High-Profile Murders as Their Own Treatment — Era by Era

1858–2005 · LEG 78 DISCIPLINE CARRIED IN THIS LEG

1858–1906, the long quiet opening: The era holds one case, and it stands whole in crime-03: the county's first murder indictment, Eager's, for the 1858 stabbing of Charles Kelley at Mishawaka, ending in acquittal on self-defense. Around it the county's celebrated killings of the histories are other ground's — Greene Township's, New Carlisle's, South Bend's — and no second Mishawaka murder stands in the histories for the forty-eight years that follow. The quiet is the record's, and it is stated plainly: from 1858 to 1906 the histories give this city one indictment and no conviction.

1906: The Ludwig killing — Cecilia Ludwig burned in her own house on 25 September 1906, her husband Frank convicted of second-degree murder on the opinion preserved entire at crime-04 — closes the era and opens the next. It stands there whole and is pointed to.

1906–1985, the quiet decades, stated as quiet: Between Ludwig and the 1980s, no Mishawaka murder reaches the record assembled for this build at case strength — not in the appellate record, not in the press of record reached, not in the histories' successors. The decades are printed as what they are in this record: quiet. The single name they hold is an unsolved one at the era's edge — Thomas Lionel Rohr, the coin-shop manager killed in a robbery of his shop on 28 August 1985, carried in crime-09 with its suspected, never-adjudicated attribution to the "Coin Shop Killer" — suspicion strength, as that entry states it, and the killing unsolved in the adjudicated record.

1988–1989, the record thickens: Two cases, both whole in the parent fragment and pointed to: Theresa Burns, sixteen, killed in her home on 11 January 1988, her case cold for twenty-two years until a gun's re-examination charged Phillip Geans, convicted at trial in 2015 and affirmed on appeal in 2016 (crime-10); and Lisa Bianco, beaten to death on 4 March 1989 by Alan Matheney, her former husband, out of Pendleton on an eight-hour furlough that day (crime-11). Matheney's is the multi-courtroom case of this record in its first sense: charged in St. Joseph County, tried on a change of venue in Lake County, convicted of murder and burglary on 11 April 1990, sentenced to death on 11 May 1990, and executed on 28 September 2005 — the county's only modern execution, and the one Mishawaka offense among the three county names on the state's list (crime-05).

1998, the case the file had not carried — Wayne Kubsch: On 18 September 1998, in the basement of his Mishawaka home on Prism Valley Drive, three people were murdered: Beth Kubsch, stabbed eleven times and bound in duct tape; her former husband Rick Milewski; and her son Aaron Milewski, eleven years old — Rick and Aaron each stabbed and shot in the mouth, Aaron stabbed twenty-two times on the federal court's account. Her twelve-year-old son Anthony found the bodies when his mother failed to pick him up from a school dance. Beth's husband, Wayne Kubsch, was charged on 22 December 1998 with three counts of murder, the state giving notice in April 1999 that it would seek death. He is this record's multi-courtroom case in its fullest sense and its child-death sentence in one: tried first in June 2000 in the St. Joseph Superior Court, convicted, and sentenced to death on the jury's recommendation — and the Indiana Supreme Court reversed in 2003, because the jury had been shown his videotaped interrogation in which he invoked his right to silence (Kubsch v. State, 784 N.E.2d 905). Tried a second time in March 2005, he was convicted again of all three murders, the second jury again recommended death, and the court imposed it in April 2005. The case against him was entirely circumstantial — no eyewitness, no DNA, no fingerprint, no forensic evidence linking him to the killings, as the federal court that later reviewed it states plainly — and it held: affirmed on direct appeal (866 N.E.2d 726, 2007), post-conviction relief denied and affirmed (934 N.E.2d 1138, 2010), federal habeas denied in 2013 and the denial left standing by the Seventh Circuit. Aaron Milewski's age is the sentence's weight: the death sentence of 2005 rests in part on the murder of an eleven-year-old child, and the case is carried here at that size — the largest murder prosecution in the city's record that the parent fragment, which closes its modern account at Matheney, did not itself contain.

The officer killings, as their set: They stand whole in crime-12 and are organized here, not retold: Patrolman Clarence Casper, killed in a motorcycle crash on 10 June 1930, the department's first line-of-duty death; Corporal Thomas Roberts and Patrolman Bryan Verkler, shot and killed answering a shots-fired call at 125 East Battell Street on 13 December 2003 — the first Mishawaka officers murdered on duty, their killer dying by his own hand at the scene, so that the record is the memorial record; and Corporal James Szuba, killed in 2010 by a drunken driver. The boundary case stands there too: Corporal Nick Polizzotto, 2007, was South Bend's officer at a South Bend address, and is not this city's.

The record's edge: Gordon Wolfe, found shot dead at 59355 Bremen Highway on 28 December 2003, stands unsolved in crime-13, and the modern counts stand unassembled there as this build's named open edge.

Sources:

1. Kubsch v. State, 784 N.E.2d 905 (Ind. 2003); 866 N.E.2d 726 (Ind. 2007); 934 N.E.2d 1138 (Ind. 2010) — the two trials, the Doyle reversal, the two death recommendations, the affirmances.
2. Kubsch v. Superintendent, No. 3:11-cv-42 (N.D. Ind., opinion of 2 December 2013) and Kubsch v. Neal, 800 F.3d 783 (7th Cir. 2015) — the facts of 18 September 1998 as the federal record states them (the victims, the wounds, the discovery), the wholly circumstantial character of the case, and the habeas course.
3. The parent fragment, crime-03, crime-04, crime-05, crime-09, crime-10, crime-11, crime-12 and crime-13 — the era's constituent cases, pointed to and organized here at their own entries' strength.