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DECEMBER 2006 – 2013 · 604 SOUTH SCOTT STREET
In December 2006 four homeless men were living, in a loose arrangement of rooms, in an abandoned building at 604 South Scott Street — a former chemical plant the men of the camp called “the Fort.” Michael “Shan” Nolen Jr., forty, and Michael Lawson, fifty-three, were expected at Nolen's family's Christmas dinner and did not come; in the days after Christmas the talk along the tracks was of men missing. Friends pointed police toward the building and toward the manholes along the Norfolk Southern tracks near Coveleski Stadium. On 9 January 2007 the first two bodies were found in a manhole — Nolen and Lawson — and two more, Jason Coates and Brian Talboom, in a second. Sergeant Ron Glon, who knew the camp, recognized Lawson, a man he had arrested near that same manhole the year before. The coroner's finding, as the Court of Appeals later stated it, was that each of the four died of cranio-cerebral trauma from blunt-force impacts. The men had hunted scrap metal in the tunnels and yards of the old Studebaker complex, and the city read the case at first through that world; the trial record corrected the reading, as the disposition below states.
On 2 February 2007, in an interview before a polygraph examination, Daniel J. Sharp, fifty-six, who shared a basement room at the Fort with Randy Lee Reeder, confessed that the two of them had planned and carried out the killings. Both men were arrested that day — Sharp in St. Joseph County, Reeder, fifty, in Berrien County, Michigan, from which he waived extradition — and on 5 February the State charged Reeder with four counts of murder. The killings had been committed between 18 and 21 December 2006; about a week afterward, the Court of Appeals' account states, the two men dropped the bodies down the two manholes. Sharp pleaded guilty to four counts of murder; under his plea agreement the four terms run concurrently — a sentence of sixty-five years — and he testified at Reeder's trial. His testimony put the motive on the record: the two men were angered over the theft of personal property, a propane space heater they had lately bought at a garage sale. The Tribune's trial coverage carried the same correction in a headline's space: the murders were not the result of scrapping.
Reeder maintained his innocence and was tried before a jury in August 2007, Judge John Marnocha presiding. The evidence, as the Court of Appeals later recited it, included a witness's account that Reeder had described himself to him as “the manhole killer.” The jury convicted him of all four murders, and the court sentenced him to an aggravated sixty-five years on each count, the terms consecutive — an aggregate of 260 years. (A figure of 265 years circulates in a later school-newspaper account; the appellate record governs, and it is 260.) Reeder's first appeal was dismissed without prejudice in June 2008 under the Davis/Hatton procedure so that he could pursue post-conviction relief first; the post-conviction court denied relief on 17 September 2012, and on the consolidated appeal that followed, the Court of Appeals affirmed both the convictions and the 260-year sentence — Reeder v. State, 994 N.E.2d 763 (Ind. Ct. App. 2013). The case's place in the city's memory was fixed by the telling as much as by the trial: Virginia Black's South Bend Tribune series on the case took first place for best in-depth feature in the state journalism awards of 2012, and the case has since been carried to a national true-crime audience. Lawson, who had lived on and off for three years at the South Bend Catholic Worker house, was memorialized by that community within days of the identification, in an account that named the city's unease plainly: the response to a missing-person's report, it said, is not the same for men of the street as for “more respectable members of the community.”
Sources:
- Reeder v. State, 994 N.E.2d 763 (Ind. Ct. App. 2013) — read first-hand; and No. 71A03-0711-CR-530 (Ind. Ct. App. 24 June 2008), the Davis/Hatton dismissal
- South Bend Tribune case coverage and timeline, 2007 (the probable-cause affidavit, the plea, the trial, the verdict), as indexed in the ProQuest newspaper archive
- South Bend Catholic Worker community, “Remembering Mike Lawson,” January 2007