True Crime Stories

This case made it to my list because while researching a few of the cases I have done recently his name was mentioned in an article. That is how come names make it to my list. The article was mentioning that he was asking for clemency from the Governor of Indiana. He was serving a sentence for murder. The article was on a site I use for archived newspaper articles from my area. There are times it seems here lately that is the only place I can find information on a case and while that was true about the murder of Linda Kearschner by Terry Drake in 1977, it did not mean that my Google search came up empty. He would serve his time for that murder, which I will obviously be going into, but that was not the last we heard from Terry Drake. The next time we heard from him was at a national level. On Thursday November 17, 1977 Michael Kearschner returned to his rural Vanderburgh Indiana home around 11:30 that night, after work, to find his wife, twenty-five year old Linda, missing....

I almost feel as if when it comes to the last several cases that I have researched have not only been ones with many twists and turns, but each time I sit down to compose them I am convinced it will end up being my longest blog yet. I am not sure where I heard the name Ralph Lobaugh and the sad part about that is that it was not that long ago that this name made it to my list. This became one of those cases where I have spent hours upon hours today researching. Some of the extra hours is because there was a lot I needed to double check and confirm; some of it was because not only were there several victims but there were several suspects and perpetrators in this case, let alone other players in the story. I will admit that by the time I am done you may have a lot of questions. For that I apologize as I try my best to package these blogs well and have a full beginning, middle and end and I like to tie up as many loose ends as I can. That simply is not going to be the case her...

  I came across this case when I learned about the last one I wrote about. And, like the previous blog there was a lot of confusion on the date in which prosecutors believed this crime had occurred. In the last few months of the year of 1975 the city of Evansville Indiana was a violent one. There were six murders in the matter of seven days. Five of those murders seemed to be focused in much of the same area so much so that they were often lumped together in articles. The other issue with confirming times or dates of death was the fact that the bodies were not found immediately. In fact, on Tuesday December 2 nd the bodies of Joe Edwards and Phyllis McCown had been found earlier in the day and then at 8:30 that evening the body of seventy-nine year old Clara Vickery found was just a few blocks away. Prosecutors theorized that Edwards and McCown were murdered on December 1 st between eight in the morning and two in the afternoon. As my previous blog pointed out there were...

I was born in 1972 in Evansville Indiana. I moved away when I was almost five but I do not remember a whole lot about when I lived here. I say here because while I moved away in 1976, I moved back to the area in 2014. At the time that I moved back I knew certain areas of town that were not “good” and where not to go house hunting. I also knew when I moved to my current home in 2020 that this area used to be a very violent and crime ridden area. Several years ago the city was given a grant and started cleaning up some of the bad areas of town. I live now in what is considered the Arts District and historic home area. In fact the home I live in was built in the late 1800's. I came across this particular case when a discussion about the area I live in was brought up on a Facebook page. Actually a few crimes were brought up and upon some research I discovered that around the time I moved away from here and for a few years prior to that there had been a lot of unrest not ...