Pod Insights Park Predators The Bike About this episode When a 15-year-old girl vanishes while riding her bike near Indiana Dunes National Park in August 1995, it’s all hands on deck to find her. However, just like the ever-shifting landscape beneath law enforcement’s feet, an elusive predator blends into an alarming wave of violence in northern Indiana and northeast Illinois during the summer of 1995.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect...
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0:30 Speaker 03 Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia Diambra. And the case I'm going to tell you about today came to me in a unique way. My friends Britten and Ashley over on Crime Junkie did a deep dive into a notorious missing persons case at Indiana Dunes National Park in their home state of Indiana. And in true Crime Junkie fashion, the more they learned about that case, the more rabbit holes they found, as well as other cases that needed deep dives too. So our teams joined forces this week to feature two different cases which aren't related, but both happened in the same national park. After you listen to this episode, go over to the Crime Junkie feed and check out their
1:11 Speaker 03 episode titled "Infamous: The Indiana Dunes Disappearances." If you're part of the Crime Junkie fan club, it's available ad-free. Something I discovered while looking into this particular park is that prior to 2019, it was referred to as the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. But now it's known as the Indiana Dunes National Park. It's situated on the southernmost end of Lake Michigan, very close to Illinois's border with Indiana. According to the National Park Service's website, "For thousands of years, the lake's whipping winds and waves have formed and reshaped the roughly 15,000-acre park." There are wetlands, woods, prairies, and plenty of shoreline.
1:55 Speaker 03 If you're interested in hiking, there's lots of that too. More than 50 miles of trails. In the wintertime, the beaches in the park are covered in snow and ice, but in the spring and summer, life flourishes. Wildflowers, maple trees, and a large variety of birds showcase just some of the park's natural beauty. And in case you thought the "dune" part of the name was just for show, you'd be wrong. There are actual sand dunes there, and it took decades for state legislators and activists to make sure they were protected and preserved. In August of 1995, though, something terrible happened in one of those dunes that shook northwestern Indiana and northeast Illinois residents to their core.
2:37 Speaker 03 The brutal murder of a teenage girl on her birthday devastated her family and community, and became part of a series of high-profile law enforcement investigations that were all fixated on the same thing: an alarming uptick of local children being abducted and murdered in recreation spaces. This is Park Predators.
3:40 Speaker 03 Around 6:30 PM on Monday, August 7, 1995, a woman named Johnny White was at her home in Gary, Indiana with some of her other children, when she realized that her daughter, Janice, who was often referred to by the nickname China, had not come home from riding her bike. Now, this was kind of odd to Johnny because that day, the 7th, was actually Janice's birthday, like, the day she turned 15. And around 6:00 PM shortly after blowing out the candles on her birthday cake, she told her family she wanted to ride her pink and purple bike up and down their street. When she left, everyone assumed she wouldn't be gone long, but when 6:30 PM rolled around,
4:23 Speaker 03 and dusk had settled in, and Janice was still not back, that's when her mom became concerned that something wasn't right, and she called the Gary Police Department to report Janice missing. The source material isn't super clear what the department did right away to address the situation, or like exactly how many officers from the police department came out to the White's home. But what I can tell you is that according to coverage by Kim Liebler for The Times, "At some point on Monday evening, someone found Janice's bicycle abandoned near Indiana Dunes National Park, but Janice was nowhere to be found." And to give you all some quick context for just how close the Whites lived to the park, their home was on Hamilton Street, which is literally surrounded by woods, sand dunes,
5:08 Speaker 03 and a body of water, and it's a little over a 10-minute walk from their house to the southernmost point of Lake Michigan, which is actually near a scenic spot in the park called Miller Woods Beach. So when I say Janice went to ride her bike on her family's street, there's really only Hamilton Street and like a handful of other small neighborhood streets that she could have gone down. And actually, where their house was on Hamilton was at the dead end of the street, so we're talking about a super-small residential area enclosed by nature. Anyway, the next day, Tuesday, August 8th, desperate to find out where she was, Janice's family members, which included two of her older brothers, Anthony, who was 16, and
5:49 Speaker 03 another brother who actually lived in Chicago, did their own search and then later joined investigators to comb the surrounding areas, looking for any sign of their missing sister. Based on what I read in the source material, on Tuesday night while that search was underway, Anthony and the other brother sort of broke off on their own to scour a section of sand dunes about two miles away from where their sister's bike had been found. And as they were searching, Anthony stumbled upon who he recognized as his sister, but she definitely wasn't alive anymore. She was partially clothed, lying face down in one of the dunes, and she'd suffered what appeared to be severe head injuries. Horrified by the discovery, Anthony and his brother sprinted back to their mom's
6:34 Speaker 03 house and told her what they'd found. Word quickly spread to investigators, and within a matter of minutes, Anthony escorted four detectives to the spot in the park where he'd found his sister. When the group arrived, and authorities realized that the specific location where Janice's body was, wasn't a place that most people could easily get to. Investigators told reporter Kim Liebler that it was a secluded spot most visitors wouldn't bother walking to unless they liked to hike the sand dunes. In that same article by The Times, detectives stated that they didn't find any evidence around or leading to Janice's body that indicated she'd been dragged to the location, making investigators, I imagine, even more curious about how she'd ended up there, and
7:17 Speaker 03 furthermore, why her bike had been found so much further away. After her body was removed from the scene and taken for an autopsy, it was determined she'd likely died sometime on Monday night after being hit on the head with a blunt object which had fractured her skull. On Wednesday, two days after she vanished and one day after her body was found, investigators sent off evidence samples retrieved from her body to determine whether or not she'd been sexually assaulted. But those results weren't available right away, though, so in the meantime, authorities continued to focus on identifying a possible suspect or suspects. But they didn't go too far from home.
7:57 Speaker 03 One of the first people on detectives' radar was Anthony, Janice's 16-year-old brother. I think because he'd been the one to find her body and was able to lead investigators straight back to it, that made some folks in the police department wonder if maybe he could have been involved. But that theory went away almost as soon as it formed because both Anthony and his mom willingly spoke with investigators at the police station on Wednesday night, and shortly thereafter, authorities ruled him out as a suspect. One detective told The Times that really the main reason police wanted to interview Anthony so early on wasn't because they genuinely believed he was involved, but because they needed him to walk them through how he'd found his sister's body, which turns
8:41 Speaker 03 out was literally described as a one-in-a-million chance. Apparently, he just happened to glance in the right direction while searching the dunes with his older brother, and that's when he spotted his sister's remains. Which, again, I think kind of reinforced for investigators the idea that maybe whoever killed Janice was familiar enough with the park to attempt to conceal her body in a location they didn't think anyone would think to check. Janice was described by her family and high school teachers as a timid girl who had learning disabilities, but was very active with her schoolwork. One of her special education instructors told The Times that the murder was shocking because she fully expected to have Janice in her class when the teens started the 10th grade that fall.
9:25 Speaker 03 This teacher also told the newspaper that Janice was "shy and malleable." On Thursday, August 17th, 10 days after she disappeared and was killed, her family laid her to rest at a cemetery in Alsup, Illinois. During a memorial service in Gary right before that, Janice's older sister became so overwhelmed with grief as the casket was being taken to the hearse that her brothers had to lovingly restrain her from draping herself on top of it. That image just goes to show you how powerfully devastating Janice's death was to her family. Shortly after learning of her daughter's murder, Johnny told reporter Kim Liebler,
10:06 Speaker 03 quote, "I'll never know what she wished for when she blew out the candles. Her wish will never come true. I'll never know what she wished for." End quote. While the whites grieved, authorities made it their priority to speak with the family's neighbors to try and find anyone who might have seen something unusual on the night Janice disappeared. Around that same time, the FBI took over the murder investigation because the land where the crime happened was technically federal property. I also saw some coverage that later stated authorities did end up getting the results from Janice's sexual assault evidence kit. And the findings confirmed that she had been the victim of a sexual assault.
10:47 Speaker 03 As the days dragged on, though, with no arrests, the Gary community began to worry about a killer on the loose. And their fears weren't just mounting because Janice's case had seemingly stalled. People were fearful because another young girl riding her bike about 15 minutes away from where Janice lived turned up dead.
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11:42 Speaker 04 You know that thing where you're scrolling the internet and suddenly you're three hours deep into a celebrity lawsuit?
11:47 Speaker 05 Or you hear a courtroom term and think, wait, what does that actually mean?
11:51 Speaker 04 I'm Eliza Orland, career public defender.
11:53 Speaker 05 And I'm Taya Johnson, law professor and legal analyst.
11:57 Speaker 04 And on our brand new podcast, Criminally Online, we break down the law behind the stories you can't stop talking about.
12:03 Speaker 05 No legal degree required, just curiosity. Find Criminally Online wherever you get your podcasts.
12:18 Speaker 03 According to an article by Ken Kosky for The Times, on Tuesday, August 22, 1995, just over two weeks after Janice was murdered, an eight-year-old girl named Sarah Paulson, who lived in the nearby city of Portage, Indiana, which is basically right next door to Gary, was found brutally murdered while out on a bike ride. In an eerily similarity to Janice's case, Sarah was also found partially undressed, lying face down in a wooded area close to her home. The two big differences between her crime scene and Janice's was that, one, Sarah's bike, which also happened to be pink and purple, like Janice's, was found close to her body. According to the coverage,
13:01 Speaker 03 it was anywhere from a few feet away to less than 50 feet away, not in an entirely different location, as was the case with Janice. And, two, Sarah had been found about 100 yards behind the row of homes her family's house was close to, so literally right down the street. Janice's body, on the other hand, had been discovered a decent distance away from her home. From the start, Sarah's death was investigated as a homicide, and after her autopsy was conducted the night her body was found, the coroner's office determined she'd been strangled and sexually assaulted. Now, the timeline of Portage Police Department's actions involving Sarah's murder was a bit more condensed, simply because she'd been found almost right away.
13:46 Speaker 03 According to news reports, she disappeared sometime after 11:30 a.m., but around 12:20 p.m., a woman walking her dog in a wooded area near the Paulsons' home discovered the little girl's body. So the timeframe of her murder was super small, roughly 40 minutes between the last time she was seen alive and when her body was found. The woman who discovered her initially shrieked because she was so horrified by the sight. In fact, another eight-year-old girl who was playing in that exact same wooded area heard that woman scream and was so frightened she straight up left the woods as fast as she could. Naturally, Sarah's murder gripped the Portage community with fear. I mean, that's exactly what I would expect.
14:31 Speaker 03 A vicious slaying of such an innocent child would send most residents' sense of terror through the roof. One mother from Portage told Ken Kosky, quote, "This is just too close to home. We used to ride horses back there. We were never afraid to go there. What is the world coming to? Kids aren't safe. It's nothing like when I was young. You get one evil person who took it out on a little innocent girl. I hope they get whoever did this." End quote. Sarah was expected to start the second grade when summer ended, and her friends described her as quiet, kind, sometimes a bit of a prankster, and full of life. But she was not the type of kid who would strike up a conversation with a stranger
15:14 Speaker 03 or go off with someone she didn't know. One girl who was friends with her and saw her playing shortly before she was killed told The Times that Sarah was fast and strong, and it would have been out of character for her to go into the particular part of the woods behind the homes where her body was found. In the wake of the crime, parents and kids in the Paulson's neighborhood told reporters about a few different incidents that had happened in the days leading up to Sarah's murder that were now, in hindsight, even more unsettling. One mother said that sometime shortly before Sarah's death, a man driving an old, black rusted pickup truck with a crack in the windshield had followed her daughter home and then circled their house.
15:56 Speaker 03 She described this guy as having a beard and dark hair that went down to his shoulders. The incident of him circling their house was so eerie to her that she'd gone the extra step and called the police, but nothing seemingly came of her report, and no one was arrested. A few other children from the neighborhood said that the Friday before Sarah's murder, a man they seemingly didn't know had chased them through the neighborhood, but he'd been unable to catch any of them because he was on foot and they were riding their bikes. I think it's safe to say, with all of these reports circulating, plus Sarah and Janice's murders happening so close together just a few weeks apart, caused people to wonder if maybe everything was connected.
16:38 Speaker 03 It's also probably a good time for me to mention that, in addition to Sarah and Janice's cases, there had been other child abductions and murders in the greater northern Indiana, northeast Illinois area during the summer of 1995.
16:54 Speaker 03 In June, just two months before Janice and Sarah's deaths, a 14-year-old girl named Nikita Moore had been murdered and dumped in some woods close to her house in Gary. And there was also another case just about an hour and 25 minutes southwest of Gary, in Aroma Park, Illinois, that involved a young boy. According to reporting by the Associated Press, on the evening of August 7th, so the same day Janice disappeared, 10-year-old Christopher Meyer vanished in a recreation space close to his mom's house. He'd been walking and riding his bike along some trails next to the Kankakee River when he went missing. Organized searches on land and in the water got underway right away, but despite not finding Christopher,
17:38 Speaker 03 investigators from the Kankakee County Sheriff's Department did manage to locate his bicycle near a boat launch about a mile away from Aroma Park. And his shoes were also recovered. Around that same time, they received several good tips that allowed them to quickly zero in on a 27-year-old man from nearby Joliet, Illinois, who'd been paroled two years earlier in 1993 for, wait for it, murdering a 5-year-old girl more than a decade earlier in 1981. This guy's name was Timothy Buss, and actually, when Timothy committed that 1981 murder, he was just 13 years old. Which is possibly one of the reasons why he got paroled in 1993
18:23 Speaker 03 and didn't serve the full 25 years he was supposed to for that crime. Anyway, within a week of Christopher's disappearance, authorities learned that Timothy matched the description of a man who several eyewitnesses had seen fishing on the river and walking with Christopher on the evening he vanished. Even more incriminating, Timothy's vehicle was similar to a car that had been seen in the Aroma Park area. And when investigators searched it, they found blood in the trunk. He'd also washed a pair of boots he owned and tossed them in the trash. On Friday, August 11th, four days after Christopher vanished, investigators from Kankakee County arrested Timothy and charged him with kidnapping. Unfortunately, they couldn't yet charge him with murder
19:06 Speaker 03 because Christopher was still technically missing. And lab tests for the blood found in Timothy's truck had not yet confirmed whether it even belonged to the 10-year-old.
19:17 Speaker 03 In the meantime, searchers continued to scour the woods in and around Aroma Park and turned up further clues like a pair of undergarments and a strip of fabric that matched the color of Christopher’s shirt. However, just over a week after he disappeared, everyone’s worst fears were realized when authorities discovered a shallow grave in Kankakee River State Park, which sits on the border of Kankakee County and Will County. Inside the makeshift grave were Christopher’s remains. His autopsy results later showed he’d been stabbed and sexually assaulted. In total, between the searches for him and what investigators found at the shallow gravesite, roughly 100 items of potential evidence were collected as part of the case.
19:59 Speaker 03 At a vigil held in his honor at a local church shortly after the discovery, his heartbroken mother read a eulogy that stated, quote, “God loaned me 10 and 1/2 years of twinkling blue eyes, dimples, and joy. It is time now to lift up Chris and ask God to use this child as our special angel,” end quote. Christopher’s father, whom he actually lived with most of the year in Washington State, also spoke publicly about the tragic loss of his son and swift arrest of Timothy Buss. He stated, quote, “Hold your children. If you let them out of your sight, people like this will take them. I’m not getting through this. I’ll never get through this,” end quote.
20:42 Speaker 03 Because of the timing of Christopher’s abduction and murder, and the fact that his slang had quickly been tied to Timothy, it made it impossible for his case to be linked with Johnnys’s and Sarah’s. But the fact that his kidnapping and murder was still so fresh in people’s minds, I think that fed parents and guardians growing fears about the safety of their children. I also want to clarify here before I go on that Timothy Buss was eventually convicted in 1996 for abducting and killing Christopher. He was later sentenced to death but had his sentence commuted to life in prison in 2003 by Illinois’s then-Governor George Ryan. As of this recording, he is still an inmate in the Illinois Department of Corrections.
21:28 Speaker 03 An article Kim Liebler wrote for The Times addressed the topic of children's safety in light of all the recent violence against kids in the region. In the piece, investigators from all the agencies involved in the separate cases stated that they did not think any of the killings were connected. A Gary PD detective who was working on Nikita Moore's case told the newspaper that it was highly unlikely Nikita's killer was the same person who'd murdered Sarah Paulson, simply because the two victims' ages were so different. Nikita was 14 and Sarah was 8, and this detective said she firmly believed that this was the case. Another Gary PD detective told The Times that he didn't think Janice's killer was responsible
22:13 Speaker 03 for Sarah's murder. In his opinion, there were just too many differences between the crimes. For example, Janice had been beaten and found much further away from her bike and home, whereas Sarah had been strangled and her body and bike had been left basically in her own backyard. Their ages were also very different. Janice was 15 and Sarah was 8. However, I was thinking a little bit more about this detective's comments while researching this episode, and I found myself wondering if maybe it was possible, since Janice had learning disabilities, that she might have come across much younger than she actually was. I don't know this for sure, but it's one possibility that the detective who made those
22:56 Speaker 03 comments to The Times may or may not have considered. Now, even though authorities were collectively downplaying the theory that there was one serial predator to blame for Janice, Sarah, and Nikita's cases, that didn't stop them from issuing warnings to families to be more vigilant of their children. And people took those cautions to heart. In fact, a lot of folks stopped going to playgrounds and parks altogether, and one mother said she wasn't sure if she should even let her kids walk down their street to play with their friends anymore. By August 24th, neither Gary PD nor Portage authorities had made much headway identifying a suspect or suspects in Janice or Sarah's deaths, despite a $15,000 reward being offered
23:38 Speaker 03 in Sarah's case, and then later increased to $20,000 and then $40,000. But investigators tried not to let that stall them. Portage police detectives sent evidence to the Indiana State Crime Lab for additional evaluation and looked into people listed on the state sex offender registry. They also interviewed and took biological samples from a man from Chicago and questioned a guy living near Sarah's neighborhood who'd previously been convicted of sex crimes against young girls. But even with all those good leads, authorities seemingly kept hitting dead end after dead end. On Friday, August 25th, a few days after Sarah's murder, her parents, friends, and
24:19 Speaker 03 several hundred attendees laid her to rest at a cemetery in Portage. That same day, the family issued a statement that read in part, quote, "The family of Sarah Lynn Paulson wished to publicly express their heartfelt thanks to their friends, relatives, and the entire community for their generous outpouring of support in response to the tragic death of their daughter. Your prayers and support mean a lot to our family at this time. The response has been overwhelming, and we just want to tell everyone, 'Thank you.'" End quote. The day after the funeral, investigators announced that a witness had come forward and reported they'd seen a black man wearing a blue and red work shirt walking away from
25:02 Speaker 03 the general area where Sarah had been killed. They described him as acting very nervously. Portage investigators jumped on this tip and attempted to find the guy, and even canvassed businesses in the area looking for workers who wore that kind of clothing, but they were unsuccessful. They also put out a sketch of the work shirt on the news, but no one who called in about it could confirm what kind of logo it was or the type of company it belonged to. This tip was considered critically important, though, because the man who'd been donning the work shirt had been spotted between 11:40 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on August 22nd, which was the approximate timeframe investigators believed Sarah's killer committed the crime and then fled.
25:46 Speaker 03 Shortly after that update came out, authorities announced they wanted to speak with a white man in his 30s about Sarah's case. This man was a different person than the guy who'd been seen in the work shirt, but whether or not they ever spoke with that white guy is unclear. What I can tell you is that while these leads were being chased down in Sarah's case, Portage Police officials stayed in contact with the FBI and Gary PD detectives, who were still trying to solve Janice's murder. By early September 1995, investigators working Sarah's case had looked into and eliminated several potential suspects, including that guy from Chicago that authorities had retrieved samples from.
26:27 Speaker 03 And I couldn't find much about where progress in Janice's case was at that point in time, but it doesn't appear there was much as far as new information. And that might have to do with the fact that in early September, Janice's case was lumped into a group of other murders that a newly-formed task force had determined all occurred in the city between May and August 1995. These seven cases included Janice's slaying and the murder of that other Gary teenager I mentioned earlier named Nikita Moore. Sarah Paulson's murder was not included in this task force's probe because all the victims they were looking into were black females, who'd either been beaten or strangled and
27:07 Speaker 03 were discovered unclothed or partially clothed in wooded areas in Gary. Basically, there was a fairly distinct pattern in those seven killings, which didn't match aspects of Sarah's murder. Ken Kosky reported for The Times, though, that while the task force worked its cases, Portage Police stayed busy doing their own thing, chasing down leads in Sarah's case. Kim Liebler reported for The Times that Gary PD investigators believed the seven victims from Gary, which like I mentioned a second ago, did include Janice and Nikita, might be the work of one serial killer. But until they could study the crimes further, they weren't sure of anything. They admitted there was a clear pattern as far as race, injuries, and location of the bodies.
27:52 Speaker 03 But Janice and Nikita's cases differed slightly in that they were both teenagers, and all the other Gary victims were in their mid-to-late 20s to early 50s.
28:03 Speaker 03 Unfortunately, I couldn't find much else about this task force's work, though, after September 1995, because the coverage just kind of dropped off after that. The next big headlines that came up were all related to Sarah's murder investigation. You see, in early November 1995, the homicide investigation into her death broke wide open when authorities identified and arrested a convicted rapist named Eugene Britt for the crime. Eugene, as it turns out, would become a notorious name in the state of Indiana for a slew of horrific murders and sexual assaults, most of which included cases that the Gary Task Force had looked into.
28:50 Speaker 00 When an intruder approaches a home, they expect a camera. What they don't expect...
28:54 Speaker 01 Stop. This is SimpliSafe. Police are on the way.
28:56 Speaker 00 Using smart AI cameras, live US-based agents help deter intruders in under 30 seconds. Don't just record a break-in, stop it from ever happening. Plans starting around $1 a day. Right now, get 70% off your new system with professional monitoring at simplisafe.com/truecrime.
29:13 Speaker 02 30 seconds response time requires monitoring plan with outdoor protection starting at $49.99 a month. Visit simplisafe.com/licenses for alarm license information.
29:20 Speaker 04 You know that thing where you're scrolling the internet and suddenly you're three hours deep into a celebrity lawsuit?
29:25 Speaker 05 Where you hear a courtroom term and think, wait, what does that actually mean?
29:29 Speaker 04 I'm Eliza Orland, career public defender.
29:31 Speaker 05 And I'm Taya Johnson, law professor and legal analyst.
29:34 Speaker 04 And on our brand new podcast, Criminally Online, we break down the law behind the stories you can't stop talking about.
29:40 Speaker 05 No legal degree required, just curiosity. Find Criminally Online wherever you get your podcasts.
29:56 Speaker 03 For those of you in Indiana or the Midwest who may be familiar with the name Eugene Britt, I probably need not say more. But for listeners who don't know who he is, I want to give you a quick rundown. In 1993, Eugene had been released from prison after serving 15 years for a sexual assault he'd committed in 1978. In August of 1995, he was 37 years old and living in Portage, Indiana, at a shelter for the unhoused, but had a job at a Hardee's fast food restaurant in town, which required him to wear a uniform or work shirt. According to coverage by the Associated Press, he'd come onto law enforcement's radar in
30:36 Speaker 03 Sarah's case after that eyewitness reported seeing a man who looked like him near where she'd been killed. So based on that, I think it's safe to say that Eugene was the guy who'd been seen wearing that apparently very unique, blue and red work shirt police had such a hard time initially identifying. Anyway, Portage investigators determined that fibers from Eugene's uniform were similar to fibers that had been discovered underneath Sarah's fingernails. When he was taken into custody, investigators seized a pair of sneakers he was wearing as evidence, and upon further examination, realized those shoes had a remarkably similar tread to shoe prints discovered at Sarah's crime scene, which was not information that
31:19 Speaker 03 had previously been publicized, at least not that I could find. After his arrest, Eugene didn't cooperate with Portage police investigators right away. But after a few days in custody and like a pastor associate of his talking with him, and an eight-hour interrogation, he eventually came clean. He admitted to killing and sexually assaulting Sarah, as well as murdering around a dozen other people in both Gary and Portage, Indiana. Some of the crimes he confessed to were deaths the police didn't even know about. For example, as part of his confession, he agreed to lead investigators to one woman's body, and lo and behold, when he took police to the remote area he claimed he'd placed
32:02 Speaker 03 her remains in, they found a woman's skeletal remains. He would later go on to lead officials to even more victims. According to coverage by the Associated Press, Eugene said all but one of his victims were women or girls who he'd either beaten to death or strangled. He claimed that not all of the slayings involved sexual assault, though. He said he'd only done that to five of his victims, but, I mean, I don't know how much stock we can put in the word of a self-admitted serial killer. Anyway, Eugene confessed that at least seven of his murders had occurred in Gary between May and September 1995. But interestingly, he did not take credit for Janice's abduction and murder.
32:44 Speaker 03 And it doesn't appear investigators working her case found anything that tied him to her death. No physical evidence, circumstantial evidence, witness sightings, nothing. But him being arrested for Sarah's murder and taken off the street at least gave the public some sense of relief. However, law enforcement's journey toward justice had kind of just begun at that point because they still had to figure out if he might be responsible for the murders of all those other victims who'd been killed in Gary in 1995. You know, victims like Nikita Moore and the other five women who the serial killer task force had looked into back in September. Unfortunately, definitive legal consequences about what crimes Eugene was responsible
33:26 Speaker 03 for wouldn't come until several years after he was caught. In November 1999, instead of going to trial for Sarah's murder, he took a plea deal which allowed him to avoid the death penalty. He was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Seven years later, in 2006, he was convicted of Nikita Moore's sexual assault and murder, the sexual assault and slaying of a 24-year-old woman named Tanya Dunlap, the sexual assault and murder of a 41-year-old woman named Maxine Walker, and the sexual assault of a 13-year-old. The news coverage from 2006 explains that originally he'd been facing charges for the
34:06 Speaker 03 crimes I just listed, plus three of the murders from Gary that the serial killer task force had looked into. But those three cases were eventually dropped as part of the plea deal. Which is super frustrating to me because according to coverage by the Associated Press, Eugene didn't deny killing those women. In fact, he fully confessed to those crimes. But, I don't know, maybe there just wasn't enough evidence in those cases, or it was a compromise prosecutors had to make to ensure he was put away forever. Like I said, it's super frustrating, but that's the American justice system for you. In court at his sentencing, Eugene wept over the impact of his crimes and said, quote,
34:48 Speaker 03 "I'm truly sorry for my sins and I take full responsibility for my actions. Ain't nobody but myself. God knows I'm guilty. God knows I'm guilty." End quote. As of this recording, Eugene is still incarcerated in the Indiana Department of Corrections. He's 67 years old, and there are a lot more articles out there that go into much further detail about him and his crimes. But I don't want to use my time here giving him any more attention than what's necessary. It was definitely a good thing for humanity that he was caught and prevented from taking even more lives. I'm sure his arrest and conviction must have been especially important to Sarah Paulson, Nikita Moore, and the other victims' families.
35:31 Speaker 03 But unfortunately for Janice White's loved ones, the end to his reign of violence in northern Indiana didn't bring them any closer to identifying her killer. In fact, based on everything I've researched and read, it appears Janice's case went cold after the late 1990s, despite the FBI offering up a $3,000 reward for information in 1997. Her mom, Johnny, passed away about a decade after that in 2008, never knowing who killed her daughter. And the case sort of faded from the spotlight for several more years, until September 2015, more than 20 years after the crime. That's when seemingly out of nowhere, the FBI made an arrest.
36:15 Speaker 03 They charged a 34-year-old man from Gary, Indiana, named Barry Taylor for making a false statement to FBI agents in regards to Janice's case. According to a federal indictment filed a few days before his arrest, at some point in the murder investigation, the FBI's lab had tested Janice's clothing and discovered there was semen present on her underwear. They subsequently tested that semen sample for DNA and discovered it belonged to an unknown male. By January 2012, the feds had done more investigating and developed enough probable cause to suspect that that unknown profile might belong to Barry Taylor. Now, I'm not sure exactly how all this happened.
36:58 Speaker 03 Like, I don't know the ins and outs of what led the FBI to his doorstep, but whatever the case was, they ended up interviewing him on January 15, 2012.
37:08 Speaker 03 During that conversation, two agents asked Barry if he'd had any kind of relationship with Janice back in August 1995, which by the way, at that time, he would have been 15 years old too, just like Janice. So I think what the agents wanted to get to the bottom of was if maybe there could have been some sort of sexual encounter between the two teens on the day she was killed, that either innocently, or perhaps not so innocently, could explain things a bit more. But Barry denied being sexually involved with Janice as a teenager, and when the agents asked him if there was any reason why his DNA might be on her clothing, he said no. But that wasn't a smart answer, because before the two agents left, they presented
37:52 Speaker 03 a search warrant to Barry and asked him for an oral swab of his DNA, which he consented to. And about two months later, on March 13th, the findings came back with damning results. The DNA from the semen found on Janice's underwear belonged to him. But, like I mentioned a few minutes ago, when the FBI formally arrested Barry in September 2015, they didn't charge him with murder. They only arrested him for making false statements to federal agents. At the time, he had a prior juvenile record that was not detailed in the available source material, and he'd been arrested and convicted as an adult for crimes like possession of a controlled substance, reckless driving, burglary, and possession of stolen property.
38:35 Speaker 03 At his first appearance in court a few days after his arrest, he was issued a $20,000 bond, which he posted and was released on. His trial was originally scheduled for December 2015, but was later pushed to March 21st, 2016. According to court records, a few days before that trial date, Barry ended up reaching a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. In exchange for admitting that he lied to the FBI about having sex with Janice in August 1995, Barry was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by two years of supervision. The judge who handed down the sentence to Barry in court said, quote, "What you did was stupid. I don't know how else to say it.
39:19 Speaker 03 It's important for you to be honest with federal investigators. That being said, you're a human being." End quote.
39:27 Speaker 03 After everything was said and done, Barry wasn't required to pay restitution to any members of the White family, and he was never charged in relation to Janice's murder. According to his inmate profile with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, he was released from prison in August 2017.
39:47 Speaker 03 To date, no one has been arrested or held criminally responsible for killing Janice. I reached out to the FBI's Indianapolis Field Office while writing this episode, and a public information officer confirmed that the homicide case still remains active with the Bureau. Where I'm left after researching the story and all the others I mentioned in this episode is just sort of sad. There's a part of me that feels justice was served in some of the cases, but then, with Janice, I feel as if so much more could have and should have been done to get to the bottom of what happened to her. If there's one thing that's clear, it's that she was a young, beautiful girl who had her entire life ripped away from her by a predator who I believe was intimately
40:30 Speaker 03 familiar with Gary, Indiana, and Indiana Dunes National Park. If you're listening to this episode and feel you may know something that could help bring resolution to her case or identify the true perpetrator, please reach out to me through the Park Predators social media pages and contact the FBI. You can call 1-800-CALL-FBI or submit a tip at tips.fbi.gov. The agents working her case are aware of this episode's release and are ready to receive any tips.
41:06 Speaker 03 Park Predators is an AudioChuck production. You can view a list of all the source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. And you can also follow Park Predators on Instagram, @parkpredators.
41:24 Speaker 03 So what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?
41:31 Speaker 06 One day last year detectives knocked on the door of a multimillion dollar mansion in Los Angeles County. Inside, they found a strange scene. A dining area converted into classrooms with children and toddlers seated at rows of desks. The couple that lived there had 21 kids.
41:52 Speaker 07 It's a house that looks like a castle, but it's under investigation for being a possible factory, a baby factory.
41:59 Speaker 06 Where had these children come from? Almost all of them were born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived. Me and my coworker, we named her the surrogate pimp. That's the one time that we called the cops because she was screaming. And then he pulled out a gun.
42:14 Speaker 05 I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into?
42:20 Speaker 06 I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark feed, wherever you get your podcasts.
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