INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - It appears to have been a typical kitchen of the 1950s, with one of those white enamel stoves, a tall metal cabinet with jars on top probably containing flour and sugar, and a Formica table surrounded by vinyl chairs.
What’s unusual are the bullet holes. There are dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Even though some are as big as quarters, it’s impossible to count them all because the room itself is long gone and all that’s left is a grainy, poorly lit black-and-white photograph. It was snapped June 30, 1954, at 733 N. Elder Ave. in the Haughville neighborhood of Indianapolis after one of the more bizarre incidents in the history of public safety, the “Battle of Elder Avenue.”
Jo Moore and Pat Pearsey, longtime employees of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, ran across the 8-by-10-inch glossy while rooting through a trove of police artifacts tucked away in a second-floor closet deep in the bowels of IMPD’s Southwest District headquarters.
It’s like the cops’ attic up there. Horrific and interesting things spill from the closet and into a larger room - photos going back to the 1910s; brass knuckles confiscated in the 1920s; two Dillinger death masks; the Russian-made rifle that Norris Edwards had with him at the Bible Way Missionary Baptist Church, 2174 N. Illinois St., on April 7, 1968.
Three days prior, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. Bible Way’s pastor, the Rev. William Blue, had just concluded a sermon on nonviolence when Edwards entered the church and shot and killed his wife, his sister-in-law and an 8-year-old girl. Four others were wounded before police shot and killed him. Edwards’ rifle has several nicks and gouges. Moore figures those are from police bullets. The initials “V.M.” and the date, “4-7-68,” are carved into the stock. “This is how we used to document evidence,” Moore said, noting that “V.M.” was shorthand for the name of the officer on the scene, Vic Moore (no relation).
Sgt. Jo Moore retires in August after 32 years on the force and is spending her last year archiving this broad collection. With the help of the Indianapolis Public Library, the collection is being digitized and will be made available to the public. Some of the items in the virtual museum will be available for viewing online later this year.
Moore allows herself to dream of an actual, physical exhibit, maybe in a walk-through trailer. “I could see a traveling museum,” she said. “You could change out the exhibits. It’s important people understand history.”
Police departments in other cities have brick-and-mortar museums. Cincinnati’s displays, among other things, a taxidermied dog that had been the force’s beloved mascot in the early 1900s. The Indiana State Police has a museum, as does the Indianapolis Fire Department.
In the 1960s, the Indianapolis Police Department, the forerunner to IMPD, had a semi-museum. “There was a room in the City-County Building that had a collection of (Indianapolis police historic) things,” said Pearsey, “but the guy behind it retired, and it went to pot.”
Several years ago, Roger Spurgeon, IMPD’s East District commander and a 30-plus-year veteran, led an effort to start an IMPD museum. He was motivated by a phone call he received in 2004 from a local historian seeking information on the murder of Helene Knabe. Spurgeon at the time was in charge of the homicide cold case unit, which is probably why the Knabe call came to him. Her case, still unsolved, is likely among the nation’s coldest, dating to 1911. The call “launched me in a variety of different directions,” Spurgeon said. “I checked and found we didn’t have any homicide records older than 1924 because a flood in the sub-basement of the City-County Building in 1977 destroyed the older records. I found we really didn’t have any way to commemorate the history of the department. And 2004 was the department’s sesquicentennial.”
The Indianapoils Police Department was founded in 1854 and so in 2004 turned 150 years old.
Spurgeon got busy and pulled together a museum committee, found 12,000 vacant square feet at the corner of Pennsylvania and Georgia streets and even had a name picked out: Cop City. “But the recession hit, and it wasn’t in the cards,” he said.
Cop City may have fizzled, but Spurgeon’s efforts at accumulating important artifacts succeeded. Retired police officers cleared out their closets and gave their treasures to the museum-in-waiting. (Norris Edwards’ rifle was a gift of James Toler, who was one of the officers on the scene of the church shooting; following the incident, a judge gave Toler the gun as a sort of keepsake, Moore said. In 1992, Toler would become part of history when he was named the department’s first black chief.)
It is Spurgeon’s wide-ranging cache that Moore and Pearsey are sorting through. In it are: dozens of police badges dating from the late-1800s; the Sylvia Likens file; an envelope, probably from the 1950s, on which is typed this, from Capt. Robert Reilly, who retired in 1964: “Inclosed bullet was on Bill’s desk this A.M. I have no way of knowing, but think it may be the slug removed from Silcox at the Hosp.” Inside the envelope is a slug wrapped in blood-stained gauze.
There’s an early 1900s handcuff-type device called a “wrist come-along” and a pistol with “Paul Taylor” etched into it from the 1920s, when police officers had to buy their own guns.
There’s a bullet-proof vest that was found in the house at 3544 N. Oxford St. where Sgt. Jack Ohrberg was slain in a gun battle Dec. 11, 1980, as he attempted to arrest Tommie Smith for bank robbery and murder. On the vest a police officer scrawled: “1354 hrs Liv rm closet 12-11-80.” Smith and his accomplice Gregory Resnover were convicted of murder and conspiracy and were executed. Smith was the first to die in Indiana by lethal injection, the method that replaced the electric chair.
To both Moore and Pearsey, IMPD history is personal. Pearsey is the son and grandson of Indianapolis police officers, a civilian employee of IMPD since 1980 and the author of two books about the department. He was drawn to police history when he learned about the Elder Avenue affair, which was so violent and so unusual it made Life magazine (“Mayhem in the sun,” was Life’s headline).
On June 30, 1954, police responded to a call by Janie Ellis about her husband, Howard. She felt threatened. He was armed. As officers approached the Ellis house, he fired on them. More police came, some 200 more, and Ellis fired on them. They fired back roughly 10,000 rounds, decimating the small, frame house and finally killing Ellis. The “battle” lasted 2½ hours. The only fatality was Ellis. Pearsey’s grandfather, Lt. Paul D. Pearsey, was one of eight officers to be hit by Ellis. All survived.
Jo Moore joined the IPD in 1985. Her husband, Spencer Moore, was already on the force. He recently retired as a lieutenant. The Moores’ son, David, joined the department in 2004, and he shared his mother’s interest in the family’s legacy. He took possession of many of his parents’ police artifacts - their badges, longevity pins, Spencer’s night stick - and displayed them in his house in a sort of collage.
“We thought our history would go on through David,” Jo Moore said.
But in 2011, David was shot and killed while making a routine traffic stop.
His parents retrieved their memorabilia from his house, kept some of it and donated the rest to the archive. They adopted David’s dog, a German Shepherd named Charlie, and Charlie sometimes accompanies Jo to work.
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Source: Indianapolis Star, https://indy.st/2nELpO2
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Information from: The Indianapolis Star, https://www.indystar.com
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