CROTHERSVILLE LOST LUSTER LONG BEFORE HER DEATH

CROTHERSVILLE, Ind. -- Well before Katlyn "Katie" Collman died, there were
signs of trouble in Crothersville.

The Rev. Mark Wooten recognized them immediately in this once-thriving
Jackson County community when he moved his family back here in November.

Instead of a homecoming to the friendly neighbors, perfect lawns and
freshly painted houses of his youth, he said he barely recognized the place.

"I remember manicured little homes up and down the streets," Wooten, the
pastor at Nazarene Church, said. "But look at the houses here now. It's a
disgrace."

The farm economy that put the shine on this town since its founding in 1858
has long since fallen away. Gone are the Chevy dealership, the lawyers, the
doctors, the drugstore and the bakery where children used to stop on the
way to school.

It was after making a similar stop, to buy toilet paper at the Dollar
General store on Jan. 25, that 10-year-old Katie disappeared. Police found
the fourth-grader dead five days later in a creek 19 miles away, her hands
tied behind her back.

When a 20-year-old resident, Charles "Chuckie" Hickman, was arrested and
charged with murder in Katie's death, the town was forced to confront a
problem that was already obvious to many.

Hickman, according to court records, told police that Katie was killed to
keep her quiet about the methamphetamine activity she had seen involving
residents of the Penn Villa apartment complex on her way home.

After the shock of Katie's murder subsided, the hard questions and
second-guessing began. Wasn't the increased drug activity in town obvious?
Should something more have been done?

Signs of drug use -- specifically of methamphetamine -- began showing up in
the past decade as the town's population was whittled away from 1,747
people in 1980 to 1,570 in 2000, and young adults saw fewer opportunities
to put down roots.

Linda Sams, who operated -- then closed -- an arcade for young people and
who now runs the town's lone grocery store, said Crothersville's drug use
has gotten worse and worse.

"Every year you could see a change," she said.

Twice in the weeks before Katie's murder, police had received complaints
about drug activity at the Penn Villa complex. Separate visits by the
Jackson County Sheriff's Department and the Crothersville Police Department
turned up no sign of drugs and resulted in no arrests.

"We've got three guys," Crothersville police Chief Norman Ford said of his
force, "and we can't even cover 24 hours a day."

State, local and federal law enforcement agents are investigating the
Collman case. Two people have been charged with giving police false
information, and authorities say more arrests are possible.

Elizabeth Mowery said she and her three children moved a few miles out of
town within the past few years because of her concerns about the
community's drug activity.

"What if I had done something more?" she said. "What if I had gone to the
state police to try to get this stopped? Would this have still happened?"

Others wondered what part, if any, the town's slide played in the tragedy.

John Masters, whose father and uncle founded a dirt race car manufacturing
operation, MastersBilt, said Hickman was a problem waiting to happen.

"He was a dropout," Masters, 18, said. "Is that a failure by the community,
by us as a whole? Or is it a failure of morals, or what? I'm not sure, but
you've got to give young people something to shoot for.

" ... We'd see kids sitting around town, not working, and we knew what they
were doing."

Meth's momentum

When Katie died, so, too, did the illusions that some residents had
nurtured about their hometown.

Karissa Glenn, a senior at Crothersville Junior/Senior High School, said
meth's reputation as the town's "drug of choice" was an open secret in the
community long before Katie was killed.

"You think evil can't happen in a small town, but it did," said Karissa, 17.

Authorities seized the first meth lab in Jackson County, where
Crothersville is located, in 1999, according to Indiana State Police
records. The number jumped to 33 in 2001, and in 2003 it reached 63, nearly
equaling the combined total of the previous four years.

Because of that, Jackson County ranked fourth among Indiana's 92 counties
in the number of meth labs seized that year.

Bill Nagle, a retired teacher and current member of the Crothersville Town
Council, said there was an "element of denial" among residents that meth
had arrived.

When he first heard about meth 18 months ago, Nagle said, he believed the
problems associated with the drug seemed more typical of an urban
environment like Louisville or Indianapolis.

Steve Daily would have set him straight.

Daily, a native of Seymour who now lives nearby in Brownstown, said he
first heard about meth in the early 1990s. He quickly discovered that it
was cheaper than cocaine and its effect lasted longer.

Daily said he initially bought meth from dealers in Arizona and California.
After learning to cook it himself in 1997, he said, he was able to
introduce the drug to hundreds of people.

"I thought I was really doing a service to my friends because I was making
something clean," said Daily, who later spent 10 months behind bars on
meth-related charges.

He said he has been off meth for four years, but his former habit damaged
his thyroid and left him permanently disabled.

Ashley Murphy, a 14-year-old freshman at the high school, said most
students at the school knew about the town's growing meth activity over the
past year or so. Frequent traffic at a house on East Dixon Street that
caught fire Dec. 9 was one sign, she said.

Jeff Tatlock, 22, and 29-year-old Walter Barger Jr., both of Crothersville,
were arrested last month on charges of meth manufacturing related to that
fire, according to police and court records. The house on East Dixon was
being rented by Tatlock at the time of the fire.

At Katie's funeral, the Rev. Jon Pearce of First Baptist Church described
her death as a wake-up call. The fire on Dixon Street a month earlier, he
said, should have served as another wake-up call, but the town failed to
respond.

Ford, who has been police chief for nearly three decades, said his tiny
force responds as well as it can. By the time of the December fire, he was
well acquainted with the network of meth cooks and abusers who hung out on
street corners in town, he said.

"There's people I know who are selling drugs," he said. "The hard part is
proving it."

Dwindling opportunities

Katie's death might have awakened Crothersville to its growing drug
problem, but longtime residents say the town had lost its luster long
before drugs became a concern.

Though never large, Crothersville was once a bustling stop along U.S. 31,
the main route between Louisville and Indianapolis before Interstate 65 was
completed, and to points north.

"Thirty-one used to be the main drag around here," said Curt Kovener,
publisher and editor of The Crothersville Times, the local weekly. "On
Kentucky Derby Day the locals stayed off the highway. There were cars
bumper-to-bumper going through town."

Kovener, 52 said when he was growing up there, the town boasted a bakery,
restaurants, a grocery store and Garriott Motor Co., where you could buy a
new Chevrolet. In the 1960s, the town also had a small but significant
professional class, he said, with three practicing doctors.

The last physician left about a year ago, Kovener and others said. The
bakery also is gone, as is the hardware store, the drugstore and all but a
couple of places to eat.

"This is an old-folks town," said Earl Peacock, 73, who added that he sold
the last drugstore in town in the 1980s. "Young people leave when they can.
It's the old people who stay."

Larry Walker, a bartender at Tommy's, the town's bar, said he left
Crothersville in the 1980s so he could keep his union job with American Can.

"They kept moving the jobs south, and I went with them so I could get my 25
years in and get the pension," said Walker, 54, adding that he later moved
back.

He said he doesn't know where local high school graduates -- or those who
drop out -- can find work that will provide the same kind of good pay,
benefits and a decent retirement.

"Sometimes I hear from people who say they are considering moving back to
town," Kovener said. "I tell them, 'This ain't the home you left.'"

Dave Salesman, a 21-year-old factory worker, left town after dropping out
of high school during his second attempt at completing his freshman year.
He comes back now from Seymour, he said, only to skate with friends and to
see his fiancee, who works at Subway, the only fast-food place in town.

Salesman said he's grateful for his second-shift production line job at
Aisin USA Manufacturing, in Seymour, where he makes a little more than $10
an hour, but says any chance he had to make something more of his life has
passed him by since he never earned his General Educational Development
certificate.

If he had $3,000, he'd go to cosmetology school to learn how to cut hair
professionally, something he learned to love when he was a teenager, he said.

"But that's not going to happen," Salesman said. "I am in a dead-end job. I
look out in front of me and I see nothing. I am going to be there for a
long time."

High school guidance counselor Ron Jackson said school officials never
followed up on Salesman once he dropped out.

"We try to keep them in school, but once they leave, our responsibility
ends," he said.

Of the 33 seniors in the class of 2005, he said, 23 have taken enough
courses to attend a state college. But only about 10 have bothered to take
the ACT or SAT college-entrance exams necessary for admission to a
four-year school, he said.

More may take the tests, he said, but no more than about 10 are likely to
further their education after high school.

"People around here aren't that educationally ambitious," Jackson said.

That wouldn't apply to Karissa, the high school senior who said meth use in
town had become obvious. She said she plans to go to college, and then to
medical school.

Her boyfriend, whom she met at a summer church camp in Danville, plans to
be a lawyer, she said. She doesn't expect they will return to Crothersville
after school.

Bob Spicer, a town native and president of the Crothersville School Board,
said hanging on to the town's best and brightest is increasingly difficult.

"A lot of parents, when I was growing up, their goal was to see to it that
their children achieved higher education levels than they had," said
Spicer, human resources director for a local company that makes insulation,
Regal Industries Inc.

"It seems like they have either moved on, or we don't have the same
attitude," said Spicer, who with his master's degree is one of just 22
Crothersville residents who hold a graduate or professional degree,
according to the 2000 census.

Wooten, the pastor who moved back to town last year, said there once was a
more tangible sense of pride.

"We had one of the best Little League programs in the state -- and that's
saying a lot for a town the size of Crothersville," he said. "That's one of
the first things I noticed, there just doesn't seem to be enough people
with the time to invest to make things work."

Law enforcement stretched

The police officials charged with keeping Crothersville safe would agree
with that.

While some residents expressed frustration with local law enforcement in
the wake of Katie's death, both the police department and the Jackson
County Sheriff's Department, which patrol the town, said they don't have
enough officers.

Sheriff Jerry Hounshel said he only has 14 officers to staff the jail and
cover the roads throughout the county, which is the state's eighth-largest
in terms of square miles.

He said he must focus his officers on areas that have no local police force
at all.

Both agencies were tipped to suspected drug activity at the Penn Villa
apartments weeks before Katie allegedly saw the meth activity that, Hickman
told police, led to her death. While both sent officers, no drug activity
was found.

"When the officers got over there to investigate, they could not smell
anything at all," said Ford. "And we did not have no probable cause to do
anything."

"We've got three guys, and we can't cover around the clock and do all the
regular police work and take care of drugs too," Ford said.

"Because ... if you're really going to be effective on drug cases, you've
got to spend some time with it and you can't be interrupted by having to go
to a traffic accident or handling some domestic call or something."

Salesman said that with only one officer on duty most days, it's too easy
to get away with something in the town.

"In my opinion, having one cop on duty at a time is b.s., pardon my
French," Salesman said. "It's ridiculous. If I know where that one cop is
on one side of town, I can peel out like crazy or do just about anything on
the other."

Ford said help is on the way. The chief said he won approval from the Town
Council shortly before Katie's death to add reserve officers. Reserves have
full police training and authority but work as volunteers. He said he plans
to add at least three reserves.

'Take our town back'

More than 200 people walked through a light drizzling rain on a Sunday
afternoon late last month to honor Katie's memory and to begin the public
healing the town needs.

"We are not the ones who should be afraid," Aaron Knieriem, the march's
organizer, told the group. "We need to send a message to the people using
drugs that we are going to take our town back."

And in the weeks after Katie's death, a number of ideas have surfaced as
part of an effort to tackle meth in Crothersville.

One is to create a formal neighborhood watch program, which would allow
residents to report suspicious activity.

Residents had also talked about raising $400,000 through Katie's memorial
fund to buy and demolish the Penn Villa apartments and build a playground
on the one-acre site. That project has been dropped, but similar plans are
now being considered a few blocks away for vacant land near the town's
school complex.

John Neace, Katie's father, said he believes the town will remain united in
the fight against meth.

The family had tentatively planned to move to southeastern Tennessee this
summer, he said, but that has been put on hold. Neace said he plans to
remain in Crothersville, partly to see to it that the town doesn't forget
about Katie.

"This is a problem that I've been thrust into," he said. "If my words can
save one family from having to go through this, it's worth all the talking."

The road to a safer Crothersville may be paved partly with help from
outside the community.

In nearby Seymour, for example, a police lieutenant is tackling meth almost
full time, offering public-awareness sessions and educational materials
throughout the county. Additional law enforcement resources also are
available through the Southern Indiana Drug Task Force.

And there have been several moves to tackle meth at the state level.
Legislation that would make it more difficult to obtain pseudoephedrine, an
ingredient in meth production, is under consideration in the General Assembly.

In addition, law enforcement officials from Jackson County and other
meth-heavy counties in Indiana met with Gov. Mitch Daniels recently to
discuss the burgeoning drug problem.

Sara Hillenburg, a member of the Town Council, said the town faces hurdles
that will not be overcome soon.

In her youth, Hillenburg said, she could walk through Crothersville and
tick off the names of almost every resident. Today, as an elected official,
she said she probably couldn't name half the town's residents.

A highly mobile society with a lack of connection between neighbors makes
it difficult to fight a problem like meth, she said.

Yet some are taking to the fight.

Shelly Erwin, a school bus driver in Crothersville for the past 18 years,
said Katie's death focused national attention on the town and energized
residents.

Erwin said she plans to do her part by attending more public meetings and
becoming more involved in the town's civic life.

"Hopefully we can change the climate," she said. "It's a shame that a
10-year-old little girl had to lose her life for us to realize what a
problem this had become."