The Hunt for a Serial Killer

Guest, former Deputy Prosecutor, Thomas Vanes gives his account of the search for an active serial rapist/murderer who is killing teenaged girls. In an amazing twist of fate, a conversation between two ladies in Florida sparks a lead that will put investigators on the trail. This is a two-part series; part one is The Hunt for a Serial Killer. Part two is the trial and sentencing of the killer. 

Mr. Vanes recently retired from government after 50 years serving the citizens of Lake County, Indiana, a suburb on the Southeast side of Chicago, Illinois. He directed the Career Criminal Unit at the Prosecutor's Office before moving over to direct the staff of court appointed defense attorneys in the county courts.

Along with an exceptional record as a Prosecutor, Mr. Vanes, in at least two cases, was largely responsible for proving the innocence of two accused murderers after identifying the responsible individuals.

James Mitchell will continue to present criminal justice representatives who will tell of actual events they have encountered during their service. Many of these guests will discuss actual cases that were documented in the book, A Badge Well Worn, by James Mitchell.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome again, Tom Vanes, former Deputy Prosecutor, Lake County, Indiana, former leader of the defense attorney, PAC uh court appointed attorneys out there in Lake County, and recent retiree Tom Vanes after 50 filled years at the prosecutor's office.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Yep, 50 plus.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

You don't you don't look at Delhi over 70. But uh all kidding aside, uh, we want to talk about a case that you were involved in as a prosecutor back in uh in 1987. Actually a pretty uh notable case. This case uh just want to preempt a little bit. Um we don't want any expose any children to any of the dialogue that we're gonna have here today. It's not really appropriate, age appropriate for uh for kids. And uh if you're a little squeamish and you things crime scenes bother you, you might want to duck out of here now, but because uh we're gonna talk about some some real life events that happened in this case. Um it might be a little sensitive. Having said that, um's going to go through sequencing his involvement, and then we're going to do a two-part series, with this being the first part, of course. And we're going to call this the hunt, hunt for the killer, the serial murderer. And uh Tom's going to start with an Indiana case that he became involved in, and we're going to expand from there. This case has got some very interesting twists and turns in it, and some uh some irony, some coincidence that uh is uh is very unusual, and uh we're gonna amplify on that as well. But having said all that, I'm gonna let turn it over to Tom, and Tom, you can explain your initial involvement, okay?

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Thanks, Jim. Uh a lot of luck involved in this one, too, as we'll talk about here. Uh it was a homicide in Griffith, Indiana. Griffith is in the far northwest corner of Indiana. Quiet little bedroom community, generally middle class, blue collar. A lot of its residents worked in the steel mills and refineries up in the uh along the uh south shore of Lake Michigan. Not much happened there, but something big did in October of uh 1987. Uh involved the murder of a 16-year-old high school student named Wendy Gallagher. That's Wendy with an I, W-I-N-D-Y. Wendy was a bright and personable and popular and pretty young high school student who lived with her mom and her sister in one of the apartment complexes there in Griffith. On, I think it was October 13th, uh, Tuesday, if I remember right. She came home to an empty apartment uh there where she lived with her sister and her mom. She was the first one home. Mom was still at work, sister was still at school, a younger sister named Chrissy. That was the last anyone saw of Wendy Gallagher alive, is when she arrived at that apartment. A few hours later, her sister, Chrissy, the younger sister, came home about 7 p.m. or so that night from school practice of some sort. Made herself some dinner. Uh apartment was pretty quiet. She went into the bedroom there in the apartment, and that's when her world stopped spinning. What she saw was her older sister Wendy sprawled across the bed crossways. Wendy had been gagged with the bed sheet. Her hands were tied behind her back with the torn bed sheet, uh, naked from the breast down to the ankles, and about two dozen, some small, some large slash wounds in a knife. She was dead, of course, um, lying there in a pool of blood. Some of the stab wounds were small, almost sadistic, torture-like wounds at the point of the knife, and then it was one huge abdominal slash. Wendy Gallagher effectively was disemboweled. Internal organs were coming through the slash in their abdomen. You can imagine the sisters' reaction to all that. Well, Griffith, this was a horrific, it'd be horrific in any town, but it was especially horrific in a smaller little community like Griffith. Um, I got involved within a few days of that crime, Jim. Um, there actually was no legal case yet, but like many of the police departments that you and I worked with back in the day, there was no real legal advisor for these departments. Did you have one in Highland?

SPEAKER_01 5:03

No.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Okay. Griffith was the same. It had no legal advisor. So if the detectives needed help, they turned to the prosecutor's office for advice, suggestion, warrants, answer questions, that sort of thing. Me and a few others were the ones who were generally responsible for serving as advisors to these investigating departments. I don't remember how I got involved in this one, whether I stuck my nose in it or whether I was assigned to it. I tended to like the hunt more than the kill, if you know what I mean. So quite often I would just reach out and say, I'm here if you need me. There was no forced entry when Wendy was killed. There was uh um, that's as you would know as a former detective yourself, if there's no forced entry, the first people you start to look at are the inner circle, friends, relatives, people in the nearby community who might have known the victim. Okay. So that's the approach that the Griffith took at first without any success. They did have a couple leads, though. A young man, kind of in his 20s, was seen in the vicinity at that time driving a blue or silver small Japanese car. Toyota, maybe Selica, maybe Nissan, maybe, something like that. And from that, they were able to get a composite sketch, too, one of the better sketches I've seen of this person who was seen in the vicinity of the apartment complex on the day Wendy was killed. Okay. So you had a composite sketch, you had something about a blue Toyota, but not really much else initially. The Lake County Crime Lab was called in. And back in the 80s, um, I can't praise them enough. They were CSI before there was CSI. They were good. And I can throw out some of the names here to recognize. I hope I don't forget anyone. Ron Ronnie Lack, Mike Riley, Kathy Kakovella, um, Butch Klasner, Jimmy Fedorchak, Bob Piscodi, uh Phil Luklinski. You talked about Yeah, you work with the with these guys. You know how top-notch they were. And when something like this happened, they went to the mass. They went all out to work that crime scene. They processed the bedroom where Wendy was was found, um, floor to ceiling, for fingerprints and palm prints. And they got some right near the bed where Wendy was found dead. There were two palm prints, okay? And the way they were oriented was fingers up. But they were real low on the wall, right by the bed, and right by a window. The only way someone could have made those prints would be almost as if they were on their knees peeking out that window at bedside. On the living on a table in the living room was a water glass that had not been there earlier that day, and they got fingerprints off that water glass. Okay. So now you've got something you can work with as a detective if, and that's a big if, if you get a suspect. Back at this time, there was no such thing called APHIS, APHIS's automated fingerprint identification system. It relies on computers to make at least a preliminary match between unknown fingerprints and known fingerprints. There were some APIs systems at some of the state level, but there were no, there was no nation-wide APHIS system in the late 80s. That was to come later. So if you have fingerprints, you just sit back and you wait for a suspect and you hope you can get someone, and then you make a match. So that's what they had initially. But within a few weeks came a pretty good-sized break in the case. Okay. The day before Wendy Gallagher was murdered in Griffith, a young woman in Chicago, I think she was actually from Skokie, Illinois, but she was walking down an alley in Chicago on the way to work, and a man pulled up in a blue Toyota, got out with a knife, put it to her throat, said, You scream and I'm going to kill you. Began tugging at her skirt while he's doing this, so we know where this was heading. Okay. Her name was Tammy Lair, and to Tammy's everlasting fortune, a pizza truck happened to come down the alley at that point in time, spooked the guy with the knife, he fled. The only thing he got out of it was Tammy's purse. He did take Tammy's purse. That happened one day before Gallagher was killed, and it happened on the north side of Chicago, which a long way from Griffith, what maybe 40 miles, maybe even more from Griffith. The connection was made, though, when they found Tammy's purse. Tammy's purse was found on the south side of Chicago, so kind of halfway between Griffith and where Tammy had been assaulted. And when she got her purse back, she opened it, and inside is the purse of Wendy Gallagher. Okay. It's a little clutch purse. Nothing had been taken from the Gallagher apartment other than perhaps this purse of Wendy Gallagher. This was the killing of Wendy was not robbery related. If anything, it was sexually related. But now you've got a connection between a, by virtue of these found purses, you've got a connection between a crime in the north side of Chicago and a crime down in Griffith, which is in the southeast portion of the Chicago metro area. So you're not looking at anyone locally responsible for that. You are now looking at someone who's on the move and committing crimes with some distance apart, and obviously sexual assaults are the motivation for these particular crimes. So you've got a connection now between those two crimes, and but you're still in the position of sitting back and waiting. The Griffith police are just waiting for some additional because break because at initially there was no suspect in the Tammy Lair case either. You've got a connection between those two crimes, but neither one of them has a good suspect at that point in time. Months go by.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Can I interrupt you for a second, Tom? Did uh Chicago notify uh the authorities in Indiana about finding that other girl, uh uh the Griffith girl's property? The purse inside the purse? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:10

Okay. In fact, it led to a false alarm at one point in time. Got a call one day. Uh the Griffith police did. The Chicago police was calling saying, we got a suspect. We think we know who committed the Tammy Lair assault. Okay. So we piled into a car and headed up to some precinct somewhere in Chicago. The Griffith cops were there, the crime led was there, I was tagging along. Um arrived at some one of the precinct station houses at some ungodly hour, midnight, one in one in the morning, something like that. They had a lineup they were conducting for Tammy of someone who had been associated with the Blue Toyota, okay? And from from what we could hear outside the lineup room, it was not going well, okay? There was a lot of loud voices, and they weren't, they were the Chicago officers trying to get a yes or no answer out of Tammy as to whether the suspect was the one who had assaulted her. Okay. She did identify someone, and uh, but immediately among coming out, she began to retract that identification. Okay. The crime lab guys got the fingerprints. They were a little dubious as to whether they would be a match to our crime. We went out and with the consent of the suspect in custody, we went out to his apartment at three in the morning somewhere in somewhere in Chicago, I don't know where. And fishing through his house, I came across some receipts. Uh he was a small businessman of some sort, and he had a table, a little desk full of receipts, and and going through them, he had receipts for the day Wendy was killed, showing that he was a long, long, long way from Griffith. So it became kind of a false alarm. Actually, as one of the better memories, I was we took those receipts, we followed up on it, and established real clearly that he could not have been the one who committed either one of these crimes. So sometimes you get as much satisfaction when you clear someone in doing something, uh, this kind of work, as you do when you convict someone. So long answer to your question there, but yeah, that's important.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

I I because I kind of remember that you telling me about that that little aspect of the story, and it actually you you could have spent a lot of time chasing uh a dead end on that on that particular part of it. But uh I'm glad you clarified that. Go ahead. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

No, no problem. Uh basically the Griffith police are sitting back waiting for a break, and then in sometime in early 88, they got one. And this is strange bit of luck, okay? Yeah. Um a woman who lived in Griffith moved to Central Florida, just north of Tampa, is a county called Pasco County. Pascoe County, directly north of Tampa. The Griffith woman moves there and is talking to a local woman, native of the Pasco area there. And the women are talking about is crime and is this area safe and that kind of thing. And the Pasco County woman starts to say, well, we did have an ugly homicide here recently in a little community called Land of Lakes there in Pasco County. And she begins to talk about the details to the Griffith woman who has now moved to the area. And the Pasco native begins to describe the killing of a young 14-year-old girl named Jennifer Kohlhauer. How Jennifer came home from school, came home to an empty house. When her rest of her family came home, they came, they didn't see Jennifer. Her little brother, Jennifer's little brother Jeremy, walked up the stairs to the upstairs bedroom. And just as Chrissy Gallagher had walked in and saw Wendy Gallagher mutilated, killed, and assaulted sexually in some fashion, little Jeremy Colhauer saw his older sister, Jennifer, in the same, exactly the same. Jennifer Kohlhauer had been brutally murdered at knife with a knife slashed in the abdomen. She had been sexually assaulted. She was stripped as had as Wendy Gallagher had been stripped. And the two women are noting, like the Griffith woman pipes up and says, My God, I know of a murder back where I came from, just like that. And so the two women decided, well, maybe we should tell something or tell someone about this. And I think it was the Florida native who both of these women may have had police fringe connections with police officers, but I think it was the Florida woman who reported back to someone in the Pasco County law enforcement communities about this Griffith homicide that sure seemed similar to the Lando Lakes killing of Jennifer Kohlhauer. The detectives working the case in Florida, Faye Wilbur and Gary Fairbanks, I think their names were, took it seriously enough. They picked up the phone and called John Mowrie. You probably knew John from the old days. Yeah. John was the chief detective working the Wendy Gallagher homicide. And I think it was Faye Wilbur, maybe, that called and said, Hey, let's talk. And as these two departments were talking, they kind of quickly came to realize that whoever did one did the other. And if we solve one, we solve both. The similarities were striking in this case. Griffith, by the way, did have that composite. I think I may have mentioned they had a nice.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

Yes, you did.

SPEAKER_00 18:32

Okay. In the Kohlhauer murder down in Florida, which was January of 88, is when Jennifer was killed. A young man had been seen in the neighborhood posing or claiming to be a real estate agent. He looked like the composite in the Griffith case. Now, in addition to that, there was the similarity in the knife wounds, the large slash to the abdomen, the person the young woman found with obviously some sort of sex being the victim of some sort of sexual assault in a bedroom naked. And I don't know what you would call that, Jim, serendipity, that a conversation involving two women a small wall story. Leads to a law enforcement break. Okay. You remember what things were like in those days. Law enforcement had trouble talking to adjoining jurisdictions, okay? You were in Highland. Uh you might know something about what was going on with in Hammond, crimes that were committed there, but not on a regular basis, you wouldn't. Right. So in the late 80s, for Griffith, Indiana, in Pascoe County, Florida to put their heads together on a homicide would have been unheard of, but for this conversation between the two women, which led to this break in the case. So now you've got two jurisdictions that are waiting for a break. Indiana has the fingerprints and the palm print from the bedroom where Wendy Gallagher was found. There was semen found in connection with the murder of 14-year-old Jennifer Kohlhauer. So they were waiting for a suspect to do the DNA analysis that was just beginning to kick in in the late 80s.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Can I interrupt you again, Tommy? Sure can. Wasn't there a vehicle seen at the at the Alanda Lakes murder?

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah, it wasn't a blue Toyota, it was a red Corvette.

SPEAKER_01 20:38

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

It was a red Corvette uh with Missouri license plate, okay, uh, on it. It was seen by in connection with that man, young man who claimed to be a real estate agent, okay? So the Florida investigators are on the lookout for anything to do with this Red Corvette. A Red Corvette had nothing to do with at that point with the Indiana case whatsoever. Okay. It was a blue Toyota that we were kind of looking at as the vehicle used for the perpetrator to get there and to escape. Okay. So yeah, uh, so you had a Red Corvette, you had seamen, you had potentially some people who might eyeball or identify the suspect because they had seen him. Not just in the neighborhood, the Kohlhowers lived at that point on the cul-de-sac, small little cul-de-sac. The Red Corvette, the real estate man, in quotations, was seen on that cul-de-sac. So it wasn't just a person in the vicinity, he was actually right there, I think, next door to the Colhauer residence. Okay. So now you got two sets of detectives sitting back waiting. For a break in the case. Not much happens for the next few months for those investigators. Something big happens, though, in Texas. A police officer named Paul Halsey. Paul was an officer for the Beaumont Police Department. Beaumont is in East Texas, maybe 20, 25 miles or so from the Louisiana border. Paul was the son of a police officer. In fact, he was the son of a former police chief there in East Texas. He actually had an application pending to become a DEA agent at the time. Anyway, he picks up this Red Corvette. Okay. And based on his instincts, based on what the Corvette is doing, he thinks he's got a drug dealer. He's in his sights. So he's tailing the Red Corvette. Now at this point, the Red Corvette has Florida license plate on it, not Missouri. Back in Landa Lakes, a Red Corvette with Missouri plates was seen next door to the Kohlhauer house. The Corvette that Halsey is tailing in Beaumont, Texas, has Florida plates on it. Okay? But anyway, Halsey loses the Red Corvette. Okay. He sticks to it, he's going to keep looking, and he finds the Red Corvette parked at a motel there in Beaumont. He goes to the motel, he goes to the room, he goes inside the room to confront the suspect or the person he's been tailing. However, it happens, that suspect gets the best of Paul Halsey. The suspect is armed. He had a, I think it was 357, I think. Anyway, he shoots and kills Paul Halsey inside that motel room. He got Paul in the side, I think it was one side or the other, between the plates of his bulletproof vest. Okay. One of those.

SPEAKER_01 24:12

Let me interrupt you just real quick again. And I'm sorry, I hate doing that because you got a good thing going. But no, didn't Hulsey get uh overpowered and uh they he his own gun was turned on him?

SPEAKER_00 24:26

No, I think it was I think it was the 357. I think um okay. He may have had the gun taken from I'll have to check, Mitch, on that. I'm not suggesting.

SPEAKER_01 24:38

I had heard that version someplace and some that they had a struggle. In fact, I think it almost tore the officer's finger off because he was trying to fight with a gun. That's the version I heard I recall. Of course, my memory doesn't serve me well anymore, but I uh I I recall that hearing that version of him got disarmed by his own gun, which by the way, 25% of all police officers who get killed are killed with their own weapons. So anyway, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 25:07

The uh what I did hear, though, in connection with this, is we probably can picture motel rooms, they typically have a dresser or a desk like setup with a mirror above it, okay. What I think they pieced together after the fact was that Lockhart, this Michael Lee Lockhart, who became the arrested person here, was able to eyeball in the mirror Halsey behind him and saw at some point when Halsey was distracted or doing something with other than focused on Lockhart, and that's when he jumped. Okay. And used the opportunity to overpower get the struggle, and that eventually led to Paul's death. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 25:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

Um, yeah. Now, there were police officers in the vicinity when Hosey was shot and killed inside this motel room. Okay. But the suspect gets in the vet, boom, he's gone. Okay. And there's a chase, and it leads to a crash where the Red Corvette is abandoned. The driver eventually gets into a taxi and is going to request to be driven from Beaumont to Houston. Okay, that's a long ass taxi ride, okay? The taxi company was a little suspicious, tipped the police, so they went chasing for any taxi on I-10, heading toward Houston. They found it, they stopped it. The suspect got out of the taxi and surrendered. That suspect was Michael Lee Lockhart. Okay? So now he's facing murder charges here for the killing of a police officer in Texas, and they're going to be seeking the death penalty. And when they do that in Texas, they're not bluffing, of course. You know, they're serious about that.

SPEAKER_01 26:59

How did they how did the the Texas police after the crash and he fled on foot, I guess? How did they know it was him? How do they know who to look for? Because it was a stolen car. Do you know how they connected him?

SPEAKER_00 27:14

I don't remember. I don't remember how. There was a foot chase involved, too. Okay. Okay. It's not a situation though where they they had him in sight at all times, okay? So, you know, I I think when Lockhart, you know, of course they're looking for a taxi driving from Beaumont to Houston. There ain't going to be too many. Okay. And when Lockhart got out of the taxi, he said something to the effect of, I'm the one you're looking for. Okay. Now, did they have more information than that? I don't know, but Lockhart goes into custody. Okay. Now, the thing that begins to tie all these things together is when they pop the trunk on that red Corvette, there is a Missouri license plate inside the trunk. You remember that the uh uh the red corvette seen in the colt on the Colhauer Colby set had Missouri tags on it. There are now Missouri tags associated with this Red Corvette. The license plate that was on the vet was a stolen plate out of Tampa, and it was stolen from the Tampa airport within a day or two of Wendy Gallagher's, excuse me, Jennifer Kohlhauer's death there in Florida. Okay. So now you've got a stolen plate that connects it back to Tampa area at the time of Kohlhauer's murder. And you've got the Missouri Tags, which connects it to the death scene in that Colhauer cul-de-sac. Okay. Now, Texas doesn't know anything about Indiana at this point in time. Texas doesn't know anything at this point in time about the murder of Jennifer Kohlhauer in Florida, okay. Paul Hosey was killed, I think, in March of 1988. That's when Lockhart was arrested for shooting Paul Hosey. A few months later, Aiden, the crime newsletter, some sort of nationwide crime newsletter for the law enforcement agency, and I don't know which one it was, or but anyway, it goes out, and it's the Texas people spreading the word on what they have, hoping it will generate additional information for them because they're trying to build a death penalty case against Michael Lee Lockhart, okay? There wasn't a lot of computer sharing of information back then either. You'll remember that, Mitch. There was no internet, okay? I don't think people were using emails, or if they were, they were very primitive. There was nowhere you could go to search, no databases you could go to really to search for crimes across the country, as it were, unless it would have been the FBI, I suppose. But this nationwide newsletter goes out, and one of the Florida investigators, either Fairbanks or Wilbur, picks it up and sees it and goes, Ooh, we know something about this. And they notify Texas that this vet, this plate, this car, was probably involved in the homicide of Jeffer. Yeah. Now, the detectives in Florida then pick up the phone and call Griffith and say, we may have our man. Okay? They relate to probably John Maori, I'm assuming. They relate to John what's been happening in Texas and its connection to Florida, and the name of the suspect, Michael Lee Lockhart. Fingerprints are faxed, and poem prints are faxed from Beaumont, where Lockhart is in custody, up to Griffith for comparison against the prince recovered from Wendy Gallagher's bedroom. Okay. Now, the guy that did the examiner, Jimmy Fedorchak, was a real pro. He's not going to base any conclusions on anything that's facts to him. Okay. He's going to rely only on inked fingerprints because faxes can be misleading, can smear, you can have. A true pro is not going to make a judgment call like this on the basis of a facts of a fingerprint set. But what Jim saw in there was enough to know that we were probably on the right track. Okay. So I think it was June now. We're in the June of 1988. John and maybe one of the other guys from Griffith, Fedorchek, are going to head down to Beaumont to actually eyeball Michael Lockhart's inked prints that are down there in the Beaumont jail and compare them to the prints recovered from the Gallagher bedroom. Okay. I tagged along. No, and I went down there too. I couldn't resist. Okay. So we get down there, Jimmy Fedorchak does the comparison, and it's an absolute match, okay? I'm coordinating with the lawyers back in the prosecutor's office to get a warrant now based on that positive fingerprint identification of Lockhart as the one who killed Wendy Gallagher. We get a warrant in Indiana, fax down to Beaumont to be placed onto Lockhart as a detainer, so that when Texas was done with them, we could grab them, we could bring them back to Indiana. We face murder charges and a death penalty prosecution appear. Okay. And I can still summon the visual image of the day we're in the courthouse. Lockhart is brought into court to be advised that he now faces uh murder charges in Lake County, Indiana, for which extradition is being sought. The murder charges being for the killing of Wendy Gallagher. And I remember I was on his somewhere off to the right of Lockhart where I could see his face. The judge reads that to Lockhart about that murder charge, and I can see his eyes kind of roll up a little bit, and he looks at the ceiling, and it's basically an aweshit kind of look on his face. Okay. At that point, two of the jurisdictions now had murder charges against them. The Beaumont or the Texas people for the killing of Officer Paul Mulchley. And we up in Lake County for the murder of Wendy Gavin. Florida had to wait a bit because DNA takes longer than just a fingerprint comparison. So they ended up getting a blood sample from Lockhart down in Texas and having it compared to the DNA from the semen found on the Kohlhauer murder scene. The lab work was done by an outfit called Selmark, which was one of the pioneers in criminal forensic DNA work at the time. And when they got a hit and there was a match there, they then filed their criminal charges and a death penalty request against Lockhart based on the Florida murder, murder of Jennifer Kohlhauer. So now the circle had been completed. All three jurisdictions had their man. That man was Michael Lockhart, and it was obvious he was a serial killer.

SPEAKER_01 35:04

That's a great story. That's a great man. You tied it together well. I got a couple just peripheral questions. Now, you guys down deep you knew that this guy was traveling all over the country doing this kind of stuff. Right. Um, and I I guess things started popping up that looked like he might have been implicated in it in some way. And all this started out in Ohio, am I correct?

SPEAKER_00 35:31

A lot of it did in Ohio. The um gun he was using and carrying around at that 357 I referred to, that had been stolen during a burglary of a police officer there in Ohio. The Corvette that he used in Florida had been stolen. He arranged for a test drive of a Corvette. And then in the process of the test drive, he basically, I think he pulled a gun on the uh uh salesman accompanying him and just said, I'm taking the car, which he carjacked him, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Carjacked it from the salesman. Lockhart's wife, if I remember, lived in Ohio. At one point in time, he went back and sexually assaulted her, okay, uh, there in Ohio. They were separated or divorced in I'm not sure which. We were dealing with at least at least six states. Illinois, where Tammy Lair was assaulted in the alley, uh, Indiana, where Wendy Gavagger was killed, all those crimes just mentioned in Ohio, Florida, uh, where Jennifer Kohlhauer was murdered, Texas, where Paul Holsey was murdered, and in between those were some bank robberies, I believe, in the state of Louisiana. Uh there may have been other states, but we had at least six states where crimes had been committed. The amount of mileage, we calculated at one point in time, uh, roughly it was enormous. Uh something like 30,000 miles in a fairly short period of time. Because he'd been out west at least twice during this back and forth. Uh, obviously, just the killings involved in Indiana, Florida, and Texas involved a substantial amount of travel, too. Yeah, he was on the road a lot, a lot.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Tell me about uh the irony of Gallagher having to go back to school on the day the day she was killed.

SPEAKER_00 37:35

Yeah, that's that's sad. Because you wonder how does a person so randomly encounter a serial killer? Wendy had come home initially. Um was at work, as I may have mentioned, sister was back at school. Wendy came home and didn't have a key to get into the apartment. So she had to go back to school to get a key from her sister Chrissy, and it was on the second trip home that he must have encountered her and somehow sweet talked his way into the apartment. I don't think we ever knew exactly. How did he get into the Gallagher apartment? Did he ask for a glass of water? Is that why there was a glass of water on the table there in the living room? That we didn't know, but you know, you ask yourself, if she hadn't had to go back for the key, would she still be alive? Those are the questions that kind of haunt you even decades later on something like that. If she'd have been five minutes earlier getting home the second time, five minutes later, would he have missed her? Lockhart was essentially Chicago-based at that point in time. He was staying a lot with a girl, first name of Tina, I don't remember her last name. Uh they had a friendly relationship. Um, but I think the night before the Gallagher homicide, he stayed at a local motel at the uh um Klein, the Borman area here in Lake County, just a little bit north of Griffith there. So how he happened to encounter Wendy Gallagher, we don't know. The apartment complex she lived in was not on the main drag at all. He was in a tucked in a subdivision. Um there was no way you would kind of like stumble into her apartment complex. Okay. He was he was hunting girls. He was cruising, yeah. He was cruising like pray. He was like for pray. Yeah. Uh it may have been he was frustrated from his unsuccessful sexual assault the day before on Tammy. Um, I don't know. But uh that was a random encounter, too, up there in Chicago. Tammy Lair was just happened to be walking down an alley on on her way to work when this blue Toyota pulls up. So it was probably some sort of random encounter there that led him to charm his way.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

You worked another case uh out of Chicago, a killer, Jeffrey Eiler in Indiana, I think. Didn't he disembowel his victims on many occasions? Wasn't that kind of a trademark of his? Not the ones that I knew of.

SPEAKER_00 40:28

And uh ironically, I live about I now live about uh two miles from one of the two. Yeah, I would know I would have buried four of his victims. Uh yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 40:41

I just I don't know if there's something something about this whole disemboweling thing that uh is uh compulsive for these people to practice this in their in their evil doing. I think at this point uh we can think about maybe taking a break. And let's let's go one more time on our next uh segment. I want you to tell the story, a very interesting story of the trials. And now that the hunt, you know who's you got them, we got a lot to talk about with the trials. There's some more quirky stuff we got we gotta reveal here about some of that stuff. But uh very interesting, Tom. Really good job. I just want to uh before I sign off here, I want to invite any of our listeners that haven't done so to go to my website at abadgewellwarn.com where you're gonna find all of our podcasts, including some several that Tom has participated in. Very interesting stuff. Invite you to uh join us and and listen in on your commute or whatever. We'll be joining you hopefully in the next week or so, and we're gonna do this again and uh we're gonna talk about the trial with Mr. Lockhart and how this all ends up if you don't Google it. Anyway, I'm gonna go ahead and sign off, Tommy, and uh thanks a lot for everything. So anyway, bye bye. Bye.