Slaughter on North Lasalle

by Robert L. Snow

  Then, according to Schultz, a new wrinkle in the case appeared. Early one morning Chastain called her collect from the prison in Florida. She said he told her that he had been up all night praying and that he had something he wanted to confess to her.

  Chastain had earlier told Schultz that he had just been the driver of the getaway car, and that was his total involvement in the North LaSalle Street murders. But now he told her that this wasn’t true. He was actually much more involved than that. Chastain’s new story was that on the morning of December 1, 1971, he drove his mother’s car to the North LaSalle Street address. In the car with him, Chastain said, were Carroll Horton and a man named Michael Golden,1 or as Chastain knew him, “Big Mike.” Chastain said that he parked the car and went into the house with them and, while they were there, two other men, named Paul Green2 and Ben Wheeler,3 drove up in an El Camino, and they also came into the house. A little later, a woman in a black Cadillac pulled up in front. According to Chastain, Horton went out and brought the woman inside. (Including the three victims, this now placed nine people in the house.)

  Chastain told Schultz that he witnessed Horton slice Bob Gierse’s throat, and next watched Big Mike kill Jim Barker. Chastain said that Horton then ordered him to either slit Bob Hinson’s throat or else they would kill him. So he did it. He said he later went outside and threw up.

  Schultz said in her book that, after this confession, Chastain began talking about all of Horton’s other victims, naming almost a dozen, until the operator finally cut him off. (The Indianapolis Police Department Identification Branch would later compare the fingerprints of all of the individuals identified by Chastain as taking part in the North LaSalle Street murders, including Chastain’s, with the still unidentified fingerprints found inside the North LaSalle Street house. No matches were found.)

  Later on, after digesting all of this information, and feeling it to be even more of a justification for her belief about the North LaSalle Street murders, Schultz tried to call Horton and found to her surprise that the phone service for the number she used to reach him at his shop had been disconnected. She checked and found that in fact all of the telephone lines going into his shop had been disconnected. She began panicking. Something was wrong. Did Horton know how much she knew about his involvement in the murders? The panic really took hold after she next called the electric and gas companies and found that their services were also being disconnected. Later that night, when Chastain called her collect again, Schultz told him about Horton disappearing. Chastain said he thought that Horton was probably trying to flee the country, and he again urged her to try to get the police to search Horton’s property for bodies.

  When Schultz finally did make contact with Horton the next day at noon, she said she screamed at him for not letting her know that he was having his telephone service disconnected. He explained the disconnections by telling her about his need to downsize his auto business and move everything into just one building. Schultz finally calmed down and then they talked for a while. Following this, she and Horton then returned to their daily telephone calls.

  Despite Carol Schultz’s continued contact with Horton and Chastain following the prosecutor’s refusal to proceed, nothing was happening in the North LaSalle Street case. It simply sat dormant, as it had for well over twenty years. Schultz knew that something had to be done. So she decided that perhaps a little more publicity could stir things up a bit. She contacted NUVO, the largest alternative newspaper in Indianapolis, and persuaded them to commit to publishing an article concerning what she had uncovered about the North LaSalle Street murders.

  Schultz said that when she told Carroll Horton about the article she was going to write for NUVO, he seemed very pleased. He told her that she needed all the publicity she could get if she wanted the book she was writing to be a success. According to Schultz, he then asked her if she was worried about him going to jail, and she told him yes. She later said that she couldn’t believe her attachment to him. She wrote that even though she honestly believed Horton to be a murderer, she still felt sorry for him.

  But Schultz also feared him. She still believed him to be a serial killer who wouldn’t hesitate to add her to his list of victims. Although Sheriff McAtee didn’t recall this, she said she mentioned to him how scared she was of Horton, and McAtee, she said, sympathized with her and offered to park an empty sheriff’s car out in front of her house. (With it out front, the thinking went, if Horton passed by he would believe a deputy was inside.) She said McAtee told her she’d have to occasionally move the car and park it in different positions so that Horton would think the deputy had left and then came back.

  Sometime earlier, in late 1993, Schultz had resigned from her job as a reporter for the Indianapolis News. She knew she had to. Schultz said her editor told her that she had gotten much too close to the police in her investigation of the North LaSalle Street killings. He told her that a reporter didn’t do undercover work for the police. Her going to dinner wearing a body wire that the police could listen in on had compromised her ethics. Journalists simply didn’t do that.

  Consequently, on New Year’s Eve 1993, as Schultz sat at home, lonely and depressed, waiting for 1994, she said she wished she had someone to share it with, but that she hadn’t dated much since she started the North LaSalle Street investigation. It had taken over her life. Finally, bored with being alone, she decided to call Horton. He told her that she shouldn’t be alone on New Year’s Eve, but out celebrating with someone. He then suggested that she come over to his place for the night, but she turned him down. Instead, she plugged in the tape recorder and tried to get him to talk about the North LaSalle Street killings. They talked for three hours, but still no confession or incriminating statements.

  Horton, however, did reportedly tell her that Sheriff McAtee had asked him to come down and take a lie detector test, but that his attorney had told him not to. Horton, though, said he was considering it. He said he was innocent, and that taking a lie detector test might be the best thing to do since it would prove he was innocent.

  Horton eventually did show up for a lie detector test, but then apparently decided at the last moment that it wouldn’t be in his best interests to go through with it after all.

  “We had Carroll Horton in for a lie detector test,” confirmed Popcheff. “When he arrived, he asked if we had a doctor or a hospital close by, and all of a sudden he’s having heart problems. He never did take a lie detector test.”

  Regardless though of Horton’s decision not to take a lie detector test, the prosecutor’s office simply didn’t feel there was enough evidence to proceed, which certainly wasn’t what Carol Schultz had expected. Along with Carol Schultz, though, family members of the North LaSalle Street victims also felt disappointed with the prosecutor’s decision not to issue an arrest warrant. They had been in contact with Schultz, who’d convinced them that she had solved the murders of their loved ones. On October 24, 1994, Ted Gierse, Bob Gierse’s brother, delivered a scathing letter to Marion County Prosecutor Jeff Modisett. In it, he told Modisett how disappointed he was that the Prosecutor’s Office wouldn’t be pursuing charges based on the new evidence recovered by Carol Schultz. Ted said that, because of this new evidence, he had changed his belief that the North LaSalle Street murders had been committed for business reasons to now considering jealousy as the motive. He pleaded with the Prosecutor’s Office to do something.

  Prosecutor Jeff Modisett, on October 25, 1994, answered Ted Gierse’s letter, explaining why his office didn’t want to proceed with the case. Modisett said that while he would love to solve the most notorious crime in Marion County history, the evidence Carol Schultz had provided was extremely weak, and he believed the witnesses (Chastain and Cavanaugh) were simply caught up in the excitement and attention they were getting because of being involved in the case. Furthermore, he said, the statements of the two witnesses were too contradictory to use in a trial, which they would almost certainly lose. Any good defense attorn
ey would tear their statements apart. (Chastain, for example, had originally said that he had been working at a garage when a man came in covered with blood and told him he had gotten $30,000 to kill the three men. Then Chastain’s story changed to himself as the getaway driver.) For these reasons, prosecution simply wasn’t possible.

  On October 29, 1994, Horton called Ted Gierse long-distance. Horton told him that his health was failing because of the accusations against him, but that he had nothing to do with the killings. He then told Ted that he was a small man, and that it would have taken someone a whole lot bigger than him to control and kill these three guys. He also claimed that he had taken a lie detector test about the murders and passed it (though he actually never took one). Finally, Horton told Gierse’s brother that he believed Ted Uland was the one who had committed the murders, and that he had phoned Uland the previous year but found out from his widow that he had passed away, so he decided to drop it.

  The year 1994 passed without any change in the status of the North LaSalle Street case. The prosecutor refused to do anything with just what evidence Carol Schultz had. Then, in March of 1995, Carol Schultz said she received some startling new information about the North LaSalle Street murders; information that could make the case famous worldwide and her book an instant bestseller: The Nixon White House might have been involved.

  Schultz said that she received a telephone call from Floyd Chastain, who said he wanted to tell her about a secret meeting he’d attended a few nights after the North LaSalle Street murders. According to Schultz, Chastain told her that he and Big Mike had driven a semitrailer to Louisville to drop off a load, then drove over to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to pick up another load, which they then brought back to Indianapolis. Chastain, thinking their job was through, got ready to leave, but Big Mike told him no, to hang around, they had to go to a meeting.

  Big Mike, Chastain claimed, then got on the telephone, and a little later, around 1:00 A.M., a limousine pulled up. They got into it and were driven to Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar, where they attended a meeting with White House aide Chuck Colson and Jimmy Hoffa (who, Chastain said, must have been on a furlough from prison). Norman Flick, the owner of the bar, also attended the meeting. Chastain said the bar had a number of other people, regular customers, in it that night, though they sat separately from the rest. He didn’t really take part in the meeting, he said, but simply sat back and witnessed it. The meeting, Chastain claimed, concerned getting Hoffa a pardon from the president then, Richard Nixon. Chastain told Schultz that at the meeting Colson had Hoffa sign some papers. Then, Chastain’s story went, Colson asked if the three men on North LaSalle Street were dead. When someone answered yes, Colson nodded and then said that he needed the microfilm the murderers had apparently been sent to find. According to Chastain, somebody went out and transferred the microfilm to Colson’s car. The implication Chastain gave was that the murders on North LaSalle Street had been committed in order to get back some microfilm that had been at the house, microfilm the Nixon White House wanted for some reason, and that Jimmy Hoffa had been the one who’d arranged the murders and retrieval of the microfilm in exchange for a presidential pardon.

  Naturally, this story raises a number of questions and stretches credibility considerably. Revelations of a secret meeting between Chuck Colson and Jimmy Hoffa in a bar owned by an organized crime figure would have been as devastating to the White House as Watergate, particularly since the White House eventually granted Jimmy Hoffa executive clemency. In addition, Chastain’s story was full of potential witnesses to this supposedly top secret meeting, from the bar populated by regulars to the waitress who he said came by with food and drinks, to his own inexplicable presence at a meeting that had nothing to do with him. This story had all the attributes of a bad spy movie, with the secret White House meeting with an imprisoned Teamsters president at a bar reputed to be owned by an organized crime figure. It was like a conspiracy theory holiday.

  In addition to all of this, if a meeting such as this had occurred, it certainly wouldn’t have been at Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar, a lowbrow tavern in a working-class neighborhood, where the limousine Chastain said he and Big Mike drove up in would certainly have attracted attention, not to mention the presence of someone as easily recognizable as Jimmy Hoffa. Truck drivers routinely patronized Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar and would have known who Hoffa was. Someone would have bragged about seeing him there. There is simply no way it would have stayed a secret.

  Yet for unclear reasons, Carol Schultz apparently accepted Chastain’s story as the truth, and from that moment on became totally convinced of a White House involvement in the North LaSalle Street murders.

  Tying in another previously dismissed theory, Schultz also said that Chastain told her he had been the one who had stripped down the stolen black Corvette that had belonged to murder victim John Terhorst. Following this revelation, Schultz then began suspecting that the White House might have also been involved in the Terhorst murder. In one of the notes she sent to Detective Jon Layton, Schultz said she wondered if Charles Colson had driven a black Corvette.

  During 1995, Schultz kept in close contact with Detective Layton. She would send him tapes of her conversations with Horton, White House material she had obtained, and other pieces of information she felt supported her new belief that the North LaSalle Street murders had been committed by the Teamsters in order to win a pardon for Jimmy Hoffa from President Nixon. Along with one of the tapes of her conversations with Horton, Schultz sent a note to Detective Layton saying that she believed this tape had the answers she had been looking for: that Norman Flick, apparently acting as an intermediary for Jimmy Hoffa, had paid Carroll Horton to commit the North LaSalle Street murders. However, on the tape, Horton is actually trying to tell her that he suspected Ted Uland had been the North LaSalle Street murderer.

  It’s Schultz, however, who dismissed that idea and insisted it was Hoffa, Nixon, the Teamsters, and Norman Flick who were involved. Basically, a review of the tape made by Carol Schultz showed it to be just a conversation with an older man who was trying to sound important and knowledgeable to a pretty young woman, and finally was willing to agree with anything that would make her happy.

  Interestingly, Schultz, in her research, managed to obtain copies of several White House documents relating to the Jimmy Hoffa case. In one dated May 26, 1970, a White House official reported that a man named Harry Singer had contacted him about getting a pardon or parole for Jimmy Hoffa, who had then been in prison for three and a half years. But the official said in the report that he told Singer all such matters were handled by the Justice Department, and that is where he should go with his request.

  In another White House document, this one dated March 19, 1971, John W. Dean III, counsel to the president, sent a memorandum to Attorney General John Mitchell. In this memorandum Dean tells Mitchell that Frank Fitzsimmons of the Teamsters Union had called him and requested that he, and Hoffa’s wife and son, be allowed to meet with the president in order to talk about Hoffa’s parole hearing coming up on March 31. Dean then suggested that such a meeting could work to the advantage of the president and offered several scenarios for the meeting, the gist of Dean’s strategy being that President Nixon do as little as possible for Hoffa but leave him feeling that he owed a debt to the White House. The president, Dean said, should be sympathetic and give the vague impression that he felt Hoffa had been the subject of a Kennedy vendetta.

  On January 14, 1972, in another document, a White House staffer sent Charles Colson a summary of the news media’s reaction to Jimmy Hoffa’s December 23, 1971, release from prison. Finally, Schultz also managed to get copies of Charles Colson’s White House calendar for December 1971.

  All of this made for fascinating reading, particularly for someone who lived during this time. However, nowhere in this material was there any mention of, or connection to, the North LaSalle Street killings. The only thing that tied them together at all was that th
ey all happened in the early 1970s.

  Still, as with the accusation that Horton had been the North LaSalle Street killer, Schultz seemingly accepted this new story about a White House connection without question. In fact, Schultz said she wondered if perhaps a connection to the White House was why the local prosecutor wouldn’t make an arrest. (Since she personally felt there was more than ample evidence for an arrest, clearly there had to be another reason.) She also said that she tried a number of times to interview Chuck Colson, but that he wouldn’t agree to meet with her. She even claimed to have received threats, warning her that she would be killed if she tried to interview Colson.

  Schultz also said in her book that one afternoon, during the time she was attempting to get an interview with Colson, a dark-haired man in a plain car pulled into her driveway and then just sat there and watched her house as he talked on his cell phone. She said that he sat there for a long time. Although Schultz said that she sneaked out and wrote down his license plate number, she doesn’t explain why she didn’t call the police.

  While the stories Chastain told Schultz kept getting more involved and more complex, he soon began to feel uneasy about what he’d told her and the police. And for good reason.

  “I told Chastain that he was likely going to be charged with murder in this case, and that it might be a death penalty case,” said Detective Charles Briley. “That’s when his story started changing and the letters where he said he’d been lying started coming.”

  Chastain, on March 30, 1993, wrote a letter addressed to McAtee and Popcheff, in which he said that everything he’d told the detectives who had interviewed him was a lie. He said that part of the information he gave to the detectives he had gotten from newspaper articles that Carol Schultz had sent him, and part of it he’d just made up. He said that he lied because he wanted to get even with Horton (apparently over a failed invention that he and Horton had worked on that Chastain thought Horton was getting rich off of). Later, however, Chastain said that the letter he sent to McAtee and Popcheff saying he was lying was a lie, and he only wrote it because he thought that was what the detectives who interviewed him wanted him to do. He said that his original statement was the truth.