Slaughter on North Lasalle (20 page)

On October 29, 1994, Horton called Ted Gierse long-distance. Horton told him that his health was failing because of the accusations against him, but that he had nothing to do with the killings. He then told Ted that he was a small man, and that it would have taken someone a whole lot bigger than him to control and kill these three guys. He also claimed that he had taken a lie detector test about the murders and passed it (though he actually never took one). Finally, Horton told Gierse’s
brother that he believed Ted Uland was the one who had committed the murders, and that he had phoned Uland the previous year but found out from his widow that he had passed away, so he decided to drop it.

The year 1994 passed without any change in the status of the North LaSalle Street case. The prosecutor refused to do anything with just what evidence Carol Schultz had. Then, in March of 1995, Carol Schultz said she received some startling new information about the North LaSalle Street murders; information that could make the case famous worldwide and her book an instant bestseller: The Nixon White House might have been involved.

Schultz said that she received a telephone call from Floyd Chastain, who said he wanted to tell her about a secret meeting he’d attended a few nights after the North LaSalle Street murders. According to Schultz, Chastain told her that he and Big Mike had driven a semitrailer to Louisville to drop off a load, then drove over to Bowling Green, Kentucky, to pick up another load, which they then brought back to Indianapolis. Chastain, thinking their job was through, got ready to leave, but Big Mike told him no, to hang around, they had to go to a meeting.

Big Mike, Chastain claimed, then got on the telephone, and a little later, around 1:00
A.M.
, a limousine pulled up. They got into it and were driven to Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar, where they attended a meeting
with White House aide Chuck Colson and Jimmy Hoffa (who, Chastain said, must have been on a furlough from prison). Norman Flick, the owner of the bar, also attended the meeting. Chastain said the bar had a number of other people, regular customers, in it that night, though they sat separately from the rest. He didn’t really take part in the meeting, he said, but simply sat back and witnessed it. The meeting, Chastain claimed, concerned getting Hoffa a pardon from the president then, Richard Nixon. Chastain told Schultz that at the meeting Colson had Hoffa sign some papers. Then, Chastain’s story went, Colson asked if the three men on North LaSalle Street were dead. When someone answered yes, Colson nodded and then said that he needed the microfilm the murderers had apparently been sent to find. According to Chastain, somebody went out and transferred the microfilm to Colson’s car. The implication Chastain gave was that the murders on North LaSalle Street had been committed in order to get back some microfilm that had been at the house, microfilm the Nixon White House wanted for some reason, and that Jimmy Hoffa had been the one who’d arranged the murders and retrieval of the microfilm in exchange for a presidential pardon.

Naturally, this story raises a number of questions and stretches credibility considerably. Revelations of a secret meeting between Chuck Colson and Jimmy Hoffa in a bar owned by an organized crime figure would have been as devastating to the White House as Watergate,
particularly since the White House eventually granted Jimmy Hoffa executive clemency. In addition, Chastain’s story was full of potential witnesses to this supposedly top secret meeting, from the bar populated by regulars to the waitress who he said came by with food and drinks, to his own inexplicable presence at a meeting that had nothing to do with him. This story had all the attributes of a bad spy movie, with the secret White House meeting with an imprisoned Teamsters president at a bar reputed to be owned by an organized crime figure. It was like a conspiracy theory holiday.

In addition to all of this, if a meeting such as this had occurred, it certainly wouldn’t have been at Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar, a lowbrow tavern in a working-class neighborhood, where the limousine Chastain said he and Big Mike drove up in would certainly have attracted attention, not to mention the presence of someone as easily recognizable as Jimmy Hoffa. Truck drivers routinely patronized Tommy’s Starlight Palladium Bar and would have known who Hoffa was. Someone would have bragged about seeing him there. There is simply no way it would have stayed a secret.

Yet for unclear reasons, Carol Schultz apparently accepted Chastain’s story as the truth, and from that moment on became totally convinced of a White House involvement in the North LaSalle Street murders.

Tying in another previously dismissed theory, Schultz also said that Chastain told her he had been the one who had stripped down the stolen black Corvette that had belonged to murder victim John Terhorst. Following this
revelation, Schultz then began suspecting that the White House might have also been involved in the Terhorst murder. In one of the notes she sent to Detective Jon Layton, Schultz said she wondered if Charles Colson had driven a black Corvette.

During 1995, Schultz kept in close contact with Detective Layton. She would send him tapes of her conversations with Horton, White House material she had obtained, and other pieces of information she felt supported her new belief that the North LaSalle Street murders had been committed by the Teamsters in order to win a pardon for Jimmy Hoffa from President Nixon. Along with one of the tapes of her conversations with Horton, Schultz sent a note to Detective Layton saying that she believed this tape had the answers she had been looking for: that Norman Flick, apparently acting as an intermediary for Jimmy Hoffa, had paid Carroll Horton to commit the North LaSalle Street murders. However, on the tape, Horton is actually trying to tell her that he suspected Ted Uland had been the North LaSalle Street murderer.

It’s Schultz, however, who dismissed that idea and insisted it was Hoffa, Nixon, the Teamsters, and Norman Flick who were involved. Basically, a review of the tape made by Carol Schultz showed it to be just a conversation with an older man who was trying to sound important and knowledgeable to a pretty young woman, and finally was willing to agree with anything that would make her happy.

Interestingly, Schultz, in her research, managed to
obtain copies of several White House documents relating to the Jimmy Hoffa case. In one dated May 26, 1970, a White House official reported that a man named Harry Singer had contacted him about getting a pardon or parole for Jimmy Hoffa, who had then been in prison for three and a half years. But the official said in the report that he told Singer all such matters were handled by the Justice Department, and that is where he should go with his request.

In another White House document, this one dated March 19, 1971, John W. Dean III, counsel to the president, sent a memorandum to Attorney General John Mitchell. In this memorandum Dean tells Mitchell that Frank Fitzsimmons of the Teamsters Union had called him and requested that he, and Hoffa’s wife and son, be allowed to meet with the president in order to talk about Hoffa’s parole hearing coming up on March 31. Dean then suggested that such a meeting could work to the advantage of the president and offered several scenarios for the meeting, the gist of Dean’s strategy being that President Nixon do as little as possible for Hoffa but leave him feeling that he owed a debt to the White House. The president, Dean said, should be sympathetic and give the vague impression that he felt Hoffa had been the subject of a Kennedy vendetta.

On January 14, 1972, in another document, a White House staffer sent Charles Colson a summary of the news media’s reaction to Jimmy Hoffa’s December 23, 1971, release from prison. Finally, Schultz also managed to get
copies of Charles Colson’s White House calendar for December 1971.

All of this made for fascinating reading, particularly for someone who lived during this time. However, nowhere in this material was there any mention of, or connection to, the North LaSalle Street killings. The only thing that tied them together at all was that they all happened in the early 1970s.

Still, as with the accusation that Horton had been the North LaSalle Street killer, Schultz seemingly accepted this new story about a White House connection without question. In fact, Schultz said she wondered if perhaps a connection to the White House was why the local prosecutor wouldn’t make an arrest. (Since she personally felt there was more than ample evidence for an arrest, clearly there had to be another reason.) She also said that she tried a number of times to interview Chuck Colson, but that he wouldn’t agree to meet with her. She even claimed to have received threats, warning her that she would be killed if she tried to interview Colson.

Schultz also said in her book that one afternoon, during the time she was attempting to get an interview with Colson, a dark-haired man in a plain car pulled into her driveway and then just sat there and watched her house as he talked on his cell phone. She said that he sat there for a long time. Although Schultz said that she sneaked out and wrote down his license plate number, she doesn’t explain why she didn’t call the police.

While the stories Chastain told Schultz kept getting
more involved and more complex, he soon began to feel uneasy about what he’d told her and the police. And for good reason.

“I told Chastain that he was likely going to be charged with murder in this case, and that it might be a death penalty case,” said Detective Charles Briley. “That’s when his story started changing and the letters where he said he’d been lying started coming.”

Chastain, on March 30, 1993, wrote a letter addressed to McAtee and Popcheff, in which he said that everything he’d told the detectives who had interviewed him was a lie. He said that part of the information he gave to the detectives he had gotten from newspaper articles that Carol Schultz had sent him, and part of it he’d just made up. He said that he lied because he wanted to get even with Horton (apparently over a failed invention that he and Horton had worked on that Chastain thought Horton was getting rich off of). Later, however, Chastain said that the letter he sent to McAtee and Popcheff saying he was lying was a lie, and he only wrote it because he thought that was what the detectives who interviewed him wanted him to do. He said that his original statement was the truth.

On December 25, 1995, Chastain wrote another letter, this one addressed to Christ and Briley, who had interviewed him in Florida. In this letter, he said that he was sorry, but that he had lied to everyone about the North LaSalle Street murders. He said that he made up the part about Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters because the detectives had shown him the picture of a man with a Teamsters
jacket on, and so he’d incorporated that detail into his story. He also said that the reason he’d lied was because he hoped that the authorities would bring him to Indianapolis, so he could visit with his family. But more importantly, he said, he wanted to finally meet Carol Schultz because they were in love with each other. (The two of them had only had contact over the telephone and through the mail.)

In her response to Floyd Chastain’s profession of love, Carol Schultz, according to an article in the May 9, 1996, issue of the
Indianapolis Star
, told Chastain on the telephone that she loved him, too. However, in an article in the August 11, 1996, issue of the
Indianapolis Star
, she insisted that she’d meant she loved him as a Christian. Apparently, however, that wasn’t how Chastain had taken it. Chastain told the police he wanted to marry Schultz, and that he had even sent her a ring from prison.

Carol Schultz, while facing opposition from a Prosecutor’s Office that wouldn’t issue the arrest warrant she wanted, eventually found that some of her former coworkers in the newspaper business were also beginning to question the credibility of her investigation. In the April 11, 1996, issue of the
Indianapolis Star
, a reporter tells of an interview with a man named Carl E. Kierner, who said he knew Carroll Horton, Mary Cavanaugh, and Floyd Chastain. Although at the time of the interview in 1996 Kierner owned a taxicab company, in the 1970s he had worked in Horton’s garage. He told the reporter that he couldn’t
believe it when he heard the news of Horton being accused of the North LaSalle Street murders. Kierner said he was stunned because
he
was the one who had introduced both Chastain and Cavanaugh to Horton, and that the introductions had taken place long after 1971. Kierner told the reporter that in the mid-1970s Floyd Chastain had come into Horton’s business looking for parts for a car he was working on. He said that he then introduced Chastain to Carroll Horton, who eventually hired Chastain as a mechanic. Reportedly, Chastain and Horton became very close and worked together attempting to design an engine that could run on alcohol and acetylene. The idea didn’t work, and soon afterward Chastain ended up in prison. According to Kierner, though, for some reason Chastain had believed that the idea had actually worked, and that Horton had made a million dollars off of it. Kierner said that Chastain then began calling and threatening Horton, claiming that he had been cheated out of his share of the profits.

Kierner also said that in the 1970s,
he
had been dating Mary Cavanaugh, who he recalled had been a very attractive woman, although a heavy drinker. She apparently had a car that needed a new engine, and so he had it towed to Horton’s garage. In January 1974, he told the reporter, he introduced Cavanaugh to Horton. The two of them hit it off right away and developed a very close relationship. Kierner said that Horton helped Cavanaugh financially, and even babysat for her children.

Along with Carl Kierner’s list of discrepancies in the story Cavanaugh told, however, Carol Schultz herself
said that Chastain had first told her that it had been a woman named Diane (Carroll Horton’s ex-wife) who had been in the house on the night of the murders. His story changed later, though, and the woman became Mary Cavanaugh.

Another news story appeared two weeks later that cast even further doubt on the credibility of Carol Schultz’s investigation. In an April 28, 1996, article in the
Indianapolis Star
, a reporter tells about interviewing a friend of Carroll Horton’s named Joe Chapman, whose mother-in-law, Verna Fisher, had been murdered. Chapman told the reporter that Schultz contacted him and said that she knew who had killed Verna, and that she was interested in the reward they had offered. Schultz had left her job at the
Indianapolis News
several years earlier and perhaps needed the money.