In with the Devil

by James Keene

  Keene was shocked. “What are you talking about, man?”

  The biker poked him again. “You told somebody about my business, about them headphones, and I want to know, why’s my name coming out of your mouth?”

  “Look, dude, you’re getting way overirate about this. That guy’s your friend.” But this time, when the biker went to poke him, Keene slapped his hand away.

  “My name never comes out of your mouth or I’ll fucking rip your fucking head off.”

  There was no calming the biker down. “His face scrunched up and kept getting redder,” Jimmy remembers. “Maybe it was the drugs he was on, but I figured that he was going to beat me up to make me an example.”

  When the biker next went to poke him, Keene caught his hand, twisted it, and shoved him across the cell. When the biker threw himself back at Jimmy, swinging wildly, Keene’s wrestling instincts kicked in. He shot down for the biker’s spindly legs and lifted him up. “All of his power was above his waist, so once I had him in the air, he was like a rag doll.” Keene then slammed him down hard on his back and kept pounding him with both fists until the guards came crashing into the cell. “This time,” Jimmy says, “the guards were really rough on me. First they maced me and then they pushed me in the corner and hit me all over with their sticks. They knew about my other fight, even though it wasn’t on my jacket.” Keene was clearly becoming a problem for the correctional officers, and they were going to inflict their own punishment irrespective of the hearing panel’s decision.

  Keene spent another night pacing in the hole, wondering if he had blown everything by participating in such a senseless fight. When he was brought to the hearing, he was surprised to see the chief psychiatrist sitting on the panel, but he never said a word during the entire session. Although the circumstances were certainly in Jimmy’s favor—“The clown was waiting for me in my cell,” he testified—Keene did not like the weary looks of those who had been in his other hearing. He was quickly developing the “assaultive” reputation that the chief psychiatrist had warned him about.

  Ironically, the biker came to his rescue. “When they brought him in,” Jimmy says, “he was totally hard-core and wouldn’t answer a single question they asked. Because of that, they had to find him at fault. For punishment they threw him in the hole for a good long time.” When he got out, the biker confronted Keene in the TV room, but this time he stuck out his gargantuan fingers to shake hands and not poke him. “We ain’t got no problems anymore, do we?”

  Jimmy shook his hand, but neither had any intention of being friends. “The only reason he shook my hand,” Keene explains, “is because he was the only one who knew how bad I beat his ass. If I did it again, his big-bad-biker rep would go downhill really fast.” Even though the biker wouldn’t again be a threat, Jimmy realized that the clock was ticking before some other nutcase touched off a fight.

  But then someone appeared who would scare Keene far more than a six-foot-eight biker. He was eating breakfast with Gigante when he heard a shout from across the dining room: “Hey, Jimmy. Jimmy Keene.”

  It was Malcolm Shade, the pudgy, little identity thief who had been Keene’s cellmate at the Chicago MCC lockup. He rushed over to Keene’s table, clapped him on the shoulder, pumped his hand, and said, “How’s it going, man? This is the last place I expected to see you.” The only reason the BOP had sent Shade to Springfield was to stabilize a kidney disease.

  “At first,” Keene recalls, “I was happy to see him, too. He could be a fun guy to hang out with, but immediately, right in front of the mob guys, he asked, ‘So how is that big drug conspiracy case of yours going?’

  “He said it loud enough for everyone to hear. I turned my head and could see Chin and all of his guys looking at me. As far as they knew, I was in prison on weapons charges, so what the fuck is this guy talking about?”

  Keene jumped to his feet, grabbed Shade by the arm, and pulled him to the side. “What are you doing?” he hissed. “You can’t just walk up and talk about my case in front of a bunch of strangers.”

  Shade threw his head back as if he’d been slapped. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, Jimmy. I didn’t mean any harm. I just wondered what was going on with you.”

  Keene then returned to the table and laughed Shade off to the mob guys, but they stared at him with quizzical looks. If they knew he was lying about his case, they would immediately suspect he was there to inform on them—another reason for him to get Gigante’s knife in the back.

  No matter how often Jimmy scolded him, Shade couldn’t shut up about Keene’s drug case. They used to talk about it so much when they were in the MCC, he wanted to know how Jimmy made it go away, and usually he’d ask when a mob guy was within earshot. Because he was black, Shade would not be embraced by the Italians the way Jimmy was, but Malcolm had more in common with the mobsters than he did with the gangbangers who made up the bulk of Springfield’s African-American population. Keene feared that in time Malcolm would become friendly with someone in the crew and spill everything he knew about Keene’s life as a drug dealer.

  Between Shade and the unpredictable nature of the other inmates, Keene felt he could no longer sit around and let Larry decide when he would confess to his crimes. Jimmy needed some other way to force the issue. He thought he found it one night in Hall’s cell when he pointed to a big manila envelope. “It’s from my lawyer, Mr. DeArmond,” Hall said. “It’s about my appeal.”

  This was the perfect opportunity to start asking about his case, even to discuss the basis for his appeal. Among other things, Keene remembered from Beaumont’s briefing it regarded expert testimony as to whether Hall’s confession had been coerced by the police. But Larry would not go into details. Instead, he kept looking at the envelope and his eyes welled up. Then he said, “You know, he won my last appeal.”

  Keene did know that to be true. He also knew how much the appellate court’s decision annoyed Beaumont. Hall continued, “And he’ll win this appeal, too.”

  Jimmy had heard that one before. It seemed as if everyone in prison with a pending appeal believed he would win it—even Frank Cihak, Keene’s library coworker in Milan, and Gigante, hardened old-timers who should have known better. “That appeal was their last hope,” Keene explains. “And once they had finally lost all their appeals, it was like their lives were over.”

  But seeing how Hall had gotten all teary at the mention of his appeal and his lawyer, Keene suddenly realized that Larry truly believed he would win it. And he believed with a fervor that was different from that of all the other convicts.

  “If Larry had religion,” Jimmy says, “it had nothing to do with the cross on his wall. His lawyer, Mr. DeArmond, was his God. Larry believed he was going to save him. And if he really did believe that he was getting out, why would he ever admit to me what he had done?”

  8.

  Innocence

  Through most of Gary Miller’s career as a deputy sheriff in Vermilion County, Craig DeArmond had been a familiar presence behind the prosecutor’s table, first as an assistant state’s attorney and then, for eight years, as the state’s attorney. Tall and distinguished looking, he had a Lincolnesque profile and a deep, deliberate voice. As a frequent witness for the prosecution in criminal cases, Miller had watched him in action many times. “I’d say DeArmond was a hell of a lawyer,” the deputy sheriff says. “Probably one of the best trial lawyers in the area.”

  Over the years of working together, the two became friendly, if not necessarily close friends—even after DeArmond opened a private practice and, as Miller puts it, “went to work for the other side.” Still, the deputy sheriff never expected, by any stretch of the imagination, that he would be facing off against the former state’s attorney in the most important case of their respective careers. But this was to be one more consequence of bringing federal charges against Larry Hall. Since the Central District of Illinois then had no federal defender’s office, U.S. judge Harold Baker had to tap a local private attorney to represent the indige
nt Hall, and given the considerable challenges of the high-profile case, he chose the most qualified candidate.

  If anyone on the government’s side expected DeArmond to go through the motions with Hall, they were sadly mistaken. Instead, he mounted a ferocious defense, enthusiastically joined by the defendant, his family, and their friends back in Wabash. Emboldened by his attorney, Larry reached out to the press from his Danville jail cell in February 1995. “Hall: FBI framing me” was the headline for one article, which quoted Larry saying, “I did not kill or kidnap Jessica Roach or any other girl. Unfortunately the truth will come out as another helpless girl comes out missing. And the real killer is still free to choose among the innocent people of this whole area.”

  Hall also complained that the extensive press coverage—with FBI spokesmen citing steadily increasing numbers of his putative victims—would discourage any future jury from believing him. “It’s come to the point where I’m completely snowed under by the FBI’s reports and stuff,” he said. “And I feel I’m not going to have a chance.” Later he added, “I’m just basically a helpless individual. I’ve just been totally taken advantage of by the FBI.”

  Between Hall’s remarks to reporters and motions filed by DeArmond, the contours of Hall’s defense strategy had already come into shape. First was to discredit—or ideally discard—Hall’s confession statement because, as DeArmond argued to the court, it was “improperly coerced.” Second was to establish an alibi. Hall claimed to reporters that “many witnesses,” principally his twin brother, Gary, would testify to seeing him at an Indiana reenactment far from Georgetown on the day of Jessica Roach’s abduction.

  Miller had no doubt who really orchestrated the interviews. “DeArmond,” he says, “uses the media perfectly.” But despite his respect for Hall’s counsel, Miller had no regrets about his role in making Jessica Roach’s abduction a federal case. “I still say that it was the best decision I could have possibly made, because we got Larry Beaumont as our prosecutor, and he was exactly what we needed.”

  Miller first got to know Beaumont after the new federal court was built near Miller’s office in the sheriff’s department. “He kept locking his keys in the car and calling over to see if we had a slim-jim to get the door open,” Miller says, laughing. As he would later learn, the forgotten keys were not the sign of an absent mind, but one working overtime. “He was the sort of prosecutor who left no stone unturned,” Miller says. “And I mean not one stone.”

  Such would be the case with all the evidence submitted by the defense. For example, to help bolster Hall’s alibi, DeArmond turned up a receipt for a transaction on the day Jessica Roach disappeared. It came from Helfin’s Sheet Metals, the auto supply store in Wabash that Larry and his friends would cruise their street rods around. Besides displaying Larry’s full name as the recipient of the service and the date of the transaction, the slip also provided the time of the transaction—5:30 p.m. That would have made it impossible for Larry to abduct Jessica Roach during the afternoon in Illinois and then drive 150 miles in time to pay Helfin that evening. “When Larry [Beaumont] showed me that receipt,” Miller says, “I told him that there’s got to be something wrong here, and he said, ‘You bet there’s something wrong with this.’ The typical prosecutor would have told me to look into it, but Larry Beaumont went to Wabash with me, and we both met with Mr. Helfin. Beaumont let him know that we’d have to examine that receipt closely and ask him to testify under oath about it. After a while, he said, ‘Okay, wait a minute. I did a guy a favor. [Larry Hall’s father, Robert] came in here and asked me to make this receipt and then an hour later came back and had me add the time, too.’ ” As a result, the time was on the slip that Robert Hall took with him, but not on Helfin’s carbon copy.

  Beaumont was now able to flip the defense evidence into powerful ammunition for the government’s case. On rebuttal he could call in Helfin to testify about Robert’s request for him to create the receipt. That sort of testimony usually had a big impact on a jury—innocent men should not have to rely on such concoctions. Of course, Beaumont could also have brought charges against old man Hall for fabricating the evidence and tampering with a witness, but Miller says that they never had any intention of doing so. “We figured he was just desperate to help his son. There are probably a lot of fathers out there who would do that.”

  As the Hall family went around town enlisting witnesses to support Larry’s alibi, they contacted Ross Davis, the twins’ friend from childhood. He had rented some space in his barn for Larry to store two vintage cars. On occasion, after Larry was done working on them, Ross and his wife would invite him to drop by for something to eat. Now Larry was telling his lawyer that one of those dinners occurred on the night he was accused of abducting Jessica Roach. Ross did have him over that week, but a few nights later. He could pinpoint the exact date because they had looked at some car parts that had just arrived and Davis still had the delivery slip.

  Of course, this was not the corroboration that Larry’s family and lawyer wanted. Gary Hall asked if he could visit Davis’s home with DeArmond. “He was pretty impressive,” Ross says of the defense lawyer. “He told me how he had been a prosecutor himself, and then he started talking about the investigators on Larry’s case, and he said, ‘I know these guys and they put several people in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Now they’re on a head hunt for Larry to blame him for a lot of unsolved cases. They’re going to put him away if you don’t help.’

  “I don’t think he wanted me to change my testimony or anything,” Davis says of DeArmond. “I think he was just trying to feel me out. But I told him, ‘You better tell Larry not to talk about having dinner with me, because I’ll have to testify against him if he does, and that will be a sad thing for all of us.’ ”

  Davis had another reason to doubt Hall’s veracity besides his dinner story. A few months before Larry was arrested, Ross was listening to the police scanner with his wife when they heard a call about a man driving a two-tone van stalking a teen girl. Immediately his wife suggested that the van might be Larry’s, and Davis reached for a pad to take down the license plate number that the girl’s family reported. A day or two later, when Hall dropped by to work on his cars, Ross checked Larry’s plate and then confronted him. “I said, ‘Larry, I want to know what the hell is going on here. What’s all this shit I heard on the scanner?’ ”

  After Ross told Hall what he had heard, Larry replied without hesitation, “Oh, that’s not true at all, Ross. Here’s what happened: I’m going down the street—and there’s cars parked on both sides with just enough room for me to get through—when I see these people working on a car. They’ve got it jacked up, and this big fat-ass bitch is bent over the fender, and there’s no way to get by. I honk the horn for her to move, but then they all start to holler at me, and we about get in a fight. Next thing I know, the police are pulling me over.’ ”

  Hall was so sure of himself that Davis backed off. “But I then said, ‘Larry, I don’t know what you’re into, but if there’s anything you need to get off your chest, go ahead and tell me. I’m your friend and I’m not going to tell anybody about anything you say.’ But he didn’t have anything to say, except to go on about that big fat-ass bitch. You know, the story sounded real and I almost believed him. In fact, I wanted to believe him. Who wants to think his friend is trying to abduct young girls?

  “I didn’t hear about his arrest [for murder] until a day or two after it happened. As soon as I did, I thought back to us standing in my barn and how quickly he dreamed up that story about the lady with the fat ass and how completely he lied—right to my face. About a half hour after that the FBI pulled up to my house wanting to search the place.”

  When Garry Reitler thinks about his daughter Tricia, he often remembers when he took her back to Indiana Wesleyan University for the last time. The four-hour drive from their home outside Cleveland was usually a good chance for the two of them to share a few long conversations. A homebody, Tricia ha
d trouble adjusting to life at school away from her close-knit family, not just the parents she considered her best friends, but her two younger sisters and brother. She stood out on the conservative Christian campus with her taste for denim cutoffs and colorful leggings. A bubbly free spirit, she could take two aerobics classes in a day, call her mother to check that she, too, had done her exercise, then go running in the evening. According to a journal entry from an IWU writing class, she did much the same back in Ohio, on occasion running through the streets of her neighborhood while the rest of the family slept.

  Her freshman year at IWU had been tough on Garry, too, mostly because he missed Tricia so much. Growing up, she had been as much a buddy as a daughter, able to talk sports or even debate like an adult. Meanwhile, Garry was going through a rough patch of his own, trying to build a furniture-manufacturing company from a woodworking trade, but Tricia was so mature, he could even confide in her about his own struggles.

  During the trip, they picked up a young couple who were hitchhiking across the country, and Garry took them a few hundred miles to their next destination. The travelers were living something of a hippie lifestyle—one distinctly different from that of the Reitlers, who were just as openly straitlaced and ardently religious. The Christian character of IWU was what most attracted Tricia to the school. Garry listened as the three young people had a spirited debate about spirituality. “The thing with Tricia,” Garry says, “is that she never judged them. She really wanted to understand why they thought the way they did. She was just such a unique person in that way. After we dropped them off, the two of us talked about religion on a deeper level than we ever did before.”

  Tricia had entered IWU as a psychology major and had started to consider a career in family counseling. She returned to memories of her family in an essay for a Bible-study class. “While I watched other ‘Christian’ families fall apart and give into the world, mine never did. . . . My prayer is that I can take a stand when I raise a family and do half as good a job as my parents.”