The verdicts that never came · 1944–45

THE FORMAL RECORD INSIDE THE "KILLER IN THE RAIN" YEARS

The main Crime section tells the wartime murders of 1944–45 in full — the four women killed, the city's fear, and the three men accused in turn. What belongs here is the narrow, formal point that makes three of those killings open cases in the eyes of the law, whatever the city's memory settled on. Franklin Click was tried for one murder — Phyllis Conine's — convicted on November 30, 1949, and executed on December 30, 1950. The murders of Wilhelmina "Billie" Haaga and Anna Kuzeff were never tried against Click or against anyone else after that conviction; the case against Ralph Lobaugh, who had confessed to them and pleaded guilty, ended in commutation and, a generation later, a governor's clemency and the state's own judgment that he was most likely innocent of them. The fourth killing, Dorothea Howard's, closed with Robert Christen's release on January 27, 1950, after the Indiana Supreme Court overturned his conviction — closed, that is, without any verdict standing against any person. Click had recanted his confessions before his execution, saying he made them so his wife could claim the reward. So the record's final shape is this: of the four wartime murders that terrified the city, one was settled by a jury, and three were never the subject of a sustained conviction at all. A fifth death, Pearl Lee's, was ruled natural in 1945, disputed by a chief of police who later had her exhumed, and never officially joined to the others; it is carried in the main section and only pointed to here.

Sources:

1. The main Crime section of this history, "Killer in the Rain," and the record it rests on: Richard Battin, "Killer in the Rain," News-Sentinel (February 5, 1994), reconstructed from the wartime files of the two Fort Wayne dailies after the police department's own case files were lost or destroyed.