Killers in the Family

by Robert L. Snow

  “Don’t worry,” Brian told his father and girlfriend. “I know where to get some more.” He picked up a .38 caliber revolver and put it in his pocket.

  Brian and Paul Sr. then left Lona’s house and walked a block west to the 200 block of North Hendricks Place, where Allen and Jenkins lived. Brian and Paul Sr. didn’t go to the front door. If a person wanted to buy drugs he or she went to the side door, which opened into the kitchen. Brian knocked on the door, and when Allen saw who it was he opened it. He had sold drugs to Brian many times. Brian and Paul Sr. then forced their way into the house, and Brian shot Allen in the head and torso with the .38 caliber revolver, killing him.

  “There was probably very limited conversation,” said homicide detective Mike Mitchell, the lead investigator on the case. “We found Allen on the kitchen floor just beyond the door.”

  Jenkins, who had been in the house with Allen, screamed and ran into the family room. Brian and Paul Sr. chased after her and then shot her with a 25 mm. semiautomatic pistol. She fell to the floor, but wasn’t dead, so they shot her four more times with the 25 mm. semiautomatic. Paul Reese Sr. would later tell the police that they kept shooting her because she wouldn’t shut up. She’d kept moaning and gurgling.

  Which one of the two Reese men actually shot Crystal Joy Jenkins was a bit unclear—it was possible that only one of them had killed both her and Demetrius Allen, switching weapons in between shootings, but the more likely version of events was that both men were involved. It was undisputed that Brian had killed Allen, but the homicide detectives said that Paul Sr. wasn’t very forthcoming about which of them actually shot Jenkins. Also, the police wanted to know, where had the 25 mm. semiautomatic pistol come from? Homicide detectives think it was likely that Paul Sr. had carried it with him to the house. He had already served time in prison for two other robberies. Paul Reese Sr., who made a deal with the police to cooperate in order to avoid multiple murder charges, would claim sometime after this that Brian had been the one who did all the shooting in the house on North Hendricks Place. While the police suspected that Paul Sr. may have done more than he said, they couldn’t prove it because Brian wouldn’t talk with Detective Mitchell. He stood on his right to remain silent.

  Since Brian had bought crack cocaine at the house on Hendricks Place a number of times before, he knew that Allen kept his stash of drugs on top of the refrigerator. Brian helped himself to it. He may have taken other items as well, but the house existed in such a state of disarray from Allen and Jenkins’s lifestyle that the police were unable to tell for certain whether Brian and Paul Sr. had taken anything besides the drugs.

  Detective Mitchell, of course, searched the crime scene thoroughly for fingerprints, shell casings, and anything else left behind by the murderer that would point the police in the right direction. Also, during the service of the search warrant at Lona’s house, the police, in addition to finding Clifford Haddix’s property, also recovered a 25 mm. Titan semiautomatic pistol. The crime lab would later confirm that this was the gun used to kill Crystal Joy Jenkins.

  But it wasn’t the crime scene that would solve this case. It would be the autopsies. The next day, the coroner removed multiple bullets from the two victims, and the crime lab ran them through their computer system, which compared them to other known and unknown bullets.

  “It was all forensics that solved this case,” said Mitchell. “The crime lab got a hit on the .38 caliber bullet that killed Demetrius Allen.”

  When the crime lab technicians checked the bullet taken from Allen several days later, they found that it matched a bullet taken from another person that Brian Reese was known to have shot.

  Interestingly enough, this wasn’t the first time Detective Mitchell had encountered Brian Reese. “When I was a young officer on the east side,” he said, “I chased Brian all the time for stealing bicycles and cars.” It was clear, though, that Brian had graduated to more serious crimes since then. When Detective Randall Cook, the lead detective in the Haddix case, eventually questioned Brian Reese, he said he felt extremely uncomfortable. “Talking to Brian Reese was like talking to Lucifer,” he said. “His eyes were real piercing and you could see the evil in them. He was one of those guys that when you talk to them the hair on the back of your neck stands up.”

  Eventually all of the investigation in both the Haddix and the Allen and Jenkins cases would lead homicide detectives to Brian Reese—but before they ever spoke to him, first the detectives had to work the leads they had. In Detective Cook’s case, that meant Lona Bishop. Cook believed she might have been a witness to Haddix’s murder, and he needed to get her to talk before he could go after Brian Reese. Cook decided to bring Lona in for questioning, and called on some district detectives to assist him—usually a very routine matter. But unfortunately, this request would instead lead to an incredible and tragic chain of events that was anything but routine.

  SEVEN

  On July 10, 2008, four narcotics detectives sat in their office in the basement of the Southeast District Headquarters on South Shelby Street in Indianapolis, Indiana. As the name implied, the district the detectives worked for covered the southeast portion of the city. The four-man unit mostly took care of smaller drug problems in the district. Catching the drug kingpins and making the huge drug busts usually fell to the main narcotics unit down at police headquarters, but the work the four men did contributed significantly to the quality of life for the residents of their district. The detectives, who worked the 11:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M. shift, were just getting ready to start work when the telephone rang. One of the men walked over and picked it up, then spoke for several minutes while taking some notes on a pad.

  “Okay, we’ll take care of it,” he said finally and then hung up the telephone. When he walked back over to the other three detectives, they all looked at him with raised eyebrows. “Detective Cook in Homicide wants us to give him a hand,” he told them. “He wants us to go over and pick up a lady on Hamilton Avenue and take her down to the Homicide Office for an interview. I guess they’re busier than hell because they’ve had a real slew of murders lately. Anyway, she lives at . . .”—he looked down at the notes he had taken—“. . . uh, 215 North Hamilton.”

  The 200 block of North Hamilton Avenue sat in a poor working-class neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis. The narcotics detectives knew that part of their district well. They had been in the area, a neighborhood infested with crackheads, many times.

  “Which murder does he want to talk to her about?” one of the other detectives asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say. But she couldn’t be too important or else he would’ve come out and got her himself. He did tell me though not to make a big show of it, but to try and keep it low key.” He again looked down at the notes he had taken. “According to him, the woman’s name is Lona Bishop. Apparently she doesn’t have any kind of record or anything, so this should be pretty easy.”

  The four detectives—Ryan Vanoeveren, Chad Osborne, Chris Smith, and Aaron Tevebaugh—had all done jobs like this before. All of the various detective units on the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department routinely tried to help one another out when they could. Besides, this one seemed like an easy enough task—it shouldn’t take that long, and since, according to Detective Cook, Lona apparently wasn’t dangerous, the four decided that there wouldn’t be any reason to conduct any surveillance first. They’d just whip by and get her, and then go about their real business.

  The four detectives decided that Smith and Vanoeveren would go up to Lona’s front door, and Osborne and Tevebaugh would cover the rear of the house. Not that they really expected her to try to run; if she’d been a flight risk, they figured Homicide would have come out to get her themselves. Doing it that way was just standard procedure. No one felt overly concerned about the task.

  The detectives talked for a few minutes about the other business they had planned to take care of that day
, and then gathered up their paperwork and equipment and headed for the exit, wanting to get this errand for Homicide out of the way so they could move on to serious business. The Southeast District of Indianapolis covered a large area, and the narcotics detectives assigned there had all of the work they could handle.

  Once out in the parking lot, the officers found the weather hot and muggy, pretty typical for Indiana in July. It was just after 2:00 P.M., and the detectives knew it was probably going to get hotter before evening finally arrived. Because their Chevrolet TrailBlazer had been parked in the sun, they cranked up the air-conditioning before pulling the vehicle out of the parking lot and heading north on Shelby Street. Lona Bishop’s house on Hamilton Avenue sat less than three miles away.

  A few minutes later, Osborne and Tevebaugh dropped off Smith and Vanoeveren at a corner near Lona Bishop’s house and then headed to the alley that ran up behind 215 North Hamilton Avenue. They idled toward the alley in order to allow the two other detectives time to reach the small, one-story, wood-frame house with a brick porch.

  Turning into the narrow alley, Osborne and Tevebaugh cruised slowly down the potholed asphalt that ran behind Hamilton Avenue, skirting a pile of old lumber and used tires someone had dumped in the alley. Meanwhile, Smith and Vanoeveren strolled casually down the sidewalk; though in civilian clothing, they wore their Glock semiautomatic pistols in holsters on their sides and their badges on chains around their necks. Since they worked narcotics, they didn’t wear uniforms, but rather dressed in clothing that would blend in the neighborhoods they worked. If they didn’t want to be spotted as the police, they took off the Glocks and badges. In this case, though, it didn’t matter if the people in the neighborhood knew they were the police. When the two men reached 215, they turned and started up the broken concrete walk. There was no thought of extra caution beyond what a police officer normally employs, or of any extra danger beyond what a police officer normally faces. This was just a routine task.

  A few moments later, just before they reached the door, a man who looked to be in his mid-thirties, with sandy hair and several days’ growth of beard, opened the door and started out. He stopped instantly when he saw the two officers. Smith and Vanoeveren identified themselves and asked if Lona Bishop was there. The detectives would later say that they had no idea at the time who this man was, but he apparently thought they did. The man looked both surprised and alarmed, and then stammered something about having to put his dog up before he could let the officers in. He then hurried back in the house and slammed the door shut. The officers heard him lock it. They soon also heard the sound of running and commotion inside the house, and the sound of the man shouting, “It’s the Feds! It’s the Feds!”

  The two detectives standing on the porch looked at each other with raised eyebrows, trying to figure out what was going on. In the alley at the rear, Tevebaugh and Osborne had just pulled their car up to the back of the house when they saw a man carrying a revolver jump out a rear window. One of the detectives quickly got onto his radio and shouted, “He’s going out a window! Watch it, he’s got a gun!”

  As all four detectives headed off in pursuit, yelling into their radios about the armed man’s direction of travel, the fleeing man leaped over a chain-link fence and ran across a neighbor’s yard, then leaped over the fence on the other side. The officers had no idea who the man was or why he was running. Still, they went after him, figuring that he was likely wanted for something—why else would he run? A couple of the detectives jumped over the fence and tried to catch up with him, but the officers soon lost the man in the neighborhood of closely packed houses, which the runner clearly knew better than they did.

  The detectives immediately asked for assistance in setting up a security perimeter. Within minutes, uniformed officers and canine teams responded and quickly set one up, hoping to trap the fleeing man inside it. Detective Chris Smith called the Homicide Branch and told the detective who answered what had happened, describing the man who had fled from them.

  “Damn, that was probably Brian Reese,” the homicide detective replied. “He’s the one we’re looking for. We think he’s probably involved in at least three murders.”

  Detective Smith tried to control his anger that Homicide hadn’t mentioned anything about Brian Reese when they asked the detectives to go pick up Reese’s girlfriend Lona Bishop. Even though Detective Cook hadn’t known that Brian would be there, Detective Smith was still upset, because if he’d been aware that there was a possibility that a dangerous murder suspect might be at the address, he and the other three detectives would have handled the situation differently. They would have set up surveillance first and taken other safety precautions. But mostly, Detective Smith was upset because of how vulnerable he and the other detective had been when they walked up onto the porch of the house. They hadn’t expected anything out of the ordinary, and had been left completely unprepared for the direction events took. They had simply gone to pick up Lona Bishop and bring her down to the Homicide Branch for an interview. Instead, they had ended up facing an armed murder suspect.

  The uniformed officers who had been called to the scene, and who would keep the security perimeter up for two and a half hours, also became upset when they weren’t told by the dispatchers until over an hour into manning the security perimeter that they were looking for an armed murder suspect. After being at the perimeter for a little over an hour, and as yet receiving no information about the person they were looking for other than his description, Sergeant Rick Snyder sent an officer to ask what the situation involved. Only then did the officers find out they were hunting for an armed murder suspect.

  Regardless, neither the narcotics detectives, nor the uniformed officers manning the perimeter, nor the canine officers could find any sign of Brian Reese. (They would later learn that he had hidden for a short time in a burned-out and abandoned house in the neighborhood. While there, Brian found some old, raggedy clothing and came up with a plan for how to get out of the neighborhood. He changed into the clothing he found, smeared some of the soot from the house onto his face and arms, then left the abandoned house and walked down an alley, opening trash cans and looking in them. By so doing, Brian was able to walk unchallenged out of the neighborhood disguised as a homeless person, not an unusual sight for the area. He hid the revolver he had been carrying in a trash can near the abandoned house.) While the officers were disappointed that they weren’t able to locate the fleeing man, this wasn’t the first person to ever escape from the police, so, after a thorough search of the neighborhood, the security perimeter was finally taken down after two and a half hours.

  Several homicide detectives went to 215 North Hamilton Avenue and talked with Lona Bishop, a thin woman in her early twenties with long, dark hair. Lona at first denied that the man who had run from the police was Brian Reese. Even though she and Brian had a child together, she insisted that the man who ran was another man she was dating named Steven Fillipo. The detectives also found Lona’s mother, Rosemary Bishop, in the house, and she told the officers that the man who fled was Brian Reese. Eventually, Lona also admitted that it had been Brian, and that the two of them, as well as Brian’s father, Paul Reese Sr., had been smoking crack cocaine that day. As a consequence, she said, Brian had been extremely hyper. That was likely why he’d been spooked by the detectives’ arrival.

  Following the failed attempt to apprehend Brian Reese on North Hamilton Avenue, the homicide detectives tried to anticipate where he would go next. They figured that Brian likely wouldn’t come back to Lona’s house, so he only had a few other options. (The police would later discover, however, that Brian did return to the area. After he’d left in the disguise of a homeless person, he went to a friend’s house, then had that friend drive him back to the Hamilton Street area so that he could see what the police were up to, and so that he could recover the revolver he had hidden in the trash can.) The homicide detectives knew that, along with his child with
Lona, Brian also had three other children with another woman, named Amy Brackin, but they figured he wouldn’t go to her because she had since married another man. Lona told the police that Brian would probably go to his mother for help. And so, the homicide detectives asked Detective Jeff Wood of the Violent Crimes Unit to set up surveillance on Brian’s mother, Barbara Reese.

  Like many others in the Reese family, Barbara had a criminal record and had been suspected, though never charged, with assisting her ex-husband and four sons in their numerous criminal exploits. A few hours after Detective Wood began his surveillance of Barbara Reese at her house on North Bosart Street, he followed her as she left her home in a white minivan and drove over to the Little Flower Catholic Church in the 4700 block of East 13th Street. A few moments after she pulled into the parking lot of the church, Detective Wood found that Homicide’s hunch had been right: Brian came running out of the building and jumped into the waiting van.

  As the van pulled away from the church, Wood put out an alert on the police radio and told the dispatcher that he was following a murder suspect in a white minivan heading south on North Linwood Avenue toward East 10th Street. Uniformed officers Jason Fishburn and Jerry Piland, who were nearby, heard the radio broadcast and raced over to position their cars at 10th and Linwood, preparing to intercept the van. However, instead of stopping for the police cars, Barbara sped around them, and the police began pursuing her. She headed south on Linwood Avenue toward the east border of the Linwood Square Shopping Center.

  After about a block or so, Barbara swerved the van into the parking lot of the shopping center and then slammed on the brakes in front of a Kroger’s supermarket. As soon as the van stopped, Brian leaped out and started running. Although the officers didn’t know it, he was again carrying the revolver. The officers who had been in pursuit of the minivan radioed that Brian was headed south on foot from the Kroger’s parking lot. A few moments later, he disappeared behind the Kroger’s building.