In with the Devil Page 16

  Two weeks after she submitted her essay, at 12:22 a.m., a phone rang in the Reitler household and life was never the same for them again. A Marion policewoman was calling. The previous evening, Tuesday, March 30, 1993, Tricia’s roommate reported that their daughter had not returned to the dorm in more than twenty-four hours. “Could she be in Ohio?” the policewoman asked.

  Something was terribly wrong, and both the school and Marion police soon shared the Reitlers’ distress. By the time Donna and Garry reached IWU on Wednesday, the college was locked down in full vigil mode. Police were posted around the campus, and some with dogs combed the grounds. The deafening whir of a National Guard helicopter split the air. Students, whom newspapers described as “stunned,” moved in cautious clusters around the campus. Wary of the press, they chatted in hushed tones among themselves. A few sobbed uncontrollably.

  The IWU president brought Donna and Garry into his office and introduced them to the police chief, who grimly told them about the first major development in their investigation. Earlier that morning, they had discovered the clothes Tricia was last seen wearing—a shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes—piled under a tree in a secluded park on the edge of the campus. Although it was not initially reported, a few drops of blood were found on the pants leg, on a nearby sidewalk, and on an earring that had evidently been torn from her ear.

  In all the horror of this information, none of it seemed more senseless for Garry than that pile of clothes. As he later told a reporter, “For her clothes to be taken off, she would’ve had to fight. I know Tricia’s personality. She would have fought for all she was worth.”

  If there was any comfort in the midst of the Reitlers’ nightmare, it was in the sincere concern for them that radiated from the entire Marion community: the faculty and administration; the students who jammed the chapels in prayer and posted signs of support in their dorm windows; the anguished police officers, firemen, and even volunteers from the community who searched for Tricia as though she were their daughter or sister. A literally iconic poster was created with Tricia’s smiling face and full, curly hair inside a cross. At the top it read, “Missing as of March 29, 1993. Tricia Reitler”; and at the bottom, “Please Pray.” As much as the town focused on the missing girl, they were also drawn to her parents, so youthful that they looked as if they could have been in college themselves: restless Garry with his sandy brown hair and neatly trimmed beard; and tight-lipped Donna, her face framed by her straight brunette hair. Seeing their picture in the newspaper, one law officer said of the Reitlers, “And knowing they are deprived of the right to know where [Tricia] is. That is enough to drive a policeman, to make [him] spend hours working.”

  But the first night in Marion, Donna and Garry also remember sitting in the apartment of a psychology professor. In yet another of the kindnesses bestowed on them by strangers, the professor had let them have the place to themselves as long as they needed it. She had even left a pot of potato soup boiling on the stove. But looking at each other in the stillness of that apartment, they felt so alone and helpless. Some of that aching loneliness has never left them. They would try to sleep, but they would keep waking up, “in a panic,” Garry says—as though the phone would ring the way it had the night before.

  The rest of the week unfolded as though they were at the bottom of a tidal basin—during the day they were inundated by well-meaning searchers and the swirl of the media; and then, during the interminable nights, all the activity rushed out and they were beached again, alone with their panic.

  They did the best they could to be helpful, organizing friends and family who came from their hometown and across the nation to help in the search. They were joined by more police and fire departments and additional units of the National Guard. More than 150 people—including local residents—spent the weekend combing the countryside around the campus. The Reitlers tried to rally the search parties, but despite their numbers they could only nibble at the edges of the wilderness that surrounds the nearby Mississinewa River and reservoir. Even the usually upbeat Garry felt overwhelmed. “It’s just so vast,” he says.

  A week after they arrived in Marion, the Reitlers gave what a newspaper described as “an emotion-filled speech” to the IWU student body, then went back to Ohio to celebrate their son’s eleventh birthday. They had left him and his two older sisters at home with friends, and there, they, too, had been besieged by well-wishers. The house was filled with gifts of food and fruit baskets, and the streets outside were lined with TV and newspaper crews.

  The Reitlers would return to Marion in a few days and there would be more massive search parties of hundreds, but no amount of work or good intentions would turn up Tricia or any more clues of what had happened to her. Two weeks after her disappearance, Donna spoke the unspeakable, telling reporters, “We have a good picture that she won’t be coming back home.”

  Still, for the Reitlers, the mission could never be complete until they found “closure.” This meant not only finding out what had happened to Tricia, but also recovering her remains. As Donna explains, “I want some place to bring flowers.” A few weeks later they even took to the national airwaves as guests on Jerry Springer—in the earlier, less manic version of his show. They talked about Tricia and issued a plea for anyone who knew anything about her abduction to come forward.

  For some time to come, almost reflexively, when any bones or skeletal remains were found, the press in Indiana and Ohio connected them to Tricia Reitler. It would start eight months after her disappearance when a woman’s body was found in a cornfield near the Illinois state line. A few tantalizing days would pass before the remains were identified as those of Jessica Roach. The next year, more heartbreak followed after a skull was found in the Mississinewa River. Each time a call came, Garry Reitler says, “It felt like someone had torn off a scab.”

  In retrospect, the most important development in Tricia Reitler’s case came just weeks after her disappearance when the body of another missing young woman was fished from a pond in La Porte, an Indiana city two and a half hours north of Marion. Sixteen-year-old Rayna Rison was last seen leaving her job at a veterinary hospital a month earlier—three days before Tricia’s disappearance. As noted in the Marion Chronicle-Tribune, Reitler and Rison bore striking similarities. Both victims were short with long, curly hair and blue eyes. As with Tricia, it appears that the abduction took place in an isolated setting. Rison was found just a few miles from a secluded lane where her car had apparently broken down. Her cause of death was strangulation, common to many victims of serial murder.

  The local newspapers were quick to see a possible connection, but the local police departments were just as quick to dismiss it. In April the Marion Chronicle-Tribune carried an article with the headline “Police won’t connect Reitler with La Porte case,” and quoted Marion police detective lieutenant Jay Kay saying, “As of now there is nothing that links the two [cases].”

  From the start, no one became more closely associated with the Tricia Reitler investigation than Kay, the detective supervisor for the Marion police, a diligent officer with hawklike features and brushed-back blond hair. He would be as obsessed with solving this case as Gary Miller was with finding Jessica Roach’s killer. In an interview with the Chronicle-Tribune, he admitted that Reitler was “constantly on his mind and that he even wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about [her case].” Over time, he became especially friendly with Garry and Donna and won their absolute trust in return. “I can’t even tell you my feelings for Jay,” Donna Reitler once said to an Associated Press reporter who asked whether police on Tricia’s case were getting discouraged. “I know he’s still looking. And he probably will look until the day he dies. I can’t even tell you what a comfort that is.” Posters of Tricia, aerial photographs of the campus, and diagrams of the suspected crime scene stared down at Kay from a bulletin board above his desk, “a constant reminder to police officers [that they are] still working to resolve the case,” as the paper put it.
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  Unlike most local detectives, Kay reached out to other police departments for assistance, and although he dismissed a connection between the Reitler and Rison cases, he also told the Chronicle-Tribune that he had been in touch with the La Porte police department when Rison had first been reported missing.

  However, Kay did not divulge the real reason why each police department lost interest in the other’s case—they both were hot on the trail of local suspects. In Rison’s case, the most obvious target for investigation was her brother-in-law, who had, in 1989, been convicted of molesting her. It was not as easy to bring charges against him as it was initially thought, but local prosecutors still tried—four years after a bottle of birth control pills with Rison’s name on it was found in Larry Hall’s van. The charges against the brother-in-law were finally dropped in 1998 for lack of evidence.

  In Marion, detectives were convinced that they already had the culprit in Reitler’s abduction behind bars—Tony Searcy. He was twenty-eight at the time Tricia disappeared. A former IWU student, Searcy still came on campus to visit with a woman who worked in the school cafeteria where Reitler had a student job. In the early-morning hours after she was reported missing, Searcy made a 911 call to the Marion police reporting the theft of copper wire. Searcy himself had already been arrested three times for stealing copper from train depots. He later admitted that he called to get a rival thief in trouble, but in the minds of the Marion police he was really trying to throw them off the trail of Reitler’s abductor. They traced the call and picked him up soon after Tricia’s clothes were found. When asked about his activities on the night she’d disappeared, Searcy failed a lie detector test. Police became even more suspicious when search dogs sniffing the trunk of Searcy’s car appeared to pick up the scent of a cadaver (although the presence of copper has been known to fool cadaver dogs because of copper secretions in the liver of a corpse).

  But for Marion police, nothing about Searcy may have been more incriminating than his antagonistic personality. He had no qualms about admitting to his previous crimes—although none involved assault or anything of a sexual nature—but he still railed against the unfairness of the American justice system. He was also outspoken on the state of Christianity, and IWU faculty claimed that he had developed frightening “apocalyptic” views during his four semesters at the school. When he was arrested on April 22, 1993, four weeks after Tricia Reitler’s disappearance, the charges against him were only related to copper theft, but prosecutors continued to hold him in jail and delayed proceedings through the summer. In an August letter to the Marion Chronicle-Tribune, Searcy wrote that his trial “will be continuously postponed until Miss Reitler is found.” He continued, “As God is my witness [and] may he take my life if I’m lying, I’ve had nothing to do with the disappearance of Miss Reitler, neither do I know who has.”

  When Searcy ultimately did go to trial in October, he claimed that the charges against him were trumped up by the police because they suspected him of Reitler’s abduction. Upon his conviction for theft, he felt the judge gave him an especially harsh ten-year sentence for similar reasons.

  On the one-year anniversary of Tricia’s disappearance, the Chronicle-Tribune devoted a full spread titled “A Test of Faith,” to an update on the investigation and a visit with the Reitler family. Although charges had yet to be brought against him in the case, Tony Searcy was still cited by Detective Kay as the “prime suspect.”

  But on the very next day after this article was published, a new development, like a bolt from the blue, would test the faith that Kay and the Marion police department had in their investigation. Another suspect in Tricia’s abduction, complete with incriminating evidence, would be delivered to them on a silver platter. His name was Larry Hall.

  That afternoon, in the neighboring town of Gas City, Hall had reportedly been circling a yard where two girls—fourteen and seventeen—were playing basketball. Before he drove away, their father wrote down his license plate number and reported it along with a description of the two-tone van to the Gas City police. Minutes later, Patrolman Neil Pence spotted a van matching that description parked in an empty Kmart lot. As he drove closer to check the plate, Hall tore out of the parking lot, but when the patrolman pursued him with his lights flashing, Larry pulled to the side of the road. Evening had fallen and Pence approached the van with his flashlight trained on the driver’s face. He asked Hall for his license and registration. As Larry rummaged through his glove compartment, Pence peered through the van’s side windows into the cargo bay. The beam of his flashlight first glinted off the blade of a big hunting knife, then fell on coils of rope, a ski mask, a can of starter fluid, a pair of gloves, and a wad of cotton. But nothing in the bay would startle the patrolman more than the “Please Pray” missing poster for Tricia Reitler.

  Patrolman Pence, like everyone else in the region, was intensely aware of Reitler’s disappearance and the as-yet-inconclusive investigation. Now, it appeared, he had stumbled on the perpetrator of the most notorious crime in the recent history of central Indiana. He immediately called his superior officer, who just as quickly called the Marion police. Detective Bruce Bender took the call. He had been assigned to the Reitler case from the start under the supervision of Jay Kay. Bender called Kay at home and both rushed in separate cars to Gas City.

  They found Hall at the side of the road in the same spot where Pence had pulled him over. Hall would later charge that Pence’s commanding officer, James McNutt, had at first threatened him for stalking girls on a street where policemen lived and then shoved him against the car. While a few Gas City officers guarded Larry, others swarmed around the van. McNutt had already gone through the vehicle and was displaying items in the cargo bay that he thought to be suspicious. In addition to what Pence had initially spotted, there were several articles about Reitler’s disappearance; a page torn from an Avon lingerie catalog with “IWU” written on the panties of a model; and mock Indiana Wesleyan University stationery with Tricia Reitler’s name pasted on it. Just as alarming was a newspaper story from the previous November titled “Marion police interested in body,” about the remains found in the Perrysville cornfield that were later identified as belonging to Jessica Roach. At first, a ten-year-old issue of Newsweek seemed at odds with the other paraphernalia until the police flipped inside and found a lengthy story on serial killers titled “The Random Killers.”

  By this time, Gas City police headquarters had completed a check on the plate and discovered that the registration on file did not match the description of the vehicle or Hall’s name. At the very least, the police could impound the van, but they could only charge Larry with “false and fictitious registration” for displaying the wrong plates—a misdemeanor.* After Patrolman Pence issued the ticket, Bender asked Hall if he would go with him to Marion police headquarters and he agreed. Kay stayed behind to sort through the items pulled from the van.

  Larry Hall remained in the custody of the Marion police detectives until three thirty that morning. He spent much of the time with Bender by the wall of photos and diagrams relating to the Reitler case, while Kay paced the corridor outside and occasionally popped in to listen to the informal interview. At one point, Larry volunteered that he had had a “nightmare” about killing Tricia Reitler. He even agreed to show Bender and Kay where he buried her in his dream. But when the three drove to an area around the historic Mississinewa battlefield, he claimed to lose his bearings. Instead of booking Hall or even holding him for further questioning, the Marion detectives returned him to his home.

  Marion PD’s quick dismissal of Hall’s confession left Patrolman Pence and the rest of the Gas City police dumbfounded. But for Kay, the confession was literally too good to be true. In his eyes the memorabilia about Reitler did not expose Hall as a serial killer, but confirmed instead that he had a morbid fascination with the case. As far as the Marion detectives were concerned, he did not disclose anything new about the abduction. Instead, he simply parroted back to them infor
mation contained in the articles he’d collected. No doubt they were also unimpressed by his nonthreatening appearance. Compared to the muscular and confrontational Tony Searcy, Hall was a little doughboy—timid and overly polite.

  “Marion PD was never going to let Hall become the suspect,” one policeman from another town says, “because they already had Tony Searcy as their suspect. No matter what they said about keeping an open mind, they had total tunnel vision on him.”

  Deputy Sheriff Gary Miller admits that serial killers are the UFOs of homicide investigations. With the Jessica Roach case, he didn’t even consider the idea of a serial killer until he had exhausted all other possibilities. “You just can’t conceive that a guy has appeared out of nowhere to kill someone in your community for absolutely no reason. It’s so out of your control, you prefer to believe it didn’t happen.”*

  In their defense, the Marion detectives were not the only ones who considered Larry Hall harmless. Their initial impression was reinforced the day after he confessed to them when Kay called Wabash City police. Phil Amones agreed with Kay that Hall had trouble separating reality from fantasy and assured him that Larry was getting treatment at a Wabash mental health center. Amones offered to stay in touch if anything emerged from the counseling that might implicate Larry in a violent crime, but at that stage his counselor agreed as well that Hall was no more than a wannabe.

  But the next time Marion detectives heard from Amones, it was to inform them that an investigator was coming to interview Hall about an abduction and murder in Illinois. Kay and Bender paid yet another call on the turf of a nearby police department, then looked on anxiously as Gary Miller grilled Hall in the Wabash City Hall conference room. Amones called them again two weeks later when Hall confessed to Miller and FBI agent Randolph. That night, unbeknownst to Miller, the Marion detectives picked up Hall from the Wabash police station, ostensibly to transport him to the county jail. But along the way, they stopped to buy him a hamburger and then, once again, took him to the Mississinewa wilderness area. Once again he had them drive in circles and claimed that he could not remember exactly where he had buried Tricia Reitler. When they deposited him at the Grant County jail in Marion, they were more convinced than ever that he was not the real killer of Tricia Reitler—just a wannabe.