Appeals, the Coroner's Index and the Playing-Cards Route

SECOND PASS · SENTENCES RE-SETTLED CASE BY CASE

(a) The appellate pulls, settled case by case: Ludwig — Frank Ludwig, convicted in the St. Joseph Circuit Court (Funk, J.) of murder in the second degree for the killing of Cecilia Ludwig, 25 September 1906; sentence, life imprisonment; affirmed entire, Ludwig v. State, 170 Ind. 648 (1 July 1908), on the ground that a killing in the commission of arson was first-degree murder, so the second-degree verdict could not be complained of as too favorable; by the modern book's account he served sixteen years. One correction of the popular record is logged with it: the book-length account's summary names the husband "Albin" and makes the potato masher his weapon; the opinion — the strongest paper in the case — names him Frank and carries the masher, on his own testimony, as his wife's. The opinion governs, as crime-04 already holds. Burns/Geans — Phillip M. Geans, convicted by a St. Joseph Superior Court jury (Frese, J.) of the murder of Theresa Burns, 11 January 1988; the case's published accounts report a sentence of sixty years, which this history could not re-settle from the opinion itself, because the 2016 decision is a memorandum decision on the conviction's validity — the conviction was affirmed entire (Geans v. State, No. 71A04-1512-CR-2341, Ind. Ct. App., 16 September 2016), and the sixty-year figure stands at the published accounts' strength, with the trial cause (71D03-1312-MR-14) as its settling record. Matheney — Alan L. Matheney, convicted in Lake County on change of venue of murder and burglary, 11 April 1990; sentence, death, imposed 11 May 1990; conviction affirmed unanimously and sentence affirmed four-to-one (583 N.E.2d 1202, 1992, DeBruler, J., dissenting on the sentence alone); post-conviction denied and affirmed (688 N.E.2d 883, 1997); federal habeas denied, Seventh Circuit (253 F.3d 1025, 2001); executed 28 September 2005. To these the pass adds the pull the parent fragment did not contain: Kubsch — two convictions, two jury death recommendations, the first reversed (784 N.E.2d 905, 2003), the second affirmed (866 N.E.2d 726, 2007), post-conviction and habeas denied (934 N.E.2d 1138, 2010; N.D. Ind. 2013; 800 F.3d 783, 7th Cir. 2015); the death sentence of April 2005 stands in the record reached.

(b) The coroner's index, read: The St. What the reading yields is stated exactly. The G file, read entire, contains no Grzyb entry in any year — the executed man is not himself a coroner's subject, as expected, and no entry in the G range answers to his case. The J file, read entire, contains seventeen Jones entries, and none dated 1896, 1897 or 1898; the nearest Jones entries are Isaiah Jones (1894) and Nelson Jones Jr. (1905), neither of which can be tied to the 1897 execution on anything the index gives. The index therefore settles nothing for either question — printed as a read-and-negative result, not as a failure to look: an index of names and years cannot place an offense whose victim's name is itself unknown. The questions stay open, and their settlers are now the records behind the index: the coroner's record files themselves, 1879 to the 1990s, at the St. Joseph County Archives, 1140 South Lafayette Boulevard, South Bend — the office whose restoration of those very records the genealogical society's own account describes — worked with the Tribune backfile for the execution years 1896–97 and 1927–28.

(c) The playing-cards file, its viewing route corrected: The unsolved-mysteries leg of this build carries the Indiana Cold Case Homicides playing cards — the Department of Correction's decks profiling fifty-two unsolved homicides and missing persons, no Mishawaka case among them. The viewing route is corrected here against the Department's own record: the decks were never a public purchase item. The third edition (released 22 April 2013, by the Department of Correction with the Indiana State Police and the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department) was distributed throughout Indiana's prisons and to law enforcement, and was the only deck available for purchase inside the state's twenty-five prison facilities. The public's route to the cards is the Department's online posting of the deck itself — the full third-edition deck published as a file on the Department of Correction's site (the 2013 release pointed readers to its cold-case page at in.gov) — and, for the cases' current handling, the Indiana State Police's cold-case pages, organized by district. Any statement that the decks may simply be bought or viewed at a sales outlet is corrected accordingly: prison distribution, law-enforcement distribution, and the Department's posted file are the routes the record gives.

Sources:

1. Ludwig v. State, 170 Ind. 648 (1908); Geans v. State, No. 71A04-1512-CR-2341 (Ind. Ct. App. 2016); Matheney v. State, 583 N.E.2d 1202 (Ind. 1992) and 688 N.E.2d 883 (Ind. 1997); Matheney v. Anderson, 253 F.3d 1025 (7th Cir. 2001); Kubsch v.
2. South Bend Area Genealogical Society, Saint Joseph County Coroner's Records — Index 1879–1960 (sbags.org) — the G and J letter files read entire; the society's archives account — the coroner's records, 1879 to the 1990s, at the St. Joseph County Archive, 1140 S. Lafayette, South Bend.
3. Indiana Department of Correction, "Prison Playing Cards Aim to Help Solve Indiana Cold Cases" (22 April 2013) — the third edition, the fifty-two cases, the prison and law-enforcement distribution, the purchase line limited to the state's prison facilities, and the Department's online posting of the deck.