After that, Paul Sr. said, the guys left to go to the flea market, and he and Dawn played a couple more games of pool in the basement. Paul Sr. said that Dawn stayed for an hour or two. While they were down in the basement playing pool, another friend of Paul Jr.’s, a sixteen-year-old named Doyle Stinson, knocked on the door. When Paul Sr. saw who it was, he sent Dawn upstairs to tell Doyle that Paul Jr. wasn’t there. Paul Sr. said that he didn’t want to talk to Doyle himself.
When West asked how long Dawn stayed at the house, Paul Sr. answered, “Oh gosh, I don’t know, probably an hour or two, something like that.” He then added that he thought she left at around noon.
Detective West pressed for more details, and Paul Sr. said that Dawn had been coming around for about a year, helping Barbara with the paper route. He said that, along with being a friend of his daughter Jenny, Dawn also came over to see two of his other sons, Jeremy and Johnny (before they were incarcerated at the Juvenile Detention Center). Paul Sr. first told West that he stayed at the house on North Bosart Street all day that Sunday, March 16, but then corrected himself and said he drove around a bit with Timothy Keller later that evening. Paul Sr. told West that the two of them drove around for a couple of hours, from around 8:00 to 10:00 P.M., but didn’t go anywhere in particular.
West asked Paul Sr. what he and Dawn had talked about in the basement. “Dawn and I didn’t talk about nothing really,” he said. “There wasn’t really much to talk about. She liked to shoot pool, and me and her had shot the day before. I was about five games up on her and she was trying to catch up.”
Paul Reese Sr. insisted to Detective West that after Dawn left the house around noon, he hadn’t seen her again, and said that Barbara had wondered why Dawn didn’t come back later to go on the paper route with her. Continuing his story, Paul Sr. said that Timothy dropped him off at the house on North Bosart at around 10:00 P.M., then Paul Sr. went inside and got a cup of coffee. Shortly after that, Dawn’s parents showed up and asked if anyone knew where she was. He then corrected himself again and told Detective West that Dawn’s parents had also been at the house just before he’d first left to go drive around with Timothy. Paul Sr. said that he hadn’t talked with them, but that his wife and girls did. He added that he heard Barbara had let Dawn’s father come into the house and look around, but that he had never personally met the Stuards. Paul Sr. then told West that the second time Dawn’s parents showed up, they said they were going to have the police search the house, and, shortly after this, one of his daughters came in and told him he’d better get out of there, so he left again. When asked why, Paul Sr. said that it was because they had a warrant out on him for a back child support charge, and he didn’t want to go to jail.
When asked where he had gone after leaving the house at 10:00 P.M., Paul Sr. said that he went over to the apartments where Timothy Keller lived, in the 1900 block of North Wallace Avenue, but that when the police showed up there (apparently investigating some stolen bicycles) he quickly left and went to the home of Jay Ward, another friend of his son’s. Paul Sr. then borrowed a bicycle from his son’s friend, and just as he did, the police pulled up to Ward’s house, so he got on the bicycle and pedaled by the house at 1428 North Bosart Street, but saw police cars everywhere. And so, Paul Sr. said, he just rode the bicycle around until the police finally left the North Bosart Street area, and then he went back inside the house.
Paul Sr. told West that as he sat in the house, drinking more coffee, the police would drive by every fifteen minutes or so. Barbara had gone on to bed, but Paul Sr. said that he sat there until she got up at about 3:00 A.M. to deliver the morning newspaper and that he went with her. He said Barbara told him that something bad had happened in the neighborhood and that’s why the police were everywhere. But Dawn Stuard’s name, he claimed, didn’t come up.
“I didn’t hear from Dawn after she left the house around noon,” he insisted again. “I haven’t seen her since she left.” When asked, he emphatically denied having anything to do with Dawn’s death.
West didn’t believe a lot of the man’s story. Paul Sr. seemed skittish and had given far too many signs that he wasn’t telling the truth. But West also knew that this early in the investigation, he had nothing really substantial to confront Paul Reese Sr. with in the hope that he would come clean. West hoped that would happen later, after the investigation had progressed a bit further.
After Detective West finished interviewing Paul Reese Sr., he then spoke with Paul Reese Jr. The teenager said that he’d known Dawn Stuard for a year or two, and that she’d been at his house on March 16, 1986. Paul Jr. told West that Dawn came over all the time to see the family because she was good friends with them.
“I saw Dawn yesterday,” he told Detective West. “She was at our house between 10:00 and 11:30. She sat and talked with me and Dad and everyone.”
Paul Jr. said that they’d all sat at the kitchen table Sunday morning and chatted before he, Pam, and Timothy Keller left to get the items they planned to sell that day at a flea market. When they came back, Pam left with her father, and he and Timothy went to the flea market. He said that this was at around 11:30 A.M. Dawn, he added, was still there when he and Timothy left. He said that his mother Barbara was asleep in her room the whole time, and he didn’t see her at all that morning.
Paul Jr. went on to say that when he got home from the flea market later that night at around 6:30 P.M., his mom and dad were both home, along with Pam and his sisters. He said they all watched television and that his father left sometime around 10:00 P.M., about ten minutes before the police showed up. (He didn’t say anything about the earlier visits from Wesley Collins or the Stuards.) No one, he told West, mentioned Dawn that evening. The next day, however, on March 17, 1986, Paul Jr. said that at around 10:30 A.M. Timothy Keller and a guy he didn’t know came knocking on the door. Apparently, the police who’d been investigating Dawn as a runaway had spoken with Timothy Keller; Paul Jr. said that Timothy, who was visibly shaken, and the other guy began asking him all kinds of questions about Dawn that apparently the police had asked them, like how well he knew her, if she had been there at his house, and if he knew where she was. They also asked him if he knew where his dad was. Timothy obviously hadn’t liked the police coming to his house to question him. Paul Jr. told them that he didn’t know anything about Dawn and that he didn’t know where his dad was, either.
West concluded his interview with Paul Reese Jr. but figured that he would have much more to ask later.
Homicide detective Tom Minor, acting as assistant in this case, interviewed the mother of the family, Barbara Reese. She told Minor that she had six children living with her on Bosart Street, her four sons: Paul Jr., John, Brian, and Jeremy; and her two daughters: Jenny and Cindy. Barbara then added that Pam Winningham also lived there with Paul Jr. but told Minor that her ex-husband, Paul Reese Sr., didn’t live there.
“I’m not actually employed myself,” she told Detective Minor. “I help my kids with their newspaper routes. And as for Paul Sr.,” she added, “I don’t know where he lives.”
When Detective Minor asked her about Dawn Stuard, Barbara told him that she had known Dawn for about three years, and that the last time she’d seen her was two days earlier, on Saturday, March 15, 1986, when Dawn had helped her and her two daughters deliver inserts to the newspaper. At around 7:00 P.M. that Saturday, Barbara said, Dawn told her that she had to be home before dark and got out of Barbara’s car while on the paper route and started walking home. That was the last time she had seen the girl.
Minor asked Barbara for more details about the paper routes. She said that she had woken up around 5:30 A.M. on Sunday, March 16, and drove her car to deliver the newspapers. She gave Minor the boundaries of the four routes she delivered on, and he made a note that the routes were very close to the area where Dawn’s body had been found.
Detective Minor then asked Barbara about the events of March 16,
1986, specifically what happened after she delivered the Sunday newspapers and returned home. Barbara said that she arrived home at around 9:00 A.M. and went back to bed. She added that her ex-husband must have come over while she was sleeping, because at around 11:00 A.M. he came into her bedroom, as he often did, and asked her what time she wanted him to get her up. Barbara told him to wake her at around 2:00 or 3:00 P.M. and then went back to sleep. When she got up later on, Barbara said, she, Pam, and her two daughters went to AMVETS, a secondhand store, and returned home at around 6:00 P.M. Her son Paul Jr. returned home from the flea market shortly after that, then around 6:30 P.M., she, her ex-husband, and their two daughters went to collect payment on the paper routes. They returned around 8:30 P.M. and all watched television. Paul Sr., she said, left the house on foot between 10:00 and 10:30 P.M.
When asked about Dawn Stuard, Barbara said that her ex-husband told her Dawn had been there that morning, but that the girl left between 11:00 A.M. and noon. Barbara hadn’t seen Dawn herself that day because she was asleep. Dawn’s parents, Barbara told Detective Minor, showed up at her home on North Bosart between 10:30 and 11:00 P.M., right after her ex-husband had left, and the police came by just a little after that. (Although these times didn’t seem right, inaccuracies like this always occur when taking statements, and Minor knew that West would have to straighten them out later.) Barbara said that she let Dawn’s father come in and look around the house, and later that night, a policeman also went through the house. Detective Minor thanked her and concluded the interview, knowing that West would want to follow up with Barbara Reese at another time.
Detective Minor then spoke with seventeen-year-old Pam Winningham, who told Minor that she had met Dawn Stuard about three times, all at the Reese house. She told Minor that she didn’t know Dawn well because she had only been living there with Paul Jr. for about six weeks, but that the girl would come over to play pool at the house and help Barbara on the paper routes. At around 9:30 A.M. on March 16, 1986, Pam claimed, Timothy Keller arrived and woke her and Paul Jr. up.
“When I went upstairs,” Pam told Detective Minor, “Dawn was sitting at the kitchen table with Paul Sr. Dawn asked me if I wanted to play some pool, but I told her I couldn’t. I had to go with Paul Jr. and Timothy to pick up some things to take to the flea market.”
The three of them then left, Pam said, at around 10:30 A.M. in Timothy’s white Ford Pinto, which had several lawn mowers in back. They returned around 11:00 A.M., which was when Pam found her father waiting in his car out front. She got into the car with him and left.
Pam said her father brought her back to the Reese house at around 4:30 P.M. but he didn’t come in, because he wasn’t friends with Paul Reese Sr. She told Detective Minor that Paul Sr., Barbara, and the two Reese daughters, Jenny and Cindy, were all there when she returned, but that Paul Jr. was still at the flea market. She said it appeared that Paul Sr. had just taken a shower. Pam went on to say that she talked with the two Reese girls for a while and that Jenny told her Dawn had gone home but had been expected to come back around 4:00 P.M. Jenny didn’t say where she got this information. At around 6:30 P.M., Paul Jr. returned home from the flea market, and Pam added that at around 7:30 P.M. the two of them went down to the room they shared in the basement and went to sleep for a while.
At around 10:30 P.M., however, Pam said that she and Paul Jr. got up and went out, walking a few streets over to check out a car someone had for sale. When they returned, Pam said that Dawn Stuard’s aunt, cousin, and parents were there. (She wasn’t quite right—it was actually Dawn’s father, Ted Stuard; her cousin Wesley Collins; and Wesley’s girlfriend Michelle Lynch.) Pam said the Stuards wanted to know if anyone knew where Dawn was, and that they suspected the Reeses were hiding her in their house. She added that they came inside and looked around a couple of times. The police, Pam went on, were also there, but Paul Sr., she said, was not. He had gone off somewhere with Timothy Keller.
“Later on, after everyone but the family had left,” Pam said, “Barbara told me that Dawn’s family thought Paul Sr. had kidnapped Dawn.”
She added that at around 11:30 P.M. she went to bed, but about an hour later, a noise in the basement woke her up. She said she asked who was there, and Barbara answered, saying that she was just doing some laundry. However, Pam added, she didn’t hear the washer or dryer start up. She told Detective Minor that she also heard Paul Sr.’s voice in the basement. Along with this, Pam discovered that Paul Jr. wasn’t asleep in bed with her. However, she didn’t give the incident much importance and went back to sleep.
Pam then told Minor that she got up the next morning and left with her father at around 7:00 A.M., and when she returned at around 1:30 P.M., the police were there again checking the house.
With no more questions to ask at the moment, Detective Minor thanked her and concluded the interview.
After interviewing Pam Winningham, Detective Minor next questioned fourteen-year-old Brian Reese, but the boy couldn’t really give much information. Brian said that he knew Dawn and thought she was a nice girl.
“The last time I talked to her was on Saturday at our house,” Brian told Minor. “She was playing cards with Jenny and Cindy.”
He told Minor that he’d been asleep for most of the morning on Sunday, March 16, 1986, and hadn’t even known that Dawn was there. After getting up, he said, he left and spent the day at some friends’ house. He added that no one had talked about Dawn that night until the police and Dawn’s relatives showed up.
Detective Minor thanked him and concluded the interview.
The next person Detective Roy West brought into the Homicide Office for an interview was seventeen-year-old Timothy Keller, who confirmed that he had been in and out of the Reese house on the day Dawn Stuard had disappeared. Timothy said that he had come to the house on the morning of March 16, 1986, to pick up Paul Reese Jr. The two of them were going to take some items to a flea market on the west side of Indianapolis and try to sell them.
“The story was that early on Sunday morning, at around 9:30, Timothy Keller went over to the Reese house,” recalled West. “He and Paul Reese Jr. were supposed to go to a flea market that morning to sell items they had stolen from their neighbors’ yards.”
When he arrived at the Reese house, Timothy told West, Paul Reese Sr. was the only one up and awake. However, within fifteen minutes of his arrival, Dawn showed up at the back door, and Timothy said he let her in before going down to the basement and waking up Paul Reese Jr. and his girlfriend, Pam Winningham. Timothy’s story was the same one that others had told—leaving to pick up the items for the flea market, returning to find Pam’s father, Cotton, out front, hearing about the altercation between Pam and her dad, then he and Paul Jr. jumping in his car and trying to make sure that Pam was okay. They followed Cotton’s car for a short distance, but when they saw that Pam was apparently all right, they returned to the Reese house at about noon. Timothy added that when they returned to the house he saw Dawn and Paul Sr. coming up from the basement holding pool cues, then he and Paul Jr. left to go sell the items at the flea market.
West was unable to place Dawn anywhere outside of the Reese house that day, or find anyone who had seen her after this. He realized that the last person to have been seen with Dawn Marie Stuard was Paul Reese Sr.
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After the interviews that night, it didn’t take very much checking up on the Reeses for Detective Roy West to discover that the entire family had a reputation at the police department for both crime and trouble. West uncovered not only Paul Reese Sr.’s criminal record (he’d served time for various crimes, including trying to kill his girlfriend) but Barbara Reese’s embezzlement conviction, and the arrest of the other two Reese sons, Jeremy and John, who were being held at the time of Dawn’s disappearance at the Indianapolis Juvenile Correctional Center.
The neighbors in the 1400 block of North Bosart Street confirmed the Ree
se family’s bad reputation. For years, the neighbors had been frightened and anxious because of the Reeses. Several of the neighbors told the news media that they felt like prisoners in their own homes. “People we talked to said they lived in fear and felt captive by this family,” Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department sergeant Dennis Fishburn told the local news media a number of years after Dawn’s death. “People couldn’t be themselves, they were so scared.”
“I’ve never encountered a group of people in my life that scared me more,” Mike Archer, a neighbor of the Reeses, told a reporter for the Indianapolis Star in 2008.
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On Tuesday, March 18, 1986, the day after the discovery of Dawn’s body, the coroner’s office performed an autopsy. While the crime scene search is often the greatest source of physical evidence in any homicide investigation, the next best source is usually the autopsy. Much like homicide detectives, many coroners also feel that they speak for the deceased. They realize that the autopsy is the last chance for the evidence that the victim’s body holds to be discovered and used in the search for the killer, as well as in his or her eventual prosecution.
“As coroners, we are the last advocate to speak for the dead,” Marion County (Indiana) chief deputy coroner Frances Kelly said. “The details and evidence that are on the body are the deceased’s way of speaking to us.”
Standard procedure was for one of the homicide detectives assigned to a murder case, usually the lead detective, to attend the autopsy, and Detective West attended Dawn’s. Not only was it important for the detective to personally see what the coroner determined to be the cause and manner of death, which can tell a detective what other evidence needs to be searched for, but a homicide detective must be present at an autopsy in order to take custody of any evidence removed from the body that could prove crucial to the investigation.
Killers in the Family Page 4