On the morning of September 30, 1983, an Indiana state trooper named Kenneth Buehrle pulled over a pickup truck parked on the shoulder of Interstate 65 near Lowell, in Lake County, and found a thirty-year-old house painter from Terre Haute in the cab with a young hitchhiker. The painter was Larry Eyler, and for the task force that had been hunting a killer of young men across Illinois and Indiana for most of that year he was the best suspect they had ever had. A sergeant, William Cothran, searched the truck at the roadside before telling Eyler he was under arrest, and found two lengths of nylon rope; later searches turned up a knife with blood beneath the handle, handcuffs, a hammer, two baseball bats, a mallet and surgical tape. His boots matched plaster casts taken where Ralph Calise, twenty-eight, had been found stabbed seventeen times in a field near Lake Forest a month earlier, down to four distinctive worn and damaged patches on the soles, and his two mismatched brands of tire matched the tracks. Eyler was charged with Calise's murder on October 29 and held on a million-dollar bond. On February 1, 1984, Lake County Circuit Judge William Block ruled that the stop had turned into an unlawful detention and suppressed nearly everything that came from it, and Eyler walked out of jail on February 6. Six months later a sixteen-year-old was dead in his apartment.
He was born in Crawfordsville, Indiana, on December 21, 1952, the youngest of four children of George Howard Eyler and Shirley Kennedy. His father drank and beat his wife and children, and the parents divorced in 1955. His mother worked in a factory and as a waitress, sometimes in a bar at weekends, and the two youngest children were passed between babysitters, foster families and their older siblings. She married three more times, in 1957, 1960 and 1972; his father and the first two stepfathers drank heavily, and one of the stepfathers disciplined the boy by holding his head under scalding water. At eleven he was placed in a home for unruly boys and begged his way out within weeks; tests then found him of average intelligence, deeply insecure and terrified of being abandoned, and he spent six months in a Catholic boys' home in Fort Wayne. He knew he was gay by adolescence, told only his family, and hated himself for it. He left high school without graduating, took a GED, and drifted through a job as a hospital security guard, a shoe store and house painting. In Indianapolis gay bars in the 1970s he was known as a good-looking bodybuilder who wore Marine Corps T-shirts though he had never served, and some of the men who slept with him described a sadist who beat them and cut them lightly across the torso.
He lived much of the time in Terre Haute with Robert David Little, a library science professor at Indiana State University whom he had met in 1974 while studying there; Little was fifteen years older, the relationship was by most accounts platonic, and Eyler regarded him as a father figure who paid many of his bills. From August 1981 his lover was John Dobrovolskis, a married man of twenty with whom Eyler lodged on weekdays in Chicago, painting houses there and working Saturdays in a liquor store in Greencastle, Indiana. The two argued constantly over infidelity. The first violence on the record came earlier. On August 3, 1978, he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker named Craig Long in Terre Haute, drove him to a field at knifepoint, handcuffed him and bound his ankles, and when Long ran, stabbed him in the chest, puncturing a lung. Eyler then drove to the house where Long had gone for help and handed a deputy the handcuff key, saying it had been an accident. In his truck were a hunting knife, a butcher knife, a metal-tipped whip, another set of handcuffs, tear gas and a sword. He was charged with aggravated battery, a check for $2,500 from Little persuaded Long to drop the complaint, and on November 13, 1978, Eyler was fined $43 in court costs. In May 1982, investigators later learned, he drugged a fourteen-year-old boy and left him unconscious in woods near Greencastle.
The dead were young men and teenage boys, most of them hitchhikers or young men who sold sex in Chicago's Uptown and in the gay bars of Indianapolis and Chicago, a few simply out on a road at night. Most were plied with alcohol and sedatives, tied, and stabbed many times in the chest and abdomen; several were disemboweled and four were dismembered; and they were left in fields near the interstates with their trousers pulled down and their shirts and wallets gone. Craig Townsend, twenty-one, was the first known to survive: picked up in Crown Point, Indiana, on October 12, 1982, drugged, beaten and left naked and comatose in a field, he lived and fled the hospital before detectives could talk to him. Eleven days later Steven Crockett, nineteen, from Chicago, was found in a cornfield in Kankakee County, stabbed thirty-two times. Edgar Underkofler, twenty-six, disappeared from Rantoul, Illinois, on October 30 and was found near Danville the following March. John Johnson, twenty-five, a bartender, was found near Lowell, Indiana, in December. William Lewis, nineteen, was picked up hitchhiking near Vincennes on November 20 and buried in a field near Rensselaer.
Steven Agan, twenty-three, from Terre Haute, was abducted there on December 19, 1982, and found in woods off State Road 63 on December 28; in an abandoned farm outbuilding nearby, investigators found traces of flesh on the walls where the plaster was damaged, and the pathologist, John Pless, wrote of tremendous rage and the likelihood of more than one killer. The same day Pless examined John Roach, twenty-one, found in a field beside Interstate 70 in Putnam County with the same wounds. David Block, twenty-two, a Yale graduate home in Highland Park for the holidays, disappeared on December 30 on his way to visit a friend in Highwood; a farmer found his body in May 1984. Ervin Gibson, sixteen, was killed in Lake County, Illinois, on January 24, 1983, and found on April 15 lying on top of a dog that had also been stabbed to death; he was buried unnamed and identified only through Eyler's confession eleven years later. Jay Reynolds, twenty-nine, who ran an ice cream shop in Lexington, Kentucky, was found stabbed in Madison County on March 22. Gustavo Herrera was killed on April 8. Richard Wayne, seventeen, vanished on March 20 while traveling home to Montpelier, Indiana, from California; his skeleton was found beside U.S. Route 40 in Hendricks County in December, and beside it the remains of a young Black man who has never been identified. Jimmie Roberts, eighteen, was found in Thorn Creek near Chicago on May 9 with thirty-five stab wounds, and Daniel McNeive, twenty-one, the same day beside State Road 39 in Hendricks County. Richard Bruce, twenty-five, was killed in Effingham, Illinois, nine days later and thrown from a bridge into a creek. An unidentified Hispanic man was found near Paxton, Illinois, on July 2. Michael Bauer and John Bartlett were among the others. Eric Hansen, eighteen, of St. Francis, Wisconsin, was last seen in downtown Milwaukee on September 27, 1983, and his torso was found by mushroom hunters in Kenosha County on October 4. On October 18 and 19 four more bodies were found beside an oak tree near an abandoned farmhouse at Lake Village, in Newton County, Indiana; two of them, John Brandenburg and Keith Bibbs, were identified by genetic genealogy only in 2021 and 2022.
By the spring of 1983 the gay community in Indiana had concluded that one man was responsible. The Indianapolis gay paper The Works set up an anonymous hotline and, with help from readers and one victim's family, offered a $1,500 reward. In May the Indiana State Police brought thirty-five detectives from four jurisdictions together and formed the Central Indiana Multi-Agency Investigative Team, under Lieutenant Jerry Campbell of the Indianapolis police, one of the first multi-state serial homicide task forces in the country; it called the killer the Highway Murderer. On June 6 a former lover of Eyler's, Thomas Henderson, called the hotline with his name, the 1978 stabbing, his temper and his taste for bondage. The FBI's profile described a strong, macho white man around thirty in a menial job, living on the edge of panic about his own sexuality and perhaps helped by an older, more educated accomplice. After the stop at Lowell, a search of Little's house found credit card receipts that placed Eyler near the killings and telephone bills showing collect calls to Terre Haute at odd hours right after them, one from a payphone by Cook County Hospital on April 8, the night Herrera died, when Eyler was treated for a deep cut to his hand; he bought handcuffs and a knife the next day. A task force member, Cathy Berner, remarked to colleagues that if Eyler was not their man, he was following the real killer around every day. A later search of Little's house turned up a key that matched one found beneath Agan's body and fit the door of an office where Eyler had worked in 1982.
None of it survived Block's ruling. Eyler's first lawyer, Kenneth Ditkowsky, had sued eleven officers in both states for $250,000 for harassment; his second, David Schippers, won the suppression hearing, at which a police sergeant conceded that Eyler had been held at Lowell only to wait for the task force. Prosecutors took the ruling as far as the U.S. Supreme Court and lost. "Now that you got him off," a Lake County investigator, Dan Colin, told Schippers, "you better hope there aren't any more long-distance calls to Terre Haute." Eyler moved to an apartment in Rogers Park in Chicago, with Little paying the rent and, once the truck was returned in July, buying it new tires.
Danny Bridges was sixteen, the youngest of thirteen children, a neglected, habitual runaway who had been selling sex in Uptown since he was twelve. He had been a friend of Ervin Gibson's, and two months before he died he had described Eyler to an NBC reporter making a documentary about the sexual exploitation of children as a real freak whom every boy on the street knew. On the night of August 19, 1984, Eyler took him back to the apartment on West Sheridan Road, tied him to a chair with clothesline, beat him, stabbed him with a knife and an awl-like tool, and cut his body into eight pieces in the bathtub. On the morning of August 21 a janitor, Joseph Balla, pulled a bag out of a dumpster that tenants were not supposed to use, thinking it was illegal dumping, and it split open on a leg; other janitors had seen the tenant in apartment 106 carrying bags to it the day before. Eyler was arrested within minutes. His fingerprints were inside and outside the bags; the freshly painted bedroom was spattered with blood that luminol showed had been dragged to the bathroom; Bridges's bloodstained jeans were in the closet and his Duke University T-shirt in the hamper; a hacksaw and newly bought blades were in the apartment.
He was tried in Cook County in July 1986 before Judge Joseph Urso on charges of murder, aggravated kidnapping, unlawful restraint and concealing a homicidal death, prosecuted by Mark Rakoczy and Rick Stock and defended by the public defenders Claire Hilliard and Tom Allen, with Schippers volunteering alongside them. He did not testify. Little testified for the prosecution that he had left for Terre Haute on the evening of August 19; Dobrovolskis testified that Eyler had put him off with calls through that night and arrived at his house freshly showered. Schippers pointed out that Little had driven home to pay, in person, a property tax bill not due until October the morning after Bridges died. The jury took three hours and convicted Eyler on every count on July 9. On October 3 Urso sentenced him to death. "If there ever was a person or a situation for which the death penalty is appropriate, it is you," the judge told him. Psychiatric evaluations on death row at Pontiac diagnosed severe borderline personality disorder and a pathological fear of abandonment. The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on October 25, 1989, and an execution date was set for March 14, 1990.
In November 1990 the Illinois appellate defender's office assigned him Kathleen Zellner, and the Vermillion County, Indiana, prosecutor, Larry Thomas, took the suppressed evidence to a grand jury in the Agan case. Facing that indictment, Eyler wrote a seventeen-page confession on December 4, pleaded guilty before Judge Don Darnell on December 13, and on December 28 was sentenced to sixty years, concurrent with the death sentence. He said Little had taken part in Agan's murder, had photographed it, and had been the one who killed Danny Bridges. The next month Zellner offered his confessions to twenty more killings in ten counties in exchange for commutation to life without parole. Eight of the jurisdictions agreed and a ninth waited on Cook County, but the Cook County State's Attorney, Jack O'Malley, refused.
Little, then fifty-three, was arrested on December 18, 1990, and tried for Agan's murder in April 1991 before Darnell. Eyler was the main witness against him and invoked the Fifth Amendment two dozen times under cross-examination. Little's mother testified that he had spent every Christmas since 1958 with her in Florida, arriving a week early; the prosecutor, Mark Greenwell, showed a Terre Haute garage ledger and a phone bill placing Little in town on December 21, 1982. "Would you convict an honorable man on the word of Larry Eyler?" the defense asked, and after seven hours the jury acquitted him. He went back to teaching. He has never been convicted of anything, and Eyler's accusation against him is the word of a man trying to save his own life. Danny Bridges's parents later sued Little for wrongful death, with Zellner representing them.
Eyler died of AIDS-related illness in the infirmary at Pontiac Correctional Center on March 6, 1994, aged forty-one, with an appeal pending in the Illinois Supreme Court; it argued that Schippers had a conflict of interest, having taken $16,875 from Little, a prosecution witness, while telling the judge he was working for free. Four days later Zellner, with her client's consent, held a news conference and released his confession to the killings, several of which had never been publicly tied to him; Ervin Gibson, among them, had been buried as a John Doe. The number usually given is twenty-one murders, with a further killing in which he admitted being an accessory. Two convictions stand, for Danny Bridges and Steven Agan. The others are cases closed on his written account and on the physical evidence that fit it, and a few of the bodies from those fields were still unnamed when he died.