Slaughter on North Lasalle (12 page)

On December 28, 1971, Lieutenant Joe McAtee had a meeting with Earl Timmons, an investigator for the New York Life Insurance Company, the company that
had written the $150,000 key man life insurance policies on Gierse and Hinson. Timmons told McAtee that he was delaying his final report about whether New York Life should pay or not until after Uland had undergone his lie detector test, which had originally been scheduled for December 22, 1971.

However, on that date, before the scheduled test, Uland and his attorney held a four-and-a-half-hour meeting with the prosecutor in order to discuss stipulations regarding the lie detector test. The attorney had tried to cover every possible aspect of the test that might negatively affect his client, including what questions could and could not be asked. When they finally arrived at the test site, Uland’s attorney refused to allow his client to sign a Miranda rights warning because he said it would conflict with the stipulations they and the prosecutor had agreed upon. Uland and his attorney then began a lengthy discussion with the detectives about the test, covering much of the same area they had already gone over with the prosecutor. By the time everything had been concluded and agreed upon, however, the test operator felt that due to possible fatigue it would be better to reschedule the lie detector test, which they did, for January 7, 1972.

Since Ted Uland had not yet taken a lie detector test, the detectives still considered him a viable suspect. However, when one of the detectives traveled to Princeton, Indiana, and spoke with Uland’s secretary at Cherokee Drilling, she provided Uland with an alibi for the night
of the murders. She confirmed that Uland had called Gierse long-distance from Princeton at around 9:00
P.M.
Several other people additionally confirmed Uland’s presence in southern Indiana on the night of November 30. Although the detectives couldn’t rule out the possibility of Uland having hired someone to commit the murders for him, they had no proof or evidence of this.

Although frustrated by the lack of evidence and the continuously growing number of suspects, the detectives could not seem to stop discovering new names to add to the list. Upon interviewing one of Bob Hinson’s former girlfriends, she told the detectives that the three victims had bought a lot of liquor from a bootlegger that a friend had introduced them to. However, a few months before the murders the bootlegger had stopped selling liquor to the three victims. She said the bootlegger had been arrested and that he was angry because he thought the three men might have been the ones who turned him in to the police.

On December 28, 1971, Detective Sergeant Pat Stark and a new detective to the case, Jerry Campbell, traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to see if they could obtain any more background information on the three victims. Bob Gierse was from St. Louis, and the detectives had heard that he and the other two men would occasionally visit there. In addition, the detectives also wanted to check out rumors that the three men had been arrested the month before, in November 1971, while in St. Louis.

Upon investigation, the detectives discovered that indeed Jim Barker and Bob Hinson had been arrested in
St. Louis on November 21, 1971, for “Aiding and Abetting a Prostitute.” Apparently, a nice young lady whom Barker and Hinson had shown interest in had turned out not to be such a nice young lady after all. Also, the detectives found, Barker and Hinson had been robbed by a Mordial Bailey Jr. during the same incident. Detectives Stark and Campbell were able, however, to rule Bailey out as a suspect in the murders because, ironically enough, they confirmed that on December 1, 1971, he was already in custody in St. Louis for an unrelated homicide. They also verified that he had been in St. Louis the night before. While at the St. Louis Police Department, the detectives checked seven persons of interest in the North LaSalle Street case for criminal records there, looking for any unknown connections that could help develop a motive for the murders. None of these individuals, however, had any police record in the St. Louis area.

The detectives next visited some of the nightspots the three victims would frequent while in St. Louis, figuring that if these men had liked to bully and intimidate people in Indianapolis, they’d probably liked to do it in St. Louis, too. Stark and Campbell went to the Boot Heel Club and the Pipeline Tavern, where employees recognized Jim Barker’s photograph but couldn’t give the detectives any useful information. Nor did the detectives have much luck at the Huckle Bee Club, the Magnolia Inn, the Olive Living Room, the Aeor Space Lounge, the Spacecraft, or the Hee Haw Club.

Detectives Stark and Campbell, a bit discouraged,
then went to speak with Gierse’s sister, Dorothy Erbs, who worked at St. Joseph Hospital in Kirkwood, Missouri. She said that the last time she’d seen her brother was three months earlier, in September 1971, when he came to St. Louis to show her the new Cadillac he had bought. Erbs said that he’d brought Ilene Combest with him on the trip and told the detectives that she and her husband had jokingly referred to Combest as Gierse’s “illegal wife,” since she always seemed to accompany Gierse whenever he came to St. Louis. Erbs, however, wasn’t able to add any new information to the investigation. She didn’t know of anyone who would want to murder the men.

Following this, the detectives attempted to find Bob Gierse’s ex-wife but could only locate her sister. The former sister-in-law said that the last time she had seen the victims was about six months ago in St. Louis, and that her husband had told her that Hinson was in some kind of trouble, but she didn’t know what kind. The detectives knew this coincided with reports that Bob Hinson had seemed depressed and worried in the weeks before his murder. Was this connected, even though six months ago? It seemed a clue worth following up on. However, for some reason the detectives apparently didn’t follow up with the sister-in-law’s husband to see if he knew what kind of trouble Hinson had been in.

While in St. Louis the detectives also spoke with Bob Gierse’s brother Ted, who told the detectives that the day after the murders a go-go dancer named Janice Smith,
who had dated his brother, had called a friend of his and told him that the murders had been business connected and that she was afraid for her life. This was a bit of information the detectives felt needed further investigation.

Other than the news about the go-go dancer, though, the detectives returned from St. Louis with very little new information. Almost a month had passed now since the murders, and while the detectives assigned to the investigation had once thought that the case would be solved and closed by the end of the year, that didn’t look like much of a possibility any longer.

An interesting development, however, did occur just before the year’s end. Lieutenant McAtee reported on December 29, 1971, that a wallet belonging to Robert Hinson, which contained credit cards and identification, had been found in a yard on the west side of Indianapolis. Unfortunately, though, while this initially seemed like it could be a break in the case, the detectives soon discovered that the wallet had been stolen from Hinson some months before the murders while he lay passed out in the backseat of a car at an all-night restaurant.

The year 1971 was just about over, and most of the detectives hadn’t had a day off in the month since the murders. They had worked through the Christmas holiday, and it looked as though they were going to work through New Year’s also. It was unbelievably frustrating. The detectives knew only too well that the reason they couldn’t solve this case was because they simply didn’t have the physical evidence or witness testimony that
could break one suspect away from the rest. They hadn’t been able to connect the bloody footprint or the cigar to any suspect. But a break had to come soon, they knew—a surprise eyewitness, someone who heard something, or an unknown piece of physical evidence—for if it didn’t, it appeared this case might never be solved.

New Year’s Day 1972 had come and gone. Most of the homicide detectives assigned to the North LaSalle Street case had worked through the holiday, but the leads they followed kept running dry. The original detectives had now worked forty-five days straight without a day off. They had taken recorded statements from 150 people and had interviewed 600 others, including 36 in St. Louis, 30 in Chicago, and 180 of the victims’ business associates and customers.

In a January 1972 article in the
Indianapolis Star
, Deputy Chief Ralph Lumpkin said that while the police were still looking at the murders as being a crime of passion, they were also now looking at a business/social motive. In actuality, however, the detectives were stumped.

Also in early January 1972, the detectives had a crime lab technician remove the sink trap from the bathroom
on North LaSalle Street and analyze its contents. The detectives knew they needed physical evidence desperately. There was the possibility that the murderer or murderers might have used the sink to clean up afterward since they had likely gotten blood on them, but also, the detectives hoped, they might have washed out a wound of their own. Nothing of significance, though, came of this.

“I wish we’d had DNA in those days,” Popcheff would say years after the murder investigation. “It sure would have made it a lot easier.” Had the murders occurred today, the detective assigned to the case would have had a DNA sample taken from the cigar butt found in the dining room and then run this sample through the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the FBI’s national link of state DNA banks. If the person who had committed the murders had been arrested for a felony anywhere in the United States, and consequently a DNA sample taken, a match would come up and an arrest would be made. But unfortunately, 1971 was decades before such technology existed, let alone was linked by databases nationwide.

By mid-January 1972, the news media had finally lost interest in the case. While for several weeks following the crime there had been front-page articles or breaking newscasts every day about the murders, the coverage had finally dried up. After the initial rush of news stories, a case with no progress and no arrests didn’t stir much interest. The news media eventually turned to other topics of importance in the early 1970s.

But worst of all, as far as the investigators were concerned, even though the case had initially looked like it wouldn’t be that hard to solve, and even though police officials had announced several times that a solution and arrests were imminent, the detectives knew that they weren’t any closer to solving the case than they had been on the day it occurred. The three men, with their stolen equipment and customers, their shady business dealings, their rowdy sex lives, and their enjoyment of embarrassing and pushing people around, had dozens of people who might have wanted to see them dead. But what had really stumped the detectives and stalled the investigation was the lack of substantial hard evidence, which left many questions unanswered.

“It seemed like we just couldn’t get our hands on anything in this case,” said Popcheff. “For example, something was missing from Gierse’s nightstand, but we never could find out what it was. Another question we had was: who went out the back door and left it open? We couldn’t find out. We just couldn’t get the upper hand on this case.”

But regardless, the detectives knew that they couldn’t quit as long as there was any trail at all left to follow. And so, in early January 1972, they went to the Warren hotel in downtown Indianapolis to look for the go-go dancer that Bob’s brother Ted Gierse had mentioned. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, when the detectives arrived, they found that several of the go-go dancers who worked in the bar at the hotel had been acquainted with the three victims. Each one had a theory about what had happened.
None of them, though, were able to give investigators any really new or relevant information about the case.

Eventually, though, the detectives located Geneva Darlene Smith, nicknamed Janice, the go-go dancer who had called Ted Gierse’s friend in St. Louis the day after the murders. She told the detectives that she had dated Bob Gierse for four or five months and then started dating Bob Hinson. Smith said she had never dated Jim Barker, though he
had
tried to get her to go out with him several times. When asked why she had called Ted Gierse’s friend right after the murders, Smith told the detectives that she had called because she and Hinson had double-dated with the friend when he was in Indianapolis and realized that he had known the three victims very well. As to the reason for the killings, she remembered saying that the triple murder had been business related, but couldn’t give the police any concrete evidence for her belief.

As might be imagined, since the day of the murders, tips on the case had come in from all corners. Even if the news media had lost interest in the case, much of the public hadn’t. The murders were still the topic of conversation in many bars and around many watercoolers. Consequently, individuals who thought they had heard something incriminating or had suddenly come up with a clue would call the police. Naturally, any of these tips that had any credibility at all had to be checked out, and that task took up hour after hour of the detectives’ time.
Most of these tips, though, turned out to be a waste of time.

A woman who worked at the White Metal Company in Indianapolis, for example, called in to say that she thought another woman who worked there might have been at the North LaSalle Street house on the night of the murders. As it turned out, when the detectives investigated this tip they found that the woman had based her information solely on the fact that the other woman talked constantly about the murders with other workers.

One of the suspects in the case, Ted Uland, came to a meeting with the prosecutor’s staff before his scheduled lie detector test in January and, after being advised of his Miranda rights, agreed to talk about what he knew of the triple murder. None of the homicide detectives assigned to the North LaSalle Street case were at this meeting, but they did receive a transcript of it later. Uland told the prosecutor’s staff that he had come in because he’d had several reporters calling him, but that he just didn’t feel comfortable talking to them. Also, he said he had come in because he was worried that maybe one of his employees at Records Security Corporation might be blamed for the murders. He didn’t want someone to take a potshot at them.