Slaughter on North Lasalle (4 page)

Upon examining the area of the bed around the body, the detectives could see a blood pattern suggesting that the murderer had wiped the blade off on the sheet. The sheet also appeared to have been slashed in several places.

“They cut Gierse’s throat so fast and so hard that whoever did it also cut the sheet after it [the blade] went through his neck,” said Popcheff. “Then they went to the end of the bed to wipe off the knife and cut the sheet. That’s how sharp the blade was.”

Gierse lay with his hands under his back, and when he was eventually turned over, the detectives found that his hands had been bound with cord similar to that used on Barker. His feet had been tied together by more pieces of a torn bedsheet. Unlike the other two victims, Gierse didn’t have his jacket on, but wore a dark pink shirt and gray slacks, suggesting to the detectives that he had been inside the house for at least several minutes before the murderer attacked him. (The detectives would later find Gierse’s coat hung up in the hall closet.) A gag, also made of a piece of torn cloth, covered Gierse’s mouth, while a huge amount of blood had flowed onto the bed from the gaping wound to his throat. In his shirt pocket the detectives discovered a silver ring, while on the floor the detectives found a T-shirt and three rags covered with blood. The murderer, the detectives suspected, had possibly used these to clean up something. Interestingly, it appeared that an item had been taken off of the nightstand
in Gierse’s bedroom. The detectives knew they needed to find out what it was.

The homicide team’s initial examination of the murder scene indicated to them that the three men had almost certainly died from huge blood loss due to the cuts on their throats, which would eventually be found to be so deep that the men’s spines had all been sliced. Later investigation would show that, after being bound, the three men had likely been grabbed and held by the hair, their necks stretched taut, as their throats were cut. The police would also later find that Hinson had broken the bonds on his hands, apparently in an unsuccessful attempt to fight off his attacker.

Despite the initial speculation that robbery might have played a part, a cursory look around the house on North LaSalle Street showed the detectives that robbery didn’t appear to be the motive for the murders after all. There were no signs of forced entry anywhere. Nothing of value in the house appeared to have been taken or disturbed, and the men’s wallets still contained money. Nor could the detectives find any signs of a struggle in the house; no overturned or broken furniture, as there surely would have been for a home-invasion type of robbery. No, the motive very likely lay elsewhere.

The detectives could clearly see that the method of killing the three men had been especially bloody and gruesome. Was this, they wondered, supposed to be some sort of sign or warning? If so, to whom? Regardless, the means of killing indicated that the murderer had harbored
an intense anger against the three men. Had the victims heard the others being butchered, knowing that they would be next? That could explain the signs of frantic struggling against their bindings. In addition, the detectives wondered why the men had allowed themselves to be tied up in the first place. Had they thought the murderer only meant to rob them and discovered too late that they had been wrong?

Rigor mortis had set in on all of the bodies by the time the police did their initial walk-through. This meant that the murders had occurred at least twelve hours earlier. So although the bodies were discovered on the afternoon of December 1, the date of death Deputy Coroner Dr. H. S. Esparza would later list for the men was November 30, 1971. (However, this date would have the notation “approx” after it.)

Despite how variables such as air temperature, heavy clothing, body weight, and so forth can affect the timing, under normal conditions a dead body becomes fully rigid from rigor mortis about twelve hours after death, then stays that way for twenty-four to thirty-six hours before the stiffness disappears. So, while not precise to the minute, rigor mortis can be useful in helping homicide detectives establish an approximate time of death (which can then be used in conjunction with other evidence to give a more exact time).

For example, the detective’s later refined theory about time of death was that, since Gierse and Hinson still wore the same clothing witnesses had seen them in the
day before, the two men had likely been killed as they came home from work late the previous evening. Their secretary, Louise Cole, told police that Gierse and Hinson had intended to work until at least 7:30 or 8:00
P.M.
, but they may have decided to stay later.

The detectives believed that Gierse, since he had hung his coat up in the hall closet, had likely arrived home before Hinson, who may have stopped somewhere first. Barker, they believed, arrived last. The positions of the men’s cars parked in front of the house supported this theory. Gierse and Hinson had parked their cars on the east side of North LaSalle Street facing north, as they would have done if they were just returning home from their office on East 10th Street. Gierse’s car was parked first with Hinson’s car behind him. Barker had parked his car on the west side of North LaSalle Street facing south, meaning that he had likely come from the direction of his home on North Rural Street. The detectives believed that the men had been confronted one after another as they arrived at the house, bound in different rooms, and then murdered.

Once the initial walk-through had been completed, crime lab technicians began processing the crime scene, paying particular attention to the objects the detectives had marked. One of their first tasks was to collect samples of blood from all of the rooms. As the homicide detectives knew, often when the murder weapon is a knife or other sharp object, a killer may cut himself while stabbing and slashing, and leave some of his own blood
at the scene. Although DNA analysis wasn’t yet available in 1971, blood typing and other markers in the blood could still help point to a suspect.

Additionally, most murders are committed impulsively, by amateur killers, not professional hit men. Consequently, a murderer who perhaps had not originally planned on killing anyone will often flee the scene immediately afterward, leaving fingerprints behind. And even if they do think to wipe off some objects, impulsive killers can seldom remember everything they’ve touched. Also, in 1971 there were not any television programs such as
CSI
to educate the public about the evidence police technicians can obtain from a crime scene. Far fewer laymen back then knew anything about the process of forensics.

The homicide investigators had the crime lab dust for fingerprints on dozens of objects in the house on North LaSalle, including a large number of beer bottles. Technicians found and recovered fingerprints from an ashtray, inside the front door glass, on several of the empty Stroh’s beer bottles, on a scotch bottle found in the kitchen, on three drinking glasses sitting in the living room, on the doors and door moldings of the bedrooms and bathroom, on a telephone in one of the bedrooms, on a Stroh’s eight-pack container, and on a Michelob beer bottle. The technicians also recovered fingerprints from each of the men’s cars parked in front of the house, which the detectives had them check in case one of the victims had possibly brought the murderer home with him, not knowing his intention.

There was one fingerprint recovered in particular that detectives thought, like the footprint in the hallway, could give them a solid lead. “We had a really good fingerprint that we thought might belong to the killer,” said Popcheff. “But our fingerprint man carried it around with him rather than keeping it in the file, and when he died the fingerprint disappeared.”

This wasn’t as odd as it might seem; the fingerprint technician kept the print on him so that he could compare it against every new fingerprint that came in. But, of course, this was not a secure way to store fingerprints. Fortunately, all of the other unidentified fingerprints from the case had been stored in the file, so no others were lost.

Along with the problem of the lost fingerprint, another problem concerning the fingerprints loomed. Even though the technicians had recovered many fingerprints, in precomputer 1971 the recovery of fingerprints at a crime scene held little value unless the detectives had a known suspect whose prints they could compare them against. If fingerprints arose in an investigation that didn’t match any of those of the known suspects, they simply went into the file. In those days, there was simply no practical way to compare an unknown fingerprint against the millions of fingerprints already on file. Still, fingerprints were recovered and kept, to be compared against those of any future suspects that might be developed in the case.

Many years later, the police department did run all of the unidentified fingerprints from the North LaSalle
Street murders through its Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), a piece of technology not available until the mid-1980s. AFIS is a complex computer system that digitizes fingerprints and then stores this digitized information in its memory. When a fingerprint taken from a crime scene is entered into AFIS, the computer digitizes the evidentiary fingerprint and then compares it with the millions of fingerprints in its memory. It takes only minutes to compare them, whereas in the past, manually comparing these fingerprints would have taken years.

AFIS’s popularity rose dramatically when in 1985 the Los Angeles Police Department used one of the country’s first AFIS systems to identify a fingerprint taken from a stolen car. The fingerprint belonged to the infamous Night Stalker, a criminal deviant who had killed over a dozen people and raped countless women in a yearlong crime spree. The AFIS system showed that the fingerprint belonged to a man named Richard Ramirez, and the police were able to apprehend Ramirez soon after.

The FBI, in order to assist local police departments in nationwide identification, maintains a link among all of the police AFIS computers across the United States. Consequently, a person arrested and fingerprinted in Indianapolis could match a fingerprint recovered from a crime in Seattle. However, regardless of this system’s potential, there was ultimately no match in AFIS for the unidentified fingerprints from North LaSalle Street.

This crime scene, because it had three separate murder locations, took much longer than most ordinary homicide
scenes to process. Each body had to be examined for evidence, as did the area surrounding the bodies. The detectives and crime lab personnel were at the house for hours. During their search of the crime scene, the homicide detectives found an address book containing the usual collection of names, addresses, and telephone numbers; but this one also listed dozens of women’s first names. This would turn out to be the scorecard of the three men’s sex contest. The detectives took the address book along as evidence, figuring it as important, but not yet knowing just how big a part it would eventually play in the investigation.

While the homicide detectives were at the house conducting their walk-through, they received telephone calls from several people who had heard the news and simply couldn’t believe it was true—including, ironically, a call from an insurance agent who was in the process of writing life insurance policies for Gierse and Hinson. Also, the news of this killing apparently soon reached beyond Indianapolis. The following day, Paula Palmer, Jim Barker’s ex-wife, who lived in Chicago, called the Homicide Office. Although Palmer and Jim had been out with the other two victims many times while they were married, she couldn’t provide the detectives with much information regarding a potential motive or pinpoint any specific person who might want to murder the three men.

Quite often, as the detectives knew, a motive for a murder can be found in the lifestyle of murder victims. The places they visited, the acquaintances they made,
and the activities they became involved in could often help homicide detectives determine why they were murdered and likely by whom. And so homicide investigators often research the victims and their lifestyles, looking for clues as to who would want to murder them. In this case, the police would eventually find that
plenty
of people wanted to murder these three men.

Robert Gierse, six feet two inches tall and 215 pounds, was the oldest of the three victims at thirty-four. Friends would later tell the police that when Gierse got his first job in the microfilm business, he found that he loved the field and never left it. Originally from St. Louis, Gierse had come to Indianapolis by way of Chicago, where he’d been employed by the Bell and Howell Company. When he arrived in Indianapolis in 1967 he and Hinson had roomed together in New Augusta, then a northwest-side suburb of Indianapolis. He initially got a job with Commercial Microfilm Services, Inc., and worked there for a year or so before moving on to the Records Security Corporation, where he quickly became executive vice president and general manager, making $225 a week, a decent salary in the late 1960s. Those in the microfilming business saw Gierse as a rising star, and at every place he worked his bosses described him as knowledgeable and extremely hardworking.

A month or so before his murder, Gierse had left Records Security Corporation to start his own business with Bob Hinson: B&B Microfilming Service Company.
Detectives would later find that when Gierse left his job at Records Security Corporation, he took several of his previous employer’s best customers with him to B&B.

Like Barker, Gierse was divorced. He had served in the army from 1955 to 1962. Friends reported that he had a photographic memory and was a very smooth and convincing speaker, which helped him in his near-constant womanizing. Acquaintances also said that he could really hold his liquor, and that, even though a diabetic, he and his two friends, Hinson and Barker, drank a lot.

Robert Hinson, twenty-seven years old, was also six feet two inches tall (though forty pounds heavier than Gierse), and originally hailed from Wilson, North Carolina. He had proven numerous times to be very good with his fists, which he’d had to use often, given the many scraps the three men got themselves into as they prowled low-class bars and flirted with other men’s girlfriends and wives. Hinson had worked with Gierse at Bell and Howell in Chicago before also coming to Indianapolis and working for Commercial Microfilm Services. But then, like Gierse, he had ended up at Records Security Corporation, which he left in September 1971, a couple of months before Gierse, to start up B&B Microfilming Service Company.