Slaughter on North Lasalle (2 page)

On the last Friday of November 1971, Hinson had gotten into a fistfight with the boyfriend of a go-go dancer at the Hi Neighbor Tavern on West 10th Street in Indianapolis, the scuffle breaking out after Hinson had
reportedly patted the dancer on her buttocks. Hinson, at six feet two and weighing 255 pounds, knew how to use his fists and had pummeled the boyfriend.

Other than on Friday nights, however, there was a steady stream of young women in and out of the North LaSalle Street house throughout all of 1971, and also in and out of Barker’s house on North Rural Street, several blocks west. Neighbors would later tell the police that the women came and went at all hours, and seldom was it the same women. A young lady who began dating Hinson near the first of November 1971, later interviewed by the police, said that she never saw Barker or Gierse with the same woman twice. She also said they almost always had a drink in their hand. Hinson reportedly told the young lady when they started dating, “Don’t get involved. This is all for fun.” And, she found, he meant it.

This contest among the three men, however, also had a serious side—throughout 1971, there began to be a number of ugly scenes at both North LaSalle and Barker’s house involving angry, jilted women. This would include yelling and screaming, and also cars squealing their tires as they left. A friend of the three men recounted a visit to the house on North LaSalle Street during the last of November 1971—upon stepping inside, he found two very angry young women making a loud scene in the living room, while in the bathroom a third, seminude, woman scrubbed Gierse’s back as he sat in the tub, apparently oblivious to what was going on in the other room.

None of this, though, slowed the three men in their
desire to beat the other two. Throughout the year, each man had put forth his best effort in order to be the winner.

On December 1, 1971, however, the contest ended abruptly, with no winner.

A business acquaintance and friend of Gierse and Hinson, twenty-nine-year-old John Karnes—who would later become an Indianapolis police officer—called the offices of B&B Microfilming Service on the morning of December 1, 1971, and asked for Gierse or Hinson. He needed to talk to them about a business matter. The secretary at B&B, Louise Cole, told Karnes that the two men had mentioned to her as she was leaving the previous afternoon that they planned to work very late that night, and so they hadn’t come in yet. They were likely, she said, sleeping in. Karnes said she was probably right. He knew how hard Gierse and Hinson were working to make their new company a success. He told Cole he would try again later.

But when Karnes checked back in later that afternoon, Mrs. Cole said she still hadn’t heard from either man and that she was becoming a bit concerned. While she knew well how both men loved to party, she also knew that Gierse and Hinson were extremely hardworking and dedicated to their new company. This just wasn’t like them. Karnes reassured her that they were probably fine, and then told her that he would drive by the North LaSalle Street address and check on them.

Karnes arrived in the 1300 block of North LaSalle Street at about 2:15
P.M.
on Wednesday, December 1, 1971. He found both Bob Hinson’s black Oldsmobile 442 and Bob Gierse’s blue Cadillac Coupe de Ville parked on the street in front of their house. This wasn’t unusual, as they always parked on the street since they kept their garage packed with files waiting to be microfilmed. But strangely, Karnes also noticed, Jim Barker’s blue Mustang sat there, too. That
was
unusual. Barker should have been at work.

Karnes parked his own car and then walked around to the rear of the house to see if perhaps the men were working on some files in the unattached garage. That could explain why they hadn’t answered the telephone. Maybe Barker had taken the day off to help them; Karnes knew that Gierse and Hinson had been trying to get Barker to quit Bell and Howell and come join them in their new company.

It was a chilly December day, with the temperature in the midthirties. There had been some light freezing drizzle and snow flurries earlier, but Karnes knew that the weather wouldn’t stop the men from working in the garage. Very little would stop them.

However, when he didn’t see anything in the backyard other than two lawn chairs and a red charcoal grill, and no one in the garage, Karnes walked back around front and up onto the porch of the house. A low electric charge raced through his stomach when he saw the morning newspaper still on the porch and found mail in the mailbox. Something wasn’t right. No matter how
hard they partied or worked, he’d never known his friends to sleep in this late.

“Bob?” Karnes called, pulling open the screen door and knocking. “Bob, are you there?” When no one answered, he tried the front door and found it unlocked. That worried him because the people in the neighborhood didn’t leave their doors unlocked. Now even more anxious, he called out again before finally pushing open the front door of the quiet, darkened house, the odor of stale beer instantly assailing his nostrils. “Is anyone here?”

When Karnes stepped into the living room and saw the twenty or so empty Stroh’s beer bottles scattered around, and spied a coat hanging on one of the dining room chairs, he felt a cool wave of relief wash over him. He’d been silly to worry about them. The men were simply sleeping off a hard night of drinking after all. Shaking his head at himself, he walked through the living room full of mismatched furniture and started to enter the short hallway, still calling out for the men, his footsteps seeming abnormally loud on the worn gray-and-black-spotted white tile. As he reached the corner of the hallway, though, Karnes stopped and looked down at something odd. There appeared to be a footprint on the hallway floor in what looked like blood. He knew it couldn’t be that but wondered what might have made it. After looking at the reddish brown impression for a moment, Karnes continued on, trying to imagine where it could have come from.

A few steps into the hallway, though, he stopped suddenly,
as if attached to a short tether. Karnes could see a pair of feet on the floor sticking out of the bathroom, a trail behind them of what he now admitted to himself was definitely blood. It looked to him as though someone bleeding pretty seriously had been dragged across the floor. After a second of confusion, Karnes crept over and peeked into the bathroom.

Karnes felt as if he had been suddenly transported into an especially gruesome horror movie. What he was seeing couldn’t be real. He would later say of his discovery, “I couldn’t believe what I saw. I couldn’t believe it. It just wasn’t human—I still can’t believe it.”

Lying faceup on the red and pink shag rug, hands and ankles bound, was the body of James Barker. A huge pool of blood, from what appeared to be gaping cuts across his throat, circled his head. Spatters of more blood, looking like some grotesque modern art exhibit, covered the toilet, sink, bathtub, and nearby walls.

Horror etched on his face, Karnes quickly backed away from the bathroom and then stumbled down the hallway. In the back bedroom at the northwest corner of the house he found another grotesque sight: Robert Gierse, lying faceup on the bed, also bound at the hands and ankles, and also with a slit throat that had gushed blood all over his dark pink shirt and onto the bed around him. As in the bathroom, large spatters of blood covered the walls, while a dark red pool of congealed blood surrounded Gierse’s head. Gierse, he could see, wore a gag made of what appeared to be torn cloth.

His stomach lurching, Karnes turned and again stumbled
back down the hallway, trying to get away from the gruesome sights. But when Karnes looked into the bedroom at the northeast corner of the house, at the other end of the hallway, the nightmare continued. Although he had already seen similar sights twice, seeing it a third time didn’t make it any less horrific. Sprawled facedown on the bed, pieces of a torn cloth binding his hands behind him and his ankles together, lay Robert Hinson. Karnes gulped for air as he stared at the splatters of blood on the pink walls and then looked unbelieving at the huge pool of congealed blood that surrounded Hinson’s face and had soaked his blue shirt and suede jacket.

The brutality of what he had found seemed unbelievable, and at first, Karnes didn’t know what to do. He had no life experiences to show him how to deal with this. Nothing in his life thus far had prepared him for this kind of situation. He only wanted to get away, to escape from the horror he had stumbled into, and so finally he turned and simply ran. But when he reached the front door, Karnes stopped. He knew he needed to call the police. They would know what to do. With numb, fumbling fingers, he turned around and picked up the house telephone, calling the Indianapolis Police Department.

Yet, when Karnes, in a frightened, stammering voice, told the police dispatcher what he had found in the house on North LaSalle Street, the dispatcher initially didn’t believe him. Even though in 1971 Indianapolis had a population of nearly three quarters of a million people, it didn’t have crime like this. Nothing so horrible and brutal had ever happened there. Indianapolis had had
plenty of murders over the years, but nothing as gruesome as this. Crime like that only happened in other cities. Karnes, the dispatcher thought, was probably just a crank caller. For a moment, the dispatcher considered simply disregarding his call. However, realizing what would happen if he was wrong, and thinking better of it, the dispatcher decided to be safe. He contacted Indianapolis police officer Michael Williams, who patrolled the area around North LaSalle Street, and told him to Signal Three (call the dispatcher by telephone). When Officer Williams did, the dispatcher told him what the caller had claimed. Even though the dispatcher said it was likely just a crank call, he asked Officer Williams to drive by and check out the situation.

A few minutes later, Officer Williams pulled his blue and white police car up to 1318 North LaSalle Street. He saw Karnes standing on the porch. Karnes was waving frantically and shouting, “In here! In here!” Officer Williams began to suspect that perhaps the dispatcher was wrong, that maybe something bad had happened after all.

Less than a minute later, Officer Williams raced out of the house and back to his patrol car. Gasping for breath, Williams shouted into his radio microphone, “Send me Car Eighty-three! Send me Identification! Send me a coroner! Send me a superior officer! We’ve got a triple murder!”

Officer Larry Summers was nearby and would answer the call. Because it was his assigned beat, he would make the original Teletype report on the triple murder, which would be designated 786420-D.

As is common with incidents of a particularly gruesome or spectacular nature, the police began to arrive in droves, crowding the street with their patrol cars. Nothing like this had ever happened in Indianapolis before, and they all wanted to see it. Firemen at a nearby firehouse, hearing the call and thinking that perhaps the officer could be wrong and that someone who needed medical help might still be alive inside the house, rushed over in their fire engine.

News reporters also picked up the call and hurried to the scene, cameras and notebooks in hand. Following them were crowds of curious people who began collecting in front of the house, having heard about the incident over their police scanners or on the local radio and television news. Others came, too: individuals who knew or had worked with the three men, such as their secretary, Louise Cole, and Diane Horton, who was dating Gierse at the time. As might be expected from all of this, a circuslike atmosphere soon enveloped the neighborhood.

Deputy Chief of Investigations Ralph Lumpkin, who also came to the scene, couldn’t believe what he saw when he looked around inside the house. He immediately called and ordered police department technicians to bring out the video equipment to record the murder scene. Video recording was brand-new technology in 1971, and this incident became the first murder scene ever videotaped by the Indianapolis Police Department.

Taking charge of the crime scene, Chief Lumpkin quickly assigned Detective Lieutenant Joseph McAtee to head up the homicide team that would investigate the
murders. He knew this incident would gather lots of media attention, and he wanted the best people possible to investigate this case. McAtee, a tall, thin man whose features seemed to be all sharp angles, was a top detective who always surrounded himself with competent, dedicated, and hardworking people—a quality that would eventually carry him up through the ranks of the police department to the chief of police’s job, then on to becoming the sheriff of Marion County. McAtee selected Detective Sergeants Michael Popcheff and James Strode to work with him on the North LaSalle Street case.

Popcheff, young, athletic, with dark hair, liked to play golf and dress well. But he was also known as an excellent and hardworking investigator. Strode, a redhead a bit older than Popcheff, took homicide investigation as seriously as any man in the police department. He was known to throw himself totally into cases. Both men, McAtee knew, were tough, experienced investigators he could depend on.

Strangely enough, when Popcheff and Strode arrived at the scene, they remembered having been to the house on North LaSalle Street on a murder case before. Six months earlier, they had come to see if Gierse and Hinson had any information about the murder of a salesman who had provided microfilm and equipment to them. The twenty-five-year-old salesman, John Terhorst, had been shot twice in the head at close range in March 1971, and then dumped into Eagle Creek on the northwest side of Indianapolis. Terhorst had worked for E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company out of Chicago, and had first
met the three murdered men when they were living and working in Chicago. On the day of his murder, Terhorst told a close acquaintance that he was headed to the Woodruff Place neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis to see a man named Bobby, who was interested in buying his 1966 black Corvette. Although the police found Terhorst’s body, they never found his Corvette. As of December 1, 1971, the Terhorst case was still unsolved.