Free Slaughter on North Lasalle by Robert L. Snow Page A

that starting up a business like B&B Microfilming would be an expensive venture, yet neither Gierse nor Hinson seemed to have the legitimate funds to do this. As a part of their investigation, the detectives obtained copies of tax returns for Gierse and Hinson and found that their expenses far outweighed their income. Where had the extra money come from? Was it a motive for the murders?
    The possible motives in the case, like the list of suspects, seemed to just keep multiplying. An article appeared in the
Indianapolis News
on December 9, 1971, claiming that the police had established a definite motive in the case, but this was only an attempt by the police tounnerve the murderer in the hopes that he would consequently make a mistake. In truth, the police still had many motives and many suspects.
    Meanwhile, on December 7, 1971, the detectives had returned once more to the North LaSalle Street neighborhood to try to talk with neighbors they’d previously been unable to contact. They finally found and interviewed a neighbor who said she had seen something suspicious on the night of the murders: a yellow car with three men sitting in it parked across the street from 1318, which she said sat there for several hours. She had never seen this car or its occupants in the neighborhood before. The detectives knew this information could be crucial and that they would now need to interview every single person on the block to see if anyone else had seen the car or the men in it.
    On December 8, 1971, McAtee and his team were still no closer to solving the case when they received a report from an Indianapolis police officer who said he had talked with a man named Ron Lisby, an employee of a company called Scott Graphics on East 52nd Street in Indianapolis. Lisby, as it turned out, had helped Gierse and Hinson get several of the very lucrative contracts they had at B&B Microfilming and had loaned them some equipment to use at their new business. But much more importantly, he told the officer that he had once visited Gierse and Hinson at their home, where he claimed he met a motorcycle bum who was apparently a friend of Gierse and Hinson’s, and reportedly on parole formanslaughter. Lisby said he later learned that the man stole a motorcycle and $1,000 from Gierse and Hinson, and that Gierse had supposedly sworn out a warrant for him. The parolee only had one eye, Lisby said, and claimed that he lost the other one in a knife fight. The detectives reluctantly added another person to their list of suspects.
    The police officer, while at Scott Graphics, also spoke with a man named Lafayette Robert Roe. Roe told the officer that he’d had his car, a 1964 cream-colored Chevrolet Impala, stolen from the rear of Scott Graphics just before the triple murder. He said that Marion County sheriff’s deputies had recovered his car on December 1, 1971, in the 2000 block of South Ritter Avenue, a little over four miles to the south of the North LaSalle Street address. Upon reclaiming his car, Roe said that he found red stains on the rear seat, floor, and inside of the right door. It looked to him like blood, as if someone sitting there had been bleeding. The detectives, upon receiving this information, sent a crime lab technician out to check the stains, which the technician indeed found to test positive for type O human blood. All of the victims on North LaSalle Street, however, had been blood type A. Still, the detectives wondered, could the type O blood be the killer’s? Could the murderer have possibly cut himself in all of the slashing and left some of his own blood behind?
    On December 9, 1971, while still trying to retrace the victims’ movements in the days just before the murders, adetective took a statement from Sandra Ann Hannemann, a woman who told them that she had met Barker, Gierse, and Hinson at the Sherman Bar on November 26, 1971. She met them, she said, when Barker came over and asked her to dance. On the night of the murders,