Dennis Faught

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 just in Evansville as a whole but also in this particular area. In May of 1974 the city had a particularly violent week. There were several shootings that were thought to be racially motivated. There were even full page ads placed in the newspaper that spoke about how differently police seemed to respond to crimes and those involved based on race. Of course the police department denied these allegations. One could argue that things haven't changed much in the last fifty years and I am unsure I could disagree about racial unrest but that is a story for another day. But, in that time period there seemed to be a lot crimes centered on two things, race and drugs. In that May a young teenager named Keith Foreman was murdered. His case was thought to be racial and two men were arrested but the case fell apart. To be fair I have not searched this case to see if the two men, or anyone else was ever charged and successfully convicted. Three different men had implicated the two men that were charged. Within a year and a half two of the men had recanted their stories and all three were either already in prison serving time for other crimes or awaiting trial. One of those men was Dennis Faught. The prosecutor announced they were forced to drop charges against the two arrested men because without these other men their case fell apart.

Now, I am not going to sit here and tell you that Dennis Faught was a choir boy by any stretch of the imagination. That can also be said for many of his associates. In fact, just two months after Foreman was murdered Faught was arrested on drug and theft charges, and something tells me this was far from his first arrest of this kind and it definitely was not his last. I cannot tell you what became of this case against him. Most of the information that I got about Faught, and the case that we will be discussing here came not from a simple Google search, but from local newspaper articles. While they were full of information, they were also full of some confusing information. I did find one appeal paper on a standard Internet search and that helped a bit.

Reading through news articles that were written before, during and after Dennis Faught's trial, as well as his appeal papers, have left me a bit concerned however. You have often heard me speak about how the guilt or innocence of a defendant is almost less important than the fairness and legality of the process and trials. It is quite easy for things to become precedent. What this means is that when a decision is made by a judge in a case it can often be quoted by another lawyer in another case when arguing for something and then the more cases that include this decision the more it becomes pretty much a law, without necessarily being a law. So, it is quite important that people have fair trials, with fair decisions, and done in the legal and proper manner. That being said, the same holds true for appeal courts when things reach their “desk.” I have some severe questions about the evidence presented in this case as well as some things that went on at the trial and decisions made by the appeals court.

I want to note that my first confusion comes with knowing the exact date that this crime occurred. My initial information stated that it happened on December 1, 1975. However, throughout my research some things state that it occurred on December 1^st while others state it was the 2^nd. I thought I could solve this by going to findagrave.com and seeing a picture of a tombstone of one of the victims but that did not help. On that site both victims are listed as dying on December 2^nd, but there are not pictures of a tombstone to confirm this. I am however sticking with the 1^st because further reading indicated that the prosecutors in the trial theorized that the crime occurred on the 1^st during the day between the hours of 8 and 2. Further understanding indicated that the bodies were discovered on the 2^nd which may have been what led to the confusion throughout. Again however, while I am sticking with the 1^st as being the date the crime occurred there were several questions throughout the trial as to whether the prosecution theory was actually true. That being said I will first tell the story from the prosecution theory, which led to a conviction, and discuss the inconsistencies later.

There seems to be no dispute that nineteen year old Joseph “Joe” Edwards was at the very least a drug user. There were indications that he was also a dealer and the fact that he had made a trip to Chicago to purchase a large quantity of heroin helped lean me towards that fact. Edwards and his nineteen year old live in girlfriend, Phyllis McCown, apparently made no secret they were going on this trip. While times, cars, roads and things have changed since 1975 and one could probably make that trip in about 5 hours from Evansville today, in 1975 it likely would have taken much longer. It was alleged that on November 30^th Dennis Faught, along with James Benton, Rodney McGillicuddy and Michael VanWay staked out Edwards' home awaiting his return. The plan was to rob him of the drugs that he was bringing back. One of the men, and I am sorry I did not note which one, worked for another dealer in the area and this gave some credence to Edwards being a dealer as it was said he was seen as competition. Whether that is true is unclear.

It was said that the four men waited for several hours, some reports say a full day, and when Edwards and McCown had not returned the men left. Prosecutors say that they returned on December 1^st sometime between eight that morning and two in the afternoon. While McGillicuddy and VanWay stayed in the vehicle, Faught and Benton went inside. Faught was armed with a .38 pistol and Benton had a sawed off shotgun with him. A some point during the conversation it was alleged that Faught shot Edwards in the head and while McCown screamed he turned the gun on her while telling Benton they had to “get rid of witnesses.” It was then alleged that he went back and shot Edwards a second time. Some reports stated that both victims had been shot twice in the head but I cannot confirm this.

It is unclear how the bodies were found or by whom. I had to do a little bit of digging to really confirm that they were found on December 2^nd. When I initially heard about this case online I had heard that their neighbor had died too. I took that to mean that this was possibly a triple murder. As I started my research I never saw the name of the neighbor, Clara Vickery, in any of the reports. Again I went to findagrave.com and searched Clara and she too showed a death date of December 2^nd. So I had to dig through more articles just to double check what the situation was. It took a bit to piece everything together and confirm but Clara was in fact murdered on December 2^nd in the same neighborhood in which Joe Edwards and Phyllis McCown lived. It appears that while Clara was found that evening, the couple had been found earlier in the day. To put things into perspective about how I discussed this area being riddled with crime at the time, it was said that just across the street from Clara a woman named Golda Fulling had been murder earlier that year in March. And, while I am sure there were living more murders in the area I can tell you that Phyllis McCown's father, Otis, was also murdered in the area six years later in 1981. These are all crimes that are now in my list to research and blog about. However, the murders of Edwards and McCown, along with the murder of Clara Vickery, seem to often be lumped together as they were all found on the same day.

Anonymous calls were made to the authorities which led to the arrest of Faught, Benton and McGillicuddy. The arrests were announced in the paper on December 16^th and it was indicated that their initial arrests were not for the murders themselves but other legal problems the three faced. They had all been arrested in the past relating to drugs and had apparently not settled all of their legal issues. I was not able to determine when VanWay was arrested for the crime. There was an indication that a man by the name of Robert Riggs had called authorities and told them that he had been told by someone who knew Faught that on November 30^th Faught and three other people were planning to rob Edwards when returned home from Chicago. Riggs would later testify that he was told not to let his roommate know so that he could “get to a telephone to call Joe Edwards.” Riggs would later receive $2,500 that had been posted as a reward for supplying information that led to a conviction in this case.

Over the next months several things happened. For Faught, it seems even in jail he could not stay out of trouble. At one of his initial court hearings he attempted to attack the prosecutor before the security guards stepped in and stopped him. There were rumors that an escape was planned at the Vanderburgh County jail by Faught following another hearing so the judge purposely moved him somewhere else. In April of 1976 Faught's wife, Terri was arrest for attempting to take drugs into the jail to him. Faught's trial was moved out of Evansville and into Sullivan County, to the north, where a special judge was brought in.

On the legal side of things the prosecutor was obviously trying to put his duck in a row and making whatever deals he could to close this case. If that sounded a little snarly I would like to say it was not intentional, but then again I am not sure that it was not. So, lets start with the deal he made. First, he made a deal with Michael VanWay who was not just looking at time in this case but also had a forgery case against him. In the end for his cooperation to testify against Faught, VanWay faced no charges in the murders and received a 2-14 year sentence on the forgery charge and he did not even have to serve that time in jail or prison as long as he spent the entire time that he would have had to serve behind bars at a drug treatment center. VanWay did his part apparently as far as testifying at Faught's trial but then in June of 1977 he left the treatment center and was promptly arrested and spent his remaining time in the county jail. Just how much time that was I cannot say for certain, county jail websites do not work like state or federal prison sites. They do not tell you really anything unless the person is currently in the county jail. I came across an article written in January of 1986 that stated VanWay got a 35 year sentence on yet another forgery charge. Actually he got five years for forgery and thirty years for being a “habitual criminal.” It was specifically ordered that he be placed in a facility far from Faught who was at the Michigan City State Prison at the time. According to the article VanWay had previous convictions for forgery, burglary and dealing in a controlled substance. Once again I cannot say how long he served. I believe I did not find this in the Indiana Department of Corrections website due to the fact that there was a fear that Faught would somehow “get” to him. The only thing on the website pertaining to VanWay was a 1996 conviction, once again for forgery in which he served 3 years and was released in June of 1999.

Rodney McGillicuddy was also given a deal by the prosecutors. He was allowed to plead guilty to conspiracy to commit armed robbery and was given a 2-14 year sentence which was the exact same sentence that VanWay got for the forgery charge. The judge made a very interesting ruling. At the time anyone given anything more than six months in jail were transferred to the state prison system. The judge ordered that McGillicuddy was to serve his sentence at the county jail. He served sixteen months and was released in April of 1977. Since his term was served in the county jail he was not listed on the Indiana Department of Corrections website for this crime. In fact, McGillicuddy seems to be the only person in this story who appears to have stayed out of trouble, or at least major trouble that is. He too was given this sentence on the condition that he testify against Faught at trial.

Then it brings us to James Benton and I am very confused when it comes to him. I read several articles through the course of several years pertaining not just to the murders of Joe Edwards and Phyllis McCown but to some of his other legal issues. In the end I can tell you that James Benton received the exact same sentence was Rodney McGillicuddy of 2-14 years. In fact the two men were released on the same day, April 30, 1977. But, here is where things get confusing. At first it appeared that this deal with Benton was settled prior to Faught going to trial but later I found an article that indicated that Benton and Faught were actually put on trial together and that the deal was not made until the fifth day of the trial in June of 1976. Neither he, nor McGillicuddy, were officially sentenced until later in the month of June. Like McGillicuddy, the judge ordered that he serve his sentence at the county jail, but that was far from Benton's last visit on the inside. It seems he was just in and out of trouble for decades. He would be convicted on charges ranging from burglary to several drug charges. His last entry on the Department of Corrections website showed a release in 2011 but it is difficult to say if that was his last run in with the law.

So, now that we have the other three men in this case pretty much out of the way with their life histories, lets move on, or back I should say, to Dennis Faught. As I stated initially it seems that he and James Benton both went on trial together facing murder charges. This occurred in June of 1976 and yet, with little information it seems that the trial lasted until November of that year. I found nothing that indicated that after Benton took a plea deal, five days into the trial, that there was a mistrial granted but in the same respect it seems very odd that the trial would have last this long. In addition to that, while there were many articles about the trial there was a large gap pertaining to the trial between the time Benton took a plea deal and the trial ended in November. This was not a case in which there was a sole defendant who decided to plea out in the middle of their trial. This was a case of two defendants in a trial in which one agreed to not only change his plea but to testify against the other.

Now, this is a case from 1975 so I would not expect a lot of forensics and cases were handled a lot different then as opposed to now. A lot of cases from this era were decided on those who testified at the trial and who the jury would believe. A prosecutor will tell you that they do not get to pick their witnesses. Criminals tend to hang out with criminals, and this case proves this. Both sides had many witnesses. I did find one interesting article that talked about how prosecution witnesses in the case actually helped both sides. I am going to be honest here and say I think that is great. I think it would be wonderful if we stopped talking about this side or that side and just hear the facts and the truth. Of course I have no delusions that will ever happen. So end the end lets look at the case and the evidence.

First there were the three accomplices, Benton, McGillicuddy, and VanWay. It appears that it was through their stories that the prosecution came up with the theory of how the crime took place. Now, I almost always say “theory” when discussing what a prosecutor says happened because that is what it is most of the time. People who are facing incarceration do not tend to always tell the truth and they always seem to lessen their culpability as to try to at the very least be charged the least amount. An example in this case is that Michael VanWay claimed to stay in the car with McGillicuddy while Benton and Faught went into the home. And yet one witness apparently identified him as being outside the car and at least near the home. This does not mean that he went inside the home for sure, but it would indicate that he did not stay in the car as he claimed. Then again one has to ask if the witness saw him on December 1^st or whether it could have been one of the other days that the prosecution claimed that the group was staking out the home. It does seem that Benton testified that Faught told him he went back to the home later that night to “wipe” fingerprints and to get rid of a gun used. I will get back to this statement later on but I will say I question when Benton decided to say this. It had to have obviously been after he had taken the plea deal, which means after the start of the trial. I will discuss later why this is severely important to me. Benton also testified that while he was in the room during the first shot he did not see it but he did hear it and witnessed the rest of the shots.

Robert Riggs, the man who received the reward money, testified that he had been told by a friend of Faughts about the plan against the couple before it occurred. That sounds great in theory. But, Riggs did not say anything before the murders occurred and apparently still did not come forward after the murders until after a reward was offered. In addition to that I am a little leery about his testimony from a legal standpoint. It is unclear whether the “friend” Riggs mentioned also testified. We hear a lot about hearsay evidence and I have talked about it in my blogs in the past. One of the fundamental rights as a defendant is to “face their accuser.” In this case technically it would be the friend that allegedly made this statement to Riggs. In addition to that I am curious how the judge determined Riggs' testimony apparently qualified as a “hearsay exception” and allowed him to testify.

I want to touch on one other prosecution witness, Donna Fields. She testified that Faught had admitted doing the murders to both her and a woman named Linda Mattingly. I am unsure what kind of details she gave about this alleged admission. It does not appear that Mattingly testified to confirm this story. The funny part about it is that she was asked if Mattingly heard the admission from Faught and said Mattingly had told her she had. Once again, I question the legality of this being entered into the evidence especially without the testimony of Mattingly. Defense lawyers apparently drilled Donna Fields quite a bit about her motive in testifying against Faught. As I mentioned earlier there had been a lot of racial unrest in the city all around the time that this murder occurred. While this one, and many others, were apparently less about race, and more about drugs, that did not settle things with citizens. Defense lawyers apparently tried to indicate that Fields, who was black, was testifying against Faught for really no other reason than because he was white. Was Fields racially motivated in her testimony? I have absolutely no idea. My questions about Fields' testimony are simply about the legality of some of her statements being allowed in. I question why if this admission was allegedly made in front of Linda Mattingly that the prosecutors did not also call her to testify.

I found an article that stated that defense lawyers were claiming that several witnesses were planning to testify, or had already done so, saying that the murder victims were alive well past the time in which the prosecution stated that they had died. There was some indication that not all of those witnesses testified for the defense. I did not get all of the information that these witnesses claimed but I will tell you about two of them. The first I did not find a name associated with. This witness claimed that Edwards and McCown had not even returned from their trip to Chicago until several hours after the prosecution claimed they were murdered on December 1^st. Now obviously this witness, nor the defense, were claiming that the victims did not die, they were simply disputing the timeline set forth by the prosecution. I can only assume that this was important for two reasons. First, was to discredit the three accomplices and their story which led to the prosecution theory and secondly, that Faught was claiming to be somewhere else at the time the defense were now claiming the murders had occurred. The second witness was a next door neighbor to Edwards and McCown, Ernest Lohman. Lohman testified that on the night of December 1^st, around eleven, he saw two figures in Edwards' home. He testified he could not make the figures out to identify them but one appeared to be a man and one appeared to be a woman. He says the woman was on a bed in the bedroom and the man had leaned over as if to kiss her goodnight and just after that the light was turned off. Could Lohman have been mistaken and gotten his nights mixed up? That is possible depending on when he was interviewed by authorities or first made this claim. I think it would be reasonable to believe that he was likely interviewed the day the bodies were found, which was the following day, about what he may or may not have seen so really it would come down to when did he make these statements.

Lohman's statement however, brings me back to Benton. As I stated earlier there were apparently at least five witnesses who claimed the victims were still alive past the time in which prosecutors claim they had been murdered. Presumably prosecutors knew this. The defense would have had to present them with a witness list and the prosecution would have had the opportunity to question them and know what they planned to say in court. The question lies with did they question Lohman? The trial began with Faught and Benton both as defendants and then five days into the trial Benton took a plea deal to testify against Faught for a 2-14 year sentence, not for murder, but on the charge of conspiracy to commit armed robbery. Benton then testifies that Faught told him that he had gone back to the murder scene to wipe prints and get rid of a gun. Presumably this was not information the prosecutors had prior to the trial because it seems unreasonable if Benton was taking his case to trial that he would have previously given them this information.

I am only going to touch on one more witness in the trial. This was a man named James Traylor. I can tell you that he testified for the defense, but I cannot tell you what he said. Traylor, like so many others in this case had a long criminal history that did not stop after this trial. Remember way back at the beginning when I told you about the murder of Keith Forman and how there had been three men who had claimed to know the two men that murdered him? Remember how I said that the charges were dropped because all three of those men were facing legal issues of their own? Well, aside from Faught, Traylor was another of those men. It was later said that Traylor was known to be an informant for the police from time to time so that is why it seemed a bit odd that he would testify for the defense in this case. Again, while I cannot say what it was that Traylor contributed as far as his testimony the interesting thing about him was that he had claimed that he had been threatened by a particular police officer about not testifying for Faught. Traylor was in jail at the time of the alleged threat. It does appear that there was an investigation within the trial about this threat. Another inmate claimed he also heard the threat but he differed in what Traylor had claimed his response had been. Traylor claimed that he told the officer it did not matter, he was still testifying for Faught while the other inmate claimed that Traylor did not say this but was quiet afterwards. It appears that the police officer was called to the stand later as a rebuttal witness and denied the claim that he had threatened Traylor and other officers would testify that the accused officer was not at the jail on the day in question. So, was Traylor threatened? Who knows. What I can say is that Traylor continued to have legal issues long after this and in 1981 while serving a sentence in Michigan City Indiana State Prison he was stabbed and killed by another inmate.

Throughout the trial the defense lawyers called for a mistrial on several occasions. Each time the judge denied it. I can say that one of those times surrounded the issue of Traylor's testimony about being intimidated by police officers but at least one other time seemed more important to me. It appeared throughout the trial that it seemed apparent that the judge had animosity against one of Faught's lawyers. There had been an incident in which the lawyer at some point presented I believe the weapon that Benton had allegedly been carrying at the time of the murder. I cannot say for certain why this weapon had been entered into discussion but at any rate after presenting the weapon the lawyer had placed it on the defense table and the judge was irate. He pointed out that obviously the gun was empty but admonished the lawyer for laying near Faught, who I admit was not the model defendant by any stretch of the imagination. It was said that throughout everything he had several outburst in court and was considered to be a danger. It was when the judge admonished the lawyer that it was claimed, well more than claimed, as I have seen the transcript of this in a 1979 appeal, the judge had been rather harsh with the lawyer in the presence of the jury. In at least one other incident a comment was made by the judge to the jury about the conduct and behavior of the lawyer. In court, for the record, the lawyer denied the claims the judge made against him and there was another motion for a mistrial. As I stated this was denied.

In the end Faught was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of murder in the commission of a robbery in November of 1976. He was give two concurrent life sentences. But, even after the trial there was an article written that left me with great concern. One of the jurors from the trial spoke out and stated that “key factors in his conviction” were the testimony of Donna Fields, who the juror stated was the one witness who “had nothing to gain” and the fact that Faught had chose to remain silence. In the next breath however this same juror stated that the fact Faught did not testify was not used against him. So, which was it? We all know that jurors quite decide cases based on their feelings, which they are not supposed to necessarily do, but they definitely are not supposed to speak about certain things out loud such as the fact that when a defendant does not testify it should be an indication of guilt or innocence.

In 1979 an appeal was filed in this case where many of these issues were discussed. As I stated earlier it was within this appeal that there was a portion in which the statements of the judge were included. The appeal was extremely long, much longer than most that I come across. As far as I could tell most of the appeal surrounded issues the multiple times the defense asked for a mistrial and it was denied, the behavior of the judge towards the defense lawyers and other things such as instructions given to the jury. The court upheld the conviction and the sentence. Faught ultimately died in the Michigan City State Prison on March 10, 1992 at the age of thirty-nine. His obituary simply stated he had suffered from a “brief illness.”

Once again I have come across a case with so much information and twists and turns that it has turned into a novel and I do apologize for that. However, when I do these blogs there are always particular things that I think are important to the story and the people in them. Even still, no matter how long it is, there are ultimately things that I either did not discover or chose to leave out as I did not feel in the realm of the story they were important. One thing I rarely fail to leave out is my opinion on the case.

I acknowledge that cases in this time period could not be as cut and dry as cases we see today with the invention of DNA and the progress in other areas of forensics. Cases in this era relied a lot on eye witness testimony, something that over the years have proven to be false time and time again. While technically in this case the only real “eye witness” was accomplice, James Benton, many of the others that testified in this case could not be relied upon. Three of the witnesses (Benton, McGillicuddy, and VanWay) were given deals to testify against Faught and receive less time. In fact, VanWay was not even charged in this case but got a deal on a forgery case. I should point out that VanWay claimed that he committed this particular act of forgery for purpose of getting caught and getting protection in jail. Well, here is the thing.... first, Faught was in the jail at the same time and secondly, VanWay continued to commit crimes, including forgery, long after this trial and from my understanding prior to the crime also. This seemed rather convenient for him to claim later but in my opinion his behavior tells me that he just saw an opportunity to make a really good deal for himself. Of course keep in mind that part of his deal was that he spent his time in a drug treatment facility and he failed to do that.

I cannot tell you if Donna Fields told the truth about Faught confessing to the crime. I also cannot tell you if Ernest Lohman was truthful, mistaken or not in his testimony. In fact, I cannot tell you for absolute certain that anyone told the absolute, no one ever can and that is why it is left up to a jury to decide who they believe. In this case Donna Fields was specifically pointed out as being believed by the jury.

Faught surely did not make things easier on himself with his behavior and outburst. In fact, after his conviction he was brought back down to Evansville to testify in a trial that involved some inmates at the jail. They found soap carved into the shape of a gun and learned of yet a second escape plan involving Faught. Faught was more than likely guilty of the crime, but that is just my opinion. Would I have voted that way if I were a member of the jury? I cannot say what I would have done over forty years ago... of course I myself was only four when Faught went to trial. Looking back at things though I have to admit that I question whether the evidence was there and was reliable. I also question the fairness of his trial if for no other reason the open hostility that the judge seemed to express towards the defense attorney.

The area in which this crime, and at least a few more that I intend to research and put together has been “revitalized” and while there are murders and crimes everywhere in general it is not an unsafe area. In fact, it is a rather fun area. As I stated earlier it is the “arts district” where there are displays all around; there are festivals and fairs in the area all through spring, summer and fall. I can sit on my porch on the weekends and hear a variety of live music. The residents in the area come from all sorts of ways of life and it is a very liberal neighborhood.