In with the Devil Read online

These were not Keystone Kops like the ones who had busted him and his brother for pot. These were the Feds, and they were as cocky as Keene himself, always acting as if it were a just a matter of time before they had his ass behind bars. It started the night of the raid. For nearly the next twenty-four hours, they held him prisoner in his own home, handcuffed to the kitchen chair, seeing what information he’d be willing to trade before his lawyer showed up. When they finally did leave, they had Jimmy’s Chevy pickup truck in tow. Because they found drugs on the premises, they could impound anything on wheels as a potential means for transporting the controlled substance.

  It took another few weeks before they came back to his front door to arrest him and then haul him downtown, where he would be paraded in front of the media along with a raft of gangbangers and low-level dealers. They had been swept up in another investigation completely different than the one that had caught Keene, but the association couldn’t have been more humiliating for Jimmy or his family.

  Larry Beaumont was the assistant U.S. attorney assigned to his case, and Keene found him as smug as the DEA agents. Unlike most other federal prosecutors, he had local roots, having previously served as an assistant state’s attorney for central Illinois. Early in their first meeting, Beaumont revealed his familiarity with the cast of Kankakee characters, but then stunned Jimmy by adding cryptically, “And we know all about your father.”

  Rather than risk a trial and even more humiliation for his family, Keene decided to take a plea, believing his sentence would be based on the minimal amount of drugs found in his house. But in the presentencing report, Beaumont insisted on charging Keene with the additional amounts that the informants alleged he had sold to them. What Richards alone said he bought from his childhood friend was enough to boost Jimmy’s sentencing guidelines from a few years to ten years and nearly twenty years. For added effect, during the sentencing hearing, Beaumont referred the judge to the guns and electronic scale that had also been found in the house and argued, “We are not talking about a casual dealer here.”

  Jimmy’s lawyer tried lamely to portray Keene as no bigger a dealer than the informants who had turned him in, but there was no sweet-talking Judge Harold A. Baker. Then sixty-eight, he had sat on the federal bench for nearly two decades. He looked down on Keene with a stern gaze framed by dark glasses and a shock of white hair. He fully believed the testimony about the additional hearsay amounts of drugs sold, and even though the gun charges were dropped, he further augmented the mandatory sentence because of the pistols found in Jimmy’s nightstand. “It’s well-known,” he said, “that people who traffic in drugs carry guns for their own protection and the protection of their merchandise.” He then invoked his sentence of ten years with no chance for parole.

  Jimmy heard later that his father stayed behind in the courtroom. He asked for a few words with Beaumont and even introduced himself to the court reporter, hoping she might be a back door to the judge. His son, he assured them, would do whatever was necessary to reduce his sentence.

  Big Jim knew that the government was always interested in using prisoners to make cases against their former associates. Jimmy also had a cunning, hard-edged girlfriend, Tina, who was more than willing to rope other dealers into the Feds’ net if it would help cut his sentence. But as they quickly learned, these deals could trim a few months here and there at most. Law enforcement had spent years trying to catch Keene, and they weren’t about to let him go anytime soon.

  When Big Jim came to visit, he tried to keep up a brave front, but as soon as his son would appear in the jail’s orange jumpsuit, he would lose his composure and sob, “Son, this is the last place I wanted to see you.” Big Jim had always been so proud of him—for his success at sports and his toughness with other males; for the wide circle of friends and beautiful girls he had attracted growing up; for the industriousness he’d shown with legitimate projects such as home construction. But Big Jim blamed himself, too, for taking Jimmy’s money and ignoring its source—even after the pot bust. For too long the Keenes had nurtured the mutual fantasy that they could somehow transform drug money into a legitimate fortune. Now, as he spoke to his son through the phone in the visiting room of the jail, Big Jim wondered whether the example of his political friends and their cronies hadn’t thrown off Jimmy’s moral compass. “It’s my fault,” Big Jim said. “If only you hadn’t been raised around so much corruption.”

  2.

  On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away

  When fifteen-year-old Jessica Roach disappeared one afternoon in September of 1993, the only evidence left behind was her cherished mountain bike—tossed on its side in the middle of a gravel road. If not for the height of the corn, her family’s trailer home would have been visible just fifty yards away.

  She was a beautiful young woman, with a short, athletic build, big doe eyes, and long brown hair. As she had set out on her bike, she told her older sister that she was going to help prepare a float for the high school homecoming parade. Her sister drove past her when she took the family car to pick up groceries. Since the family lived in a sea of cornfields—miles from town or much of anything else—the bike was especially precious to Jessica. When the sister found it abandoned on her return home, she knew something was wrong.

  Their father immediately called the police from nearby Georgetown, Illinois (population 3,628), and a search soon began—complete with dogs to pick up Jessica’s scent. After a few hours, when the police still couldn’t find her, they called for help from Pat Hartshorn, the county sheriff.

  Vermilion County sits like a domino in the midsection of Illinois, flush on the border of Indiana—two hours south of Chicago and two hours west of Indianapolis. It is mostly rural and relatively bucolic, except for a gritty pocket around Danville, the county seat. When teenagers go missing, they usually turn out to be runaways. But Hartshorn—a detective before he was elected sheriff—could quickly see that Jessica’s disappearance was an exception. When he called his chief investigator, Gary Miller, he told him, “There is something really wrong here.”

  Miller, then a twenty-year veteran of the sheriff’s department, had snuck out of work early to watch his son play baseball, but left before the game was over and arrived at the Roach home as the sun was setting. The Georgetown patrolmen continued to comb the cornfields with their yelping dogs. Hartshorn sat inside the trailer home with the distraught Roach family: Jessica’s parents, her older sister, and younger brother, all of whom were shaken and in tears. Nothing about the girl suggested any spontaneous act of youthful protest. She had no boyfriend or recent argument with parents or siblings. If anything, she couldn’t wait for the homecoming parade that weekend. As Miller later learned, the parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses and hewed closely to the sect’s sober lifestyle, so most of Jessica’s social life outside of church revolved around her school activities.

  Before it was dark, Miller and Hartshorn got into a car and drove a few miles in each direction to acquaint themselves with the area. The immediate vicinity was as flat as a pool table and covered with cornfields. The Indiana border was literally up the road, but once they crossed the state line and made a quick turn, the road descended into a different world, where the even farmland tore open into some sort of Midwest Middle-earth, complete with jagged, wooded ravines and river gorges. Looking over the edge of one bluff, Miller saw a drop of one hundred feet to the whitecapped Wabash River below. “That gal didn’t have to go too far to get into all kinds of trouble,” he thought.

  Miller, then forty-five, is a garrulous man with a barrel chest and a slight Southern twang. He easily breaks into a hoarse, deep-throated laugh. But his easygoing manner masks a steely persistence that saw him through a stint in the Marines dismantling bombs and proved just as valuable in detective work.

  At first, Miller had his hands full just chasing down the leads about Jessica that flooded into the police tip lines. Meanwhile, he had to proceed on the typical path of a police investigation, moving out in tight co
ncentric circles from the victim, starting first with her family. Jessica’s father had been napping in the trailer while his oldest daughter was out with the family car. Miller says, “It’s always difficult dealing with the parents at the beginning of an investigation. They feel you can never do enough. And what made this even more difficult was their beliefs as Jehovah’s Witnesses, which to my understanding don’t foster great trust in the arms of government. But the father was one of the last one to see her, and it’s just basic police work to ask that person for a polygraph. Somehow we got through that with him and he came out okay, but I’m sure there were hard feelings.”

  Although Jessica had no real boyfriends, she did have typical crushes, and these unsuspecting young men had to be interviewed. Some elders of the Jehovah’s Witness Assembly Hall had contact with her and were questioned as well. Miller then pushed the circle out farther, beyond those with personal acquaintance, to individuals in the vicinity with a history of rape or sexual abuse charges.

  Only after exhausting all of the usual suspects did Miller consider the outermost circle: a total stranger from beyond the community randomly lighting down on Jessica—in other words, a serial killer. “That idea of someone from the outside coming in to commit a crime just goes against the grain of every local investigator,” Miller explains. “You really want to believe it’s in your control to figure out what happened.”

  Miller knew that the FBI had a database that supposedly linked missing persons and unsolved cases with serial killers, so he reached out to a local FBI agent, Ken Temples, for help. Together, from Temples’s office, they called Quantico, Virginia, to speak to one of the bureau’s vaunted profilers. They answered a few questions about Jessica and the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, then listened to the expert clack away at a computer until he confidently concluded, “She’s a runaway.”

  Miller could only scoff, “This gal in no way had the desire or street smarts to take off on her own.”

  If there was any question about Jessica’s whereabouts, it would be put to rest by an Indiana farmer. While shearing through a field of corn, six weeks after her disappearance, he saw a dark object between the uncut rows and climbed down from his combine for closer inspection. To his horror, he found a badly decomposed naked body, nearly skeletal in some places. Another piece of farm equipment had rolled over it, so the head lay a few feet from the torso.

  Because the corpse was recovered in Indiana, it went to a medical examiner in Terre Haute. He quickly determined that the remains could not have been those of a fifteen-year-old. Miller was incredulous. “It had to be Jessica. The location was just too close, and the decomposition was in line with the time that she was missing.” Before the report became public, Miller says, “I drove as fast as my squad car would go to get to Jessica’s parents and I told them, ‘He’s saying it’s not Jessica. I disagree. I understand that I’m disagreeing with a doctor, but I’m telling you I disagree.’ ”

  Miller then probed to see if they had any information that could be used to identify their daughter. She had not been to a dentist, so the most reliable forensic marker—a dental chart—was missing, but years before, the parents said, when she was still in grade school, a deputy sheriff visited the class and had the students put their fingerprints on a card. That deputy had been Miller himself, and Jessica’s mother still had the card. The medical examiner could only pull one print from the remaining fingertips, but when that was sent to the FBI lab in Washington, it was a positive match with a print from Jessica’s card. Only then, Miller says, did the Indiana pathologist step back from his earlier conclusion and agree that the remains belonged to Jessica Roach. It was the first of many occasions when Miller questioned the competence and professionalism of legal authorities “on the other side” of the state line.

  But even after the body had been identified, Miller still had little to go on. The autopsy suggested strangulation as the cause of death and that her jaw had been broken first, but there was no other physical evidence. A local resident came forward a few months later to claim that on the night of her abduction he had seen a man step out from the cornfield where her body was later found. He also remembered that a van was parked by the side of the road. But he could give no detailed description of the suspect or the van.

  As months passed, no other leads surfaced. Still, Miller could not let go of the investigation—maybe because it was the first kidnap murder he had ever handled or maybe because his own son was Jessica’s age. “Every day when I woke up in the morning,” he remembers, “the first thing that occurred to me was the Jessica Roach case.”

  In his greatest act of desperation, Miller even brought in the America’s Most Wanted TV show, the Hail Mary pass that police make only when they feel all other options have been foreclosed. It was another painful ordeal for the publicity-shy Roach family, but at least they now had full faith in the county investigator’s intentions to turn over every possible stone.

  When the big break in the investigation finally came—nearly a year after Jessica’s abduction—it did not come from a TV show or FBI database, but good old-fashioned police work, fueled no doubt by Miller’s obsession with the case. Each week he thumbed through police reports in his county, and he came across one about a man in a van who had harassed two fourteen-year-old girls riding their bikes down a Georgetown street. After they escaped through an alley too narrow for a van, one told her father, who drove around town with the girls until they spotted the vehicle. He took down the license number and reported it to the local deputy sheriff. When Miller checked the number, he discovered that the plate had been called up three times by other local police departments—something they tend to do if they catch an out-of-state vehicle aimlessly cruising the streets or suspiciously parked on them. The van was registered to a Larry D. Hall, and to find him, Miller could have done no more than traced the Wabash River, which raged near Jessica’s home, coursed north along the state line, and then veered east through the heart of Indiana to the city of Wabash, three hours away.

  On a hunch, with only the license-plate information, Miller called the Wabash police department to ask about the van’s owner. He was ultimately connected to Detective Sergeant Jeff Whitmer, who not only knew Larry Hall, but readily admitted that he grew up with him. Miller filled him in and asked, “Can you think of any reason he would be in this area?” Whitmer replied, “Do you have Civil War reenactments over there? He travels all over going to those.”

  Miller didn’t have a clue. He next called the county parks department and was told that they did not host Civil War reenactments, but just as he was about to hang up, Miller remembers, “The guy said, ‘You know we did have a Revolutionary War reenactment.’ ” It was held a year before at the Forest Glen park just outside Georgetown—and on the weekend preceding the Monday when Jessica disappeared.

  Moments later, Miller was back on the phone with Jeff Whitmer in Wabash, who told him something else about Hall. Although Whitmer considered him a “harmless weirdo,” Hall had been a suspect in another missing-person case, that of Tricia Reitler, a nineteen-year-old girl who had apparently been abducted six months earlier from her college campus in Marion, just down the state highway from Wabash. Miller was familiar with the case because it had made the national news, and because a few missing-person flyers had crossed his desk with Reitler’s photo.

  But Whitmer was quick to minimize Hall’s involvement with Reitler. “They might have looked at him,” he told Miller, “but they’re tied into another suspect. I think they know who did theirs.”

  Still, whatever Hall’s role in the Reitler case may have been, Miller says, “A lot of things were coming together. With that reenactment, I had a reason to place Hall close to where Jessica Roach was abducted, and for some reason he’s back in Georgetown a year later. That created enough interest for me to interview him.”

  When Miller asked if Hall would submit to an informal interview, Whitmer assured him that he would. The department’s other
detective had known the Hall family and had a good relationship with Larry. “He’ll get him to come in and talk to you.”

  The Miami, the native tribe that once dominated their namesake state of Indiana, called the river Wah-Bah Shik-Ki—“pure white” or “bright”—to describe the sun reflecting off its limestone banks. For French trappers, the first European interlopers in the territory, it was known as Oubache, and that became Wabash for the English speakers. It is the longest river east of the Mississippi and so closely identified with Indiana that the state’s official song remains “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away”—a maudlin hit tune from a hundred years ago.

  Despite the sentimental attachment, the Wabash has brought as much grief as gain to its mother state. Unlike the Mississippi, it never had the predictable currents or, in some stretches, the depth that commercial shipping required during the westward expansion of the mid-nineteenth century. Politicians decided instead to build a canal alongside it that would ultimately link up with the Erie Canal to the north and the Mississippi to the south. It was to be Indiana’s internal Suez Canal, but it became one of the greatest public works boondoggles in American history, literally bankrupting the state and then, for good measure, driven into early obsolescence by the transcontinental railroad system. Ever since, Indiana, compared with other states, has tended to frown on statewide initiatives or regional authorities. Nothing exemplifies that spirit of disunity more than the state’s strange time-zone map, where counties in the northwestern and southwestern corners observe central time (“Chicago time,” as the locals say) and more than twenty counties between them observe eastern time.

  As Gary Miller drove the three hours from his office to Wabash, a crazy-quilt pattern of industrial development and agriculture flashed by his car window. Flat, geometric farms were interspersed with untended woodland and sudden outcroppings of smokestacks and manufacturing complexes. For Miller, Indiana police departments were as patchwork as the countryside. “A detective one week is a patrolman the next,” he says. “Nobody seems to get the time or training on the job to become a professional investigator.”