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FEBRUARY 14, 1986 – SEPTEMBER 14, 1988 · 902 OHIO STREET AND THE CAUSATION HOLDING
Walkerton's one homicide prosecution is a case about what a killing is, and it began with the victim reporting it himself. Robert LaBere lived alone at 902 Ohio Street, Walkerton, in one unit of a duplex whose other unit stood empty. He was a coin collector — he bought rolls of pennies, searched them, and rewrapped them — and he weighed, the opinion records, between four and five hundred pounds, with the circulatory problems his size carried. At about 10:00 p.m. on February 14, 1986, LaBere entered the Walkerton Police Station and reported that his home had been broken into and he had been stabbed. He had driven himself there. He described a tall white man of about forty in a red baseball cap, blue jeans and a jacket — "a face he would never forget" — and said he had chased his assailant through the house as he was stabbed, three times, in the chest and abdomen, and had grabbed the man's red cap from him. He was taken by ambulance to LaPorte Hospital, alert and able to walk with assistance. The abdominal wound had penetrated the peritoneum; because a vital organ might be damaged and the risk of missing it was death, his surgeons performed an exploratory laparotomy despite the danger his size and circulation made of it. The knife had in fact damaged no vital organ. LaBere improved from critical to fair, was conscious and helping the nurses move him — and on March 1, 1986, fifteen days after the stabbing, he died of a pulmonary saddle embolism, a blood clot from his legs blocking both lungs, a product, the physicians testified, of his condition and his post-operative immobility.
The evidence against Donald C. Pittman was the evening reassembled. He had been drinking in Walkerton that night with Jesse Roach, George Mosley and Teddy Salzer; when the group came back together at Salzer's apartment, Pittman looked scared or excited, smelled foul, and said he had robbed a fellow and stabbed him three times. He had three rolls of pennies. He washed his clothes and put them back on wet. He had left a butterfly hunting knife at Salzer's. He told them the man he stabbed lived in the 900 block, and that he regretted stabbing a man for three rolls of pennies; his wife confirmed he came home about 10:30 without the red baseball cap with an Indian on it that he had worn out. LaBere's ransacked house held the red cap, with blood on it, on the kitchen floor. A St. Joseph Superior Court jury convicted Pittman of robbery, a Class A felony, burglary, a Class B felony, and murder; on March 30, 1987, he was sentenced to forty years for felony murder and ten years for burglary, concurrent, the robbery merged into the murder.
The appeal made the case the county's precedent on causation, and it is the reason the case is still read. Pittman argued that a one-inch wound that touched no vital organ could not, two weeks later, be the legal cause of a death by embolism. The Indiana Supreme Court disagreed, on the rule of Sims v. State: it is no defense that the victim would not have died but for his weakened condition; the question is whether the wounds caused or contributed to the death or set in motion a chain of events reasonably expected to end in it. The pathologist's testimony closed the chain in a sentence the opinion quotes: "if it were not for the stab wound of the abdomen there would be no cause of death because in my opinion Robert LaBere would be alive today." The court also sustained the causation instruction, refused the claim that Pittman was entitled to a publicly funded hypnotist to rebuild a memory he said drink had taken (his own psychiatrist found the memory loss self-serving), found no mistrial in a witness's parting words near the jury box, and rejected the ineffective-assistance claims. On September 14, 1988, the judgment was affirmed in full: Pittman v. State, 528 N.E.2d 67 (Ind. 1988). The sentence the opinion carries — forty years from March 1987 — is the last word on the case in the record reached for this build; any later post-conviction course stands in the closing article as a named item, with the county's public docket as its settler.
Sources: Pittman v. State, 528 N.E.2d 67 (Ind. 1988) (facts, verdict, sentence of March 30, 1987, the causation holding and the Sims rule, and affirmance of September 14, 1988, all from the opinion, read first-hand for this build).