Slaughter on North Lasalle (6 page)

However, despite the detective’s hopes, these individuals provided mostly only background information on the three men. Still, from these interviews the detectives
did manage to compile a long list of other people who needed to be interviewed. For example, one of the interviewees told the detectives about a former girlfriend of Gierse’s named Ilene Combest, who had supposedly gone to the house on North LaSalle Street, extremely upset at having been two-timed by Gierse, and had ended up making a scene and breaking the glass in the front door. Would this be enough to make someone want to commit such a brutal triple murder? Probably not, the detectives thought, but still it merited looking into.

During her interview with the detectives, Gierse’s girlfriend Diane Horton added corroboration to the time of death timeline by stating how, on the way home from a girlfriend’s house, she had driven by the North LaSalle Street address at around 1:00
A.M.
on December 1. She had hoped to stop by for a while but said that although she saw all three of the men’s cars there, no lights were on in the house, so instead of stopping she drove on.

Louise Cole, the secretary at B&B Microfilming and a mother of seven children, told the detectives how B&B, even in its very short span of business, had already established an impressive list of customers, a number of whom the company had taken away from Gierse and Hinson’s previous employer, Records Security Corporation. All of the people interviewed said that the three men were inseparable and had gotten along remarkably well. They never seemed to tire of one another or have personal spats. Friends called them the Three Musketeers.

Strangely enough, on Thursday, December 2, 1971,
the day following her interview at police headquarters, Mrs. Cole called the police and told officers that at around 6:00
A.M.
that day she had received a telephone call at her unlisted number. She didn’t recognize the caller, who had asked to speak to her husband. When James Cole got on the line, he said the caller told him that he would be the next one to be murdered.

The Coles’ story might have seemed far-fetched or paranoid, but while the police were at the Cole house taking the report, the couple received several more telephone calls, which one of the police officers monitored. In one of these calls, the caller made threats against Mrs. Cole’s life, and in another the caller made obscene remarks about the Coles’ fourteen-year-old daughter. A further caller told the Coles that the fire department was on the way (the fire department did indeed receive a false request to go there), while another caller threatened to kill both Mrs. Cole and her daughter. What was particularly odd was that the police officer monitoring the telephone said that the calls didn’t seem to be coming from the same person. As might be imagined, these calls upset the Coles very much. They didn’t know who these people were or how so many people had obtained their unlisted telephone number.

Also on December 2, 1971, Detective Sergeants Popcheff and Strode interviewed Ilene Combest, Gierse’s former girlfriend. They found that, in a fit of jealousy over a woman named Brenda Wood, who was supposedly staying with Gierse, Combest had indeed thrown all of
the woman’s clothing out into the yard, and then broke the glass in the front door of the North LaSalle Street house. Combest said that she later felt bad about her behavior because Wood (who had been a secretary for Ted Uland, Gierse’s former boss at Records Security Corporation) was actually a very nice person. Combest told the detectives that she had dated Gierse on and off for five years, and that the last time she’d had contact with him had been on the morning of November 30, 1971, the day he died.

Combest said she’d had a telephone conversation with Gierse at around 11:00
A.M.
that day. Besides being lovers, they had also been friends, and so she asked him how his new business was going. He told her that they were doing great and that he had two garages full of file cabinets waiting to be microfilmed. He also told her that he’d just gotten the Indiana National Bank account, one of the largest banks in Indianapolis, and that he’d recently gotten a couple more accounts that had previously belonged to Records Security Corporation. He felt certain that B&B had a great future, and he was glad that he had left Records Security.

Besides being lovers and friends, Combest had also been a close confidant of Bob Gierse, who had told her about much of his business life. As a consequence, Combest was able to give the detectives some history on Records Security Corporation and its owner Ted Uland. A few years earlier, she said, Uland had had the opportunity to buy a bank vault in Logansport, Indiana, a small town a little over seventy miles north of Indianapolis.
The owner had offered it cheaply and so Uland bought it. But then, she said, he didn’t know what to do with it until a friend told Uland about how the vault would be the perfect place to store microfilm. So Uland started up Records Security Corporation, which both microfilmed documents for companies and offered them secure storage for the microfilm.

At first, Combest told the detectives, Uland had a man named Henry Colchee running Records Security Corporation, but had reportedly fired him for stealing. Uland then hired Bob Gierse to take Colchee’s place, and eventually, at Gierse’s urging, he also hired Hinson. Once Colchee had been fired, Combest added, he was kind of left out in the cold with no job and little future. Wondering if this Colchee could be bitter about being fired and replaced by Gierse, detectives made a note to put him on their list of possible suspects.

When Uland hired Gierse at Records Security Corporation, Combest went on, the company had been experiencing serious financial problems because of unpaid taxes and a lot of misuse of money by Colchee. Uland expected Gierse to straighten it out. Along with microfilming, Uland had business interests in several other areas, his major business being digging oil wells, and so consequently, Uland had let Gierse essentially run Records Security Corporation until he quit to start up B&B Microfilming.

Combest then told the detectives how Hinson had quit Records Security Corporation first, but that Gierse had told her he was going to stay on until he could be
sure that B&B would get several good contracts for microfilming. For a while Hinson ran B&B by himself. Combest said that for a time she had helped by answering the telephones for the business, which had been set up to ring at both the office on East 10th Street and at the house on North LaSalle Street. She said she asked Gierse if he thought that Records Security Corporation was going to be a lot of competition to them at B&B, but that Gierse had laughed and said no, since Uland didn’t have a clue about what he was doing when it came to microfilming. She also later mentioned that Ted Uland and Richard Roller, a friend of the three men, both had keys to the house on North LaSalle Street. Why they did, no one knew.

The detectives, having heard hints and rumors from other individuals about a possible affair, also asked Ilene Combest about Bob Hinson’s relationship with Louise Cole. Combest told the police that yes, she believed Hinson and Cole had been having an affair for several years, but that apparently Louise Cole had had no intention of divorcing her husband, with whom she’d had seven children. This was despite the fact that, according to Combest, James Cole had often threatened to beat his wife. There had even been an incident at a party once, she said, in which James, angry and suspicious as always, had poured a cup of coffee over Louise’s head and made her cry.

When asked about other women the three men had dated, Combest told them about one of Gierse’s girlfriends named Bonnie Russel, who had told several people
at the beauty shop where Combest worked that the murders had been committed by the Mafia. She didn’t say where this information had come from.

Finally, Combest told detectives about how she had heard from another person that Bob Gierse had once sent money to a woman named April Lynn Smoot when she and her husband, David Lynn, were stranded in New Orleans. Smoot had contacted Gierse and asked for his help, so he sent her $50. Smoot’s husband, Combest said the person told her, became very suspicious and jealous, and accused her of having an affair with Gierse. He then reportedly blacked her eyes and threatened to kill all of them if April ever tried to leave him. The detectives made a note to add Mr. Lynn to their list of possible suspects, and, very important, to find out if April Lynn Smoot had recently been involved with Gierse.

Also on December 2, 1971, the detectives interviewed Sue Ross, the office manager at the Bell and Howell plant in Indianapolis, where James Barker had worked as a service manager. She said she had known all of the victims but hadn’t dated any of them. Although the police had already learned about the men’s lothario ways, Ross was the first person to mention the sex contest to the police, and it changed the direction of the investigation. She said Barker had told her about it. Suddenly, the detectives had a new motive and possibly dozens of new suspects. This information also gave new meaning to the list of women’s names the detectives had found in the address book at the North LaSalle Street house.

The detectives knew this also meant they’d need to
find and interview dozens of new individuals in the case; not only the women involved in the sex contest, but potentially also their husbands or boyfriends. Any one of the women could have become angry at being used for the contest, or could have had a husband or boyfriend who found out about the contest and decided to seek revenge. But since the list only contained the first names of the women involved, or in some cases what appeared to be a nickname, the detectives could see hundreds of hours of work ahead trying to find these individuals.

And as if this thunderbolt of information didn’t already add enough new suspects to the case, Ross added yet another to the detective’s ever-growing list. As kind of an afterthought, she related how Barker had told her about an incident he and Bob Gierse had been involved in a couple of weeks earlier: Around the middle of November, Barker and Gierse had gone to a bar on East Washington Street and, while there, had gotten into an argument with a man who had ended up holding a knife to Barker’s throat and telling him and Gierse to get out, which they did. Ross didn’t know what the disagreement had been about, but chances were one of them had flirted with the man’s wife or girlfriend. The detectives made a note to look further into this incident, too.

Another name that came from those initial interviews held on December 1 and 2 was Tim Ford. Detective Sergeants Popcheff and Strode found that Ford, who worked at a SupeRx Drug Store, had become acquainted with both Bob Gierse and Bob Hinson from riding motorcycles
with them. He also independently corroborated Ilene Combest’s belief that Hinson had been intimately involved with Louise Cole for some time. Ford said that he had attended Gierse’s birthday party at the North LaSalle Street house on November 18 of that year, and that Louise and James Cole had also been there. A friend at the party, he said, told him that James Cole had been drinking heavily and was extremely angry and upset, telling the friend that he believed one of the three men was sleeping with his wife. Cole then told the friend that he would cut anyone he caught messing with his wife.

Following this bit of information, Ford recounted for the two detectives an incident that had occurred earlier in the year at a Knights of Columbus hall, in which James Cole had cut off Bob Gierse’s tie with a knife. The detectives made a note to talk to Mr. Cole about these occurrences. He had suddenly moved up on the suspect list, especially when the detectives recalled the incident Bill Anderson, the reporter for the
Indianapolis Star
, had told them about in which two women in the crowd outside the North LaSalle Street house on the day of the murders discussed suspicions that Cole might be the murderer.

After talking to Ford, the detectives, again using information gained from other interviews, traveled to a home on West 26th Street in Indianapolis, where they spoke with a Mac and Laura Harbor, who also reportedly had information about the victims. This couple said that they, like Ford had said earlier, knew Gierse and Hinson
from riding motorcycles with them. They also knew the Coles, and they said James was always suspicious that someone was messing with his wife. Like Ford, the Harbors had been present at the incident in which Cole had sliced off Gierse’s tie.

Though not new, all this information confirmed the seriousness of James Cole as a key suspect. The Harbors said that they had also been at Gierse’s birthday party. At that party, Mac said, he had been talking with James, who had been drunk. He said that James told him he was positive one of the three men was messing with his wife, and that if he could find out which one of the sons of bitches it was, he would cut his throat. Had Cole, the detectives wondered, found out which one he thought was having the affair with his wife? Or had he perhaps just decided to kill all three of them to be certain he got the right one? Popcheff and Strode knew that Cole had some serious explaining to do.

The detectives then drove back to the house on North LaSalle Street, where they met with Bob Gierse’s brother Ted. Because the house had been sealed by the coroner, he needed their permission to go inside. Popcheff and Strode allowed him to go into the house to get a gray suit, white shirt, and pink-striped tie to use for Gierse’s funeral. They also allowed Ted to take Gierse’s Masonic apron from a dresser drawer so that it could be used during the Masonic ceremony at the funeral.

While there, the detectives took another look around the house, just to be absolutely certain they hadn’t
missed anything. Despite the very thorough search they had conducted on the day the murders had been discovered, the detectives knew that sometimes, once the bodies and other evidence had been removed, other items could stand out that hadn’t seemed obvious the day of the initial investigation. Or, based on interviews with witnesses and persons of interest they’d since conducted, an item that hadn’t appeared significant before could suddenly become key evidence. In this case, however, the detectives didn’t find anything new.