Best Crime Stories

Jessie Whitehouse was shot in her home last fall, and IMPD hasn’t yet publicly identified a suspect.

“We are all defined by our fathers,” says Bishop T. Garrett Benjamin of Mmoja Ajabu. “Everything we do in life is either in honor of, or in reaction to them.”

After one son died in a house fire, Kristine Bunch of Greensburg did 16 years for murder and arson while separated from her other child. Eventually she won a grueling fight for freedom and a chance to be a mother again. But some things, she discovered, were lost forever.

“I feel like we are doing this by ourselves and fighting a losing battle,” says Rev. Charles Harrison.

Men are the fulcrum. The epic takeaway—my thesis statement, if you will—is to use better judgment in choosing men.

Co-author Bettie Cadou was a longtime reporter for The Indianapolis News and taught journalism at Butler University and IUPUI. After her death in 2002, she was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Brian D. Smith is a former IM senior editor.

What turned a simple robbery into a triple homicide remains an open question. If Raymond Adams indeed killed all three victims, why would the small-potatoes con man engage in such senseless savagery?

Something just wasn’t right, and Connie Ballard knew it. Three weeks earlier, one of her best patrons, a kind, elderly man named Milt Lindgren, had come into her automotive-repair shop to tell her that he was planning a roadtrip, and that he wanted the oil changed in his van before he left. But he never returned to have the work done.

Deborah Provisor doesn’t fit the stereotype of a child molester.

Editor’s Note: The following originally appeared in the October 2005 “Small Towns” issue and is included among IM’s Best-Ever Crime Stories.