TOO LATE FOR KATIE, TOWN TACKLES A DRUG'S SCOURGE

ROTHERSVILLE, Ind. - John Neace forces himself to pass by the run-down
apartment buildings every day. Inside, the police say, Mr. Neace's
10-year-old daughter stumbled on someone with methamphetamine last month.
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, Mr. 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," Mr.
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."

Katie's Jan. 25 disappearance, and the Feb. 2 arrest of an unemployed high
school dropout, have shaken this small town out of silence about the
scourge of methamphetamine.

Like many similar communities across the nation's midsection,
Crothersville, 40 miles north of Louisville and with a population of 1,541,
has seen methamphetamine steadily seep into its streets.

When the roof of a house behind the funeral home exploded in December, a
makeshift meth lab was found in the fire. Another lab, spitball distance
from the school, was raided earlier last year. The uncle of the young man
now facing charges of killing Katie wrote a letter to the town council two
years ago beseeching the members 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 methamphetamine use at the dilapidated Penn Villa
apartments in the days before Katie's death yielded no arrests.

Now, as people here comfort the families of the victim and 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 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 groups.

"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 proposed 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 gave Reese's peanut butter cups and Popsicles
to Katie even when she 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 surname is that of her mother because she was born before her
parents were married, was a fourth grader who loved animals and the Disney
Channel. She came home that Tuesday afternoon bubbling about a pajama party
planned at school the next day, her mother, Angela, 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 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
A.T.V.'s and on horseback. A state trooper found her body on Jan. 30 in a
creek that runs off Cypress Lake, 18 miles up Interstate 65.

For local residents, who presumed Katie had been abducted by a stranger,
the tragedy deepened with the arrest on murder charges of Charles Hickman,
20, a fixture in front of his family's trailer on Crothersville's main
street, just across from the Dollar General and Penn Villa.

Known as Chuckie, Mr. Hickman had a couple of curfew violations as a
juvenile but no police record as an adult. The children who used to shoot
baskets with him at the high school hardly recognized the wan face of his
mug shot.

According to an affidavit submitted by the F.B.I., Mr. Hickman told
investigators that Katie saw people producing or using methamphetamine at
the apartments, "so they decided to scare her with the hope that she would
be intimidated enough to keep her observations to herself."

Mr. Hickman, according to the affidavit, said he took Katie to the creek 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 read. "In any event, Hickman watched, left the area with
Collman's unmoving body still in the creek."

Two others, including the truck's owner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and a
17-year-old whose name is being withheld, have been arrested on charges of
lying to the police, who continue to search for co-conspirators. Sgt. Jerry
Gooding of the state police, spokesman for a multi-agency task force of 50
officers, said they had combed through only 20 percent of some 500 leads so
far.

In an interview, Mr. 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," Ms. Hickman said of her jailhouse conversation
with her son on Sunday. "I'm scared for the whole town. If they don't stop
this drug stuff, it's going to happen again."

Indeed, the authorities say that up to 90 percent of recent crime in these
parts is tied to drugs, mostly methamphetamine, a powerful and addictive
stimulant that can be made from cold medicine and farm chemicals.

In Jackson County, which includes Crothersville, meth-related arrests
skyrocketed to 116 in 2004 from 29 in 2002. There have been 187
methamphetamine labs seized in the county since the first two were found in
1998, as lab seizures statewide climbed steadily to 1,549 last year from
177 in 1999.

"If we had a brothel move into town, people would close it down instantly,"
said the Rev. Jon Pearce of the First Baptist Church here. "If we had an
X-rated movie house come, it'd be gone within a week. But this has been
here. It is a monster. We didn't know what kind of monster it was."

Lifelong residents say Crothersville has been changed, like a child coming
of age. Marty Hoevener said he checks what his 10-year-old son and
7-year-old daughter are wearing each morning, for fear of having to
describe them to the police.

Marsha Fink, a bank teller, said, "my doors are locked now." Mr. Pearce is
ordering lights for the alley behind his church's gym, and no longer lets
children wander out during activities.

People who had been frustrated with the local police are thrilled that the
task force, including county, state and federal agencies, continues to camp
at the firehouse, with seemingly new resolve to stamp out drugs. "Anyone
who tells themselves it's not a problem in their area is fooling
themselves," said Sergeant Goodin. "Are we stupid enough to think we got
them all? No way. It's something we're going to stay on."

Neighbors who had not spoken for decades now meet to discuss plans for the
playground; Katie's father even met with Chuckie's sister and two uncles,
telling them, "I want you to wave at me as you always do." Some 1,600
people paraded through the funeral home over two days to pay their respects.

Everywhere, the beatific grin in her school picture beams from buttons,
T-shirts, and framed funeral programs. In the Neaces' trailer, a large
painted version is propped on the ice box, behind a ceramic angel and under
a butterfly balloon.

Near midnight Monday, after his wife and mother-in-law had gone to sleep,
Mr. Neace sat in his worn beige recliner, staring at his daughter's smile.

"I thought, now's my time, finally I'm alone, I can do a little grieving,"
Mr. Neace recalled. "I wanted to cry. I didn't have the tears. I looked
over here, and I caught myself smiling at her."