Post by Joanna on Dec 7, 2013 16:04:32 GMT -5
1971 LaSalle Street murders a mystery
The crime: All you have to say to anyone who has lived in the Indianapolis area for a while is: the LaSalle Street murders. They'll know what you're talking about.
Details might have faded from memories since three businessmen were discovered murdered 42 years ago – on Dec. 1, 1971, in a house at 1318 N. LaSalle St. But the horror – and the decades-long mystery – of the case virtually ensures it will remain as one of the area's most notorious cases with more twists and turns than a fiction writer could make up.
No one has ever been prosecuted. It's unlikely anyone ever will be. There are at least two theories of who committed – or commissioned – the slayings. All the known suspects are dead. But were there accomplices who are still alive? No one has an incontrovertible answer.
The three men killed at the house were Indianapolis businessmen Robert Hinson, 30; James C. Barker (pictured above), 27; and Robert Gierse, 34. Their hands and feet were bound. Their throats had been slit.
Each body was found in a different room in the house – Hinson in a front bedroom, Gierse in a back bedroom and Barker in the bathroom in between those two rooms.
The victims, key characters and the twists and turns: Gierse and Hinson were friends who had quit their previous jobs, for Jasper businessman Ted Uland, to start their own microfilming business. The two allegedly had taken with them some of Uland's clients, equipment and money. Uland also had taken out $150,000 life insurance policies on the men, and he became the prime suspect of the initial investigators, including Indianapolis Police Detective James M. Strode.
Former Indianapolis Police Department Capt. Robert Snow, who was in charge of the homicide unit in the late 1990s before retiring, published in 2012 his book Slaughter on North LaSalle. In the book, he concludes Strode and his colleagues were correct from the beginning: Uland hired someone to kill the men, and he collected on the life insurance.
However, in the immediate days, weeks and months after the slayings, detectives had no idea who Uland may have hired. The businessman himself had a rock-solid alibi, placing him in southern Indiana. In addition, all three of the men who were killed had been involved in activities that could have linked them to unsavory and angry men who might have wanted them dead.
When those leads went nowhere, another theory developed: The men were killed because one of them was involved with the ex-wife of Carroll Horton.
Diane Horton, identified then as a "friend" of victim Griese, was pictured sobbing in the arms of a neighbor outside the LaSalle Street house in The Star's coverage of the murders.
In the mid-1990s, a freelance journalist, Carol Schultz, launched her own investigation. She befriended Carroll Horton but worked with Police Detective Jon W. Layton to make a case against Horton.
In March 1996, Horton, then 70, was indicted and spent about a month in jail. Layton acknowledged, in court, that he had instructed Schultz to tell Horton that his fingerprints had been found at the murder scene, knowing that was not true. And Schultz testified that she had been investigating the murders since 1992, had negotiated a book and movie contract, and had been offered up to $1 million for the story. Her book, The LaSalle Street Murders, points to Horton.
After a hearing while Horton was jailed, a judge took the unusual set of granting bond for a murder suspect. She also castigated the police for bungling the investigation, Schultz for interfering and undermining it and the prosecutor's officer for presenting a weak case. Charges against Horton and his co-defendant, Floyd Michael Chastain, were dropped. Chastain, who acknowledged wanting to get out of a prison sentence in Florida, had testified that former President Richard Nixon plotted the murders, which were carried out by vanished labor leader Jimmy Hoffa.
Superior Court Judge Paula E. Lopossa called Chastain's story "incredible."
She also criticized Schultz, who led police to Horton.
"The court finds that the investigation was compromised by the meddling of Carol Schultz, who is a very biased former investigative reporter," Lopossa said.
Where does the case stand? Each camp believes in its scenario, but the case still sometimes is debated – even by current homicide detectives.
In 2001, police received a letter written by Fred Harbison, who had worked for Uland and who had died a few years earlier, leaving the letter in a safe deposit box. It apparently went unopened for a few years, but when it was, it was given to police.
Snow, initially skeptical that the confession letter could be verified or corroborated, said he believes now-retired Indianapolis Police Detective Steve West managed to accomplish exactly that.
In the letter, Snow said, Harbison said Uland had hired him to kill the men but never paid him for the job. Harbison couldn't very well go to police or sue for his money, and he was afraid of Uland, Snow said.
But how did West corroborate Harbison's claims in the letter left behind in the safe-deposit box.
Snow says he has the answer.
"Read my book," he said. "I can't give it all away."
Source: Cathy Knapp, The Indianapolis Star, December 4, 2013.