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JANUARY 11, 1974 – MARCH 25, 1976 · THE BURGER DAIRY ABDUCTION AND ITS APPEAL
The gravest night in Walkerton's record began in a store parking lot, and it is told here at the strength of the Indiana Supreme Court's own opinion, which is the record the case left. At about 8:00 p.m. on January 11, 1974, Cheryl Pauline Simon drove to a Burger Dairy store in Walkerton with her young daughter and her niece, and went inside, leaving the children in the car. When she returned, a man confronted her, ordered her into the car, drew a gun when she refused, forced her in, and drove the car himself. For the following four to four and a half hours he drove his captives along the country roads surrounding Walkerton, stopping occasionally; the opinion records that Mrs. Simon was raped a number of times during the ordeal, and it records offenses against her niece as well, which this section does not elaborate beyond the court's own statement. Toward the end he took four dollars from her, returned one for gasoline, made her promise not to go to the police, and told her, in the opinion's quotation, "we are going to have a party like this again." She was followed as she stopped for gas and at her niece's home, reached her brother-in-law's house, picked up her husband from work, and — persuaded by him — told her story to the Walkerton police at about 2:00 a.m. on January 12. Rickie William Pearish was arrested on January 30, 1974, identified by Mrs. Simon and her niece; a weapon taken from him matched the gun described, and a clip fitting it was found in the Simon car, identified as one he had dropped there.
A St. Joseph County jury convicted Pearish on December 10, 1974, of three counts of kidnapping and one count of armed robbery, and on January 19, 1975, he was sentenced to life imprisonment on each kidnapping count, with a determinate ten years for the armed robbery to follow them — the heaviest sentence ever imposed on a Walkerton case in the record reached, and, Indiana having no death sentence available for the offense, the era's maximum in fact. His appeal reached the Indiana Supreme Court on three grounds that have kept the case in the law's memory: whether the trial court abused its discretion in finding his young niece-victim competent to testify (she was twelve at trial, with a learning disability the defense argued placed her mental age at five; the court held the competency ruling sound, distinguishing Easterday v. State); whether the prosecutor's closing argument — calling the case "vile" and "gross" and the defendant a liar, against a defense that the encounter had been consensual — required a mistrial (it did not); and whether cross-examination about his bad-conduct discharge from the Marine Corps was proper impeachment (it was, the subject having been opened on direct). On March 25, 1976, the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in full: Pearish v. State, 344 N.E.2d 296 (Ind. 1976). The case is printed here as the court printed it — charges, evidence, verdict, sentence, appeal — and no further: the two children are not named in this section although the opinion names them, and no detail of the offenses stands beyond the opinion's own words.
Sources: Pearish v. State, 344 N.E.2d 296 (Ind. 1976) (facts, convictions of December 10, 1974, sentences of January 19, 1975, and affirmance of March 25, 1976, all from the opinion, read first-hand for this build).