by James Keene
But Wabash police officers were still driven by the fear that a mass murderer had been operating under their noses. For those who knew Larry’s family, their first thoughts went to the ghoulish backdrop of his upbringing—Falls Cemetery. After receiving permission from the cemetery association board, the police chief dispatched Whitmer on another grisly mission—this time to search the cemetery mausoleums for any sign that Hall had hidden his victims there. He remembers, “It was an eerie feeling to open up those crypts, and to be honest, it was kind of shocking to see how the people inside decomposed. But as far as we could tell, there was no double occupancy.”
Although it seemed as if the nation’s attention was on them, the Wabash City police didn’t even have an official case against Hall other than for stalking. It was up to the FBI to lead the way, and it took three weeks after Hall’s arrest before the Evidence Response Team from Washington, D.C., arrived in force. They were assisted by the Marion police, who were still contemplating charges in the Tricia Reitler case. Together, they removed the piles of paper and clothes from Larry’s room for off-site sifting. Earlier they had seized his two vans: the 1984 Dodge Ram and a more dilapidated 1980 Plymouth Voyager, which no longer ran, but was used for storage. It had been planted in the front yard for years before the police hauled it off to a local garage.
Since he drove the Dodge to work, Larry kept its front bucket seats and rear bench relatively clean, but the cargo bay was filled with boxes, old license plates, and piles of clothing. Trash rose to the windows of the Plymouth like water in a tub: car parts, two-by-fours, buckets of tools and bolts, plywood. On the surface, none of it appeared to incriminate Hall for more than slovenly pack-rat ways. There were no obvious weapons, bloodstains, or implements of restraint.
But upon further examination, chilling evidence did emerge—none of it forensic, as the crime-show cops would say, but some of it truly graphic: photographs of young women torn from pornographic magazines had been marked to show mutilation, strangulation, and stabbing. Teeth were blacked out and blood was drawn dripping from the mouth. On the bottom of one page, in pen, was written, “Jessica,” with blood drawn dripping from the letters. Her name was also found in a 1993 U.S. Postal Service book of Christmas stamps. Less sensational but even more compelling were Indiana maps marked with dots, including one that indicated the spot where Jessica Roach’s body was found and another where Gary Miller believed him to have murdered her. (Hall confirmed that the maps and marks were his when Randolph went to visit him in the Vermilion County jail.)
Other writing was found, too, notes tucked under the carpeting of the Dodge van and pulled from Larry’s room. At first, the notes appeared to be no more than lists, but on closer inspection, they also contained fevered commands and obsessions that broke out like welts on the white scraps of paper. Pieced together, they comprised an instruction guide to serial rape and murder in central Indiana. If there was any question as to whether the notes were some sick charade or the modus operandi of a real killer, one of the few complete sentences among all the writing appears to give the answer: “I can’t see the faces, but I can hear the screams.”
While Larry sat in his Danville jail cell, back home the local newspapers reported on his community’s stunned response to the charges against him. A neighbor who described herself as “in total shock” explained to one reporter, “He always struck me as being very quiet, kind of backward. . . . He always appeared shy, willing to help. . . . I feel sad for his parents.”
It took those parents a day to respond to the press, but when they did, the Halls were vociferous in their son’s defense. The headline for the interview blared, “Hall’s parents talk of ‘kind’ son.” His mother, Berniece, told reporters, “Any women he ever meets he treats with kindness. You can talk to any of his friends here in Wabash, and they’ll all tell you he treats women with respect.” She added that he had several girlfriends who would concur, although she did not name any. His father, Robert, chimed in, “We think he’s an awful nice boy and he’s not capable of this. We brought him up the way he was supposed to be brought up, and he turned out right.”
To further prove her point, Berniece volunteered that Larry was an identical twin, as if to argue that he could not have committed such crimes without involving his brother. She added, “All Larry and Gary want to do is hunt arrowheads, collect coins, and do Civil War reenactments. Murder isn’t in their book.”
Those sentiments were echoed by the friends who knew them best, starting with next-door neighbor Bobby Allen, who had watched the twins grow from children to men. “They’re not no violent people,” he told a reporter. “I never seen Larry with a rifle, a BB gun, or even a slingshot. If he went hunting, it was for old beer cans.”
Micheal Thompson, the fellow foot soldier in the Iron Brigade, had probably spent as much time with the brothers as any outsider during the many hours they traveled to Civil War reenactments. “To be honest,” he remembers, “I thought if either one was guilty, it would be Gary. I couldn’t imagine that Larry could be that aggressive with anyone.”
Still, even in the first newspaper articles about his arrest, other information about Larry emerged that was at odds with the portrait of the gentle soul painted by friends and family. A reporter for the Wabash Plain Dealer found one woman who claimed that he had stalked her and a friend as they jogged in the early-morning hours a few months earlier. When she complained to the police, they told her that Hall had already been arrested for stalking on several occasions and one time needed a “letter of credibility” from his boss at the Credit Union to get released from jail.
But for most Wabash readers, more eye-opening than the stalking charges were the connections Hall had with the Tricia Reitler case in Marion. They would come to light in the same article that included the parents’ defense of their son. (It also appeared on the day that Larry met with FBI agent Randolph to recant his confession.) As the newspaper reported, eight months earlier, a policeman from Gas City stopped him just two miles from where Tricia Reitler was last seen the year before—almost to the day. He was stalking teen girls just as he had in Georgetown on the anniversary of Jessica Roach’s murder. But this time, the police caught him before he drove away from the area with “items” that supposedly implicated him in Reitler’s abduction.
Hall’s parents angrily dismissed the story. “If Gas City police don’t retract what they said, someone’s going to get a lawsuit,” Robert Hall told a reporter. His son’s van had been impounded after the traffic stop, Hall explained, but it was then returned. “I was with Larry when he went to get his van and nothing like that was in it.”
As she did when Larry was younger, Berniece turned any charges against her son back on his accusers. “Gas City just did this for publicity,” she said. “Gas City has picked on that kid.”
But Gas City police were not about to retract anything. The chief replied, “I will verify everything in the report. I was at the scene where the van was stopped and saw the items. Marion police also were called to the scene and photographed the items.”
For people in Wabash and Gas City, one question loomed over all of these revelations was, why had the Marion police done nothing further after the stop in Gas City? But in Marion itself the question had long since been answered. “Privately, [Marion] police say they don’t believe Hall did it,” Marion Chronicle-Tribune executive editor Alan Miller wrote shortly after Hall’s extradition to Illinois. As summed up by the column headline, Miller was more concerned that the news would bring another “Agonizing day for the Reitlers,” meaning Tricia’s parents, Garry and Donna. In fact, the Marion police were immediately in touch with the Reitlers to downplay Larry’s confession to Randolph and Miller. The Chronicle-Tribune quoted Donna saying, “[Hall] gave no more information than he could have gleaned from your newspaper. If he had given us something a little more concrete, then that would have been a possibility. I think it was a man seeking attention.”
The Marion police felt they had
a much more likely suspect in Tricia’s abduction than Hall. Neither Larry’s confession nor the developments in the Roach case could convince them that Hall was anything more than a “wannabe” serial killer.
But how would a real serial killer have behaved? Surprisingly, the Indiana detectives did not know, and most other police departments don’t either.
Next to the mobster, if any type of criminal has won celebrity status in America’s popular culture, it is the serial killer. Psycho and Silence of the Lambs are respectively the twenty-third and twenty-fourth most searched films in the Internet Movie Database, and since the silent era, more than one thousand movies have been devoted to the subject. A serial killer has been featured in hundreds of television shows, dozens of documentaries, and even has the starring role in one recent series. Amazon has more than twenty-two thousand books for sale that deal with serial killers, as well as two hundred comic books and graphic novels, including one series called Psycho Killers, which devotes each issue to an actual serial killer. In the words of criminologist Steven Egger, who has studied the phenomenon, serial murder has become “a growth industry.”
Despite all the fascination with serial killers and the extensive coverage of their crimes and trials, Egger writes, “Law enforcement agencies today are simply not adept at identifying or apprehending the murderer who kills strangers and moves from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.” As opposed to fictional villains such as Hannibal Lecter, Egger argues, the men who actually commit multiple homicides are not all that proficient at killing—the cops are just not very good at catching them.
The failings of local police aside, the general public is still confident that a higher authority in law enforcement, the FBI, will protect them against serial killers. Thanks to TV crime shows and such movies as Silence of the Lambs, this faith is buttressed by the belief that the Bureau has access to comprehensive databases of information and that oracular special agents—known as profilers—can sift through this data to predict the identity of potential predators with uncanny precision.
But in truth, there is no real clearinghouse for information about unsolved homicides or missing persons—with the FBI or any other federal agency. Although crime writers often refer to the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program (VICAP), it is limited to information voluntarily submitted by local police departments. HOLMES, the United Kingdom’s counterpart system, has proven much more effective because all levels of British law enforcement are forced to participate and provide uniform data. HOLMES also includes missing-person reports, which can be essential in identifying a serial-murder spree when the bodies of only a few victims have been found. In the United States, the friends and relatives of the missing must file notices with a hodgepodge of authorities to get their loved ones on lists that can vary by state, county, city, and, in the case of Pennsylvania, even by State Police troop.
As for the vaunted FBI profiles, these, too, have come under fire. In a New Yorker article titled “Dangerous Minds,” Malcolm Gladwell quotes forensic scientists who have analyzed FBI profiles after the perpetrators had been caught and found them to be either wrong or too vague to be of any real use to investigators. According to criminologist Egger, any proactive role played by the FBI—in either the detection or prevention of serial murder—is a “myth” that is “carefully manipulated [by the FBI] through the media.” Instead, he writes, “The identification of a serial murderer frequently occurs through happenstance or a fluke,” as a result of “routine police work in response to a seemingly unrelated criminal event.”
Larry Hall’s arrest would certainly qualify as one of Egger’s flukes. Had he not been tracked down by Gary Miller for stalking in Georgetown, there is no telling how much longer he would have been on the loose. But he had already been caught stalking—in another fluke—by the Gas City police and the Wabash City police before that. Egger writes that typically “police do not exchange investigative information on unsolved murders to police in different jurisdictions,” a failing he labels as “linkage blindness.” But in Hall’s case, Gas City police immediately contacted Marion detectives, who then followed up with their colleagues on the Wabash City force. Although the Gas City police were convinced that they had caught Tricia Reitler’s killer, both Marion and Wabash were just as convinced that Larry was “harmless.”
Ironically, one of the items seized from Hall’s van by Gas City police was a 1984 Newsweek article on serial killers. In it, a forensic psychiatrist comments on the nonthreatening appearance of most multiple murderers: “These aren’t the people who are camped under freeways talking to themselves. Their overt sickness is a momentary thing—very episodic, very impulsive.”
This clinical description of the serial killer’s startling duality—so serene one moment, so savage the next—sounds much like the legend of the werewolf. Werewolves held a particular fascination for Larry Hall, who was known to draw them or cut out clips about them in prison. Stories of men who switch back and forth into wolves date back to Greek mythology, but according to The Book of Were-Wolves by the nineteenth-century folklorist Sabine Baring-Gould, werewolf tales became more prevalent in Europe during the Middle Ages after several notorious incidents of actual serial murder by deranged noblemen.
Like werewolf hunters in fairy tales, real-life detectives searching for serial killers must see through the hypernormal veneer that a serial killer displays to the outer world—what psychologist Joel Norris calls the “mask of sanity.” Although it may be difficult to predict exactly who is committing a string of similar unsolved homicides, once a suspect is in hand, investigators can look at both his personal history and alleged criminal behavior to see how he compares with men previously convicted of serial murder.
Giving Hall that sort of evaluation in 1993 would have been like running uranium past a Geiger counter. Of the twenty-one psychosocial “patterns” identified by Norris in what he calls the “serial killer syndrome,” Hall shares as many as fourteen. These include repeated efforts to confess and seek help, sleep disorders, issues with memory, placid “no-affect” appearance, low self-esteem, an alcoholic father, problems at birth, and the probable difficulties his older mother had during pregnancy.
Hall’s out-of-body experiences and inability to distinguish dreams from reality, which the Marion police found so interesting—but not incriminating—are conditions common to serial killers. Norris describes these as “periods of blackout or gray-out in which the person experiences long periods of floating sensations.” Citing the research of neuropsychologists, he attributes these episodes to “deep brain dysfunction,” which may correlate with birth trauma or early childhood head injuries. During the acts of violence, he writes, “The person seems to meander in a semi-dream state, experiencing hallucinations or delusions as if he were a healthy person on the very edge of sleep.”
For those who rape and murder, there is also a high incidence of a “smothering” overprotective mother, much like Berniece Hall. In many cases the son’s intense feelings for her are complex. If he’s a victim of maternal abuse, he may be obsessed with either killing his mother or women who remind him of her. But with men like Hall (who would call Berniece “darling” and “sweetie” when he talked with her on the phone each week from prison), the sentiments for their mothers are remarkably tender—especially considering the brutality they inflict on their female victims. If nothing else, the mother’s dominance leads to “inadequate socialization,” which may have contributed to Larry’s extreme shyness and his failure to consummate a normal romantic relationship with a woman, yet another trait of serial rapist killers.
Even Hall’s involvement with Civil War reenactment—what seemed like his healthiest outlet—would make criminologists suspicious. To assume Norris’s “mask of sanity,” serial killers often draw attention to themselves with a high-profile disguise. The most famous example is John Wayne Gacy, who killed thirty-three young men in Chicago while he won awards for his charitable activities performing as Pogo the Clown. When
Ted Bundy went on a rape and murder spree that claimed more than thirty-five college coeds in the Pacific Northwest and Florida, he simultaneously volunteered to work on suicide hotlines, campaigned for local politicians, and even wrote a handbook on rape prevention. Creating a convincing alter ego is not a stretch for serial killers, Norris argues, because “they have spent a lifetime repressing the cancerous rage at the core of their personalities.”
According to Norris, these extracurricular activities also serve as “camouflage” to help the killer find new victims—rootless young men for Gacy, and for Bundy, attractive young women who were also volunteers. With Hall, reenactments and the search for classic-car parts gave him a ready excuse to travel widely. “Many killers have extraordinarily high mileage on their cars,” Norris writes, “and this can lead to their identification and arrest.”
The proximity of victims to their killer is an essential part of the typical serial killer profile. The “megamobile” killer, such as Bundy, has victims spread across wide stretches of geography. The “megastat,” such as Gacy, primarily kills close to home. But if Hall’s confessions were to be believed and the actions preceding his arrest taken seriously, then he appears to have been an especially lethal mega-combination, with victims close to home and across the country. Whether a serial killer is “stat” or “mobile” may depend on his circumstances more than his desire.
With the far-flung destinations of Larry’s leisure activities—and the virtually unsupervised nature of his job—he had the opportunity to be a menace both near and far. He also had the personal freedom necessary for the all-consuming double life of a serial killer. As Norris writes, because the serial killer’s homicidal behavior “is a compelling urge that has been growing within him sometimes for years, he has completely amalgamated this practice into his lifestyle. It is as though he lives to kill, surviving from one murder to the next, stringing out his existence by connecting the deaths of his victims.”