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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/higgs06142007.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/higgs06142007.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2>June 14, 2007</font><font size=3>
<br>
</font><h1><font size=4><b>Gay Panic in Indiana?<br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font size=4 color="#990000">Murder in a Small Town
</b></font></h1><font face="Arial, Helvetica" size=3>By STEVEN HIGGS
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=5 color="#990000">T</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>he simple facts in Shorty Hall's murder shout
major media. Brian Williams or Katie Couric, maybe. Bill Moyers, someday.
Indianapolis Star, unquestionably. The 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in
Wyoming is commonly invoked in comparison.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Thirty-five-year-old, 5-foot-4,
100-pound Aaron Hall was brutally beaten on April 12 for hours by two
teens who have described the murder in chilling detail to police. Each
says Hall precipitated the violence by making a homosexual
suggestion.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The beatings included repeated
pummelings with fists and boots and dragging Hall down a wooden staircase
by his feet as "his head bounced down all of the steps," in one
of the accused's words. He died naked and alone, in a field, where he had
crawled after his killers dumped his body in a roadside
ditch.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Police found Hall's body 10 days after
his death wrapped in a tarp in the garage of Jackson County Deputy
Coroner Terry Gray, whose son is one of the accused.</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>According to the local paper, The
Crothersville Times, a witness said 19-year-old Garrett Gray, upon
learning that Hall was dead, "began vomiting and making statements
of what his dad would say when he found out about this
incident."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The fact that this tale has received
almost no media attention outside Jackson County, Monroe's far
southeast-corner neighbor, is but one of its bizarre twists.<br>
Another is the suggestion that Hall made no sexual advance on 18-year-old
Coleman King, the other accused, that he and Gray made up the story as an
excuse for murder.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>There's a legal theory for their
argument. It's called the "gay panic defense," and it suggests
that temporary insanity from exposure to homosexuality is a defense
against murder. Matthew Shepard's killers tried to use
it.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Gray, Coleman and others, including
21-year-old Robert Hendricks and uncharged co-conspirator John Hodge,
told police remarkably similar stories about a violent reaction to a
homosexual advance in Gray's Crothersville home, according to court
documents filed by police in the case.<br>
Coleman said he got to Gray's place around noon and that he and Hendricks
went to the Stop-In Liquors in town and picked up Hall on their way
back.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>According to the Times: "King
said they were all drinking beer and whiskey when Hall grabbed him in the
groin, asking King to perform oral sex. King said he punched Hall, then
jumped on him, punching him several more times. King said Gray also
punched Hall while King held Hall down."</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Gray said King left the room after
initially assaulting Hall. Gray said he walked over to ask Hall if he was
all right.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>"Gray then admitted to striking
Hall several times in the eye area causing significant damage," the
Times reported.<br>
Gray told police that King walked back into the room and moved Hall to
the couch.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>"According to Gray, King then
straddled Hall and began physically assaulting him multiple times with
his hands," the paper said. Hendricks said the beatings "went
on for several hours before Hall was loaded into Gray's
pickup."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Before dragging Hall down the steps to
Gray's Ford Ranger pickup, Gray said they assaulted him again on the
deck.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>King said he and Gray "continued
beating Hall as Hendricks drove south to the dirt farm lane." There
they dumped Hall in a ditch and threw his camouflage coat over his
body.<br>
"King admitted to striking Hall a few more times," the Times
said. "The trio then left Hall in the
ditch."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Hodge told police that he was working
during the beating. Gray sent him a multimedia text message on his phone
with a photograph of Hall, in between Gray and King, with a swollen eye
and lip.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>About 15 minutes later, Hendricks
called Hodge from the scene. The Times reported that Hendricks shouted:
"They're beatin' the hell out of that guy."</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Hodge told police he could hear
screaming and yelling in the background and thought he heard Hall
yelling, "Bitches."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The next morning Hodge went to Gray's
house, and he and Hendricks drove to the site where Hall's body had been
dumped because Hendricks wanted Hall's camouflage jacket. They saw only
clothes in the ditch.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>"Hodge then described seeing
something in the field that he thought at first was a dead deer,"
the paper reported. "Hodge said he walked towards the object and
said it was a human body. Hodge said he went back and forth a few times
before he finally approached the body. Hodge said the body was completely
naked and was severely beaten. He said he recognized the subject to be
Aaron Hall and that Hall was dead."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Hodge, Gray and King all said they
returned to the field a couple days later and removed the body. They
wrapped it in a blue tarp and hid it in Gray's detached
garage.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Crothersville is a town of 1,500,
located midway between Louisville and Indianapolis just off Interstate 65
in the southeast corner of Jackson County.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>According to the U.S. Census, it is
97.6 percent white, and 75.4 percent of its residents 25 or older have
high school educations. The national average is 80.4.</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>It's not the sort of place that makes
big news often. One of the more recent times was in 2005 when a
10-year-old Crothersville girl named Katie Collman was kidnapped,
sexually assaulted and murdered.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>"Ironically, it was Terry Gray,
Garrett Gray's father, who served as the Collman family spokesman during
the investigation and court proceedings," the Times
reported.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The Collman case was big news.
Indianapolis Star-columnist-turned-Internet-blogger Ruth Holliday noted
on May 8 that it "had a lot of twists and turns." A search of
the Star Web site turns up more than a dozen stories.</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Yet the Star has left the Hall murder
to the Jackson County media, the never-to-be-trusted Indianapolis and
Louisville television stations and bloggers like Advance Indiana's Gary
Welsh, who has covered the story in depth and, along with Holliday, has
questioned the lack of major media attention.</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>A search of the Star Web site for
Aaron Hall returned zero stories.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>On May 3, Welsh, who is an advocate
for hate crimes legislation in Indiana, wrote a column titled "Why
Won't the Star Cover The Hate Crime Killing of Aaron Hall?" He noted
that the paper "has been silent" about the Hall case but that
editorial writer RiShawn Biddle argued in his May 1 Star blog that a hate
crimes law would not have prevented Hall's murder.</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>In his blog, Biddle argued that the
"murkiness of the case shows that it may not even have been
considered a hate crime."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Biddle's assessment is shared by
others, especially in Jackson County. Many of them see it as bunch of
kids drinking and going crazy.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>An anonymous contributor wrote in
Welsh's blog: <br><br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>"No one in the News knows what the hell they're talking about. I
know what went on i really do. It wasn't a hate crime. Garrett hit him
because he said F#%% you and your mom and his mom was dead. Anyone that
knows him knows that."<br><br>
</dl>One local woman, who also says the murder was not a hate crime, told
the Alternative that Gray's mother has been dead for years.<font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>On April 29, Welsh reported that
Crothersville resident Leslie Horton told him that rumors in town are
that "Aaron was gay and had AIDS" to shift the blame away from
them and onto Hall, thereby "stigmatizing him in the hope of getting
off easy."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>"People are losing sight that
this man was not gay in the slightest," Horton told Welsh. "It
was a ploy to make their crime seem justifiable since it seems to be
condoned by some evil people in this world."</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">***</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The gay panic defense led to an
acquittal in a murder case in West Virginia, according to a story in a
1993 Barnes & Noble book Some Days Nothing Goes
Right.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Numerous Internet sources, including
Wikipedia and Answers.com, report the same passage. <br><br>
<dl>
<dd>"The Sun-Times Wire reported in Harrisville, West Virginia, USA,
that one Dean Ludwig Bethoven, aged thirty, accepted a ride home from a
bar by funeral director Dent Pickman, and fell asleep in his
car.<br><br>
<dd>"When he woke up later at Pickman's house, he found his body
covered with 'ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, pickles - things out of the
refrigerator,' and Dent Pickman licking mayonnaise off his naked body. 'I
went crazy,' said Bethoven, who stabbed Pickman to death with a kitchen
knife. The jury acquitted him of murder."<br><br>
</dl>One of the highest-profile gay panic defense cases was a 1995 murder
in which a man killed a friend after learning on the The Jenny Jones Show
that the friend was sexually attracted to him.</font><font size=3>
<br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Jonathan Schmitz confessed but said he
was angered and humiliated by his friend's advances. He was convicted of
second-degree murder and received a 25-to-50 year prison
sentence.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>The judge in the Shepard case threw
out the killers' use of gay panic. He ruled it was "either a
temporary insanity defense or a diminished capacity defense, such as
irresistible impulse, which are not allowed in Wyoming
..."</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Shepard's killers later recanted their
story, characterizing the murder as a robbery attempt gone awry under the
influence of drugs.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Each received two consecutive life
sentences.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>Steven Higgs</b> can be reached at
<a href="mailto:editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com">
editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com</a>.</font><font size=3> <br><br>
<br><br>
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