house sealed.

On the way back to police headquarters, Popcheff and Strode stopped off at the home of James and Louise Cole and requested they come back down for some more questioning. The detectives particularly wanted to confront Mr. Cole with the information about his threats to cut the throat of anyone he caught messing with his wife and see how he responded.

When the detectives arrived at police headquarters,
however, they first talked briefly with Barbara Munden, one of Bob Hinson’s former girlfriends who had just been located. She said that she had started dating Hinson about two years earlier, and that she had gotten a divorce six months after that. She and Hinson had broken up two weeks before the murders because she said she had found a new boyfriend, who had since moved in with her. However, Munden also added that her new boyfriend had come home recently to find Hinson in her house. This added at least one more possible suspect—the new boyfriend—to the detectives’ growing list; or maybe two, if the ex-husband had found out about the woman’s affair with Hinson while they were still married.

Following this, Popcheff and Strode then began an in-depth interview with Louise Cole. She said that the last time she saw Gierse and Hinson had been at around 5:30
P.M.
on Tuesday, November 30, 1971. She was leaving for home and they told her that they had some important microfilming to do and would be working late, probably until about 7:30 or 8:00
P.M.
or even later. She then told the detectives that, like two of the murdered men, she had also previously worked for Records Security Corporation. She had gotten that job through Hinson, whom she had met at the Sherman Bar in Indianapolis. When Gierse and Hinson decided to leave Records Security Corporation and start their own business, they persuaded her to come and work for them at B&B Microfilming.

Mrs. Cole also told the detectives about an incident between Gierse and Ted Uland, the owner of Records
Security Corporation. She said that Gierse had a drawer in his house in which he kept all of his canceled checks, and that recently he had opened the drawer and found them missing. She said that Gierse told her he believed Uland, who had a key to the North LaSalle Street house, had come in and stolen the checks. Gierse was upset but didn’t tell her why he thought Uland would want to do this.

In regards to her husband, Louise Cole told the detectives that on the night of the murders he had left home at around 7:40
P.M.
and returned at about 9:30
P.M.
She said she didn’t know where he went but assured them he hadn’t come back bloody. She would have noticed, she insisted—though of course, the detectives knew, he could have simply cleaned up before coming home. When asked if she would be willing to take a lie detector test, Louise agreed readily.

The polygraph, or lie detector, came into use in law enforcement in the 1920s. The device is meant to measure several physiological responses—such as perspiration, blood pressure, and pulse—as a person is asked a series of questions, the theory being that these measures will change when a person lies. Several contemporary studies, however, have since shown lie detectors to be only 80 to 90 percent effective; consequently, most courts won’t allow their use as evidence. However, though much less likely to be used today, back in the early 1970s polygraphs were considered by the police to be much more reliable, and were often used to include or exclude someone as a suspect.

After this interview, the detectives talked to James Cole. They confronted him about his threats to cut the throat of anyone he caught messing with his wife. Cole at first denied knowing what they were talking about and claimed he had been too drunk to remember making this threat at Gierse’s birthday party, but then finally said that, yes, he was a very jealous man and he might have said it. Apparently realizing where this was going, Cole then denied having anything to do with the North LaSalle Street murders, and when asked about the incident at the Knights of Columbus hall, he claimed that he had cut Gierse’s tie off as a joke because the event was supposed to be casual. There had been no threat involved. It had all been in fun.

James Cole said that the last time he saw the three victims had been on November 25, Thanksgiving Day, when Bob Gierse had given the Coles an old Chevrolet he had. James said that on the night of the murders he left home around 7:30
P.M.
and went to the Irvington Play Bowl, where he met up with some people he worked with, then stopped by a grocery store for a few minutes before returning home between 8:30 and 8:45
P.M.
(about an hour earlier than his wife had said). He claimed that he knew what time it was when he got home because he got there in time to watch the television program
Hawaii Five-0
, which came on at 9:00
P.M.
He couldn’t, however, tell the detectives what the show had been about. When asked if he would be willing to take a lie detector test, he said he would, and the detectives—still
listing him as a key suspect—decided to schedule it for as soon as possible.

After the questioning of Hinson’s girlfriend and the Coles, Popcheff and Strode left police headquarters and, to close out the day, stopped by the Sherman Bar, which had been a popular hangout for the murdered men. A number of the people they’d interviewed had mentioned seeing or meeting the three victims there. At the bar, three separate customers told the detectives that they thought the murders might have been committed by a very jealous local thug who hung out at the bar and whose ex-wife had dated one of the victims. Although not married to her any longer, this man still became incensed whenever his ex-wife even talked to another man. The detectives looked into it, and given this man’s reputation and police record, they realized he was certainly another possibility to consider.

The list of possible suspects just seemed to keep getting longer and longer. According to the
Indianapolis News
, the city’s afternoon newspaper, by December 3, 1971, the police said they had three definite suspects they were looking at—but the truth was that they had many more possible suspects, and many, many people of interest yet to be interviewed. They hadn’t even gotten to most of the women listed on the men’s scorecard yet. The investigation seemed to grow more involved and complex with every person they talked to.

On December 4, 1971, the Grinsteiner Funeral Home in Indianapolis held the funerals for James Barker and
Robert Gierse, one right after the other. They held Barker’s at 1:00
P.M.
and Gierse’s at 1:30
P.M.
(On December 5, 1971, Joyner’s Funeral Home in Wilson, North Carolina, held Robert Hinson’s funeral.) The police naturally attended the ceremonies in Indianapolis, both to pay their respects and to see who attended. Through experience, the police knew that a killer will often come to a victim’s funeral because he wants to hear what people are saying about the murder. Interestingly, of the eighty-five people present at the two funerals, officers reported that half of them were young, attractive women. Aside from that note, however, nothing else at the funerals seemed unusual.

Hinson’s family buried him at the Evergreen Memorial Cemetery in Wilson, North Carolina; Gierse’s family buried him at the Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri; and Barker’s family buried him at the Odd Fellows Cemetery in Salem, West Virginia.

After attending the funerals, and as part of their investigation, the detectives then visited a large number of the kind of cheap taverns in Indianapolis that the victims were known to frequent. They hoped to pick up rumors of any threats made against the men or to find out about any other incidents that might lead someone to want to kill them. Alas, ultimately the detectives didn’t learn much from the people at these taverns, but they did hear from several of those close to Bob Hinson that for the
last month or so he had been very moody and depressed, not his usual happy, ready-to-party self. However, these people said, he had refused to talk about what was bothering him. The detectives naturally wondered if the source of Hinson’s unhappiness could have had anything to do with the motive behind the murders. Did he know or suspect that someone intended to kill him?

On December 6, 1971, six days after the murders, detectives interviewed April Lynn Smoot, the woman whom Bob Gierse had sent $50 when she and her husband were stranded in New Orleans. When asked about the day of the murders, she said that she had driven by the office of B&B Microfilming that day and saw Gierse’s and Hinson’s cars parked there but didn’t stop. She also told the detectives that she had talked to Hinson on the telephone the day of the murders at around 4:30
P.M.
It had just been a friendly conversation, and there’d been no hint of anything bad about to happen. When asked about her husband, she shrugged and said that he had left her and she believed he was probably headed back to Louisiana. She told the detectives that her husband, David Lynn, had left town for New Orleans on December 1, 1971—the day the murders were discovered—which seemed very suspicious, since Lynn was reported to the police to be an extremely jealous man who had once allegedly beaten and threatened to kill her and others because he suspected she was involved with Gierse. When asked about her husband’s whereabouts on the night of the murders, she gave Lynn an alibi for the entire night,
saying that on the night of November 30, 1971, they and another couple had spent the evening going to several taverns. She said that she spent the whole night with her husband. However, she later became very upset when the detectives caught her in several lies concerning other events. The detectives, naturally suspicious, asked her if she would be willing to take a lie detector test, and she said she would. Ultimately, the test showed that she was telling the truth about her lack of participation in the crime. However, the test operator said that he had questions about whether or not she believed her husband might be involved.

The detectives then reinterviewed Louise Cole and Diane Horton, two women who had reportedly been sleeping with the victims, and who also had, respectively, a very jealous husband and ex-husband. However, they didn’t get any new information of significance out of either woman. Detective Sergeant Michael Popcheff would later say that Diane Horton seemed to him to have been either a very unobservant or uninterested witness in many of the events the three victims had been involved in. She often traveled with the men when they went somewhere, but when asked by the detectives who the men met, what they discussed, or what the men did, she would always say she didn’t know. She claimed she usually waited in the car, and apparently never asked the men about where they’d been or what they’d done.

Even though the detectives already had a long list of possible suspects, they soon began looking at the possibility
of adding yet another one: Ted Uland. They had received reports that Records Security Corporation was experiencing serious financial difficulties and that this situation was getting only worse because B&B Microfilming had persuaded several important clients of Records Security Corporation to transfer their business to them. The detectives also discovered that Uland had taken out a $100,000 life insurance policy on Gierse and a $50,000 life insurance policy on Hinson, and that these policies were due to expire just a few weeks after the murders. This was a huge sum in 1971, and $150,000 for a company about to go under financially certainly seemed to give Uland the motive necessary for the murders.

However, as suspicious as those life insurance policies might have seemed on the surface, the detectives soon learned that taking out life insurance policies on key executives is a common practice in business. In addition, they found that Gierse had actually been the one to make payments through Records Security Corporation for these policies, and he’d also recently inquired about getting similar policies for himself and Hinson when they started up B&B Microfilming. This didn’t appear to be some secret plot in a murder-for-profit scheme after all.

Nonetheless, the homicide detectives asked the Indiana State Police for any information they had in their files on Uland, who lived in Jasper, Indiana, about 125 miles south-southwest of Indianapolis. The state police reported back that Uland had no criminal record but was
in significant monetary straits: The Cherokee Drilling Company, Uland’s lead company, appeared to be in serious financial difficulty, and Uland was also in the process of being sued by an airplane company, a logging company, and an oil company.

Lieutenant Joe McAtee and his team also followed up on a tip that a man named Charles Blythe, the current general manager for Records Security Corporation, might have some knowledge about the crime. Blythe denied all knowledge of the murders, however, and passed a lie detector test. When asked by the detectives about the relationship between Gierse, Hinson, and Uland, Blythe said that as far as he knew they had all been friends, even after Gierse and Hinson had left to start their own company.

Interestingly, the state police investigator said that when he interviewed Uland’s secretary, an Elizabeth Angle, she told him that she had recently accompanied Uland on a visit to the North LaSalle Street house. However, she also told him that she was “scared to death” to be working for Uland, and that she was terrified “they” would get her if they realized how much she knew about Uland and the microfilming company in Indianapolis. She added that Uland’s employees in the drilling business were the meanest, toughest people around. Yet she either didn’t have or wouldn’t share any information with the investigator about what would make anyone want to kill her, or who specifically she was afraid of. Ultimately, while the detectives found Miss Angle’s information interesting, they dismissed her interview, figuring
her comments about the danger she was in had more to do with her watching too much television and seeing too many movies than any real threats.