The corridor test · the region's documented cases, checked one by one

1908–2022 · EVERY CASE AT ITS OWN ADDRESS

Belle Gunness is the nearest case, and she is La Porte County's. A Norwegian immigrant twice widowed, she bought a farm on McClung Road outside La Porte, the next county west of this one, and from 1905 placed advertisements in Chicago and Norwegian-language newspapers — a comely widow with a large farm, seeking a gentleman equally well provided, "with view of joining fortunes." The men who answered, and came to the farm with their money, did not leave it: John Moe of Elbow Lake, Minnesota; Ole B. Budsberg of Iola, Wisconsin; Henry Gurholdt of Scandinavia, Wisconsin; Andrew Helgelien of Aberdeen, South Dakota; her hired man Thomas Lindboe; and others whose names the digging could not restore. On April 28, 1908, the farmhouse burned, with a headless woman's body and her three children's in the ruins — whether the woman was Gunness was never proved, and she never stood trial. In the days after the fire, at least thirteen bodies were dug out of the farmyard, among them her adopted daughter Jennie Olsen. Not one of the identified dead came from South Bend or St. Joseph County. The case is Indiana's most famous serial case, it sits some twenty-five miles from this city's courthouse, and on the record it has nothing to do with this city at all.

Larry Eyler's ground was the highway map of the 1980s, and this county is not on it. Born in Crawfordsville and raised in Lebanon, Eyler killed young men whose bodies were found in Lake, Jasper and Newton counties in Indiana's northwest and along the Indianapolis–Terre Haute line, and in Illinois; his bases were Chicago, Indianapolis and Terre Haute, the cities his cases were prosecuted from. No Eyler victim, body, base or investigation touches St. Joseph County.

The "I-65 Killer" worked the other great Indiana corridor. For three decades the murders of motel clerks along Interstate 65 — Vicki Heath, 41, at a Super 8 motel in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on February 21, 1987; Margaret "Peggy" Gill, 24, at the Days Inn in Merrillville on March 3, 1989; and Jeanne Gilbert, 34, at the Days Inn in Remington the same night, with a fourth clerk in Columbus, Indiana, assaulted in January 1990 and surviving — were an unnamed man's work. On April 5, 2022, the Indiana State Police announced that DNA and investigative genealogy had identified him as Harry Edward Greenwell, dead of cancer since 2013. Merrillville is in Lake County and Remington in Jasper, and his corridor ran up I-65 from Kentucky toward Indianapolis. The Indiana Toll Road — Interstates 80 and 90, the east–west corridor that crosses the north side of St. Joseph County — appears nowhere in the State Police's accounting of his crimes.

Christopher Peterson, the "Shotgun Killer," was Gary's. Born in Gary in 1969, he was convicted in Porter County of the December 1990 murders of Harchand Dhaliwal, an attendant at a Portage gas station, and Marie Meitzler, a motel clerk, and in Lake County of the murders of brothers Eli and George Balovsky in their Gary tailor shop on December 18, 1990. Indiana's own courts describe the setting of his cases as a shotgun shooting spree in northwestern Indiana; his death sentences later gave way to consecutive terms totalling 120 years. Nothing in his record lies east of Portage.

The northwest corner holds the rest of Indiana's documented concentration, and it stops at the same county lines. Alton Coleman's 1984 rampage crossed Gary; David Maust killed in Hammond; Eugene Britt's cases are Gary's and Portage's; and Darren Vann pleaded guilty in 2018 to the murders of seven women in Hammond and Gary in 2014 — one of them a native of Knox, in Starke County, who had been living in Gary. Hammond, Gary and Portage are Lake and Porter County ground, sixty miles and more from South Bend, and no case in that cluster reaches this county.

The remainder of Indiana's documented list is scattered the same way, each name seated in its own county: Herb Baumeister at Westfield in Hamilton County, where the bones found at Fox Hollow Farm made the investigation's center; Orville Lynn Majors, the nurse at Clinton in Vermillion County, convicted of murdering his hospital patients; Steven Judy, tried in Indianapolis; William Clyde Gibson, in New Albany in Floyd County; and Larry Hall of Wabash, suspected in disappearances across the Midwest and convicted of kidnapping in Illinois. Hall is the list's most travelled suspicion, and even his record, as reached, contains no St. Joseph County case.

Samuel Little required the closest testing, because his was a corridor career — ninety-three confessed killings between about 1970 and 2005, more than sixty of them verified by the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, the largest confirmed count in the bureau's history — and the open road was his method. His Indiana entry in the official accounting is a single one, and it is not this county: the Allen County Sheriff's Department announced on March 6, 2020, that Little had confessed to its detectives the murders of Valeria Boyd and Mary Ann Porter, picked up on one night in late October 1980 near Maumee Avenue and Division Street in Fort Wayne and left in rural Allen County. A prosecutors' list of the places where Little claimed a killing also carried Portland, Indiana — in Jay County, far southeast of here — as a claim, which no matching in the record reached has ever turned into a case. And the bureau's published narratives of the confessions that remain unmatched name no Indiana place. No confession of his, matched or unmatched, no arrest and no residence places Samuel Little in South Bend or St. Joseph County. He died in California custody on December 30, 2020, never charged in Indiana.

Dellmus Colvin is the corridor test in its purest form: a Toledo long-haul trucker, convicted on his guilty pleas of murders in Toledo and elsewhere in Ohio, in Monroe County, Michigan, and in Atlantic City, New Jersey. His confirmed ground is the turnpike country east of here. In 2020, speaking by telephone from prison to a podcast, he claimed dozens of further victims across the country. A convicted man's unsworn claims are claims, not findings: no court or official record reached tests them, and none of them puts a victim in this county. They are printed here at exactly that size, as the operated-here test's last return — negative, like all the others.

Sources:

1. La Porte County Historical Society, its Belle Gunness account and coroner's-inquest transcriptions — the farm, the advertisements, the identified suitors and their home places, the April 28, 1908 fire, and the bodies exhumed.
2. Indiana State Police announcement, April 5, 2022 (as carried by the Associated Press) — the identification of Harry Edward Greenwell and the I-65 case list: Elizabethtown, Merrillville, Remington, Columbus.
3. Peterson v. State, 674 N.E.2d 528 (Ind. 1996), and Ben-Yisrayl v. State, 690 N.E.2d 1141 (Ind. 1997) — the Porter and Lake County convictions and the courts' own description of the spree's setting.
4. Allen County Sheriff's Department, news release, March 6, 2020; Federal Bureau of Investigation, ViCAP Samuel Little releases, 2018–2021, and the Texas Rangers' Samuel Little case profiles, November 2021 — Little's Indiana accounting, Fort Wayne only.
5. The court records and guilty-plea reporting of the Lake, Porter, Hamilton, Vermillion, Marion and Floyd County cases, and of Colvin's Ohio, Michigan and New Jersey pleas, as assembled for this section.