Slaughter on North Lasalle Read Free Page B

themurders. He knew this incident would gather lots of media attention, and he wanted the best people possible to investigate this case. McAtee, a tall, thin man whose features seemed to be all sharp angles, was a top detective who always surrounded himself with competent, dedicated, and hardworking people—a quality that would eventually carry him up through the ranks of the police department to the chief of police’s job, then on to becoming the sheriff of Marion County. McAtee selected Detective Sergeants Michael Popcheff and James Strode to work with him on the North LaSalle Street case.
    Popcheff, young, athletic, with dark hair, liked to play golf and dress well. But he was also known as an excellent and hardworking investigator. Strode, a redhead a bit older than Popcheff, took homicide investigation as seriously as any man in the police department. He was known to throw himself totally into cases. Both men, McAtee knew, were tough, experienced investigators he could depend on.
    Strangely enough, when Popcheff and Strode arrived at the scene, they remembered having been to the house on North LaSalle Street on a murder case before. Six months earlier, they had come to see if Gierse and Hinson had any information about the murder of a salesman who had provided microfilm and equipment to them. The twenty-five-year-old salesman, John Terhorst, had been shot twice in the head at close range in March 1971, and then dumped into Eagle Creek on the northwest side of Indianapolis. Terhorst had worked for E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company out of Chicago, and had firstmet the three murdered men when they were living and working in Chicago. On the day of his murder, Terhorst told a close acquaintance that he was headed to the Woodruff Place neighborhood on the east side of Indianapolis to see a man named Bobby, who was interested in buying his 1966 black Corvette. Although the police found Terhorst’s body, they never found his Corvette. As of December 1, 1971, the Terhorst case was still unsolved.
    “We were at the house six months earlier on the John Terhorst investigation,” said Popcheff. “They were having a cookout and saw us coming. Gierse told everyone that he would do the talking, which he did.”
    As the investigation into the triple murder progressed and became more complex, McAtee would later add Detective Sergeants Pat Stark and Bob Tirmenstein to the investigative team. Stark, middle-aged and totally bald, was a veteran homicide detective who eventually became the National Fraternal Order of Police president from 1975 to 1979. Tirmenstein, also older and a veteran detective, would work his way up to the rank of captain and was in charge of the Special Investigations Branch before succumbing to cancer in the 1990s.
    After McAtee, Popcheff, and Strode had heard from Officer Williams concerning what he’d found inside the house, they realized this wouldn’t be a pretty case, but likely an easily solvable one. Anyone who would kill three men so brutally obviously had a terrible grudge against them. That kind of rage typically couldn’t be suppressed or hidden for long. And so, with just a little investigation,they figured, they ought to be able to locate this person and close the case. The killer, they assumed, would have to have made his anger known to someone. With this thought in mind, McAtee and his team mounted the front steps of 1318 North LaSalle and got ready for their initial walk-through of the crime scene.

CHAPTER TWO
    “Oh my God!” were the first words uttered by most of those who visited the crime scene on North LaSalle Street. The
Indianapolis
Star
would call them “the most vicious crimes ever committed in Indianapolis.”
    Throughout their careers, Lieutenant Joe McAtee and his team of homicide investigators had been to the scene of hundreds of homicides—but none of them had ever seen anything like this. Although there had been many murders in Indianapolis in the years before, no one