However, as was becoming par for the course with this investigation, when the police requestioned Winslow they also developed yet another possible suspect. She told them about a run-in Barker and Gierse had had with a man named Frank Salonko, a former boyfriend of hers. Winslow told them that Barker and Gierse had had a confrontation with Salonko at the Idle Hour Tavern. Salonko apparently didn’t like Winslow hanging around with Barker; Salonko was very possessive, and Winslow said he’d often threatened to kill her if she went out with another man. She also said he had bragged to her about shooting a man in Oklahoma. The detectives checked and found that Salonko did indeed have a police record and apparently hung out with a very rough crowd. The detectives reluctantly added him to their lengthy list of suspects.
On December 21, 1971, the police also reinterviewed Bob Gierse’s girlfriend Ilene Combest. She told them that she had met Gierse about five years earlier through a girlfriend, and that she had dated him on and off ever since. Combest told the detectives that she and Gierse had had a decent sex life, though nothing to brag about, but that it had stopped completely eight months before the murders. She said that suddenly he was no longer interested in having sex with her, and he told her that it was because he was working out and lifting weights. Combest obviously didn’t know about Gierse’s involvement in the sex contest.
Combest additionally told the detectives that the three men didn’t seem to have any special interest in pornography. Along with this, she said she had never seen any of the three men involved with or taking narcotics. (The detectives were still attempting to find out where the extra money the victims were spending was coming from, and another rumor the detectives had picked up involved the three men dealing in narcotics.) Combest did tell the police, though, that Gierse used to regularly buy stolen items from people. She said that he had bought a typewriter from a guy who often came into Records Security Corporation peddling hot items. During their investigation, the detectives had also heard from several people that the color console television set in the house on North LaSalle was stolen property, and Combest confirmed that Gierse had bought it from a guy in a Zionsville tavern.
She added that when the three victims went out somewhere they liked to throw their weight around and really enjoyed embarrassing and ridiculing people.
The conversation with Combest then turned to Gierse and Hinson’s September trip to Bloomington to meet Ted Uland, a trip she had accompanied them on. She told the detectives that she had been instructed to wait in the car while Gierse and Hinson went into the Big Wheel Restaurant to talk with Uland, and that after about five minutes Hinson came back out and waited in the car with her. Uland had tried to convince Hinson to stay on at Records Security Corporation and, when he wouldn’t, Uland excused him from the meeting because he said he wanted to talk to Gierse in private. When Gierse finally came out about two hours later, he told her and Hinson that Uland had offered him $10,000 to stay on at Records Security through the first of the year. But, Gierse told them, the offer was ridiculous because Uland didn’t have that kind of money. And besides, Gierse told them, no matter what, he was going to leave soon and have his own company.
However, Combest also said that both Gierse and Hinson agreed that Uland could be a dangerous man if he got backed into a corner financially. And, she said, Gierse was worried about Uland having a key to his house on North LaSalle Street because he was afraid that Uland might go down into the basement and see the equipment he planned to use in his new business. He apparently feared that Uland would recognize it.
When asked who she thought might have committed the murders, Combest said it could have been someone the men had ridiculed or pushed around in a bar, which they liked to do regularly. But, she also said, she wouldn’t put it past Uland to have hired someone to do it.
Following their interview with Combest, the detectives finally located two more women on the men’s scorecard of sexual conquests. One was a lady named Virginia France, who, like many others, told detectives that she had met the three victims through a girlfriend. She also denied any knowledge of the men having been involved with pornography or drugs, but did add that she had an ex-husband from whom she’d only been divorced a little over a month, and that he had serious mental problems and a violent temper. The detectives added another name to their suspect list.
On December 23, 1971, the police interviewed the second woman, Ruth Ellen Lochard. Her ex-husband, whom she had divorced in 1970, had once worked with Jim Barker, which was how she’d met him. She told the detectives that she had suspected some type of contest was going on because she said that Barker had told her she was “number thirteen.” She told the detectives that she hadn’t seen the men have or use any drugs, and that they hadn’t shown any unusual interest in pornography.
By this point, the detectives realized that the pornography and drug-running angles were dead ends. They had just been rumors.
Although their investigation seemed not to be going anywhere, the detectives were still not ready to give up. They interviewed a Mr. Bernard M. Faust, the bookkeeper for B&B Microfilming. He gave the police an interesting bit of information. He said that Gierse instructed him not to keep a record of how much money he was paying out at B&B, an unusual request to give a bookkeeper. In a memo about the interview, though, one of the detectives noted that Faust appeared extremely nervous, had conferred with an attorney before coming to talk with the police, and could not be ruled out as a suspect himself. But interestingly enough, Faust also gave the police a new suspect, a man with a beautiful blond wife who had at one time been involved with the three victims.
On December 28, 1971, Lieutenant Joe McAtee had a meeting with Earl Timmons, an investigator for the New York Life Insurance Company, the company that had written the $150,000 key man life insurance policies on Gierse and Hinson. Timmons told McAtee that he was delaying his final report about whether New York Life should pay or not until after Uland had undergone his lie detector test, which had originally been scheduled for December 22, 1971.
However, on that date, before the scheduled test, Uland and his attorney held a four-and-a-half-hour meeting with the prosecutor in order to discuss stipulations regarding the lie detector test. The attorney had tried to cover every possible aspect of the test that might negatively affect his client, including what questions could and could not be asked. When they finally arrived at the test site, Uland’s attorney refused to allow his client to sign a Miranda rights warning because he said it would conflict with the stipulations they and the prosecutor had agreed upon. Uland and his attorney then began a lengthy discussion with the detectives about the test, covering much of the same area they had already gone over with the prosecutor. By the time everything had been concluded and agreed upon, however, the test operator felt that due to possible fatigue it would be better to reschedule the lie detector test, which they did, for January 7, 1972.
Since Ted Uland had not yet taken a lie detector test, the detectives still considered him a viable suspect. However, when one of the detectives traveled to Princeton, Indiana, and spoke with Uland’s secretary at Cherokee Drilling, she provided Uland with an alibi for the night of the murders. She confirmed that Uland had called Gierse long-distance from Princeton at around 9:00 P.M. Several other people additionally confirmed Uland’s presence in southern Indiana on the night of November 30. Although the detectives couldn’t rule out the possibility of Uland having hired someone to commit the murders for him, they had no proof or evidence of this.
Although frustrated by the lack of evidence and the continuously growing number of suspects, the detectives could not seem to stop discovering new names to add to the list. Upon interviewing one of Bob Hinson’s former girlfriends, she told the detectives that the three victims had bought a lot of liquor from a bootlegger that a friend had introduced them to. However, a few months before the murders the bootlegger had stopped selling liquor to the three victims. She said the bootlegger had been arrested and that he was angry becaus
e he thought the three men might have been the ones who turned him in to the police.
On December 28, 1971, Detective Sergeant Pat Stark and a new detective to the case, Jerry Campbell, traveled to St. Louis, Missouri, to see if they could obtain any more background information on the three victims. Bob Gierse was from St. Louis, and the detectives had heard that he and the other two men would occasionally visit there. In addition, the detectives also wanted to check out rumors that the three men had been arrested the month before, in November 1971, while in St. Louis.
Upon investigation, the detectives discovered that indeed Jim Barker and Bob Hinson had been arrested in St. Louis on November 21, 1971, for “Aiding and Abetting a Prostitute.” Apparently, a nice young lady whom Barker and Hinson had shown interest in had turned out not to be such a nice young lady after all. Also, the detectives found, Barker and Hinson had been robbed by a Mordial Bailey Jr. during the same incident. Detectives Stark and Campbell were able, however, to rule Bailey out as a suspect in the murders because, ironically enough, they confirmed that on December 1, 1971, he was already in custody in St. Louis for an unrelated homicide. They also verified that he had been in St. Louis the night before. While at the St. Louis Police Department, the detectives checked seven persons of interest in the North LaSalle Street case for criminal records there, looking for any unknown connections that could help develop a motive for the murders. None of these individuals, however, had any police record in the St. Louis area.
The detectives next visited some of the nightspots the three victims would frequent while in St. Louis, figuring that if these men had liked to bully and intimidate people in Indianapolis, they’d probably liked to do it in St. Louis, too. Stark and Campbell went to the Boot Heel Club and the Pipeline Tavern, where employees recognized Jim Barker’s photograph but couldn’t give the detectives any useful information. Nor did the detectives have much luck at the Huckle Bee Club, the Magnolia Inn, the Olive Living Room, the Aeor Space Lounge, the Spacecraft, or the Hee Haw Club.
Detectives Stark and Campbell, a bit discouraged, then went to speak with Gierse’s sister, Dorothy Erbs, who worked at St. Joseph Hospital in Kirkwood, Missouri. She said that the last time she’d seen her brother was three months earlier, in September 1971, when he came to St. Louis to show her the new Cadillac he had bought. Erbs said that he’d brought Ilene Combest with him on the trip and told the detectives that she and her husband had jokingly referred to Combest as Gierse’s “illegal wife,” since she always seemed to accompany Gierse whenever he came to St. Louis. Erbs, however, wasn’t able to add any new information to the investigation. She didn’t know of anyone who would want to murder the men.
Following this, the detectives attempted to find Bob Gierse’s ex-wife but could only locate her sister. The former sister-in-law said that the last time she had seen the victims was about six months ago in St. Louis, and that her husband had told her that Hinson was in some kind of trouble, but she didn’t know what kind. The detectives knew this coincided with reports that Bob Hinson had seemed depressed and worried in the weeks before his murder. Was this connected, even though six months ago? It seemed a clue worth following up on. However, for some reason the detectives apparently didn’t follow up with the sister-in-law’s husband to see if he knew what kind of trouble Hinson had been in.
While in St. Louis the detectives also spoke with Bob Gierse’s brother Ted, who told the detectives that the day after the murders a go-go dancer named Janice Smith, who had dated his brother, had called a friend of his and told him that the murders had been business connected and that she was afraid for her life. This was a bit of information the detectives felt needed further investigation.
Other than the news about the go-go dancer, though, the detectives returned from St. Louis with very little new information. Almost a month had passed now since the murders, and while the detectives assigned to the investigation had once thought that the case would be solved and closed by the end of the year, that didn’t look like much of a possibility any longer.
An interesting development, however, did occur just before the year’s end. Lieutenant McAtee reported on December 29, 1971, that a wallet belonging to Robert Hinson, which contained credit cards and identification, had been found in a yard on the west side of Indianapolis. Unfortunately, though, while this initially seemed like it could be a break in the case, the detectives soon discovered that the wallet had been stolen from Hinson some months before the murders while he lay passed out in the backseat of a car at an all-night restaurant.
The year 1971 was just about over, and most of the detectives hadn’t had a day off in the month since the murders. They had worked through the Christmas holiday, and it looked as though they were going to work through New Year’s also. It was unbelievably frustrating. The detectives knew only too well that the reason they couldn’t solve this case was because they simply didn’t have the physical evidence or witness testimony that could break one suspect away from the rest. They hadn’t been able to connect the bloody footprint or the cigar to any suspect. But a break had to come soon, they knew—a surprise eyewitness, someone who heard something, or an unknown piece of physical evidence—for if it didn’t, it appeared this case might never be solved.
CHAPTER FIVE
New Year’s Day 1972 had come and gone. Most of the homicide detectives assigned to the North LaSalle Street case had worked through the holiday, but the leads they followed kept running dry. The original detectives had now worked forty-five days straight without a day off. They had taken recorded statements from 150 people and had interviewed 600 others, including 36 in St. Louis, 30 in Chicago, and 180 of the victims’ business associates and customers.
In a January 1972 article in the Indianapolis Star, Deputy Chief Ralph Lumpkin said that while the police were still looking at the murders as being a crime of passion, they were also now looking at a business/social motive. In actuality, however, the detectives were stumped.
Also in early January 1972, the detectives had a crime lab technician remove the sink trap from the bathroom on North LaSalle Street and analyze its contents. The detectives knew they needed physical evidence desperately. There was the possibility that the murderer or murderers might have used the sink to clean up afterward since they had likely gotten blood on them, but also, the detectives hoped, they might have washed out a wound of their own. Nothing of significance, though, came of this.
“I wish we’d had DNA in those days,” Popcheff would say years after the murder investigation. “It sure would have made it a lot easier.” Had the murders occurred today, the detective assigned to the case would have had a DNA sample taken from the cigar butt found in the dining room and then run this sample through the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), the FBI’s national link of state DNA banks. If the person who had committed the murders had been arrested for a felony anywhere in the United States, and consequently a DNA sample taken, a match would come up and an arrest would be made. But unfortunately, 1971 was decades before such technology existed, let alone was linked by databases nationwide.
By mid-January 1972, the news media had finally lost interest in the case. While for several weeks following the crime there had been front-page articles or breaking newscasts every day about the murders, the coverage had finally dried up. After the initial rush of news stories, a case with no progress and no arrests didn’t stir much interest. The news media eventually turned to other topics of importance in the early 1970s.
But worst of all, as far as the investigators were concerned, even though the case had initially looked like it wouldn’t be that hard to solve, and even though police officials had announced several times that a solution and arrests were imminent, the detectives knew that they weren’t any closer to solving the case than they had been on the day it occurred. The three men, with their stolen equipment and customers, their shady business dealings, their rowdy sex lives, and their enjoyment of embarrassing and pushing people around, had dozens of people who mig
ht have wanted to see them dead. But what had really stumped the detectives and stalled the investigation was the lack of substantial hard evidence, which left many questions unanswered.
“It seemed like we just couldn’t get our hands on anything in this case,” said Popcheff. “For example, something was missing from Gierse’s nightstand, but we never could find out what it was. Another question we had was: who went out the back door and left it open? We couldn’t find out. We just couldn’t get the upper hand on this case.”
But regardless, the detectives knew that they couldn’t quit as long as there was any trail at all left to follow. And so, in early January 1972, they went to the Warren hotel in downtown Indianapolis to look for the go-go dancer that Bob’s brother Ted Gierse had mentioned. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, when the detectives arrived, they found that several of the go-go dancers who worked in the bar at the hotel had been acquainted with the three victims. Each one had a theory about what had happened. None of them, though, were able to give investigators any really new or relevant information about the case.
Eventually, though, the detectives located Geneva Darlene Smith, nicknamed Janice, the go-go dancer who had called Ted Gierse’s friend in St. Louis the day after the murders. She told the detectives that she had dated Bob Gierse for four or five months and then started dating Bob Hinson. Smith said she had never dated Jim Barker, though he had tried to get her to go out with him several times. When asked why she had called Ted Gierse’s friend right after the murders, Smith told the detectives that she had called because she and Hinson had double-dated with the friend when he was in Indianapolis and realized that he had known the three victims very well. As to the reason for the killings, she remembered saying that the triple murder had been business related, but couldn’t give the police any concrete evidence for her belief.
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