In with the Devil Page 19

  Jimmy was as much to blame as the girlfriends for the failed relationships, if not more so, but in talking to Hall it was easy to work himself up about their betrayals. “I wanted Larry to understand that I’ve been hurt by women, too, and that was the risk I took by getting involved with them. He was hurt by women not wanting to get involved with him, but we could feel the same anger. I’d walk across the hall to his cell and say, ‘Yeah, girls suck, man.’

  “Once when we were talking like this, he asked if I had dreams about hurting women, which seemed pretty weird at first. I said no, but then I said, ‘When I think about all the things I gave to April and then what she did to me, I could fucking kill her with my bare hands.’ And Larry would look at me and start nodding. All of that talk finally pushed the door open for him to tell me what happened with Jessica Roach.”

  The most extended conversation started when Keene asked how Hall had met her. “I don’t understand,” Jimmy said. “If you didn’t date her, then how did you get together?”

  Hall told him about the nearby reenactment at the park near Georgetown. He slept that night in his van and the next day drove around looking for the car in Auto Trader. “I was driving down the road,” he said, “and I seen her walking her bike.”

  He pulled up alongside and he got out of his van asking if he could help. “They make it seem like I just jump on these girls, James, and it’s not true. They really wanted to talk to me.”

  Hall opened up the double doors to the van and showed her the bike he had inside and told her he liked cycling, too. “Then she got into the van. She really did. The trouble started when I went to kiss her and she wanted to get out.”

  He then explained how he had a rag ready with “chloroform.” Keene says, “He never told me he made it out of starter fluid. He just said that if he put one hand around her neck and used the other to put the rag over her face, it would settle her down.”

  “If I didn’t do it,” Hall told Keene, “she would have kept on hitting me.”

  After she was bound in the back of the van, Hall drove away with her. “He said how he didn’t know where he was going, but finally found a place where he could stop and then got in the back of the van with her.” When she started to struggle, Hall would put the rag over her face to subdue her again.

  “Did you have sex with her?” Keene asked.

  Hall replied with a vacant look in his eyes, “I kind of had a blackout and then it was like a dream and I see myself beating on her and using the rag on her. Then I wake up and her clothes are off and my clothes are off, so I think we had sex together.”

  But his victim was now conscious as well. She was not just crying for help, Hall told Keene. “She was crying for her mother and I didn’t like that.” He put his clothes on, then led her naked out of the van and told her to sit with her back against a tree.

  Keene says, “He showed me with his fingers how he would interlock two leather belts. He then got behind the tree, so he wouldn’t have to see her face. He whipped the belts around her neck and used a stick to twist them like a tourniquet and kept turning and turning until he didn’t hear her make another sound.”

  Jimmy shrugged his shoulders and nodded. “Well, I guess you had to do what you had to do,” he said, but suddenly Keene felt as if he were choking, too. Until he heard Hall talk about whipping the belts around the tree, he never truly appreciated the horror of what Hall had done to the young girl. “I probably should have changed the subject and stayed around to shoot the bull, but I just had to get out of there.”

  When Keene returned to his cell, he says, “I was thinking, ‘Man, if only I had a wire on.’ ” The Feds had briefly considered it, but a concealed tape recorder, no matter how small, is impractical for use in a prison where inmates are constantly searched, and it’s highly dangerous for the informant if word ever leaks out about it. “But I still felt very good about what I had,” Keene says. “I had a solid confession out of him, which was eighty percent of what they wanted from me.”

  Yet, along with his elation, another feeling as well clawed at any joy he felt about finally cracking Hall. “I went back to my cell and replayed in my head what he told me, and I kept seeing the pictures of Jessica Roach that Beaumont showed me in the Ford County jail—the ones of her body in the cornfield—and I kept thinking about her crying for her mother. And I told him, ‘You had to do what you had to do.’ It was part of the act, so he would talk to me. But later I felt so bad about that. Almost like I was guilty of killing her, too.” From this night forward, that revulsion would become a ticking time bomb inside Keene. To keep it from blowing up would be one more unexpected challenge in completing his mission.

  As always, with the dawning of the next day, Hall had regrets about his nocturnal admissions. “At breakfast,” Keene says, “I could see him watching me from his table; like he was afraid I was going to turn on him. After the mob guys left, I walked right up to him, and I could see he was examining me. Then I said, ‘Are we meeting down at the library today?’ Again, he had that look of relief, and the next time we talked, I brought up an entirely different subject, telling him how out of shape he had gotten and what he could do to work out. I wanted him to see that what he told me the night before didn’t change anything between us.”

  Although Keene could control his emotions around Hall, sometimes it wasn’t so easy around other prisoners. “There were certain days when I felt unbelievably happy that I’d be leaving soon. It’s like the cold, gray days of winter, and all around me are these guys shuffling along on medications and double life sentences. But here I am thinking that Beaumont’s crazy plan is actually going to work out, and suddenly I would get giddy. I’d have to catch myself to bring myself down again. Otherwise someone could look at me and say, ‘What the fuck are you so happy about, dude?’ It could have blown my cover.”

  But at night, alone in his cell after another session with Hall, any happiness that Keene felt was mixed with equal amounts of dread. To hear about the killings from Hall’s own lips made them more real than anything he had read on paper. As he listened to each new detail, he ultimately realized why he felt so guilty. “It wasn’t that Hall was my ticket out. It was what he did—the number of victims he had and that they couldn’t find them all. I was trying to help find Reitler, but the evil in this guy was helping me get an early release. I used to think, ‘What if these girls didn’t die? Or what if he didn’t kill so many? I’d be rotting in prison another ten years.’ The closer I got to accomplishing the mission, the more those thoughts started to eat at me.”

  After Hall told him how he killed Jessica Roach, Keene waited another few days before he broached the subject again. “That’s pretty wild how that went down,” he said. “So what was with this other girl they keep talking about, this Reitler girl?”

  Once again, Hall assured Keene that the official version was not accurate: “It didn’t happen that way.” While it was true that he approached Reitler after she left the store, he did not immediately confront her with a knife. “Me and her were talking. She was friendly with me, James. She’s one of the first girls that I ever talked to that was being nice to me.”

  “Well, that’s cool.”

  “But they said I just jumped on her with a knife and that is not true.”

  Keene shrugged his shoulders and acted disinterested. “I just kind of let it be,” he says, so Larry wouldn’t get more upset. But the following night, Hall brought it up himself. In the statement that FBI agent Randolph took from Hall in the Wabash City Police Department, Larry reportedly said that Reitler tried to run away and he stabbed her with a knife and then had sex with her on a tarp outside the van.

  Instead, Hall claimed that Reitler still had her clothes on when she got into the van with him. Keene remembers, “He made it sound like she went inside the van herself, but he admitted he had the knife, so you can’t believe she was willing to be with him. And then he got bug-eyed and started talking like he was in a trance.”

 
The dim light in Hall’s cell that had once seemed so comforting had now become creepy. “It was like this little confession room for him and me alone,” Keene says. “It was weird.”

  “When I tried to kiss her,” Hall said, “she started like going crazy on me, and hitting me, and punching me, and wanting to get out of the van.”

  None of the girls had ever fought with him like that, and Hall was caught by surprise because she had seemed so nice. “I started choking her to make her stop. And honestly, James, that’s the last thing I remember. It was like I blacked out again. When I woke up, I was lying next to her, and her clothes were all off. Then I looked at her and I knew that she was dead. I started feeling for a pulse but it wasn’t there.” Although Hall didn’t say it directly, Keene assumed that in the van he might have stabbed her as well as choked her, since the clothes were found with bloodstains.

  This wasn’t how it went with the other girls, Hall told Keene, so he panicked. First he gathered up her clothes and shoes. He had pulled his van alongside a pocket park, and he put her things under a tree there. Then, he got behind the wheel of his van and drove directly back to his home twenty minutes away. He left the van in the street outside the house and went to his little room to gather his thoughts.

  “I realized I had done it again,” Hall said. “I was real panicky trying to figure out what I would do next, pacing back and forth.”

  “He buried her that night,” Keene says, “in a place that was way out in the country.” Once again, as Jimmy heard the details, he felt his blood run cold. While everything Hall told Jimmy brought him that much closer to freedom, it was also too much to bear. The first chance he could, he got up to say he was tired and went back to his cell.

  He had the confessions, but that was still just part of the mission. He knew he would have to probe deeper to get a more precise location for where Hall had buried Tricia Reitler, but that wasn’t going to be easy. It sounded as if he had taken her into the wilderness. What landmarks could Hall possibly give him to pinpoint an exact location in an area like that?

  The next two nights when they met to talk, Keene tried to steer the conversation back to Reitler, but there really was no way to ask where she was buried—other than coming out with the question. “Once I got those two confessions out of him,” Jimmy explains, “I just got incredibly antsy and impatient. I kept pacing all day long, all around the building as far as I could go, and I don’t think I slept more than a few hours a night. Now when I looked at his cell, it was like torture. Getting out was so close and it was still so far away.”

  Finally, one night in January 1999, Keene decided to act. He found himself going back to the thoughts he had the first time he saw Larry Hall—that he could grab him by the throat and wring Reitler’s burial place out of him. But six months later, he felt crazed enough to actually do it. Then the masquerade would be over. He wouldn’t have to pretend to be Hall’s friend, and if nothing else, Hall would finally get some of the rough justice he deserved. “Oh, I wanted to beat the hell out of the guy. Just mess him up real bad. I stormed into his cell, but it was empty,” Keene remembers, “so I just started walking real fast to the little TV room. When I saw he wasn’t there, I figured he could only be in the wood shop.”

  If Larry was in the Arts & Crafts center at some kind of class, Keene planned to wait outside the door and ambush him as he left, but when he arrived, no guard was at the door. Looking over at the wood shop area, he spotted Hall from behind, sitting in front of his workbench on a stool, hunched over a project. He stepped through the doorway and crept closer until he could see what Larry was working on.

  “The first thing I saw,” Keene says, “was that falcon. But then I saw that there wasn’t just one, but ten or twelve of them—exactly alike.” Hall had them lined up at the top of a big piece of paper that lay partly on the bench and partly in his lap. When Keene got close enough to look over Hall’s shoulder, he saw it was a black-and-white photocopy map of Illinois and Indiana with several red dots scattered inside the borders.

  “I was just behind him,” Keene says, “when I said, ‘Hey, Larry.’

  “He practically fell off his chair, but then he dove to put both shoulders over that map so I couldn’t see it.”

  “What are you doing here?” Hall asked. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  “He was just stunned that I was in there,” Keene recalls. “And I said, ‘The guard wasn’t at the door, so I figured I could come in and take a look at what you’re always working on.’ ”

  As Larry folded up the map and pushed it to the side, Jimmy reached over to pick up a falcon. They were all unpainted, but as Jimmy looked at one closely, he could see that its eyes and feathers were so carefully etched, they could have come from a machine.

  “This is pretty cool,” Jimmy told Hall. “Did you make all of these yourself?”

  Hall reached out as though to grab the falcon away from him, but then extended a quivering hand, palm side down, and petted the head as though it were alive. “I’m sending them to my brother. Do you know what they’re for, James?”

  Keene shook his head.

  “They watch over the dead.” Hall kept petting the head, then asked, “Do you want one, James?”

  Jimmy chuckled. “Uh, no thanks, Larry. What do I need something like that for?”

  But Hall was totally focused on the falcon, and Keene handed it back to him. Jimmy says, “As he looked at it, he had big, buggy eyes—all red and wild—like he was in some kind of zone over the spiritual being of these little falcons.”

  Immediately Keene realized that he had stumbled onto the key to his entire investigation. “He was so protective of that map that I knew it had to mean something, but I got a good enough look at it before he rolled it up to see all the red spots on it.” Jimmy assumed that each of the red spots had marked a place where Hall killed someone, like the maps in the Roach trial. Larry must have intended for his twin to put a falcon near each of the spots marked on the map.

  Hall looked up at Keene with the falcon in his hand and repeated, “They watch over the dead, James. They will guard their spirits to make sure they’re okay.”

  All the murderers that Jimmy ever knew wanted to get as far away from the scene of the crime as possible. Frank Calabrese, for one, probably had no interest in seeing the cornfield where they buried Tony Spilotro after Frank helped to kill him.* But Keene could see that Hall wanted nothing more than to return to the places where he killed the girls, and while he was behind bars, the falcons would go in his place. “As I looked at him,” Keene says, “all I could think was ‘Dude, you sure are a nutcase. No doubt about it.’ ”

  But now Jimmy was anxious to let his handlers know that he had finally cracked the case. If they seized the map before it got to Larry’s brother, they might actually find out where he buried Tricia Reitler and some other missing victims, too. “Look, Larry,” Keene said. “I got to get out before that guard comes back and catches me in here or I’ll be in the hole for three days.”

  Keene slipped back out of the Arts and Craft center and ran to the nearest pay phone. First he called the emergency number he had been given by his visiting “girlfriend,” Agent Butkus. Jimmy hadn’t even told her that he was talking to Hall regularly, let alone that he was visiting his cell, because he was afraid she would rein him back. “I figured she’d be shocked to hear that I had the whole thing licked with the confessions and the map,” Keene says, “but I couldn’t wait. I wanted her to get that map from Hall before he put it in the mail the next day.” Since it was so late at night, the operator at the FBI could not put him in direct contact with Butkus. Instead, he got her voice mail and left a long, breathless message. He would have preferred to talk to her in real time, but she’d always responded quickly when he or a member of his family had called her voice mail in the past.

  Keene then put in a call to Big Jim—equally breathless and probably even more incoherent: “Dad, listen, I just went down to Hall’s wood shop class and
he’s got a map just like the one that was in the back of his van when they caught him, and he also had all of these little birds that he carved out.”

  After a moment of silence, Big Jim asked, “What are you talking about, Son?”

  “Dad, just trust me. I’ve figured this thing out. I think I’ve got this thing conquered. I just want you to know so that you can finally get some peace of mind and relax about me being here.”

  Big Jim knew that inmate calls could be monitored, so he didn’t ask any further questions. “Whatever you say, Son. I just hope it’s true.”

  Keene practically flew back to his cell. It would all soon be over. He clattered around his shelves and locker to pull together his few belongings—the toiletries, the girlie magazines, the stupid headphones that almost got him killed—all crap that he’d probably dump the moment he got outside. Glancing across the hall, he saw Larry returning to his cell. With all the anxiety and sleeplessness of the last few days, he could not contain himself. He had some unfinished business with Larry Hall before he left.

  Then Keene did something he’s regretted ever since. He decided to give Larry Hall a piece of his mind. To this day, he does not exactly understand why he did it. Partly he was intoxicated with the belief that he had done the impossible—not only gotten Larry to confess to him, but found the body as well. But mostly he was driven by guilt. He felt guilty when he’d passively nodded as Hall explained how he killed the girls. He felt guilty for telling him, “You had to do what you had to do.” And he felt guilty that his early release would come from the suffering of those girls and their families. “Before I left Springfield,” he says, “I just had to tell Larry that I wasn’t like him.” He didn’t see how it could hurt. Only minutes later, lights would go out and they would both be locked down for the night. Jimmy had no doubt that Janice Butkus would be as responsive as ever to his message. FBI agents would probably be waiting when the door opened for Hall in the morning.