The Innocents (1964)
by Edward D. Radin

Excerpt from Chapter 13 on

Ralph W. Lobaugh

As this is being written, the state of Indiana has started legal moves that may lead to the release of Ralph W. Lobaugh from prison after serving fifteen years for murder. But what nobody in Indiana can really explain is why Lobaugh has been imprisoned for fifteen years and what particular murder or murders he committed. The bewildering series of events in this case once led former Governor Henry F. Schricker, who tried to cope with it while he was in office, to describe it as "the most involved and tangled legal problem in the history of In­diana." Yet, at many points, had anyone succeeded in stopping the legal machinery, it could have been untangled.

It began with three separate murders, all distinctly similar, and then a fourth one was thrown in to add to the confusion, all of them in and around Fort Wayne.

The first three murders occurred about three months apart. Shortly after she had finished work at 4:30 P.M. on February 2, 1944, Wilhelmina Haaga, thirty-eight, a former actress, was seen entering a car near the plant where she was employed. Less than two hours later, clad only in a tattered dress, raped, brutally beaten, her skull fractured, she staggered to a farmhouse five miles from town and collapsed. She never regained consciousness, and died in a hospital. Beyond finding her fur coat and one shoe on a lonely road, with the earth churned up in several spots to show that a struggle had taken place, police were without clues. On May 21, Anna Kuzeff, nineteen, who lived on the sparsely settled west side of the city, left her home at 10 P.M. for her job on the night shift in a nearby factory. She never arrived, and the following day her body was found in vacant land that was within sight of her house. Her dress hung in tatters; she had been raped; her face and body were covered with a mass of bruises, and there were telltale scuffle marks at various spots. Again there were no clues. On August 4, Phyllis Conine, seventeen, a high-school student, left her home at 2:30 P.M. She planned to do some shopping and then meet a girl friend in front of a movie theater. Four days later her body was found some seven miles from Fort Wayne, a rape victim, her clothes tattered, her skull fractured, her body badly bruised, the ground showing scuff marks in several areas.

Since criminals, like everybody else, are creatures of habit, police had little doubt that the same man was involved in all three murders. He evidently was a sadist who allowed his victim to run a short distance and then pounced upon her again, pummeling her with his fists, repeating the performance until he killed her.

For the first time there was a clue; a shabby, blood­stained man's trench coat, with the sleeves containing traces of the schoolgirl's face powder, was found not far from the body. There were no identifying labels, and although photographs were published of the coat, police were unable to trace it.
By now an alarmed city had posted a total of $16,500 in reward money for the solution of the three murders, and while this stimulated a great many tips to police, they proved to be of no help.

But the cycle of murder every three months had stopped. The remainder of the year passed without incident. For the fourth murder we come to the night of March 5, 1945. Mrs. Dorothea Howard was the wife of a soldier assigned to Baer Field near Fort Wayne. Her husband had expected a short furlough and she had come there to meet him, but it fell through, and the disappointed and lonely young woman wandered about the streets, stopping in a tavern occasionally for a drink. A pedestrian who found her stumbling about in the rain in the downtown section of the city brought her into a tavern with the intention of getting her some coffee, but when the woman owner berated him for bringing in a woman in an intoxicated condition, he stalked out. Mrs. Howard sat down at a table occupied by a soldier and a civilian, strangers to each other. The owner warned the waiter not to serve Mrs. Howard any intoxicating beverage, and when the civilian slyly pushed his glass of beer over toward Mrs. Howard, the owner angrily snatched it away. The civilian got up and left. The soldier offered to escort Mrs. Howard to her hotel. When they came out the civilian was waiting; he promptly joined them and steered the woman into an alley that ran parallel to the street. After walking a short distance, Mrs. Howard sat down in the rain on some projecting steps, and the soldier and the civilian seated themselves one on each side of her. At this point a woman drove her car into the alley and called out, asking what was going on. The soldier decided that he did not want to become involved and left, catching the 11 P.M. bus back to the base. The civilian moved toward the woman in the car, whereupon she became frightened and backed her car out of the alley. She saw the man help Mrs. Howard to her feet and the couple continue walking up the alley.

Some four hours later Mrs. Howard was found in the alley, about a block from the tavern, nude, her face and body brutally battered. The dazed woman was unable to give police a coherent story, developed pneumonia, and died.

When newspapers published her photograph, the soldier promptly came forward and told his story. The woman who had driven into the alley confirmed that he had left Mrs. Howard with the civilian. The soldier was released after an investigation by civil and military authorities.

Some papers claimed that Mrs. Howard was the fourth victim of the sadist killer, while others disagreed, pointing out that this murder did not follow the regular pattern. In any event, it also remained unsolved despite an angry public outcry that did not go unnoticed by the politicians.

More than two years passed, and then on the night of June 10, 1947, Lobaugh injected himself into the case when he entered a police station in Kokomo, some eighty miles southwest of Fort Wayne, and asked to be locked up because he felt an uncontrollable urge to kill. When the desk sergeant did not seem impressed and suggested black coffee, Lobaugh received prompt attention by adding that he was responsible for murdering three Fort Wayne women. Rushed to that city, Lobaugh confessed that he had killed Miss Haaga, Miss Kuzeff, and Mrs. Howard. He said he had had nothing to do with the murder of Phyllis Conine. Police reasoned that he did not want to admit this crime because of the schoolgirl's age.

The only witnesses were in the Howard murder. With war over, the soldier had been released from service, but he was traced to Memphis. A detective showed him a photograph of Lobaugh and the former soldier identified him as the civilian who had been in the alley.

The joy of police at solving the murders was short-lived. Lobaugh soon recanted. He said that he had gone to the station house after a quarrel with his bride of thirty-five days, his third wife, and confessed to the three murders as a spectacular way to commit sucide. He employed Robert Buhler, a Fort Wayne lawyer, to defend him.

Buhler pointed to glaring inconsistencies in the confession. Lobaugh claimed that he had met Miss Haaga in a tavern, while she had been seen entering a car after she left the plant. He said he had waited in the lot where Miss Kuzeff was killed because he knew it was used as a short cut by factory workers. The victim was the only person in that area employed on the night shift and she was the only one to use the lot. His confession also said that he had bought Mrs. Howard two drinks in the tavern before taking her into the alley, a statement which was at complete variance with the facts related by the soldier and the tavern owner, who would not allow Mrs. Howard to have any liquor.

Further information to disprove the confession was soon forthcoming. Lobaugh's second wife, who had divorced him and had no reason to defend him, told police that he had been visiting her in a hospital at Wolflake, some thirty miles from Fort Wayne, at the very time of the Haaga murder. Her parents said that on the night Miss Kuzeff had been slain, Lobaugh had been visiting them, also a good distance from the murder scene. They added that it would have been impossible for him to have lurked at night in the lot because he had an abnormal fear of darkness.

The four unsolved murders had become a political issue in Fort Wayne, and worried police decided to give Lobaugh a lie-detector test. He interrupted the examination to confess once again to the three murders. Several days later he once more recanted.

The prosecutor announced that he believed the confessions and would go ahead with the case, but Lobaugh saved him the trouble. The vacillating prisoner aroused the jail in the early hours of October 27 with shouted demands that he be taken immediately before a judge in order to plead guilty. As soon as court opened, he was obliged. Buhler rushed to court to prevent this, but Lobaugh dismissed him, and without benefit of counsel and without a trial, Circuit Court Judge William J. Schannen accepted his plea of guilty to the three murders and sentenced him to death in the electric chair.

Two days later Lobaugh once again changed his mind, but now it was too late. He was in the death house, and the legal machine that is so hard to stop was rolling. An attempt by Buhler to have the plea set aside was denied, and Governor Ralph G. Gates rejected a plea for clemency.

Lobaugh's plea and sentence did not stem the voter unrest. The strongly entrenched Republican party was voted out of office. The wind of change also swept through the police department, and Lester Eisenhut, a career officer, was appointed chief.

Eisenhut had strong doubts that Lobaugh was involved in the murders. He had the former soldier brought up from Memphis to the state prison, along with the woman who had driven the car into the alley. Lobaugh was placed in a line-up with other prisoners, and neither witness could identify him. When Lobaugh was pointed out to them, they were certain he was not the man. The former soldier said that the detective who had visited him in Memphis had told him that the prisoner had confessed and so he had merely glanced at the picture and said it looked somewhat like the civilian. The detective had left, satisfied with the identification.

Chief Eisenhut asked Buhler, if Lobaugh would submit to a truth-serum test, and the lawyer agreed to let him take it. The sodium pentathol was administered in prison by two state physicians in the presence of police and newspaper reporters, and Lobaugh denied the three murders while under the influence of the drug. The governor hurriedly issued a reprieve of the death sentence, the first of many over the next three years.

Fresh detectives went to work on the Howard case and soon learned that the civilian in the tavern had been a Fort Wayne druggist who had been ordered to leave town after a number of sex crimes. He was located in Denver and on November 8, 1948, was brought back for trial after he had been identified by both the former soldier and the woman driver. His lawyer succeeded in obtaining a change of venue from Fort Wayne to rural Columbia. A jury found him guilty of second-degree murder and in March, 1949, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

This meant that Indiana now had two men in prison for the same crime, Lobaugh on his plea of guilty to the Howard murder, among the others, and the druggist convicted by a jury. And since it was obvious that Lobaugh had not killed Mrs. Howard, this fact cast strong doubts on his confession to the murders of Miss Haaga and Miss Kuzeff.

While Buhler was trying new tactics to get his client released, the case really became snarled on August 17, 1949. Franklin Click, thirty-one, the father of five children was arrested for the rape of a housewife. Two weeks later he handed his wife a note in which he admitted that he was guilty of murdering Miss Haaga, Miss Kuzeff, and Phyllis Conine. He told his wife to take the note to Chief Eisenhut and put in a claim for the reward money.

Since the prisoner faced life imprisonment anyway, this new multiple confession was viewed with doubt, but this quickly evaporated when Click was questioned. He said that he was passing the factory when Miss Haaga came out and offered her a lift; this information had not been publicized. He had worked on a celery farm opposite the Kuzeff home and knew that the girl took the short cut to the factory. This was checked and found to be true. In the Conine murder he said he had stolen a car and had found the trench coat in the rear. Later that same day he had been spotted in the stolen car by a police cruiser and liad wrecked it during the chase but managed to elude the officers. Police records verified the incident of the chase and the wreck of the stolen car. The owner was located and he recognized the trench coat as an old one he had kept in the back to protect samples of merchandise. With little doubt now that Click was the actual killer, he was indicted for the three murders.

By now the people of Indiana needed a score card to keep up with the developments in the case. Lobaugh had pleaded guilty to the murders of Miss Haaga, Miss Kuzzeff, and Mrs. Howard and was still under death sentence for them. The druggist had been found guilty if the murder of Mrs. Howard, and now Click had confessed to all the murders except that of Mrs. Howard.

The state elected to try Click on the Conine indictment, its strongest case, since there was the corroborating evidence of the stolen car and trench coat. Incidentally it was the only one of the four murders for which there had been no plea of guilty or conviction. Click was found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

It now looked as if Buhler would succeed in winning freedom for his client, but at this point Lobaugh performed another of his strange flip-flops. He now claimed that he had killed the Conine girl, the one murder to which he never had confessed. And just as promptly Click repudiated his confession; he claimed he had confessed so that his wife would get the reward money, and the city had refused to pay it to her.

Adding further to the confusion, the Indiana Supreme Court granted the druggist a new trial because there had been a lapse of four hours between the time he had been with Mrs. Howard and the time she was found in the alley. "With four hours unaccounted for, and a woman in a helplessly intoxicated condition in a dark alley, almost anything could have happened," the court remarked. "Appellant had the opportunity to commit the offense charged, but so might many others." With no additional evidence available, the prosecution agreed to drop the charge, and the druggist hurriedly left the state. Click's appeal for a new trial was denied and he was executed on December 30, 1950.

This still left Lobaugh, who by now had been in the death house for three years. Governor Schricker, who had inherited the case, asked psychiatrists to examine the prisoner. On May 2, 1951, the governor made known his decision, disposing of a vexing problem. He pointed out that substantial doubt existed as to Lobaugh's guilt, but he added that he felt the prisoner was too dangerous to be set free, and so he commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, and upon the recommendation of the psychiatrists Lobaugh was transferred to a mental hospital.

This left unanswered the question why Lobaugh was serving a life sentence, but with Lawyer Buhler's death, there was no one around who seemed to care. Since then, though, doctors have pronounced Lobaugh sane, and the Indiana department of corrections has accordingly conducted hearings on whether or not to parole Lobaugh. If the decision is favorable, it is expected that the governor will grant clemency so that Lobaugh can be freed from serving any more time for murders nobody really believes he committed.