In with the Devil Read online

  Although the Roach trial was effectively over, Larry Beaumont and his Illinois investigators had some unfinished business with Larry Hall and the Marion police. The one way, outside of court, to definitively prove Hall’s guilt in the Tricia Reitler case was to find her remains using one of the maps pulled from Hall’s van in Gas City. On it Hall had marked an X on the southeast side of Marion.

  Three weeks after Hall’s conviction, Assistant U.S. Attorney Beaumont was at that spot, on the edge of the Mississinewa River, and “waist-high in weeds,” according to the Chronicle-Tribune. As he explained to the reporter, a lot was at stake in his search. Finding Reitler could influence Hall’s sentencing for the Roach murder. It could also be the impetus for a homicide indictment from the state’s attorney in Indiana, where Larry could get the death penalty, and it would continue the momentum for investigating more unsolved crimes associated with his notes and confession.

  To help in this extraordinary expedition, Beaumont brought along a forensic anthropologist, cadaver dogs, divers, Marion detectives (including Lieutenant Kay), and FBI agents from Illinois and Indiana. Beaumont even arranged for an FBI plane with special cadaver-detecting heat sensors to fly overhead. But after a full day of looking with all of these high-tech resources, they had only a buried carpet to show for their efforts. Once again Kay pronounced Tony Searcy his prime suspect in the abduction of Tricia Reitler. Even more infuriating for Gary Miller, the Marion PD was joined in that assessment by Ken Ivan, the FBI agent working out of the office in Fort Wayne, Indiana, who had collected the evidence in Wabash and testified for the government during the trial.

  A month later, Hall was sentenced, and during the hearing he continued to proclaim his innocence. He told the court, “I would just like to say to you, Judge Baker, and to God in heaven, that I did not commit this offense that I am charged for. I would like to say that I am very sorry for the loss of Jessica Roach to her family, and that I am in no way responsible for taking their child away from them; and I just pray to God that the truth be known that I am not guilty of this crime in no way. I just pray to God for help with my personal problems and that the truth be known eventually.”

  Judge Baker felt otherwise. “The jury found [Hall] guilty beyond a reasonable doubt and the court [namely, the judge himself] concurs in the finding of the jury.” Baker disclosed a letter he’d received from Jessica’s parents. “It’s a statement of personal sorrow and heartfelt regret from the family and the void that has been created in their lives through the loss of their daughter. And the court takes that into consideration in disposition of the case.” Soon after, Baker sentenced Larry Hall “for the term of his natural life without release.” He added, “The court elects not to impose conditions of release. They would be pointless in this case.”

  However, the judge did not entirely dismiss all the testimony about the defendant’s troubled mental condition: “It’s the recommendation of the court that because of the personality disorders that the evidence show affect the defendant, that he be assigned, at least initially, at the correctional institution at Springfield, Missouri, to the psychiatric division for further evaluation and ultimate assignment. I think he is a vulnerable prisoner . . . and that appropriate caution should be taken in handling him.”

  As expected, DeArmond appealed the verdict; however, the decision of the notoriously unpredictable Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals was anything but expected—especially by Larry Beaumont. As Gary Miller sat through oral arguments in Chicago, he could see the wind was not blowing the government’s way. He was particularly surprised by how testy the three judges on the panel were with Beaumont. Afterward the prosecutor assured the deputy sheriff, “They’re always like that.” But Miller did not like what he saw. “They’re upset,” he told Beaumont, “and I think we lost.”

  Miller was right, but the decision, issued in August 1996, did more than just throw out Hall’s conviction. It was a stinging indictment of Beaumont’s case, a condemnation of Judge Baker’s decision making, and practically a brief for the defense. If anything, in writing the decision, Seventh Circuit judge Diane Wood summed up Hall’s case better than DeArmond: “At the trial, Hall’s entire theory of defense boiled down to a simple proposition: due to a personality disorder that makes him susceptible to suggestion and pathologically eager to please, he ‘confessed’ to a crime that he did not really commit, in order to gain approval from the law enforcement officers who were interrogating him.”

  The appeals court agreed with the defense argument that Gary Miller could have intimidated Hall into a false confession. “Some of the evidence indicated that Miller became upset with Hall’s responses, moved closer to Hall, and started suggesting the ‘right’ answers as the questioning progressed,” Wood wrote.*

  Since the verdict hinged on Hall’s state of mind during the confession, Wood argued, Dr. Ofshe’s testimony would have gone “to the heart of Hall’s defense.” As a result, the Appeals Court found Judge Harold Baker to have acted too abruptly in dismissing him. “Properly conducted social science research often shows that commonly held beliefs are in error. Dr. Ofshe’s testimony, assuming its scientific validity, would have let the jury know that a phenomenon known as false confessions exists, how to recognize it, and how to decide whether it fit the facts of the case being tried.” If Hall was indeed capable of a false confession and was indeed suggestible, Judge Wood wrote, then the jury might have appreciated “the likelihood that the ‘confession’ added nothing to what the government already knew.”

  To add even more insult to injury for Beaumont, the Appeals Court disagreed with Judge Baker’s ruling on issues related to the abduction of Tricia Reitler. Once again, Judge Wood questioned whether the government learned anything new about Tricia’s case from Hall’s confession. “The Reitler case had been discussed extensively in the press, and Hall’s statement contained facts that could have been gleaned entirely from news reports. It offered nothing that could have been known only to the guilty party. The government presented no other evidence linking Hall to the Reitler murder.”* Given the “potential unreliability of the confession,” the Appeals Court found Judge Baker at fault for barring Chief Homer and Deputy Sheriff Himelick from stating their opinions about Tony Searcy. If Beaumont had wanted to keep them from testifying, Wood wrote, the prosecution should have concentrated exclusively on the Roach case without introducing “the massive prejudice that inevitably attends evidence suggesting Hall had committed three similar murders.” In other words, the likelihood that a defendant might be a serial killer must be hidden from a jury so as not to prejudice it. This is the sort of judicial jujitsu that raises the bar even higher for prosecutors attempting to explain why a stranger would be motivated to suddenly rape and ritually kill a vulnerable young woman.

  Although Judge Wood expressed regrets for dragging “all involved in this case through another trial,” she almost predicted that Hall would be acquitted in a retrial when she concluded, “A jury with all the evidence before it might have convicted, but it might have concluded that Hall was a ‘wanna-be,’ and that the true kidnapper/murderer is still at large.”

  In August 1997, Beaumont retried the case against Hall—before a different judge, without any evidence related to Tricia Reitler, without the problematic testimony of the defendant, and with the testimony about false confessions from Professor Ofshe. This time the jury took fewer than four hours to convict. If Judge Wood had thrown down the gauntlet when her panel reversed the first conviction, Beaumont had certainly met the challenge by winning the second.

  But the Appeals Court decision still did lasting damage to the overall Larry Hall investigation. No longer would state’s attorneys threaten him with trials in state courts where he could be sentenced to death. His case was not the slam dunk that it appeared to be when he was first arrested. Interest in his involvement with any other unsolved murders or missing persons waned from local investigators and reporters. When some of the victims’ stories were dredged up again
on five- or ten-year anniversaries after their death or disappearance, Larry’s name had flaked off the list of suspects like old paint. Evidence such as Rayna Rison’s birth control pill bottle was misplaced or destroyed. Some items, including women’s clothing, were returned to Hall’s family by the FBI office in Indiana.

  No doubt the urgency of getting Hall convicted for another crime dissipated after he was sentenced again to a term of natural life. In contrast to his usually placid appearance, Hall heard the judge pronounce the punishment with his shirt torn and his hands cuffed, supposedly as the result of a tussle with the U.S. marshals when he warned them that he might lash out in court. DeArmond blamed the odd behavior on Larry’s despair over losing again. He explained to a reporter that his client’s “emotional state [had] gotten worse because he put a lot of hope in this second trial.”

  But this time, Beaumont was not rejoicing over the jury’s verdict either. He still had to worry about the schizoid Seventh Circuit Appeals Court. When he pulled Jimmy Keene out of his Michigan prison in the summer of 1998, Hall’s appeal on the second trial was still pending. Hall’s defense team was once again seeking to get the conviction overturned on issues related to the expert testimony. Once again, they claimed that the judge had not given a fair hearing to their arguments about a coerced confession.

  Meanwhile, the court of public opinion had considerable doubt that Hall was guilty of anything. In Wabash, old friends such as fellow reenactor Micheal Thompson and neighbor Bobby Allen, who had been so shocked at Larry’s arrest, could now credibly believe that Larry had been no more than a wannabe who had, in the words of Allen, been “railroaded” by the press and unscrupulous investigators from Illinois.

  Meanwhile, in Marion, on the fifth anniversary of Tricia Reitler’s disappearance, a TV reporter organized a billboard campaign that urged passersby to “Do the right thing” and call the police if they had any information about what had happened to her. Newspaper articles once again replayed the competing arguments about the likely culpability of Tony Searcy and Larry Hall, but a consensus had clearly grown among investigators that a third man was responsible. Lieutenant Kay had almost closed the door on Hall, explaining to a reporter that Larry had been “a psychiatric patient . . . which has diminished the credibility of his confession,” but the detective still couldn’t close the door completely, adding that Hall remained a suspect because “we’ve never been able to rule him out.”

  9.

  The Falcon’s Tale

  By November 1998, four months since his arrival at Springfield, Jimmy Keene had to make his move. He no longer worried about getting access to Hall. “We had plenty of time to just sit in that cell every night and talk an hour or two before lockdown, and it was totally safe, because the mob guys were in a whole different wing from us. In the mornings I’d play my little charade about being a part of their group, and I’d go down to play boccie ball with them. At night, they didn’t know where I was and they didn’t care.”

  But even with all the time they spent together, Hall was no closer to telling Keene why he had been sentenced to prison. The closest they ever got to the subject was Beaumont. “It all came up naturally,” Keene remembers. “We were talking about how close I lived to Indiana, and then he realized that we were both tried in the Central District.”

  “Who was your prosecutor?” Hall asked.

  Jimmy had to catch himself before he answered. He couldn’t tell Hall the truth, so he mentioned the name of another assistant U.S. attorney who operated out of the court.

  “Have you ever heard of this guy named Beaumont?” Hall asked.

  “I heard about him,” Keene replied. “I heard he’s real hard-nosed.”

  “Yeah, he’s something else,” Larry said. “That fucking guy, he was after me no matter what. Man, he was crazy.”

  Typically, Hall had little bad to say about anyone, but Beaumont was different. “He’d even make jokes about Beaumont,” Keene says. “He might see some inmate strung out on drugs stumbling around and he’d go, ‘Look at that guy, kind of looks like Beaumont.’

  “Everybody hates their prosecutor. But Larry really hated Beaumont. You could see it in his eyes and the fear, too. That boy has nightmares about Beaumont.”

  Still, no amount of Beaumont bashing would get Larry to talk about the actual charges against him. “I had to find some other way to pry the lid off,” Keene says.

  “One day we were sitting in the library and I was watching him read his paper one page at a time when I suddenly got an idea.” Later that night as they sat in Hall’s cell, Jimmy asked, “Haven’t we been hanging around each other long enough to tell each other the truth?”

  Hall replied, “What do you mean?”

  “Come on, Larry. You’ve been telling me all along that you had this weapons charge and you got forty years. But you’re the same Larry Hall that lives in Wabash, Indiana, right?”

  Hall nodded, but instead of looking confused, his eyes grew wide and then he looked away. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I know all about your case, dude. You know my mom’s from that state. The other day I told her about my new friend here, and when I mentioned your name, she said you were the one they accused of killing those girls. It’s in all the Indiana newspapers.”

  “But it’s not like they said. It’s not like they said.”

  “Relax. It doesn’t matter to me what you did, man. Look at all these crazy people in here. Whatever you did, you did for your own reasons. I just thought that you’d have leveled with me because we were friends. I didn’t expect to hear this from my mother.”

  When Keene left Hall’s cell, he began to second-guess himself and once again barely slept through the night. This time there was no doubt he had pushed too hard too fast. But he had finally reached the point where he was willing to accept the risk. In no way could he wait any longer for Hall to talk without going crazy himself. During breakfast the next morning, as he ate at the mob table, he could see Hall stealing looks at him from across the dining hall. Had he been up all night thinking, too?

  Jimmy couldn’t wait to find out. When they passed each other on the way out of the dining hall, he slapped Hall on the shoulder and said, “See you later in the library,” as though nothing had happened the night before.

  Hall looked back at him with visible relief, saying, “Yeah, sure.”

  With that one relieved look, Hall revealed what he most feared—that Jimmy would stop talking to him because of his crime. “He got really worried about offending my mom,” Keene remembers. “He didn’t want her to think that my new friend was this psycho killer that they were making him out to be in the papers.”

  That night while they were talking in his cell, Hall was not ready to go into detail about the charges, but he said, “It’s not the way they made it sound. Everything your mother read in the papers came right from Beaumont’s mouth.”

  Keene was careful to let these discussions come in snatches, and then he’d move on to a different subject, so he didn’t sound too interested. But he had to introduce a name. “Back when I was in Ford County jail,” Keene says, “Beaumont and the FBI told me to start with Roach, since it was only natural to talk about the one he had been convicted for killing.”

  One day, Keene finally just blurted out, “So who was this Jessica Roach girl?”

  Hall immediately became defensive. “What do you mean?”

  “That’s one of the girls that they prosecuted you for, right? Didn’t they say that you murdered her or something?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Larry, come on, man.”

  “Well, you know, Jim, it’s not like they say. Beaumont thinks he’s got all the facts right, but it’s not like he says.”

  This was always the endless loop with Larry, but Keene kept probing, “Well, what was it then?”

  “Yes, I met this girl, but when I met her, it wasn’t like they say.”

  “Were you dating the girl? Is that how you knew
her?” Jimmy asked, trying to sound as ignorant as possible.

  “No, but I could have dated her.” For the next few minutes, Hall talked about Jessica Roach as if she had lived down the street or gone to school with him, how she was the kind of girl he had always wanted. How she was cute with long brown hair and how nice she seemed at first. This turn in the conversation relaxed Larry, and Keene realized that Hall still had vivid memories about his victims and extensive fantasies that he actually knew them for more than the few horrific moments of their actual encounters. But Hall still did not feel comfortable about discussing the actual murder.

  If Keene was going to get him to talk, he says, “We had to take the girl bashing to a deeper level.” It wasn’t enough for Jimmy to feel sorry for Larry and the other guys who had been ignored or mistreated by women. Jimmy had to express rage at what the women in his own life had done to him.

  But how could the experience of a man who had all the women he wanted—even a porn star—compare with that of a man who had none? At night, as Keene lay awake plotting how to get into Hall’s head, he spent nearly as much time psychoanalyzing himself. A part of Keene did truly have regrets about his love life. He never had the long-term relationship he wanted: a woman he could marry and have children with. The closest he came was with April, the girl who lived with him the first time he was busted. After she had gotten rid of the drugs in the house and given the money to Big Jim, she and Jimmy decided it was best for her to leave town and live with relatives until Keene could settle the charges against him. But in months, she had met someone else and gotten pregnant. Even Jimmy’s last girlfriend, Tina, who had worked so hard to get him out of prison, became unhappy when Keene abruptly left Milan and had to cut her out of the loop. In recent weeks he heard that she, too, had had a fling, gotten pregnant, then had an abortion.