Every Town - Death in Every Town - The Road Was His Hunting Ground

Episode Date: June 27, 2025

Get 15% off OneSkin with the code EVERYTOWN at https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod If you were a serial killer, what would be the perfect cover? You’d need something that lets you move from town to town without raising suspicion. Something that makes people see you as harmless. Maybe even entertaining. So how about being a Civil War actor. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/8hF0AWD5iUU 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY for FREE! ⁠https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvtlOlODQ8g&t=5238s⁠ ⁠https://tubitv.com/movies/100029672/an-angry-boy⁠ International & Other Ways To Watch: ⁠https://www.anangryboy.com/⁠ 💀 MERCH: ⁠https://scary-mysteries.teemill.com/⁠ 💀 Free 7 Day Trail on Exclusive Episodes, Podcasts & Perks! ⁠https://www.patreon.com/scarymysteries⁠   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠ 👁Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠   🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you ready to dive into the unknown? Join me, Peyton Moreland, on Into the Dark, the true crime podcast from Ono Media with a hint of horror and mystery. Each week, I dive into a different case, breaking down the facts and pondering the age-old question, why do people do what they do? Now, sometimes the answer isn't so clear, and that's why I'll also explore conspiracy theories, hauntings, and all things spooky. From the Green River Killer to the Mothman incident, we will unravel all of the questions that keep us up at night. So don't miss out. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform.

New episodes drop every Wednesday. Into the dark, where true crime meets the eerie unknown. Every town has a dark side. If you were a serial killer, what would be the perfect cover? You need something to let you move from town to town without raising suspicion, something that makes you. people see you as harmless, maybe even entertaining. So how about being a Civil War reenactor? I mean, it gives you a reason to travel across state lines,

sleep in your van, and blend in at roadside motels, all while scouting your next victim. And that's exactly what Larry Hall did. And by the time anyone started paying attention, dozens of young women were already gone. Now, hey guys, it's Andrew, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Everytown. Between 1982 and 94, more than 50 women disappeared from 13 states across the U.S.

Teenagers snatched while riding bikes home from school, college students who vanish, walking back to their dorms. And bodies began showing up in cornfields, ditches, and along lonely roads, and nobody connected the dots. That is, until the authorities started to realize the crimes were all happening close to Civil War reenactment events. And so then, how exactly did a quiet janitor of a police for so long? Let's head over to Wabash, Indiana to find out and trace the twisted path of Larry Duane Hall. And the story of Larry Hall begins quite literally in Death's Backyard. Going on December 11th of 1962 in Wabash, Indiana, he and his identical twin brother Gary were the sons of Robert Hall,

the town grave digger over at Fall Cemetery. The twins grew up in an old home that sat right on the cemetery's grounds, where funerals and burials were just a part of everyday life. As such, they were exposed to the concept of death much earlier than many children, and the father had a sort of detachment from his job that rubbed off on his kids, especially Larry, as we would all find out eventually. And day in and day out, digging in the earth and burying bodies, Robert grew accustomed to the work. In the same way, say, a cobbler doesn't see it as just a shoe but pieces of leather and string tied together. Robert didn't see those he lowered into the ground as people so much as large chunks of flesh. The twins spent pretty much their whole childhood around that cemetery, helping their dad. By the time he was 12 years old, Larry was regularly digging holes for the dead, a job that

really mess with his head, as you can imagine. But that was their livelihood and something Larry may have ended up doing the rest of his life, because as it turns out, he was never exactly considered scholarly when it came to his schoolwork. Over at West Ward Elementary School, he didn't make friends and pretty much kept to himself. His IQ was in the low 80s, so school was hard for him. for him, and kids, they were brutal. They made fun of his stuttering, his nightmares,

and the fact that he wet his bed well into his teens. A possible partial explanation for at least some of this. As doctors put it, Gary had quite literally fed on him while inside their mother. As a result, his brain may not have lived up to its potential in terms of growth and functionality. Interestingly, the bedwetting thing later stood out to investigators because it's part of what they called the homicidal triad, bedwetting, fire setting, and hurting animals. These three things often show up in the childhoods of serial killers.

We know Larry was setting fires as a teen, checking another box in this disturbing pattern. He was actually a suspect in an arson case when he was in his early teens, but that charge was eventually dropped. While there's no records that he was hurting animals, he may have actually easily skipped that stage since he was already dealing with real human dead bodies. I mean, you can make the argument that messing with animals would be a sort of step down from actually burying a person. And things at home went from weird to worse

when Larry's dad lost his cemetery job because he'd get drunk and put bodies in the wrong graves. The family then had to leave their house and moved to a tiny one-bedroom shack making Larry's already unstable life even shakier. Well, Gary tried to look out for his brother, and their relationship was dangerous. Years later, Gary told authorities that Larry had tried to kill him multiple times when they were kids. By 15, both brothers got arrested for smashing windows at a downtown store, but police thought Larry was doing a lot more, setting those fires and breaking into places

and causing trouble all over Wobbish. After high school, as you probably would expect, Larry didn't exactly build a great life for himself. He got a job as a janitor, perfect for someone who didn't want to talk to people all that much. He also found something that interested him a great deal. Something that would change everything for Larry moving forward, Civil War reenactment. You ever notice more hair in the drain lately? Yeah, well, I did too. That's when I found out the problem might not actually be your hair.

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Invest in the health and longevity of your skin and scalp with OneSkin. Your future self will thank you. He was always the backward twin. I was the more dominant outgoing twin. He hung out with what my wife and I and a lot of fellow classmates called the misfits or the stinky crowd. For a guy who never really fit in, slipping into the role of a Civil War soldier, felt like a perfect escape. In those reenactment groups, he could be whoever he wanted. It was freeing. I met a lot of new friends during that time period, and I was able to meet him in the battle field.

He did it on for a lot of fun. And suddenly his strange behavior and offbeat looks didn't raise eyebrows. They just seemed like part of the act. He let his beard grow wild and wore the old uniforms and finally felt like he belonged somewhere. And for once, he had something he'd never had before. Respect, friends, and place to be. But the costume gave him more than just acceptance.

It gave him cover. A way to blend. blend in and to travel and hide. Laird didn't just see reenacting as a fun hobby. He saw it as a mask. It helped him excuse his poor hygiene and gave him a way to act out his darker impulses. The heavy uniforms and layers made it easy to carry weapons without raising suspicion. And driving to events in different towns were totally normal for a civil war buff.

No one thought twice about seeing him sleeping in his van either. It fit the whole living history vibe. In the end, Larry hadn't just joined a hobby. He built himself the perfect disguise. The FBI believes Hall started killing in the early 1980s, though we'll probably never know exactly how many women he murdered. He for sure has two confirmed victims, but he's either confessed or been suspected of anywhere between 35 to 50 more,

which is an insane number, if true, no matter which one you land on. Simply put, as he traveled across more than a dozen states, he left a trail of victims that local police departments couldn't connect because they couldn't share information easily back then. So how prolific he was is basically impossible to know. But eventually detectives pieced together enough to know how he operated. All would go to these civil war events and partake in the them, but that was only half of his mission. In his off time, he would be scouting the area,

sometimes even going to other towns nearby looking for young women, mostly white teens and college students. He'd watch them, learn their routines as best he could, and then snatch them up when the opportunity came and throw them in his man. From evidence found in Hall's possession, autopsy reports, and his later confessions, we know he had a sick, ritualistic way of killing. Many victims were knocked out with rags soaked in starter fluid, tied up with rope and then assaulted. He usually killed by strangling or stabbing, often cut up the bodies afterward, and sometimes performed acts of necrophilia. Some bodies he dismembered before dumping them, while others he buried or left in remote spots. And as time went on, the killings got more

violent, showing the typical pattern of a serial killer who needs more and more extreme acts to capture that same adrenaline rush. And so, then, who were Larry's victims? One of the first police suspect he took was a 14-year-old named Deanie Peters, who vanished from her middle school in Grand Rapids, Michigan in February of 1981. As she was last seen at her brother's wrestling practice, and then never heard from again, and never even found her body, in fact. But Hall became a suspect years later when cops discovered papers with her name on them among his stuff in his van.

That same year, 12-year-old Deborah Jean Cole disappeared from Lebanon, Indiana. And for years, she was considered a runaway, but once Larry was apprehended and his timeline carefully pieced together, it was discovered that he was in that area right around when she vanished. But, like many of Hall's suspected victims, she was never seen again, so who knows for sure. By the mid-1980s, women were vanishing more frequently, though again police were always one step behind because Hall was a traveling killer. So what might look like a one-off crime was actually connected to this serial killer, who had already wandered on to the next town. In August of 85, 19-year-old Jennifer Schmidt disappeared from Purdue, University in Indiana. And just days later, and about two hours east of there, the body of 21-year-old

Marcy Swinford turned up in a wooded area near Honey Creek. As she'd been strangled and mutilated, a gruesome signature that cops would see again and again in cases tied to haul, only, of course, they didn't know it at the time. In September of 86, a woman was found strangled and mutilated in a cornfield near Summerfield, Illinois. And nobody knew her true identity for years. She was just called the Summerfield Jane Doe, and buried under a gravestone that read Jane Doe, known only to God. It wasn't until 2007 that fingerprints finally identified her as 28-year-old

Yulia Chavez, a drifter from California. By then, Paul was incarcerated, and so he wrote in to a TV, reporter in St. Louis, claiming he was the one who did it. I guess he wanted to bring himself back into the spotlight again, but as to whether or not he was telling the truth, we don't know. DNA tests couldn't prove anything because of how decomposed the body was when it was found. In February of 87, brought one of Paul's youngest victims. 10-year-old Linda Weldy disappeared right after stepping off her school bus near her home in the Port, Indiana. Three weeks later, Someone found her body along an abandoned railroad track nine miles away.

The coroner said she'd been strangled by hand shortly after being kidnapped. Later, cops confirmed Hall had been in the area for a reenactment event nearby. And that summer, 16-year-old Wendy Felton vanished right from her home in Marion, Indiana, less than 25 miles from where Hall lived in Wabish, and near reenactment site he often visited. Her family found all her stuff still in her bedroom, but Wendy was gone forever. Her case highlighted something that would help investigators later. Hall's crimes tended to cluster around his home base and the historical sites he visited,

creating a geographical pattern that eventually helped link the cases and possible victims. As time went on, Hall's hunting territory got bigger. He, of course, had Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois, but, He went as far east as Pennsylvania and Virginia, and as far south as Alabama and Georgia, plus a whole bunch of other states. In September of 88, 19-year-old Paulette Webster disappeared while walking home in Chester, Illinois. A town near a historic landmark, Hall often visited while he was in town. Years later, in 2011, Hall sent a disturbing letter to an author writing about his case,

claiming he was the one who killed the girl. He described grabbing her from the main road that ran through Chester near her mobile home park and taking her to a remote spot where he kept her and assaulted her for hours. Then he either threw her body in the Mississippi River or buried her in a field. He wrote specifically, If I did it, I would have put her in a river or in her field, though her body has never been found. By the early 1990s, with his confidence and an all-year-old,

time high. Well, Hall's crimes were getting more frequent and more violent. I mean, he was doing whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, and nobody was putting the pieces together. Though soon enough that arrogance would catch up with him and ultimately be his downfall. In July of 1991, 20-year-old Michelle Dewey was found strangled in her Indianapolis apartment. Her 18-month-old son was found unharmed in a back bedroom with a door-wared shut, showing Hall was thinking clearly enough to isolate the child before attacking the mother. And Gary, Hall's twin, later said Larry confessed to this murder, mentioning that Larry had gone to Indianapolis that day to look at a van he saw on a classified ad.

Investigators think Hall spotted Dewey sunbathing in her backyard before going into her house and just killing her. On August 19th of 1992, we got one of Hall's few confirmed. victims, 22-year-old Lori DePees, who disappeared after parking her car at her boyfriend's apartment complex in Manasha, Wisconsin. Her boyfriend and friends heard her car pull in but got worried when she never made it to the apartment. And they found her locked car with a styrofoam cup sitting on the hood in her purse and overnight bag still inside. And just three days earlier, there had been a Civil War reenactment at the Grignan Mansion and nearby Kokana, only 10 miles from where she vanished. In 2010, Hall admitted to kidnapping and killing to peas,

though cops never found her body in the places he pointed to. The disappearances just kept coming. On March 29th, around 8 o'clock at night, Tricia Reitler came here to this shopping center. She bought a soda in a magazine and started walking back to campus. But then she disappeared. Tricia's mother made a desperate appeal to Tricia on the Jerry Springer show. Hang in there and know that we love you. And we're doing everything we can to find you. Despite huge media coverage and their pleas for answers, none ever came. It's like she just vanished in the thin air. Tricia was never found. When investigators eventually searched Hall's van, where they found maps, photos, and newspaper articles about Reitler, along with handwritten notes describing how he stalked women outside the very grocery store where she was last seen.

But in the end, it was the disappearance of 15-year-old Jessica Roach in September of 93 that finally and thankfully ended Hall's killing spree. On the afternoon of the 23rd of that month, Roach went out for a bike ride near her home and joy. Georgetown, Illinois, when she vanished, though not without a trace. A bus driver later reported seeing an expensive-looking bicycle lying abandoned in the middle of the road, a weird sight that would later be crucial to cracking the case. Despite immediate searches by family and police, Roach was missing for several weeks. Jessica's badly decomposed body was found in an Indiana cornfield weeks later. Because the body was in such bad shape and had been damaged by farm equipment,

investigators couldn't tell exactly how she died, though they noted evidence of a broken jaw possibly caused by someone punching her. There's a lot of times you wonder whether you'll ever solve it, but you know that you're going to keep going, you're going to check everything out, you're going to re-check everything. That case went cold with cops having zero physical evidence at the scene, but then in the early months of 94, The two teenage girls in Georgetown reported being followed by a guy in a van.

They didn't try to get out of his vehicle, but the girls got spooked and ran to a house and called for help. The whole town was still on edge from what had happened to Jessica. Most importantly, those girls got his license plate number. That van was registered to Larry Duane Hall from Wabush. The police looked into Larry's pass, so when Vermillion County sheriffs' investigators, investigator, Gary Miller, went to question him, and he knew this wasn't the man's first run-in with young women in the area. See, similar incidents had been reported in several towns, with teenage girls describing a brown and tan van following them. In Georgetown,

another pair of girls came forward saying they had escaped haul by cutting through an alley on their bikes. In Wabish City Park, he'd apparently approached a group of girls, asking if they wanted to go for a rye. But the investigation really kicked into high gear when police learned Hall had been questioned back in March of 94, after officers in Gas City, Indiana, searched his van and found a knife, a can of starter fluid, a cotton mask, rope, the most disturbing, a flyer about Trisha Ritler's disappearance, along with a piece of Indiana Wesleyan University paper with her name written on it. So on November 15th of 94, Miller went back to Wabich, though this time armed with FBI Special Agent Ken Temple's. After Hall agreed to be questioned and waved his Miranda

right, Miller showed him a photo of Jessica Roach. He immediately flinched. He turned to his right and put his hand up over his face like he didn't want to see the picture. Told me he didn't think he'd ever seen that girl. and then told them what he had done that day to her back in 1993. The case had officially been cracked wide open, and during a marathon interrogation lasting nearly 17 hours, O'Hall confessed to kidnapping and murdering not just Roach, but several other women. Though he took it all back the next day,

it was too late and a full-scale investigation into Larry was underway. When they searched his place in Van, they found some pretty incriminating stuff. Notes he'd written saying things like, seen joggers and bikers, many alone. Seen some prospects. Cover all floor and sides of van. And no body contact, buy condoms.

He also found newspaper clippings about Jessica Roach and Tricia Reitler. Maps with locations marked where bodies have been found. And many other creepy items, no normal person would have regarding dead women and girls. And so, Hall was arrested and charged with kidnapping Jessica, a federal crime since he'd taken her across state lines from Illinois to Indiana. Even though prosecutors couldn't charge him with murder because they couldn't prove exactly where she'd been killed,

they had enough circumstantial evidence, including Hall's confession, though redacted, with details only the killer would know to go after him for the kidnapping. During his trial, Hall's defense team tried to argue that his confession was fake, just the product of a personality disorder that made him super eager to please authority figures. Psychologists testified about his attention-seeking behavior and how suggestible he was, mentioning his IQ was low and that he had a history of anxiety and depression.

The defense claimed Hall was a wannabe, someone who confessed to crimes he didn't do just to get attention and approval. But the real evidence was most certainly there. Larry didn't just play pretend. He had committed an almost endless list of crimes. As such, on June 6th, he was found guilty of kidnapping Roach and later sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He immediately appealed saying he didn't get a fair trial.

And then something happened that literally inspired, an entire miniseries, which, as a side note, is really great TV if you haven't seen it. It's called Blackbird and came out in 2022, so check that out if you haven't. Anyway, the FBI started to worry that Hall might actually win his appeal and walk free, so they came up with a pretty bold plan. They reached out to James Keene, a Chicago guy serving a 10-year sentence for drug charges and made him an unusual offer. At that moment, I looked up at Beaumont, and he says,

Jimmy, we need you to help us with this case. Beaumont wanted Keene to go undercover. If he agreed to transfer to the same high-security prison as Hall, and get close to him and find out where the bodies were buried, he says, if you can get solid confessions from him, and if you can help us locate the bodies that are still missing, we're willing to completely wash your record. Alkeen took on the dangerous assignment, and over several months he gained Hall's trust inside that prison.

Eventually, Hall showed Keen a hand-drawn map of the Midwest, covered with red dots and names representing his victims. Hall also directly confessed to killing Tricia Reiler, describing how he kidnapped her, kept her tied up in his van while deciding what to do. He said, so he got some lime together, he got a shovel, and he said, he got a lantern and he drove her way out into the woods and he buried her out in the woods. He admitted to you that he buried her in the woods. Several times she's admitted that, yes. I basically made him feel like it was okay to tell me his secret. When Keene finally snapped and called Hall,

one of the most despicable forms of human life on this planet, well, things went downhill fast. Their fragile friendship fell apart and Keene ended up in solitary, completely cut off, and no contact with his FBI handlers, so no way to prove he was undercover. And the map that could have led to the victims was never found. Even with that major setback, Paul's appeal was denied, and he's still locked up at the federal correctional complex in Butner, North Carolina, currently at the age of 62.

And since behind bars, Paul's story has been all over the place. And sometimes he confesses, other times he confesses, other times he's. takes it all back. In a 2011 interview with the Associated Press, he claimed he'd kidnapped 39 women between 1980 and 1994, including Lori DePie's. But in other letters and confessions, he's pointed the finger at others, or suddenly claimed innocence. The truth is, we may never know how many people Larry Hall really killed. Investigators believe it could be anywhere from 40 to 50, numbers that would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history. The cemetery keeper's son, who dressed like a civil war soldier,

so he could travel around doing ungodly crimes. Whether Larry killed five people or 50 is still a mystery. What's undeniable is how many chances were missed, how many families were ignored, and how a man who may have hunted across state lines for over a decade was almost forgotten. Maybe we'll never know the true body count. Because there were so many, maybe Larry himself doesn't even remember. And if you really think about that, that's about as dark as a serial killer's story can get.

So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I hope you all enjoyed it. If you did, and you want more, go check out the links in the description. And we have YouTube, more podcasts, and exclusive episodes, merch, and more. I appreciate you all very much. much, so thanks for tuning in. Remember to come back next week for another episode of every town filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.