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 Notable Murder Cases section's own record of it, with the names set right and the outcomes stated, and with the section's finding for the decades that followed.

Five names belong to the case. Wilhelmina Haaga, 38, a defense plant worker, was attacked on 2 February 1944 and died of her injuries on 5 February. Anna Kuzeff, 20, a General Electric night-shift worker, was killed on 22 May 1944, walking to her bus. Phyllis Conine, 17, a South Side High School junior, disappeared on 4 August 1944; her body was found two days later in Aboite Township. Dorothea Howard, 36, was attacked in a downtown alley on the night of 5 March 1945 and died on 17 March. The fifth name took a separate path through the record: Pearl "Torchy" Lee, 26, was found dead in her East Main Street apartment on 7 February 1945. The coroner's office found no evidence of foul play and attributed her death to heart disease, or possibly to cyanide left from a fumigation of her building, and her death was never included in the investigation of the others. Late in 1948 the new police chief, Lester Eisenhut, who had been a patrolman on the Lee case, had her body exhumed and examined by Dr. Alan Moritz of Harvard's department of legal medicine. Moritz reported that Lee had possibly died of intracranial bleeding from one or more blunt impacts to the head, and that he found no evidence of heart disease. In 1951 the county prosecutor judged the evidence insufficient for further action, and there the Lee record ends. The man who had found her body, her boyfriend, was Robert Christen.

The killings brought the city a $15,000 reward, authorized by the City Council on 8 August 1944, and eventually three prosecutions, no two of them alike. Ralph Woodrow Lobaugh walked into the Kokomo police station on 9 June 1947 and confessed to the murders of Haaga, Kuzeff and Howard. He pleaded guilty that October and was sentenced to die. His execution was stayed eleven times, his sentence was commuted to life late in 1949, and a 1975 investigation under Governor Otis Bowen concluded he was guilty of little more than perjury: he had confessed, again and again, to killings the evidence no longer tied to him. Bowen granted clemency in August 1977. Lobaugh had spent thirty years in prison. He died in a South Bend nursing home on 18 June 1981, aged 64. The Indianapolis Star's modern account calls him the innocent man who spent thirty years in prison.

Robert Christen was tried for the murder of Dorothea Howard, on the identification of the soldier who had been with her the night she was attacked. A Whitley County jury convicted him of second-degree murder in April 1949 and he was sentenced to life. In January 1950 the Indiana Supreme Court overturned the conviction, writing that hundreds of other persons besides Christen could have committed the crime and that a verdict resting on possibility and conjecture could not stand. The charge was dismissed on 27 January 1950 and Christen went back to Denver.

Franklin Click was arrested on 17 August 1949 because a young housewife he had abducted and assaulted, Leona Sparks, had written down his license number. Under questioning he confessed, in a letter addressed to his wife, to the murders of Haaga, Kuzeff and Conine; he had lived across Fillmore Street from the Kuzeff family in 1944 and had served as a pallbearer for Anna Kuzeff. He was indicted for all three murders and tried for one, Conine's. The jury convicted him on 30 November 1949 after eleven hours, and he was sentenced the next day. He was executed at the Indiana State Prison on 30 December 1950. In December 1951 the city divided the reward money among Click's widow Marie, Leona Sparks, and Floyd Moreland, an amateur investigator who said he had traced a laundry ticket from the Haaga scene to a car sold to Click days before the first murder, and whose report the police had shelved in 1944.

The documentary record under all of this is thin, and the News-Sentinel's fiftieth-anniversary account says so plainly: the police and sheriff's files on these cases have been lost or destroyed, and no transcript of Click's trial survives at the courthouse. What remains is the newspaper record, which was unusually detailed, and the court outcomes, which are not in dispute.

Beyond this case, the section states its gap plainly. A search of the sources reached for a second Fort Wayne tried case of the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s with a documented profile comparable to the cases in this section (national coverage, a lasting court record, a place in the city's memory) found none, and rather than fill the space with lesser cases promoted beyond their record, the section records the finding. The decades between the Killer in the Rain and April Tinsley were not free of murder; they produced no case that the record lifted to this section's standard.

Sources:

1. Richard Battin, "Killer in the Rain," Summit City History Notes, The News-Sentinel, 5 February 1994 (the victims and their dates; the Lee exhumation and the Moritz findings; the Lobaugh, Christen and Click proceedings; the reward and its 1951 division; the loss of the case files).
2. Dawn Mitchell, "A history of executions in Indiana," Indianapolis Star, 11 December 2019 (Franklin Click, executed 30 December 1950; indicted for three murders, tried and convicted of the Conine murder).
3. Kristine Phillips, "The tragic story of Ralph Lobaugh, the innocent man who spent 30 years in prison," Indianapolis Star, August 2022.
4. Allen County INGenWeb Project, 1940-1949 Timeline of Allen County (dates of the four 1944-1945 murders, quoting the 1994 News-Sentinel account).
5. Crime History section of this history (the Killer in the Rain case in full).