The pregnant woman was found slumped behind the toilet.

Mary Holland had been shot through the right temple at close range. Police didn’t find any other signs of a struggle. There were a couple of bruises and cuts on her body, but they said those were likely caused when she fell to the floor. The 33-year-old, who was due to give birth to her child that summer, was so wedged behind the toilet in the back of Bellemeade Liquor Store that police had a hard time pulling her body free.

Her husband, A.C. “Doc” Holland, found her there just after 11 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1954. It was so dark in the restroom that he didn’t see her at first. Then he noticed the blood.

They owned the store with Mary’s father and took turns running the place. Mary had been at the helm since 5:30, and Doc had just finished his shift as an assistant yardmaster at L&N when he stopped by to help Mary close for the night.

But he knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped inside. Mary’s purse lay open on the floor, the billfold missing. An open bottle of Calvert’s whiskey stood on the counter near the open register. And when he called his wife’s name, she didn’t answer.

Doc suspected the thief got away with about $250. He told police they had a policy at the store that if they ever faced a robbery, they would fork over the money without any fuss. So he knew his wife hadn’t put up a fight. But someone killed her anyway.

“It was a cold-blooded crime,” Detective Dan Hudson told the Evansville Press the next day.

Authorities didn’t know then that Mary’s death would mark the beginning of the bloodiest, most notorious crime spree in this area’s history. Over the next five horrifying months, five more people would turn up dead – all shot to death with a .38 revolver. Victims ranged from a World War II veteran to a housewife to a farmer slaughtered alongside half his family. Some killings happened in the middle of the night. Others in the middle of the day.

Terrified residents locked their homes and stocked up on guns. One salesman in Henderson County said every time he knocked on a door, a panicked housewife would swing it open and point a rifle in his face.

Hysteria gripped the Tri-State until late March 1955, when a group of young guys tooling around Vanderburgh County backroads in an old Ford noticed a dark-haired man stalking up a hill near their house. Suspicious of everyone in those days, they jotted down the man’s license plate. Days later, a similar car was spotted at the scene of a triple murder in Henderson County.

The boys called it in. It came back registered to Leslie Irvin: a handsome 31-year-old neighbors described as well-liked and polite.

Irvin confessed to the killings, and it seemed like a straightforward case at first. But by the time it was over, it would upend the Supreme Court and change murder trials forever.

“I can remember my mother telling me not to go outside,” said local author Peggy Newton. “Because Leslie Irvin may be out there.”

The veteran

Three weeks after Mary Holland’s murder, Wesley Kerr called his wife on the phone.

It just was just before midnight on Dec. 22. Kerr was in the middle of a late shift at the Standard Oil Station at U.S. 41 and East Franklin but took a quick break so he and Peggy could finalize their plans for the holiday. The itinerary was to spend Christmas Eve with the kids at their house before driving to Dayton, Tennessee, to exchange gifts with Kerr’s family. Christmas dinner would consist of a turkey his bosses gave him as a reward for superior customer service.

“But sometime between 1:30 a.m. and 1:45 a.m. yesterday,” reporter Paul Townsend wrote in the Dec. 24 edition of the Courier, “a gun-wielding bandit wiped out all of those plans when he fired a bullet into the back of Kerr’s head for a few dollars in the cash register.”

Like Holland, police found Kerr’s body in the bathroom. He’d been killed execution style, leaving behind Peggy and three young children, including a three-month-old daughter.

The irony was downright brutal. The man had survived two wars, and yet there he was, meeting his end in a dirty washroom on the South Side.

Kerr barely made it out of World War II. He served as a paratrooper in the Battle of the Bulge, and his feet froze so badly they almost had to be amputated.

After going home to heal, he reenlisted in 1949 and married Peggy soon after. The first two children arrived before he was shipped off to the Pacific.

“The Army wanted him to join a demolition unit in Korea, but Wesley said he couldn’t because he had a family,” Peggy told the Courier the day after the murder.

After returning home for good in 1953, the family moved to Evansville, and he bounced between jobs. He eventually landed his position at Standard Oil in the fall of ’54 – a couple of months before his death.

His funeral was on Christmas Day.

The housewife

Wilhelmina Sailer’s 7-year-old son came home from school on March 21, 1955, and found his mother in the living room. She was lying face-down on the floor, a single gunshot wound shining from her head.

Her husband, John Sailer, got home about five minutes later and cased the house. He discovered his wife’s purse lying open and empty on their bed. She normally only carried small bills, he told police, so the assailant didn’t get away with much.

Investigators discounted any connection with the killings of Mary Holland, Wesley Kerr and the 47-year-old farmer’s wife who lived in a five-room home seven miles north of Mount Vernon, Indiana.

“I can’t see any similarity in the Kerr and Holland murders in Evansville and this death,” Indiana State Police Sgt. Russell Cox told the Press. “Except that a .38 caliber pistol was used, and the victim was shot in the head.”

The last time John saw his wife was that afternoon. He had come home to eat lunch, and when he left at 1 p.m., she was doing the dishes.

About an hour later, a family member who lived a quarter-mile up the road saw a man wheel up the driveway and knock on the door.

The boys

“At the time this was going on, Evansville sold out of locks for their doors,” Gary Peerman said last week. “And anytime any people got together, that’s what was talked about.”

It was certainly what Gary and his brothers and the neighborhood boys who gathered at their house on Vienna Road were talking about one cool evening in late March of 1955. Sailer had just been killed, and police still didn’t have any leads on the Kerr and Holland murders.

The boys were milling around. Peerman’s parents and his little sister were home, too, but Peerman just couldn’t sit still. When his friend Bill pulled up in his 1940 Ford sedan, he got an idea.

“I said, 'Well, why don’t we just go out and catch that S.O.B.?'”

So they piled into Bill’s car and headed down the driveway.

“And (Bill) started to turn left to go to the highway, which was 500 yards from the house. And I was sitting in the passenger seat in front, and I looked to the right and I said, ‘Wait a minute Bill! There he is down there!’”

He pointed to a car parked alongside a gravel road not more than 50 yards from the driveway. Its driver was stomping through the woods, headed up a hill that led to the backside of the Peerman home.

That was a little suspicious, maybe, but Gary was just joking around about catching a murderer. He didn’t know this random guy from Adam.

But at the time, he seemed pretty confident.

“I said, ‘Bud, what the hell are you doing? We’re investigators!'” Peerman said, laughing now. “And he reached down like he was zipping his pants up. Like he got out to relieve himself. He went down there and got in his car. I told Bill ‘OK let’s go. I’ve got his information.’”

Peerman, now 81 and who still works 12-hour shifts at SRG Global, still remembers the license plate number -- EL351. And the small dent in the left front fender.

“We took off and didn’t think no more about it. Couple days later it came out that the family in Kentucky had been shot,” he said. “And the newspaper said the only thing neighbors (saw) was a black car with a dent in the left front fender.”

READ PART TWO

This is the first in a series of articles detailing the life and crimes of Leslie “Mad Dog” Irvin. All information was collected either through interviews or Evansville Press and Evansville Courier archives.

Contact columnist Jon Webb at jon.webb@courierpress.com