The distinction · the manhole murders, 2006–07

DECEMBER 2006 – 2013 · FOUR MURDERS, ONE MORNING, TWO MEN CONVICTED

The building the men called "the Fort" was an abandoned chemical plant at 604 South Scott Street, beside the Norfolk Southern tracks near Coveleski Stadium, and in the winter of 2006 it was home, of a kind, to a shifting company of homeless men who slept in its rooms and hunted scrap metal in the tunnels under the abandoned Studebaker plant complex nearby. Two of them, Randy Lee Reeder and Daniel J. Sharp, shared a room in the basement and kept a propane heater against the cold. In a room upstairs lived four more: Michael S. "Shan" Nolen Jr., forty; Michael William Lawson, fifty-three; Brian Talboom; and Jason Coates, twenty-nine.

Nolen and Lawson were expected at the Nolen family's Christmas dinner, and when the two men did not come, and did not come, their friends along the mission circuit — both were regulars at the Hope Rescue Mission, and Lawson had stayed at the Catholic Worker House — began asking after them. The four had simply stopped being seen. South Bend police began investigating the men's whereabouts on January 9, 2007, and Sergeant Ron Glon, who knew that homeless men stayed at the Fort and sometimes took copper from the underground substations nearby, went to show another officer the ground. He lifted a manhole cover by the tracks and found the first two bodies: Nolen and Lawson.

The second pair — Talboom and Coates — was found in a second manhole in the 600 block of South Scott Street. The Court of Appeals' account dates that discovery two days after the first, on January 11; the Tribune's report of the fire crews bringing the bodies up, photographed that Friday, is dated January 12, and this section prints both rather than choose. What the discoveries did to the city's homeless community is in the contemporary record: the South Bend Catholic Worker's remembrance of Lawson, published January 24, 2007, wrote of the prospect of "the murderer, or murderers, still among us, walking around," and that it "has left a lot of folks uneasy." Four homeless men were dead, hidden in the ground beside the railroad, and for three weeks no one could say by whose hand. Whether a stranger was hunting homeless men — the question the case posed in every shelter and drop-in center in the city — was a real question in January 2007. It has a documented answer.

The men were mourned publicly, which was not nothing for men who had lived as they lived. A vigil was held for them that January, and the Catholic Worker community offered a public Mass and dinner in Lawson's memory at Our Lady of the Road, its drop-in center at 744 South Main Street, where he had been a guest. The St. Joseph County Homicide Unit, which took the investigation, appealed publicly for information.

The answer came from a shoeprint. Moving the bodies, Sharp had stepped in blood, and the print was recovered. On January 30, officers interviewing Sharp noticed that the shoes he was wearing matched it. On February 2, in a pre-polygraph interview, Sharp confessed that he and Reeder had planned and carried out the killings; both men were arrested in the first days of February, and on February 5 the State charged Reeder in St. Joseph Superior Court with four counts of murder. There was no transient, and no stranger. The killers had been in the basement the whole time — and they were not rootless in the way the first fear supposed: Reeder had lived in and around South Bend for decades, keeping a house with his former wife on Roosevelt Road, just south of the city, during a marriage that ran from 1975 to 1997, as his former brother-in-law told the Tribune after the arrest.

What the courts established, stated as the Court of Appeals states it in Reeder v. State: on the late evening of December 20, 2006, Reeder and Sharp came back to their basement room to find it in disarray and their propane tank gone, and Sharp heard the heater running in the room upstairs, where Nolen, Lawson, Talboom and Coates lived. In the early morning of December 21, after Talboom and Coates had left the building, the two men went upstairs — Reeder with a three-foot metal pipe, Sharp with a hammer — kicked in the door, and attacked Nolen and Lawson, Reeder beating Lawson to death and the two of them leaving Nolen near death. They then waited some two hours for Talboom and Coates to come back, and killed them both as they entered. Hearing Nolen still alive in his room, Reeder went back and beat him to death. The autopsies found that each of the four men died of cranio-cerebral trauma consistent with blunt-force blows from a pipe and a hammer. About a week later, after Christmas, the two men dropped the bodies down the two manholes by the tracks. As to why: Sharp testified at Reeder's trial that the pair believed the four had stolen the propane space heater they had lately bought at a garage sale, and that they had heard the men upstairs using it; the police affidavit at the arrest described a second suspected theft, of scrap metal the two men had collected to sell. This section prints both attributions, as the record carries both.

Sharp pleaded guilty in July 2007 to four counts of murder, under an agreement that his sentences would run concurrently — up to sixty-five years — in exchange for his testimony at Reeder's trial. He testified, and on September 4, 2007, he was sentenced to sixty-five years. Reeder was tried before Judge John Marnocha in August 2007 — the Court of Appeals records that he had described himself to another inmate, in the jailhouse phrase that gave the case its second name, as "the manhole killer" — and the jury convicted him on all four counts. The court sentenced him to sixty-five years on each count, the terms to run one after another: 260 years in all. His appeals ran six more years: a direct appeal dismissed in 2008 so that a post-conviction case could be built, that case denied in 2012, and in 2013 the Court of Appeals, in Reeder v. State, 994 N.E.2d 763, affirmed the convictions and the sentence together. The case's fullest narrative remains Virginia Black's multi-part retrospective in the Tribune in 2011.

The manhole murders are the worst multiple killing in this city's modern record, and they are not a serial killing, and the difference matters to how the case is filed. Under the definition this section uses, serial murder is killing in separate events; this was one event — one building, one morning, one grievance — by two men against four men they knew and lived a floor away from. The fear of January 2007 was of a pattern: a killer choosing homeless men as a class, perhaps moving along the rails. The record's answer is the opposite shape: no pattern, no stranger, no series — a theft believed in, and four men killed over a propane heater. The press name for the case is the manhole murders; the courts' record of it is four counts of murder, proved twice over. This history files it under the second.

Sources:

1. Reeder v. State, 994 N.E.2d 763 (Ind. Ct. App. 2013) — the facts and procedural history as the Court of Appeals states them: the Fort, the night of December 20–21, 2006, the discoveries, the shoeprint, the February 5, 2007 charges, the August 2007 trial, the 260-year sentence, affirmed.
2. Reeder v. State, No. 71A03-0711-CR-530 (Ind. Ct. App. June 24, 2008) — the direct appeal's dismissal under the Davis/Hatton procedure, St. Joseph Superior Court, Judge John Marnocha, Cause No. 71D02-0702-MR-2.
3. South Bend Tribune, January–September 2007 (via ProQuest) — the discoveries of January 9 and January 11–12, the St. Joseph County prosecutor's identification of Michael S. Nolen Jr., 40, and Michael William Lawson, 53, the February 2 confession, Sharp's plea and September 4, 2007 sentencing to sixty-five years.
4. South Bend Catholic Worker, "Remembering Mike Lawson," January 24, 2007 — the missed Christmas dinner and the homeless community's fear, in a contemporary voice.
5. Virginia Black, the manhole murders retrospective series, South Bend Tribune, 2011 — the case's narrative of record.