The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
19–20 November 1974; decided 24 June 1977
The town's documented felony murder is a tavern robbery that went wrong in the first minutes. The Indiana Supreme Court's opinion in Candler v. State, 266 Ind. 440, 363 N.E.2d 1233 (1977), states the case plainly. On the night of 19–20 November 1974 — the information dates the acts to 19 November, the opinion's narrative to the night of 20 November, and both print here unmerged — Robert Eugene Candler and two companions robbed the J & H Tavern at 59400 Crumstown Highway, North Liberty, a house run by Helen Elliot. In the course of the robbery Candler fired a 12-gauge shotgun and fatally wounded a customer, John F. Britton. The robbery count, as the information frames it, charged the taking of about $130 in currency from Anita Wroblewski by violence and fear.
A St. Joseph County jury convicted Candler of first-degree murder and of committing a felony while armed, and the court imposed consecutive terms of life imprisonment for the murder and fifteen years for the armed robbery. On appeal the Supreme Court affirmed the murder conviction. It held that a defendant cannot stand convicted of both felony murder and the underlying felony, and it remanded with instructions to vacate the armed-robbery sentence; it also held that a warrantless search of Candler's vehicle had been improper but that the error was harmless against the identification evidence at trial (summarised in the opinion and its case summaries). John F. Britton, the man killed, is carried in this build as the record names him — a customer in a tavern on an ordinary night — and no detail beyond the court's own statement is printed. The two companions are not named in the opinion passages reached, and no separate disposition for them is printed; their course stands as a named gap, its settler the St. Joseph County circuit court file in State v. Candler and its companion cases.