Larry Hall (criminal)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Larry DeWayne Hall has confessed to more than thirty-five murders, and he has taken back every single confession. He is an American man convicted of kidnapping and suspected of far worse. Hall was devoted to the history of the American Revolution and the Civil War, and he traveled across the Midwest to take part in historical reenactments. Some authorities believe he is responsible for the deaths and disappearances of between forty and fifty young women. If that is true, he would rank among the most prolific serial killers in American history. Yet some of his confessions describe crimes he could not have committed, and some of his directions have led searchers to nothing. This documentary asks what is actually known about Hall, what is only claimed, and why a man who talks so freely has left so many families without answers.

  451

• 2. A Gravedigger's Son

  ›

  Larry DeWayne Hall was born in Wabash, Indiana, on the 11th of December 1962. His parents were Robert and Aera Hall, and his father worked as a gravedigger at Falls Cemetery. Hall spent his first days in a neonatal intensive care unit. A complication in the womb, tied to his twin brother Gary, had left him short of oxygen.

  At West Ward Elementary School, Hall showed antisocial behavior and struggled with his lessons because of a low IQ. Classmates teased him over his learning difficulties, his frequent night terrors, his speech impediments, and his bedwetting. According to Gary, Larry never formed friendships or romantic relationships. Gary says he tried to be a positive influence, but Larry allegedly tried to kill him several times.

  At age 12, Larry began digging graves alongside his father. The work left him numb to the sight of human bodies, and he took to stealing valuables from the coffins. Robert Hall's aggressive alcoholism eventually cost him the job, because he began placing bodies in the wrong graves. The family had to give up the house the cemetery provided and move into a shack with a single bedroom.

  At 15, Larry and Gary were both arrested for breaking the windows of a downtown storefront. Larry is also suspected of arson, burglary, and other petty crimes during his teenage years. After high school he took a job as a janitor.

  41

• 3. The FBI's Pattern

  ›

  The FBI believes that Hall began killing in the early 1980s. Over the following decade, female bodies turned up across the country, some of them young and never identified. Investigators later attributed many of them to Hall because the women had been strangled and sexually mutilated.

  Historical reenactment sites around the United States were the common thread. Hall would visit them, then choose victims from the surrounding towns and cities. His targets were mostly, though not exclusively, young white girls and adult women. He abducted them, and he often but not always raped and tortured them. He then stabbed or strangled them to death, and the FBI describes further abuse of the bodies afterward.

  This is the bureau's picture of a pattern, not a set of proven convictions. The earliest case tied to Hall by physical paperwork dates to the summer of 1982, in Wyoming.

  45

• 4. Names Returned

  ›

  On the 28th of June 1982-19-year-old Naomi Lee Kidder left Buffalo, Wyoming, with several friends. They were headed for Rawlins. The group stayed at the Travel Lodge Hotel until the 29th of June, when Kidder left to hitchhike. No one saw her alive again. Her nude remains were found in Natrona County on the 10th of September 1982, in what looked like a partially dug grave. Dental records identified her only on the 10th of March 1993, more than ten years later. She had died of ligature strangulation. Hall is considered a viable suspect because a document bearing Kidder's name was found in his possession after his arrest.

  On the 6th of September 1986, a young woman's body was found in a cornfield near Summerfield, Illinois. She was nude, strangled, and sexually mutilated, and she had died about a day earlier. Detectives called her the Summerfield Jane Doe. She was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery under a gravestone reading "Jane Doe: Known Only to God." In 2007, fingerprints from an arrest record matched her to Eulalia Mylia "Lolly" Chavez, who was 26 when she died. Hall had written a letter to a St. Louis television reporter confessing to Chavez's murder, which made him a suspect. DNA evidence from the crime scene was inconclusive against his own.

  The lists of possible victims also included girls far younger than Chavez, among them a ten-year-old from northern Indiana.

  14131964

• 5. Suspicion Without Proof

  ›

  Linda Lynn Weldy, aged 10, disappeared on the 24th of February 1987. Her school bus dropped her near her home on McClung Road in La Porte, Indiana, at about 3:30 pm. Her body was found on the 17th of March, three weeks later, beside an abandoned railroad track on County Road 500 South near Kingsbury. That was nine miles from where she was last seen. She had been manually strangled. According to investigators, Hall was in the area at that time.

  On the 1st of July 1991-20-year-old single mother Michelle Lee Dewey was found strangled in her second-floor apartment on South Downey Avenue in the Irvington section of Indianapolis. Her 18-month-old son was in a back bedroom with the door wedged shut, and he was unharmed. Gary Hall claimed that his brother confessed to killing Dewey. Hall had come to Indianapolis that day after seeing an advertisement for a 1982 Dodge van. Authorities suspect he noticed Dewey sunbathing in her backyard.

  Wendy Louise Felton, 16, was home in Marion, Indiana, at around 2:00 pm on the 4th of June 1987. Her older sister had driven their parents part of the way to an airport for a business trip. When the sister came back at about 5:00 pm, Wendy was gone, and every one of her belongings was still in her bedroom. Felton's home was less than twenty-five miles from Wabash, where Hall lived at the time. It also stood only a few miles from a reenactment site he often visited, and detectives have not ruled him out.

  1011121913

• 6. Confessions Without Bodies

  ›

  Paulette Sue Webster, 19, was last seen walking home from a friend's house in Chester, Illinois, at 11:00 pm on the 2nd of September 1988. She has never been seen since. Authorities first believed she had left on her own, but they now suspect foul play. In 2011, Hall sent a letter to Christopher Hawley Martin, a Wabash native who wrote a book about him. In it Hall claimed responsibility for Webster's murder. He said she was taken from the main east-west road through Chester, near a mobile home park, and held at a remote location for several hours. He wrote that she was either thrown in the Mississippi River or buried. Elsewhere in the letter he wrote, "If I did it, I would have put her in a river or in a field."

  Laurie Jean Depies, 22, was seen getting into her grey 1984 Volkswagen at the Fox River Mall in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, at about 10:00 pm on the 19th of August 1992. She was expected at her boyfriend's apartment complex in Menasha, in the 300 block of West Wilson Avenue, by 10:15 or 10:30. Her boyfriend was waiting there with his sister and a friend. They heard a car pull into the lot, and when she did not come up they went looking. They found her locked vehicle with a Styrofoam soda cup on the hood and her purse and overnight bag inside. Hall was first named a suspect in 1995. In 2010 he admitted to abducting and murdering her. Investigators searched the place where he said he had buried her, but they found neither her body nor any other proof.

  Tricia Lynn Reitler, 19, was last seen at about 8:00 pm on the 29th of March 1993 at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion. She walked half a mile to Marsh Supermarket, bought a soda and a magazine, and set out for her dormitory in Bowman Hall. Authorities believe she was abducted on the way back. Her bloodstained pants, shirt, and shoes were found in a field near Seybold Pool and Centre Elementary School. Inside Hall's vehicle, investigators found maps, ether, photos, and newspaper articles about Reitler. Hall led searchers to an area of Grant County near the Mississinewa Reservoir and said her body was buried there. No evidence turned up. He withdrew his confession and was never charged in her disappearance.

  Only one case from this period would ever produce a conviction.

  1516182025

• 7. The Roach Case

  ›

  On the 23rd of September 1993-15-year-old Jessica Lynn Roach was last seen at about 3:30 pm, riding her bicycle near her home in Georgetown, Illinois. On the 8th of November, her body was discovered in a cornfield near Perrysville, Indiana.

  In early 1994, two 14-year-old girls from Georgetown told police that a man in a van had followed them. Within days, two more teenage girls reported being followed while walking home. They managed to note part of a license plate. Police traced the vehicle to Hall and brought him in for questioning in October 1994. Evidence in his van connected him to Roach's disappearance, and he supplied details that only the person responsible could have known. He confessed and was charged with her abduction. Police could not determine where she had been killed, so he was not charged with her murder. He was arrested at his parents' home in Wabash in December 1994 and found guilty in June 1995.

  27284

• 8. The Informant

  ›

  In 1996, the FBI approached James Keene, a Chicago businessman serving ten years in prison on a drug conspiracy charge. Agents had heard of his affability and charisma. They also worried that Hall might win his appeal against the Roach kidnapping conviction. The bureau offered to commute and erase Keene's sentence entirely if he agreed to be moved to Hall's maximum security prison. His task was to befriend Hall and learn where the bodies were. Keene accepted.

  Hall eventually confessed to Keene that he had killed Reitler. He also showed Keene a map of the American Midwest that he was working on, covered in red dots and names representing his victims. Keene shouted at him that he was "one of the most despicable forms of human life on this planet." Afterward Keene could not reach his government contacts or prove who he really was, and he spent two weeks in solitary confinement before being released. The map was never recovered. Hall's appeal was denied, and Keene's sentence was ended as promised. Hall is serving life without the possibility of parole in the Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

  The 2022 American crime drama miniseries Black Bird dramatizes the prison relationship between Keene and Hall, with Paul Walter Hauser playing Hall. Dennis Lehane developed the series from the 2010 autobiographical book In with the Devil: a Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption, which Keene wrote with Hillel Levin. The six-episode series premiered on the 8th of July 2022 on Apple TV+.

  29303114