The Deck - Ann Kline (8 of Hearts, Indiana)

Episode Date: April 6, 2022

Our card this week is Ann Kline, the 8 of Hearts from Indiana.Ann Kline, a loving daughter, wife and teacher, was grading papers in the middle of the afternoon in January 1973 when someone stabbed her repeatedly in the hallway outside her Evansville, Indiana classroom, and left her to die. Detectives have worked for 50 years trying to solve her murder, and today they’re working a lead that could actually close the case for good. If you or someone you know has information about Ann’s murder, call 812-436-7979. That’s the main line to the Evansville Police Detective Unit – and it’s staffed 24/7.To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

Our card this week is Anne Klein, the 8 of Hearts from Indiana. Anne was a loving wife and devoted teacher who was well on her way to earning a master's degree. When one winter afternoon in 1973, she was viciously attacked outside her classroom. This episode is a special one because I've wanted to tell Anne's story ever since I first heard about it years ago, long before we ever started this show. I just didn't have enough information. That is, until now, when the detectives working her case agreed to speak with us.

And they say that they might be closer than they've ever been to finding her killer. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. On January 18, 1973, college student Dennis Clem had just wrapped up his last class of the day at Lockier College of Business in downtown Evansville, Indiana. The business college was temporarily holding classes in the basement of the Old Courthouse downtown due to a fire at the actual college campus a week before. Now Dennis also worked as a custodian in the Old Courthouse, so in order to report for work when he got out of class, all he had to do was go up a few flights of stairs and he was able to punch in his time card. On that particular day, his shift didn't start until three. Dennis had wrapped up his last class of the day a few minutes before that, like around 245. So, to kill some time,

he decided to go back downstairs to the basement, where he'd just been for a class and asked one of his accounting teachers, Mrs. Anne Klein, what grade he'd gotten on an accounting test. When Dennis got to the basement, he found Mrs., what great he'd gotten on an accounting test. When Dennis got to the basement, he found Mrs. Klein exactly where he'd expected her to be, behind her desk in her temporary classroom. Unfortunately for Dennis, Anne told him she was still in the process of grading the tests, so he'd have to wait a little bit longer to find out what his score was. At about 10-3, Dennis heads back upstairs to report for his work shift, and when he arrived,

he bumped into one of his co-workers who was also a business school student. At 3 on the dot, the two men headed to a room on the second level to start their cleaning duties for the day. But just as they were arriving to that room, they heard screaming. The shrieks weren't coming from like a room over or even on the same level. They sounded distant like maybe they were coming from downstairs in the building's basement. Denizen as co-worker kind of froze and looked at each other. But then the screaming stopped.

So they shrugged it off as maybe just some kids playing. Which might sound weird at a courthouse slash college, but you see, Lockhear was a two-year business college, so students were a little older than your typical college age students, and many people who attended classes were parents of young children. It wasn't unusual for students to bring their kids to class sometimes. Right after the faint screaming stopped, they heard a man's voice that said something along the lines of, get out here here or get out of here. Denison and his coworker just couldn't tell for sure.

The voice was much more pronounced than the screams and sounded urgent, so Denison and his coworker high-tailed it downstairs to see what was going on. The old Vanderbure County Courthouse, where this is all happening, is this massive or neat government building that was built in the late 1890s. Up until 1969, it still functioned as a courthouse, but then all government services moved to a civic center and another part of downtown. Today, county commissioners lease out rooms to various businesses, and it's still known as the old courthouse. It's a beautiful old building with massive corridors for hallways, really tall ceilings,

a grand rotunda and a bell tower. The basement though has creepier vibes. Here's Evansville Police Detective Sergeant Peter DeYoung. Very secluded, there are no windows, there are just the two doors, it's pretty dark. When Dennis and his coworker got down there, they couldn't believe what they saw. Their accounting teacher, Anne Klein, was on the floor of the hallway, covered in blood. She had several stab wounds all over her chest and even one on her face. They could tell right away she was already dead. So shocked and horrified, they ran back upstairs to the closest telephone, which was in the administrator's office on the second floor.

Two more of their co-workers joined them and within a matter of minutes, the Evansville Police Department were on their way. When officers walked into the basement hallway, they saw what Dennis and his co-workers had seen, which was Ann laying on her back in the big hallway with her long black hair soaked in a pool of her own blood that was spread out wide around her body. Anne was pronounced dead right then and there in the hallway of the old courthouse. And police officers took statements from Dennis and his co-workers right there in the building's basement. Evansville Police Detective Sergeant Kyle Theory is working the case today, alongside

Detective DeYoung. You'll hear from both of them throughout this episode. They say that the gruesome nature of Ann's murder caused many people who worked at the school and attended classes to pull away from Lockhear entirely. Here's theory. They did get a lot of attention and it scared a lot of people. In fact, we've spoken to several former students that they kind of rattled them a bit. We've seen report cards where kids like immediately unenrolled from the college and went elsewhere.

Police worked to preserve the crime scene by clearing everyone out of the basement. They ushered building staff and people like Dennis away from Ann's body to keep them from gawking at the bloody scene, but they didn't let them go home without providing statements first. All of this was unfolding just after 3 PM

in the middle of the day, so police felt confident that someone who worked in the building had to have seen the murderer, or at least might know what direction the killer went to get out of the school. Given how many stab wounds Ann had, they knew the perpetrator wouldn't have walked away from the crime without being covered in blood. Not only that, but police had arrived so fast that unless the killer had a car like waiting right outside, they had to be nearby. So, detectives started talking that everyone they could as the coroner arrived and the scene was being processed, but everyone was so shocked in those first few moments they were no help to investigators. Detectives

briefly considered the idea that maybe whoever attacked Ann wanted to rob her, but that just didn't add up. She still had her wedding rings on, her purse was found in her classroom. So I mean, that would be something we obviously look for on every major scene like this, is whether there be any signs of foul play. Obviously with her having multiple sad wounds, I know that would be a foul play, but as far as a robbery goes, like as far as a motive, I believe it doesn't look like it would be a robbery. Someone was stabbed 16, 19, almost 20 times.

There's some sort of intimacy there, some sort of anger, some sort of, in my opinion, I wouldn't say that would be a random thing. So detectives immediately consider the theory that maybe Anne's husband Robert was involved. They needed to find out if he was accounted for from 2.30 pm until 3.30 pm. But police found Robert Klein, Anne's longtime partner at work in Newberg, Indiana, 20 minutes from the crime scene.

Newberg is a whole town over from Evansville. Alcoa Operations is a global aluminum production and supply company where Robert was an engineer and it was 16 miles east of where Ann was killed. He was in meetings at the time of when this happened and there were several people that verified that so he was quickly ruled out. Just to cover their tracks, detectives snapped some photos of him. He had no blood on him and no injuries, and he was displaying all the signs of a shock and distraught husband who had just found out

that his wife had been brutally killed. And by all accounts Robert and Ann had had a great marriage. They were high school sweethearts who were both from rural Pennsylvania and got their degrees at Penn State before marrying and moving to Newburgh in 1968 for jobs at Alcoa, Robert in engineering and Anne in accounting. But by 1970 Anne had left Alcoa for her teaching job at Lockhear. In 1971 to further their education even more, the couple enrolled in night classes at the University of Evansville. As busy and non-stop as they were, Robert and Anne's friends told police that the two

had a happy marriage and seemed very much in love. No one knew of any drama in their life, so police were perplexed. The crime by its very nature appeared to be intimate and Anne seemed to be the target of someone's personal rage against her. The Vanderbure County Corners office took Anne's body for an autopsy. During the exam the deputy coroner determined that she'd been stabbed 19 times mostly to her upper left chest area. There was also a slash wound to one of her arms and one to her face. But the wound that ultimately killed her was straight to her heart. The coroner also made note that there were no signs that Anne had been sexually

assaulted. So Anne's clothing and other evidence were given to investigators for processing. There were some hair fibers that were collected at the scene on her hand. There were some scraping, taking root fingernails. The deputy coroner estimated Anne's time of death to be around 3.15 pm. So literally, minutes after Dennis Klam had last seen her alive greeting papers in her classroom. With each hour that passed after the crime, the cops knew that if the killer was a stranger who'd come to Lockhear with no other reason than to kill Anne, whoever they were, they were getting further and further away. But police had to consider the real

possibility that the murderer was someone who worked in the old courthouse building or attended classes at Locke here. It has to be someone that has access to her that, I mean, this was in a daytime in a public place with people around. So we would think it would be someone that knew her that had some sort of access to her. So I would say yes, and students could be persons adventurous. I mean, anybody could be a person adventurous at this point, but I would say, yeah, I mean, students could be person of interest, any extramarital stuff, if we ever come

aware of it, could be persons of interest. It's probably only so many things that somebody would want to harm or for. After investigators ruled out Robert, detectives decided to press Dennis and his co-workers harder for information. During their interviews, each of the men reiterated their stories of hearing the screams

in the building around three, immediately followed by the sound of what they thought was a man's voice, saying something like, get out here or get out of here. None of these witnesses caved under pressure and all of them seemed to be genuinely disturbed by the crime. There was also the fact that none of them were bloody or unaccounted for at the time of the murder. Police realized that if Anne was last seen grading papers at 250, then witnesses heard her screaming at 3, and then she was dead by 315, that left a very narrow window of time for the killer to enter the courthouse, locate Anne, end up in the hallway, stab her multiple times, and then leave completely undetected.

Based on that, detectives determined one way the killer could have entered and left unnoticed was by using a door in an alcove that led from the sidewalk of 5th Street straight into the basement hallway. Those doors were the only way someone could have gotten access to Anne, committed the crime, and left within 15 minutes. If they'd gone any other way in the building, they would have had to take several flights of stairs, and more than likely would have run into people. That made investigators even more convinced that they're likely suspect New Anne, and likely New exactly where to find her. Because I mean, even think about what I

said earlier, this isn't where she had been teaching for like years and years. She was teaching out of a temporary classroom off campus just as of like a week before. When our team went to Evansville to interview detectives theory and a young, our reporters stopped by the old courthouse and actually took some photos. If you go to thedeckpodcast.com, you can get a better visual of what that hallway and entrance of the old courthouse look like. A few hours into their investigation, police started canvassing the neighborhoods and buildings around the old courthouse. They were looking for blood trails, but they didn't find a single drop. The lack of blood or murder weapon

at the scene was puzzling for police. From the beginning, this case was defying the norm. If Anne's murder wasn't domestic and it wasn't robbery, why had someone killed her in such a vicious way? Everyone investigators had spoken with shared story after story of how nice Anne was and how her humble upbringing affected the way she cared for people around her. I know she had a neighbor. I saw what people commented on her being a country girl from Pennsylvania and that she loved animals. I think she had a neighborhood system to match. She rescued some kittens once and a couple of people said she was a tough teacher, but she was fair. Despite their best efforts and dozens of cops canvassing the old courthouse building in grounds, detectives never found a murder weapon. They assumed that they should be looking for a knife

considering the size and shape of Anne's wounds, but they couldn't even be 100% sure because for all they knew the killer could have used another sharp object to kill Anne. Either way, it wasn't like a bloody knife or shard of something had shown up in the building. After exhausting their efforts, searching Lockhear police spread out their search area and actually checked in nearby YMCA, which was a place that they knew transient men and women were known to hang out. But no one there had seen anything suspicious on the day Ann was killed. As word of the murder spread, people in Evansville were on edge. In the 70s, the small city was made up of barely 100,000 people, but it still felt like a small

town and residents there were spooked. When headlines about the brutal stabbing hit newspapers the day after the crime, Leeds started flooding into the police department. They were getting lots of tips, like there were some interesting ones. There was a witness that saw somebody run into the north and somebody run into the east at around that time because they were driving by. This report of someone running away from the business school right around the time of the murder peaked investigators' interest.

But it never really led anywhere because it was raining the afternoon and was killed. So there were lots of people running to and from buildings in the afternoon. Police didn't have a good way of following this lead, and it wasn't like they could question much less even track down every single person who might or might not have been leaving buildings in the rain that afternoon. The day after Anne's murder right when the investigation felt like it was about to stall an important call came in. A janitor in a nearby building had found blood. I'm the guest they've come in and saw some blood on the water fountain in the basement there.

They think it was obviously connected. We don't know for sure if it was or not, but kind of coincidental that there would be a murder, you know, just to what two blocks away where a lot of blood was. And then you get, it looks like possibly some cleanup or something, the basement of that 312 building. What Detective Theory refers to as the 312 building was a building with some business offices just a few blocks away from the old courthouse. Now there wasn't a lot of blood, but there was a smear, a few inches wide, on a water fountain

downstairs in the building. Luckily, the custodian who found the smear of blood did not clean it off. He left it untouched so crime scene text could respond to take scrapings of it as evidence. With the technology they had at the time, authorities tested the dried blood to see if it was a match for Anne. But they were unable to come to a definitive conclusion because it tested positive for two types of different blood. Knowing the blood type, it will narrow down some suspects. We can eliminate 94% of people, but look at, you know, a city of 100,000 people that's still a lot of people

that could be a suspect. So the blood smear felt like a huge clue in the case, but with no science to be able to link it directly to the crime, police couldn't say for sure that the water fountain blood was even connected to the murder. But like detective theory said, it would be a wild coincidence if it wasn't. Detectives interviewed people who worked in the 312 building to see if anyone had seen a bloody person may be going into the basement on the day and died, but those efforts turned up nothing. Like a lot of cases that have forensic evidence that predated DNA testing,

the water fountain blood scrapings were preserved with the hope that someday they would provide more information to investigators. Detectives continued to work the case and fielded more tips via phone calls, and their diligence paid off. A significant report from an Evansville pharmacist came in just days after the murder.

They claimed that someone covered in blood went into the Columbia Pharmacy. The Columbia Pharmacy on Columbia Avenue was not far from downtown Evansville where the murder took place. There are two women that worked as Columbia Pharmacy and they said between 320 and 340, which are crime happened around 335-15, they said that and they give a description about a white male and is around 30 years old that have blood on them and she knew what blood looked like because she worked on a pig farm and then he was in the store. I don't remember what he did in there but then he got in a blue car and left. The employee is told police that the man they'd seen had bushy brown hair.

Detective DeYoung said that he couldn't tell from the case file whether or not the women ever mentioned the strange man buying anything from the pharmacy. The pharmacist said that the reason she hadn't reported the bloody man when he first walked into her store was because she didn't want to assume the worst about him, but then she heard about the murder so she felt like she needed to call and report the strange sighting. The timeline of when the pharmacy workers had seen the man and described how he looked made him highly suspicious to authorities, so police announced that they might be looking for a white man in his 30s with bushy brown hair who was driving a blue car.

At the same time, detectives got to work digging through recent call logs to see if they'd responded to any incidents involving knives in the downtown area in recent weeks. They found a report from Days Prior from a woman who said that she had encountered a man downtown with a knife before Anne was killed, but she hadn't provided police with any description of the guy, and the rest of her story didn't include a lot of detail. A few weeks after Anne's murder, the Dean of Lock Your Business College announced that the school was offering up a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of Anne's killer. He told the Evansville Courier that

Anne was a well-liked teacher. She had even been recognized in an annual awards program honoring teachers' achievements, called Outstanding Educators of America. Her students and co-workers loved her and she received the recognition she deserved. A few months before she was murdered a newspaper in town ran a story about the award, which showed a photo of Anne's smiling above the article. In another article that ran in the Evansville Courier on January 28th, the Vice President of Lock Your Business College said he hoped local businesses would pitch in and increase the $1,000 reward for information. The call to action worked, and the pot of money grew to $8,600 thanks to donations.

The college's VP told the Evansville Courier quote, me that this could happen in the middle of the afternoon and someone who has committed a brutal killing such as this could walk or run out of the building without anyone noticing something unusual." That feeling was shared by most of the people who were living in Evansville at the time. By the start of 1974, the one-year anniversary of the murder loomed and police were no closer to narrowing in on Ann's killer. The one saving grace that they hoped would send them in a new and productive direction was getting the initial test results back from the hair and fingernail clippings that the coroner had retrieved from Ann's body during her autopsy. But when those test results came in, they showed that

most of the hair found in Ann's palms was hers, but one strand was not. The problem was, police didn't know who this single strand belonged to. They suspected it more than likely belonged to Anne's killer, but it wasn't like authorities back in 1974 had the capability to extract DNA or any kind of pertinent information from that piece of hair. At the time, investigators weren't even able to determine if it belonged to a man or a woman. So after that, the investigation stalled for the rest of 1974, and the only information coming into police was a random call here and there with very vague information. There was a tip from an off-duty officer in Nashville, Tennessee that said some guy was

bragging about murders and that he committed by three or four, that he kind of overheard and somehow this one came up. I know there was one tip from it was like a soldier at Fort Campbell that had stabbed the woman and whatever military police called and gave us his information and then they checked and he was actually locked up for something else at the time of Klein's murder. 1975 rolled around and the investigation had lost steam almost entirely, but that's when another bizarre lead came in that sort of changed the trajectory of the case. Authorities learned from a woman who'd called in that her ex-boyfriend, a man named Darryl, had robbed a pharmacy in Evansville, not the Columbia pharmacy, but another one in late

1974. She described Darryl as having bushy brown hair, and during the early 70s he had a history of drug use and robbing stores and buildings in the Evansville area. She told police that Darrell had been killed during the pharmacy robbery in 1974, but she thought that they should look into him for Ancline's murder. This information about Darrell, the pharmacy robbery and him being shot during it, was not something police were familiar with. They checked their records and sure enough, they found the report and realized that up up till that point they had never put two and two together about Darrell.

Interestingly, he was killed on New Year's Eve of 74 when he was trying to rob a pharmacy and the pharmacy worker. The pharmacist had a good white camera, what kind of gun it was. But he had a gun and shot and killed this guy trying to rob him. And then we didn't even find out any of the stuff about him until 1975. That lead us to, okay, now we have sort of draw his paperwork because this guy had been eliminated, you know, what's his blood type at least. Can we say, you know, someone with his blood type without the scene? Detective started looking for physical evidence to tie Darryl to Anne's murder, but he

died a year before they even learned about him, so there wasn't much to get from him to compare to the case. So instead, they interviewed some of his friends who told detectives, oh yeah, Darryl might have said something about killing that teacher, and you know what, I might have the murder weapon. And there was another man who said that he had brought to him, and that's how we ended up with the knife that he had killed Anne and that's how we ended up with the knife. That he had killed and climbed with that knife.

And that was Darryl's knife? Yes. That he supposedly gave to this guy because this guy was looking for a weapon. And he said here take this one it's a good kill knife. Police took the knife from Darryl's friend as evidence and it remains with Evansville PD today. Even though Darryl had an extensive felony record when he was alive, his DNA was never entered into any kind of database, back in the 70s that wasn't required.

So technically, Darrell is still a suspect in Anne's murder, and until authorities can get a DNA sample from him or one of his close relatives, detectives can't compare his genetic profile to the evidence inadance case, like that single strand of hair, or the flakes of blood from the water fountain. They would need a willing relative to give a DNA sample, or a court order to exume his body, which they don't feel like they have enough probable cause for.

So for now, it's a waiting game. Honestly, their best bet is for one of Darrell's relatives to come forward and help them out. For years, police leaned really hard toward Darrell as being a likely suspect, but without that concrete proof, they had to keep an open mind about the case. Almost a decade later, in 1982, detectives took a report from a woman who had a story completely unrelated to the Darrell theory. This woman told police that right after Anne's murder, one of her tenants in an apartment building

that she managed in Evansville had paid his rent and then skipped town abruptly. She felt at the time it was super odd, but she'd never come forward to tell police about it. When investigators asked the woman what the guy's name was, she told them, now we've changed his name for this episode because the man is still alive today. We'll call him Nicholas.

She said that Nicholas had been a student of ants at Lock Your College. Police immediately tried to follow up on this tip and track down Nicholas, but they were unsuccessful. I guess too much time had passed and they couldn't retrieve the school's old records, or this woman who was his landlord didn't have any further identifying information for him. But either way, the Nicholas lead fizzled pretty quickly. And it stayed dormant until December 23rd, 2018 years later.

That's when the name Nicholas popped up on investigators radar for a second time. A clerk working in the Evansville Police Department records room picked up a phone call, and a man was on the other end of the line. He introduced himself as Nicholas, a former student of Anne Clients. When Evansville Police talked to Nicholas, they learned a lot from him that made them scratch their heads. He said he experienced blackouts and thinks he could have committed the murder. Detectives wasted no time in following up on the man's statement, and they got on the next flight to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he said he lived to interview him.

Basically, everybody told the detective they stabbed her 16 times and thought that she was killed in the basement. Nicholas was given a polygraph test to vet the story that he was giving to police, but the results came back inconclusive. The more appointed detectives got in their questioning, the more they began to realize that Nicholas might be lying, or perhaps struggling with mental health issues. He cannot give really any specific details on it. It was clear that it was pretty much fabricated.

And he was claiming that he blacked out on and off and doesn't really remember, but then, you know, would try and give other details that were pretty much common knowledge. It wasn't really any kind of clear motive. And then at one point he changed his story and said he didn't kill anybody. And, you know, gets into this whole thing

about blackouts and he just doesn't remember. Investigators took DNA samples from Nicholas and strands of his hair and his fingerprints, but after running those against the case evidence, nothing matched. To everyone's disappointment, the case stalled again. Then five years after Nicholas's out of the blue half confession, a woman from Texas called and said she knew who killed Ancline. For perspective, it's 2005 by this point. It's been over 30 years since An was murdered, so tips and honestly people who were even

alive when the crime occurred are few and far between. The woman on the phone claimed to have gone to church with another woman who used to live in Evansville. This woman claimed that she and f*** have been friends and that they attended the church, the Mormon church together in Texas, and that f*** had disclosed to her that she killed and clined because she wasn't going to let and clined

have the man that she liked. Detectives hopped on the next flight to Texas to find the woman. But when they got there and interviewed her, she denied ever saying those things to her church friend, and she willingly gave her DNA to be ruled out as a suspect. The woman confirmed that back in 1973 she had been a student of Anc, but she also denied holding a jealous grudge against her former teacher. I know if we have DNA that when we get new stuff or we get new things that could contain DNA, we're all in a way compared against a known that we do know of.

And so I don't think we were able to ever obtain any hard evidence against to the charge room. The theory of whether or not Anne had been having an affair and whether it was the reason behind her death was definitely something police, even back in 1973, had considered as a possibility. And even though it would explain a lot about the brutal and personal nature of the murder, they never found any evidence to support it. But throwing rumors like the supposed confession at a church in Texas, and you can see why police have always felt like they can't let a theory like that go.

According to investigators, that phone call was the only time they ever heard anyone suggest an affair as a possible motive. The next lead came in the form of a phone call in 2020, literally just two years ago. A young woman called the Evansville Police Department and said that her boyfriend's mother killed and Klein and that her boyfriend was just a small

boy at the time but he and one of his friends were there when the crime happened. The tipster reported that her boyfriend's mother had been a student of Anne's in 1973 and had it out for her though she didn't know why. We got some more report cards and some enrollment forms, and I think we were able to confirm that that woman was a student in one of A&S classes. Today, this tip remains a viable lead for investigators. And as of this recording, detective theory and the young

are working to corroborate the tip through interviews and evidence. When technology changes, it's going to catch up to them. At least we hope so. And that murders, I mean, they never go just go away. But, you know, to me, and to the stuff matters, because to somebody, this was their world. This ain't a crime.

She meant something to these people. I mean, that was somebody's daughter. That was Robert's wife. I'm sure she had best friends and really close relatives. Just because I didn't know her, but to somebody, she was her everything. It's been 50 years. Ancline deserves justice. Her family deserves to know why she was killed and who her killer is.

Detectives might have a new suspect in mind, but that doesn't mean they don't still need the public's help. If you or someone you know has information about the murder of Ancline, please call 812-436-7979. That's the mainline to the Evansville Police Detective Unit, and it's staffed 24-7. Maybe you have the missing piece of information that could finally close Anne's case forever. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the Deck and our advocacy work, visit the DeckPodcast.com. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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