South Bend's High-Profile Murder Cases

High-Profile Murders · the cases that entered the city's permanent record

Some murder cases a city tries and forgets. A few it cannot put down: the trial the whole county followed, the sentence the newspapers carried for years, the case that changed how the police work or how the courts sit. This section tells those cases whole, from the documented record — the crime as the courts and the press of record state it, the proceedings, and the disposition each case finally reached. The selection rule is stated plainly: a case belongs here because of its documented prominence — an appellate record, a sustained press record, a civic consequence — and not because of the manner of the killing. Acquittals, reversals and dismissals are dispositions, and they are carried here as prominently as convictions; a defendant who was never convicted is printed with that standing in the same breath as the charge. Cases that remain unsolved are told in the Unsolved section of this history, except where a case's course through the courts — charged, convicted, reversed, retried, dismissed — is itself the story, and then it is told whole here with the cross-reference stated. The general run of the city's homicide record belongs to the Crime survey. What follows is the record of the famous cases.