Slaughter on North Lasalle (3 page)

“We were at the house six months earlier on the John Terhorst investigation,” said Popcheff. “They were having a cookout and saw us coming. Gierse told everyone that he would do the talking, which he did.”

As the investigation into the triple murder progressed and became more complex, McAtee would later add Detective Sergeants Pat Stark and Bob Tirmenstein to the investigative team. Stark, middle-aged and totally bald, was a veteran homicide detective who eventually became the National Fraternal Order of Police president from 1975 to 1979. Tirmenstein, also older and a veteran detective, would work his way up to the rank of captain and was in charge of the Special Investigations Branch before succumbing to cancer in the 1990s.

After McAtee, Popcheff, and Strode had heard from Officer Williams concerning what he’d found inside the house, they realized this wouldn’t be a pretty case, but likely an easily solvable one. Anyone who would kill three men so brutally obviously had a terrible grudge against them. That kind of rage typically couldn’t be suppressed or hidden for long. And so, with just a little investigation,
they figured, they ought to be able to locate this person and close the case. The killer, they assumed, would have to have made his anger known to someone. With this thought in mind, McAtee and his team mounted the front steps of 1318 North LaSalle and got ready for their initial walk-through of the crime scene.

“Oh my God!” were the first words uttered by most of those who visited the crime scene on North LaSalle Street. The
Indianapolis
Star
would call them “the most vicious crimes ever committed in Indianapolis.”

Throughout their careers, Lieutenant Joe McAtee and his team of homicide investigators had been to the scene of hundreds of homicides—but none of them had ever seen anything like this. Although there had been many murders in Indianapolis in the years before, no one could recall a case even close to as brutal as this one. Everywhere one of the detectives turned in the house, it seemed, there lay a body, its head yanked back at an unnatural angle, blood settling around the head in huge coagulated puddles.

“The scene was the worst I’d ever seen because of the way they killed them,” said Popcheff. “They cut their
necks all the way through. Another cut and their heads would have come off. That bothered me for quite a while, thinking about it.”

While the detectives would have liked to have started their investigation with a pristine crime scene, that didn’t happen. Because the crime had been so unusual and so gruesome, other officers, mostly high-ranking ones, had wanted to see what had happened—so despite protocol, these other officers had wandered through the house and looked around before the homicide detectives could get there and take control of the scene.

“Jim Strode and I were meticulous about securing the crime scene,” said Popcheff. “But when we got there we found there’d already been people in the house before us, and that really disappointed us.”

They were especially disappointed because later in their search the detectives would find that they had to be extremely careful where they stepped or what they brushed against. Surfaces everywhere had blood spattered on them. There was blood on the floors, on the walls, on the furniture, on the curtains, on the fixtures, and on the clothing that lay scattered all around the house. The detectives doubted that those in the house before them had been that careful. They could only imagine how much evidence had been trampled on, brushed against, or displaced. But there was nothing they could do about it by then. It was too late.

At any homicide scene, the homicide investigators’ first step—as it was even in 1971—is to conduct a very careful initial walk-through to evaluate the scene, attempt
to develop a working theory about what happened, and mark any evidence that the crime lab needs to process and collect. These walk-throughs aren’t intended to solve the crime, though that does occasionally happen. Rather, they’re simply meant to acquaint the detectives with what they have and what they will need to properly process the crime scene and, unless they have already received reliable information about what happened, to allow them to develop a working, tentative theory about what occurred. This theory must be very flexible, however, so that it can be changed if necessary with each new discovery of evidence. A more solid theory about what happened won’t come until after all of the evidence has been collected and preliminary interviews conducted.

The detectives began their initial walk-through on North LaSalle Street in the living room, and they could see right away that the home had all the markings of a bachelor pad. No woman, they knew, would have decorated a house like this. The room was unorganized; the furniture was all mismatched. As they looked around, the detectives saw a plaid padded chair with clothing lying draped across a worn ottoman sitting in front of it, a flowery wingback, and two couches that didn’t match anything else. On a beat-up and scarred coffee table sat a collection of empty Stroh’s beer bottles, while under the table rested several empty pizza boxes. Shoes and clothing lay scattered all around the living room. But notably, the messy living room didn’t show any signs of a struggle: no overturned or broken furniture.

The living room also had two televisions—a color
console television and a smaller portable one sitting on top of it (the console would later be reported to be stolen). Between the front door and the plaid chair sat a large roll of Owens Corning fiberglass insulation with a newspaper resting on top of it, looking like a makeshift end table. Friends would tell the police that Gierse had had plans to install it soon, though it had been sitting there for a while.

During the initial look at the room, the detectives found both Gierse’s and Hinson’s wallets. Gierse’s lay on the floor and Hinson’s on the coffee table. The detectives would also later find a watch belonging to Gierse stuffed down into the cushions of a couch. Was this just an accidental drop, they wondered, or had he put it there to keep it from being taken? The possibility of robbery as a motive suddenly found its way into the working theory. On the floor in front of one of the couches the detectives spied a set of keys. They also noticed a tape recorder in the living room. It had a tape in it, so the detectives marked it to be taken as evidence. Although the detectives knew it was unlikely, it might contain evidence of the crime.

As they continued their initial walk-through of the house, Popcheff and Strode discovered a drop of blood on the floor in a dining area that sat between the living room and the kitchen, showing that the killer had likely passed this way afterward, possibly to leave by the back door. They marked the blood for processing by the crime lab technicians. The detectives also found a potential clue
in the dining area, a cigar in an ashtray, a clue that they never released to the public. (It is common practice to keep a few details from public knowledge, to help separate true culprits from those who, for various reasons, falsely confess.)

“There was a big ashtray in the dining room that had a cigar butt in it,” said Popcheff. “Someone had laid a cigar in the ashtray and none of the three guys smoked cigars.”

The detectives, after passing through the small dining area, stepped into the kitchen, where they saw that the counter held numerous liquor bottles and a box that had once contained a thirty-two-piece glass tumbler set. The ironing board and iron were still set up as if someone had just used them. The trash can sat filled with empty beer containers and whiskey bottles. It didn’t take much of a detective to figure out that either the people who lived here liked to entertain a lot or were some really heavy drinkers. The police would later discover that both were true.

Walking over to the back door, which led out of the kitchen and onto the back porch, the detectives found that the door sat slightly ajar, but hadn’t been forced. The working theory now included the murderer or murderers possibly entering and likely leaving this way. As a part of their investigation, the detectives would later examine all of the windows in the house, and although several of them were unlocked, the dust patterns around them hadn’t been disturbed, indicating that no one had
entered or exited through them. A much more thorough search of the house, including the full attic and half basement, showed no signs of a forced entry anywhere. The detectives now added another question to be answered about the murders: How did the front and rear doors get unlocked? This wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where people would have left their doors unlocked at night.

McAtee and his crew left the kitchen, passed back through the dining area, and then walked through a door that led to a hallway that ran along the north side of the house. The hallway, they found, ran from a bedroom on the east to another on the west, with a bathroom between them. The sheared-copper smell of blood was so bad on the north side of the house that it made the detectives’ eyes water. When the detectives reached the bedroom at the northeast corner of the house, they looked in to see Robert Hinson lying facedown on the bed, his arms and legs bound with a piece of torn cloth, later found to be part of a bedsheet, a gag made of the same material tied across his mouth. Hinson, the detectives could see, wore blue-and-gray-checked slacks and a blue shirt. But more important to the detectives was the tan imitation suede jacket he wore, indicating to them that he had just come in from the outside when attacked. Blood from his severe throat wound soaked the sheets and quilt he lay on.

As their gaze moved around the room, the detectives spied a set of blood-spattered clothes draped across a chair next to Hinson’s feet. But then they also noticed that two drawers of a dresser next to the chair stood
open, again bringing up the possibility of robbery as a motive.

The detectives, upon closer inspection of the room, found that the dresser, along with the blue window curtains, had been spattered with blood. They also found blood on the floor next to the dresser and on the east and south walls. Also on the floor, they discovered, lay a pillow with a large glob of blood on it. The victim, they figured, had apparently put up a struggle before being killed. While the science of blood spatter analysis wouldn’t be fully developed until years later, the detectives could tell that the violence in this room had been tremendous.

“Whoever killed Hinson pulled his head up and sliced his throat so violently that the blood sprayed off the blade and onto the wall,” said Popcheff.

“We’ve got a nasty one; this is really messy,” one of the detectives would tell reporters.

As the detectives left the room, they stepped carefully when they saw drops of blood leading out of the bedroom and down the hallway, possibly having dripped off of the murder weapon. As they approached the next room, a bathroom, they spied an important piece of evidence in the hallway: a shoe or boot print on the tile floor. Someone, they could see, had stepped in the blood and left a mark. The pattern, a diamond design, appeared to the detectives to have likely come from a boot or overshoe. The detectives immediately marked the print for processing by the crime lab. This would be a key piece of evidence that could tie someone to the crime scene.

While most people might think that a murderer would immediately get rid of the shoes or boots worn at the scene of the crime, this doesn’t happen as often as might be expected. Sometimes the murderer doesn’t realize that he stepped in the blood, sometimes he’s just lazy, but quite often the murderer won’t get rid of the evidence because he doesn’t want to have to buy new boots or shoes. Many murders over the years have been solved with evidence like this, so the detectives felt good about finding it.

Inside the bathroom, the detectives found another man, later identified as James Barker, lying on his back, also bound hand and foot. Unlike the man in the front bedroom, however, Barker’s hands had been bound with a piece of cord, possibly taken from a venetian blind. Like the man in the front bedroom, Barker’s feet were tied together with cloth, but in this case the killer had used a man’s shirt with a French cuff to secure his legs. The detectives found another piece of torn cloth, also likely from a bedsheet, around Barker’s neck. They believed that it had been used as a gag, but was now loose, again suggesting a struggle. These men, the detectives realized, hadn’t meekly submitted to being killed, but had clearly fought back, making the absence of overturned or broken furniture even more puzzling.

Barker wore brown slacks and a green shirt, but he also wore his jacket, a tan Windbreaker, as if, like Hinson, he’d been attacked just as he came in from outside. It would later be found that the killer had wiped the
knife or other cutting instrument on Barker’s jacket. Barker’s left pants pocket appeared to have been pulled out, once more raising the possibility of robbery as a motive for the murders. Barker’s head lay next to a cast-iron freestanding bathtub that someone had decorated with three eagle decals, his feet sticking out of the door into the hallway. Similar to Hinson, Barker had apparently died from a severe slashing to his throat.

The bathroom floor had a red and pink shag carpet that had now soaked up the blood from the gaping wounds to Barker’s throat. Also, the detectives noticed, blood had been spattered onto a cabinet, the toilet, the bathtub, and the green and white tile walls. All of this blood, everywhere, again showed the detectives that these men had fought back pretty strenuously, even if unsuccessfully. Upon inspecting the room, the detectives found a half-empty blood-spattered pack of Salem cigarettes next to the toilet and a Zayre’s department store paper cup next to Barker’s head. A checkbook belonging to Barker lay on the floor next to the victim’s right leg. The detectives wondered if it had been dropped by the murderer or had fallen out of Barker’s pocket during the struggle.

In the final bedroom, at the northwest corner of the house, the detectives found the body of Robert Gierse lying faceup on a bed covered with a blood-soaked yellow sheet. The room, with its walls painted blue, looked typical of a single man. Clothes had been strewn onto a chair just inside the door, and some also lay on the floor.
On the dresser sat a doll wearing a party hat, along with an empty can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.