Girl's Killing Unites Town Against Drugs

DAD WANTS TO BULLDOZE SUSPECTED 'METH HOUSE'

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, 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 $14.75-an-hour
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 this town
of 1,541 out of silence about the scourge of methamphetamine.

Like so many similar places across the nation's midsection, Crothersville,
40 miles north of Louisville, has seen meth steadily seep into its streets.
The roof of a house behind the funeral home exploded in December, and a
makeshift meth lab was found in the fire. Another lab, spitball distance
from the school, was busted earlier last year.

But many residents said they had been scared to report suspicions in a
community where everyone seems somehow related. Others complained that the
three-member 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 here comfort the family of the victim as well as that of the
suspect, stories are spilling out, in a town seemingly transformed.

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," said 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 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?"

Katie, whose last name is different from her parents' because she was born
before they were married, 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. 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 Dum-Dum 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. A state
trooper found her body 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. Known as Chuckie,
Hickman had a couple of curfew violations as a juvenile but no adult police
record.

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."