A Saturday morning outing to Hemlock Cliffs, with an unexpected side order of unsolved murder.

On Saturday morning we drove down to the Hemlock Cliffs in Crawford County, a charming sandstone box canyon that's part of the Hoosier National Forest. The photos don't do it justice; it's a hidden jewel, not a big ticket item. Coupled with the drive, I found the experience to be a lesson in regenerated second-growth forest. There'd have been a great deal of pasture land and denuded hillsides even when I was a kid.  

When I posted about it later on Fb, a friend mentioned the saga of William Dessie Messamore.

In the early 1950s, Messamore was questioned about a family who had disappeared from his Crawford County, Indiana, farm without a trace on January 7, 1949. Members of the missing family were Thomas Vandiver, his wife, Beatrice, and her daughter from another marriage, Wanda Johnson. The family had been living with Messamore on his farm in English when they disappeared. The Vandiver investigation led to a confession from Messamore that he had been part of a Kevil, Kentucky, bank robbery. Police worked for years to solve the Vandiver mystery while Messamore served a 28-year prison sentence, including time at Alcatraz, for the bank robbery and a Paducah jail break. He was eventually paroled. No one was ever charged in the Vandiver case, although authorities always suspected the case was murder and thought Messamore was involved.

Supposedly the house where the crime occurred was located a few miles north of our whereabouts Saturday near the hamlet of Mifflin, which no longer exists. It is said the house was up on Saltwell Hill, with an expanse of cliffs in the back yard, so local legend affirms the existence of bones in a sinkhole (or the bottomland over the edge of a cliff like those we walked past). 

It's a helluva story, and based on Messamore's attraction to crime, all too possible. The story is retold here (The Vandiver Mystery) and there (Hughes Interview).

Car-centrism: Why does the news media always let human drivers off the hook when non-driving humans get killed?

Can any human (as opposed to his or her word processor) connected with the news media, now or in the past, explain why other humans walking, biking or skateboarding invariably are hit, injured and sometimes killed by vehicles, and not by the humans driving them?

Is this stated somewhere in a style guide: Thou shalt not trouble a driver when a vehicle can be blamed?

Greenville councilman fatally struck by car, by Aprile Rickert (Tom May Unlimited)

Alan K. Johnson was struck Saturday on U.S. 150

GREENVILLE — The Town of Greenville is mourning the loss of a community staple and council member who died Saturday after being struck by a car.

Alan K. Johnson, 66, was crossing the road in the 9600 block of U.S. 150 when he was hit by a 1996 Toyota Rav4, driven by Constance Sue Huber, 69, of DePauw, according to a news release from the Floyd County Sheriff's Department.

First in the title, then in the opening paragraph -- and for a third time in the opening clause of the second paragraph, it's the car that killed Johnson. Only in the second paragraph is the driver identified.

Wait -- the driver was identified?

Has the driver who killed Matt Brewer in August yet been identified?

Has the Combined Accident Reconstruction Team, the prosecutor's fanciful name for "here in Floyd County we don't prosecute drivers for killing non-drivers," released the report on Matt's death?

In May of 2016, Chloe Allen was killed by a driver named Terra Lawrence while trying to cross Spring Street at the suburban chain hellscape of Vincennes and Spring. The late Branden Klayko wrote about it at Broken Sidewalk.

I'm reprinting Branden's commentary in its entirety, with highlighting of crucial passages.

Woman killed by motorist in New Albany

Chloe Allen, 83, is dead after being struck by a motorist in downtown New Albany over the weekend.

The collision took place at Spring Street and Vincennes Street in the Southern Indiana city at 2:00p.m. on Friday, May 13. Allen was crossing the street in the crosswalk when struck by Terra Lawrence, 42, who failed to observe Allen in the street. Lawrence was driving a 2013 Dodge Ram truck and turning left onto Spring from Vincennes, according to police reports. Allen died after being transported to University Hospital in Louisville.

The incident was reported by the WLKY, WDRB, WHAS11, and the News & Tribune.

While a great deal of information was rendered by an investigation, it’s unfortunate that for the sake of a catchy acronym, the unit is labeled the Floyd County Combined Accident Reconstruction Team. As we have discussed many times, crashes and accidents are very different things and should not be mislabeled.

All of the local news reported that the pedestrian was struck “by a vehicle” rather than the driver of that vehicle. Cars and trucks don’t drive themselves—people crash them into things. Both WDRB and WHAS11 labeled the crash an accident, with WHAS11 going as far as to include a large “Accident” graphic complete with cracked windshield illustrating its report.

Each report duly noted a police statement that said speed nor alcohol are suspected in the crash. From a witness account, the motorist simply was not paying attention when turning, although none of the reports cited that the driver was errant or that charges were due.

New Albany has really let itself go at this intersection, allowing an anti-urban Walgreens, White Castle, and Rally’s to be built behind moats of parking that make walking unsafe. Low visibility crosswalks are clearly worn away by vehicle tires, compounding the walkability issue.

But the city should have seen this one coming. Back in 2014, urban planner Jeff Speck issued a report on the streets of downtown New Albany in which he identified Vincennes Street as “clearly oversized for its traffic.” Speck wrote of the three-lane street: “At no point do car accounts approach the number that would require a third lane. This condition is supported by the fact that the third lane, rather then (sic) being striped for left turns, merely provides northbound redundancy with no southbound counterpart.” He recommended a reconfiguration to improve safety.

Speck had also recommended making Spring Street west of here, among other local streets, a two-way thoroughfare (Spring is two-way to the east). He labeled Spring Street’s design as it moved from a grid to a highway layout as dangerous:

This four-lane section of Spring Street also feels very much like a highway, and experiences a large amount of speeding while creating an environment that is dangerous to walk along or live near. The ideal solution for this street would be to calm the traffic and create an environment of greater safety, without significantly changing its capacity, beyond perhaps a slight lowering of volume to match current demand.

Further, KIPDA has ranked two segments of Spring Street in New Albany—including this intersection—as among the most crash-prone in all of Southern Indiana, spurring plans for design changes on the street. Most of those changes call for lights making driving through the area easier, but buffered bike lanes are also part of the plan, which will be under construction this summer. Even these minor changes were challenged by area trucking companies in court, citing they make driving big rigs through the area more difficult.

New Albany has a long way to go on street safety.

By the way, as City Hall dithers about radar displays to tell them what the man in the moon already knows -- drivers drive too damn fast on Spring Street -- dead man's curve remains a killing waiting to happen.

ASK THE BORED: Faced with 75 signatures on a petition, Nash, Summers and the clueless BOW non-safety board can't muster a single empathetic response.

Dead Man's Curve has killed, and it will kill again unless our cowardly ruling clique does its job.

They're not going to do anything to promote public safety, are they?

Remembering Chloe Allen -- and the unfinished task of making streets safe for all users, not just drivers.

As the late Chloe Allen's former neighbor pointed out yesterday, the second anniversary of her tragic death fell on squarely on Mother's Day.

It's also the second anniversary of Mayor Jeff Gahan's refusal to say her name aloud, or even to acknowledge her passing.

I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

I thought it prudent to wait a bit before mentioning it, and asking: Is the intersection in question safer now?

Perhaps marginally. It's still a terrifying place to watch the very worst that drivers can be. 

In the column reprinted here, I asked that Chloe Allen's death not be allowed to become yet another forgotten civic footnote. Unfortunately, the powers that be barely noticed when this murder-by-driver occurred, much less committed the sad fact to active memory.

The incessant roar of Team Gahan's campaign finance accumulation machine tends to drown out the sounds of compassion and human dignity. In 2019, we can do something about this. 

---

12/22/2016

ON THE AVENUES: For New Albany’s Person of the Year, the timeless words of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living.”

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It’s time again for NA Confidential to select New Albany’s "Person of the Year." In 2016, we’ll be approaching the task a bit differently than before, although our basic definition remains intact.

Person of the Year (formerly Man of the Year) is an annual issue of the United States news magazine Time that features and profiles a person, couple, group, idea, place, or machine that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year."

Admittedly, in past years the selection process has been conducted with a certain flippancy, and what I mean by this is that … we've done it with tongue planted in cheek, disrespectfully and facetiously.

(Just trying to help Shane out, in case he’s reading.)

• 2011 ... The Sherman Minton Bridge
• 2012 ... Bill "Slumlord" Allen
• 2013 ... (tie) Houndmouth and "Quality of Life"
• 2014 ... Heroic Non-Incentivized Downtown Developers
• 2015 ... New Albany property tax payers

Yes, we’ve been flippant in the past, but not this year. This year we're playing it perfectly straight.

That’s because in May, Chloe Allen was killed.

---

Chloe Allen was trying to walk across Spring Street where it intersects with Vincennes. It’s a chaotic intersection for pedestrians because it is designed expressly for cars, not people, with drive-through retail businesses trafficking their wares via numerous curb cuts on three of four corners.

To walk there regularly even while remaining entirely on the sidewalk is to know how unsafe it feels, but walking isn’t something Jeff Gahan’s team of Bud Light-swilling, frat-brother suburbanites understands, and so Chloe Allen was running errands in preparation for a family wedding, and she tried to cross Spring Street.

It should have been routine, but she never made it to the other side.

A distracted, negligent or otherwise rotten driver hit her, and she died. Of course the driver wasn’t charged, because the firebrand ideological appendage Keith Henderson evidently saw no potential for a book deal in the wake of her passing, and in the weeks following her death, New Albany City Hall contracted a severe and abiding case of laryngitis.

It remains a telling silence induced by pure, pitiful, bottomless cowardice.

Chloe Allen’s death was briefly discussed at city council, though not by those Disney-Democratic rubber stamp council persons who yawningly align themselves with City Hall’s every whim.

Her death was mentioned before the Board of Public Works and Safety during public comments, although these bored time servers were able to muster little more than tepid gurgling sounds for fear their phones might ring at 2:00 a.m., with Hizzoner himself breathing heavily and suggestively on the other end of the line.

Speaking for myself, I’ll never forgive any of them for their giggling remoteness, their nonchalant callousness and their cavalier gutlessness. I never will, and you shouldn’t, either.

It didn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn't be this way ever again, but what can we do?

For starters: Not forget.

---

In December, when I solicited nominations for Person of the Year, more than one blog reader suggested that Chloe Allen would be the best choice, precisely because the cosmic senselessness of an ordinary citizen’s murder while on foot, seeking nothing more than to continue her walk on the other side of a street designed to terrify any user not passing through at high speeds in an automobile, is a lamentable (and preventable) state of affairs perfectly illuminating the fundamental and enduring disconnect between New Albany's political hacks and their subjects.

And so it does, chillingly so.

It also holds an inconvenient mirror aloft, one that catches the reflection not only of Team “Image First” Gahan’s leering, abysmally-mannered, serial refusal to accept responsibility for anything at all that can’t be alibied in a poorly written press release, but serves also to expose these very same pusillanimous tendencies in the city’s populace as a whole.

However, when Chloe Allen’s name was mentioned as a possibility, I was hesitant, mindful of the local political caste’s knee-jerk reaction earlier this year when some citizens dared to speak truth to power.

Like the reaction of my councilman, who insists he supports safe streets for everyone, but spent the first five years of Gahan’s personality cult idly watching, with nary a peep, as Dear Leader sat on his hands, although at least my councilman will concede privately that he has felt constrained and unable to object openly, lest his imperial overlord respond by doing even less for public safety than before – if that’s possible.

Greg Phipps expressed annoyance with those who feel it is a public official's responsibility to speak to matters of the public's interest -- especially when these matters pertain to safety. Phipps referred to "malcontents" in this context.

Or City Hall’s anonymous house spokes-tweeter:

Hey everybody watch me crassly exploit a human being's death to score extremely cheap points for my pet agenda.

Which begs the question: Shouldn’t public safety be Gahan’s foremost “pet agenda” as mayor -- not dully repetitious ducking and covering?

In time, with our bureaucratic political caste busily lobbing flaccid missiles from their pea shooters, the sound of circling wagons brought Matthew Shepard to mind.

(The) backlash following Shepard’s murder was knowingly spurred and intentionally politicized by LGBT activists, civil rights advocates, world famous celebrities, but also ordinary folks inhabiting a table at Denny’s. It was crass, exploitative and fully justified. I supported it then, and I do now.

Perhaps then we’re all malcontents, each and every one of us, crassly exploiting tragedy for political purposes, whether it’s Marc Antony, the grieving Armenians pointing fingers at the Kremlin, Dr. King, human rights proponents memorializing Shepard – or a citizen like Lori Kay Sympson, who doesn’t want you to forget that her friend Chloe Allen was killed trying to cross a dangerous street in New Albany, where streets are kept dangerous due to crass exploitation – that’s right, for political purposes.

Politics is power. For a prevaricating politician like Greg Phipps to selectively deny the efficacy of this statement by tarring others as malcontents is a tragedy in itself, and a misreading of history eligible for crass exploitation by those of us, malcontented or otherwise, who apparently understand his elected position – and his past – far better than he does.

Alas, it seems we're no less malcontented now than in May, and so Chloe Allen is NA Confidential’s Person of the Year for 2016, but not without a respectful and sizable caveat.

---

Chloe Allen’s death cannot be allowed to become another forgotten civic footnote. 

Her passing must not have been in vain. In years to come principled citizens of this city – the ones for whom conscience isn’t a high school vocabulary term to be discarded once they’re elected to office – must forcibly insist that her memory be honored, nay, overtly exploited for the sake of a worthwhile agenda.

Specifically, an agenda of public safety in this city. Among other aspects, this public safety agenda reorders auto-centrism by reimagining our streets as community spaces, not mere transit routes. This agenda urges a genuine commitment to public safety by design, for all users, not drivers only. This public safety agenda empowers from the grassroots up, not the TIF bond down.

The late Chloe Allen is New Albany’s Person of the Year because we have no choice except to rededicate our efforts to honor her memory by lobbying for street grid improvements that matter for people, too, and not only their machines.

An excellent place to begin is the horrible intersection of Spring and Vincennes, though not to neglect Main and W. 1st, where City Hall gratuitously fumbled a nuts and bolts traffic taming opportunity in 2015 in favor of showy repaving prior to an election.

And then there's Spring and W. 1st. The only surprise here is that a lawyer hasn't yet been hit. Make it a Democratic donor attorney, and traffic calming might actually occur.

Not to mention State and Spring, where speed and recklessness are everyday occurrences for walkers.

But all these opportunities for correction simply must be accompanied by a civic mission statement of intent, as in Toronto, Canada:

Six Principles of Toronto Pedestrian Charter

Accessibility
Walking is a free and direct means of accessing local goods, services, community amenities and public transit.

Equity
Walking is the only mode of travel that is universally affordable, and allows children and youth, and people with specific medical conditions to travel independently.

Health and Well-being
Walking is a proven method of promoting personal health and well-being.

Environmental Sustainability
Walking relies on human power and has negligible environmental impact.

Personal and Community Safety
An environment in which people feel safe and comfortable walking increases community safety for all.

Community Cohesion and Vitality
A pedestrian-friendly environment encourages and facilitates social interaction and local economic vitality.

The Toronto Pedestrian Charter is an initiative that came from residents who serve their city on the Toronto Pedestrian Committee. The Charter reflects the principle that a city's walkability is one of the most important measures of the quality of its public realm, and of its health and vitality.

This is the first pedestrian charter in North America, and the first approved by a municipality anywhere. So this is an historic first that we hope will set an example for other municipalities across the country, the continent and around the world.

In approving the development of the Charter in 2000, The City intended:

• to outline what pedestrians have a right to expect from the City in terms of meeting their travel needs;
• to establish principles to guide the development of all policies and practices that affect pedestrians; and
• to identify the features of an urban environment and infrastructure that will encourage and support walking.

Most importantly, the Charter was intended to serve as a reminder to decision-makers, both in the City and in the community at large, that walking should be valued as the most sustainable of all forms of travel, and that it has enormous social, environmental and economic benefits for the city.

We can dedicate these to Chloe Allen, but unfortunately, we also can predict with near certainty that City Hall will remain indifferent.

Gahan’s grandiosely termed Downtown Street Grid Improvement Project might yield a bare minimum return on investment by restoring two-way streets, but otherwise it’s just another of his mock Potemkin façades, dedicated to garnering as much campaign finance lubrication as possible from the usual suspects in engineering and construction without making truly transformative changes to the grid.

It’s why the forever uncomprehending Gahan stripped Jeff Speck’s plan of its most potentially useful recommendations, and it’s why we’ll have to add them back as we’re able, with or without City Hall’s permission.

Rest in peace, Chloe Allen. I proceed and persist in the hope that we can make you and your family proud of us, and help this city become a safer place for people to live, work ... and walk.

"It is more than about time, 36 years later, to bid a proper farewell to Vernon Kroening."

I almost missed "A Proper Farewell." There is a compelling poignancy to this story of forgotten history, of the music director at a church entirely unworthy of him, and the little-known Dutch dorman, extending to the deranged shooter Crumpley, who spent the rest of his life in secure psychiatric hospitals.

The same writer provides further background here:

New York’s Own Anti-Gay Massacre, Now Barely Remembered.

A Proper Farewell, Finally, for a Victim of an Anti-Gay Rampage in New York, by David W. Dunlap (NYT)

Thirty-six years after Vernon Kroening, music director of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, was killed outside the Ramrod bar in the West Village, friends remembered him as “all-embracing.”

It is more than about time, 36 years later, to bid a proper farewell to Vernon Kroening.

Mr. Kroening, a Minnesota native and former Benedictine monk, was the music director, choirmaster and organist of St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Greenwich Village.

He was 32 years old. He loved the liturgy. He loved the church. And he loved other men.

On the night of Nov. 19, 1980, heading home from a musical rehearsal, Mr. Kroening stopped at the Ramrod bar in the West Village. That placed him in the line of fire when Ronald K. Crumpley, a homophobic former transit police officer and minister’s son, went on a murderous rampage through the neighborhood, shooting a submachine gun indiscriminately into a crowd of men standing in front of the Ramrod and Sneakers, another gay bar, on West Street.

Mr. Kroening was killed instantly. Jorg Wenz, a 24-year-old doorman at the Ramrod, died hours later at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Six other men were wounded that night.

Prejudice and institutional reticence held The New York Times back from giving faces to these victims and telling their stories at the time, as it did with those who were killed at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla., in June.

Wrist slap: Run a red light, kill three kids -- hey, I thought it was green.

In which we learn that "Kentuckiana" isn't the only place in the country where drivers are not held accountable when they murder walkers and persons riding bicycles.

The Oregonian: Run a Red Light and Kill 3 Kids? “Just a Tragic Accident”, by Angie Schmitt (Streetsblog)

In February, a pickup truck driver in suburban Eugene, Oregon, ran through a red light at 40 miles an hour, killing three children — 4-year-old Tyler Hudson, 5-year-old McKenzie Hudson, and 8-year-old John Day — and critically injuring their mother. The family was walking with the right-of-way in a crosswalk, returning from getting ice cream.

The response to this horrible loss of life? Law enforcement and the state’s largest paper, The Oregonian, have chalked it up as a “tragic accident.”

The Lane County district attorney recently announced there won’t be any criminal charges for the driver, Larry LaThorpe, 68, formerly a commercial truck driver. LaThorpe’s defense is simple enough: He thought the light was green. And that, it seems, is all you have to say to avoid prosecution for killing three children with your motor vehicle.

Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists? (and for that matter, pedestrians).

An extended excerpt from another must-read.

Is It O.K. to Kill Cyclists?, by Daniel Duane (New York Times)

... the social and legal culture of the American road, not to mention the road itself, hasn’t caught up. Laws in most states do give bicycles full access to the road, but very few roads are designed to accommodate bicycles, and the speed and mass differentials — bikes sometimes slow traffic, only cyclists have much to fear from a crash — make sharing the road difficult to absorb at an emotional level. Nor does it help that many cyclists do ignore traffic laws. Every time I drive my car through San Francisco, I see cyclists running stop signs like immortal, entitled fools. So I understand the impulse to see cyclists as recreational risk takers who deserve their fate.

But studies performed in Arizona, Minnesota and Hawaii suggest that drivers are at fault in more than half of cycling fatalities. And there is something undeniably screwy about a justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you’re driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you’re not obviously drunk and don’t flee the scene. When two cars crash, everybody agrees that one of the two drivers may well be to blame; cops consider it their job to gather evidence toward that determination. But when a car hits a bike, it’s like there’s a collective cultural impulse to say, “Oh, well, accidents happen.” If your 13-year-old daughter bikes to school tomorrow inside a freshly painted bike lane, and a driver runs a stop sign and kills her and then says to the cop, “Gee, I so totally did not mean to do that,” that will most likely be good enough.

“We do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run,” Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.

Get it right, or let him go.

David Camm's murder verdict was overturned today, and there will be a third murder trial.

Read the Indiana Supreme Court opinion.

I find it regrettable that so many opinions about this decision will be proffered within the parameters of what a third trial will cost.

Yes, it will be an awful lot.

Yes, I'd rather spend the money on other things.

Yes, it's frustrating.

But that isn't really the point of justice, is it? Even the most cursory consideration of American history should lead most fair-minded people to concur with this assessment, as written at another local blog:

How many times do we have to convict this guy? The answer is, one time - fairly.

Conversely, if the evidence is valid or admissable, acquit him and be done with it. Either way, do it fairly.

It's always fashionable to bash lawyers and decry the expense of justice in cases like this. There are valid reasons for both these points of view, and I'm not the one to outline the case for how the situation might be improved, although from where I'm sitting, two successive prosecutions have been botched. Where's the rage against the lawyers responsible for the mishandlings, and hence the reversals?

There should be a large element of conscience to all this. Who among us is willing to dispense with the sort of legal safeguards against abuses and errors that were exercised today by the Indiana Supreme Court's ruling? Things like this prove the viability of the legal syystem. At the same time, calculations of justice in the context of Steve Price's nickels and dimes proves just how shallow we can be at times.

Get it right, or let him go.

But feel free to disagree.

Murder in the name of religion? No thanks.

The New York Times gets it right.

Murder in Kansas

There must be a sustained focus by federal and state officials to prevent further acts of violence against physicians who risk their safety to perform legal medical procedures.

While disagreeing with blogger/economist/educator/candidate Eric Schansberg's overall position on abortion, I appreciate his take on the most recent crime: Robert George on Tiller's murder.

Of course, Tiller's cowardly murderer reminds us that it's always very useful, if not "fun" and "sexy", to keep close watch on religious extremists, because the havoc they've merrily wreaked in the name of God and throughout the past few thousand years simply cannot be rationalized, and should be frequently and unequivocally disavowed by believers who aren't in favor of converting the planet at the point of a gun.