Frightened City

For more than a month, mayhem and murder, rape and robbery had been rampant in Indianapolis and surrounding Marion County. Husbands armed themselves, then armed their wives. People bought watchdogs. Locksmiths did a land-office business and householders chained their doors at night. From exclusive Meridian Hills to Pat Ward's Bottoms, nerves were taut. Indianapolis had escaped race trouble during the war, but all the ingredients for an explosion were there now.

The city has 65,000 Negroes, 15% of the population. For whatever sociological or economic reasons, Negroes had generally been involved wherever the police could get a line on a crime. But to calm observers it seemed that the crime wave--if it was one--could be blamed on the police rather than on any racial group. The force has had four chiefs in five years. Its merit system doesn't work. There is lack of cooperation between the cops and the courts; hoodlums with long records walk the streets on low bail. One man even drove a truck for the city while out on bail in a rape case.

The terror started in October with the kidnaping of a young girl. She told police that half a dozen Negroes had raped her at knifepoint. About three weeks later, 68-year-old Mrs. Mabel Merrifield, clubwoman and wife of a former assistant attorney general of Indiana, was murdered in her suburban home. Her throat had been ripped open with a butcher knife. Her killing is still unsolved. Next, a cab driver was beaten to death. Five Negroes, who claimed he took 15-c- too much from them, will be tried for the murder.

Last week the jittery community suffered a further shock. In Meridian Hills, wealthy food broker Herschel Burney came home one night, found his 39-year-old wife, Mary Lois, dead on a bed, her face half blown away by a shotgun blast. Her murderer got away.

In the Meridian Hills Country Club, a few nights later, 250 frightened, angry people met, drafted an open letter to Governor Ralph Gates. "Law enforcement and administration of justice in the city and county are a travesty," it said. They asked for a gubernatorial investigation.

Even as they met, three women and a twelve-year-old girl were molested, three men were beaten and robbed.

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