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High-Profile Murders · the cases that defined the city's eras
Every era of Fort Wayne has a murder case it cannot put down. In the nineteenth century they were the trials the newspapers sold out on and the hangings the whole county attended. In the twentieth and twenty-first they are the cases that drew the national cameras, changed how the police work, or — in one instance — changed the law itself. This section tells those cases whole, from the documented record: the crime as the record states it, the investigation, the trial, the outcome, and the place each case holds in the city's memory. The selection rule is stated plainly: a case belongs here because of its documented profile — the contemporary coverage it drew, the court record it made, the lasting place it holds — and not because of notoriety alone. The famous trials of the scaffold era and the city's great mid-century murder series are owned by the Crime section of this history and are pointed to here, not retold. Cases that remain unsolved are told in their own sections. What follows is the record of the famous cases that reached a courtroom, or that the city itself stopped to count.
The famous trials of the scaffold era · the record owned by the Crime section
1830–1883 · CROSS-REFERENCE
The nineteenth century's famous Fort Wayne murder cases were capital cases, and they are told in full in the Crime section of this history, where the execution record lives. They are named here so that this section's arc is…
“Our Murderers” · the docket the Sentinel counted in November 1875
NOVEMBER 1875 · FORT WAYNE DAILY SENTINEL
On 6 November 1875 the Fort Wayne Daily Sentinel stopped and counted. Under the headline “Our Murderers,” the paper told its readers that Fort Wayne and Allen County had “gained an unenviable reputation abroad” for violence, and…
The mid-century record · the Killer in the Rain, and the quiet decades after
1944–1945 AND AFTER · CROSS-REFERENCE AND A NAMED GAP
The famous Fort Wayne murder case of the middle twentieth century is the series the city remembers as the "Killer in the Rain" murders of 1944 and 1945. The Crime section of this history tells the case in full; this page is the…
April Tinsley · the case that waited thirty years
1988–2018 · FORT WAYNE, SPENCERVILLE AND GRABILL
April Marie Tinsley was eight years old, a first-grader at Fairfield Elementary who sang in the children's choir at Faith United Methodist Church. On Good Friday, 1 April 1988, she was playing between friends' houses in her Fort…
Joseph Corcoran · two trials, and the execution that ended a fifteen-year pause
1992–2024 · STEUBEN COUNTY AND FORT WAYNE
Joseph Edward Corcoran's case reached a courtroom twice, a quarter-century apart in its consequences, and it is the case that ended the State of Indiana's fifteen-year pause in executions. He was born in Fort Wayne on 18 April…
Stacy DeGrandchamp · the backyard fight and the seventeen-year silence
2002–2022 · THE COLD CASE REOPENED
Stacy Maria DeGrandchamp was seventeen, a student at Wayne High School, when she was stabbed during a fight in the backyard of a Fort Wayne home on 15 August 2002, at a party at her ex-boyfriend's house. The other girl in the…
Lewis Street · Mohamedtaha Omar, Adam Mekki and Muhannad Tairab
24 FEBRUARY 2016 · 808 EAST LEWIS STREET
On the afternoon of 24 February 2016, a young man named Aboubakar Souleimane stopped by a vacant house at 808 East Lewis Street — a house the neighborhood knew as a hangout for the young people of Fort Wayne's East African…
Sarah Zent and her children · four life sentences, and a law in Aubree's name
2021–2024 · AND WHAT FOLLOWED IN THE LEGISLATURE
Sarah Nicole Zent was twenty-six, and her children were Carter Matthew, five; Ashton Duwayne, three; and Aubree Christine, two. In the night of 1–2 June 2021 they were killed in their Fort Wayne home. The bodies were found late…
Marcia Linsky · the lawyer the courthouse lost
2024–2026 · GRABILL AND ALLEN SUPERIOR COURT
Marcia Linsky, 64, spent her whole working life inside the institution that would have to try her killing. She had been an Allen County prosecutor; she had been a magistrate of the county's courts; and she was working, at the…
How the city keeps its famous cases · anniversaries, television and statute
THE RECORD SINCE
Fort Wayne has been taking stock of its famous murders for as long as it has had them. The first stock-taking in this section is a newspaper's: the Sentinel's “Our Murderers” survey of November 1875, in which the city counted its…