In with the Devil

by James Keene

  The whirlwind of publicity that followed Hall’s arrest and indictment did little to sway the Marion detectives’ opinions about Larry or Tony Searcy. Although Lieutenant Kay continued to call Searcy the “prime suspect” in the Reitler case, he was always careful to leave the door open for Hall should there be more convincing evidence of his guilt. Other Marion officers working on the investigation were not so nuanced. “Tony [Searcy is] the guy. There’s no question in my mind,” Sergeant Darrell Himelick, chief investigator for the Grant County sheriff, told the Chronicle-Tribune. In the same article those feelings were echoed by Kay’s boss, Marion chief of police Dave Homer. “Personally I believe [Searcy is the top suspect],” he was quoted as saying. “I felt that way from the beginning.”

  But from the perspective of Beaumont and Miller in Illinois, nearly as much incriminated Hall in the Reitler abduction as in the Roach case. Beyond just the physical similarity between the victims (same height, build, and brown, shoulder-length hair), Hall also made specific references in his notes consistent with what is known about Tricia’s last hours on the campus.

  For example, he refers to the Marsh supermarket on the edge of the IWU campus as a place where he has “seen many nice girls.” He writes, “Lots of walkers at 7:15, walking to apartments on Nebraska [Street] and 44–43 [streets]. Must be housing for the university.” Tricia was last seen shortly after 8:30 p.m. at the drugstore next to Marsh in the same strip center. The most direct route from the stores to the dorms is Forty-fifth Street, bounded by athletic fields on one side and a park and pool house on the other, which is where her clothes with drops of blood were found.

  But most telling is an entry Hall makes on “April 5, ’93.” Reitler had been abducted the week before. If she had indeed bled inside his van, then the following actions that he itemizes are especially ominous: “Replaced rear grass carpet in van, cut out stained carpet, vacuumed van thoroughly, sprayed down chemical, wiped with Armorall, burn paint tarps, buy new hacksaw blades, clean all tools with denatured alcohol.” It’s not clear why he must clean those tools, especially the hacksaw, but the stains he is cutting out and the residue he is vacuuming or wiping away very much appear to be the “forensic evidence” he constantly reminds himself to destroy in other notes.

  Just as intriguing are the final lines in his April 5 entry: “Take tires off and clean mud from under fenders. 700 West Frances Slocum Trail.” By that address, Hall could have meant one of several locations. Frances Slocum was the white woman abducted by Indians as a child who spent the rest of her life with the Miami tribe. Many different roads in the area bear variations of her name, but all are located in or around the Mississinewa reservoir, where Larry fished and searched for Indian artifacts with his brother. If mud went into the wheel wells and under the fenders, Hall evidently took his van off the road and it sank deeper than he expected. Given the sequence of activities in his notes, he may have gone off road to bury Tricia Reitler. Elsewhere in the notes he reminds himself to “put a bag of lime at the spot and spade under the bridge.”* The lime would have helped speed decomposition if he had indeed buried a victim there. He would have made note of a nearby address so he could return to it, as he did the cornfield where he left Jessica Roach’s body.

  Evidence of Hall’s fixation with the IWU campus went beyond his notes. After the extensive publicity surrounding his arrest—including copies of his mug shot with the distinctive muttonchop sideburns—two young women recognized Hall and came forward to testify about something that happened when they were roommates at the school. It occurred one evening just a week after Tricia Reitler had disappeared. They had gone shopping at the Marsh supermarket, and on the way back to campus, as they walked along the same street where Tricia’s clothes had been found, they noticed a van slowly following behind them. The driver leaned out of his window to yell something, so they had a better look at his face. The students didn’t wait to find out what he wanted. They rushed back to their dorm to immediately report the incident to campus security, and a guard soon spotted the van as well. When he had the driver pull the van over, Hall told the guard that he had been looking for a friend’s house in the area and had gotten lost.

  For Beaumont and his investigators, all of the Tricia Reitler evidence, complete with eyewitnesses, was too valuable to pass up. He could not charge Hall with her murder without complicating the Roach case—especially since Tricia’s body had never been found—but he could still use the Marion case to show the jury a pattern of behavior that would be duplicated in Georgetown: the stalking, the collection of memorabilia about the victim, the returning obsessively to the scene of the crime.

  But from a media perspective, any evidence about Tricia Reitler was sure to upstage the Jessica Roach case. Reitler’s disappearance had been much more publicized both regionally and nationally. As far as the Marion investigators were concerned, Beaumont was unnecessarily dragging their case into his, either to make a point about their dereliction or just to poke a finger in their eye. When looking back at how the law enforcement agencies in Illinois and Indiana viewed each other, Gary Miller says, “It did get kind of personal.”

  In the rivalry, Craig DeArmond saw an opening for his client. When he produced a list of the defendant’s witnesses, it included several members of the Wabash and Marion police departments.

  On May 23, 1995, when the curtain lifted on Larry Hall’s trial, the jurors could not have asked for a more dramatic opening—Assistant U.S. Attorney Lawrence Beaumont played the segment about Jessica Roach from America’s Most Wanted. John O’Brien, then a seasoned court reporter at the Danville News-Gazette, had eagerly awaited the proceedings, and they didn’t disappoint. “Any homicide trial in Vermilion County was considered big news, especially where you have a stranger abduction of a young girl,” he says. “But the added element for me was watching Beaumont and DeArmond. You really didn’t have two better lawyers in the area, and every day they just slugged away at each other like two heavyweights.”

  But aside from the initial glitz of America’s Most Wanted, Beaumont spent four days methodically laying out his evidence. First he established how Jessica suddenly disappeared with testimony from the sister who saw her off on the bike, the bus driver who first saw that bike abandoned in the middle of the road, and the parents, who then reported her missing. Beaumont next presented eleven witnesses who had either been targets of Hall’s stalking or witnessed it, including the IWU students, the two young Georgetown girls whom Hall followed as they rode their bikes, and the father who then drove around town looking for Hall’s two-tone van to get the license plate number.

  For the government, the voices of all the young victims of Hall’s stalking joined into a compelling chorus of the ones-who-got-away. They would be a counterpoint for Jessica Roach—the one who didn’t. Her body was discovered, jurors learned, when a farmer, Rusty Smith, spotted “something that just looked out of place; something dark.” He was followed to the stand by a parade of forensic experts, who established that the grisly remains that he found were those of Jessica Roach.

  To place Hall in the area at the time of Jessica’s disappearance, the government called four witnesses who had seen him observing the nearby Revolutionary War reenactment—he stood out like a sore thumb in his Civil War Hardee hat and muttonchop sideburns. Also, approximately six hours after the abduction, Monte Cox, a gas station attendant returning from a late shift, saw a “stocky” man emerge from the cornfield where Rusty Smith would find Jessica a few weeks later. Cox thought the man was some out-of-towner cut short by Mother Nature who had pulled over to relieve himself. But, he testified, “I thought that was strange, too, since it was so far from the highway.” He would be the only witness to place Hall directly at the crime scene, but he waited two months before he called Crime Stoppers, and his vague memories of both Hall and his van, parked across the road from the cornfield, were the easiest to shake under cross-examination.

  The two government witnesses who spent the most time
on the stand were Mike Randolph and Gary Miller. Beaumont took them step by step through their sessions with Hall and how his confession had unfolded. Beaumont’s case culminated with the pictures, notes, and paraphernalia discovered in Hall’s rooms and vans—especially the map on which Larry had marked in the spots corresponding to the cornfield where Jessica Roach’s body was found and the woods by the pond where Miller believed she was killed.

  Right from the start, in his opening remarks, DeArmond indicated the tightrope he had to walk with his client. “You may not like Larry Hall,” he told the jurors. “But he is not here for a popularity contest.” The lawyer admitted that Larry acted in suspicious ways—but only to get attention. As he explained, “[My client] suffers from a number of mental and emotional problems that led him to engage in a series of very serious and self-destructive behaviors that included planting false evidence in his van, behaving in a manner intending to arouse suspicion, and, eventually, making incriminating statements which were not true.”

  As DeArmond admitted, it was hard to understand Hall’s “self-destructive behaviors,” but he assured the jury “that police quite often confront people who, for one reason or another, make false admissions or confessions about crimes. They even have a term for it. It’s called wannabes.”

  To the astonishment of both Beaumont and Miller, the excuse that the Wabash and Marion police departments had used for not taking Hall seriously had now become the central tenet of his defense. Beyond the wannabe explanation for Hall’s actions, DeArmond still needed testimony to refute the government’s evidence, but his most persuasive argument pointed out what the prosecution lacked—namely, despite the best efforts of the FBI and all of its celebrated crime laboratories, “not one tiny speck” of physical evidence linked Larry to any crime he “supposedly confessed to.”

  The rest of the defense case proved much more difficult to sustain during Beaumont’s cross-examination and rebuttal. DeArmond started with the alibi, lining up friends and family to testify that Larry was elsewhere on the day that Roach was abducted. Leading off these witnesses was a stooped Robert Hall, who looked and acted older than his seventy-two years. He apologized for his hearing, caused an early recess so he could walk back to the car to get his reading glasses, and, when challenged on the auto parts receipt, admitted, “I am getting feebleminded.” He was followed by Larry’s twin, Gary Hall, who testified that on the day of Roach’s abduction, Larry attended a Native American reenactment with him in Rochester, Indiana, 30 miles north of Wabash and 180 miles from Georgetown. But on cross-examination, Beaumont reviewed the answers Gary had given FBI agent Temples shortly after his brother’s arrest. At that point, before Gary understood the significance of what he told Temples, he even volunteered the place where he and Larry first saw a handbill advertising the fateful Georgetown Revolutionary War reenactment. For those who knew the Hall family history, the most surprising defense witness may have been Gary’s first wife. Despite a history of periodic estrangement from her ex-husband, she still showed up to confirm his alibi testimony, since he claimed to have brought their daughter with him. But some of the other friends who testified about Larry’s presence at the Rochester reenactment were far from certain about the exact day they saw him and were easily shaken by the prosecutor. The alibi was shredded even further by shop owners who testified in rebuttal about Robert asking them to fabricate receipts, and Ross Davis, who produced a shipping receipt to prove he had had dinner with Larry a few nights after Jessica Roach’s abduction, and not the night of her abduction as Larry claimed.

  Another essential part of the defense was to show that everything in Larry’s confession was contained in one of the articles he read or collected. But as Beaumont pointed out, no newspaper reported on strangulation as the cause of Jessica Roach’s death or pinpointed the place where she was murdered, as Hall did on his map and in his statement. Also, when he confessed to Randolph about Reitler, Hall remembered that a barking dog had approached shortly after he seized her. At the time of the abduction, police in the area had received a complaint about a barking dog, which had never been reported in the press. Also, Hall had described Jessica’s bike as having both curved handles and ten speeds, another detail he could not have read in the papers.

  But more than anything, DeArmond’s case hinged on how Larry’s mental issues could make him unusually suggestible to the good-cop/bad-cop routine of Randolph and Miller. As DeArmond pointed out, the day after the deputy sheriff’s first interview with Hall, Larry learned that he would be losing his counseling services at the local mental health clinic. DeArmond argued that Larry was then forced to pretend he might be a danger to the community so that his therapy would continue. He signed the statement from Randolph because he was eager to please and “suggestible.” Indeed, he didn’t even question the first line of the statement where Randolph accidentally wrote, “I, Larry DeWayne Daniels . . .”

  To prove his point, for two hours DeArmond hammered away at Gary Miller about what information Hall had really volunteered and what Miller had suggested to him. Eventually, the cross-examination tried even the patience of the judge, who admonished the defense counsel in a sidebar. (“You are asking the same thing over and over again.”)

  Having observed DeArmond so often in the past, Miller knew exactly what Hall’s lawyer was trying to do. “Basically his mission was to destroy my credibility and the credibility of the statement we took from Hall. But I don’t think he caught me.”

  In addition to his cross-examination of Miller and Randolph, DeArmond planned to build much of his coercion argument around the testimony of Richard Ofshe, a professor at the University of California–Berkeley and an expert in the field of false confession. But Ofshe never personally interviewed Hall. Instead, he listened to a tape of Larry that DeArmond had made. The professor was also prepared to analyze the testimony Miller and Randolph gave during the trial. But in a hearing outside the presence of the jury, flinty Judge Harold Baker (the same judge who sentenced Jimmy Keene) dismissed the idea of Ofshe critiquing other testimony in the trial. He snapped, “You’re asking this witness to judge the credibility of the witnesses and you usurp the function of the jury [to judge the witnesses’ credibility] and I will not permit it.” Judge Baker then dismissed Ofshe before he uttered a word to the jury.

  The most crucial testimony on the state of Larry Hall’s mind was therefore left to Larry Hall himself when he took the stand in his own defense—in every way the climax of a most dramatic trial. It was a bold move on DeArmond’s part, but the confidence that Hall had in his lawyer was clearly mutual. Ironically, in meeting DeArmond’s expectations for his performance, Hall may have performed too well. In contrast to the defense testimony that he had a “low-average” IQ, Hall came off as articulate and well prepared on the stand. Like an actor in a play, he hit every mark that had been laid out for him during rehearsal, especially when DeArmond walked him through the convoluted reasons why he desired police attention. “It made me feel important that they wanted to talk to me,” Larry told the court. “I was desperately trying to get—I don’t know—you call it attention or whatever.”

  In a similar vein, he testified that he actually wanted to be arrested by the Gas City police. “I love the attention of when they would pull me over and they wanted to question me, and I would refuse the questioning and it made me feel important, like I knew something that they didn’t.”

  He went on to claim that he had prepared a script about the Reitler abduction a few weeks before he was pulled over in Gas City. “I wrote out everything the way I wanted to tell him or tell whoever I was talking to.”

  Hall admitted he was not as eager to talk to Randolph and Miller, but that they held him in the Wabash station for too long a time. “I would have said just about anything for them to let me go home, which they told me [they would do] after the questioning was over.”

  If Larry’s self-assurance seemed out of character during his direct examination, so, too, was his attitude d
uring Beaumont’s cross-examination. His responses were sharp and combative. When the prosecutor asked where he learned unpublicized information about Roach and Reitler, without hesitation he claimed that it had been divulged to him by the detectives who questioned him.

  At times, in the heat of their exchanges, Larry could even be snarky. When Beaumont pointed to a dot on the map that marked where Jessica Roach’s body was found, he asked, “Where did you get the precise location [to put that] dot?” Hall shot back, “How precise can you be on an Indiana state map?”

  At another point Beaumont asked, “Is it possible that there was a great big bag of lime in your van?” Hall replied, “It is possible that there was a bag of lime in there, but I don’t know about a great big bag of lime.”

  In both direct examination and cross-examination, Hall spent more time on the stand than he did when he was supposedly trapped in the Wabash police station, but he never cracked—the sort of fortitude that may not have played well with his jury. Beaumont could turn that feat into one of his strongest arguments. Although the defense psychologists had testified that Hall was “unduly suggestible,” Beaumont argued, “On cross-examination, for an hour and ten minutes, I asked him nothing but leading questions, and he never agreed with me once. Not once.”

  The jury took fewer than three and a half hours to convict Larry Hall for the abduction of Jessica Roach. But behind the scenes of the Roach trial another battle had played out over the abduction of Tricia Reitler. Although Detectives Bender and Kay had been called by the defense to testify about Hall’s confession to them and why they dismissed it, they were fairly circumspect about eliminating him entirely as a suspect. But out of the presence of the jury, Sergeant Darrell Himelick, chief investigator for Grant County, and Marion chief of police David Homer both named Tony Searcy as the prime suspect in the Reitler case. Because nothing else in evidence supported their theory, Judge Baker would not let them testify.