Indiana’s “ Upstate Slayer”: Part One
Prelude To Murder
A blue-eyed, middle-aged woman slowly pulled into a space inside her Park Lane apartment’s adjoining garage. Her brakes lightly squeaked as her vehicle crept to a halt. Her arrival was barely noticed by her few neighbors in the apartment building across the alley, who happened to be awake that night. She took stock of her belongings inside her car: a purse and a tin canister holding celluloid film.
It was barely March 3, 1949, having just left Glen Park from her job as a teacher at Lew Wallace High School. There, a meeting that amounted to a Parent Teacher Association meeting was held at Lew Wallace, where 44-year-old Mary Isabel Cheever was employed as a romantic language educator.
According to writer Paul S. O’Hara, the University of Paris graduate was sometimes called a “spinster school teacher.” A “spinster” is an old-time derogatory term for a middle-aged woman who never married or was unlikely to marry and spun yarn for a living. A more 1950s-ish term would be “old maid.”
There was a long-time stigma on female teachers that essentially barred them from marrying while being employed as teachers. This stigma existed for many, even into the mid-1970s. The issue was not marriage per se but whether female teachers could retain employment and still take care of their duties at home — or vice versa. It was not unheard of for recently wed women educators to find themselves suddenly out of the job.
In addition, unwed, middle-aged women like Mary were sometimes stigmatized as weird, antisocial, and haggish. The societal norms of the time were not in her favor, and it is still being determined why Mary wasn’t married in 1949. As such, she was not immune to such criticisms, but one thing couldn’t be denied: her abilities as a teacher.
Nearly everyone who had the pleasure of knowing Cheever revered, respected, and complimented her education skills. Cheever's dedication to her students was unparalleled. She taught French and Spanish, and at that night’s PTA meeting, she proudly showed private films of a recent trip to Guatemala to the Lew Wallace Sprench Club and guest students from all over Gary.
According to the Quill and Blade, 1944 edition, the Sprench Club was the official combination of Lew Wallace’s French and Spanish clubs. Mary Cheever entirely sponsored Sprench, forming it into her own thing.
I have never heard of a French teacher at a local high school being known as “popular,” especially district-wide. Here, Mary was the exception again. She was a so-called spinster, a prominent romantic language orator, and a paramount educator. In 1949, being all three and being an unwed lady in the magic City of Gary, Indiana, was possible. Her achievements were a testament to her resilience and dedication.
Guatemala was a far cry from Gary that night. It was grey, overcast, and moonless, with temperatures in the mid-30s. Cheever’s only light was from the outside floodlights that illuminated the alleyway behind her apartment, the streetlights at the end of her alley, and the few inside lights of the midnight oil burners dotted throughout the buildings.
Little did she know that someone was lurking in the darkness beyond where the available light could reach — someone with sinister intentions to rob and do worse if necessary.
Mary’s Life Ends
The sequence of events immediately after Cheever shuts her car off is unknown. We don’t know if she was forced at gunpoint to exit her vehicle, though that may be unlikely because she carried her purse and film tins with her into the alley.
We don’t know if her keys were taken or left behind or the make and model of her car. Finally, it is unknown if anything was spoken between Cheever and her assailant. The only thing known is what witnesses claim to have seen and heard just a few moments after the teacher pulled into her parking space. The scene is painted below.
The above ghostly noir photo shows the alley behind Mary Cheever’s apartment. The year is unknown but will likely be just after Mary’s death.
Her building was at the northwest corner of 8th and Monroe Street. Mary’s address was 517 W. 8th Avenue, which would have been around the corner, to the right of the building at the far right. The photographer is looking north through the alley toward Jefferson Park.
The aforementioned park was North of her building, as shown in the picture at the end of the alley and across 8th Avenue. The same tree shown above at the end of the building is still there today.
Cheever’s Park Lane Apartments building is at the right of the black-and-white picture, adorned with bright flood lamps. The car garage barn is at the extreme right, decorated with wooden “X” braces. Mary would have pulled her car into one of several manually operated garage doors shown.
Sharp shrills filled the cold, damp air. Due to temperature inversion, nighttime air can make sound travel further and faster because the waves get angled toward the ground. Mary’s screams were heard very loud and clear to the handful of people who happened to be awake at that moment.
A man dressed in a brown coat and cap dragged Mary by the top of her hair towards the stairway of her building. Mary struggled against him, but the small-framed, lightweight woman was no match.
“Give me that purse!” the man screamed.
“No!” Mary shouted in response, her voice high-pitched with indignance and terror.
More screaming, more struggling.
Somehow, Mary got free from the robber’s grip.
It is unknown if Mary ever saw the gun, a .38 revolver. What is known is that Mary turned away from the man and started to run towards her building’s back entrance. The man quickly caught her arms and began yanking back hard. He grabbed her hair, pulling out strands that fluttered softly onto the ground. Mary managed to get one arm free, and at that moment, a shot was fired.
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BAM!
The bullet pierced her fur coat, singeing the fibers as hot metal tore into the flesh of her back. Her assailant was taller than her, which resulted in the slug moving downwards in a right-to-left direction from her right shoulder.
The bullet couldn’t have done a better job of killing her. It knifed into her chest, severing her aortic artery. Spinning, the shell thrashed her left lung. Finally, after bouncing off a rib, it speared deep into her liver before exiting through the lower torso. All of this occurred in a split second.
A final scream and Mary collapsed on her face in a heap onto the cold, filthy alley. As she writhed in pain, the man crouched over her. Witnesses cautiously peeked from the safety of their windows as the man fumbled with her purse, which remained on her arm. He tugged hard, freed the bag, and quickly stood. The man was paranoid that he was being watched.
Someone must have made a noise. Sweating and panting in the bitter, amber light, the robber turned his head behind him to look up into the apartments across the alley. The light from Cheever’s building illuminated his head. For sure, he had to be spotted!
It is unknown if he made eye contact with a witness or if something else happened, that caused him to become aware of eyes all around. Regardless, in a huff, the man advanced with Cheever’s purse, the revolver still in hand, and escaped on foot, running in an unknown direction.
Cheever was left on the ground, surrounded by her coveted celluloid films and tins.
All the above events are paraphrased and organized based on publicly printed information on the Internet. There is no one official timeline that details the robbery and murder of Cheever from start to finish.
The Gary Police Department was summoned. They arrived and were immediately dismayed by the sight before them. Looking at the photograph above, they were likely dumbfounded by the crime scene. Nobody knew what to make of it. While petty thefts and armed robberies were not uncommon around the exclusive “Uptown” neighborhood, none had ever led to murder before this night.
Police officers, detectives, and the media gathered around Mary as she lay silently bleeding internally. Her coat was examined; the powder burns still stank of ozone. Someone turned her over onto her back. She flopped, arms like noodles as a detective scanned her torso for more injuries. The photo above shows an unknown detective removing a film tin from her left side. There is no word on what happened to these films.
An ambulance was fetched, and she was hurriedly whisked to Mary Mercy Hospital, where, shortly after that, she died within thirty minutes of being shot.
Some Information to be Had
The March 3, 1949, events made national headlines for days and weeks. The press salivated at the chance to tell the story of Gary’s dark underbelly. They printed countless articles and columns full of sex, murder, rumor, and mayhem.
Mary was a well-liked middle-aged white lady who lived in the nicer sectors of Gary’s elite classes and was a popular teacher. The Uptown neighborhood she lived in stood in awe, shocked that something like this could occur where they resided. Crimes such as murder happen in the black, multi-ethnic, poorer, lower-middle-class Midtown areas. Not here.
There were eight unsolved murders in the Midtown district before Mary’s death, and there wasn’t nearly as much attention given to those cases as Mary’s. Even without the later extreme reaction of Gary’s womenfolk, the fact that this case was not solved promptly gave the Gary Police Department a political beating.
Yet, before we get to what was jokingly referred to as Gary’s “Petticoat Rebellion,” we must discuss the immediate reaction of the Gary Police Department.
This section of the story has been revised. Eagle-eyed Gary Historical Collective member Susan Hasara pointed out a significant discrepancy in the police statistic numbers I used in the previous version.
I said: “According to the Gary Police Department’s 1945–1946 Annual Report, there were an estimated total of 15,152 property thefts, 25,120 reported burglaries, and 208,298 auto thefts during the first year after WWII concluded.”
These numbers need to be corrected. The numbers I cited in the report are monetary values, not crime frequency numbers. If I had paid attention to that detail, there would have been no reason to revise.
Mrs. Hasara also provided one screenshot from Uniform Crime Reports for the United States and its Possessions, 1950. This cites one line on a crime statistics chart from Gary from 1949 to 1950. As with the source I used, geographical demographics do not break down the totals, and these declarations do not consider ethnicity and race.
I’ll write them out for you. Between 1949 and 1950 there were:
- 17 Murders/Manslaughters
123 Robberies
173 Aggravated Assault
582 Breaking/Entering
209 Auto Thefts
The other information in the chart about Gary is not pertinent to the story. I just included a few select sectors.
If one were to go back in time, it would be easy to assume that most crimes occurred inside or immediately around Midtown. However, though thefts may have occurred frequently in these areas, the high-value targets would be nearly all located in majority-white neighborhoods and wards.
Considering the demographics and geographic makeup of Gary at the time, blacks and other minorities were regulated mostly south of Downtown Gary and north of Glen Park in an area we now call Midtown. Midtown is then broken down into several different neighborhoods—some still exist, and some don’t.
We can thank the efforts of photographer Michael Rougier, who was hired at LIFE Magazine only two years before Mary Cheever’s death. Without his presence, we wouldn’t have any intimate pictures of the broader crime scene.
