45:Carol Ann Rhoades, Connie Weaver, and Kathryn Kaufman
The days immediately leading up to Christmas often seem to have a special feeling in the air. The excitement is building as people finish their shopping and gift wrapping. Christmas parties with co-workers and social groups keep everyone especially busy. It can be a whirlwind of activity.
On December 23rd 1972, 18 year old Carol Ann Rhoades attended a Christmas party held at the Tote-a-Poke Restaurant in Whiteland, Indiana. (I love that name. A poke is an old fashioned name for a sack or bag. I assume they did a good take out business.)
Whiteland is about a 40 minute drive South of Indianapolis. It is just southeast of Greenwood off Indiana Highway 31.
Carol worked in Indianapolis and her parents lived in Whiteland. She was home for the holidays. It should have been a wonderful time for everyone.
Carol Ann Rhoades was last seen in the parking lot after the Christmas party in a white or cream colored car with a man. One witness described it as a light colored car. Witnesses also said it had a large “whip” antenna on the back much like a police car would have had at that time.
Carol did not have plans to leave the party with anyone else. People were confused to see her in this car. This wasn’t right. Sometimes witnesses see a situation and they don’t recognize what they are seeing. A kidnapping doesn’t always look like a kidnapping from a movie.
She didn’t come home on the night of the 23rd. There was no word from her on Christmas Eve. Her family and friends knew then that she didn’t leave the party with that man willingly. She must have been forced. When she also missed Christmas, they feared the worst.
Family and friends had been frantically searching. Police were looking for the car that was described. There was no sign of Carol.
Carol Ann Rhoades was finally found on December 26th, 1972. She had been shot. Ballistics tests showed that the weapon used was a .38 caliber. She had also been violently raped.
Six weeks later, On February 11th, 1973, Connie Weaver, 25, was driving on 31 North, just 4 miles north of Westfield (North of Indianapolis) when she had car trouble. It was 9 p.m. and very dark and cold there on the side of the road. That area was very rural then and not at all as developed as it is now. She pulled over and a man in a light colored car offered assistance. He showed her a badge in a wallet and said he would drive her to a phone. He said he was an off duty policeman. He looked dirty and his hair seemed too long to be a policeman but it was cold and he was offering to help. Once in the car he began making lewd comments and attempted to rape her. She resisted and he shot her as she fled the vehicle. She was critically wounded in the back by a .38 caliber weapon. She was able to flag down a passing motorist who took her to Riverview Hospital. They were pulled over for speeding on the way but the officer quickly saw the life and death situation and provided a police escort. Because of the severity of her injuries, with bullets lodged near her spine, she was transferred immediately to Indiana University Medical Center in Indianapolis.
She survived. Miraculously she survived multiple gunshot wounds to the back and later described her attacker and his car. A sketch was made and widely publicized. He was not apprehended quickly. This victim who got away and described him also was not enough of a threat to him to keep him from offending again just 48 hours later.
On the evening of February 13th 1973, Kathryn Kaufman of Greenwood, Indiana was working a late shift at Sander’s Cleaners. She had finished High School in December and was looking forward to graduating officially in May. She had her whole life ahead of her. Maybe she was thinking about Valentine’s Day. Maybe she would bake cookies as a treat for her sisters and brothers when she finished work. Maybe she was dreaming about college as she worked. We don’t know what her plans were. We just know that she was shot 4 times as she exited the door of her workplace. The weapon was a .38 caliber.
She was fleeing or just leaving Sanders Cleaners, a laundromat and dry cleaning business where she was employed part time. Police did not consider robbery to be a motive initially. The shots came from behind her as she was walking or running out the door of the cleaners. (My guess is that the killer entered the building and threatened her with the gun. I believe he was trying to rape her at gunpoint. She then ran in an attempt to reach safety and he shot her as she fled.)
Witnesses described a light colored car with a whip antenna. Immediately the connection was made between Connie Weaver’s attacker and Kathryn Kaufman’s murder.
Raymond Charles Lamb was 26. He went by the alias Edward H. Emmertt. His live-in girlfriend and her children from a previous relationship only knew him by that name. He lived in Hortonville, Indiana just off Indiana Highway 31. It is just a few miles north of Whiteland. He had owned a light colored Buick with a large “whip” style antenna but had taken it to a salvage yard and had it crushed for scrap before fleeing to Maryland in the days after the murder of Kathryn Kaufman.
Lamb was arrested in Maryland in March of 1973 by the FBI. A search turned up a .38 caliber weapon and Lamb was returned to Indiana to face charges. A special lineup was arranged at Indiana University Hospital so that Connie Weaver could potentially identify her attacker. She pointed out Lamb definitively. Her bravery in that moment is remarkable and commendable. Imagine knowing your attacker is going to be brought into the same hospital building where you are recovering from multiple gunshot wounds.
While in jail, Raymond Charles Lamb confessed to killing Kathryn Kaufman in Greenwood. His girlfriend also testified that they were in Greenwood that day. She and her children were having pizza. She testified that Raymond left them there for a time. She testified that he always carried a .38 revolver. She said that Raymond packed everyone up and they left in a hurry the next day and moved to Maryland. Raymond was eventually captured in Maryland and brought back to Indiana to stand trial. He pled not guilty. However, he had confessed on tape while in police custody. The tapes were eventually ruled admissible. Eventually he was sentenced to life in prison. He appealed in 1976, 1987 and 1990. All appeals were denied. He was found to have had adequate and competent counsel and to have had a fair trial.
Lamb also confessed on those tapes to killing Carol Ann Rhoades in Whiteland but was never tried or convicted of her murder. Police suspected him of her murder and journalists reported on the similarities. No one was ever tried and convicted of her murder.
He was also considered a suspect in two other very similar murders in 1968 and 1970. The murders of Beth Ann Haab and Constance Mae Thomas. Both were profiled in earlier posts.
I think he could definitely be a suspect in Beth Ann Haab’s murder. A .38 caliber was used to kill her just a quarter of a mile from her home. The murder site is also just a few blocks from Meridian Street. Indiana Highway 31 is called Meridian within the Indianapolis city limits.
It is possible that he also killed Constance Mae Thomas but there are some differences in her situation that bring up more doubt. Her pregnancy and the boyfriend who she was with on the night of her murder make the boyfriend a more likely suspect. He had a strong motive. She was pregnant and he might not have wanted to be a responsible father. She was also killed by a .22 caliber weapon near Hardin Street and Hanna. It would be an odd route in the rain and the dark from Highway 31. It’s not that he couldn’t have done it. But, the boyfriend was the last person with her and he had a very strong motive.
Did Raymond Charles Lamb commit other rapes and other murders? He seems to have driven around Indianapolis quite a bit with murders and attempted murders North of the city and South of the city, all easily driven on Highway 31 at the time. It’s also very easy to go to Illinois, Ohio, Michigan or Kentucky. It’s never a very long drive. I think we have to consider the possibility.
He was in FBI custody as of March 10th, 1973. He was returned to Indiana to the custody of the state police to face charges. He was charged with the murder of Kathryn Kaufman and bond was set at 10,000 dollars. He sat in the Johnson County jail until the 13th November 1973 when he escaped with several other inmates and managed to evade capture until November 29th. (The Johnson County Jail had experienced several jailbreaks in a three month span. Apparently word had gotten around among the inmates on the successful ways to escape.)
He made it all the way to Santa Monica, California. How did he get there? Probably hitchhiking. Thumbing a ride was extremely common in the 1970’s. Can you imagine realizing you gave him a ride? Can you imagine him just accepting a ride, keeping quiet and getting out at the end of the line? Did he assault any drivers or steal any cars? It’s only a couple of weeks but Raymond Charles Lamb had raped and murdered one woman, attempted to rape and murder another and murdered yet another young woman in the space of only 7 weeks. And those are the crimes he was connected with that we KNOW about in those seven weeks.
After the 29th of November, 1973, he was never free again. I have not found an obituary so I presume he is still living and still in custody. I will continue to keep tabs on him.
But still my mind goes back to Carol Ann Rhoades, Connie Weaver and Kathryn Kaufman. They were all so young. Connie Weaver survived but her experience and her injuries were traumatic and life changing. She did not get to experience the life she should have had.
Carol Ann Rhoades was just starting out life as an adult. She was working in the city and planning her life. She was home for Christmas with her family. It should have been a fun filled celebration leading into the new year. But she never got to see that New Year or any of the new years that her life should have had.
Kathryn Kaufman was called Kitty by her family. She had not lived in Greenwood, Indiana for long. Her family had moved there for her father’s job a few years earlier. Kathryn helped her Mom with the house and the other kids while juggling high school and working part time. She was looking forward to graduation parties and college.
These women should have had full, rich lives free from violence.
My research started with Kathy Kohm and her 1981 murder. She and I were the same age and lived only 25 minutes apart. I naively thought murder was rare in Indiana until I started researching her death. In the late 1960’s through the 1990’s; violent rapes and murders were not nearly as rare as I thought. Indiana was not an idyllic safe place. It was not a picture postcard. People who romanticize the past need to understand what the past was really like.
As I researched I found it useful to create a chronological list. There are so many on this growing list.
I had to take a couple of weeks recently and step away from it all. There were so many victims. As I researched one I would find another and another. An update for a podcast would come discussing a case recently solved by DNA and it would be a girl that wasn’t even on my list. (I research using newspaper databases. If a small town did not have a newspaper and a larger town nearby didn’t pick up the story…It wasn’t searchable.) There were just so many victims of violent crime at the hands of men in the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s.
Reading all their stories made me angry, disgusted and so incredibly sad. But I also felt like I had to read about them and write about them. Some of their stories only exist in old newspaper archives. No one is writing about them now. Only their family members remember them and many of them are passing away. There will be no one left to tell their stories. In the case of Constance Mae Thomas there are no parents or siblings around to keep her story alive.
I have long admired young people who interview veterans in order to get their stories recorded on film. Veterans definitely deserve this. They deserve to be remembered. History should be recorded so that we can learn from it.
As a historian, I have also long been incredibly frustrated by the fact that history is generally the story of men. Men were allowed to work, run for office, own land and factories, go to war, explore distant lands, fight against oppression and colonialism. Most of our history only records what the men did and what the men said. The women are utterly forgotten. Oppressed in life and silenced forever in death. If she’s lucky her name is on a tombstone.
More than likely, very few people will read what I write. But, I will write anyway. Those girls and women deserved a long life without violence. They deserved to work, go to school, have friends and experience all the things a long life brings. They should be here. They were taken from us all. The ladies deserve to be remembered.
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