In with the Devil Page 22

  The twin confided in Ron about the road trip that he, Larry, and another friend took out West in 1984. According to Smith, Gary said, “We got this girl and we had our way with her.” It’s not clear exactly what Gary meant by this, and he has never been charged with any sexual assault, but Smith wonders whether that incident tripped a lust reflex inside Larry that led to the later rapes and murders.

  Gary also told Smith about the reenactment and sightseeing vacation in Pennsylvania that the twins took with Gary’s second wife and how the couple booted Larry out of their motel room. Smith says, “So [Larry] then took off in Gary’s car. They didn’t see him for a while, but when he came back, he went and got another room and took a shower for several hours. And when he came out of the motel room, he was all kind of roughed up with scuff marks on his face. And Gary is telling me this like he’s finally put all the pieces together. He then said, ‘I didn’t think much about it until we were back home and all of a sudden my wife gave me all kinds of shit and wanted to know what female I had in my car, because she found a woman’s earring underneath the front seat and it didn’t belong to her.’ ”

  Another time, Gary told Smith, Larry took him to a farmer’s field by the Mississinewa reservoir where they could search for arrowheads. “He says, ‘We were out walking all through there and we go by a gravel pit, and I see what I think is a hand sticking up, and when I said, ‘Did you see that?’ Larry grabbed my arm and brought me to the side and said, ‘I don’t think you want to go over there.’ ”

  But most disturbing for Smith is what happened, according to Gary, after Larry was arrested by Deputy Sheriff Miller. From the jail in Marion, Hall called his father and told him to retrieve some items from his storage cars in Ross Davis’s barn. When Robert returned, Gary told Smith, he saw him with a “big map” of Indiana with more than twenty “DB” marks all over it. Smith says, “I asked him, ‘What’s DB stand for?’ and he answered, ‘At the bottom [of the map] it said DB equals “dead body.” ’ And then he watched his dad burn that map into a trash can.” Smith later talked to one of Robert’s neighbors who saw him burning material in barrels for several days after Larry’s arrest.

  Ron Smith was not the only Wabash resident to hear these revelations about Larry Hall from his twin brother. In late 2007 Gary Hall dropped by Ron Osborne’s house with Osborne’s younger brother. The two had met when they were both in the same drug treatment program. Since Ron Osborne has long worked at a Wabash foundry, his unemployed brother came to ask him for money and Gary tagged along. It had been years since Ron Osborne had seen Gary, and he says, “I didn’t hardly recognize him. He looked pretty rough and his hair had some gray. He talks different now—like a robot really—and I think he was a little messed up that night, so it was pretty sad. Just to be polite, I asked him how his brother was doing, and he told me that Larry was in a prison for the criminally insane. And then he says, ‘Because he killed twenty-two women.’

  “And I was shocked. I asked, ‘That many?’ I didn’t realize he had done that many. To be honest with you, I didn’t really follow the case that closely in the newspapers. Then he sat there telling me details about how the first couple [of women] that Larry did, that he couldn’t look them in the eye, so he pinned them up against a tree and he strangled them from the other side.

  “He was telling me that and I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ And I asked him, ‘How did you not know [Larry was doing these things]?’ He said, ‘Well, when we would go away to these reenactments, we’d have like a camp setup, and what he would do is sneak out of the tent after everyone was asleep and do whatever he did and come back.’ ”

  Ron Osborne says he later told his younger brother, “I would rather you not bring him here again.”

  “I have problems with my memory,” Larry Hall says. “I’m not sure why that is.”*

  But during a brief telephone interview in the summer of 2008, Hall is nothing like the incoherent puddle of free associations that former detective Ron Smith encountered a year before. As Larry explains, his real problem then was sleep apnea—not schizophrenia as Smith thought. Since he’s been using a mask at his bedside to assist with breathing, he’s been getting full nights of sleep for the first time in his adulthood. Indeed, his responses to questions are quick and lucid, and his high-pitched voice sounds steady with just a slight warble at the end of his sentences. Despite the protest about his memory, he still remembers that he was blamed for breaking those store windows when he was fifteen and that they cost $500 to repair.

  Most of the memories of his youth are sharp—the childhood playmates, his teachers in school, each and every car he owned, the Civil War battlefields he visited. When asked about his tendency to look away from cameras in all the photographs, he quickly replies, “I’m always afraid of breaking them. I never really liked the way I looked. Maybe that’s got something to do with it.”

  He is equally candid about the solitary life he lived as a young man—still in his parents’ house and working alone at night. “I didn’t want to keep living my life the way I was living it,” he says. “I wanted things to be different, you know, but I guess I didn’t really do the right things and change the way my life was going.”

  When asked what his dream would have been if he had won the lottery, he replies, “Then I would have bought my mom and dad a nice new house. And bought myself one real close so I could, you know, watch over them and take care of them.”

  It is the answer of the good and kind son as his mother portrayed him in interviews with reporters. But something adolescent is in these wishes as well, and when asked what his dream job would have been, he also harks back to the passions of his teen years, saying, “[To] own my own street-rod shop, where I could fix up antique street rods.”

  As for girlfriends and family, he says of his life before prison, “I thought about getting married a couple different times, but it always kind of scared me off. I’m not sure why, but I was always afraid of not being able to handle a family. After I had seen what had happened to both my brothers being married twice and divorcing, having to pay a lot of child support, it kind of scared me off.”

  Larry has no contact with his nieces, although one lives near the prison in North Carolina, and he admits that he has not seen Gary in ten years. He explains, “It’s a long travel distance from Indiana,” but even though he calls his mother on the phone each week, he does not talk to Gary.

  He seems resigned to living the rest of his life in the Butner prison, but misses Springfield, where he says he had several good friends. When asked about Jimmy Keene, he hesitates at first and then replies, “I became friends with James for a short while. As I remember it, when he found out what I was charged with, he kind of scared me off. I didn’t really want to be around him anymore.”

  Hall then names the woman who was his “doctor” in Springfield and says, “She had [Keene] put in the hole because he said that he knew I was responsible for a bunch of people dying, and he was going to get it out of me. . . . I felt bad about him going to the hole, but I felt that he was sent [to Springfield] by the prosecutor. . . . I’m not sure why [Beaumont] acted the way he did towards me, but I felt that he had a lot of hate for me and I don’t really understand why.”

  Larry’s doctor certainly did not have that hate for him. Not only did she protect him from Keene and Beaumont, she also had him transferred to one of the most desired placements in the Bureau of Prisons—the medium-security facility in Oxford, Wisconsin. Set among rolling hills and dairy farms, it has a culinary vocational program and the best food in the federal prison system. “It’s like a hotel in there,” one frequent visitor told the Chicago Tribune. “It’s clean and comfortable and quite quiet.” As a result, it has become the destination of choice for Chicago’s convicted mobsters and corrupt politicians.

  If Hall’s doctor truly believed he was a dangerous serial killer, it’s unlikely that she would have sent him to a place with lower security than the Medical Center. But
once a convict enters the Bureau of Prisons, no outside checks are made on his transfers within the system. His doctor can take the place of the sentencing judge, jury, and prosecutor. A law enforcement officer familiar with Hall’s prison records says, “It’s amazing how Larry brings out the maternal instincts in the women who have worked with him in prison, especially when you consider the crimes he committed against women on the outside.”

  But if Hall’s Springfield doctor thought she was doing him any favors by transferring him out of the MCFP, she was wrong. He did not like Oxford at all and attempted suicide there.* Another factor contributing to Hall’s depression may have been that when the Seventh Circuit court denied his second appeal, any flickering hope of leaving prison was snuffed out forever.

  After the suicide attempt, Hall was sent to the BOP’s hospital in Rochester, Minnesota, for intensive treatment, and then, in 2004, to the long-term psychiatric care center in Butner. By the summer of 2008 when he had the interview over the phone, Larry may have regained his senses with the treatment for sleep apnea, but he was not yet ready to concede that he had committed murder. Why then did he confess to so many different policemen? He replies, “I did confess to certain policemen that I had dreams that I did things.”

  And could those dreams be a window into actual things that the bad side of Larry Hall has done? After a few moments of silence, he says, “Yes, I’ve thought of that.”

  Only eight months later, in April 2009, Larry would not be so tentative. Instead, he swung back to making the sort of full confession that would be difficult—if not impossible—to deny later. Once again, his admission was prompted by two visiting law enforcement officers, but this time they were joined by none other than his twin brother, Gary.

  The police were cold-case detectives from Indianapolis investigating the 1991 murder of twenty-one-year-old Michelle Dewey. She had been strangled at home in a quiet residential neighborhood known as Irvington. Her infant son had been left unharmed in the next room. Although the family always suspected that an old boyfriend committed the crime, the police were not so sure and could find no evidence to link him to the killing. The 2008 August issue of Playboy, with an article about Jimmy Keene’s mission to Springfield, appeared nearly seventeen years after Dewey’s death, but the story became especially timely for the cold-case detectives when they read about Tricia Reitler and Hall’s forays to Marion—just eighty miles north of Indianapolis, up U.S. Route 69. When they contacted retired Wabash detective Ron Smith, he suggested that they go see Larry in Butner, North Carolina, and bring Gary Hall along.

  If Jimmy Keene had become something of a substitute twin to Larry to get him to confess in Springfield, then the real twin would be the catalyst to keep him confessing in Butner. After briefly meeting with Gary, Larry agreed to speak with the Indianapolis police and admitted that he killed Michelle Dewey. As he did before with FBI agent Mike Randolph and Deputy Sheriff Gary Miller, Hall provided vivid details about the murder that were not generally known to the public. He was drawn to her neighborhood by his never-ending search for a vintage Dodge van advertised in the Auto Trader, and Michelle caught his attention as she lay sunbathing in her backyard. When he followed her into the house, he was startled by the cries of her baby and left soon after he strangled her, but took a record album with him as a souvenir.

  According to Gary Hall, Larry did not just admit to the Dewey murder. He confessed to killing fourteen other young women as well. He continued talking with the detectives for five hours until visiting hours were over. They returned the following day and spent another eight hours with Larry before they were through.

  Gary broke the news about his twin’s confessions during a November 2009 interview on Indianapolis TV station WTHR. He no longer had the gray, haggard look that Ron Osborne had seen two years before. Instead his brushed-back hair was jet-black. With a tanned complexion and scruffy Fu Manchu, he appeared more Mexican than Midwestern, but his voice had the same high-pitched whine and warble of his brother’s. “I believe Larry killed Michelle,” he told the WTHR reporter. “I believe Larry killed a lot of young women, I’m sorry to say.”

  The victims, Gary revealed, were spread out across the country. In addition to Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, he counted out California, Colorado, Missouri, and Wyoming on his fingers—states that had not previously appeared as places of suspected Larry Hall murders. He then added, “I don’t believe he’s making any of this up. He’s got too many specific details.”

  When the reporter asked Gary why he was “coming forward” with the information about his twin brother, he replied, “We’re searching for the truth,” but then he echoed the sentiments expressed by both Jimmy Keene and Larry Beaumont in the Playboy article. “We want closure for the families,” Gary said. “We want the victims all brought home—every last one of them.”

  He confirmed that those victims included Tricia Reitler. On the second day of their interview with Larry, the Indianapolis detectives brought him a map to show them where he buried her. Hall pinpointed a spot near 700 West Old Slocum Trail—the same address listed in his notes for “Frances Slocum Trail.”

  As the Indianapolis detectives have worked through the information they received from Hall, they have been careful to keep Garry and Donna Reitler abreast of the investigation. “We are very honored that they continue to focus on finding Tricia,” Garry says. The Reitlers were not aware of all the evidence connecting Larry Hall to the abduction of their daughter until the Playboy article was published. In addition, the scenario that Hall disclosed to Keene makes much more sense to them than the statement originally taken by Deputy Sheriff Miller and FBI agent Randolph.

  But knowing who murdered Tricia is not enough for her parents. “We just need to find Tricia,” Donna says. “That immeasurable longing never ceases. The ache is still unbearable.”

  Given the sixteen years that have elapsed since Tricia’s murder and the remote area where she was buried, it may still be a challenge to find her remains—no matter how accurately Hall marked the map. Garry Reitler remains hopeful and is anxious for the authorities to start looking again with cadaver dogs, but because of the dense wilderness in the area, searches must be limited to a few weeks before spring, when vegetation starts to flourish, or winter, when the ground freezes. If necessary, he believes Hall should be brought back to assist them. An important incentive could be a last chance to see his mother, since she has been too infirm to visit him in prison. But Garry adds, “Ideally we wouldn’t need his help.”

  The Reitlers often think about a project they could pursue that would prevent other families from going through the same ordeal, which could be a living tribute to Tricia’s memory. Garry says, “Maybe there could be a resource to help educate the police about serial killers, so if someone does confess, they know whether to take it seriously.”

  Meanwhile, Garry has no problem updating the Marion police with anything he learns from the Indianapolis cold-case detectives. He bears Lieutenant Jay Kay and Detective Bruce Bender no ill will for dismissing Hall as a suspect in their daughter’s case. “We know their hearts,” he says, “and they are passionate about finding her—even if Larry ends up being the one to tell us where to look.”

  Ironically, if Jimmy Keene’s mission to Springfield did not succeed in providing closure to one family—the Reitlers—it did for another: his own.

  After he left Judge Baker’s courtroom, Keene still had to bounce around the BOP like a pinball. First he had to go back to the MCC for processing, then again to Milan, where Jimmy expected his release would come in days. The first night there, he couldn’t sleep, but since he was placed in a lower-security unit, he was permitted to watch television. When he first walked into the TV room, it appeared to be empty, lit only by the shimmering light of the television screen. But as he went to sit down, he noticed his old library coworker and former bank president, Frank Cihak, slumped in a nearby chair.

  Keene went over to greet him. “Hey, Frank, how you d
oing?”

  “Hey, Jim,” Cihak said in a monotone. He barely looked up and kept staring at the television. When he spoke again, he asked, “So how’s it going on your appeal?”

  “Everything went really well,” Jimmy replied. “Actually, I could be out of here in the next four or five days.”

  Cihak rocked backward and turned to fully face Keene. “That’s some news, Jim. I’m really happy for you.” Cihak then swallowed and added, “I finally lost my last appeal and I’m never getting out of here. I’m going to die in here.”

  Then, in the light of the TV set, Keene saw the tears running down Cihak’s face.

  Keene could only sit and watch. “I felt bad for the guy, but I really didn’t know what to say to him.”

  When Jimmy finally met his caseworker at Milan, he discovered his own unpleasant news. To satisfy all the terms of his release, he needed one official meeting with the probation officer, and that could not happen for another few months. Meanwhile, Milan was too full for him to wait there, so he was bounced again, this time to the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. The facility had similar levels of security as Milan, but with older, grungy facilities.

  When he first arrived in Indiana, Keene was placed in solitary until his paperwork could be fully processed and a bed was found for him in the prison camp. “Every solitary unit is shitty,” he says, “especially because you can smell the other guys there. It’s beyond body odor. It’s like death.”

  Terre Haute is the one federal prison with a death row, and a few weeks after Keene arrived, he watched what looked like a military division—complete with battle-helicopter gunships—bring in Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, who would be executed there two years later.

  When Jimmy did get his bed in a low-security prison-camp building, he discovered that another inmate in his wing would be B, the alphabet gangbanger who’d fought with him in Milan. “As soon as I saw him, I thought, ‘You’ve got to be shitting me, man. This guy is going to be on my trail for the last few weeks before I get out of here.’ It’s so typical of the prison system that they would put us together without checking whether we had any problems.”