Monday, Aug. 17, 2009
bnd.com
Body was found near Summerfield.
BY GEORGE PAWLACZYK - and Beth Hundsdorfer
Her final resting place is not a grave in Palo Alto, Calif., where she grew up, nor a cemetery in Summerfield, where her strangled and mutilated body was found in a cornfield almost 23 years ago.
The remains of 27-year-old Eulalia Mylia Chavez, or "Lolly" as her friends knew her, are not actually buried. Instead, they are stored in archival box 07-14 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where her skeleton is kept for anthropological study. No one was ever charged with her murder.
But Chavez, who was found on Sept. 6, 1986, but not identified until an FBI fingerprint match in January 2008, has not been forgotten.
Gary Hall of Wabash, Ind., believes his twin-brother Larry D. Hall, a suspected serial killer doing life in a Butner, N.C., federal psychiatric prison, has been questioned recently by investigators about Chavez and several other young women from the Midwest who disappeared or were murdered in the late 1980s to early 1990s.
Gary Hall said that in July he traveled to the Federal Correctional Complex at Butner where police investigators from Indianapolis met with his brother. Gary Hall said he was not present during the questioning but was "pretty sure" that Chavez came up during the interview. It was at least the second time this year that Larry Hall, 46, a former janitor, has been questioned by police.
Capt. Steve Johnson of the St. Clair County Sheriff's Department, said, "Investigator Pat Walters is in close contact with a detective from an Indiana homicide squad who has been in the process of interviewing a suspect. This suspect has given some information regarding the Summerfield murder."
Johnson said he could not discuss what was said by the suspect, who he declined to name.
Police attention was refocused on Larry Hall after a Playboy magazine article last year about a convicted drug dealer who agreed in 1998 to be placed in a maximum security prison for the purpose of befriending Larry Hall and enticing him to reveal where he buried Tricia Reitler of Olmstead Township, a community in Northeast Ohio. The 19-year-old disappeared in 1993 from the campus of Indiana Wesleyan University near Marion, Ind., when she took a break from writing a term paper to walk to a store for a can of root beer. Her clothes were found near the market.
According to a Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper article, Larry Hall was arrested a year later at Indiana Wesleyan, where Reitler had been a student. In his van, police found rope, a mask and several newspaper articles about Reitler. The story about his arrest stated that he confessed to killing Reitler, but his confession was not believed and he was released by local police.
In November 1994, he was charged with kidnapping 15-year-old Jessica Roach as she was riding her bicycle in a rural area near Georgetown, Ill., close to the Indiana border. Her decomposed remains were found in an Indiana cornfield, and Hall was arrested a few months after Roach disappeared when police near her hometown received complaints from other young girls that Larry Hall had been stalking them.
Larry Hall was convicted in federal court of kidnapping that resulted in death and was given life in prison. He killed Roach by sitting her against a tree and placing two belts linked together against her throat and then stepping behind the tree and pulling on both ends. A police report states he strangled her in this manner so he would not have to look at her face as she died.
At this time, according to news articles, Larry Hall was suspected of killing at least seven other young women and was the target of state and federal investigators. His confession in the Roach case contained admissions in the Reitler murder. But he was never charged and interest in him cooled until last year when the Playboy article brought national attention to the Reitler murder. However, he still has not been charged in her death.
Evidence during Larry Hall's 1995 trial for kidnapping Roach showed connections to Illinois. A check of the evidence file inventory revealed that a large map of Illinois was found in the van he was driving when he was arrested in the Roach case. Interviews with her family members following the identification of Chavez revealed that she was a chronic runaway who often hitchhiked across the country.
Hall left Roach's remains in a cornfield, which is the same type of field Chavez's body was found.
Also like Chavez, Roach was ligature strangled. Unlike Chavez, whose pelvic area was brutally mutilated, no such mutilation could be determined in the Roach case because her remains were skeletonized and had been broken up by a farm combine.
The remains of Chavez were exhumed in June 2007 after a News-Democrat reporter suggested to St. Clair County Coroner Rick Stone that new methods in sculpting a likeness in clay from a skull might lead to an identification.
As part of the exhumation process, police resubmitted her fingerprints and, with newer technology, Chavez was identified. Her family donated her remains to the anthropology department at the University of Tennessee. Evidence in his trial showed that Larry Hall traveled widely to attend Civil War and other military re-enactments, but not until 1989, three years after Chavez was murdered. However, beginning in the early 1980s he dressed like a "greaser" and traveled widely in the Midwest including Illinois to attend car shows, Gary Hall said.
"He wandered all over the Midwest, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio. There were many times when he took off and we had no idea where he was," Gary Hall said.
Given a description of Chavez, who was about 5 feet, 4 inches, 100-110 pounds with black hair, Gary Hall said, "I'll just say it fits the profile of a lot of his victims. ... He preferred darker hair with a small, athletic build. That's what I've been told since clear back when he first got arrested."
"He would go to these Civil War re-enactments and women around there started popping up dead," said former U.S. attorney Lawrence Beaumont, who prosecuted Larry Hall in U.S. District Court in Urbana for the kidnapping of Roach in Georgetown, a day after a Revolutionary War re-enactment in a nearby state park.
"He could be connected to a number of cases in the Midwest," Beaumont said.
Gary Hall said he has cooperated with police and wants the murder cases solved for the sake of the victims' families.
"Every one of them breaks my heart," he said, "All we can do is get closure for the families and try to find the answers that could bring the victims home. It's not so much to impose any more punishment on Larry. He's already doing life without parole."
Contact reporter George Pawlaczyk at gpawlaczyk@bnd.com or 239-2625. Contact reporter Beth Hundsdorfer at bhundsdorfer@bnd.com or 239-2570. Sphere: Related Content
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