In with the Devil

by James Keene

  He was shoved to the side while a correctional officer asked, “So what do we got?”

  The marshals acted as if they didn’t even remember Keene’s name, he was just some guy they had to transport. They handed over his file, then joked around with the guards. Had he really been taken for such a sucker? Only as they turned to leave, when the guards had their heads turned, did one of the marshals look directly at Jimmy and sneak him a quick thumbs-up. This was to be his one shred of consolation as the guards shouted at him to remove his clothes and bend over for the strip search.

  After the intake guards had issued Keene his bed kit and toiletries, they took him directly to his cell. To move between buildings, they walked downstairs to a network of submerged, humid tunnels. Jimmy was shocked at how old everything looked, from the plaster walls and pillars to the battleship-linoleum floors. The only light came from recessed ceiling fixtures that cast a dim yellow haze. At last they surfaced in “9 building,” and a ward that looked more like a hospital floor than a prison, but with doors of solid, vaultlike metal.

  Inside, the cell was slightly bigger than the ones at Milan, but the added space made the furnishings look even sparser—an open toilet, a metal slab bed that pulled down from the wall, and a galvanized-steel locker, desk, and bookshelf unit common to all federal prisons. Keene was just starting to set up his toiletries when a loud, reverberating buzzer sounded through the ward. Still in a daze—he hadn’t slept for a day—he wandered outside his cell and was immediately caught up in a crush of convicts surging down the hall. Keene figured they were going to breakfast, but compared with the orderly procession to the mess hall at Milan, he says, “This was like mass hysteria: guys running, shouting, and shoving.” They all wore green shirts, camouflage pants, and shiny black boots—like a bizarre army. Most disturbing for Keene were the ones who shuffled forward with blank expressions like zombies in what looked to be some drug-induced stupor.

  He followed the crowd to a cavernous dining hall with cathedral windows, where noises—clinking plates, strange chatter, and shouts—echoed even louder. The tables were bolted to the floor in row after row, like the pews of a church. As Keene looked around to see where he should pick up his tray, his eyes suddenly locked on a pudgy little con sitting in the corner. It was Larry Hall.

  “I thought, ‘Damn, there’s the dude already,’ ” Keene says. “After all the months of looking at his picture, to see him there was too much.” He had put on a few pounds and was clean-shaven—without the muttonchop sideburns from his mug shot—but he still had that faraway gaze. Despite the chaos swirling around him, he seemed locked into his own world.

  Jimmy knew he was supposed to stay cool and detached, but even after he sat down at the opposite end of the cafeteria, he still couldn’t take his eyes off Hall. He felt his heart pound and his clothes tighten with sweat. His whole future was now wrapped up in this one man. He had hardly eaten a bite before the buzzer sounded and he was back on his feet. Now the tide of prisoners was sweeping him out of the dining room, and Hall was directly in his path, just a few yards away. As he stumbled closer, Keene’s mind raced with the possibilities. “I was thinking, ‘Maybe I should talk to him, but what should I say? Should I even say anything? They told me not to say anything to him. But maybe I can talk this guy into helping me. But why is he going to help me? He doesn’t give a shit about me. He just wants to help himself. But then maybe I can beat it out of him.’ ”

  Despite all his inner turmoil, Keene still felt himself drawn to Hall like a magnet; closer and closer until—thump—he bumped flush into his shoulder. Startled, Hall spun around, his eyes swimming, confused, then fearful.

  “Shit,” Jimmy thought, “what have I done?”

  4.

  Life in the Cemetery

  Things never went better for Robert Hall and his family than when he worked as a sexton in the Falls Cemetery on the southwest side of Wabash, Indiana. He dug graves along its winding paths and tended to hilly grounds no bigger than a pocket park. For manual labor, the job paid well—as good as factory work—and better yet gave him the right to live in the sexton’s house, a big shambles of a place with white clapboard shingles. It sat on a ridge, in the corner of the cemetery, overlooking gravestones and mausoleums, but with a backyard that included a babbling brook and more green space than anyone else had in that part of Wabash. The spooky backdrop aside, it was pretty fancy digs for the son of a housepainter, and the perfect place to raise a family.

  The Falls is one of the oldest independent cemeteries in Indiana, but in the twenty-five years Hall worked there, the surrounding neighborhood changed as much as at any time in its history. Just blocks away, on either side, huge factories opened, which then recruited out-of-state workers to man the shop floors. The newcomers moved into ranch houses that cropped up across empty fields and ash pits, right to the edge of the cemetery. Since many of them came from Kentucky, locals from elsewhere in Wabash disparaged the enclave as Wal-Tucky, or worse, Wal-Trash. To accommodate the mushrooming population, a secondary school complex was built in the valley down the hill behind the Falls equipment shed, and the once-quiet streets around the cemetery rang with the shouts of children.

  For most of those who grew up in the neighborhood, the sexton and his wife could be strange and intimidating figures—like trolls in a fairy tale. Robert had a broad, florid face and a burly body made that much more powerful by his work. Some felt threatened by his gruff manner and the ever-present smell of beer on his breath, but he loved impressing little boys by ripping catalogs and Bell phone books in half as easily as most people tore up envelopes. His wife, who was known by her middle name, Berniece (her first name was Aera), did not go out of her way to impress anyone. Instead, she is remembered as a grossly overweight woman with a pinched face and sharp tongue, especially sharp in defense of her rambunctious twin sons, Larry and Gary.

  When the boys were born on December 11, 1962, the Halls were considered, in that era, fairly old to have babies. Robert was then forty and Berniece thirty-three. She already had a sixteen-year-old from her first marriage. This birth would be difficult; the doctor told her that Larry emerged from the womb looking blue—or deprived of oxygen—and nearly died. A more recent diagnosis of his condition would be “twin-to-twin” or “fetofetal” transfusion syndrome, which is unique to identical twins. According to multiple-birth researcher Elizabeth Bryan, “The phenomenon arises when blood from one baby crosses to the other baby and the recipient doesn’t give as much back.” Ironically, as they mature, the identical twins that survive the syndrome look more different than fraternal twins. Because of Larry’s complications, the babies and their mother stayed in the maternity ward for another week before they went home.

  Their parasitic relationship in the womb—where Gary thrived at the expense of Larry—would become inverted during the rest of the twins’ childhood. Gary emerged taller, slimmer, and more outgoing, while Larry was pudgy and painfully shy. Gary was always the one to make friends and initiate any activities. Larry tagged along like a soft and silent shadow.

  Despite their modest means, Robert and Berniece doted on their sons. Ross Davis, who became one of the boys’ best friends, remembers that he was attracted more to the toys than the twins. “They always had something,” he says, “like a minibike or a go-cart or a dirt bike; things my parents couldn’t afford to give me. You could always go up to their house and ride and hang out with them and have a fun time.”

  But the spacious yard outside the Halls’ home contrasted sharply with the squalor inside. “The house was a big place, but it was a dump,” Davis says. “It was like a path to walk through. Stuff was piled everywhere. Mrs. Hall was always having a rummage sale, and we used to joke that they lived inside a rummage sale. All the years I knew that family, I never once saw her do any cleaning. They would eat out every day because she was too lazy to cook. That’s why they never saved a penny. She was just a big fat lady who sat around the house all day and did nothing but yell
and stir up a lot of trouble.”

  Once, when the twins played with Davis at his home, they all got into a fight and Ross went inside. To get him to come back out, the brothers threw stones at the house until Mr. Davis chased them away. When he called to tell Berniece what her sons had done, Ross says, “She laid it all on me. She told my dad, ‘That little son of a bitch Ross was up here throwing shit at our house yesterday, and they’re just getting back at him.’ That’s the way it was with her. Her kids could do no wrong.”

  But according to Davis, as the boys got older, they increasingly did do wrong. They started out with fairly harmless pranks, such as leaving a wallet stuffed with money in the middle of the street and then using fishing line to jerk it back through the hedges when drivers got out of their cars to investigate. “We’d be watching and laughing behind the curtains of their windows as those people tried to find that wallet.” They next directed their hoaxes at the police, dressing up dummies and placing them in the gutter as though they had just been hit by a car or passed out. “They’d wait and listen on the police scanner. When somebody called in and reported it, then they’d run back outside, grab the dummy, and throw it behind the hedges. The police would look all over the place for it and give up. But after they left, the Halls would throw the dummy back out there again and keep the cops running all night long. Those boys really did have a thing for fooling the cops.”

  At the age of fifteen, the Hall brothers graduated from practical jokes to property damage and were arrested for breaking downtown storefront windows. Some friends believe they were led into the mischief by another neighbor who also had relatively elderly parents and limited supervision.

  Wabash detective Ron Smith and his partner were assigned to the case, and they questioned each boy individually. Usually, teenagers crumbled quickly under those conditions, but Smith says, “It took a long time before we could crack the Hall brothers. They were just kids, but they held up better than hardened criminals, even over something as petty as broken windows.”

  Larry was the first to crack and later explained that he confessed only to get the cops off his back and that most of the damage was really done by Ross Davis’s older brother. Whatever the truth, the Halls were the ones who had to cough up $500 for the damage, which was then a hefty sum, and Larry had to earn it back by mowing the lawn for his father. Smith believes the boys were “terrified” of Robert, which is why they were reluctant to confess and face the consequences from him. “The mother,” Smith says, “was another story. As far as she was concerned, it was always someone else’s fault. Never her boys’.”

  Growing up, the twins were inseparable. As teens they bonded even further with a shared passion for hobbies that followed them into adulthood. It began with collecting old beer cans, a craze that swept blue-collar communities in the seventies. Ross Davis remembers, “If me and my brother had one hundred beer cans, we thought we was doing good, but the Halls would have a thousand. And their dad would just take them anywhere they wanted to go. He knew where all the old dumps were, and they would run around all weekend just so they would have a better collection than everybody else did.”

  While searching the woods and fields around Wabash, the twins began to keep an eye out for Indian arrowheads, too, and this would come to mean more to them than beer cans. Their father always spoke about having Miami Indian blood, and although he could not point to any specific ancestor, the twins themselves had the jet-black hair and eyes that many in the area identified as Native American. The Halls were not alone in claiming Indian heritage: for many in central Indiana, romance and royalty are both associated with Miami blood—probably because so few certifiable members of the tribe remain.

  Besides the name of Wabash itself, the area where the Halls grew up was studded with landmarks associated with the Miami Indians and the various skirmishes that ultimately decimated them—no place more so than the Mississinewa 1812 battlefield, just ten miles south of their home.

  The Miami only reluctantly and belatedly followed the other tribes of the Northwest Territory in allying with the British in the War of 1812. But the Miami were the best fighters of the bunch, routing the Americans from several forts. Once the states regained the upper hand, the U.S. military returned to the area with a vengeance. They tried to massacre the Miami as they slept in their villages along the Mississinewa River and killed dozens, but were bloodied and rebuffed by the fierce warriors yet again. Each year, reenactments of there skirmishes are conducted in a designated battlefield area, just north of Marion, that locals refer to as “1812.”

  The government ultimately prevailed over the Miami, first taking their land and then, in the 1840s, physically removing them first to Kansas and then to Oklahoma—all despite the tribe’s best efforts to assimilate. It is both poignant and telling that one of the best known Miami is Frances Slocum, a white woman kidnapped by Indians as a child. She chose to remain with the Indians even after her blood relatives had tracked her down. Remnants of the Miami who stayed in Indiana or straggled back at the end of the nineteenth century were given property as individuals, but no reservation or recognition as a tribe. In the 1960s, as if to further obliterate their memory, the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Mississinewa River for flood control, creating an expansive lake and reservoir system that swallowed up the ancient Miami village sites.

  The twins avidly read stories about Slocum and the Miami’s greatest warrior chief, Little Turtle. Imagining themselves to be Indian braves, they hiked and fished the reservoir area, always keeping an eye out for arrowheads. Often their searches covered the untilled fringes of nearby farm fields, although they were careful to ask the farmers’ permission before they picked across their property.

  Little of the twins’ curiosity about their Native American roots translated over to schoolwork. They were C and D students at best. When they hit high school, one teacher remembers, their indifferent study habits were coupled with an “ornery” attitude. They wore their hair down to the shoulders and hung out with serious troublemakers from the neighborhood, impatiently biding their time until graduation. There is no record that they participated in extracurricular activities or even submitted photos for the junior and senior yearbooks.

  “We used to say our high school was divided between jocks and grits,” Ross Davis says. “The Halls and people like me were the grits.” Grits worried more about cruising in the right car than going to college. The focus of the twins’ social life became their “street rods” (souped-up production cars as opposed to customized “hot rods”). From the time he was a little boy, Larry had an interest in cars, and he would watch as Robert and his equally gruff neighbor, a dwarf named Bobby Allen, worked under the hoods of their old vehicles. Allen has only fond memories of Larry—maybe because his own son was so unruly. “That was a good kid,” he says. “Never obnoxious, never drank or swore. I will never say a bad word against him.” As a foreman at the factory, Allen was well-off compared with Robert Hall. He had the money to spend on used cars and took Larry under his wing to show him how to fix them.

  The experience with Allen encouraged Larry to devote his senior year to taking vocational courses in auto repair. Although the classes never led to a lasting job, they did give him the ability to bring some decrepit junkers back to life. While other teens may have been attracted to hot cars like Gary’s flashy 1957 Chevy Bel Air, Larry developed a lifelong affection for the more plebeian Chryslers and their Mopar parts. His car was a 1967 Dodge Dart.

  But for all of Larry’s expertise in auto mechanics, he and Gary were still at a disadvantage compared with their friends. “They were just poor boys,” says Ron Osborne, who was part of the Wabash street-rod scene. “They could only fix their cars up a little at a time with whatever money was available to them.” At times, he suspects, they couldn’t even afford the gas to run them.

  Not that there were all that many places for them to go in Wabash during the early eighties—the most popular stretch for cruising was just a couple
of blocks long, and it ran only from a fast-food stand to an auto-parts store and back again. This was the scene for showing off your macho swagger and, if you were so fortunate, your girl—two aspects of the street-rod culture that Larry was not ready to deal with. His twin was another story.

  “Gary had a mouth on him,” Ross Davis says. “That was Gary’s problem. He didn’t care who it was that he’d run his mouth to, and it got him beat up a couple of different times.”

  Silent, awkward Larry was more the target of loudmouths and, at five feet four inches, was far from a threatening presence. But Davis remembers one night when Larry decided not to take any more taunting from one of the toughest boys in school. “Larry and this guy slugged it out; they slugged it out pretty good, actually. You didn’t want to push Larry into a corner because he would fight, and he wasn’t really bad at it for a little short guy.”

  If Larry had an edge over Gary as a fighter, there was absolutely no competition between the two when it came to girls. Throughout his teens, Larry had serious acne, which compounded the insecurity and shyness he already felt. None of his friends remember him having a girlfriend—ever. But with his long hair and more chiseled features, Gary had several, especially after they graduated high school in 1981.

  While Gary’s dates might have been an expected part of teen life in most families, they were loathsome interlopers for Larry. The twins could not share this experience like their hobbies. Instead, the girls took Gary out of the house and away from Larry for extended periods.

  It would get even worse in 1984, when Robert was abruptly fired from Falls. The cemetery association’s board had always been uneasy about his heavy drinking, but when they discovered that he’d been putting bodies in the wrong gravesites, they had to let him go, which meant he had to vacate the sexton’s house as well. At sixty-two, Robert was not about to find comparable employment, so his family took up residence in a dilapidated wood-frame shack with just one bedroom. Larry’s bed was crammed into the tiny living room in the front of the house.