DEATH HUMANIZES METH ISSUE

Girl Found Dead In Ind. After Witnessing Drug Production Wakes Up Town

CROTHERSVILLE, IND. -- John Neace forces himself to pass by the rundown
apartment buildings every day. Inside, police say, Neace's 10-year-old
daughter stumbled upon someone with methamphetamine. Her drowned body was
found five days later at a nearby creek, small hands tied tightly behind
her back.

As dime and dollar donations poured in from around the corner and around
the country for the little girl's burial, Neace, whose factory job barely
covers the $400 monthly rent on his trailer, had a thought: What if he
could buy the hated buildings, bulldoze them and build a playground in
their place?

"Katie may be gone, but she's going to live forever in this town," Neace,
35, said of his daughter, Katlyn Collman. "We're taking down one meth house
- -- you probably can't take them all down, but it's sending a message. We're
taking our town back."

The girl's Jan. 25 disappearance, and the Feb. 2 arrest of an unemployed
high school dropout known for loitering on his lawn, have shaken the town
of 1,541 souls out of silence about the scourge of methamphetamine.

Like so many similar places across the nation's midsection, Crothersville
has seen meth steadily seep into its streets. The roof of a house behind
the funeral home exploded in December, a makeshift meth lab found in the
fire. Another lab, spitball distance from the school, was shut down last
year. The uncle of the young man now facing murder charges in the case
wrote a letter to members of the town council two years ago begging them to
do something about drugs before someone got killed.

But many residents said they had been scared to report suspicions in a
community where everyone seems somehow related. Others complained that the
three-man police force too often looks the other way -- the man who lived
at the house behind the funeral home has yet to face charges, and two
complaints about meth at the dilapidated Penn Villa apartments in the days
before Katie's death yielded nothing.

Now, as people comfort the family of the victim as well as that of the
suspect, stories are spilling out, in a town seemingly transformed.

Changes 'Too Late'

The pastor who preached at Katie's funeral is organizing Crothersville's
first-ever Neighborhood Watch. Shady characters no longer stalk the streets
of the one-stoplight town, where rain-stained ribbons of blue, Katie's
favorite color, hang from utility poles and porches. Gone, too, are the
bike-riding and dog-walking youngsters, now let outside to play only with
their parents, or in seemingly safe packs.

"This town is not going to be known, and these people are not going to let
it be known, for a murder," declared Terry Gray, the assistant chief of the
volunteer fire department, who has pledges for $100,000 of the $400,000 he
estimates will be needed to buy the Penn Villa apartments and build the
park. "They're going to be known as a town that took a bad situation and
made it something good."

But amid the pride in the prospect for change that the playground
represents, there is shame that it came to this.

"It's changed too late," said Misty Banks, who works at the Butcher Block
convenience store, where she fed Katie Reese's peanut butter cups and
Popsicles even when the girl could not pay. "They've known it's been going
on this whole time, and they have to wait until a 10-year-old's dead?"

She Never Returned

Katie was a fourth-grader who loved animals and the Disney Channel. She
came home that Tuesday afternoon bubbling about the pajama party planned at
school the next day, her mother said. And at 3:10 p.m., Katie headed to the
Dollar General store a few blocks away to pick up some toilet paper. She
apparently swung by the People's Bank, as she did practically every day, to
grab a lollipop and stopped at the Penn Villa apartments to tell a resident
that a dog had been hit by a train on the adjacent track.

She never came back.

By nightfall, scores of volunteers were combing the countryside, on ATVs
and on horseback. A state trooper found her that Sunday in a creek that
runs off Cypress Lake, 18 miles up Interstate 65.

For local residents, who presumed Katie had been stolen by a stranger, the
tragedy swelled with the arrest of Charles Hickman, 20, a fixture in front
of his family's trailer on Crothersville's main drag, just across from
Dollar General and Penn Villa. Known as Chuckie, Hickman had a couple of
curfew violations as a juvenile but no adult police record. The youngsters
who used to shoot hoops with him at the high school hardly recognized his
mug shot.

According to the FBI's probable cause affidavit, Hickman told investigators
that Katie saw people producing or using meth at the apartments, "so they
decided to scare her with the hope that she would be intimidated enough to
keep her observations to herself." Hickman said he took Katie to the lake
in a borrowed pickup truck.

"Hickman stated first that Collman tried to run away and fell into the
creek, but also said that he might have 'bumped' her into the water," the
affidavit says. "In any event, Hickman watched, left the area with
Collman's unmoving body still in the creek."

Two others, including the truck's owner, have been arrested for lying to
the police, who continue to search for co-conspirators.

In an interview, Hickman's mother, Sandy, acknowledged that her son had
been addicted to drugs, including meth, for perhaps two years, but said he
had falsely confessed to involvement in the crime for fear of being killed
himself.

"He shook his head and he goes, 'No mom' -- he looked me in the eye, and he
never looks me in the eye," Hickman said of her jailhouse conversation with
her son Sunday. "I'm scared for the whole town. If they don't stop this
drug stuff, it's going to happen again."