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25 AUGUST 1990 – 2006 · THE WESTERN AVENUE OSCO
On the morning of 25 August 1990, three employees were found shot to death inside the Osco Drug store on Western Avenue: Scott Dick, twenty-nine, the assistant manager, who had been the first to arrive to open the store; Tracy Holvoet, the pharmacist; and Connie Zalewski, forty-three, a store clerk. An audit found $6,421 in cash missing from the store safe. The murders were the city's defining crime of their decade, and the case that followed them ran sixteen years without ever reaching a verdict that stood.
Christopher Allen had managed an Osco store and had been fired some weeks before the killings; a store manager gave his name to police within two hours of the discovery, and the trial record carried the details of his firing — a front-door lock changed, the combination of the top of the safe changed, his alarm code canceled, and the combination of the bottom of the safe, by the testimony, not changed until after the murders. But the State did not charge him for nine years. In November 1999 a grand jury indicted him on three counts of murder and one of robbery, and he was arrested in Georgia, where he was then living. In April 2000 a judge dismissed the indictment because the prosecution had failed to notify Allen that the grand jury was hearing evidence, and so had denied him the opportunity to testify before it; the State indicted him again, and the case was moved out of St. Joseph County.
His first jury, in June 2001, could not reach a verdict, and a mistrial was declared. His second trial sat in the Henry Circuit Court with a jury drawn from Delaware County; on 22 June 2002 that jury convicted him on all counts, and he was sentenced to an aggregate term of 144 years. The State's case, as the Tribune reported the trials, rested on identification evidence, on the unreversed safe combination, and on a note found in the store that former co-workers said resembled Allen's writing — though the handwriting experts called by the two sides at the second trial could each say no more than that the match was inconclusive. On 9 August 2004 the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed the convictions and remanded the case: the trial court, the court held, had committed reversible error in excluding a defense witness whose testimony indicated that someone other than Allen had committed the offenses. The court found the evidence sufficient to permit a retrial, and it rejected Allen's claim that the long delay in charging him had denied him due process — so the State tried him a third time, and in 2006 the third jury also failed to reach a verdict. Special Prosecutor Michael McAlexander then announced that Allen would not be tried a fourth time, because prosecutors did not believe they could win a conviction, and the charges were dismissed.
That is the case's disposition, and it is printed here at the same size as any conviction in this section: Christopher Allen was convicted once, the conviction was reversed on appeal, two other juries hung, and the State dismissed the charges. He stands in the National Registry of Exonerations. No one else has ever been charged with the murders of Scott Dick, Tracy Holvoet and Connie Zalewski, and in the eyes of the record the case is unsolved; it is carried in the Unsolved section of this history as well, and it is told whole here because its court course — charged, convicted, reversed, retried, dismissed — is itself the largest murder-case record South Bend made in the twentieth century.
Sources:
- Christopher M. Allen v. State, No. 33A04-0305-CR-249 (Ind. Ct. App. 9 August 2004) — the reversal, read first-hand
- Associated Press, “Ga. man will not face 4th trial in 1990 South Bend murders” (2006) — the decision not to retry
- South Bend Tribune trial coverage, 2001–2006 (the suspect's naming, the safe testimony, the verdict, the families' response)
- National Registry of Exonerations, case record for Christopher Allen — the indictment and first dismissal