In with the Devil Page 11

  As Jimmy introduced himself to Larry’s breakfast companions, he could understand their lack of popularity. One was in his twenties, tall and skinny, with a mullet haircut and big bug eyes. He sat erect, and his head swiveled like an owl’s, staring out at the room around them. Supposedly he had taken a chain saw and, for no reason, murdered the family in the house next door. Another tablemate was in his thirties with a froglike face and reading glasses always perched at the edge of his nose. He had killed little girls—or so Keene was told by other inmates. The third was big and fat with a bad case of acne. Jimmy never learned his crime.

  For most of the meal, Keene was the only one who talked. He cracked jokes; he complained about the food and asked what they liked to eat. Only Hall seemed to tune in to him and even brightened a bit when Keene spoke. Out of the corner of his eye, Keene could see that Larry was squinting at him with increasing interest, almost as if he recognized a long-lost friend.

  The next time they saw each other at the library, Hall was a little more animated, saying hello as well as good-bye and making a brief comment about the news. For some reason, he liked the formality of calling Keene, “James.” Keene found him most chatty at 7:00 p.m. when they stood together in the pill line outside the nurse’s station down the hall from their cells.

  “What are they giving you?” Hall asked. It was the first question he ever asked Keene.

  “Trazodone,” Jimmy said, “for depression.”

  “I haven’t heard of that one before.” Hall then asked him a series of questions about the drug regarding “classes” and “compounds” and technical terms Keene had never heard before.

  “Larry found it fascinating to compare medicine,” Keene says, “and he knew a tremendous amount about the pills people took in there: how they were made, what they were supposed to do for you, the side effects. Just when you thought the guy was a waste case, he’d come up with information like that and you realized he was a lot smarter than you thought.”

  The nurse doled out a fistful of pills for Hall and he dutifully swallowed them. Keene kept his one pill under his tongue. When he returned to his cell, he ground it up and washed it down the drain. He had stopped taking his medication back in Milan because he hated the side effects, but he learned that he had to dispose of it immediately. If guards ever found the pills in his cell, they could accuse him of hoarding them to sell on the prison’s black market.

  Despite all the progress with Hall, Keene was careful to keep these developments to himself. Everything had moved much more quickly than the Feds had anticipated or desired, and Jimmy didn’t want to take the chance that they would shut him down. Contact with his FBI handlers was only to be in person during visiting hours. Still, Keene was caught totally by surprise when he was summoned to the administration building on his first Sunday in Springfield. Told he had a visitor, he expected to see Big Jim. Waiting instead was an attractive blonde, who was nearly his height when she rose to greet him. She had short-cropped hair and wore a conservative blazer and skirt. When Jimmy extended his hand, she grabbed him by both shoulders and pulled him into a kiss. “Don’t ever shake my hand,” she whispered into his ear. “I’m supposed to be your girlfriend.”

  Her real name was Janice Butkus, and she was a niece of the iconic Chicago Bears linebacker Dick Butkus, but she was also a career FBI agent, working out of an Illinois office, and had signed in at the visitors’ desk with an assumed name. She had gone to some length to develop the alias, in case anyone at Springfield checked up on her. This need for secrecy seemed odd to Jimmy. “You would think the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons would be one happy family,” he says, “but I could see that they really didn’t trust each other.”

  As they talked, to keep up the pretense of being her boyfriend, Keene held her hand—above the table as required by BOP visiting-room regulations. She gave him a phone number he could call to reach her in an emergency and again stressed that he not be too quick in approaching Hall. Keene assured her he was still keeping his distance.

  In fact, he was eating breakfast with Hall every morning. But even as Jimmy continued to show up at their table, it did not make the other Baby Killers any more cordial. “They’d just sit there all spaced-out,” Keene says. “Some of that was due to their medicine, but I don’t think these guys were ever all that interesting. If they had anything to say, it would be ‘Hey, you gonna drink that milk?’ or maybe ‘All right, guys, I’m getting ready to go.’ And their voices were so dull and slow. At least I was quick with my speech, awake, and alive; not drugged out like everyone else. When I talked to Larry, it was about normal stuff, and I could get him to feel like he was free again and remembering what life was all about on the outside. It would bring out the kid in him. Sometimes he even looked a little happy.”

  Bit by bit, Larry opened up a little more about his hometown of Wabash and his family. Often he compared Keene with his brother, Gary. Jimmy had seen Gary’s picture in Hall’s room when he looked inside from the corridor, so he was surprised to hear that they were identical twins. But everything Keene learned came in quick snatches. Their time to talk was limited to the thirty minutes they had for breakfast. Keene still didn’t know where Hall spent his afternoons other than the library, and they couldn’t have a conversation in there.

  Jimmy had come so far in only a few weeks, he figured he could wait out Hall a little longer before he invited him to his cell or some other place where they could talk. But then a conflict arose that neither he nor the Feds ever anticipated. It started one afternoon while Keene was walking down a lonely tunnel corridor before lunch. When he turned a corner, three white weight-lifter types with slicked-back hair surrounded him. He had seen them in the dining room and assumed that they were Mafia. Usually, they hovered around a stooped, elderly prisoner whom Keene figured to be a mob boss. “I pulled back,” Keene says, “because it looked like they were ready to jump me, but instead they said, ‘The old man wants to talk to you.’ ”

  The old man was Vincent Gigante. Then seventy years old, he had been the leader of the Genovese crime family in New York City. For most of the nineties, he had frustrated federal efforts to prosecute him by pretending to have dementia. He wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in a robe and slippers with a vacant stare. Newspapers dubbed him the Oddfather. In fact, he was among the most sophisticated bosses in recent New York Mafia history, overseeing an extensive syndicate for illegal sports-betting rackets and using his control of trade unions to shake down construction sites.

  Keene knew nothing about Gigante’s background, but he had got along just fine with the mob guys in Cicero and Milan prison. He figured he should hit it off with them in Springfield, too. Gigante’s men hustled Jimmy into a corner where the old man was waiting. Up close, he had a passing resemblance to the actor Jason Robards, with wavy gray hair, dark eyebrows, full lips, and a lantern jaw that had earned him his nickname, the Chin. According to mob lore, his underlings were forbidden to ever mention his name, in case their conversation was picked up on a bug or a wire. When referring to him, they pointed to their chin instead.

  Gigante gave Keene the once-over and then started poking him in the chest. “Lemme ask you a question,” he said in a high-pitched, nasal voice. “Why you hangin’ around with them Baby Killers?”

  Keene rocked back on his heels, totally shocked by the question. He stammered and then said, “I didn’t even know what they did.”

  Gigante swatted the air with his hand in disgust. “Oh, c’mon! Are you crazy or something? Everybody in the prison knows what them guys are here for. You want somebody should put a knife in your back?”

  Keene shook his head no.

  “All right then,” Gigante said with a royal wave. “From now on, you eat breakfast with us guys.”

  6.

  “I can’t see the faces, but I can hear the screams”

  After Larry Hall signed his statement confessing to the murders of Jessica Roach and Tricia Reitler—among others—Vermilion County
deputy sheriff Gary Miller was not going home without him. “I really felt that if I left him in Wabash,” he says, “we would lose all control of the case.” Time was of the essence. It was Tuesday afternoon, and there was no telling what the local police in Wabash or Marion might do in the week ahead of them.

  First of all, Miller needed a car. Because he had never expected a confession, he’d hitched a ride to Wabash with Ken Temples, his local FBI agent. After the deputy sheriff left Hall, one of the first calls he made was to his office. “Whoever that investigator was who picked up the phone,” Miller remembers, “I told him, ‘Get in your car and get over here, and I mean as fast as you can.’ ”

  Miller also needed a warrant for Hall’s arrest. Even though he expected the case to end up with the U.S. attorney in central Illinois, he first called his local state’s attorney so that charges could be filed the next day. Some Indiana jurisdiction might also seek Hall’s arrest, but Miller was confident that he had the most developed case, at least for the attempted abduction of the girls in Georgetown.

  Finally, Miller needed Hall’s cooperation so he could take him across state lines. To his surprise, Larry instantly waived the extradition proceedings (Indiana was one of the few states where he could do so without a hearing before a judge). In return, Hall had a request of his own. He did not want strangers disturbing his parents and poking around his things. Miller readily agreed to let Wabash detectives Phil Amones and Jeff Whitmer lead the first police visit to Hall’s house. Miller knew that in time the FBI would seek a search warrant and return to do a more thorough job.

  To book and hold Hall, the Wabash police transferred him to the Grant County jail in nearby Marion. Miller stayed the night in a Wabash motel, but he hardly slept. “I had to get my thoughts together of what to do next,” he says. Since the jail was only a few miles from where Reitler was abducted, Miller believed Hall might be ready to show him where he buried her or any other victims. “I had a full day planned for what we could do in that area.”

  But his plans abruptly changed the next morning when he arrived at the jail. “It was like an alien spaceship had just landed,” he recalls. A cordon of TV-station vans surrounded the building, all sprouting satellite antenna poles. As Miller pushed past the reporters and video cameras, he realized that he couldn’t take Hall anywhere in Marion without attracting a crowd. Instead, he had to concentrate on getting him out of town as quickly as possible.

  The media onslaught had been touched off by the chief of the Wabash City Police Department, who had held an impromptu press conference the day before. When asked about the extent of Hall’s crimes, he replied, “We’re not talking about [just] one or two cases—[but] at least possibly four. We’re not exactly sure at this point.”

  The mere suggestion of multiple murders and a possible serial killer sounded an irresistible siren call to news outlets across the state and country. It was not just the potential number of victims that drew them, but also the connection with Tricia Reitler’s disappearance, which was a much bigger story than Miller had ever realized.

  When Jessica Roach first disappeared, Miller had been anxious for all of the publicity that he could get. But now the deluge of attention was no more welcome to his investigation than a rainstorm after a flood. Up to that time, the Wabash and Marion police departments had been content to watch from the sidelines. Now they were suddenly swept into the fray, determined to show the locals that they were on the ball. Meanwhile, back home in Danville, Illinois, the phone lines were jammed—not with tips, but requests for media interviews. After a few months, the surge of interest would subside, but it would wreak more havoc than bring anything of use to the deputy sheriff or the prosecution. Miller understood that there was no avoiding publicity for a putative serial killer, but he adds, “It was the premature news releases in Indiana that were so detrimental to the investigation.”

  The blowback began with Hall himself. As Miller bundled him into the car for the trip to Illinois, Larry said he had talked earlier that day with his twin, Gary, who had been reading the morning paper. “My brother told me I better shut my mouth and get a lawyer because I’m in a lot of trouble.”

  During the long ride to Danville, Miller had hoped to spend time going over details of Hall’s statement, but now, as he corkscrewed in the front passenger seat to talk to Hall, he could see that Larry was in no mood for further confession. “He wasn’t showing a lot of emotion but he was clearly upset,” Miller recalls. “I made a determination that it was more important for him to relax than feel any more pressure from me. So we talked instead about the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and some of the historic sites we were passing.”

  What Hall told him surprised Miller as much as anything Larry had said in his confession. “I can assure you he did most of the talking because my knowledge of those subjects goes no further than what I learned in the fifth grade, but he was very knowledgeable about that stuff—and about Indians, too. He told me the places in northern Indiana where he would search for their artifacts and what he found there. You just listened to him for a while and you realized that he wasn’t as simple as you first thought when you saw him.”

  However chatty Hall seemed in the car, he would not have much more to say about his crimes. If anything, he wanted to retract what he had already said. Almost as soon as he was settled in the Vermilion County jail in Danville, Miller started calling FBI agent Mike Randolph to ask for another interview. When Randolph did meet with Larry, just three days after his initial confession, Hall told the agent that he did not remember exactly what he had previously told him in Wabash, but that he had done no more than disclose his dreams. Nothing that he mentioned in the statement had actually happened. Randolph replied that both he and Deputy Sheriff Miller believed Hall was confessing to real murders, which is why they had him arrested. According to Randolph, Larry then changed course yet again and confirmed that the statement had been truthful. But over the next two weeks, Hall kept calling Randolph, more adamant each time when they talked that he had confessed to dreams and nothing more. Finally, he requested a polygraph, something the FBI agent could not do until a federal court appointed Larry counsel.

  No matter how much Hall dismissed his confession as fantasy, it always had the ring of truth to Gary Miller. When he returned to Illinois and drove around Jessica Roach’s home, he discovered that the statement was consistent with many distinctive features of the local landscape. Working with another deputy sheriff who grew up near Georgetown, Miller was able to weave those elements into a plausible route for Larry’s peregrinations after the abduction of Jessica Roach. For example, Hall had spoken to Miller of a steel bridge. The escape route that Larry described to Miller did lead to a steel bridge—a truss bridge—the only steel bridge in the area at the time (it has since been replaced by a cement structure). Hall talked about heading east to get into Indiana and then crossing over a highway. That was Highway 63—the only major thoroughfare in the area—and it runs parallel to the state line. Once he was in Indiana, he described his frenzied attempts to go farther east along deserted dirt roads. Each one came to a dead end on the Wabash River. This, too, conformed with actual geography. At last, he said, he took a paved road, which appeared to lead to a bridge crossing, but instead veered south into another dirt road that wound only deeper into the woods. With no one in sight and the sun setting, he decided to stop near a pond to rape and then murder his passenger, who was bound in the van’s cargo bay but starting to cry out. Again, Miller was able to pinpoint two adjoining roads in the buggy-whip shape Hall had described just two miles from the cornfield where the remains of Jessica Roach were finally found.

  This was not the route that a cold, calculating killer would take. Instead, it was the panic-stricken, haphazard trail of a stranger who had no familiarity with the local terrain, which gave it all the more credence to Miller. As Hall freely admitted, he had been in Georgetown after the reenactment to scout out an old Dodge Charger listed in an Auto Trader classif
ied ad. He stumbled on Jessica Roach by chance and had attacked her because she appeared so vulnerable while walking her bike down a lonely country road.

  But to build a strong case against Hall, the government needed more evidence than his confession. To his chagrin, Miller now had to rely on others to pursue the investigation, starting with Wabash City Police Department detectives Phil Amones and Jeff Whitmer. They were the first to search Larry’s room, just hours after his confession.

  As Whitmer drove over to the Hall house with Amones, he says, “I was thinking, ‘Oh, shit, is this really happening?’ Larry was never someone I worried about.” He could see that his partner, Amones, who had referred Hall to counseling after the stalking incidents, looked even more upset. It was one thing to be embarrassed because their instincts about Larry had been wrong. It was another thing if young women had died as a result.

  Their stomachs took a second turn when a stunned Robert Hall let them into his home. Instantly they understood why Larry was so sensitive about the intrusion of strangers. “It was just a real mess,” Whitmer says. “Stuff piled everywhere.” Larry’s room was no better than the rest of the house. As the detectives waded calf deep into the clutter, Whitmer remembers, “All we could do was move things around. At one point, Phil picked up a pile of stuff in the closet, and all of a sudden he jumped back and the eyes about popped out of his head. He’s one of those flatliners who usually don’t show much emotion, so I had to see what this was about, and there, on the closet floor, was a human skull. But when we looked closer, it was plastic. Some kind of gag gift. We both got a kick out of that. I don’t remember finding anything else.”