1832
La Porte was settled in 1832; the land was purchased and a saw mill built in the first year.
about 0:07:55The story
La Porte, Indiana, is a town of about 21,900 people in La Porte County, on the northern border of the state, roughly an hour and twenty minutes from Chicago and forty-five minutes from Gary. It calls itself the hub of awesome.
He suffered a severe brain injury at birth, apparently caused by forceps used to pull him out, and the damage to his frontal lobe was significant enough that doctors warned he might not be right. At fourteen, in 1967, he was placed in the adult ward of Batey's Memorial Hospital, an institution later renamed Westville Correctional Center. He spent a year there and was sodomised and abused by both adult patients and staff throughout that time. By 1971 he was living in Union Mills, Indiana.
On June 3rd, 1971, Dwayne Bush, a thirteen-year-old boy from Union Mills, was reported missing from his home. He had problems with his parents and with the juvenile court, and police assumed he had run away. Three months later a hunter found his scattered skeleton in woods five miles outside town. He had been kidnapped, sodomised and strangled, and he was identified from dental records. The killing was not solved at the time.
He served less than three years and was out before 1974.
On January 10th, 1983, a fifteen-year-old boy left a store in La Porte at about five in the afternoon after playing arcade games and took his usual route home through a cornfield. He noticed a man following him, who ran past him to the end of the field. He tied a wire around the boy's neck, performed oral sex on him, and pulled the wire tight until the boy passed out. He said he would knock him unconscious first, then hit him on the back of the head with the gun.
He arranged to meet fifteen-year-old Darren Reed later that evening. At about ten o'clock he hid by some railroad tracks, called out to Darren as he walked past and gave him a beer. This time he strangled him with his bare hands, carried the body across a field and a fence, and left it in the weeds.
Two days later, on June 18th, two friends went camping at Kingsbury Fish and Wildlife Park, just south of La Porte. Jeff Lopez was fifteen and Eric Fuller was fourteen. He shared it, told them he grew marijuana and let them ride his dirt bike. He later turned up at their campsite with more joints and stayed about ninety minutes, leaving at dark. He then watched the campsite from outside, in his own words lurking around waiting, until the campers at the next site had gone quiet.
He entered the tent, woke Lopez at knife point and took him down the tracks, where he tied him with wire, assaulted him and strangled him with the wire. He kissed the body and left it in the weeds. At about three in the morning he went back and woke Fuller, telling him Lopez had been hurt riding the motorcycle and needed help. He led Fuller down the tracks, made him lie down, took away his axe, tied his hands with wire and assaulted him, then hit him on the head with the axe four times. Fuller lost consciousness after the first blow. On the Monday morning workers found him crawling out of the brush, covered in blood and disoriented. He remembered only waking in hospital with four wounds on his head. The blows damaged his peripheral vision and left him with seizures, dizziness, headaches, nausea, nightmares and difficulty walking.
The axe, which belonged to Fuller's father, was found at the campsite.
His lead lawyer, George Hoffer, had only two years' experience and had never handled a capital case; he was assisted by an experienced lawyer named Humphrey. His lawyer called him a tormented person and asked why he should live.
The court rejected the argument that the molestation was complete before the killings and so could not be an aggravating circumstance.
The special judge, Bruce Emry of Miami County, wrote that the state had created the monster it now sought to destroy.