Eyewitness to Murder, Part 5

Mark Felsher

On April 13, 1975, an unemployed Silver Spring carpenter named Michael Edward Pearch dressed in his Army fatigues, strapped a machete to his chest, shrugged on a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and loaded his .45 automatic pistol. He drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall and began killing. Within the next half hour, he shot seven people, all African-American. Two of them died. I don’t want to mention Pearch’s name without also listing his victims, so here they are.

• John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland: died.
• Laureen D. Sligh, 40, his wife: wounded.
• Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville: minor injuries when his car crashed.
• Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17: wounded.
• Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC: killed.
• Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, Maryland: wounded.
• Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville: wounded.

Pearch died at the hands of the police: “suicide by cop.”

Two years ago, I told that story on my blog, and last month I summarized some of my encounters with others touched by the same experience. The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School led to my revisiting the story, and in particular telling about my encounter with Mark Felsher, one of the last people to talk to the killer. Yesterday, I told the story about how Felsher first met Pearch. Today I'll share the final chapter of that part of the story.


Mowing the Lawn

As Mark entered his teenage years, he spent less time camping in the Greenbelt woods and more time working for spending money. Each Saturday he mowed lawns for a landscape service run by a family friend, going as far afield as Silver Spring, a few towns west of Greenbelt in neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland. The owner, Howie, would pick Mark up (he was still too young to drive), and the two would work together. Mark was fifteen years old.

This particular day, Howie told Mark he had a new customer on Dennis Avenue in Silver Spring. As the two got to work, Howie began working around the right side of the house while Mark started in the front, near the sidewalk. The owner, a woman, arrived at the same time and took in some brown paper bags of groceries. Howie and she exchanged a few words.

The house was old and somewhat neglected. The windows were unpainted and dark, with blinds pulled down. Shortly after the owner went inside, the door opened again and a man walked out.
Mark initially didn’t recognize the man, and assumed he was going to talk to Howie about the work, but instead the man walked confidently and deliberately up to Mark. “You’re Mark Felsher,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

It had been two years since the incident in the woods, and it took Mark a few seconds to place the man. “Mike Phipps?” he asked tentatively.

Mike shook his head. “Sorry, that’s not really my name. It’s Pearch. Mike Pearch. I was just toying with you guys. I said my name was ‘Mike Phipps’ after the quarterback, but my real name is Mike Pearch.” Mike Phipps was an NFL quarterback with the Cleveland Browns, though Mark didn’t know that at the time.

The whole conversation, Felsher said, was uncomfortable. Pearch was intense and focused, not at relaxed as he’d been during their time camping. “I just could not catch up to where he was,” Mark said of the conversation. “It was as though he had seen me yesterday and I had not seen him for two years.”
Pearch had recently come back from Germany, but according to Mark sounded like he was visiting relatives there rather than having been deployed. He told Mark he’d been engaged to be married, but Mark got the sense that the engagement was over.

The real focus of the conversation, however, was about falconry. Pearch had gotten into the sport, and was very passionate about it. But Mark had grass to cut and his boss was watching, so he ended the conversation, fully expecting to see Mike again when they came back to cut the grass.

Mark didn’t think much of the conversation at the time. It was odd, he thought, that Mike had recognized him so readily after two years, but that was all. People change a lot between the ages of 13 and 15, and if you don’t know somebody well, it’s altogether possible that you wouldn’t recognize them after two years of adolescent growth. But Mike Pearch had recognized him with only a glimpse through a window.

It was Saturday, April 12, 1975, in the late afternoon.

Those Who Watch

As an ostensible witness to the situation, as I’ve mentioned previously, I failed to grasp what was going on around me, and I still feel bad about my failure. Mark Felsher told me that one of the reasons he’d gotten in touch is that he also felt bad about his failure to read Pearch’s character correctly, and wonders if there is anything he could have said or done that would have changed the events of April 13, 1975.

In both our cases, I suspect the answer is that even armed with 20-20 hindsight, there was little if anything either of us could have done. But that doesn’t change the feeling of responsibility. I imagine that even the heroes of Sandy Hook Elementary will carry the same feeling — although they did more than either Mark or me, they will always wonder if there was more they could have done, if there were additional steps they could have taken.

The feeling of helplessness and stupidity in the face of terrible events stays with you, and perhaps it’s right that it should. Regardless of what might or might not have been possible, the human need to try should always be paramount in our minds.

More of the Story

Thanks to Mark, I've been able to learn something of the story of two more of the victims: Rosalyn Stanley and Harold Navy. (Navy was the victim I saw.) In addition, I've just received another comment from someone who also knew Navy.

It's usually the killer who gets most of the focus in stories like this, not merely because of the sensationalism but also because of our human need to make sense from horror. But without the stories of the victims, it doesn't mean a thing. Stay tuned.


More to come…

Eyewitness to Murder, Part 4

On April 13, 1975, an unemployed Silver Spring carpenter named Michael Edward Pearch dressed in his Army fatigues, strapped a machete to his chest, shrugged on a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and loaded his .45 automatic pistol. He drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall and began killing. Within the next half hour, he shot seven people, all African-American. Two of them died. I don’t want to mention Pearch’s name without also listing his victims, so here they are.

• John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland: died.
• Laureen D. Sligh, 40, his wife: wounded.
• Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville: minor injuries when his car crashed.
• Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17: wounded.
• Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC: killed.
• Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, Maryland: wounded.
• Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville: wounded.

Pearch died at the hands of the police: “suicide by cop.”

Two years ago, I told that story on my blog, and last month I summarized some of my encounters with others touched by the same experience. In October of this year, I heard from Mark Felsher, who had known the killer, Michael Edward Pearch. He wrote:

Mark Felsher

“My connection to this event is before the fact. I had met Mike Pearch a couple of years before the shooting and spent a lot of time with him camping over three days. With only one exception, our paths did not cross again for about two years, until I happened to randomly wind up doing yard work at his mother's house about 24 hours before the shooting began. 

 

“Mike recognized me and came out of the house to talk. The conversation lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes and mostly covered the past two years. I know that there was much more behind his actions, but I have always been haunted by the question of whether something about that conversation may have been the final trigger for him to snap. I strongly suspect that the whole time he was speaking with me that he already had at least some idea about what he was going to do and perhaps he had already planned every detail. 

 

“Not that I think it would have made much of a difference but I was never interviewed by the police. I don't think they ever knew much of anything about me or that I had just spoken to Mike. I was only fifteen at the time and could not figure out what to do with what I knew. My parents were even afraid to talk to me about it beyond being the ones to inform me about the shooting. 

This whole episode is to me like a manila file folder that has no place in the file cabinet. I try to put it somewhere; maybe in the wrong drawer, maybe in the trash, maybe I try to bury it under other things but sooner or later it keeps reappearing on top of the file cabinet. I suspect you and others, connected to this event, feel the same way. And always the question, ‘Is there anything I could have done?’

 

Obviously, there is not a thing I can do to change the past but if there is any way that sharing what I know can bring some relief to someone else affected by this tragedy then perhaps I could finally put this in the file cabinet under, ‘Something good finally came out of that part of my life.’”

I began corresponding with Mark, and on October 21 of this year met him in person. Mark’s a few years younger than I. (He was fifteen at the time of the incident, and I was 22.) He’s a home improvement contractor by trade, with a background in leading youth camps. Highly religious, he’s involved with his church and family. He’s been married for 29 years and has four children with ages ranging from 20 to 23. He currently lives in North Carolina.

Mark had a job to do in the DC suburbs, so we agreed to get together on the Sunday after his work was finished. I drove to Greenbelt, where we met at Generous Joe’s Deli — Mark had gone to school with the owner. Over fried shrimp baskets, we talked about our lives and about our involvement with the Wheaton murders.

Mark — like Pearch — grew up in Greenbelt, Maryland, a planned suburban community located in Prince Georges County, which borders the District of Columbia. Like the two other “green” towns built by the United States Resettlement Administration in the 1930s, the town was designed as a self-sufficient cooperative community, surrounded by (as the name implies) a belt of forest. Eleanor Roosevelt was actively involved in the layout of the town, and appeared at its official inauguration. Greenbelt’s downtown is a lovely (if a bit run-down) example of Art Deco architecture. At the time of its founding, it was officially a segregated community (a proposed annex that would welcome black residents was scuttled in the face of local opposition), and even by the 1970s, black residents in Greenbelt were highly unusual.

The Mysterious Camper

For Mark Felsher, the undeveloped “green belt” that surrounded the town was a boy’s paradise. Along with his boyhood friend, Mike King, he explored the woods on an almost daily basis, building secret forts and camping out. Although they were only a short distance from the townhouse row where they both lived, it was easy to believe that all the civilization around them had disappeared. Both were members of the local Boy Scout troop; both loved camping and the outdoors. He was thirteen at the time.

It was on one of their hiking trips, not too far off one of the winding paths through the forest, that Mike King suddenly stopped and told Mark that someone was nearby. Mark looked around, but saw no one, until Mike King pointed to a small patch of trees where an older man, perhaps in his early twenties, nearly camouflaged in the dense underbrush, stood watching them.

The boys introduced themselves, and the man told them his name was Mike Phipps. (It would be some years before Mark learned his real name.) "Phipps" was also camping in the woods, but on more of a semi-permanent basis. He had built a semi-log cabin, with three straight sides and an angled top, which served as a base over which he’d stretched a tent. The whole camp was artfully concealed in the woods, effectively invisible to any casual observer.

Mike Phipps was friendly, if a bit guarded, and the two boys decided to set up their own camp near him. For three days they lived near each other in the woods. Their conversation was limited. Mike had been a member of the same Boy Scout troop some years previously, and as a lifelong resident of Greenbelt, they knew various other people in common. He had been in the Army, he told them. The conversation didn’t go into a lot of depth.

After a couple of days, Mike took Mark aside and pointed out that he was camping out for solitude, and politely suggested that the boys might want to find a different location.

About six months later, Mark saw Mike Phipps again. He was walking briskly along the trail beside a thin and winding creek, not too far from the old campsite. He was clearly in a hurry. He waved at Mark when he saw him, but didn’t slow down. Where he had come from and where he was going were both a mystery.

Two more years would pass before the third and final encounter.

More to come...

Eyewitness to Murder, Part 3

Sandy Hook Elementary School Students

Mass Shootings in the US in 2012

In the wake of the Sandy Hook killings, I did a little research on some of the other mass shooting incidents in the United States this year.

1. December 15: Birmingham, Alabama triple killing, four dead including the shooter.
2. December 15: St. Vincent’s Hospital (also Birmingham, Alabama), three wounded, shooter killed.
3. December 14: Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, 26 dead at the scene, including 20 children; one offsite death; shooter dead.
4. December 11: Happy Valley shopping mall shooting, two killed including the shooter, one injured.
5. October 21: Brookfield, Wisconsin, spa killing, three killed, four injured; shooter killed himself.
6. September 27: Accent Signage Systems shooting, eight injured and dead including the killer.
7. August 13: College Station, Texas, three killed including the shooter, four injured.
8. August 5: Sikh Temple shooting, ten injured and killed including the shooter.
9. July 20: Aurora Theater shooting, seventy injured and killed; shooter arrested.
10. May 30: Seattle café shooting, seven injured and killed including the shooter.
11. April 6: Tulsa spree killing, three killed, two injured, shooters arrested.
12. April 2: Oikos University killings, ten injured and killed; shooter arrested.
13. March 8: Duquesne University shooting, two killed including the shooter, seven injured.
14. February 27: Chardon High School shooting, three killed, two injured, shooter arrested.
15. February 21: Su Jung Health Sauna shooting, five injured and killed including the shooter.

At least that’s what turned up in a few minutes of Google searching. There may well be more. In fact, in the last thirty years, there have been at least 62 such incidents. That doesn’t include my own encounter with mass murder, which took place more than thirty years ago.


On April 13, 1975, Michael Edward Pearch dressed in his Army fatigues, strapped a machete to his chest, shrugged on a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and loaded his .45 automatic pistol. He drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall and began killing. Within the next half hour, he shot seven people, all African-American. Two of them died. I don’t want to mention Pearch’s name without also listing his victims, so here they are.

• John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland: died.
• Laureen D. Sligh, 40, his wife: wounded.
• Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville: minor injuries when his car crashed.
• Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17: wounded.
• Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC: killed.
• Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, Maryland: wounded.
• Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville: wounded.

Pearch died at the hands of the police; “suicide by cop.”


Two years ago, I told that story on my blog, and last month I summarized some of my encounters with others touched by the same experience. In October of this year, I heard from Mark Felsher, who had known the killer, Michael Edward Pearch. That story will appear over the next two days.

More to come...

Eyewitness to Murder, Part Two

On April 13, 2010, I wrote a blog piece entitled “Eyewitness to Murder,” in which I recounted my involvement with a 1975 shooting spree in Wheaton, Maryland. Seven people (all African-American) were shot; two of them died. The killer also died, shot by police. He was white.

Although I drove within feet of the killer and his fourth victim, I completely misread the situation. It was so inconceivable to me that a killing spree was taking place on a sunny Sunday afternoon in downtown Wheaton that I failed to process anything going on around me. I couldn’t have picked out the killer from a police lineup even though I saw him clearly. There was just enough askew about the situation that I decided for safety’s sake to drop by the police station on my way home — and it was there I learned that I had been an eyewitness to murder.

The incident itself quickly dropped off the front pages and has largely been lost to history. With the killer dead, there was no trial, and the number of victims was too small to register with the national media. The incident — and my failure — have stuck with me for many years, and armed with Google, I decided to find out what I could learn, and uploaded my blog piece on the 35th anniversary of the shootings.

For the record, and because it can’t be stated often enough, the victims were:

• John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland: died.
• Laureen D. Sligh, 40, his wife: wounded in both legs, survived.
• Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville: minor injuries when his car crashed.
• Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17, a freshman at the University of Maryland: wounded in the abdomen, but survived. Navy was the victim I saw.
• Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC: killed.
• Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, Maryland: wounded.
• Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville: wounded.

The killer was Michael Edward Pearch, an unemployed carpenter living with his mother in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Since I first published the piece, I’ve heard from several other people connected to the incident.

About six months after “Eyewitness to Murder” appeared on my blog, I got an email from the daughter of John and Laureen Sligh. We exchanged emails and a few telephone calls, and finally arranged to have lunch on April 13, 2011, the 36th anniversary of the shooting. She told me her story. Her parents normally went to the movies on Sunday afternoon, and were just leaving the Wheaton Plaza theaters in separate cars when they encountered the shooter. The daughter herself was watching television when a special bulletin interrupted her show — and that’s how she learned her father was dead and her mother in the hospital. No one had bothered to sequester the news until the next of kin could be informed.

Both John and Laureen Sligh were scientists working for the Department of Defense. John Sligh was also a businessman and had purchased several small businesses. After his death, Laureen Sligh moved back to her home in Mississippi, and the businesses were left to the care of a relative who unfortunately was unable to keep them going, leaving the daughter without much in the way of means. We’ve kept in touch, and I’ve been pleased to hear that her daughters in turn are doing well; the youngest has ambitions to go to medical school.

I next heard from a man who was investigating the disappearance of the Lyon sisters, an unsolved case of two young girls who vanished in Wheaton in 1975.  Although there’s no known direct connection between Pearch and the disappearance of the Lyon girls, Pearch’s killing spree makes him an obvious potential suspect.

An anonymous comment in June 2012 gave me some more information about Harold Navy, Jr. He wrote, “I'd just like to add a correction, if I may? I remember Harold Navy Jr, being shot in the upper leg and it affected his basketball playing as he had a long recouperation. I remember him returning to High School basketball after the shooting, so I don't think he was yet a freshman in college.”

In August, I heard from another eyewitness, who wrote, “I was in early elementary school at the time of this horrific crime. My family was in the Wheaton Pharmacy (now long gone, but it was in the shopping center with Planters Peanuts,etc.on Georgia Ave.). My memories are vague, but I do remember hearing the gun fire, hiding in the small bathroom with the wife of the owner, my mother and my brother while my father and the pharmacist grabbed heavy objects, ducked behind the counter and waited (seems silly in hindsight, but it was all they could do). I had supressed my memories until the sniper shootings several years ago. I was surprised that this crime never re surfaced in the media. We also found out after the attacks that as a white family, we most likely were safe, but there was no way to know that at the time.”

And finally, a little over a month ago, I heard from one more person — someone who had known the killer.

“My connection to this event is before the fact. I had met Mike Pearch a couple of years before the shooting and spent a lot of time with him camping over three days. With only one exception, our paths did not cross again for about two years, until I happened to randomly wind up doing yard work at his mother's house about 24 hours before the shooting began. 



“Mike recognized me and came out of the house to talk. The conversation lasted about fifteen or twenty minutes and mostly covered the past two years. I know that there was much more behind his actions, but I have always been haunted by the question of whether something about that conversation may have been the final trigger for him to snap. I strongly suspect that the whole time he was speaking with me that he already had at least some idea about what he was going to do and perhaps he had already planned every detail. 



“Not that I think it would have made much of a difference but I was never interviewed by the police. I don't think they ever knew much of anything about me or that I had just spoken to Mike. I was only fifteen at the time and could not figure out what to do with what I knew. My parents were even afraid to talk to me about it beyond being the ones to inform me about the shooting.

This whole episode is to me like a manila file folder that has no place in the file cabinet. I try to put it somewhere; maybe in the wrong drawer, maybe in the trash, maybe I try to bury it under other things but sooner or later it keeps reappearing on top of the file cabinet. I suspect you and others, connected to this event, feel the same way. And always the question, ‘Is there anything I could have done?’



Obviously, there is not a thing I can do to change the past but if there is any way that sharing what I know can bring some relief to someone else affected by this tragedy then perhaps I could finally put this in the file cabinet under, ‘Something good finally came out of that part of my life.’”

For the story of how we met, and what I’ve learned since then, stay tuned.

Fifty Thousand!

 

I was pleased to discover yesterday that my Sidewise Thinking blog has now hit the 50,000 pageview mark. Last month, there were over 4,300 views, or well over 150 per day.

My first post, "What's SideWise Thinking?", appeared on April 11, 2009. It was an excerpt from the book I was currently working on, Creative Project Management (with Ted Leemann). I've generally put a new post up every Tuesday (with a big gap between July and November 2010), with topics ranging from project and risk management to my two big series on cognitive biases and decision-making disorders.

The most popular piece so far has been "You're Not Being Reasonable," on the rules of reasonable arguing. First published on March 2, 2010, it's gotten over 3,400 page views, helped primarily by a plug from the blog "LessWrong" and a StumbleUpon link.

I don't quite understand why the second most popular post is the 23rd part of my Red Herrings series, "Hume's Guillotine." First published January 24, 2012, it's gotten over 2,200 hits, but I can't find any specific factor driving traffic to that article and that one alone. Next comes "Triage for Project Managers (Part Two)" (February 8, 2011, over 1,700 hits), and "Eyewitness to Murder" (April 13, 2010, with over 1,300). Red herrings strike again with "A Cute Angle (Part 19)" (December 27, 2011, over 1,000 hits).

By comparison, my new blog, Dobson's Improbable History, which has only a little more than a month under its belt, is already exceeding 100 hits per day, with over 3,200 pageviews last month — a much better start.

This is the 149th post I've made to the blog. I made 29 entries in 2009, 31 in 2010, 52 in 2011, and 43 so far this year.

Thanks very much for reading, and I hope you continue to enjoy it.

Eyewitness to Murder

Today, Tuesday, April 13, 2010, is the 35th anniversary of a killing spree in Wheaton, Maryland. My girlfriend and I were on our way home from Young Frankenstein when we drove right through the middle of it.

Michael Edward Pearch shot seven people, all African-American, killing two and wounding the rest. There were indications, police said, that the shooting were racially motivated. All the victims were black and the gunman was white. He passed up at least one car with whites, said police, as he walked down a highway looking for another target.

There were at least two such cars. One of them was mine.

Here’s the story.

Pearch, an unemployed carpenter living with his mother in Silver Spring, Maryland, left home about 7:30p on Sunday, April 13, 1975, and drove to the nearby Wheaton Plaza shopping mall. He was wearing his Army fatigues, a knapsack with 250 rounds of ammunition, and a machete strapped to his chest. He carried a .45 caliber automatic pistol.

He walked to the traffic light at the entrance ot the mall, where he shot and killed John L. Sligh, 43, of Rockville, Maryland, and wounded his wife, Laureen D. Sligh, 40, in both legs. He walked to the next car and fired at Dr. Ralph C. Gomes, also of Rockville, but missed. Gomes swerved, crashing his car into another. He suffered minor injuries.

The panic started at once. “Some witnesses ducked for cover. Others just stood there and watched in disbelieving shock,” said police captain Miles Daniels. One particularly brave man (I don’t know his name) called the police and began following the gunman.

We were on our way home from the movies. It was a warm spring evening. The car windows were open. As I neared the intersection of Georgia Avenue and University Boulevard (a major intersection), I heard what I thought at first were gunshots.

But gunshots on a lazy Sunday evening on a busy suburban street? Surely, I must be imagining things. Then I saw the man who had followed the gunman. He was ducking behind cars. Well, if there wasn’t any gunfire, then surely the man was just playing some sort of game.

The light turned green. I pulled forward. As I reached the intersection, I saw two men in the left turn lane on the other side of the street. One man was standing. He was white. One man was face down. He was black. In his right hand, he was carrying a brown paper bag.

If there wasn’t any gunfire, and the man ducking behind cars was playing some sort of game, then I figured I was looking at some drunks, with one of them (clutching his booze in a brown paper bag) passed out in the street.

As I drove through the intersection, I passed within five feet of Michael Edward Pearch, the shooter, and his most recent victim, Harold S. Navy, Jr., 17 years old and a freshman at the University of Maryland. Navy was working as a busboy at the Anchor Inn, right on the corner of Georgia and University. He had been sent across the street to a supermarket to buy a jar of applesauce, the contents of that brown paper bag. He was wounded in the abdomen, but survived.

There was a police station about a mile north of the intersection, right on our way home, so I pulled in. “There’s a drunk passed out in the left turn lane at Georgia and University,” I told the officer at the desk.

“Wait here,” the officer said.

Moments later three plainclothes officers came out of the back room. “Are those the eyewitnesses to the murders?” one of the officers asked.

It was not until that moment that I had any idea what I had seen.

We spent the rest of the evening in a room with an increasing number of witnesses. It wasn't until afterward that I learned the rest of the story.

Walking up Georgia Avenue, the gunman shot and killed Connie L. Stanley, 42, of Washington, DC, and then shot and wounded Rosalyn Stanley, 26, of Annapolis, who was in the next car.

Two policemen spotted the shooting and ordered Pearch to halt. He turned, looked at the officers, then walked to the next car with African-Americans and fired again, wounding Bryant Lamont Williams, 20, of Rockville. The two officers opened fire with a shotgun and a pistol, and killed Pearch.

“He was smiling. I thought he had been shooting blanks,” said William Painter, one of the 40-50 witnesses.

* * *

Some of my interest in cognitive biases and perceptual distortions stems from this incident. Eyewitness testimony, experts know, is not particularly reliable, especially from people not trained in the art. I was within five feet of the murderer, but couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup on a bet. I had no idea what was going on. I am still ashamed.

Selective perception underlies a lot of cognitive biases. We adjust and filter the world around us according to our sense of what the world should be, and therefore miss a lot about what the world really is.

I’ve been trying to get the details of this story for a long time, but even in a Google world, it’s hard to find. Perhaps it’s the small number of victims, but this particular incident doesn’t show up on any list of racial violence I can find. There’s a United Press article that appeared in various papers, ranging from the Fort Scott (Kansas) Tribune to the St. Petersburg (Florida) Evening Independent.

Michael Edward Pearch is mentioned as a potential suspect in the Wheaton abduction of the Lyon sisters, but there’s no evidence other than his killing spree to link him to the murders, and the Lyons were white. He’s also mentioned on at least one white supremicist site, where he’s a hero.

On the anniversary of this terrible event, I remember the victims, and remember also the lessons of my own failure to perceive what was going on all around me.