Larry DeWayne Hall is serving a life sentence in a federal prison for one offense: the 1993 kidnapping of Jessica Roach, a 15-year-old from Georgetown, Illinois. The jury that convicted him in 1997, and the one that convicted him in 1995 before an appeals court ordered a new trial, were not asked to decide a murder charge. No one has ever been charged with murder in connection with Jessica Roach's death, and Hall has not been charged with murder in any other case.
His name nonetheless appears in investigations across the Midwest. After his arrest in 1994 he signed a statement admitting the kidnapping and killing of Jessica. Within a day he retracted it. In the years that followed he made further statements to investigators, a prison informant and a reporter, some of them naming other women and girls, and he withdrew many of them as well. Police in several states have said he cannot be ruled out in dozens of cases; reports describe dozens of confessions, most of them withdrawn. No charge from any of them has been reported. The record is therefore two things at once: a settled federal conviction for a single offense, and a long list of claims that courts have never tested.
Hall was born on December 11, 1962, in Wabash, Indiana, an identical twin. His twin brother and their father both appear in the trial record, as possible alibi witnesses. The News-Gazette of Champaign described Hall at the time of his arrest as a 31-year-old former janitor.
The court record shows that a detective who dealt with him in 1994 noticed signs of mental health problems and recommended counseling at a mental health center in Wabash, and that he attended. A psychiatrist who later examined him for the defense, Dr. Arthur Traugott, described him as highly suggestible and given to seeking attention. That description became the core of his defense.
Jessica Roach lived near Georgetown, in Vermilion County, Illinois. Her mother described her to the News-Gazette as a shy girl who loved books and the film "Gone with the Wind." Jessica wanted to be a pilot and had told her father she hoped to fly commercial jets. She had an older sister and a younger brother. Speaking to students at the school in 2009, her mother told them that Jessie, as the family called her, was a kid just like them, the Commercial-News of Danville reported.
On September 20, 1993, Jessica was kidnapped near Georgetown, close to the Indiana line. She was taken across the state line. The charge on which Hall was convicted rests on that crossing: the federal kidnapping statute reaches a kidnapping in which the victim is transported between states. Investigators could not establish where or how she died, which is why the case was brought as a kidnapping. CBS News reported in 2011 that Hall was never charged with murder because police could not determine where she was killed.
In the years since, her family has marked her memory through a scholarship awarded each spring to a graduating senior at the high school and a memorial stone placed beside a tree planted at the school. The stone carries the line "No one thinks it will happen to them."
More than a year passed before Hall came to police attention. The court record says there was no physical evidence at either location connected with it. What moved it forward was a separate matter. On October 22, 1994, two teenage girls in Georgetown reported that a man in a van had followed them, and they wrote down the license plate. It was registered to Larry Hall.
Police found that Hall had a history of following teenage girls in Indiana and Illinois. The Seventh Circuit later listed incidents in Marion, Indiana, in April 1993; Gas City in March 1994; Georgetown and Perrysville in May 1994; Logansport in July 1994; and Georgetown again in October 1994. Hall admitted some of these and disputed others. In March 1994 police had searched his van in Indiana in connection with a different matter and found, among other items, a flyer about Tricia Reitler, a 19-year-old woman from Marion whose case dated from 1993. That search produced nothing that tied him to Reitler's case.
On November 2, 1994, Hall was brought to the Wabash police department about the Georgetown report and was then questioned about Jessica Roach. He denied knowing her. The Seventh Circuit recorded testimony that the Wabash officer questioning him grew upset, moved closer and suggested the answers he wanted, and that Hall cried and asked what was expected of him. The session lasted about two and a half hours and he was allowed to leave.
On November 15, police told him they needed to talk again. The questioning ran from about 10:00 a.m. until about 3:20 a.m. on November 16. The FBI joined in, and an agent offered Hall a polygraph examination, which he declined. After roughly two hours alone with the agent, Hall began to talk about Jessica; admissions followed some twenty to thirty minutes later. No notes were taken and no recording was made. The agent wrote out a narrative statement and Hall signed it. He was booked into the Grant County jail at 3:25 a.m. on November 16.
The statement set out that he had kidnapped and killed Jessica. It also named other girls, among them Tricia Reitler. The Seventh Circuit later held that the part of the statement about Reitler should not have been put before the jury, because nothing in it came from information only the killer could have known, no other evidence tied Hall to her, and the court judged the prejudice of suggesting three similar crimes to be severe.
The next day Hall retracted the statement. The retraction did not stop the case: he was indicted in December 1994 on a single count of kidnapping Jessica Roach, with other elements as charged, and transporting her from Illinois to Indiana.
The defense moved to suppress the confession. The district court denied the motion. At trial, which lasted eight days, the defense argued that Hall's personality disorder made him susceptible to suggestion and eager to please, so that he had confessed falsely. It offered two experts. Dr. Traugott, a psychiatrist, was allowed to describe Hall's suggestibility and attention-seeking but was barred from testifying about his susceptibility to particular interrogation techniques or his capacity to give a false confession. Dr. Richard Ofshe, a social psychologist who studies coercive interrogation, was excluded altogether on the ground that he would be judging the credibility of the officers and that jurors needed no help.
The jury convicted Hall in 1995, and the court sentenced him to life imprisonment. He was sent first to the federal medical center for prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, according to Newsweek.
Hall appealed, and on August 27, 1996, the Seventh Circuit vacated the conviction. In an opinion by Judge Diane P. Wood, joined by Judges Cummings and Easterbrook, the court held that the trial judge had not applied the framework for expert testimony and had misread the rule on helpfulness to the jury. Ofshe's testimony, the court said, would have shown the jury that false confessions exist, and it went to the heart of Hall's defense. Excluding it and limiting Traugott's was not harmless.
The panel did not accept every argument. It found no basis to disturb the trial judge's conclusion that the officers had not threatened or deceived Hall and had not known of his impairment in a way that required special care, so the confession itself could be used. It held the stalking evidence admissible to show intent, preparation or plan. The opinion describes the confession as the government's main evidence and notes that there was no physical evidence at either location connected with the crime. Rehearing was denied on October 28, 1996. The case was returned for a new trial.
Before the retrial, the district judge held a hearing on whether Ofshe could testify. In an order dated August 13, 1997, Judge McDade found him qualified in the study of coercive interrogation and found this area of social psychology to be a reliable body of knowledge. The ruling set limits. Ofshe could testify that false confessions exist, that they are associated with certain interrogation techniques, and that some of those techniques were used in Hall's questioning. He could not testify that the techniques caused a false confession in Hall's case, or interpret the narrative in the signed statement, or address Hall's psychological impairments.
The second trial lasted seven days. The government's evidence again rested mainly on the written confession. Three eyewitnesses placed Hall in the area on the day before the kidnapping, and a fourth testified against him. The defense said the confession was false because personality disorders made him more suggestible and more eager to please. The government answered with a rebuttal expert of its own, which the Seventh Circuit later held proper. The prosecutor also told the jury in his opening statement that Hall's father and brother might be offered as alibi witnesses and that the prosecution would answer them with rebuttal evidence, including that the brother had told the FBI it was possible Hall was in Georgetown that day. Neither relative testified.
In 1997 the second jury convicted Hall of the same offense, the News-Gazette of Champaign reported; the same paper described him in 2014 as serving life without parole.
Hall appealed again. On January 19, 1999, a panel of Judges Coffey, Easterbrook and Kanne affirmed. It held that the trial court had acted within its discretion in excluding a psychologist who would have challenged the eyewitnesses' reliability. It upheld the exclusion of hearsay statements in which other men were said to have admitted the crime. One was by L.O., who denied making the statements and passed a polygraph examination. The other was by K.G., who the court said appeared psychotic, confessed to whatever he was asked about, knew little about the case and had no corroboration. Judge Easterbrook agreed with the result but wrote separately to say that expert testimony on memory and eyewitness identification should not be excluded across the board. Rehearing was denied on February 16, 1999. The conviction was affirmed.
Hall's statements about other crimes are the reason he is discussed at all outside the Roach case. They share a pattern: each was made to police, an informant or a reporter; none came with physical evidence that investigators could confirm; and he withdrew many of them.
Tricia Reitler was 19 and lived in Marion, Indiana. The November 1994 statement named her, Hall later withdrew it, and he has never been charged in her case. Detectives in the Reitler case, Newsweek reported, regarded him as a serial confessor. The Seventh Circuit ruled in 1996 that his statement about Reitler was inadmissible in the Roach trial.
In May 2011 police in Menasha, Wisconsin, announced that Hall had admitted involvement in the 1992 case of Laurie Depies, a 20-year-old woman. The Associated Press reported that Hall gave information in an interview of nearly two hours in November 2010, without a lawyer present. The Menasha police chief, Rod McCants, called it a major break, but said the case could not be closed on Hall's admission alone. Police said they had no physical evidence linking Hall to the case, though he knew details that had not been made public. Hall had been a person of interest for years. He was not charged. Police speculated that he might want a transfer to a prison with better mental health care, and that fear of the death penalty might have shaped his decision to talk; the AP noted that only Hall could say.
Later that month Hall spoke to the AP himself, in an interview the Daily Herald carried. He said he had taken 39 women altogether between 1980 and 1994 and that harm came to some of them, without saying how many or where. He said he suffered blackouts and blamed mental illness. Police said he was not cooperating in other cases. The outcome of the Wisconsin inquiry is not on record.
In May 2016, two investigators from the St. Clair County sheriff's office in Illinois interviewed Hall at the prison and took a DNA sample, The Indiana Lawyer reported in July 2016. The case concerned Eulalia Mylia Chavez, a 28-year-old woman from Palo Alto, California, who died in 1986 while traveling through Illinois. Her identity had been established only in 2007. The Indiana Lawyer reported that Hall had confessed to dozens of crimes, including details about Chavez, and later recanted them. The sheriff said the case could be solved. Investigators also said that even a DNA match would be unlikely to lead to prosecution, because Hall cannot be released and Illinois no longer has the death penalty. A result of the test is not on record.
Newsweek reported that the prosecutor of Hall's first trial later arranged an undercover operation. James Keene, a federal prisoner, was offered a way out of his own sentence in exchange for going undercover near Hall at the Springfield medical center. The News-Gazette columnist Jim Dey wrote that Keene did not obtain the information he sought but reported that Hall kept a map and carved wooden falcons. Nothing from Keene's account was used to charge or convict Hall.
The conviction is for kidnapping. Some later reports, including the Champaign newspaper's 2014 coverage of the family's memorial, describe it as a conviction for kidnapping and murder. The court record shows one count of kidnapping; CBS and the Associated Press stated that no murder charge was brought because police could not say where Jessica died.
The confession has been contested from the day after it was signed. In 1996 the Seventh Circuit upheld the trial court's finding that the statement was voluntary, and in 1999 it affirmed a second conviction in which the statement was the principal evidence. The same court called the false-confession testimony central to the defense in 1996, and no notes or recordings of the 1994 questioning were made. A court's decision to allow a confession before a jury is not a finding that it was true, and the courts did not find it false.
The numbers attached to Hall's name, dozens of confessions and 39 women in his own words to the AP, come from his statements and from police speculation. None is a conviction, a charge or a finding.
A 2011 CBS News report and an Associated Press report placed Hall at the medium-security federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, serving a life sentence. The News-Gazette described the sentence in 2014 as life without parole. Newsweek reported in 2022 that he remained at Butner.
December 11, 1962: Larry DeWayne Hall is born in Wabash, Indiana.
1986: Eulalia Mylia Chavez, 28, dies in Illinois; later inquiries name Hall as a person of interest.
August 1992: the Wisconsin case of Laurie Depies, 20, in Menasha.
1993: the case of Tricia Reitler, 19, of Marion, Indiana.
September 20, 1993: Jessica Roach, 15, is kidnapped near Georgetown, Illinois.
March 1994: police search Hall's van in Indiana in another matter.
October 22, 1994: two girls in Georgetown report a man in a van and note the plate.
November 2, 1994: first questioning at Wabash.
November 15 to 16, 1994: day-long questioning; signed statement; booked at 3:25 a.m.
Next day: Hall retracts.
December 1994: one-count indictment for kidnapping.
1995: jury convicts; life sentence.
August 27, 1996: Seventh Circuit vacates the conviction (rehearing denied October 28, 1996).
August 13, 1997: pretrial order allows limited false-confession testimony.
1997: second jury convicts; life sentence.
January 19, 1999: Seventh Circuit affirms (rehearing denied February 16, 1999).
November 2010: interview with Menasha police.
May 16, 2011: Menasha police announce that Hall admitted involvement; no charge.
May 2016: St. Clair County investigators interview Hall and take DNA.
2022: reported at the federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.