The Lost and the Found

continued

Road Kills

By any standard, the Highway Murders case was an investigators nightmare. A brutal killer roamed at will across the American Midwest, targeting male prostitutes and hitchhikers, hacking them to death and discarding their mutilated bodies in rural locales, sometimes buried in clusters with weird ritual trappings. At least ten victims were killed before members of various law enforcement agencies realized their separate cases involved a single predator. Even then, years of suspicion and police harassment in the gay community prevented witnesses and traumatized survivors of the crime spree from communicating with authorities.

The Highway Murders spanned four states and 14 counties, from southeastern Wisconsin to north-central Kentucky. At its worst, the case highlighted breakdowns in communication at the city, county, state and federal levels, while the slayer--or slayers--was free to hunt from Chicagos mean streets and the gay bars of Indianapolis to small farming communities. Even after a task force was formed and a prime suspect was identified, the murders continued--13 more, in fact, to haunt police as they pursued their man.

Knowing a killer and confining him are sometimes very different things, as illustrated in this case by careless, bungled searches and interrogations, leading to judicial suppression of critical evidence, freeing the murderer to kill again. Even surveillance failed, as rivalry between police departments and inept communication left the slayer free to travel widely, often unobserved. For a time, it seemed as if the stalker was unstoppable--until his own clumsy arrogance landed him back in court and ultimately sent him to death row.

But even then, the Highway Murders case had more surprises left in store. The slayer caged was thought to work with an accomplice--a respected academic from a leading Indiana university--and he agreed to testify against the man he claimed was both the mastermind and gloating witness to his vicious crimes. That trial and its surprise result added another twist to one of Americas most convoluted serial murder cases and left the conclusion in doubt--perhaps forever.


Pattern Crimes

Nineteen-year-old Steven Crockett was the first known victim of the Highway Killer, stabbed to death and discarded in a cornfield outside Kankakee, Illinois, 40 miles south of Chicago and fifteen miles east of the Indiana state line. Discovery of his mutilated corpse on October 23, 1982 raised no alarms outside the immediate area of Kankakee County.

Number two, although unrecognized as such for nearly seven months, was 25-year-old John R. Johnson. He vanished from Chicagos grubby Uptown district, a neighborhood of rootless drifters and transplanted Appalachian hillbillies, one week to the day after Steve Crocketts body was found. Missing for two months, he was found near Lowell, Indiana--some 35 miles northeast of where Crockett was found--on Christmas Day.

Police in Illinois and Indiana had no reason to suspect the two crimes were related, and since the FBIs National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime would not begin computerizing records of unsolved murders until June 1984, there was no handy method to check on similar crimes in different states. The Highway Killer was a busy predator, however, and he would soon provide authorities with evidence of his existence.

Sadly, they chose to ignore it.

Two more mutilated bodies were found by Indiana police on December 28, 1982. The days first victim, 23-year-old Steven Agan, had left his mothers home in Terre Haute to catch a movie with the boys and never returned. Found in a wooded area near Newport, in Vermillion County, Agan had been slashed across the throat and stabbed repeatedly about the abdomen, leaving him disemboweled. Relatives called to identify the body insisted that the white tube socks found on his feet in death were not a part of Agans wardrobe.

Victim number two for December 28 was John Roach, a 21-year-old Indianapolis resident, stabbed to death in a maniacal frenzy before his body was dumped along Interstate Highway 70 in Putnam County, thirty-odd miles southwest of his home. Again, the connection in two separate cases--drawn from separate jurisdictions, forty miles apart and separated from each other by Parke County--might have been missed, except for a quirk of fate.

Since neither Vermillion nor Putnam Counties had their own forensic pathologists, both victims were sent to Bloomington Hospital, for examination by Dr. John Pless. The crimes, while not identical, were similar enough that Dr. Pless was moved to suspect a serial killer at large. Before days end, Pless reported his suspicions to the Indiana State Police--who in turn dismissed him as an alarmist.

The killers next victim may have been 22-year-old David Block, a recent Yale graduate who vanished on December 30, 1982, while visiting his parents in Chicagos affluent Highland Park suburb. Blocks new Volkswagen was recovered from the Tri-State Tollway near Deerfield, north of Chicago, and while he remained missing, authorities noted that Deerfield lies in Lake County, Illinois--sixty miles north of Lake County, Indiana and the scene of John Johnsons death. By the time Blocks skeletal remains were found near Zionsville, Illinois on May 7, 1984, advanced decomposition and exposure to the elements ruled out definitive pronouncement on the cause of death.

Members of the Chicago and Indianapolis gay communities already recognized what police were loath to admit: that a serial killer of gays was at large and trolling for victims across the Midwest. The crimes revived ugly memories of John Wayne Gacy--then on death row at Menard, Illinois--but Gacy had concealed his victims, while the Highway Killer seemed to flaunt his crimes. By January 1983, a gay newspaper in Indianapolis had established a hot line for tips on the case and profiled the killer as a self-loathing homosexual who killed his one-night partners to refute unwelcome desires. Local police, for their part, still refused to link the crimes and had no luck prospecting for leads in the citys gay bars, where their appearance was regarded as a threat and violation.

The next verified Highway victim was 27-year-old Edgar Underkofler, found stabbed to death outside Danville, Illinois on March 4, 1983. As in Steven Agans case, the killer had removed Underkoflers shoes and stockings, replacing them with white tube socks the victim never owned.

Jay Reynolds was the sixth to die, the 26-year-old proprietor of an ice cream shop in Lexington, Kentucky. Reynolds left home to close his business on the night of March 21 and never returned. His mutilated corpse was found the next day, discarded along U.S. Highway 25 in rural Fayette County, south of town.

Aprils first victim--and number seven on the Highway Killers confirmed hit parade--was 28-year-old Gustavo Herrera, found by construction workers in Lake County, Illinois, near the Wisconsin border. A resident of Chicagos Uptown district, Herrera was a father of two, but he also frequented local gay bars. Aside from multiple stab wounds, his killer had cut off Herreras right hand and removed it from the scene where he was found on April 8, 1983.

Another victim surfaced in Lake County one week later, on April 15. The youngest killed to date, he was 16-year-old Ervin Gibson, found outside Lake Forest. Gibsons body had been crudely camouflaged with leaves, and he was found stretched out beside the lifeless body of a dog. Detectives noted that both victims had been dumped near exit ramps for Interstate Highway 94.

The slayers first black victim, 18-year-old Jimmy T. Roberts, was found in Cook County, Illinois, near the Indiana border, on May 9, 1983. A Chicago native, Roberts had been stabbed more than thirty times, after which the killer pulled his pants down and rolled his body into a creek. The water had removed any signs of sexual assault, but a sadistic motive was clear, as in the eight previous crimes.

The case changed forever when another victim was discovered on May 9, 1983. Discovered in a field beside Indiana State Road 39, in Henderson County, 21-year-old Daniel McNeive was a sometime street hustler from Indianapolis. He had been stabbed 27 times, one of the abdominal gashes leaving his entrails exposed. Because Henderson County had no forensic pathologist, the corpse was sent to Bloomington Hospital--and Dr. John Pless once again saw marks of a familiar hand at work. Disturbed, Pless reached out for the state police a second time.

This time, they listened to him and believed.


The Suspect

Six days after McNeives corpse was discovered--on May 15, 1983--members of several Indiana law enforcement agencies gathered to discuss the Highway Murders. Meeting in Indianapolis, they organized a task force, formally christened the Central Indiana Multi-Agency Investigative Team. Lieutenant Jerry Campbell, from the Indianapolis Police Department, was assigned to lead the team, assisted by Sergeant Frank Love from the state police.

A month later, on June 14, fifty officers from eight jurisdictions gathered to review a score of unsolved murders, all involving young men or teenage boys who were stabbed or strangled to death, their bodies dumped along highways throughout the state.

By the time of that second meeting, the task force already had a prime suspect on tap. June 6 brought a phone call from Indianapolis, naming 31-year-old Larry Eyler as the Highway Killer. The caller had no direct evidence of murder, but alluded to an incident from August 1978, when Eyler had attacked hitchhiker Mark Henry at Terre Haute.

Eyler had given Henry a ride on August 3, then drew a butcher knife when Henry rejected his sexual overtures, swerving onto a dark side street where he forced Henry into the bed of his pickup truck, stripped and handcuffed his victim, then bound Henrys ankles and began stroking his body with the knife. Terrified, Henry broke free and hobbled from the truck, Eyler pursuing him and stabbing Henry once, with force enough to puncture a lung. Henry played dead, whereupon Eyler sped from the scene. Left alone, Henry had staggered to a nearby trailer court and roused a tenant there who drove him to the hospital.

Eyler, meanwhile, had also stopped nearby, choosing a house at random to confess his crime and surrender a handcuff key. Police found him waiting in his pickup and arrested him, confiscating a sword, three knives, a whip, and a canister of tear gas. Bond was initially set at $50,000, reduced to $10,000 on August 4 by a sympathetic judge, whereupon one of Eylers friends posted $1,000 as surety for his release.

Charged with attempted murder, Eyler beat the rap on August 23, after his lawyer gave Henry a check for $2,500 and Henry declined to press charges. Judge Harold Bitzegaio had dismissed the case on November 13, 1978, after charging Eyler another $43 in court costs.

The Henry stabbing was not Eylers only contact with police. Three years after that incident, in 1981, he was arrested for drugging a 14-year-old boy and dumping him unconscious in the woods near Greencastle, Indiana. That victim had also survived, his parents dropping charges when he left the hospital with no lasting damage.

Larry Eyler seemed to lead a charmed life, but he came from humble beginnings. The youngest of four children, born at Crawfordsville, Indiana in December 1952, he saw his parents divorce when he was still a toddler. Dropping out of high school in his senior year, Eyler later earned his GED and dabbled at college, attending sporadically from 1974 through 1978, finally quitting without a degree. He favored military T-shirts and fatigues, but never served in uniform. Of late, he lived in Terre Haute with Robert David Little, a professor of library science at Indiana State University. Eyler worked part-time at a Greencastle liquor store and frequently drove to Chicago on business unknown.

By July 1983, task force members were focused on Eyler as their only suspect in the Highway Murders case. FBI profilers were less certain, noting evidence of separate killers in at least two of the homicides. Indiana officers concentrated on Eyler, since they had no other prospects. He was shadowed daily, photographed as he traveled to and from work, followed to various bars after dark. No murders were committed while Eyler remained under surveillance, but skeletal remains of an eleventh victim--this one unidentified--were found in Ford County, Illinois on July 2, 1983. Investigators dutifully added the corpse to their list.

On August 27 police trailed Eyler to an Indianapolis gay bar, watching as he left a short time late, with another man. Eyler drove his one-night stand to a Greencastle motel, where they rented a room. The move broke Eylers pattern, which favored open-air sex in the bed of his pickup--complete with a plastic-wrapped mattress--and officers feared they might miss a homicide in progress while they idled outside the motel. Finally, one of them crept up to the room and peered through the window, jogging back to report no evidence of any violent crime.

Manhunters didnt know it yet, but they had mounted their last stakeout on the man whom they believed to be the Highway Killer.


The Break

Near midnight on August 30, 1983, 28-year-old Ralph Calise left the apartment he shared with a girlfriend in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, near Uptown. Calise liked to party and often disappeared overnight, but he never returned from this excursion. A tree-trimming crew found his mutilated corpse on August 31, in Lake Forest, near the sites were Gustavo Herrera and Ervin Gibson were murdered in April 1983.

Calises slaying seemed to fit the Highway Killers pattern. Found naked to the waist, his pants pulled down, the victim had been stabbed seventeen times with a long-bladed knife, virtually disemboweled. Marks on his wrists suggested he was handcuffed prior to death. Tire tracks and footprints at the scene offered police their first real traces of the killer who had claimed at least a dozen lives.

Background investigation on Calise revealed a troubled life. He had dropped out of college in his first semester, compiling a record of arrests for drug possession, arson, and episodes of violence. Police recommended psychiatric treatment, but Calise had no money for counseling and a stint with the Salvation Army failed to turn his life around. Known to friends and family as a heavy drinker and drug user, Calise was living on welfare when he met his killer in August.

A review of the Illinois cases to date told police that four Highway Killer victims-- Crockett, Johnson, Herrera and Calise--had lived in or near the Uptown neighborhood before they were murdered and dumped in outlying districts. More to the point, Herrera and Calise had once lived only two doors apart, on North Kenmore Street. Around the time these revelations broke--on September 3, 1983--Illinois detectives also learned for the first time of Indianas ongoing investigation into four similar cases.

The interstate connection grew more plausible when Chicago officers heard about Craig Townsend, taken from the Uptown neighborhood on October 12, 1982, by a man who drove across the state line, drugged and beat him, then dumped him semi-conscious near Lowell, Indiana. Transported to Crown Point for treatment, Townsend fled the hospital without describing his attacker to police. He was missing in September 1983, but authorities had his mug shot on file, taken after an arrest for drug possession.

On September 8, 1983, investigators from Waukegan and Indianapolis converged on Crown Point, Indiana, for a conference on the Highway Murders. FBI agents were invited to attend the gathering, providing a psychological profile of the slayer from the bureaus Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia. That profile described the killer as a macho man who affected military garb and patronized redneck bars in a bid to deny his own sexuality. Murder after sex was the ultimate denial, certain corpses covered with leaves or loose dirt to negate the final act.

Indiana detectives agreed that the profile seemed to fit Larry Eyler in all respects, from his Marine Corps caps and T-shirts to his drinking and high-speed night drives in his pickup. Informed of Eylers frequent visits to Chicago, Illinois police gave their Indiana counterparts photographs of tire tracks and footprints from the Calise murder scene, for future comparison against Eylers pickup and boots. They also agreed to keep watch on Eyler if he surfaced in Chicago.

Before the month was over, Indiana state police would have their chance to stop the Highway Killer--but the opportunity would find them grossly unprepared.