Death and Forgiveness (eBook)

Chapter 1

Future Murderer: Eugene Gall

Eugene Gall. Photo by Department of Rehabilitation and Correction

Long before I had any experience with the death penalty or murderers, I stepped into a prison for the first time to interview a serial rapist, not knowing he would later become a killer of young girls.

I was 23 years old, just two years after graduating from Indiana University with a degree in journalism and political science. I was working, and thrilled to be employed, as a reporter at the Kettering-Oakwood Times, a solid, well-respected, twice-a-week newspaper in suburban Dayton, Ohio. Up to that point, I had mostly been assigned to cover city council and school board meetings, Friday night high school sports, and the occasional feature story.

My biggest personal crime? Occasionally drinking too much and driving home one night a week after work. I knew next to nothing about incarcerated criminals and prison.

It was January 1975, and I was on an assignment to write a profile on a sexual offender to accompany another reporter’s story on female rape victims. Co-worker Anita Richwine, then the Times women’s editor, had the main story. Mine, known as a sidebar in news lingo, was to supplement hers.

My interview took place at the Lebanon Correctional Institution, then a 15-year-old state prison nestled among cow pastures on the outskirts of a small town in southwestern Ohio. Notebook and pen in hand, I stepped from my car in the parking lot into the Midwest winter chill and entered through the sally port, a name I later learned meant the secure, controlled entry point to the prison. It was my first time of many going through a metal detector, before they became a standard fixture in airports.

When I entered the prison, the heavy steel-bar bar doors slammed loudly behind my back, startling me. I knew in my mind that I could get out, but this place was home to 2,000 convicted criminals. While I tried to convince myself I was safe, my blood chilled and I felt temporarily nervous and trapped with unguarded inmates in blue uniforms roaming everywhere, it seemed, as we walked the corridors. They didn’t look friendly and despite my size – six-foot-four and 250 pounds – I wasn’t confident how I would fare if a fight broke out. I had been in just one bout in my life with the only damage a chipped tooth.

For the interview, prison officials had selected, at my request, an inmate serving time on a rape sentence. I never learned how he was picked, but clearly fate was at work in the process. We met – two men roughly the same age – in a windowless room, starkly furnished except for a metal table and a few straight-back chairs. I knew his name at the time, but we agreed in advance to not use it in the story. I called him “Mike” in the sexual predator profile I wrote that was published on Jan. 29, 1975.1

What I learned four years later was that “Mike,” whose real name was Eugene W. Gall Jr., was subsequently released from prison and became a serial rapist and murderer of girls, including Beth Ann Mote, 14, of Oakwood, at least one other young woman. He was known by law enforcement as the “Friday Night Rapist” for his pattern of committing his crimes on Friday nights.

The Interview

My interview that winter day in 1975 was remarkable to me then because it was my first time inside prison walls. Later, I found it notable for more sinister reasons. My interview transcript contained haunting clues foretelling Mote’s death, an infamous murder, but at the time meant little to me.

Over four decades in journalism and since that first interview, I visited many prisons to talk to inmates to write stories. I pretty quickly got used to the rhythm of prisons, walking hallways and yards unconcerned as dozens of inmates, from bad check writers to killers, milled around. I’ve been on Death Row many times, gone through metal detectors so often that I learned to cover my belt buckle with my hand so it wouldn’t set off the alarm, had my hand stamped to be viewed by ultraviolet light, ate bland prison food, and heard metal doors clank shut hard and loud around me.

There are sights and smells unique to prison.

By contrast, my talk with Gall that winter day so long ago ended up being surprisingly relaxed and low key given the subject matter we so casually discussed. Lew Stamp, a photographer from the newspaper where I worked, was with me to take pictures, but he was limited in what he could shoot since we had agreed not to identify Gall in print or to use a recognizable photograph. We published a picture of Gall seated with his hands steepled in front of him, a ring and big wristwatch on his left hand.

Gall, when we met, was serving a 10- to-30-year sentence on multiple counts of rape, abduction and assault with a deadly weapon involving three young girls. Prior to arriving at Lebanon, he spent a little less than two years at what was then the Lima State Hospital, a state psychiatric prison for the criminally insane. Once he was determined by psychiatric officials to be “returned to sanity,” Gall was shipped to a regular prison to finish serving his sentence.

It is no spoiler alert to say Gall had not returned to sanity, only taken a short side trip.

While I did not remember many specifics about the interview, fortunately I tape recorded it and later typed a transcript, a document that would, to my surprise, play a key role in Gall’s trial for the Beth Ann Mote murder. I kept a copy of the transcript when I left the Kettering-Oakwood Times in 1978 to head 40 miles east to go to work for the Springfield News-Sun. I left the original transcript, typed on 8-by-14-inch newsprint copy paper, in a file at the Kettering newspaper office.

Gall told me in significant detail in 1975 about how he planned and carried out his abductions and rapes. More importantly – because of the role it would play later in his trial - he explained his modus operandi, a specific, telltale method involving a mask he used in his rapes.

“The first one was in August 1970,” he said. “This girl was getting in her car after coming out of the house, and I jumped out of the bushes. Had a .45. I got her keys, started a car and we drove out to Warren County, pulled into a cornfield, told her to get into the back seat and she did.”

“I put the blindfold over her eyes, turned her around, and took off her clothes.”

Gall said he raped another girl in her home four months later, then described how he had to flee on foot, abandoning his third would-be victim, then he drove into a gas station where he was spotted by employees and subsequently arrested.

He bragged, with a measure of pride in his voice, that he had committed other abductions and rapes in Tennessee, Illinois, New York and New Jersey. I did not know if it was true or just criminal bravado, but I found it morbidly fascinating that he was so bold in his admissions. Most of the time, he said, “I would have them shut their eyes and take the mask off my face and put it over their eyes so I could kiss them and all that without the mask getting in the way.”

That detail with the mask would play a significant, haunting role in the murder of Beth Ann Mote and Gall’s trial, but at the time it was just an oddity to me. I wrote it down as a curious detail and moved on.

“They say a woman cannot be raped unless she wants to,” Gall told me off-handedly. “That’s not true. If a girl is scared enough, if you can put enough fear in a girl, she’ll do anything you want her to do.”

Gall was hoping back then that he would be released on what was known as “shock probation,” an experimental, sudden release aimed at shocking the offender to walk the straight and narrow. He was discharged from prison on parole just about two years later on April 12, 1977, having served five years of a 20-year sentence.

He told me he wanted to be caught – in fact was glad he was caught and sent to prison – because he feared his impulses would rage out of control again and he could rape or even kill a victim.

“If I had to spend five years here,” Gall told me, “I would fantasize probably of raping again, only this time on a mass scale, a Girl Scout camp or a college dorm, where you could line up 15 or 20 girls.”

My last question to Gall: “Do you think it’s a possibility when you get out this will happen again?”

“No. I’m not promising. I’m just hoping,” he replied absently.

And that was that, or so I thought. I returned to the Kettering newsroom, typed up my interview notes, and wrote a story, not using Gall’s name or picture, which accompanied the companion piece on rape victims.

I forgot about the story and about Eugene Gall.

Repercussions

About four years later, I was in the newsroom of my new employer, the Springfield News-Sun, when what I felt was that one-time, long forgotten story about a prison rapist boomeranged back to me. In a phone call from the Times, I learned that the prisoner I interviewed for 60 minutes in 1975 was out of prison, and was charged with kidnapping, raping and murdering Beth Ann Mote, of Oakwood, an affluent Dayton suburb. Gall pulled the 14-year-old off the street when she was her way to school on Oct. 20, 1977. She was never...