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Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And the story I have for you today is the twistiest case you've probably never heard of, but it happened right in my backyard, proving home is where the mysteries are. So buckle up, Crime Junkies. You are in for a wild ride. This is the story of the LaSalle Street Murders.
It's about 2 p.m. on December 1st, 1971, and 29-year-old John Carnes picks up the phone to dial the number of a local business. Again, he's trying to get a hold of the owners of B&B Microfilm Service Company. He's been trying to get a hold of them all day, actually, and he's friends with the two guys that own it, 34-year-old Bob Gearse and 27-year-old Bob Hinson.
But today, he's calling to talk business. Except he can't, because every time he gets through, their secretary, Louise Cole, tells him the same thing. They're not in yet. Nope, still not in yet. John's first thought is that they probably worked late and then very well might be hungover, because he knows the Bobs like to party.
But after a few calls, Louise is more concerned. And listen, you know the saying, like, work hard, play hard. These guys practically invented it. They don't let one interfere with the other. And as far as I can tell, they've never just not shown up for work before, even if they were riding the struggle bus. So in one of his calls to the office, Louise tells John that the whole thing has her feeling really unsettled. And John's a nice guy. He's friendly with Louise, and he doesn't want to just let her worry.
Who says chivalry is dead? So he's like, you know what? I'll just swing by their house and I'll see what's up. Let me put your mind to ease, Louise. Shakespeare in a leisure suit. I have a feeling that these guys like rocked a leisure suit. So John jumps in his car, heads to their house on North LaSalle Street, which is in a neighborhood called the Near East Side. And technically it's Bob G's house. He owns it. But this place is like the ultimate bachelor pad and both Bobs actually live there.
John pulls onto their street and sees their cars parked out front along with the car of one of their other friends, a 27-year-old guy named Jim Barker, which would totally be par for the course if it was later in the day. Jim and the Bobs are super tight. They are practically always together. Jim lives nearby, but he spends most of his free time bro-ing it out with the Bobs at their house on North LaSalle Street if they aren't all out on the prowl at some seedy local haunt.
But, I mean, right now it's like 2.15 in the afternoon. And unlike the Bobs, Jim's got a boss to answer to and he doesn't get hangover days. So he definitely should be at work.
John hops out of his car and walks up to the front door, gives it a few knocks. There's no answer. So he just tries the handle and he realizes that the door is unlocked, which is strange. Like this neighborhood isn't bad per se, but it's also not the kind of place that you just leave your front door unlocked even in 1971. Yeah.
And as far as John knows, they usually don't leave their door unlocked. So even though he can like jiggle it and it's like open, he like keeps knocking. He's like calling out the guy's names. He opens the door just a little bit, calls their names again, but he's still not getting a response.
So finally, he's like, screw it, I'm going in. And according to a 2012 book on this case by Robert L. Snow, who he himself was a 38-year veteran of the Indianapolis Police Department, John feels a little silly when he steps inside because everything looks perfectly normal, down to the 20 or so empty beer bottles littering the living room floor and the empty pizza boxes stacked under the coffee table.
So in his mind, he's like, oh, clearly the guys just had a wild night after all. Louise will be so relieved. But he does got to put eyes on him, right? So he heads toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. But something on the floor catches his eye.
It's this boot print in blood. And it almost registers in his mind like a question. And that was his initial thought because he's trying to talk himself out of what it is he's seeing. And he's like, come on, man, get it together. It's probably mud or something. But then something else a little farther down the hall catches his eye. Something he can't rationalize away.
It's a pair of feet sticking out of the bathroom. A pair of feet lying at the end of a trail of blood. I mean, we're talking lots of blood. Like those feet have been dragged to that spot. By this point, panic is coursing through his body as he makes his way to the bathroom door and peers in. And what he sees is straight out of the grisliest slasher flick. Britt, I'm going to have you read this excerpt from Robert Snow's book describing the scene.
And it only gets worse from there.
John tries to get away from the bathroom in pure terror, I'm sure, and he finds himself at the doorway of one of the bedrooms. So he looks in there.
And go ahead, I'm going to have you read this next part too, because I don't know how else to rephrase stuff like this. It is just, it's too much. In the back bedroom at the northwest corner of the house, he found another grotesque sight, Robert Gears, lying face up on the bed, also bound at the hands and ankles, and also with a slit throat that had gushed blood all over his dark pink shirt and onto the bed around him.
As in the bathroom, large spatters of blood covered the walls, while a dark red pool of congealed blood surrounded Gears' head. Gears, he could see, wore a gag made of what appeared to be torn cloth. John then finds the other Bob in another bedroom. And from the book it says, quote, Sprawled face down on the bed, pieces of torn cloth binding his hands behind him and his ankles together, lay Robert Hinson.
John gulped for air as he stared at the spatters of blood on the pink walls and then looked unbelievingly at the huge pool of congealed blood that surrounded Henson's face and had soaked his blue shirt and suede jacket.
So naturally, John does what anyone would do in that situation. He books it. I mean, I don't know if I would have even made it to the bathroom. I would have seen the blood in the feet and just bolted. Same. And John's almost out the front door, but then it hits him like someone needs to call the police. He needs to call the police. So he changes course and grabs the phone there in the house.
And what he describes to the dispatchers is so wild, so incomprehensible that truthfully, the dispatcher doesn't believe him. I mean, what he's describing is a massacre and massacres don't happen in Indianapolis, Indiana. Clearly, this caller is yanking his chain.
The dispatcher at one point actually thinks about ignoring the call altogether. But then he thinks about the deep that he'd be in, like on the off chance that there actually is a triple murder scene. So he sends over a single patrol officer who's already in the area, Officer Michael Williams, but like warns him that this is all probably just some sick joke. Officer Williams makes his way over to 1318 North LaSalle, I'm sure in no big hurry.
As he pulls up, he sees John waving his hands from the front porch, excitedly, desperately. And when he climbs out of his patrol car, it occurs to him that if this is all a joke, like, no one's told this poor guy. Williams heads inside, and he isn't in there but a minute before he, like John, comes barreling back out. I'm picturing eyes wide and face pale, probably looking like he's seen a ghost.
He races to his patrol car and grabs his radio, hardly even pausing to take a breath, and he yells to whoever is listening, quote, send me car 83, send me identification, send me a coroner, send me a superior officer. We've got a triple murder. And then for good measure, he adds, and send me anything else you can.
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As investigators make their initial walkthrough of the house, the sheer brutality of the scene escapes no one. Even the most seasoned among them are left speechless. Appreciating the gravity of the situation, Deputy Chief of Investigations Ralph Lumpkin quickly makes a couple of key game-time decisions. First, he wants some cutting-edge technology on the scene, ASAP, technology that IPD hasn't even had the chance to ever deploy yet.
Britt, do you want to guess what this cutting-edge technology is? Okay, this is not just the 70s. This is like early 70s, right? 71? 71. Okay, so it's not DNA. I mean, it could be like something super basic, like fingerprints even. Photography? I have no idea. Oh, you're so close. Videography. Oh, my God. This is the first case where IPD has video of a crime scene. Wow. Wow.
Wow. Now, as for who's going to run the investigation, he taps Detective Lieutenant Joe McAtee, who brings on Detective Sergeants Michael Popchef and James Strode to work the case with him. And as soon as Detective Sergeant Popchef and Detective Sergeant Strode hit the scene, they have this weird realization.
They've been here before, at this house, about six months earlier. And it's not your run-of-the-mill noise complaint either. Homicide detectives don't usually respond to those. Right. No, they had been here regarding the death of a 25-year-old microfilm salesman named John Terhorse. What?!
John had been found in this park area about 20 minutes away with two gunshot wounds, and they had wound up at the Bob's place because a panther
apparently he'd done business with them before. And right before he died, he had told someone that he was headed to a neighborhood on the east side of the city to meet up with someone named Bobby who might be interested in buying his black Corvette. Well, I can think of a couple of Bobbies that live in, I don't know, near east side. Right.
So Popchef and Strode went to pay the Bobs a visit back then, and they showed up while they were hosting this cookout. And when detectives mentioned why they were there, Bob G kind of hushed the whole group up, and he said that he would be doing the talking, thank you very much, for all of them. Okay, is Bob G also a lawyer on the side? Because that feels super weird. No, no, he's not. And I think they thought this was weird, too.
But long story short, that investigation didn't go anywhere six months ago. And they didn't know who killed John Terhorst, and they never could find his black Corvette. So the case quickly went cold. But now they're back, back at the same house, under similar, yet at the same time very different circumstances. Is it a weird coincidence? I don't know. Too soon to tell. They haven't even really looked at the scene yet.
But when they do, a number of things stand out. Like for such a violent crime involving three healthy young men, men more than capable of putting up a fight, the house is largely undisturbed. With the exception, obviously, of the rooms off the hallway.
But I mean, there's no overturned furniture or anything like that. Like if you just walked in and looked around, you could never have imagined the horror just feet away. I mean, John didn't know what he was going to find. He just thought it was like the normal setup of their house. Right. Now, they also see that both of the Bob's wallets are just sitting out in plain view, not showing any signs of having been rifled through. They still have cash in them and everything.
And it doesn't look like anything of value was taken from the house either. So probably not a robbery. Probably not. But then they find Bob G's watch stuffed between the couch cushions, and they wonder if maybe he'd shoved it down there to hide it from someone. Now, there are no signs of forced entry. We already know the front door was unlocked, and they soon find that the back door was not just unlocked, but also slightly ajar.
When they check the windows, they see that a few are unsecured, but the thick layer of dust collected on each of the windowsills is undisturbed. I mean, this all feels way too personal to be someone random coming in to rob them. Right, I agree. So the question is, who hates these guys? And that's the right question. And to be honest, they're already thinking this is an easy case to close for exactly that reason. Whoever did this clearly hated at least one, maybe all of these guys.
The kind of hate that poisons your blood and sinks into your bones. The kind of hate most people can't keep to themselves. So they're thinking what you're thinking. Find out who hates these men. Find your killer. Meanwhile, crime lab techs are collecting every last fingerprint they can find, although they won't be able to do much with them until they have a suspect to compare them to, since APHIS is still a far-off thing by that point.
They also take note of that bloody boot print and they make sure to preserve and process that as well. And in collecting all of this, investigators start developing a theory of the attack from like a logistics standpoint.
They think that the men had arrived at the house at slightly different times on the evening of November 30th, one after the other. Partly this conclusion is based on the positions of their cars out front, but also the fact that as William E. Anderson reports for the Indianapolis Star, Bob G. was the only one who had time to remove and hang up his coat. Bob H. and James were still both wearing theirs.
And that would also help explain how they were subdued with such brutal efficiency. Presumably, Bob G. got home first, and he had a moment to settle in before being confronted by a killer or killers who were already laying in wait. And then Bob H. came, and then Jim. Right, so whoever killed them wasn't attacking all three guys at once. He was picking them off one by one. Exactly. Now, chillingly, they think the men were attacked first.
subdued somehow, and then tied up one by one before they were finished off one after the other. And judging from the state of the bindings and the gags, which the men had clearly struggled to break free from, there is a chance they were conscious when they were killed. So that means two of them probably heard the execution of the others. Yeah. Now,
Now, the men's autopsies are performed the next day, and the coroner's findings only underline the brutality of their deaths, as if there could be any doubt. The most notable injuries, obviously, are the massive sharp force wounds to the men's throats, which are so deep that they cut into their spinal cords and honestly came close to decapitating them altogether. Mm-hmm.
Although investigators initially assumed that the men had all died from blood loss, the coroner determines that their cause of death was actually asphyxiation caused by the severing of their windpipes.
Robert Snow explains in his book, Slaughter on North LaSalle, that Bob G had a single clean laceration to his throat more than 10 inches long. Bob H also suffered a single clean laceration seven inches long. But Jim's injuries were actually a little different. He had three separate lacerations to his throat, all of which are described as jagged. And I don't know why this next thing is like such a disturbing visual to me. I mean, I do, but like, you know,
You know what I mean. But Snow writes in his book, quote, the coroner in his examination could see that all three of the men had been gripped by their hair to stretch their necks taut.
before their throats were slit. But while the neck wounds might be the most noticeable injuries, they're not the only injuries. And the others also help explain how the men were subdued in the first place. Because all three had pretty significant blunt force injuries to their head, suggesting that they'd all been hit with a heavy object in a series of blitz attacks. So they were knocked out before they were tied up. Yeah, that's what it looks like. Now,
Now, the coroner also notes that rigor mortis had already set in when the bodies were discovered, suggesting that they had been dead for at least 12 hours when they were discovered, possibly even longer, which gives investigators a bit of a window to work with as they start to try and interview witnesses and alibi people out.
Now, naturally, they start with John, who discovered the men, and Louise, the secretary for B&B Microfilm Service Company. Louise tells them that on the evening of November 30th, the Bobs had planned on working late, probably till 7.30, 8-ish, although they could have stayed even longer. Because work hard, play hard. Exactly. So the men were likely killed between 8 p.m. on the 30th and 2 a.m. on the 1st, give or take, though several sources do differ on this.
Now, that's good to know, but it still leaves a pretty big window. And eight is just the start of it. Like, did they see anyone after that? Did they go anywhere after work? Investigators look into the men's most recent girlfriends, including Bob G's girlfriend, Diane Horton.
Now, Diane didn't see any of the guys that night, but she tried to. She says that she had driven by the house at around 1 a.m. on the first, hoping to pop in and hang out, but she saw that all of the lights were off, so she just kept driving.
So knowing that the guys planned to work till about 8, knowing the lights are off by 1, they still had their coats on when they were attacked, or at least two of them did. It was pointing investigators towards a theory that they were likely killed in the earlier part of that 8 p.m. to 2 a.m. window. But even as they close in on the when, they still have to figure out the who and the why.
And going back to your original question, who hates these men? Well, the simpler answer might have come from asking, who doesn't? Because Snow writes in his book that investigators, quote, "...quickly discovered that these three men, in their short lives, had made an amazing number of enemies."
Investigators start hearing rumors that Louise might have been more than just a secretary, at least to one of the men, Bob H. And as you can imagine, that was very bad news to her husband and the father of her seven children, James T. Cole. And one friend they interviewed tells them about an incident he'd witnessed at Bob G.'s birthday party less than two weeks before the murders.
I guess James and Louise were there at this party. The alcohol was flowing and James was getting pissed.
First, he said that he thought Louise was cheating on him with one of the men, although he didn't know which one. And then he growled that he'd quote unquote cut anyone he found out was involved with his wife. Another party guest had a similar story, namely that James said he was damn sure his wife was sleeping with one of the guys. And if he could figure out which one, he would quote unquote cut his throat, which is pretty...
Yeah. Yeah.
To which the other woman replied, I don't know. He may have. He was mad. JT as in James T. Right. But Louise mostly alibis him and James and Louise both take and pass polygraph tests. But James isn't the only guy with a jealous streak and a bone to pick. Far from it.
Diane Horton's ex-husband, Carol Horton, is also known to be a wildly jealous guy who's more than a little angry about his ex's relationship with Bob G.,
And then there's a guy named David Lynn, who Snow writes, beat up his wife and threatened to kill, quote unquote, all of them after Bob G wired her 50 bucks when she and David got stranded out of town. He basically took that as a sign that they were sleeping together. And this dude had apparently skipped town on the day that the men's bodies were discovered. And then there are a couple of confrontations with strangers that investigators keep hearing about. Confrontations that took place the night before the murders.
Both over, what else, the men's romantic pursuits. One of the fights was with three unnamed guys at a bar called the Idle Hour Tavern.
The other fight, which actually turned physical, was between Bob H. and an unidentified man at the High Neighbor Tavern. I'm sorry, how many guys are fighting over a few women? Oh, that's the thing. We're not just talking about a few women, Britt. So when police had searched the crime scene initially, they had found this weird little address book. But it was a little bit of a mystery.
But it wasn't the numbers or addresses that stood out to them. It was this list that the address book contained of women's first names, 63 first names in total. And that got their attention. At the time, they didn't know what it meant, so they kind of just like filed it away for later. But it didn't take long before they got to the bottom of what it was.
You see, Jim had confessed to his office manager, Sue, that the three of them were in this contest of sorts. I already don't like this. I know. They wanted to know who could sleep with the most women in 1971.
So what they had found, this list, was a trophy list. And according to Sue, the men weren't exactly judicious in their pursuits or even discreet for that matter. So like, singled, married, or otherwise, anyone was fair game. And it was practically sport for them. Now, almost in passing, she also brings up yet another alcohol-fueled altercation in the weeks leading up to the deaths.
This one involving a different likely jealous beau holding a knife to Jim's neck in a fit of rage. As Snow sums it up, quote, The detectives found that the three victims had been in arguments and fights with dozens of people in the bars they prowled on Friday nights. And they'd also been sleeping with dozens of other men's wives and girlfriends.
There were a number of people who felt that the men had done them wrong, end quote. But as the investigation progresses, they start to realize that not all the men's rivalries were necessarily romantic in nature. They do a deep dive into B&B Microfilm Service Company, that business that the Bobs own.
And they're left with almost as many questions as answers. Because despite being a super new operation, I'm talking like a month or so old, they have been bringing in clients like gangbusters, like big clients, banks and insurance companies and the like.
And I know I've kind of referenced what the business is, like, duh, microfilm. But we might as well be talking about, like, the steam engine as far as a lot of crime junkies are probably concerned in today's cloud-based world. But at the time, this was big business, and it could be very lucrative.
And Brett, can you give our young crime junkies a little explainer on microfilm? Sure. I feel super old. Did you know that when I was in high school, I volunteered at our library and worked with microfilm? I did not know that. How did I not know that? I like worked for this tiny little historical section of the library and went through microfilm for like hours and hours and hours. Honestly, that's like that's like you to a T. Like I'm not even. Of course you don't.
So microfilm is basically a document storage technology. According to BMI Imaging Systems, it's a way to make, quote, small, eye-readable images out of original hard copy or digital documents.
And it's really kind of like you said, like the cloud before the cloud. It's all about maximizing physical storage space. BMI explains that a single roll of microfilm can store about as many pages as like a run-of-the-mill banker's box, which do we also need to do an explainer on banker boxes? Oh, we might. No, but I'm not doing it. We'd be here all day. It's like Google people. Yeah.
Oh, my God. Our producer just told us she did have to Google what a banker's box was. Okay. A banker's box. It's a box that holds folders. Yeah. And they're big and you stack them up and you still see them in a lot of departments. It's like the size of a filing cabinet, but that's not helpful either. This is going south. Wow. Okay. I'm going to get back to the story. You can Google what it looks like.
Anyways, investigators consider a number of possible angles concerning B&B. Like maybe these guys had gotten mixed up with loan sharks. Like getting a microfilm company off the ground isn't exactly a cheap endeavor after all. And they're having a hard time figuring out how the Bobs came up with the funds to do it. In the words of Detective Sergeant Popchef, as quoted in Snow's book, these guys were spending money they weren't making. And we couldn't understand where that money was coming from.
They also considered that, like, maybe it was the mob. Like, one investigator tells the Indianapolis News that the deaths might have been a warning from organized crime trying to muscle its way into the industry. When the head of the Indiana State Police's Organized Crime Unit is asked about the possibility, his response is a curt, quote, you can read between the lines. Okay, then. I know. And then there's that unsolved murder that the men were questioned about six months prior.
William E. Anderson suggests a possible connection to that case. So reporting for the Indianapolis Star says, quote, The theory that organized crime had contracts assigned to have the three men killed, their throats were slashed ear to ear, has support among some detectives who believe there also may be a mob tie-in with the unsolved murder last March of Indianapolis salesman John C. Terhorst.
Then they also get in touch with a businessman from Jasper, Indiana, by the name of Ted Uland. Now, Ted owns Record Security Corporation, which is the company that the Bobs actually both worked for prior to opening B&B.
And it seems that this Ted guy is something of a serial entrepreneur. And he had kind of jumped into the, what else, microfilm industry a few years earlier, almost on a lark. He'd originally had this one guy running the thing for him, but the business actually ran into some serious money issues when that guy allegedly started embezzling from the company. So that guy got the boot and Ted hired Bob G to come in and kind of clean things up. And then Bob G eventually brought on Bob H to help.
But bringing them in might have hurt Ted more than it helped. Because whatever financial issues Ted was already having at record security were only exacerbated when the Bobs abruptly left to start B&B and began picking off Ted's biggest ticket clients. And this was all happening just like a month or so before the murders. And that already sucks, but it turns out that a lot of things had been falling apart for Ted.
Snow explains in his book that he'd also had a drilling company that was in financial distress, and he was being sued by everyone from like an airline to an oil company. So investigators naturally do a bit more digging on Ted for good measure, bringing in his secretary, this woman named Elizabeth, who confirms that things are decidedly not all sunshine and roses in the world of Ted Uland. In fact, she tells them that she's, quote, scared to death to work for Ted.
And that she's petrified that they will come after her when they realize how much she knows about the business operations. Who are they? Well, that's the million-dollar question. And so it doesn't take long for investigators to make their own conclusions that even Elizabeth doesn't know who they are or why specifically they might want to target her.
She says that Ted's drilling company employees are known to be a rough bunch, but like that's all like she knows. I mean, that's the extent of it seems like. So investigators are kind of left with the conclusion that Elizabeth is probably more a victim of her own imagination and maybe a few too many Hollywood crime stories than any like real threats to the real world.
Except investigators discover that Ted might have reason to want the men dead. Or rather, reasons. Maybe 150,000 of them dead.
Because it turns out he was the one set to receive a hefty payout as a result of their deaths. Because he, or rather his company, Records Security, is the beneficiary of a couple of life insurance policies on both of the Bobs. Like I said, substantial ones. $100,000 on Bob G and $50,000 on Bob H. I mean, that's a
Chunk of change today, let alone in 1971. I know, I know. And for a company neither of them works for to be the beneficiary? Well, the thing I'll say is that the policies were taken out when they were affiliated with the company.
And Snow explains that as sus as it may seem on the surface, investigators pretty quickly determined that lots of companies take out life insurance policies on their higher ups. Not only that, but the Bobs were well aware that the policies existed. Like Bob G had even been the one making sure the premiums got paid when he was still at record security. And he had also looked into setting up similar policies for himself and Bob H now that they were running B&B.
But what stands out to me is that these policies were set to expire just days after the murders, which is like every reason to still be suspicious AF. But Ted turns out to, I guess, have a rock solid alibi for the night of the murders. And so investigators kind of just lose interest in him.
And this is when they catch wind of a homicide investigation out of Morgan County, Indiana, involving what is described in the Indianapolis Star as a gangland slaying of a convicted burglar by the name of Bobby Lee Atkinson. Specifically, William E. Anderson writes that Bobby Lee's death might somehow be linked to stolen office equipment that had made its way into the possession of B&B.
And the case bore some notable similarities to the John Taylor case.
tear-horsed case, mainly that both had been found shot in or near local bodies of water, and both were suspected of operating in the world of stolen office goods. And their curiosity is only piqued when they realized that Records Security was itself, remember, that's Ted Ulan's company, Records Security was itself burglary targets back in June of 1969 when Bob G. reported the theft of about $5,500 of microfilm equipment.
According to Snow, the investigating officer noticing the inconsistencies in Bob G's story wasn't convinced that things were on the up and up, and he kind of wondered if he might be running an insurance scam.
But what investigators now discover is that, quote, "While much of the equipment at B&B Microfilming had had their serial numbers removed, the items appeared identical to the equipment listed as stolen in the burglary reported by Gearse." Who's Bob G? So what you're saying is it's possible the Bobs were stealing more than just clients from TED and Records Security. Very possible.
But these suspicions don't seem to lead anywhere for the moment. And Anderson writes of yet another theory in that same piece, specifically that there are rumors the men had been involved in the illicit porn trade. This one kind of comes out of left field. And going down this path, investigators can't help but wonder if a couple of recent arrests of the Bobs in St. Louis for soliciting sex work might play into that whole thing.
Which is all of this to say that even as investigators work round the clock to narrow their focus down, the investigation just continues to broaden. It's like every rock they turn over doesn't uncover earth. It uncovers this like mine shaft they have to go down. It just gives you more rocks. Now, by January of 1972, the IPD's file on the LaSalle Street murders is their largest in history.
But they've got little to show for it. In June, Deputy Chief Lumpkin reassigns the case to a couple of new detectives named Jerry Campbell and Daryl Churchill.
And he gives them the direction to basically start from scratch. And this leads the investigation to revisit the possibility that the slayings were maybe just a robbery gone bad after all. But even when they work that theory, it still comes up empty. And in March of 1973, the focus is back on a possible connection with loan sharks or other unscrupulous business associates.
And Thomas Keating reports for the Indianapolis Star that investigators don't fail to notice that of the many, many potential witnesses and suspects who have voluntarily sat for and passed lie detector tests, there has been one stubborn standout. Our old pal, Ted Ulan. And that's not to say they haven't tried.
As Snow explains in his book, they've asked Ted to sit for a polygraph a few different times. And he seemingly agreed. He and his attorney even met with prosecutors way back on December 22nd in 1971. And the plan was for him to be polygraphed that day. But in the pre-test meeting, Ted's attorney, doing what attorneys do, got real hung up on the details of the exam, like what was and was not off-limits.
And over the next four and a half hours, they negotiated a set of stipulations, eventually coming to something close to an agreement. But when Ted and his attorney arrived at the test site later that same day, the attorney had a new objection. Ted couldn't sign a Miranda waiver because doing so would somehow violate the stipulations that they had just hammered out with the prosecutor.
So this led to a repeat of the day's negotiations, only this time with investigators as opposed to prosecutors, until the examiner kind of like threw up his hands and said, like, we should probably just reschedule on account of Ted's likely fatigued state. So they rescheduled the exam for January 7th. But for whatever reason, that day came and went. No polygraph was conducted. And as we know, polygraph or no, the investigation's focus had moved on back then.
So the next three plus years pass without any seeming movement in the case. And by August of 76, Paul Bird reports in the Indianapolis News that investigators have circled back to the theory that the men were killed maybe by some jealous husband or boyfriend or ex. I'm getting whiplash from all these theories over here. I know. But it's like you don't get anywhere with one. So like.
You either do nothing or you go back to another. You spin around and do the next one, and then that becomes a dead end, and then you go back to something else. But girl, fasten your seatbelt, secure your belongings, because in December of 77, it's reported that investigators have uncovered yet more connections between the men and stolen microfilm equipment, finally confirming that a decent amount of equipment stolen from records security has been stolen.
had, intentionally or otherwise, made its way into B&B's possession. I'm going to call B&S on that. Yeah. How could that have happened unintentionally? Yeah, so Richard E. Caddy and Donald K. Thrasher report that investigators are pretty sure that that Bobby Lee character was behind the record security robbery in 69. Yeah.
And that maybe the Bobs had, quote unquote, ironically wound up purchasing stolen equipment for B&B from like who happened to be their employer. Oh, so ironic. I know. Don't you think? But this is about when the case really starts to go cold. So cold that when about 75 percent of the evidence inadvertently gets tossed out in the mid 80s, at first, no one even notices.
Snow writes in his book that although the files were stamped with the words murder case, which should have guaranteed their preservation through any future prosecution and subsequent appeals, they somehow ended up on a destruction list instead. Eventually, the 80s give way to the 90s, which is when a young Indianapolis-based journalist named Carol Schultz learns about the case.
Once Carol sinks her teeth into the LaSalle Street murders, she can't quite let it go. And things go a little off the rails. It all starts when Carol manages to track down one Carol Horton, i.e. the jealous ex-husband of Bob's girlfriend, Diane, if you remember from, like, the very top of the episode. And before long, Carol and Carol...
Carol, not confusing at all. They are talking on the daily. And Carol Schultz, the journalist, is nothing short of stunned when Carol Horton soon confesses to her that he had been in the house on the day that the men were discovered. He says he didn't have anything to do with the murders, but he managed to finagle his way onto the crime scene nonetheless somehow. Mm-hmm.
And here's where things get real weird. Because before long, he's got Carol Schultz believing he very well might be psychic.
Snow writes that he starts going into these weird trances mid-conversation and claims he can see the murders unfolding in his mind. And eventually, Carol Horton convinces journalist Carol Schultz that she needs to get in touch with a guy named Floyd Chastain, a troublemaker who'd worked in his repair shop back in the 70s and is by now a convicted killer serving time in a Florida prison. But
Poor old Carol Horton comes to regret that suggestion when Floyd convinces other Carol that Carol Horton was the real killer all along. According to Floyd, dude is not clairvoyant. He's just guilty. And Floyd would know, he says, because he claims to have been the getaway driver.
And there was like a car seen outside of the house with one, maybe more men. Like it's never confirmed if it's connected or not connected. I mean, you know how many like witness statements come when you're dealing with a case like this. Right. Now things really take off when Carol Schultz gets a meeting with the current Marion County Sheriff Joe McAtee, who you'll recall had originally run the investigation for IPD. Or maybe you don't. This has been a long episode, but
He basically agrees to reopen the case, even reaching out to coordinate with now-Lieutenant Michael Popchev, who is still with IPD.
Now, the whole situation absolutely spirals. And before long, Carol Schultz has investigators buying into her theory of the case and lobbying the Marion County Prosecutor's Office to bring charges. And this results in kind of a standoff between prosecutors who don't believe there is a winnable case there and law enforcement who does winnable.
And by March of 1995, the theory has evolved even further because now Floyd has Carol Schultz convinced that the triple murder was carried out on orders. You're not going to believe this. From one Richard M. Nixon, the then president of the United States. And.
and he was in cahoots with Jimmy Hoffa, known mob affiliate and Teamsters union official. I'm going to be completely honest. I did not have Nixon or Hoffa on my bingo card for this episode. I don't know if the rest of the crime junkies did. No, I was going to say, who possibly could have? Oh, my God. But according to Floyd, in the short course of its business, B&B had come into possession of some microfilm containing some pretty sensitive material that the White House wanted back. So the story goes that
Jimmy Hoffa had arranged the hit and the microfilm recovery with Carol Horton in exchange for a presidential pardon from the Nixon White House. Snow describes the whole thing in his book as a, quote, conspiracy theory holiday. And yeah, basically. Now, in the meantime, while this is unfolding, there's new leadership that takes over at the prosecutor's office.
And on March 22nd, 1996, a Marion County grand jury officially indicts Carol Horton on three counts of murder. And before long, they indict Floyd Chastain as well.
But over the coming weeks, the case unravels in spectacular fashion. And in May of 1996, the charges are abandoned altogether, but not before the judge issues some withering criticism for everyone involved in bringing them in the first place. So Floyd Chastain and Carol Horton weren't involved after all? Not even a little bit.
a little bit. But it seems that both had been quite taken with Carol Schultz, and they reveled in the attention she showered on the men in the course of her investigation. And so they both say they told her what they thought she wanted to hear. And so then it's not until 2000 that there's any additional movement in the case. That's when a Gibson County, Indiana woman named Angel Palma happens upon a chilling discovery.
Angel, you see, is the daughter of a guy named Fred Robert Harbison, who was something of an outlaw before passing away in 1998. Now, I guess Angel was feeling nostalgic that day in 2000, so she decided she was going to go through some of her father's possessions, kind of reminisce a bit.
And that's when she stumbles on this unopened letter he'd written, still sealed in its original envelope. And she kind of can't believe her luck. Her and her dad were always kind of super tight. And here she is two years after his death, getting to almost hear from him, like beyond the grave. But when Angel tears that letter open, she doesn't get the rose-colored trip down memory lane she was hoping for. What she gets instead...
is a cold-blooded murder confession. The crux of this letter is that her dad had been hired to take a couple of guys out back in 1971 so that a local businessman from Jasper, Indiana, could collect on their generous life insurance policies. A local businessman like Ted? The one and only Ted.
Robert Snow writes that Fred points the finger directly at Ted Uland, writing that Ted tasked him with killing two guys, but that he'd been forced to take out a third who showed up unexpectedly. He also confesses to burying the boots he was wearing that night after realizing he'd left boot prints at the scene. And who is this letter addressed to, you ask?
To quote Chief of Police, Police Department, Indianapolis, Indiana.
And an envelope holding a photocopy is addressed to the Indianapolis star. But why would this guy leave, like, a written deathbed confession for his kid to find? Well, it turns out that our guy Ted didn't actually live up to his side of the bargain. Fred was supposed to get a hefty payout from the insurance proceeds that Ted collected, but Ted never paid up.
And that's the rub in being a contract killer, I guess, right? Like you can't exactly sue over unpaid services. So Fred wanted his wife, who he presumed would find the letter after his death, to pass it along to IPD and the local news media, finally exposing Ted's involvement in the infamous triple murder. But I don't know what happened or why it didn't get opened. And by the time it does, Ted is long gone by the time the letter actually is found in 2000.
So this is when everything finally seems to fall into place. Fred was known for his deep fondness of knives, which he always carried at least one of, and kept razor sharp almost as a hobby.
The car he had driven in 1971 matched those few witness descriptions I talked about of a car parked outside the house on North LaSalle the night of the murders. And his wife, Joyce, even remembers a time in 1971 when he buried a pair of his own boots. Now, Snow writes that she didn't know why he was burying boots, but she also probably didn't want to know why.
She also acknowledges that Ted had dragged her husband into all manners of unsavory activities over the years, and that it wouldn't surprise her one bit to find out that her husband had carried out a contract killing on his behalf.
Detective Sergeant Roy West with the IPD spends the next few years verifying as much of the confession letter as he can. And in early 2003, Snow writes that Sergeant West feels confident enough in his case to request an exceptional closure, drafting a 40-plus page report outlining all the reasons he feels that the triple murder was committed by Fred at the direction of Ted Uland.
And on May 5th, 2003, Sergeant West receives a response from Deputy Prosecutor John Commons. Commons writes at long last, quote,
Okay, but I still have questions. What about those other two murder cases of John Terhorst and Bobby Lee Atkinson? I don't think...
I don't think that that question is ever answered. Like, as far as I can tell, because I had the same questions, those are never solved. But it like, it does seem like there was this like bigger thing happening, right? Like within the microfilm industry, the fact that they... Like a ring of corruption or something going on in this niche industry. I know. And then like, what about Fred? Was he just like a one man hit team? Also a bit of an open question. Yeah.
Like, I do know that Fred's letter doesn't indicate that anyone else was involved in the hits. Like, to make a long story short, it seems like Ted was the mastermind and Fred was the muscle. What about all those fingerprints? I mean, they collected a bunch of them from the scene where they...
lost when the file got trashed? Were they cataloged elsewhere? Yeah, I wonder too if they were able to connect Fred to the scene physically. Like definitively, yeah. Yeah, I don't know that they ever found the boots or anything. I know that some of the prints were preserved, but no one they've run them against has ever been found to be a match. Not even Floyd Chastain, not Ted Uland, presumably not Carol Horton.
And when Detective Sergeant West had the FBI search their database to see if Fred Harbison's had ever been taken, he found out they hadn't. So they haven't been able to run a comparison on his. And the question I have is, like, I don't have details about where these fingerprints were taken from. Were they in blood? Like, were they very incriminating prints? Or we know the guys, I mean, you had 20 beer bottles and pizza boxes. Like, they had people in their home. Depending on what they were, they might not have been connected to the crime itself.
But whatever physical evidence they do or do not have, they felt confident in connecting the case. And after all this time, one of Indianapolis' coldest, most brutal cases had finally been solved. And I think it's a good reminder to all to feel free to go through that box of things left behind by your loved one, because you never know what you might find.
You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, CrimeJunkiePodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at Crime Junkie Podcast. We're going to be back next week with a brand new episode. But if you want to stick around for a couple of minutes, we've got some good news for you.
All right, we're back with the good segment to talk about some of the good that our Crime Junkie community has created. My favorite time of the month. I know, a little lightness after so much dark. So what do you got for us today, Rip? Okay, it's kind of a heavy one, but here we go. Hey, y'all. I just wanted to reach out and thank you for your content surrounding domestic and emotional abuse. This is a different kind of thank you than you're most likely used to and one that is difficult for me to say.
A few years ago, I was in an abusive marriage. We were both terrible for each other. And while we both did things that could be considered manipulative and emotionally harmful, I could be described as the abuser. Oh, wow. Financial and emotional abuse, more specifically. I don't want to go into details, but I had the classic signs and was the living embodiment of a real piece of work. She left me, as she should. I spiraled, drank too much, and generally became worse. I was a little bit of a
I found a new friend and she was really into your show, so I gave it a listen. All of the episodes are great, but every time I got to an episode about abuse, I just couldn't listen. I didn't realize I had been an abuser at the time, but something felt off. I felt a racking sense of guilt with each of those episodes. And then it clicked. I'd always hated other abusers, but I'd always thought that abuse was just physical. It hadn't really resonated that you could abuse someone emotionally or financially.
Your show typically preaches the need for people being abused to be aware of their situation. I think I learned the same thing, but reversed.
It's a journey and a lot of therapy to get to the other side. And your team helped me start that healing process. I really wanted to just say thank you. So thank you, Brandon. Holy crap. That was heavy, but in the most amazing way. It is. Our show, I think we often always talk to the people in the relationships about ways to get out. The fact that like...
God, if it's possible to reach these people at the source, right? Because an abuser will go on to continue to abuse. And how many more victims will they continue to have? Yeah. It's one thing to get victims out. But if you can...
stop more victims from being made. Like, this is incredibly powerful. You and I always talk about how important it is to educate, in general, educate our listeners. And this is a portion of our listeners and an education that I had never really thought about or considered the impact of until we got Brandon's letter. And I mean, I think it's beautiful. And like I, you know, hats off to Brandon for recognizing that. I think that's really hard to do. And that's what I like,
I love, I know we're telling stories every day, but like without, I don't want to make them too preachy because I feel like the second you're like, you know, you're going with that attitude, like people don't want to listen. But if you can, if you can hear the human stories and like the underlying things, I. Make those connections emotionally. Yeah. And it's, it's awesome that, that
that he was open enough to hear it and to see it and to be willing to go to therapy and be willing to do something about it. Like, that's really, really amazing. And I'm, yeah. Wow. That's freaking cool. I like, yeah, that was great. Yeah. Thanks for sharing your story with us, Brandon. And remember, you can share your good story with us as well. You can find that information on our website, CrimeJunkiePodcast.com. Crime Junkie is an Audiochuck production.
So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?
