In with the Devil Page 21

  His anger did not abate for another few hours until the plane circled to land in Chicago, and it finally dawned on him that at least he was out of Springfield and still had some chance that this could soon be over.

  10.

  Closure

  During the weeks following Keene’s release from Springfield in January of 1999, his travels amounted to a fast-motion replay of his first ten months in the prison system. Butkus took him directly to Chicago’s MCC from the airport, and after a mercifully brief stay, he was sent to Milan, Michigan, where Jimmy used a cover story about winning an appeal, and then, as abruptly as before, he was yanked back to Illinois, first to the MCC and then Ford County jail, where he was told he’d have to wait a few weeks for his sentencing judge, Harold Baker, to return from vacation.

  As he lingered yet again inside a stinking Ford County jail cell, Jimmy could not help but worry. He may have gotten out of Springfield, but he continued to roil inside his own purgatory of remorse that he had not helped locate Tricia Reitler’s body. His lawyer, Jeffrey Steinback, confirmed that the falcons and the map were not recovered, but he kept assuring Jimmy that the Feds were sure to provide some reward for his travails—especially after his unjustified stint in the hole. But who really knew how Beaumont and the judge would respond? They alone would decide his fate.

  For his part, Keene was convinced that he had learned enough from Hall to become an important witness in any future prosecution. “I could get up on a stand and testify in all honesty that he did it,” Jimmy says. “I know that jailhouse confessions are a dime a dozen. Prosecutors use cellie snitches to set up guys all the time. But I’m not saying that Hall like turned around one day and bragged to me how he killed those girls. It took weeks of slowly working him every night in the cell; and getting him to believe in me and believe we were friends.”

  Equally important in his conversations with Keene, Larry disputed key elements of the statement that was so hastily transcribed by FBI agent Randolph—especially in regards to the death of Tricia Reitler. What Hall told Jimmy was more consistent with other evidence and the victim’s personality. For example, according to the statement, Larry forced her to undress in the park on the edge of the IWU campus, something her friends and parents don’t believe she would ever have done without a struggle—even if threatened by a knife. It makes much more sense that she was stabbed and ultimately killed inside Hall’s van, as he disclosed to Jimmy, and that Hall had neatly piled her clothes under the tree later.

  The information that he gave Keene about returning home before he buried Tricia Reitler is also plausible. Unlike with Jessica Roach, he had much more time to think about disposing of her remains and to gather the tools necessary—shovel, lantern, gloves—to complete the job without leaving any evidence behind.

  Suddenly one morning, without warning, the Ford County guards shackled Keene again and bundled him over to the courthouse thirty minutes away. At first he thought the judge had returned from his vacation, but instead of a holding cell, he found himself in Larry Beaumont’s office.

  The prosecutor—who once provoked such fear and loathing in Jimmy—now offered him a doughnut, which Keene politely refused (“I’d rather starve than eat junk food,” he says), but then did something just as unexpected. He asked Keene to take a lie detector test.

  “Do you have any objections to it?” Beaumont asked. “I can assure you that if everything comes out the right way, it will be in your best interest.”

  It was gut-check time. Beaumont could not just take Jimmy’s word that Hall had confessed to him. He needed to know without a doubt.

  “No, I have no problem with taking the test,” Keene answered confidently. “None at all.”

  “Good,” Beaumont said. He already had everything set up in the next room.

  Jimmy had taken a polygraph before, but this equipment was nothing like the device he remembered. “They didn’t just have a few wires wrapped around your fingers and biceps. Instead they had me pull off my shirt so they could attach electrodes to my chest and then they slipped some other things on my fingers and put a cap on my head. I must have looked like an alien.”

  Instead of running lines across a graph page, this machine had digital readouts and charts. But rather than watch the flashing lights, Keene looked out the window as the examiner began his test. “He started out asking me the most general questions. Like my favorite color or who was my first girlfriend,” Jimmy remembers. “And then, out of nowhere, he hit me with a pinpoint question about Hall. What did he say and when did he say it? Did he talk about choking her first or using the rag? And then he went back to his general questions again.”

  It was a cold, sunny day, and Keene focused on a little sparrow that had perched on a branch just outside the window. “It was the dead of winter,” he says, “and this little bird was still hanging around. I kept my eyes on it the whole time that I took the test, and I thought, ‘It won’t be long before I’m out there with you.’ ”

  Beaumont was still huddling with the examiner when the U.S. marshals put the shackles back on Keene. But before they could march him out of the building, Beaumont pulled Jimmy aside. At first he glared, sending a shiver down Jimmy’s spine. Then suddenly and unexpectedly his face broke into a smile. “Jimmy, you did wonderful. You passed it.”

  Still numb from the experience, Keene would not allow himself to be exhilarated by the news until he returned to the jail and was told to call his lawyer, Jeffrey Steinback. “I just talked to Beaumont,” Steinback told him. “He is ecstatic about the results of that lie detector test. I think they’re going to let you get out.”

  On February 23, 1999, Lawrence S. Beaumont, assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of Illinois, filed what is known as a Motion for Reduction of Sentence Under Rule 35(B), stating, “Mr. Keene was placed in an undercover role at the Bureau of Prisons medical facility in Springfield, Missouri. He conducted this activity for approximately six months. He was able to gain specific information from the target of the investigation which may lead to the solving of a kidnapping and murder case from Indiana. During this time, Mr. Keene was placed in a facility in which he faced substantial danger.”

  The next day, Keene was taken to the courthouse. As opposed to his previous sentencing hearing before Judge Baker, this was mostly a procedural affair with little said in open court. But to go off the record, stern Judge Baker put his hand over the microphone. This time when he looked down again at Keene, it was not to admonish but to soothe: “Young man, I can tell you’ve been through hell and back. Just bear with me while we go through the formalities.”

  Papers were shuffled between Beaumont, the clerk, the judge, and Steinback. No formal thanks were offered one way or the other. The 35(B) motion to reduce Jimmy’s sentence to time served—with a few months to spare—was granted. Judge Baker stated simply his reason for the ruling in the minutes of the proceeding: “Court finds defendant has rendered assistance.”

  Larry Beaumont is one lawyer who does not take polygraphs lightly. His own lie detector business helped put him through law school. If the federal government had not prevented polygraphs from being used as evidence in 1988, he would probably be in the field to this day. “They’re not perfect,” he says. “If it says you’re lying, there’s a ten percent chance it’s wrong. But if it says you’re telling the truth, you’re telling the truth. You just can’t beat it without several months of preparation.”

  Early in his career as a state’s attorney, Beaumont put his belief in lie detectors to the test in the case of a botched kidnapping that ended with the death of a Kankakee media mogul. To spare his girlfriend, the man who was ultimately convicted for the kidnapping fingered a local criminal as his accomplice. “We grabbed that guy while he was eating breakfast and threw him in a jail cell,” Beaumont remembers, “and he said, ‘Hey, I’m a burglar and a car thief, but I sure as hell didn’t kidnap anybody.’ He claimed that at the time of abduction he was having sex with a girl and describe
d in pretty graphic terms what they were doing. I polygraphed him and sure enough he passed. Before we let him out of jail, we next questioned the girl, and she corroborated everything he said—right down to the graphic details. From then on, he was no longer a suspect in the kidnapping. You could say that the polygraph ended up saving that guy a lot of time and expense—if not his life.”

  For Beaumont, Larry Hall’s case is exactly the sort that proves the polygraph’s value. Not only did Keene pass his battery of questions, but Hall failed his test when he took a polygraph soon after he arrived in Illinois. Although it was never publicized, Beaumont did grant Hall’s request to take a lie detector test, which he made repeatedly to FBI agent Randolph. “The FBI was dead set against giving him a polygraph,” Beaumont says, but the prosecutor wanted to call Hall’s bluff. “I just couldn’t see how it would hurt us, so I arranged for him to get a polygraph from a state examiner.” As he expected, Hall failed the test, and although the results could not be used against Larry in court, they did confirm for Beaumont and Miller that Hall really was a worthy suspect in both the Roach and Reitler cases. “I also watched a videotape of the examination,” Beaumont says, “and Hall even looked deceitful.”

  Today in private practice, having retired from the Department of Justice in 2006, Beaumont has shaved off the beard that Jimmy Keene once found so fearsome and looks back on the Larry Hall case with few regrets. Beaumont does not deny that “competition” developed between his team and the Marion detectives during the investigation leading up to Hall’s trial. “We were pretty sure [Hall] did Reitler, and there was kind of a fight between us and Marion [police] because they were so convinced that he didn’t do it. Then, when they came out in that article before trial where they were quoted saying that [Tony Searcy was the prime suspect], that pissed us off even more.”

  Ironically, Beaumont had second thoughts about including Reitler in the first trial. He explains, “Because we didn’t have any physical evidence with her case, it really could have looked like Hall was somebody who was just confessing to a lot of murders. But finally we did feel that we could not leave Reitler out, if for no other reason than to give her parents some closure. They really were not aware of all the evidence implicating Hall, and when that trial began, they still had no idea of what happened to their daughter. I have a little girl myself, and I can only imagine what that’s like to have your daughter suddenly disappear.”

  Beaumont again tried to give the Reitlers closure when he conducted the search party to Marion and, after that failed, when he plucked Keene out of Milan and sent him to Springfield. The idea to choose Jimmy for the mission, Beaumont says, actually came from a DEA agent in the narcotics task force. “All I knew was that Jimmy Keene was a smart, wily kid who wasn’t happy with the sentence we gave him. I figured he would jump at the opportunity to get out early.”

  As to the ultimate outcome, he says, “Well, we didn’t find the body, and the goal of this investigation was to find the body. In fact, I had told Jim that unless we found the body, he ain’t getting jack for it. But once he passed the polygraph about the statements he heard from Hall, I still had to ask the judge to give him credit. It was the only fair thing we could do because, after all, he did sit in the nuthouse with this guy.”

  Ironically, within days of Keene’s passing the lie detector test, the Seventh Circuit released its decision on Hall’s second appeal. This time the jury’s guilty verdict was affirmed with the court finding that the judge acted appropriately in admitting and barring expert testimony for the retrial.

  If nothing else, Beaumont had the satisfaction of knowing that Hall would spend the rest of his life in prison for the murder of Jessica Roach. But his attempt to tie him to Tricia Reitler’s abduction or any other murders appeared to come to an official end with the motion to release Jimmy Keene.

  In fact, the investigation was still far from over. Now Jimmy’s story would accomplish what he himself could not. It would continue to play out in unexpected ways over the next nine years with allies and sources that Beaumont would never have anticipated in his wildest dreams.

  Today, if there is any clearinghouse for the Larry Hall investigation, it resides in the boxes and file cabinets of Ron Smith’s home office. When Smith retired five years ago from the Wabash City police department, where he served as both a patrolman and a detective, he started work as pastor for his church. At sixty-seven, he is a big, expansive man with a brown brush mustache. “One thing about us ex-cops,” he says, laughing, “We either turn to God or the bottle.” But in the last few years, he has also devoted an increasing amount of his spare time to all of the various loose ends that the night janitor may have left behind.

  “One of the first ones goes back to 1987,” he says. “A sixteen-year-old girl.” Although Smith is reluctant to provide the name, she has been identified as Wendy Felton by other investigators and lived just two miles from where Tricia Reitler was last seen. Although as with Reitler, Felton’s body was never found, her likely abduction from a quiet road near the family farmstead bore similarities to that of Jessica Roach.

  In 2007 Smith was again approached about Larry Hall by a state police trooper in Rochester, Michigan, this time regarding a woman found just a month before Hall confessed to Randolph and Miller. If Felton had been the first known victim, this older woman was probably the last. Police believed that she had been a prostitute. Like the other suspected Hall victims who had been found—Beck, Rison, and Roach—she, too, had been strangled. If Larry had really killed her, Smith says, he had reached a murderous frenzy where he was going after any vulnerable woman he could find, which may be why he even pursued the middle-aged jogger who lived up the street from him in Wabash.

  In the winter of 2007, during a car trip to Florida, Smith made a stop in Butner, North Carolina—just outside of Durham—where Hall is currently incarcerated in a high-security hospital. Although Larry had to give him permission before he could visit, Smith found him to be barely coherent when he arrived. “I really didn’t get him to respond to anything until I took out a picture [of Wendy Felton], and just like Gary Miller did, I laid it out in front of him and he couldn’t take his eyes off of it. Then, out of nowhere, he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember her.’ I said, ‘You do?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, she used to work in a restaurant. I was going in there to eat pretty frequently. And I bought her some jewelry and then she befriended me and I had to kill her.’ ” Of course none of the details applied to Wendy Felton, but something about her picture had touched off Hall’s babble of free associations. For the retired detective, the sudden bits of confession were like the brief flashes of lucidity one hears from someone with dementia or severe schizophrenia.

  “I never found out who he was really talking about,” Smith says, “but the clinical psychologist who was watching about fell off his chair. He said, ‘I’ve never even seen him talk to anybody like that.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve known him for years.’

  “I later found out that his mother found out I was coming and she tried to get him to stop from talking to me.”

  As far as Smith is concerned, all mysteries about Larry Hall begin and end with his brother, Gary. The twin fervently defended Larry during his trials and appeared to take the convictions especially hard. He later became chronically unemployed and needed treatment for substance abuse—at the same public facility where his brother received counseling in the year before he was arrested for murder. After their father, Robert, died in 2001, Gary stayed with their mother in a tiny house owned by his older half brother, who maintained steady employment at a local factory. But at times Gary was also seen by friends living out of a car. They have no doubt that his decline was due to Larry’s crimes. “He keeps telling you, ‘I’m not like my brother,’ ” says Ron Osborne, who knew the Halls back in high school when they cruised street rods together. “But I think somewhere deep down inside he’s afraid he could be like him since he is his identical twin. And the truth is that Gary has not been emotionally or m
entally stable since his brother [was arrested].”

  Some of Larry’s therapists believe that Gary may have played a much larger role in his twin’s pathology than he ever thought or intended. They argue that when Gary moved out of the family household to live with and then marry his girlfriend, it fundamentally rearranged the furniture in Larry’s psyche. None of them articulates this better than psychiatrist Arthur Traugott, who was a witness in Larry’s defense. “I remember very distinctly when Larry was telling me about Gary’s first marriage and how Larry just felt utterly abandoned,” Traugott testified in the first trial. “As he was telling me about this during the interview, he broke into tears crying about how he felt left alone.”

  The hectoring voice in Larry’s notes may have cropped up to take the absent twin’s place. As one counselor points out, it is probably no accident that victims such as Jessica Roach and Tricia Reitler had the same hairstyle and body type of Gary’s first wife, Catherine, who was sixteen when they first started dating.

  But in the eyes of retired Wabash detective Ron Smith, Gary shares some more direct blame for his brother’s homicidal behavior or at least in covering it up. Smith believes that may feed his guilt as well. During the years of Gary’s downward slide, Smith reached out to him to see if he would be willing to come clean. When they met, it was only for short, sporadic sessions. “When he was living with his mom, you couldn’t get anywhere near him,” Smith says. “He would ask to meet you someplace and then would never show up. I probably spoke to him a total of three and a half hours over three years, and like Larry, he gave me stuff in bits and pieces—just enough to get me interested but not too much to make me think he was involved in what his brother did.”