But it was thanks to Joe Balla that one of the most notorious figures in local criminal history was taken off the streets. Janitors from neighboring buildings had seen the man who threw the bags into the dumpster, and one of them led police to the apartment of Larry Eyler. Eyler, then 31, was a housepainter who worked intermittently, a weight lifter who was fond of Marine Corps T-shirts (though he had never served in the military), a man of normal appearance who did not seem to have much of a plan for the future. In certain circles he was already well-known, a suspect in the murders of 23 young men whose bodies had turned up in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. Many of the victims had links to gay communities in Indiana and Illinois.
In relatively short order, police discovered that the leg in the Hefty bag belonged to Danny Bridges, a 16-year-old prostitute from Uptown. Bridges was unusual in that he had been befriended by policemen, who had introduced him to television and newspaper reporters working on stories about the sexual abuse of children. As a result, his murder rose above the statistics; his photo, taken from a television screen, appeared in newspapers, his words were quoted, his story was told, and for at least a short time the city paid
attention.
Almost two years after the Hefty bags were opened, Mr. Balla and his colleagues took the witness stand in the Criminal Courts Building and told their stories. Larry Eyler was convicted of murder and aggravated kidnapping, and on October 3, 1986, Judge Joseph Urso pronounced sentence. Citing the "overwhelming" evidence he said, "If there ever was a person [for whom] the death penalty is appropriate, it's you. You are an evil person. You truly deserve to die for your acts."
Eyler went off to death row, and it seemed as though gay men throughout the midwest could rest a slight bit easier.
But the killings continued. In May 1985, eight months after Eyler's arrest, the body of 17-year-old Eric Allen Roettger turned up off a rural road in Preble County, Ohio. Not many dead bodies turn up in Preble County, which has a population of about 45,000, so when a second body turned up there the following year, David Lindloff, the county prosecutor's sole investigator, began to wonder what was going on.
In 1987 a body turned up in Shelby County, Indiana, just across the border from Preble County. By April 1992, 11 bodies had turned up in rural counties in Ohio and Indiana, 4 of them in Preble County, and Lindloff and investigators from Indiana had a pretty good idea of what was going on. The dead men, whose ages ranged from 15 to 32, all had links to the gay community in Indianapolis. They had been found naked or partially clothed in desolate rural areas, in creek beds, ditches, a railroad bed. Many had ligature marks on their wrists, indicating they had been tied up. Most had been strangled (the bodies of two of the victims were too decomposed to determine a cause of death).
None of the victims had been killed during the winter; it seemed the killer got the urge only during warm weather. By April of this year, when investigators realized that an 11th body--found in a creek bed in Defiance County, Ohio, in 1989--fit the strangler's pattern, it was apparent that this murderer had been dumping bodies for a decade or more.
There were some significant differences between this string of murders and the ones that Larry Eyler had been suspected of. Eyler's alleged victims were stabbed, and as many as 16 of them may have been murdered within 12 months' time. The other victims were strangled, and their killer seemed less driven, sometimes waiting more than a year between one murder and the next.
Still, the similarities were also striking. Both killers concentrated on gay victims and both dumped bodies off Interstate 70 and U.S. 40, two highways that run roughly parallel from Terre Haute to Indianapolis and east to Ohio. Several of the strangler's victims were found not far from Richmond, Indiana, where Larry Eyler's mother had lived.
These facts gave rise to the theory that the murders were all connected; perhaps the stabber and the strangler were part of a team that did not retire after Larry Eyler went off to death row.
The Return of Larry Eyler