Dead End tells the true story of a serial killer who struck along Interstate 70 in 1992, and the police officers, families, and investigators who have spent decades trying to bring justice to the victims.
Dead End: Inside the Hunt for the I-70 Serial Killer (Paperback)
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Untitled
CHAPTER 1
“And then I started wondering, was Robin really the first? Could there have been others before her?”
The phone rings every April 8 in Susan Fuldauer’s Indianapolis home. She will pause what she is doing, look at the incoming number, glance quickly at the calendar, and smile. Mike Crooke never, ever forgets.
“I just pick up the phone every April 8 and I call her,” Crooke says. “And I say to her ‘Hey Susan, I am not calling you because I have some good news to report about.’ It is more like ‘Hey Susan, I have not forgotten about you, your family or your sister Robin, and I never will. I am still out here plugging away. I am still out here trying to do my best.’ I always call her on the anniversary of that day and just remind her that she and her family are still in my thoughts, and they always will be.”
Crooke, the longtime sergeant of the Indianapolis Police Department, has remembered since April 8, 1992, the day the Robin Fuldauer nightmare began. He is long since retired, but he has never, ever forgotten.
***
November 2021. Our crew left St. Louis in the early morning and headed east, photographer Chuck Delaney driving, producer JJ Bailey riding shotgun, and me in the backseat taking notes of the scenery along Interstate 70. As we drive along the highway I picture in my mind what the killer saw 30 years ago. Pick an exit to get off, quickly find a small store in a strip mall, make sure a woman is working alone, get in and get out without being seen, and leave a body behind. Surely it is not that easy. It simply can’t be.
Our first stop, like the killer’s, was Indianapolis. Interstate 70 east through Indy to the 465 loop, then a quick jaunt north. The killer wasn’t patient, he took the first possible exit, Pendleton Pike. He could have headed east or west. He could have picked any woman, anywhere, to kill. He chose to turn left at the light and go west. And then he immediately had options to kill on both his right and left. He picked the Payless shoe store.
The Indianapolis police detectives still working the Robin Fuldauer case were waiting for us when we arrived. Like other major cities, Indianapolis had seen a huge spike in homicide cases recently. Their staff was spread thin trying to solve not only murders that seemed to be happening daily, but cold cases that had piled up over the years. Clearance rates, or rates of solving homicides, ranged around 50 percent. That meant hundreds of unsolved cases piled up each year. After 30 years, an unsolved homicide is often a file, in a box, in a closet, never to be opened again.
“We have thousands of unsolved cases over the years,” said Captain Roger Spurgeon of the Indianapolis Police Department. “And more are coming every week. It is overwhelming. You do the best you can do, and then another case lands on your desk.”
Spurgeon and I looked around the busy Pendleton Pike area and I knew we were reading each other’s minds: The killer could have stopped anywhere.
“Why here, do you think?” I voiced to the detectives. “He could have stopped anywhere. Why do you think he stopped here?”
The men looked at each other and shook their heads. A question that has never been answered here, or at any of the other crime scenes.
“This would be one of the last places you would think he would strike,” said Columbus Ricks, one of the Indianapolis detectives. “Look at how busy this area is.”
But Spurgeon guessed there was a method in the killer’s madness. “I think there would have been a variety of stores for him to choose from in the area,” Spurgeon said. “It was just a matter of whatever our suspect was looking for at the time. You have all of this busy traffic around this area, all of this movement, all of these people coming and going so quickly. Unless somebody really stood out to someone as behaving oddly or looking oddly, you could really go about your business with relative anonymity and nobody would ever really pay you any attention.”
I pointed to the busy Speedway gas station that was literally steps from the Payless shoe store. Customers were filling their tanks, and numerous people were coming and going inside the store by the minute.
“Was the gas station there in 1992?” I asked Spurgeon.
He nodded yes.
“That does not make any sense,” I said. “You would have to be a fool to kill somebody with this many potential witnesses around.”
Ricks and fellow detective David Ellison both laughed.
Spurgeon nodded again. “Welcome to the world of the I-70 serial killer where nothing makes any sense.”
I walked up to the front door of the gas station, and then took a few steps to the Payless store. It took me less than 20 seconds. Ellison and Ricks stood alongside Spurgeon and watched me make the walk.
“Twenty seconds,” I hollered at them. “No way somebody is killing somebody with all of these people just 20 seconds away.”
I looked at Spurgeon again. He nodded and I shook my head. “No way,” I muttered to myself.
I kept walking between the gas station and shoe store, and then returned to the detectives.
“Let me make sure I have this right,” I said. “He somehow chooses this busy location in the middle of the day. Then he kills Robin with all these people around. And then what, he just disappears?”
“Pretty much,” said Ellison. “Pretty much.”
Robin Fuldauer was not sure where life was taking her yet, but she was moving very quickly. She was the salutatorian of her Lawrence Central High School class, located just down the street from the Payless shoe store. She graduated a few years later from Indiana University. And now she had already risen to become a manager for Payless.
Sometime around 1pm on that April day, a serial killer was about to embark on a month-long journey, one that would take him to five cities, leaving six body bags behind. He was patrolling Pendleton Pike Road, looking for his first victim.
Receipts from the store show the last purchase was made at 1:12pm. Police believe the killer was likely in the store at the time, saw the only other customer leave, and then made his move. He forced Fuldauer into a storage room in the back of the store, made her kneel, then shot her twice in the back of the head, execution style, with a .22 caliber handgun. There was no sign of any struggle inside the store. The killer then rummaged through the cash register, taking less than $100. Police believe he left through a back door by 1:30pm, leaving Fuldauer lying dead behind a closed door. For the next hour, Payless customers would have their run of the store, with nobody in sight.
“I don’t believe there was an opportunity for anybody to go inside the store and observe that there was a body there,” Spurgeon said.
The Payless store had little in the way of store security. Just a bell that would ring when a new customer arrived.
Police records showed a woman named Lucretia Gullett was working at the Speedway gas station the day Fuldauer was killed. It was Gullett who discovered Robin’s body and called police.
Before arriving in Indianapolis, I began the task of searching for Lucretia Gullet.
“Is this Lucretia Gullet?” I asked the woman on the other end of the phone.
“It is,” she said.
“Ma’am,” I said, “I am a reporter working on a serial killer from 1992. And I believe you found the body of his first victim. A woman named Robin Fuldauer in the Payless shoe store.”
Gullett paused on the other end. “I did not really find her body. But yes, I was there, and I called the police. But what did you say about a serial killer?”
I told Gullett her Payless killer went on to kill numerous other women across the country.
“What?!” she screamed into the phone.
And I realized she was unaware. “Do you still live around Indy?” I asked her.
“I do,” she said.
“I am coming to town,” I told her. “Would you meet with me?”
“I will,” she said. “And did you say serial killer?” Apparently, she was still coming to grips with this.
I stood by the Speedway gas station with my crew and the police detectives, and watched as a woman parked her car and walked toward us.
“I am looking for Bob,” she said.
“Hi Lucretia,” I said, and we shook hands.
We began walking around the area. “This brings back a lot of memories,” she said.
“Have you been back here since…?” I asked.
“No,” she said as she looked around. “Thirty years is a long time. I just avoided coming around here.”
I asked Gullett to take me back to that day, as best she could.
“My shift at the Speedway gas station was ending at 3pm. I was almost getting off work to go home when I received a phone call from a man who said he was the district manager of the Payless store. It was probably around 2pm,” Gullett remembered. “He told me that he had been calling the shoe store for quite a while, but that no one was answering the phone there. He was really concerned, so I told him I would go next door to Payless and see what was going on over there.”
Gullett and I made the 20 second walk from one store to the other. “What happened when you walked in?” I asked.
Gullett paused at the door. “This is hard,” she said. “I walked up to the front door, opened it up and looked around. I did not see anybody. No manager, no customers. I looked over to the left and noticed that the cash register was open and then I went through the aisles, but nobody was around. I really was not sure what was going on, but I knew it was not right. Then I heard someone talking in the back of the store, so I went back there and I saw a woman who had a child with her. They were looking at some shoes. I asked her to please leave, and told her something was wrong. I did not know what was happening, but I knew something was wrong. So I just immediately stopped looking around and called the police. I was probably only in the store for about 10 minutes. And then I just waited for the police to arrive.”
Police records show they arrived at the scene around 3pm. When they did, Gullett said she then stood watch over the front door while detectives made their way inside. She watched them search the store before heading towards the back. And then she saw them open a closed door and look inside.
“One officer looked down to the right,” Gullett said, “and I could tell he was shocked at what he saw.”
Incredibly, some 30 years after Robin Fuldauer was murdered, Gullett says she was not aware the homicide scene she walked into three decades ago became linked to a serial killer, or that it was not solved all these years earlier. “I just became aware of that when you called me,” she said.
“You did not follow the case over the years as it exploded?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I was shocked when you told me it was a serial killer. I was like, whoa! That is when I put two and two together, and like, wow!”
Brought back to the scene, and meeting new detectives for the first time. Gullett is now spending time detailing the case to police again.
“They wanted to know if there was anything else I ever came up with or thought about.” And then she winked and smiled. “Maybe. Maybe. It might just be a coincidence. But yes, I hope I can help.”
***
Roger Spurgeon was an Indianapolis police officer at the time of Robin Fuldauer’s murder, not yet working in homicide. Now, he has been with the police department more than 25 years, most of them in the homicide unit. He would inherit the Fuldauer case, and says that in spite of the busy area, and in spite of the busy time of the day, early leads in the case quickly fizzled. “At first, because there was a small amount of cash taken, detectives thought it was likely a robbery that somehow turned into a homicide. They had a variety of potential suspects they were looking at in the very beginning. But If you describe a suspect as somebody you really have a keen interest in because of some sort of an evidentiary link or eyewitnesses, no, there was nothing there which stood out to the investigators at that time.”
Detectives immediately began canvassing the area on Pendleton Pike. The first witness they found was the store manager at MAB paint, across the street from the Payless, He told police he saw a strange looking man carrying a long bag. The witness said he watched the man repeatedly circling the Payless store, and then watched as the man sat down at a curb nearby for nearly 30 minutes. And then around 2pm, he suddenly disappeared from sight. The witness told police the man appeared to either be on drugs or had a mental problem.
Police would only locate less than a half dozen potential witnesses. One of them said they saw a man who matched what the earlier witness said calmly trying to hitch a ride along the highway. Police found a couple of other witnesses in the area who thought they saw something, but none of those leads panned out.
Detective Columbus Ricks is part of the Indianapolis Unsolved Homicide Unit. Like Spurgeon, he was also an Indianapolis police officer at the time of the Fuldauer murder. “The homicide investigators tracked down almost everybody that was said to have seen something in the area or had been seen by someone. They all had enough of an alibi to eliminate them. The descriptions of the suspect were all black males…” Ricks said, shaking his head. “And within days, after Wichita, the detectives knew the killer was a white male.”
I looked at Ricks and laughed. “How stupid,” I said.
“Not as easy as it seems on TV,” Ricks laughed again.
And then came the question: How did the killer get away? How did he simply walk out of the store in the middle of the day, with people all around, and disappear into thin air?
“I think he could have easily parked a vehicle on one of these residential side streets and casually walked to it,” Spurgeon said. “And nobody would have paid any attention to him unless he was acting strangely. Obviously, he had to have some sort of wheels to get from point A to point B. But we still do not have a good handle on that. Detectives had a lot of different theories at the time.”
Our crew walked around the area near the store. Busy streets in front, a side street on the side, and an older residential section behind it. Spurgeon appeared to be on target. The most likely answer was the killer parked a car on one of the residential streets, walked calmly to the Payless store, murdered Robin Fuldauer, and then walked back to his car.
Time moves forward. Today, a Batteries Plus store sits where the Payless Shoe store stood in 1992. But what has not changed is that police departments in five cities are still digging, talking to each other, and hoping for a DNA match.
“Science was not as developed then as it is now,” said Ricks. “We are going to see if DNA and new technology can assist us in solving this case.” Ricks added that another new witness may have recently emerged. Until then, we wait. The police. The families. Everyone. And they all understand that they are waiting for an answer that may never come.
Robin’s sister Susan will never forget that day. You can still hear the sadness in her voice. “My husband found out about Robin first. He came home and told me. It was just so incredibly hard to process. It was something completely out of the realm of expectations. I immediately went to pick up my daughter and then we went to the Payless store. There was so much activity at the scene it was hard to believe. It is just a nightmare that you live through and cannot possibly process. It is just very hard to describe.”
And then just a few days later, the bombshell of Wichita came, where 700 miles away and just three days after Robin Fuldauer was murdered, Patricia Magers and Patricia Smith were killed in the same fashion. And almost immediately, police were hit with a stunning reality: The same gun used in Indianapolis was used in Wichita. It seemed impossible with the time frame. But, suddenly, Indianapolis and Wichita had a serial killer on their hands.
“Then it all became just surreal,” Susan said. “Wichita was connected to my Robin? And again, look at the pattern. So cold blooded. Another busy, noisy store. And then the others soon came rolling in. And then I started wondering, was Robin really the first? Could there have been others before her? This was now totally beyond belief. And then our family began grieving not just for Robin, but for all of these other families going through the same exact nightmare that we were going through.”
There is another heartbreaking twist of fate to Robin’s story. She was not supposed to work that day, but another employee called in sick. The Payless store was short-staffed, so Robin came in to cover the shift, as she had so many times before.
After all these years, one thought keeps sticking in Susan’s mind. “I know you cannot turn the clock back. But I usually went by Robin’s store on most days after I got off of work, just to make sure she was okay. For some reason, I did not go by that day. And I always ask myself, ‘Could I have possibly done something? Could I have possibly stopped something?’”
Susan Fuldauer is realistic about the chances of finding the killer after all these years. But she says she will always remain hopeful. “We have always maintained hope that Robin’s murder will someday be solved. Maybe the killer is in jail somewhere. Maybe he is no longer alive. But, like the detectives tell us, we have new technology now. We have new DNA techniques. We have hope. It does not bring Robin or the other victims back. But to know that he might be stopped, and he can never do anything like this again, that would be a major victory for our family.”
Mike Crooke, who has seen everything in his 52 years in law enforcement, insists the case can someday be solved. “I am still hopeful we will resolve this. We did not have the advances in science 30 years ago that we have now.”
Robin Fuldauer was 26 years old. She was the first known victim of the I-70 serial killer. And while it all began in Indy, sadly, it did not end there. And on April 8, pick a year, any year, Mike Crooke will pick up the phone and call Susan Fuldauer. She will smile. They will talk. And they will cry. “It is so kind and considerate of Mike to reach out to my family,” Susan said. “He reminds us that Robin will never ever be forgotten. I appreciate that so very much. We do not talk about the what ifs, because this was such a heinous crime. It is just very comforting to know that Mike remembers us each year. That amount of kindness is really wonderful and will never be forgotten.”
In 1992, a store clerk was found shot to death in broad daylight at the Boot Village in St. Charles, Missouri. Nothing was stolen and there was no sexual assault. This bizarre and seemingly isolated murder was quickly connected with others in Indianapolis, Wichita, Terre Haute, and Raytown. The media dubbed the suspect “The I-70 Serial Killer.” He has never been captured, and the story quickly fell out of the media’s attention. But the cases never went cold for the officers in those cities.
In 2021, with the advancements in DNA, St. Charles Police Captain Raymond Floyd launched a task force, bringing all jurisdictions together along with federal agencies to take one final crack at solving the crimes. The task force selected Bob Cyphers of KMOV-TV to follow them along, city by city, in the hunt for the killer. Cyphers and his KMOV crew produced a seven-part award winning series called “Chasing the I-70 Serial Killer.” Their work led to national exposure of the case in People magazine and on the Discovery Channel, winning an Edward R. Murrow Award and being nominated for an Emmy.
Dead End: Inside the Hunt for the I-70 Serial Killer follows on the work done by the task force with the important goal of keeping the story alive in the public eye. New evidence, never before available to the public, is revealed here, with the hopes of triggering a memory or revealing a new lead. The task force may be closed, but the drive to find this killer is alive and well.
Anyone who may have information about the case should contact the I-70 hotline at 1-800-800-3510.
25 Frozen, 1 Thawed tells the true stories of unsolved murders across the Midwest and the long, painful search for answers that families and investigators continue to face.
25 Frozen 1 Thawed (Paperback)
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Chapter 1: Frozen 1
Frozen 1
“The Never-Ending Story”
On a warm summer day in 1983, KMOV-TV in St. Louis was covering a news story at City Hall. While there, a wedding ceremony was taking place. A few wedding pictures would be a nice way to close the evening’s newscast. With that, Larry Wolff kissed his bride, Denise. They rushed home to tell all their friends that they got married on television.
That’s just the first twist in this never-ending story.
Denise Wolff had already lived a hectic life before she met Larry. She dropped out of high school, left home, and married her high school sweetheart at 16. By 17, she was the mother of a little girl named Angie and divorced. A second marriage would come, but that marriage too, ended in divorce. And then she married Larry, and they had a child, Jennie. The marriage to Larry didn’t last either, and Denise filed for divorce. But Larry talked her into settling for a legal separation. Next, Denise bought a house in Lindenwood Park in south St. Louis.
Then Larry bought a house right around the corner.
The separated pair were frequently together. Very frequently. This lasted for years, until Denise, pushing 40, made it clear she was moving on with her life. A new job as a dealer at the President Casino meant more money, and a brand-new Chrysler Cirrus LX. Things were looking up for Denise Wolff.
Not to mention a new boyfriend she met at work.
Denise worked the overnight shift. Police records show she clocked out at 4:09 a.m. on July 17, 1997. Denise pulled through the drive-through window at Hardee’s on Hampton Avenue and grabbed a breakfast sandwich. She was careful as she drove home. She had to be. The South Side Rapist was on the loose.
His name was Dennis Rabbit, and he had been raping women for 25 years. He claims to have raped more than 100 women around the country. And when the rapes intensified in south St. Louis in the late 1990s, Denise installed a motion-activated floodlight system near her driveway. And when she drove home in the middle of the night, she would head straight into the garage.
But not on that morning.
On that morning, around 4:30 a.m., for some reason, Denise got out of her car, walked down the driveway, and through her front yard. Seconds later, gunfire rang out through the sleepy neighborhood. A neighbor, an off-duty police officer, was awakened and looked at his clock. It was 4:37 a.m. He rushed outside and found Denise lying face down on the sidewalk, shot multiple times. Her house was riddled with bullets fired from a high-powered rifle. Within minutes, lights in the 6800 block of Bancroft Avenue would flicker on. Windows would be looked out from. 911 would be called.
An ambulance arrived within minutes, and EMS workers tried to save Denise. Police quickly arrived and were told Larry Wolff lived just 100 yards away. They knocked on his door, and he answered in a pair of boxer shorts. Unlike other neighbors, he told police he hadn’t heard a thing. Police say he then went and stood in front of the ambulance and watched. When the ambulance took Denise to the hospital, Larry did not go with her. Denise Wolff was pronounced dead within the hour.
By the time the sun rose, nearly 20 police officers would be on the scene at Bancroft. Multiple witnesses told them a gray or silver van with a stripe on the side was seen driving away. Nothing was taken from the scene. Police did not believe this was a random act. They said Denise was targeted in the middle of the night, with a killer waiting for her right in front of her home.
St. Louis Police Captain David Heath quickly sized up the scene.
“This is a very vicious crime. This is a very purposeful, vicious crime,” Heath said. “We’re not looking at this to be a random act under any circumstances. They very well intended on what they were doing.”
As homicide detectives investigated Denise’s past, they looked at her ex-husbands, her current husband, and her new boyfriend. The earlier husbands were not in the picture. Larry Wolff was a St. Louis city plumbing inspector. The new boyfriend from work had a wife. Police quickly began focusing in on the rather odd relationship between Larry and Denise.
Friends and relatives told police they fought a lot. They lived for a while in rural Robertsville, about an hour outside of St. Louis. But with Larry working in the city, he often slept at Denise’s sister Cathy’s house in St. Louis. Finally, Denise had enough and filed for divorce, which led to the separation, and the neighboring houses in Lindenwood Park. And as bizarre as the arrangement seemed, it lasted for seven years.
They had keys to each other’s house. Sometimes Larry slept over. Sometimes he helped with money. Sometimes he cooked dinner. For big events, Larry, Denise, and daughter Jennie were inseparable.
Homicide detectives believed Denise’s relationship with her new boyfriend complicated matters for Larry. But he claimed he didn’t know about the boyfriend. And family members had Larry’s back. Their arrangement was working. They said there was never a hint of violence, and Denise showed no signs of following through with the divorce. But friends painted a different picture. They told police the couple was now arguing more than ever, and Denise suspected that Larry knew about her boyfriend. But as police focused in on Larry, they had problems. No real eyewitnesses, no murder weapon, no silver or gray van. And was there really a motive?
Retired St. Louis homicide detective Chris Pappas looks back on the Wolff homicide in bewilderment. “We really had no idea what happened there, until....”
Until Laurie Lynn Chirco turned the case upside down.
Chirco lived in the area, nearby on Jamieson Avenue. When police first knocked on her door, she insisted she didn’t want to get involved. But Laurie Lynn Chirco would soon meet Chris Pappas. And there, the already evolving tale truly begins.
She said she always walked her dog between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. Sure enough, she was out walking her dog on that fateful night. But she said she didn’t see or hear anything. Police found that improbable and asked her to come down to the police department to answer a few questions. And there her tale would turn for the first time. Now, she remembered she did see a man while walking her dog. She suspected the man was the South Side Rapist. She gave police a full description, and said the man walked right toward Denise’s house. This was quite different than Chirco’s earlier statement, and detectives kept pressing. And pressing.
They questioned Chirco for 11 hours. And she was not happy. She says she asked to leave the interview dozens of times, but the officers wouldn’t let her. At one point, when she asked police if she could go to the bathroom, she claimed they handcuffed her to a table. She says an investigator threatened to put her child in foster care. At that point, she stopped talking, hired a lawyer, marched into the mayor’s office, and filed a complaint with the internal affairs unit of the St. Louis Police Department, claiming she was mistreated by the detectives.
Police investigators were in disbelief. The city later ruled her complaint “not sustained.”
Chirco was a hospice care worker. Just before Denise Wolff was murdered, Chirco married Marcello Chirco. But, like the Wolffs, they lived separately. And Marcello Chirco owned a gray van with a stripe on the side. He also owned a high-powered rifle similar to the one police say was used in the Wolff shooting. Laurie Lynn Chirco would tell detectives that a man was constantly following her in her car. It had a city license plate. Laurie Lynn Chirco said she feared for her life and was going to move out of the area.
As police tried to figure heads from tails on the one witness who was out walking her dog in the middle of the night at the time of the murder, they knew they were up against the clock. And sure enough, the calendar kept turning.
Then, nearly a year after the murder, Laurie Lynn Chirco picked up the phone and called the city homicide department. Pappas answered. She wanted to meet again.
She told them she was having a hard time living with herself. This time, she said, she wanted to tell them what she really saw that night. They met again, and detectives turned on their recorders. In this account, Laurie Lynn Chirco said she was walking her dog on Jamieson. She saw a man wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt standing by an alley on Bancroft. Then she said she saw a gray van drive around the block a few times before stopping where the man was. The driver of the van and the man talked, then the man got into the van, and they parked it in front of Denise’s home. Then the shooting started. Detectives asked her if she recognized the man standing in the street who got into the van.
Yes, she said. It was Larry Wolff. And where exactly, police wondered, was Laurie Lynn Chirco when all this happened? Hiding in the bushes, she told them. And now there was more. Laurie Lynn Chirco told police she had discovered who was following her in that car: Larry Wolff.
Pappas still shakes his head when he thinks back to those interviews.
“We didn’t know what her story was. How could we? She kept changing it every time we met. At one point, I remember thinking, ‘Did you really witness anything?’” Pappas said.
Pappas and the other detectives might not have been sure what to think at this point considering their long dance with Laurie Lynn Chirco, but they still had the only firsthand eyewitness, and arranged for another meeting with Chirco. But this time she canceled and said she would not cooperate any further. But then, she changed her mind again and agreed to meet with police in her attorney’s office.
And that’s where things with Laurie Lynn Chirco really went off the rails.
This time, Laurie Lynn Chirco had complete notes. She walked her dog at exactly 4:07 a.m. And this time, she walked right up to Larry Wolff, who was standing in the street. Her dog began growling at him. Now she said she also saw the driver of the van and gave police a description: a white male in his 30s, unkept hair.
She said she heard 10 shots. She ran to the bushes with her dog. She told them exactly which streets the van took to get away. Police told her they had nearly a dozen other witnesses who described how the van exited, and they were different than hers. She insisted they were all wrong.
And then she dropped another bombshell. She tracked down Larry Wolff, called him in the middle of the night, told him she saw him kill his wife, and that he better turn himself in. She said he threatened to kill her if he ever saw her again. Then she said Larry and other men came to her apartment and threatened to kill her child.
“We were at the point where we didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t,” Pappas recalled.
Laurie Lynn Chirco agreed to sign a formal statement to police. Then she refused. Police didn’t know what they had with their witness, but they thought they had enough. In October of 1998, a grand jury indicted Larry Wolff for the murder of his wife.
Laurie Lynn Chirco wasn’t the only one whose story kept changing.
Larry Wolff originally told police he slept peacefully through the night and never heard gunshots. When police told him a witness put him at the scene of the shooting, Larry then said yes, he heard dogs barking. But all he did was look outside to see what was happening. He insisted he had a wonderful relationship with Denise. He spoke to KMOV:
“I wasn’t up. They’ve asked me and they’ve badgered me, made me a nervous wreck over this. I think we’ll all feel better if...” Larry’s eyes teared up. “Once we find out who did it and why.”
When Larry hired prominent defense attorney Richard Sindel, prosecutors knew they had a battle on their hands. And off to court we went in the murder trial of Larry Wolff, but not before the lead prosecutor in the case, Ed Postawko, took a leave of absence.
Meanwhile, Sindel kept looking right at Laurie Lynn Chirco, and smiling.
But the biggest bombshell was about to come. Laurie Lynn Chirco said she had taped her conversations with police. She said the tape was hidden in “a very safe place.” Sindel subpoenaed the tape. Chirco refused the subpoena. Sindel then moved to strike her testimony and to strike her as a credible witness. Circuit Judge Philip Heagney agreed. Without Laurie Lynn Chirco, the state had no eyewitness, and no case. The next day, the charges against Larry Wolff were dismissed. He was a free man.
Chris Pappas, who had seen everything in 33 years on the homicide beat, had never seen anything quite like this. “All signs pointed to Larry Wolff in this case,” Pappas said. “He was the only person with a motive. It was really a shame because an awful lot of work was done on that case. But without Chirco’s testimony....”
But Laurie Lynn Chirco would be heard from again, this time on the Steve and DC radio show, when she called in. Listening at home, Denise Wolff’s family lit up the phone lines with questions for her. Chirco told listeners she feared for her life, that her phone was tapped, that she gave away custody of her daughter because she feared for her safety, and that she was contemplating divorcing her husband for his safety. The next day, Sindel took time from his busy schedule and called the radio show and told the world that it was Laurie Lynn Chirco’s lack of credibility that ended the case against Larry Wolff:
“I don’t know if they found anything else out,” Larry said at the time. “I wish they would. I don’t know where to go from here.”
But Laurie Lynn Chirco was not done with Sindel. She mailed him a handwritten card that said, “I hear from several people that you didn’t think you could win against me in court. I would have never thought you would quit. I know I would have won against you in court. But just remember you didn’t win. I gave it to you!”
The circus was officially in town.
Sindel remembers the case like it was yesterday:
“This was the weirdest case, absolutely crazy!” he laughed. “Larry might have had a motive. I don’t know if he was guilty or not, but the evidence they had was like throwing Jell-o to a wall. The state has a burden of proof, and they were not going to be able to do that with Laurie Lynn Chirco. Her credibility as a witness was just shot. Yeah, this case stands out. Just very strange.”
Larry Wolff sat in jail for a year and a half. He always proclaimed his innocence.
Efforts to locate Laurie Lynn Chirco for this story were unsuccessful. Denise Wolff’s family declined to be interviewed, but they insist they know who killed Denise: “In our hearts, we know who did it,” a family member said. “But there is no use now.”
That is because Larry Wolff has passed away.
At the time, the St. Louis Police Department said Larry was their strongest suspect, even after the charges against him were dismissed. But today, the case is in the rear-view mirror for the St. Louis Police Department.
“This case in 1997 was cleared with warrants issued on her husband Larry Wolff,” a police spokesperson said. “The case was later dropped after the primary witness refused to assist in prosecution due to threats from Larry’s brother. Larry’s brother later died, and Larry also died with the case never moving forward.”
At the end of the day, Laurie Lynn Chirco may have had it right. You just needed a good GPS system in 1997 to figure it out.
25 Frozen, 1 Thawed (Murder and Mayhem in the Midwest) takes readers deep into the heart of unsolved and unforgettable crimes from America’s Midwest—cases as haunting as the winter nights they were born from. Through meticulous research and vivid storytelling, veteran journalist Bob Cyphers unravels the chilling details behind murders, disappearances, and mysteries that refused to fade with time.
From the quiet streets of St. Louis to small towns where everyone knows everyone—and no one will talk—these true accounts lay bare the human stories behind the headlines. A young mother gunned down steps from her home, her life cut short by a killer who may have been closer than anyone guessed. A teenager snatched from a bike ride and never seen again, her absence still echoing through her community decades later. A journalist-in-training whose promising future ended in a shallow creek, leaving two suspects and questions that still divide a town. And a sorority sister found beaten on her own front lawn just before Christmas break, in a case that still unsettles a college campus.
Blending compassion for the victims with a reporter’s drive for facts, Frozen doesn’t just revisit the evidence—it brings readers into the emotional center of each story. These are not distant, cold cases; they are stories of lives interrupted, families searching for truth, and communities forever changed.