Hillside deaths perplex police, frighten neighbors

Building A Safer City

Building A Safer City is an occasional series highlighting problems that lead to crime and ways to improve life Indianapolis. Today's installment is the first in a two-part look at the link between crime and urban blight in the Hillside neighborhood.

The stench seeped through the walls of Progressive Plating Co. and lingered. On June 2, it became so powerful that the owner, thinking someone might have died out back, walked around the building to investigate.

The rotten smell was strongest in an empty field a few yards away. There, amid brush, brambles and broken branches, he lifted a piece of wood and discovered a decomposed human leg.

The business owner couldn't bear to look further. He turned away, gagging, before calling the police.

The body of Loy E. Ofsthun, a 56-year-old drug addict who had worked as a prostitute, was the first to be found in the impoverished Hillside neighborhood.

Three days later, the skull of another woman was discovered on a set of long-abandoned railroad tracks about 160 steps from the spot where Ofsthun's body had been found. It belonged to another former prostitute, 45-year-old Selese D. Goss. She, too, had drug addiction problems.

Four months later, little had been reported about either death.

At halftime of the Colts game on Oct. 9, Edna Wilson, 49, who had a history of drug problems, got up from watching television and told her longtime boyfriend, Donald Collins, 76, that she was going to Walgreens to buy some beer.

She didn't come back.

Collins said he filed a missing persons report as soon as authorities would let him — records have it on Oct. 13. "If she did stay out," he later told The Indianapolis Star, "she'd call and let me know where she was, but never like this last time."

A week later, Wilson's badly decomposed body was discovered miles away, lying in some brush no more than 150 feet from the place where Ofsthun's body had been found. This time, foul play was obvious: homicide detectives say Wilson's neck had been broken.

Hillside residents say the discoveries have shaken their Near-Northside neighborhood to its core. Some fear the unspeakable: that the three deaths might have been the work of a serial killer.

As the police investigations drag on without arrests or answers, some residents wonder whether Hillside, which is checkered with overgrown vacant lots and abandoned homes, has become a perfect dumping ground for bodies.

They wonder whether urban blight is being used by someone like Darren Deon Vann, who Gary police say preyed on seven women and hid some of their bodies in boarded-up homes.

Police say a definitive connection between the deaths remains unproved, but they agree with residents on one point: Too many similarities in the three deaths exist to ignore the possibility that a serial killer might be to blame.

Said Sgt. Mark Prater, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department detective assigned to Ofsthun's case: "It is something that has to be looked at and investigated."

Many questions, few answers

More than three months have passed since Wilson's body was found in Hillside. It's been eight months since Ofsthun's body was found.

And all three cases remain open. In two of the cases, police don't know how the women died. Police have yet to identify suspects in any of the cases, and there's no proof of a link among any of the women, Prater said. Police aren't even sure how all three women, none of whom lived in Hillside, ended up there.

Ofsthun, for example, was last seen at a mental health center on Meridian Street, Prater said, nearly 21/ 2 miles from where her body was found behind Progressive Plating Co. on Columbia Avenue. She had just left jail and was trying to find permanent housing.

"She was somewhat of a loner, did her own thing, lived her own life," Prater said.

But Prater said the cases share enough similarities to arouse suspicions of a possible link — the proximity of the bodies, for example. "That's strong in itself, I think," Prater said.

All the women were black and middle-aged. Two of them had worked as prostitutes. And all three bodies had cocaine in them, according to toxicology reports.

In all three cases, it's also difficult to know whether someone tried to speed up the rate of decomposition. Prater said the heat in early June — when Ofsthun's body was found — might have contributed to the decay, along with rain and small animals, such as raccoons and rats.

But trying to disguise a murder is not unheard of. Last August, homicide detectives investigating the death of a 15-year-old Ben Davis freshman named Dominique Allen said her body was found burning in a backyard. A suspect was arrested in connection with her killing about three months later.

Whatever the cause of the decay, the state of the bodies means investigators may have to rely on other evidence. "You're going to have to have a witness statement, or somebody that maybe the suspect confessed to," Prater said.

The fact that all three women had drug histories also could yield clues.

"I believe you have to keep your mind open to possible drug use, and until we can pinpoint who's involved in this and what method they are (using) of luring these ladies, you can't really say for sure," Prater said.

Prater, who was an Indianapolis patrolman near the area in the early- to mid-1980s, said drug dealing was common in Hillside at the time. Those familiar with the neighborhood told The Star it still is.

"When you have drug houses, you have theft," Prater said. "You have assaults, you have people trying to rob people, people trying to obtain money from other people to go buy the drugs."

Prater said the age range of the women, who were in their 40s and 50s, also could be significant.

"I don't think he's gonna be a young person," Prater said. If there is only one perpetrator, he said, it's likely someone older: "I'm talking 35-50, somewhere in there."

And Prater is fairly certain of one characteristic: "The person knows the area."

Loved ones dealing with loss

Cathy Rimmer had one thought when television news reported in June that a decomposed body had been found on Columbia Avenue in the Hillside neighborhood.

"I said, 'I hope it ain't Loy.' "

Rimmer, who usually heard from her older sister every other day, had lost track of Ofsthun in May. "I started worrying about her," said Rimmer, 54. "Hadn't anybody seen her." She thought her troubled sister might be in jail, or worse.

Later that evening, Rimmer was in the middle of cooking dinner for her grandchildren when the phone rang.

"I got a call from the coroner," Rimmer said, "and it was her."

That was typical of the gut punches that clobbered the loved ones of Ofsthun, Goss and Wilson last summer and fall. Today, they still suffer.

**

Curtia Taylor, 39, spoke to The Star by telephone about her sister, Selese Goss, pausing every now and then to care for her 27-month-old niece.

"You cannot stand in the chair!" Taylor pleaded. "Sit down and eat, girl. Sit down."

Taylor's dead sister was the girl's mother. Taylor acknowledged her sister's struggles with drugs and prostitution but said she was "a loving mother when she wasn't on drugs." Taylor said she is trying to get custody of the girl in the wake of Goss' death.

During the conversation, she turned to her niece: "Auntie gonna get you!" she said.

You could hear the toddler giggling in the background.

**

Collins said he doesn't get out much anymore. Without Wilson, he said, he can barely summon the energy to move and feels crippled by panic attacks.

In an interview at his 38th Street apartment in November, Collins said in a gentle voice that he was with Wilson for much of the past 26 years.

They met at a parade in Anderson, when Collins was in his 50s, an avid motorcyclist eager to travel. Wilson, then in her early 20s, had moved to Indiana from Alabama.

When The Star asked Collins about her, he handed over a picture of a pretty young woman whom he described as adventurous and quick to make friends. When Wilson met Collins, she stopped working, and the pair traveled around the country for years.

"That was a whole part of my life," Collins said.

During a phone interview with The Star in January, Collins struggled to find words to describe his loss.

"I wish I could explain it to you better," he said. "Just losing my damn mind."

Frustrated by a lack of answers

Collins, Rimmer and Taylor express different degrees of frustration with the police investigation into their loved ones' deaths. Collins said the investigation of Wilson's disappearance seemed to slow to a crawl, then stop altogether.

"It's another black woman. Crackhead. They probably saying, 'I don't care,' " Collins said. "They don't care what happened down in that neighborhood because if they did, they'd put a stop to it in some kind of way."

So he went out to the Hillside neighborhood to ask some questions.

He wasn't shocked by what he found: the same destitute, drug-riddled area where he said he briefly lived with Wilson before moving farther north.

"No matter what you want, you can go down in that area and get it, from A to Z. And that's the way it still is, you know?" he said. "It's different people doing a different game in a different way."

Collins said he thought Wilson's battle with crack cocaine had ended. A few years ago, she returned from a two-year drug rehabilitation program in Florida.

But some of the things he discovered in Hillside changed his view. "Street people" there claimed to have seen Wilson at a drug house the night before she disappeared.

"If I could find out who done it tomorrow, I'd take him shortly afterward, you know," Collins said. "And wouldn't care what happened or not."

**

Goss, too, had stopped using cocaine, Taylor said. But in the months before her death, she was using again.

Goss did not live in Hillside, but Taylor said she was familiar with the area.

"When she was using drugs, it wasn't too far from where she was getting high," Taylor said. "That was pretty much the area where she would frequent."

Taylor said she received text messages alleging that her sister was killed by "a dope man" who sought payment from her for drugs. Taylor forwarded them to police.

Although Taylor said she kept in constant contact with the detective working her sister's case, she felt dissatisfied with the lack of results.

"I don't actually feel like they're doing anything," Taylor said. "He wasn't looking into any of the leads that I was giving him."

**

Two of Ofsthun's family members, meanwhile, said they have had little contact with police. Rimmer said it bothers her that the coroner hasn't ruled her sister's death a homicide — as if, she said, Ofsthun had just lain down and died on her own.

"My sister wasn't the type of person that would lay outside in no grass," Rimmer said. "Something's still not right. She just didn't keel over."

**

When bodies are as badly decomposed as the ones found in Hillside, Marion County Chief Deputy Coroner Alfie Ballew said, finding a cause of death is challenging. Unless the bones were broken, there are often no traces of a crime.

"We all sort of suspect that maybe there was something that occurred," she said, "it's just, (we're) scientifically unable to determine what that was."

**

Maj. Chris Bailey, IMPD's assistant criminal investigations commander, said he understands frustrations from those closest to the cases, but he believes IMPD has done all it can.

Bailey said police flooded the area after each of the deaths, going as far as conducting vice operations to track down prostitutes and interview them for potential leads.

"We took steps," Bailey said, including taking DNA from people of interest and reaching out to the public for help. But evidence-gathering hasn't been easy.

"It's not always as cut and dry as what you see on TV," Bailey said. "We make our moves based on evidence." Without the proper information, he said, it's hard to move forward.

"I'm not downplaying their deaths," he said. "We want to find out. We want to give them answers. And we want to make sure the community is safe."

Scared to go out of the house

As the investigation enters its eighth month with no news, some Hillside residents told The Star they live in fear.

Andre Phinisee, 54, lives in a duplex with his wife in the 1900 block of Columbia Avenue, about a block south of where the bodies were found.

To say his wife is rattled is an understatement, Phinisee said. She keeps weapons around the house — hammers, pepper spray — just in case an intruder approaches. When Phinisee sat down with The Star in November, his wife refused to come downstairs.

"My wife, she's scared now to even go out of the house, you know, without my company," Phinisee said. "That's a kind of horrifying thing."

Phinisee said he has heard the rumors — that drugs were involved, or that the perpetrator is someone preying on streetwalkers. He doesn't know whether any of them are true.

"Whoever it is is silent, keeping to themselves," he said.

He said he wishes he could leave Hillside.

"At this point, I don't have very much choice, but I stay in the neighborhood because of financial reasons," Phinisee said.

**

On Arsenal Avenue, about a 15-minute walk northeast from Phinisee's residence, Anna Carter, president of the Hillside Neighborhood Association, said she laments the Columbia Avenue deaths. At 65, Carter is nine years older than Ofsthun, the oldest victim.

"We're upset about it," she said, as she walks along a crumbling sidewalk. "Number one, they haven't found who is doing this. Number two, you know, it's so sad that it's in our neighborhood."

She and others see the grisly discoveries as a macabre capstone on decades of decay and neglect. To many, the story of Hillside is not just a story of a possible serial killer. It's a story about blight itself.

Carter said she is concerned about the number of vacant or abandoned properties in the area. As she walks, she passes at least four vacant lots. Another house is boarded up. A fire damaged it more than two years ago, Carter said.

Prater, the IMPD detective, said parallels to the Vann serial killing case in Gary are hard to make. Vann told police he stashed his victims inside abandoned houses.

But Ofsthun, Goss and Wilson's remains were found on the ground, suggesting a less methodical approach. "They're probably not thinking long-term," he said. "They're thinking short-term ... just trying to forget what they did."

The tall grass and brush in Hillside can still present temporary opportunities. As Prater says, "it's a good way to hide a body," even if that body eventually will be found.

That worries 70-year-old Jo Anna LeNoir. From the broken sidewalk at her front gate, one can almost see the sites where each body was found.

But trees and brush obscure the view.

She's old enough to remember a time before all that brush grew up. The neighborhood LeNoir once knew — one of friendly families and factory workers — slowly deteriorated, becoming more and more decrepit, eventually vanishing altogether.

The brush and rubble that replaced it have been troubling her for a long time. Now she knows why.

"I thought," she said, "it was a perfect dumping ground."

Star researcher Cathy Knapp contributed to this story.

Call Star reporter Jill Disis at (317) 444-6137. Follow her on Twitter: @jdisis.