Although assigned new murder cases to work on, West continued to work the Sheese case whenever he could. Whenever he was close by on another case he would stop in the areas he had earlier canvassed and check for new information or for witnesses he had missed. He also contacted the uniformed officers and the vice and narcotics detectives who worked around 1500 East Michigan Street, letting them know that he was interested in any information they came across concerning Sheese or her murder. While it would seem logical to contact the vice and narcotics detectives (since Sheese had been a known crack addict and a prostitute), West, because of his thoroughness, knew that the uniformed officers could also be great sources of information. They patrol the same areas every day and know most of the people like Sheese who cause them problems. West always believed in tapping every source of information possible.
West also talked several times to his superiors about reopening the case so that he could give it more attention. However, since West had no leads or suspects, he was uniformly told that the case was a dead end and that he needed to let go and move on.
But West’s persistence paid off. On January 22, 1999, three months after Shanna Sheese was found and after West had made several follow-up contacts to be certain that both the uniformed officers and the vice and narcotics detectives knew he was still interested in information about Sheese, narcotics detectives brought to Detective West a man who had told them that he had information about the Sheese murder. Individuals regularly involved in criminal activity will hang on to and then use information such as this as currency to buy their way out of jail. There was an expression at the Homicide Branch, “We’ll always trade a weenie for a ham,” meaning they were always open to dropping or reducing charges on lesser crimes for information on more serious crimes. That was what this man was looking to do.
Ray Harber,1 a crack addict, told West that he had recently been at a crack house where he overheard two brothers talking about a murder. Harber said that during the conversation he heard them claim that they had beaten a woman to death with a brick and then left her on a vacant lot, stripping off all of her clothing so that it would look like a john/prostitute murder. The brothers, Harber told West, were named Malcolm and Darrell Wilson. West immediately remembered Malcolm, whom he had talked to right after the Sheese murder. Malcolm had admitted to West that he knew Sheese, but also claimed that he hadn’t seen her on the day she died, nor had any information about her murder.
Harber’s information, of course, wasn’t enough for West to make an arrest, but it did finally give him a suspect and a direction for the investigation. He now became more committed than ever to solving this case.
A month later, on February 22, 1999, after West had also been in touch with the uniformed personnel at the jail and told them that he was interested in any information about Shanna Sheese, Teresa Sessile,2 who had been incarcerated in the Marion County Jail, contacted him. She told West that while in jail she had talked with a woman named Vanessa Thompson. Thompson, according to Sessile, had bragged that she and Malcolm Wilson had killed Sheese by repeatedly hitting her in the head with a brick.
Then on February 26, 1999, another inmate at the Marion County Jail, Beverly Hudson,3 contacted West. She also had information. Hudson told him that a cellmate of hers, Alexa J. Whedon, had confided to her that on the day of the Sheese murder she had been at a party with Vanessa Thompson, Malcolm Wilson, and Shanna Sheese. According to Whedon, Thompson had previously been Wilson’s lover, but he had recently dumped her in favor of Sheese, which had infuriated Thompson. Apparently, Whedon said, Thompson, already angry at Sheese over some drugs she had supposedly stolen, became so incensed when she saw Wilson and Sheese together that she suddenly smashed Sheese in the head with a brick.
Alexa Whedon additionally confided to Hudson that, although in the past she, too, had been involved with Malcolm Wilson, at the time of the murder she was actually in a lesbian relationship with Vanessa Thompson. Because of this, Whedon said, she joined in and also struck Sheese with a brick. She told Hudson that after she and Thompson thought they had killed Sheese, Wilson took her bloodied body to the vacant lot, but as he was getting ready to dump her he found that Sheese was still alive and gasping. So Malcolm Wilson bashed her several more times in the head with a brick and killed her.
Even with all this new information, Detective West knew that it still wouldn’t be enough for the staff of the Prosecutor’s Office, since it involved only overheard conversations and unsubstantiated claims. He didn’t have enough yet.
“All I had,” West said, “was a lot of ‘he said, she said.’ I knew I needed some hard evidence.”
Now that he felt he knew what had actually happened, West began collecting more statements and searching for more evidence. In any free time he had between his other cases, he would visit the murder site and interrogate everyone he could find who might have any knowledge at all about the case. And as will often happen when a person refuses to give up, West’s persistence paid off and he soon began accumulating small bits of evidence. Finally, when West felt that he had collected enough evidence, he brought everything he had, including many additional statements he had taken, to the Prosecutor’s Office, which then filed murder charges against Wilson, Thompson, and Whedon. In three separate trials, juries found all of the defendants guilty of the murder of Shanna Sheese. Malcolm Wilson received sixty-five years in prison, while Vanessa Thompson and Alexa J. Whedon each received fifty-five years.
This one case, however, was by no means the only time that Detective Roy West demonstrated exceptional ability as a homicide detective. Another investigation that showcased his extraordinary intuitive abilities was West’s investigation into the murder of eleven-year-old Lashonna Bates.
On April 5, 1994, a man who said he was searching for a runaway dog in a large wooded area on the northeast side of Indianapolis stumbled onto the extremely decomposed body of Lashonna Bates, who had been reported missing a month and a half earlier from her home over five miles away. According to police reports, Bates had last been seen waiting for a school bus on February 15, 1994. During the autopsy, the pathologist found that Bates had died from blunt force trauma to the head. Although the body was badly decomposed, and later there would be conflicting testimony, the pathologist stated that he didn’t believe Bates had been sexually molested.
Steven Guthier, the homicide detective initially assigned to the investigation, worked intensely on the case, interviewing dozens of people and repeatedly canvassing the areas where Bates lived and where she had been found. After hundreds of hours of investigative work, and the assistance of several other homicide detectives, Guthier wasn’t able to turn up much evidence or information about what had happened to the little girl. The chief suspect in the case was a relative of Bates, one who had allegedly been sexually molesting her. In fact, Bates’s mother had reportedly been planning to turn the relative in to the police on the same day her daughter disappeared. However, the relative had a solid alibi for the time Bates disappeared, and consequently, the case stalled. Eventually, when no arrest was made, Guthier’s lieutenant took a look at the investigation, and after reviewing the case status, decided to deactivate it.
Five years later, in 1999, the cold case squad reopened the Bates murder investigation. The cold case squad is a team of homicide detectives who look into old deactivated murder cases in the hope of perhaps finding new witnesses or maybe clues and evidence overlooked in the original investigation. Sometimes, along with trying to find new witnesses and evidence, this unit can also try using new technology that was not available when the original detective investigated the case. In the Bates investigation, however, the cold case squad was unable to find any new evidence or witnesses. They, too, saw the relative as the key suspect and unsuccessfully tried to break down his alibi. After two years of fruitless investigation, the cold case squad was about to deactivate the Bates murder case once more.
Before they could, however, Major Richard Crenshaw, the command
er of the Crimes against Persons Bureau, asked that a detective who hadn’t been involved in the original case or in the cold case investigation take a fresh look at the file just to be absolutely certain nothing had been missed. Since this crime had involved such a young and totally innocent victim, he didn’t want to let it be shelved again if there was any chance at all of solving it. Roy West was the detective assigned this responsibility.
West’s uncanny ability as an investigator soon demonstrated itself again. All of the other detectives who had looked into the case, both originally and during the cold case investigation, had focused on the relative who had been molesting Lashonna Bates. West, however, apparently saw something in the file that the other detectives didn’t that made him suspect the man who had found the girl’s body.
“I saw some things in his statement that struck me as odd,” West explained. “Whenever he talked about Lashonna [Bates], he personalized it too much.”
West contacted the man and explained to him that he was taking one last look at the case. He didn’t want to alarm the man or frighten him into running, so he acted as though everything he was doing was just routine. He asked the man if he would mind coming down to the Homicide Office and answering just a few questions. In addition to being an exceptional detective, West was naturally also a skilled interrogator, and he eventually got the man to confess to the crime and reveal information that had never been released to the news media and would only be known by the murderer.
And so, when in late 2000, a person came forward claiming to have knowledge about who had committed the triple murder on North LaSalle Street, Detective Sergeant Roy West, because of the abilities he had shown in dozens of murder cases, and particularly because of his ability to see things unapparent to other detectives, became the obvious choice to investigate it. With his usual enthusiasm and vigor, West went right to work.
1 Denotes pseudonym
2 Denotes pseudonym
3 Denotes pseudonym
CHAPTER TWELVE
On November 17, 2000, the Indianapolis Police Department Homicide Branch received a telephone call from Deputy Deborah Borchelt of the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office. She called to pass along the news that a young woman named Angel Palma had come into her office and said that she had some very important information about a triple murder that had taken place up in Indianapolis. The young woman, however, only had scant information about the murders. Palma told Borchelt that she thought the murders may have occurred in 1971 and that three men had had their throats cut. She went on to tell the deputy that she suspected the killer might have been her father, Fred Robert Harbison, and that he had been hired by another man to kill the three victims.
Police officers often hear stories like this, about someone suspecting someone else of a crime. Usually, the information comes from hearsay or an overheard conversation. Seldom is it based on fact. And so, when Borchelt asked Palma how she knew all of this, expecting to hear a typical story about how someone had told someone else who had told her, Palma instead said that her father had left a letter confessing to the crime in his safety deposit box, only meant to be opened after he died (which he had in 1998). In the letter he told about his involvement in the murders. Now Deputy Borchelt was interested. Deathbed confessions of this sort often contain information about actual crimes.
Consequently, Deputy Borchelt excused herself, told Palma that she would be right back, and then went and contacted the state police post in Indianapolis, where she talked with a Trooper Brooks. In smaller rural counties, such as Gibson, the Sheriff’s Office is much more used to dealing with the state police involving murder investigations than with the local police. She told Brooks what Palma had said and asked if there had been such a case in Indianapolis in 1971. Gibson County is about 145 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The news in this area comes more from Evansville (Indiana) and Louisville than from Indianapolis. After a bit of thought, Brooks said he believed Palma must be talking about the North LaSalle Street killings, but that he wasn’t positive the date was 1971. He thought it might be later. At any rate, the trooper told Borchelt, it wasn’t the state police who had investigated that case. It hadn’t fallen within their jurisdiction. The case had been investigated by the Indianapolis Police Department. He gave Borchelt the telephone number of the Indianapolis Police Department Homicide Branch. Borchelt thanked him and then hung up and called the Indianapolis Police Department.
As luck would have it, Deputy Borchelt talked to Sergeant Roy West when she called into the Homicide Office. West listened to her story and then asked the deputy to get a recorded statement from Angel Palma. After she sent him the tape, West told her, he would listen to the interview and, if it seemed like the statement had any veracity to it, an investigator, depending on who got the case, would come down and speak with Palma.
West was well aware of the North LaSalle Street murders. Although they had occurred in the year before he joined the police department, everyone who had lived in Indianapolis during that time knew about them. They had filled the newspapers and television news broadcasts for weeks. But in addition to this, West also had a much closer connection to the case—when it was resurrected in the early 1990s by Carol Schultz, West had been detailed to assist Detective Jon Layton. Although only peripherally involved in the case at that time, doing mostly “gofer” work, West was nevertheless well aware of the major aspects of the case.
When, at West’s request, Borchelt went back to speak with Palma, she found the young woman to be very reticent. Palma didn’t want to go into much detail about the letter, and seemed particularly nervous about giving a recorded statement. Palma said that right then all she really wanted was just to be certain that a crime such as this had really occurred. Palma said she wasn’t 100 percent sure that the information in the letter was true, but she felt she had to check it out.
“Initially she [Palma] was scared,” West said. “When she originally brought this information to the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office, she was fearful of giving them too much information.”
After confirmation from Deputy Deborah Borchelt that such a case had occurred, Angel Palma finally began talking. She said that, according to the letter, her father had been hired to kill the three men so that another man could collect on an insurance policy. When asked by Deputy Borchelt, Palma refused to give the name of the man who had hired her father but said that she would possibly give it later if the information in the letter proved accurate. At this time, Palma said she wasn’t totally certain that the letter wasn’t just a hoax or joke. She wanted to be absolutely sure that the facts in the letter were true before she gave out too much information. Also, she believed that the man her father claimed had commissioned the killings still lived in nearby Jasper, Indiana, and so Palma said that she was worried about the safety of herself and her two children if she accused him of murder.
In the letter, Palma continued, her father stated that the reason he was writing it was because he had been cheated out of the money he had been promised for the killings. He said in the letter that he had warned the man who hired him that he was going to write the letter and put it in his lockbox at the bank. If he wasn’t paid by the time he died, his wife would send the letter to the police.
This was all the information that Palma wanted to give at the time. However, she left promising to come back in and bring the letter.
“Naturally, I was skeptical about the letter in the beginning,” said West, “given the amount of time that had passed and the publicity the case had gotten.” West had not forgotten the huge amount of publicity—not just local, but also national—that Carol Schultz had generated with the case.
Three days later, Angel Palma again showed up at the Gibson County Sheriff’s Office, this time upset and disheveled. She told the deputies that earlier that day she had been involved in a disturbance with her uncle, Jeff Pankake, and that two officers who had been called to the scene had taken her to the local hospital in handcuffs, but that the hospital ha
d later released her. Palma said that she had intended to come to the Sheriff’s Office that day and bring them the letter from her father, but that it had disappeared from her purse during all of the ruckus surrounding her being handcuffed and taken to the hospital. It had been in her purse, she said, when she arrived at her uncle’s house, but then it wasn’t there when the police gave her the purse back later. She didn’t know what had happened to it.
Deputy Borchelt, after listening to Palma’s story, contacted the police department in Princeton, Indiana, where the disturbance with Palma had occurred. The officers involved in the incident said that when they arrived at the scene they had spoken with Jeff Pankake. He showed the officers where Palma, during the disturbance, had apparently broken several windows in his car. She had been so upset that Pankake asked the two officers to take her to the local hospital for observation. Pankake would later tell West that Palma was having a very difficult time dealing emotionally with the revelations about her father, a man she had adored, and that she apparently took her frustration out on his car windows.
When the officers who had responded to the disturbance call spoke with Palma, she told them about the letter she was bringing to the Sheriff’s Office. She told the officers that she had come over and shown the letter to her uncle. The officers said that they then went and asked Pankake about the letter, and he showed them a scanned copy of it on his computer. Pankake, apparently having realized that in Palma’s emotional condition anything could happen to the letter, had scanned it as a precaution. After scanning it, Pankake said he gave the original back to Angel Palma. Palma apparently still had the original in her purse, but in her excited condition the officers likely wanted to speak with someone calmer, so they went to Jeff Pankake. The officers verified to Borchelt that the letter had talked about some murders in Indianapolis, where the victims had had their throats cut.
Slaughter on North Lasalle Page 18