The corridor test, case by case

Northwest Indiana sits between documented killing grounds: the I-65 and I-70 corridors, the Chicago exurbs, and La Porte County. A corridor test does not ask whether killers passed through Indiana; it asks, of each documented case, whether a victim was taken here, a body was left here, the offender lived here, or a court here touched the case. Run that way, case by case, the region's record is this.

Larry Eyler, the "Highway Killer," was convicted by a Cook County, Illinois jury in July 1986 of the murder of Danny Bridges, sentenced to death, and the conviction and sentence were affirmed by the Illinois Supreme Court in 1989 (People v. Eyler, 549 N.E.2d 268). In December 1990 he pleaded guilty in Vermillion County, Indiana, to the murder of Steven Agan and took sixty years. After his death sentence was final he confessed to twenty-one killings committed in 1982–84; the confession list runs through Lake, Jasper, Newton, Hendricks, Morgan, Putnam, and Vermillion Counties in Indiana, Cook County in Illinois, and cases in Kentucky, Ohio, and Wisconsin. St. Joseph County is not on the list, no Eyler victim was found in Clay or Harris Township, and his alleged accomplice, Robert David Little, was tried for the Agan murder and acquitted. Eyler died in March 1994 of AIDS complications at Pontiac Correctional Center. Excluded — on the confession list itself, not on inference.

Herb Baumeister of Fox Hollow Farm, Westfield, Hamilton County, was never tried: he fled in June 1996 as investigators dug his property and died by suicide on 3 July 1996 at Pinery Provincial Park, Ontario, leaving a three-page note that spoke of a failing business and marriage and not of the murders. Investigators recovered on the order of ten thousand bone fragments; the working count at the time was eleven bodies, and the Hamilton County Coroner's identification work has since named ten victims — Manuel Resendez, Roger Goodlet, Jeffrey Jones, Richard Hamilton, Steven Hale, Alan Broussard, Michael Keirn, Jerry Williams Comer, Allen Livingston (identified in late 2023), and Daniel Thomas Halloran (identified in April 2025) — with the coroner stating thirteen victims and four further DNA profiles still unnamed, and remains that could represent twenty-five or more people. Baumeister is also the main suspect, suspected and never charged, in the I-70 Strangler series of at least eleven men and boys killed in Indiana and Ohio between June 1980 and October 1991. Hamilton County is the seat of every part of that record; no victim, scene, or tie reaches St. Joseph County. Excluded.

Orville Lynn Majors, a licensed practical nurse at Vermillion County Hospital in Clinton, Indiana, was convicted in October 1999 of six murders of ICU patients aged fifty-six to eighty-nine, killed with potassium chloride and epinephrine; a seventh count deadlocked. He received six consecutive sixty-year terms — 360 years — sentenced 15 November 1999 in the Clay Circuit Court at Brazil, Indiana, on a change of venue from Vermillion County, before jurors drawn from Miami County. The Indiana Supreme Court affirmed on 14 August 2002 (Majors v. State), and Majors died in custody on 24 September 2017, aged fifty-six, at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. Investigators suspected many more deaths — he was on duty for 130 of the 147 deaths at the unit between May 1993 and March 1995 — but suspicion is not a count, and no part of the charged or suspected record touches St. Joseph County. Excluded.

Belle Gunness of La Porte, La Porte County, is the corridor's oldest case and its nearest: her farm at 44 McClung Road drew men answering matrimonial advertisements between 1902 and 1908, and after the farmhouse burned on 28 April 1908 investigators recovered a headless adult female torso and three children from the cellar and at least fourteen sets of remains from the grounds, with estimates running to forty. Her hired hand Ray Lamphere was indicted for murder by arson and as an accessory in the murder of Andrew Helgelien; he was convicted of arson and acquitted of murder. A coroner's jury found the headless body was not Gunness; a warrant for fourteen counts of murder was never served, and her fate is unresolved on the record. La Porte County borders this county, and the case is carried at that size — a neighboring county's record, with no victim, no scene, and no proceeding in St. Joseph County. Excluded.

Two federal identifications close the corridor. Larry Hall, the "Grave Digger," was convicted federally of kidnapping Jessica Roach of Illinois and is suspected in rural Indiana disappearances between 1995 and 2009, including Indiana Wesleyan student Tricia Reitler of Marion in 1993 — the Wabash and Grant County ground, not this one. The I-65 Killer was identified in 2022 by the FBI and the Indiana State Police, through genetic genealogy, as Henry Edward Greenwell, responsible for at least three murders and a sexual assault in Indiana and Kentucky in the late 1980s and early 1990s along the interstate; Greenwell had died in 2013, aged sixty-eight, after prison sentences in Iowa and Kentucky. Neither record names St. Joseph County, Clay Township, Harris Township, or Granger. The corridor test, run case by case on the convicting courts, the confession lists, and the coroners' identifications, returns the same answer six times: the region has documented serial cases, and none of them is seated here.