33 years ago last month

Here's the story I wrote following the March 9, 1981, execution of Steven Judy - Indiana's first execution in almost two decades.

By John Flora
The Indianapolis News

MICHIGAN CITY, Ind. – Minutes after making a surprise telephone call to a former girlfriend he hadn't seen in five years, convicted murderer Steven Judy died today in Indiana's electric chair.
Judy, 24, became the first felon to die in the electric chair at the State Prison in nearly 20 years at 12:12 a.m.
Judy's foster father, Robert Carr, Indianapolis, and his attorney, Steven Harris, were the only two witnesses to the execution, other than Department of Correction personnel who helped carry out the sentence imposed by Hendricks Circuit Judge Jeffrey Boles.
"He called a girl in Texas that he was really serious about a few years ago," Carr said of Judy's final half-hour. "I don't know why. It just came out of the dark. He hadn't talked to her in five or six years. This was about 25 or 20 'til 12.
"They finally located her and got her on the phone... her name is Jeannie. I don't know her last name," Carr said. "He went with her a year or two back in '73 or '74.
"I think she was probably the only girl he really loved," Carr said.
Carr said Judy received about 20 telegrams on his last day on Death Row, all of them from people urging him to change his mind and ask for a stay of execution.
Judy, he said, remained adamant until the end that he would rather die in the electric chair than spend decades in prison for the April, 1979, rape and murder of Terry Lee Chasteen and the drowning deaths of her children, Misty Zollers, 5; Stephen Chasteen, 4, and Mark Chasteen, 2.
Mrs. Chasteen, a divorcee, was en route to the home of a babysitter with her children before going to her job as a supermarket checkout clerk when she had a flat tire along Interstate 465 near Weir Cook Airport. Judy happened by and changed the tire, but disabled her car and lured her into his pickup truck.
Testimony at his trial in Martinsville indicated Judy drove his victims to a secluded area along White Lick Creek southwest of Mooresville where he raped and strangled Mrs. Chasteen and drowned her children in the creek.
"I have all the sympathy in the world for the Chasteen family," Mrs. Carr said after the execution.
"But Mark Chasteen (Mrs. Chasteen's former husband) has put on a veneer as the grieving father and the grieving husband. He never showed one bit of emotion during the entire trial.
"Most men would have to be physically restrained," she said. "Through the entire thing, he sat holding hands with his lady friend and he showed no emotion whatsoever.
"And suddenly he claims to be a devout Christian. But he has made the statement that he would like to be the one to pull the switch. I didn't know that God had granted him that right," she said.
Less than an hour after the execution, Mr. and Mrs. Carr returned to the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge where they and their family have been staying in recent days and told their children Judy was dead.
"We just told them it was fast," Carr said.
"We told them it was finished and he went like a man and like he wanted to go," Mrs. Carr added.
"We told them that he sent them his love."
Carr, who left the prison visibly shaken, said he watched the execution through a glass window. He said he believed Judy was unable to see him through the glass before the mask was placed over the condemned man's eyes.
"I kind of looked for him to maybe throw a hand signal or something, but he didn't," Carr said.
"They gave him a shot at 15 'til 12. It was like a tranquilizer because all of his muscles were tightening up," Carr said, adding that it was Judy's decision to have the shot.
"He wasn't nervous at all," Carr said. "It was just that his nerves were tightening up and he was kind of hyper the last half-hour or so."
Mrs. Carr said Judy broke down and cried on at least on occasion yesterday.
"Even though the public has never seen Steve Judy cry, I guarantee he cries frequently," she said, still speaking of her foster son in the present tense 90 minutes after his execution.
When Mrs. Carr left Judy's cell for the last time she said, "We hugged. We do what you do when you tell people good-bye for the very last time. I'm certain there are very few people who have ever experienced that.
"I told him I loved him and he told me he loved me and was sorry he had put us through so much," she said, adding she and Judy were both crying at the time.
One of Judy's last acts was to give his wrist watch to fellow Death Row inmate James Lowery with whom he had developed a friendship while at the prison.
Earlier, Carr said, Judy had joked about wearing his watch to the execution to "charge it up."
About 60 reporters and cameramen covering the execution were passed through two checkpoints about 11 p.m. and gathered in a small conference room on the second floor of the prison administration building.
As the clock on the conference room wall edged past midnight, the room became noticeably quieter, but there was no dimming of the lights or other indication of the exact moment the initial switch was thrown and the first charge of 2,300 volts passed through Judy's body.
The first official announcement came at 12:20 a.m. when Tom Hanlon, administrative assistant with the Department of Correction, stepped to the podium and, voice trembling, said, "The execution of Steven T. Judy, 24, as ordered by the Morgan County Superior Court, was carried out this morning at the Indiana State Prison, Michigan City, Indiana. The official pronouncement of death was made by the doctors in attendance at 12:12 a.m. CST."
At 2:30 p.m. yesterday, Hanlon said, Judy showered, received new institutional clothing and was prepared for the execution. At 3:31 p.m., he was moved from his cell on Death Row to a holding cell in the execution room.
"He ordered and received supper which consisted of prime rib, lobster, baked potatoes, salad and dinner rolls. He ate at 8:04 CST," Hanlon said, noting Judy's request for beer with his last meal was denied.
"At 12:05 a.m. CST, DOC personnel entered Judy's cell and asked if he had any comments or requests.
"He said, 'I don't hold no grudges. This is my doing. I'm, sorry it happened,'" Hanlon said.
"He was then escorted from the holding cell to the execution room and placed in the electric chair.
The sentence was then carried out. Steve Judy's body was released to the LaPorte County deputy coroner.
Funeral and burial arrangements will be made by the foster family," he said.
After the initial 10-second high-voltage charge, Hanlon said, Judy received a 20-second charge of 500 volts.
Carr said later he was convinced Judy felt nothing after "three or four seconds" and was satisfied the execution was carried out as painlessly as possible.
Asked who actually threw the switch to execute Judy, Hanlon said, "I can only refer you to the Indiana statute which says, 'either the warden or his assistant,'" adding it will never be announced which person carried out the sentence.
At the close of the press conference, Hanlon distributed copies of a statement by Gov. Robert Orr which said, in part, "Now that this difficult ordeal is over, I am at peace with myself because I know I have met my responsibilities under the law and because I believe justice has prevailed."
Henry Schwartzchild, who represented the American Civil Liberties Union in a fruitless attempt to foil Judy's wish to die, told about 200 protesters outside the prison gates before the execution, "The governor, the attorney general, the clemency commission, the judges and the prosecutors involved all have the invisible mark of Cain upon their foreheads.
"Judy's consent to his own execution cannot wipe that stain away, for who would think that our political and legal leaders should follow the wishes of a sick and destructive killer? Like Adolf Eichmann, they say they merely did their duty and like Pilate they say, 'The law took its course and the blood is not on our hands.' It has been a contemptible spectacle."
"The State of Indiana tonight is winning a very sorry victory over us," he said.

Diversity

The world if full of things that seem perfectly normal to some people, but strike me as hopelessly bizarre.

I was reminded of that this afternoon while scanning images from the 1972 Flora (Ind.) Centennial Celebration Parade.

Specifically, I’m bemused by these photos of a bunch of guys from the Kokomo Shrine Club in their tiny antique cars. I’ve seen Shriners in tiny Corvettes, too, but these things are particularly quaint.

What motivates a guy to spend time and money to join and participate in a sub-group like this? They obviously enjoy it and think it’s a worthwhile activity.

Maybe they think there’s something extraordinarily wacky about wanting to ride a motorcycle across the country. Seems normal to me, but it could be completely inconceivable to them.

I hasten to add that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wearing a fez white shirt and tie and stuffing oneself into a tiny car and driving down the street with a dozen or so like-minded buddies. I’m glad there are such people and things in the world. It makes life interesting.

Just don’t ask me to do it.

More random scans

The dog who hung out under the liar’s bench in front of the Needham Post Office. Needham was a small village northeast of Franklin in Johnson County, Indiana.

An audience gathered in anticipation of the obligatory up-the-skirt blast of compressed air at the Indiana State Fair Midway Fun House.

WTTV’s Janie, from the “Popeye and Janie Show,” in the 1973 Flora, Indiana, Centennial Parade.

Me, looking for something to photograph around 1967.

A self-portrait shot in the autumn of 1966 when I lived in a mobile home and worked at the Tipton Tribune. This was among the first photos I shot with my first-ever 35mm camera – a Minolta Hi-Matic 7.

Awkward moment

I got this text message this morning from a number I didn’t recognize.

I quickly texted Maria to see if she sent it. She didn’t.

I supposed it was someone telling me to mow my home lawn and wondered which of my neighbors would be so presumptuous.

So I responded, asking who sent it.

Turns out it’s from one of the tenants of our downtown office building. I noticed the grass was getting woolly there when I rode past on Saturday morning. I supposed that our geriatric lawn boy would get to it over the weekend, but he obviously didn’t.

I called him and he assured me he will get on it ASAP.

Sorry, blog, I’ve neglected you…

I just realized I haven’t posted here for a few days.

I’ve been having fun going through my image archives now that my scanner is functional and I found my lightbox and bought a cool Mamiya 3x 6x7 loupe from longtime Indianapolis News friend Rich Miller. (It’s the perfect complement to my Mamiya 5x loupe.)
I still haven’t found the missing Janis Joplin negs, but plenty of other long-lost images have surfaced and they’re getting rave reviews from folks on Facebook.
It’s amazing how a throwaway shot, like this 1967 photo of Christmas shoppers at Glendale Shopping Center in Indianapolis – that’s when Glendale was an open-air mall – evokes such powerful nostalgia in so many people.

Being a Cancerian, I have a strong attachment to the past and an inclination to never throw anything away and my refusal to part with old slides and negatives is paying off now.

Like this photo from a 1988 Labor Day Weekend ride Rich Nathan and I took to the Ozarks.

Or this photo Mark Wadleigh shot of me and Michael Lindberg buying milk and Tab at the Lindner’s Dairy Store at 49th and College in Indianapolis. Michael was a great guy whose life ended much too soon. A few years after this 1977 photo, he blew his brains out with a .357 magnum pistol on a park bench in Seattle. I still have a coffee table he made as a high school shop project in his hometown of Thief River Falls, Minn. It’s on loan to Morgan at present.

My first car

I was 21 when I bought my first car – a Fontana gray 1965 Volkswagen beetle.

I bought it on Aug. 1, 1966 at University Motors in West Lafayette, Ind. I remember the date because the sound system at the dealership was carrying the radio news reports of Charles Whitman shooting people from the top of the University of Texas Tower.

I drove it well past the 100,000-mile mark and sold it sometime in the mid-1970s after parts of the floor rusted out letting the road show through.

Here’s the view from the driver’s seat. What can we see?

There were 42,918 miles on the odometer, the gas gauge shows a full tank, and it had the stock AM radio. I added the under-dash parcel tray after seeing one in the VW Steve Power’s mom drove. The hood (actually it was a trunk since the engine was in the back) release that I had to pull whenever I gassed up. It was a year or two later that VW added an external gas filler. There are two packs of Viceroy cigarettes, one unopened, and a box of Kodak Ektachrome 35mm film.

The key is in the ignition with my U.S. Air Force dogtag dangling on a short chain. And the ashtray is open.

Notice that the odometer only goes up to 99,999. That was when anything over about 60,000 miles was high mileage.

Something was in the air

It was the spring before the Summer of Love and I drove down to Bloomington with some friends to check out a “Be In” at Dunn Meadow on the Indiana University campus.

Sure enough, the place was full of tail-end beatniks and proto-hippies all trying to look arty and cool, yet profound.

It felt a bit forced and self-consciously artificial, but it was the Midwest, so we all had a lot to learn about what it meant to be 20-something in 1967.

I don’t recall smelling any pot smoke or seeing anything suggestive of drug use, just a lot of young people checking each other out.

How I used to spend my summers

I was an instructor for the Motorcycle Safety Foundation’s beginning rider course for 10 years from the mid-1980s to the mid-‘90s and taught more than 1,000 students the basics of motorcycling.

I taught under the auspices of ABATE of Indiana in a mobile home converted into a classroom and plunked down on whatever parking lot we could find.

This is the view from the podium during a class in the summer of 1989.

I loved teaching people who were motivated and wanted to learn. I would have made teaching my profession if I could have been guaranteed motivated students, but the big difference between teaching motorcycle safety and any other subject in a public school is having to deal with kids who aren’t interested in what you have to give them. That pretty much never happened in the MSF course. It happens every day in public schools.

The course has since been revised several times and instructors are now called “coaches.” But it remains an extremely powerful learning experience that combines classroom lectures and videos with hands-on riding exercises on entry-level motorcycles.

Anyone who wants to ride a motorcycle owes it to himself and everyone he shares the road with to take the course. I can’t count the number of times the knowledge and skills I gained in the course have saved my life.

Jean Dixon in Flora, Ind.?

The town of Flora, Ind. marked the centennial of its naming in 1975 and, since it was named for some of my ancestors, I got to cover the festivities for The Indianapolis News.

I haven’t looked at the negatives I shot for decades, but when I was going through my archives last week in search of some Janis Joplin photos – which continue to elude me – I found them.

And I was startled to be reminded that the famous astrologer, psychic and syndicated newspaper columnist Jean Dixon was the parade marshal.

How in hell the folks in Flora chose and got her to appear is a baffling mystery. To me, anyway.

Dixon supposedly predicted the 1963 assassination of John Kennedy in the May 13, 1956 issue of Parade magazine. She later advised Richard Nixon and Nancy Reagan.

She died in 1997.

Niagara Falls. Really.

Here’s a view of Niagara Falls I’ll bet you’ve never seen.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers diverted the Niagara River, “dewatering” the American Falls on June 12, 1969.

The point of the exercise, which kept the falls mostly dry until November, 1969, was to determine the rate of erosion and to try to stabilize the falls from deterioration.

That first day, the bodies of a man, a woman and a deer were found at the foot of the falls. The woman’s body was badly decomposed, but she wore a gold wedding band engraved with “Forget me not.” The man is believed to have committed suicide by wading into the river at the edge of the falls the day before the water was diverted.

This is how the American Falls looked on June 13, 1969.

The water was restored to the falls on Nov. 24.

Here are your wedding photos, Lieutenant. Sorry they’re 69 years late.

My late father-in-law, Capt. Phil Kroon, ended the war in Austria and was billeted at the Hotel Bilroth in St. Gilgen.

He shot a lot of photos during the war, but the only surviving negatives were after V-E Day. They include these photos of a newlywed lieutenant and nurse, possibly at the Bilroth.

I can't tell what unit the lieutenant is with but his boots are bloused, which could mean he was airborne - perhaps 101st Airborne, since they ended the war in the same area.

I have no idea whether Capt. Kroon ever had prints made from these 35mm negatives, so this very well could be the first time these nearly 69-year-old images have been seen.

My first four motorcycles

I finally got my scanner working again, so I have access to my vast archive of negatives and slides.

This photo dates from the autumn of 1985 and is a sequential lineup of my first four motorcycles – a Kawasaki KR-175, a 1971 BMW R50/5, a 1978 Kawasaki KZ650, and my latest acquisition, a 1981 BMW R100RS.

The R100RS sat on the showroom floor at Cycle Werks BMW in Indianapolis for several months, apparently not appealing to anyone – probably because the previous owner put a stupid-looking too-tall windscreen on it. I saw past that flaw and made it my own for the next six years, after restoring its appearance to stock with an OEM windscreen.

I have fond memories of all four bikes, but the R100RS is the one that took me to California and opened my mind to the possibilities of long distance motorcycle touring. It changed my life.

Quilt show weekend

The annual St. Bernards Threads of Life Quilt Show is this weekend at the St. Bernards Auditorium in Jonesboro.

Maria has some quilts on display and will work the gift shop tomorrow.

This bud’s for us

It looks like at least one of our four kwanzan flowering cherry trees is going to bloom this spring.

I photographed these buds a few minutes ago and inspected the other three. They’re all showing green buds, but nothing suggesting flowers yet.

Spring seems a little late this year. We’re just now starting to see a hint of a green haze on the trees when we peer into the woods and our dogwood tree seems to be struggling to put on buds.

Searching for Janis

I finally found my lightbox this morning, buried deep in cardboard boxes in the garage, which makes it possible for me to renew my search for missing images – notably black-and-white negatives from a 1967 performance by Janis Joplin and Big Brother & the Holding Co. at Indiana Beach in Monticello, Ind.

I have a couple of six-frame strips in my “rock stars of the ‘60s” portfolio, but a contact sheet I made at the time tells me there are several strips unaccounted for.

I’m using the nifty Mamiya 3X 6x7 loupe I bought a week or so ago from longtime Indianapolis News compadre and master wedding photographer Rich Miller when he was disposing of his darkroom stuff.

But I was stymied until I found the lightbox, which has been the subject of an off-and-on search for several weeks. There’s also a box somewhere out there with several thousand color prints, but that will have to wait.

The negs go back to the first 35mm stuff I ever shot in 1966 while working at the Tipton Daily Tribune, using my first 35mm camera – a Minolta HiMatic 7. And they’re a mix of personal photos and pictures shot for The Indianapolis News, which makes the process a real stroll down Memory Lane.

There are photos of pigs on a houseboat on a rural Sheridan farm, Carmel and Zionsville cheerleaders that Skip Hess and I shot thinking we might be able to sell them to the girls’ parents, the first Banks of the Wabash Festival in Terre Haute, a guy in Hagerstown who made tiny wedges to fit the handles to hammers and hatchets and similar hand tools, a Galveston church being converted into a private home, Gov. Edgar Whitcomb signing a proclamation, a Carmel girl’s Soap Box Derby car, an Amish festival at Bremen, and on and on.

And also a shitload of photos I don’t remember shooting of people I’ve forgotten doing things I don’t recognize. There are thousands of those and, since I can’t imagine ever needing them, they are consigned to the wastebasket next to the kitchen table where all of this is happening.

I am struck by how much film I wasted on stupid, pointless shots of trees, clouds, cars on the street, planes at the airport and in the sky, birds in trees or on bird feeders, odd buildings, etc. Those are helping to fill the wastebasket too.

Of course, if and when I finish this task, I have to take another run at getting my Nikon negative scanner to work with my 64-bit Windows 7 operating system. Nikon orphaned the machine when Win7 came out by not writing a 64-bit driver for it. Happily, someone did, but I have not been successful in getting it to work right, even though I had it working with an earlier version of Win7 on a hard drive that died.

One more

70,000 miles later, I still love it

Here I am at 11:03 a.m., Saturday, February 22, 2003, at Revard BMW Motorcycles in Indianapolis.

It was the first time I sat on what was to become my new ride – a 2003 BMW K1200GT. It’s taken me to the West Coast a couple of times, the Colorado Rockies several times, Daytona Bike Week twice, and BMW MOA rallies in Charleston, W.Va. (2003); Spokane, Wash. (2004); Lima, Ohio (2005); Essex Junction, Vt. (2006); Gillette,Wyo. (2008); Johnson City, Tenn. (2009); Redmond, Ore. (2010); and Sedalia, Mo. (2012).

Betcha can’t catch me, Jack…

We stopped by Hollywood Feed in Jonesboro this afternoon to pick up some dog treats.

We ended up getting a BOGO (buy one, get one free) deal on two small bags of exotic dog food that is better for them than standard treats, cashing in a completed Fromm card for a free 33 pound bag of food and this wonderful, seemingly indestructible rope toy.

Dora and Jack took to it immediately and took turns owning it as they romped around the yard in the 75-degree spring sunshine.

Another reason to like Qdoba

Free mouthwash dispensers in the restrooms.

There were heroes all around us

Growing up in Delphi, Ind. in the years immediately following World War II, I felt at a disadvantage regarding some of my friends because my dad didn’t go to war.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. He and his best friend Marshall Wagner went to enlist shortly after Pearl Harbor. Dad was rejected because of his age (31) and a heart murmur. They took Wagner, who fought in the Pacific, survived the war and had a post-war career with the Indiana State Police.

But our next-door neighbor at our first home was Jay Taylor, who had been a bombardier on B-17s. When we moved to a new house in 1954, it was next door to Bob Popejoy, who had been an Army cook in the China-Burma-India Theatre of Operations. Down the street was Merrill Plummer, who startled me one spring day in the mid-1950s by hanging out a couple of huge red-white-and-black German flags on his backyard clothesline, airing them out as he and his family prepared to move to a new home.

Most of my male teachers had been in the war. Charles Geheb, who taught chemistry and physics, was in the Army Air Corps and flew over Hiroshima a few days after it was flattened in the world’s first atomic bomb attack.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised this week when longtime friend Lonnie Miller sent me a link to the obituary of Chuck Ritzler, who was Carroll County Surveyor for almost 30 years.

Ritzler, it turns out, was in Co. D, 501st Parachute Regiment, 101st Airborne Div. and jumped into Normandy early on D-Day, distinguished himself in combat during the Market-Garden invasion of Holland, and was wounded at Bastogne. I this sounds familiar, it’s because his sister company, Co. E, was the subject of Stephen Ambrose’s best seller, “Band of Brothers,” that was subsequently made into an HBO miniseries.

Here he is with a buddy getting ready to climb aboard a DC-3 on Sept. 17, 1944 bound for Holland.

And here is his obituary from the Lafayette, Ind. Journal & Courier:

Charles J. Ritzler, 92, of Delphi, died Mon.-Mar. 24, 2014 at 4:50am, at St. Elizabeth Healthcare Center-Delphi.

He was born June 3, 1921 in Three Oaks, MI, to the late Charles E. & Sylvia Borders Ritzler. His marriage was to Norma Jean Yerkes in Flora, on Dec. 23, 1945, and she preceded him in death on Apr. 29, 2009.

He graduated from Three Oaks High School in 1939, and graduated from Purdue University in 1950, with a degree in Civil Engineering.

A WW II Army Veteran, he enlisted in the airborne division, and was assigned to the newly formed 501st Parachute Regiment in Toccoa, Ga., for basic training. He qualified from jump school in 1943 at Fort Benning, and began intense training at Camp McCall in North Carolina.

Late in 1943 he arrived in England, and in the early morning of June 6, 1944, he jumped into France (D-Day), returning to England to regroup in July-1944.

He then jumped into Holland on Sept. 17, 1944, under British command. After 50 days of frontline fighting, the regiment was withdrawn to Mourmelon, France, to again regroup.

The 101st Airborne was suddenly rushed into Bastogne, Belgium, on Dec. 19, 1944, to stop a push of the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge. Wounded from that conflict, he spent 3 months in hospitals recovering.

He received the British Military Medal from Field Marshall Sir Bernard Montgomery on Mar. 26, 1945, for his actions at a railroad bridge at Veghel, Holland, where he and his machine gun squad, held off the German soldiers for a day and a half, until reinforcements arrived.

He was discharged on Dec. 5, 1945, at Camp Atterbury. He served his apprenticeship with Arthur Ritchie & Robert Brown, civil engineers, in Carroll Engineering Service from 1950-1954. He then served as deputy county surveyor, from 1954-1956, and then was the Carroll County Surveyor from 1956-1984.

After retiring from office, he started Ritzler Engineering Inc., from 1984-2005. He was registered in the State of Indiana as a professional Civil Engineer, and as a land surveyor.

He was a life member of the Delphi American Legion Post #75, and the Delphi VFW Post #9383, and the #13 Hoosier State Chapter of the Disabled American Veterans, 101st Airborne Division Assoc., the Airborne Static Line and Geronimo (501) Regiment. He was an endowed member of the Mt. Zion #211 F.&A.M. Lodge in Camden, and the Murat Temple and Shriners in Indianapolis. He was a member of the Purdue University Alumni. He was an ardent fisherman, having fished all over Canada from 1948-2005. Surviving: daughter-Tara & Jay Rivinius of Sacramento, CA; grandson-Grayson T. Motsch; stepsister-Diana & Bill Burge of Niles, MI. Preceded in death by his son Charles J. Ritzler II.

A memorial service will be held at a later date. Online condolences: abbottfuneralhome@frontier.com. Abbott Funeral Home-Delphi, in charge of arrangements.

He is mentioned several times in “Hell’s Highway,” George Koskimak’s book about Market-Garden.