In with the Devil

by James Keene

  This compulsion to kill brings with it other telltale obsessive and compulsive activity—most tellingly for Hall, his need to return to the scene of his abductions and to collect or create items associated with them. Norris compares serial killers to “wild animals” because “they are fascinated with the remains of their crime. They visit the graves of their victims and attend their funerals.” Even after the burial, he explains, the serial killer “likes to keep the crime alive in his memory by reading about the dead victim in the newspapers and even visiting the site where he first found his victim. When many murders have been committed at the same site, it is likely that the killer periodically returns there even when he has no victim to kill.”

  Hall’s return to the scene of the crime one year after Jessica Roach’s abduction was his ultimate undoing. As Gary Miller’s investigation revealed, he did not just troll for girls near Georgetown, where he abducted Jessica Roach. On that same day he also pursued a young woman rollerblading alone in Indiana—one hundred yards from the cornfield where Jessica’s body was found.

  But when Hall was picked up in Gas City, it was not only his proximity to Tricia Reitler’s college that made him so suspicious to the patrolman, or even what the police later described as “an abduction kit” in his van. It was all the paraphernalia he had collected that was connected to her disappearance. Again, this is in line with Norris’s research, which shows that “serial killers are also compulsive record keepers. They maintain scrapbooks and organized memorabilia concerning the killings. . . . Among the items of memorabilia catalogued by the serial killers in our study were scrapbooks with press clippings of the murders [and] press clippings of other or similar serial killings.” It is like a ballplayer who collects trading cards of other players, and this habit would explain why Hall hung on to the old issue of Newsweek with the long article about serial killers. Clearly his knowledge of them was as extensive as his knowledge of Civil War generals. On the bottom of one defaced magazine pinup, Hall had scrawled a name that mystified the FBI investigator, who read it as “Sam Hain.” In fact, Hall meant “Samhain,” the Celtic god of the dead misconstrued as a devil figure by serial killer David Berkowitz, who referred to himself as Son of Sam.*

  While much identifies Hall as a serial killer to a savvy investigator, several aspects to both his personal history and criminal behavior are unique. Most obviously, no other documented serial killer has an identical twin. Second, he defies easy classification into the categories that criminologists use to distinguish different types of offenders who commit sexual violence. Beyond his tendencies to be both megastat and megamobile, he is also what FBI profilers would call both “disorganized” and “organized” in the way he commits his crimes. His impulsive decision to abduct Jessica Roach, his frantic efforts to take her across state lines, and finally his slipshod disposal of her body all suggest the profile of a disorganized offender.

  But the notes on the scraps pulled from his car and room indicate something quite the opposite: a predator that stalks, pounces, and kills with the utmost care—the essence of organized behavior. Indeed, most of the women he confessed to killing have never been found, and for those that have, no physical evidence—no DNA, hair, fibers, or mud—has linked him to their rape or murder. If credit is due for this forensic feat, it goes to the author of these notes—no doubt Hall, but clearly a side of him that no one has heard before: an insistent, calculating inner voice that prods soft Larry into action. Properly assembled, the notes provide chilling insight into the young women he pursued and the methods he used to abduct them during the early nineties.†

  Get one . . . Find one . . . Find one now . . .

  The notes refer to his quarry in terms that don’t define sex or even humanity. They are his “prospects,” “joggers and bikers,” “singles,” or “walkers.” But sometimes he slips. “Seen many nice girls,” he says of one location; in another note he reminds himself, “Take a lot of clothes, blankets—to keep her out of sight.”

  Get one around the southeast Grant.

  He has his own shorthand, but it can be deciphered with only a passing knowledge of local geography. By “Grant,” he means Grant County, just south of Wabash in the northeast quadrant of Indiana.

  Maybe check Taylor areas, or Marsh at Hartford City.

  Taylor University is a small Christian college in southeast Grant County, and the Marsh supermarket, in nearby Hartford City, is frequented by Taylor students.

  Place to find one. Anderson College or Mounds Mall.

  Anderson is another Christian college farther south, and the mall is another local student destination. Neither Taylor nor Anderson is a major university insulated by expansive campus grounds. Instead, they are small schools closely hemmed in by residential streets, industrial strips, and farmland. Students walking to class or dormitories are easily observed by outsiders who drive past on local roads and highways.

  It’s apparent from these notes that Larry Hall continually drove down from Wabash to circle in and around the Christian-college campuses, over and over. “Trolling or cruising activity associated with a search for a victim,” Norris writes, is another part of the serial killer’s compulsive behavior. “Like the relentless animal hunt for food.”

  Seen several singles walking, teen-age, few older, close to country . . . Seen joggers and bikers, many alone . . .

  He is looking for “singles,” or those who are alone and in areas that are sparsely populated—empty side streets, parks, and countryside. These are his “spots.” The notes remind him to “check spots,” and if he finds a prospect, to make sure that “zero people” are “closer.”

  Seen many police cars around Taylor [University]. Very risky.

  If he is worried about the police, he is not just looking for “nice girls” to chat up or ask for a date. The Larry we hear in these notes may be aggressive, but he is exceedingly cautious, too. He checks for the presence of law enforcement and, just in case, plans for a quick getaway. So as not to raise suspicions and to cover his tracks, he replaces his own license plate with abandoned ones. The notes instruct him to find a plate for each of the counties he frequents. He must always remember “to look over E Plans. Three possible.” These could be his “Escape Plans,” because he charts routes away from his “spots” along country roads known by their scenic landmarks or just numbers.

  Take 300 to 500 [Bradford Pike] east into Jay Line to the old house [where he and his parents used to live]. Take out east wilderness to Jay. Most likely to safety.

  His directions repeatedly refer to the “Jay Line,” his own name, perhaps, for the county’s meridian road—as wide as a highway—that slices down south from Wabash, alongside the old Jonesboro train line, through two Christian-college towns and just a slight jog from a third. It is his pulsing glide path to action and then back home again to “safety.”

  Things to have done for trips . . .

  On the surface some of those “things” don’t seem necessarily harmful. For example, he writes, “Buy two more cans of SF.” He probably means “starter fluid,” an ether compound that can be sprayed into carburetors to turn over old engines, but it can also produce light-headedness or unconsciousness if sprayed into a rag that’s placed over the mouth and nose. Other items on his lists proceed similarly from the quotidian to the queasy: “Buy new tarp to cover the whole rear, no exposed carpet, no remnants, no body contact, buy condoms, buy two more leather belts, take Buck knife, gloves, mask.” Buck is a popular brand of hunting knife and creates a jarring juxtaposition to the condoms, gloves, and mask. It also makes you wonder what he intended to do with those belts. Elsewhere, he reminds himself to bring rope.

  A theme throughout the notes is avoiding “contact”: body-to-body contact and contact of a body with any surface in his van. He includes the following on one list of chores: “Buy two more plastic tarps, clean out van rear, put curtains back up in windows, furnace tape tarp [to] van, ready to haul, zero contact equal safe, silk sock to cover it
, underwear, head cover, rear door plastic, bleach rear of his van.” What does he intend to cover with the sock—a used condom? The silk, as opposed to some other fabric, would keep it from leaking. What is a “head cover”—something to cover a prospect’s head? There is no question what he means by “zero contact equal safe.” Next to another reminder about covering the rear of the van he adds, “No evidence. No forensic residues.”

  If his old friends had looked through all of Larry Hall’s notes, none of the writing would have amazed them more than a poem found on a discarded piece of paper in his room. He was a poor student in school, even considered developmentally disabled by some teachers and acquaintances. But the voice in this piece is a sophisticated companion, who can be as wistful as he is calculating. He writes:

  Now, I know it’s hard, so hard sometimes

  To leave the ones you love behind.

  But I feel a calling from deep inside,

  Sometimes so strong it’s hard to hide.

  I can feel the winds of change, my friend.

  I feel them blowing through my mind.

  And I know it’s time for me, my friend,

  To be moving on down the line.

  In early 1993, weeks before the abduction of Tricia Reitler, the “winds of change” were blowing Larry to the streets surrounding Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion. Like Anderson and Taylor, IWU is another small Christian college shoehorned in among local residents and commercial strips. A large factory assembly plant is just a block away from the campus in one direction, farm fields a block away in the other. Here, too, a Marsh supermarket is a few blocks from the dormitories, and this is where Larry reminds himself in the notes that he has “seen many nice girls.”

  He loops in and out of the nearby streets, around and around, over and over, monitoring the movement of students in the afternoon and evening. One long stretch of the road leading to the supermarket is deserted by the end of the day. The early-evening walkers are especially important to him because he has decided that this is when he should strike: “to let the time [be] near dark,” he writes, with enough light to still give his prospects a false sense of security while the curtain of darkness relentlessly falls.

  Ready end of February? Plan and plan. Check over again.

  For anyone familiar with the research, these notes are very much in keeping with the behavior of serial killers. But for anyone familiar with Larry, they are strangely at odds with virtually everything friends knew about his personality. The commands are as blunt and bold as those from a drill sergeant. They have a confidence and even a cockiness that the shy individual had never shown in any other pursuit.

  This curious contradiction in character was of no concern to the FBI evidence technicians. Even on the surface, the material pulled from his vans contained incriminating information about Hall’s involvement with Roach and Reitler as well as several other unsolved crimes, including young women still listed as missing. Some of the evidence was as explicit as a bottle of birth control pills with the victim’s name on it found in the piles of clothes. Within days after Hall’s extradition to Illinois, an FBI spokesman told the press that a “multi-jurisdictional group of detectives” were investigating Hall for his connection to the Roach case. Two weeks later, the same group was now looking at other cases “across the country.” By the end of December, a federal grand jury in Illinois indicted Hall for the abduction of Jessica Roach, but word kept leaking out about his association with yet more victims, which finally reached a crescendo with the January 21, 1995, headline from the Associated Press: “Report: Hall linked to 20 murders.”

  Although that list has never been completely released to the public, it was known to include at least three areas where there were clusters of women suspected killed or reported missing. Two clusters were in Indiana. By the state line with Illinois, besides Jessica Roach, a year earlier Holly Ann Anderson had been found three miles away, stabbed to death in a drainage ditch. Two miles from where Tricia Reitler was last seen on campus, Wendy Felton had disappeared from her family’s farmhouse in 1987. The third cluster was in central Wisconsin, near a historic mansion that hosted a Civil War reenactment each summer. In July 1990, Berit Beck was abducted in Appleton and then found strangled to death in a drainage ditch six weeks later. In August 1992, Laurie Depies was seized from a parking lot in Menasha, leaving behind a cup of soda on the roof of her car. Her body was never found. They were pretty young women under the age of twenty with striking physical similarities—almost all had brown, shoulder-length hair and short, athletic builds.

  Looking back on those heady days, Deputy Sheriff Gary Miller is still amazed at how he took a minor stalking report out of little Georgetown and touched off such a massive nationwide investigation. He is even more amazed at where it all led. “A lot of people ended up believing I was the crazy one,” he says, “and they still believe that to this day.”

  7.

  America’s Most Wanted

  Jimmy Keene may technically have been in the Springfield MCFP, but after meeting the Oddfather, he was also confined to Vincent Gigante’s jail, and the mob boss enforced a strict regime. The next day, he expected Keene to join him almost as soon as the dining hall opened. “The mob had their own table,” Keene remembers, “and Gigante would be there first thing with his guys.” These breakfast companions seemed fairly normal compared to the Baby Killers, if a little bulked up. As Jimmy learned later, they had not been assigned to Springfield because of medical or mental issues but to staff the kitchen, laundry, and maintenance crews. They were all still deeply involved with the Mafia. From what Keene could hear, the old man used snatches of code words to issue commands that were relayed back home.

  As he ate breakfast, Jimmy couldn’t help but sneak a glance at Larry’s table. “He kept looking over at me. I think he had liked having breakfast with me, and it really hurt him to see that I was now with Gigante. That really pissed me off.”

  For his part, the old mob boss wolfed down his food. “Hey, kid,” he said between mouthfuls. “You good at boccie?”

  Keene shook his head. He had never even heard of it.

  Once again, Jimmy had amazed Gigante. “You gotta be kidding me,” he sputtered. “C’mon and I’ll teach you to play.”

  After breakfast, they went outside to the prison yard, where a long rectangular court stretched out by the baseball diamond’s left-field line. It had gravel squares on each side with grass in between that was manicured like a putting green. Keene had seen similar layouts at other prisons, but never knew their purpose. As he watched Gigante expertly bowl the hard, colored wooden balls toward a smaller target ball on the green, he instantly understood why the game was so popular with aging mafiosi. It took minimal physical effort, but required cunning and ruthlessness as you knocked your opponents’ balls off the court.

  “It didn’t matter how cold it was,” Jimmy says. “Gigante was always out there playing. Although he was old and hunched over, he was still exceptionally good. It took a while before I could beat him.” Since Keene’s allergies exempted him from a prison day job and the Oddfather had his own medical pass for a heart condition, Gigante expected Jimmy to be his morning boccie buddy until the others got out of work. On those rare occasions when it rained or snowed, they would sit together and watch Jerry Springer instead.

  Whatever they did, Gigante did most of the talking. He was practically a generation older than Calabrese Sr., but also a more genteel breed of mob boss. While Calabrese still seemed obsessed by his brutal business, Gigante dwelled instead on his huge extended family: kids, nephews, grandchildren, his brother the priest—the life they had in Manhattan and especially the food they ate. Sometimes Jimmy didn’t know what Italian delicacy Gigante was talking about—this was not the cuisine served by his grandmother or the mobsters in Cicero—and the old man would give him another exasperated “Ya gotta be kidding me. You never had prosciutto?” He always punctuated his culinary memories by adding, “And look at the slop we got to
eat in this place.”

  One freezing morning in October while they were alone outside on the boccie court, Gigante cocked his head up at a wing of a building where hospital patients stayed. “You know they brought Johnny Gotti in here today. He’s right up there in that window.”

  Gotti—the Dapper Don—was the one New York mobster Jimmy knew about and, in those days, was probably the most famous mafioso of them all. Keene couldn’t help but look skeptical, which infuriated the old man. He sidled closer to the window, made some quick whistles with two fingers, and yelled, “Hey, Johnny! Johnny!”

  Keene peered up at the window, he says, “And all of a sudden there he was—John Gotti; standing right there on the second floor, wearing the same khaki shirt as the rest of us, but thinner and paler than he looked in the newspapers. They started talking to each other using some kind of code language with their hands. Then they waved good-bye.”

  Gigante turned and punched Jimmy in the arm. “See?” he said triumphantly. “And you didn’t believe me, did you? I knew he was here the moment he arrived. They’re doing that thing on his throat.”

  As Keene later learned, “that thing” was surgery for cancer, which would eventually kill Gotti. What Jimmy never knew was that the Dapper Don and the Oddfather were blood rivals back in New York (the government even charged Gigante with plotting to kill Gotti). To look at the old man on the boccie court, Keene would have thought that they were once the best of friends. Gigante’s eyes misted up and he gave another nod toward the window. “Look at how they’ve crushed us,” he said, referring to the hated Feds. “Now we’re all in here together. Even a guy like you! You’re no crazy psycho killer. But you could be here another fifty years if they had their way.”