Greg Crim:Serial Stalker of Terre Haute, Indiana
Imagine getting a call from the police and they tell you you’ve been the victim of a crime. But you don’t remember being the victim of a crime. The police assure you that you definitely were the victim of a crime on multiple occasions. They’d like you to come down and talk about it. But you still don’t have any idea what kind of crime it could’ve been.
This strange scenario is exactly what happened to me and hundreds of other women in Terre Haute, Indiana in the 1990’s.
I need to tell you about Greg Crim. In the early 1990s I was living in Terre Haute Indiana. My sister and I and another roommate shared an apartment. It was a ground floor apartment with two bedrooms, only three windows, a front door and a sliding glass backdoor. We were careful to make sure the doors were locked. The sliding glass door had a length of wood that we left in the track to keep it even more secure. We thought we were very safe. We never noticed a break in.
My sister and I each had our own rooms. Our roommate set up a bedroom in a corner of the living room.
We lived there for more than a year I think. My older sister had rented the apartment for a while and I moved in later. My sister was going to college as was our other roommate. I was working and thinking about going back to college.
I was taking a break from school trying to figure out what to do with my life. I waited tables then at Chi Chi’s Mexican Restaurant and later worked at Thom McAn shoes in the mall. I think that I only lived there in that apartment a few months actually.
While we lived there a couple of strange things happened. At a certain point, I couldn’t find my Social Security card. I kept all of my important papers in a wooden box on my dresser. I had used my card to get a job at the restaurant. They need ID so that you can fill out the I-9 form and prove that you are a citizen. I put it away and didn’t look for it again for a long time. But when I did, it was missing.
Nothing of great value was ever missing. It’s not like we had anything of value. We were broke students. All our furniture was hand-me-down or picked up off the street. (College towns are great pickings when everyone moves away in late Spring.)
One night I was in my bedroom and my boyfriend was with me. And we were doing what a couple does when they are alone and young. I looked up at the window in my room and saw a man looking in at us. I screamed or gasped and managed to say something. My boyfriend at the time carried a gun, and he grabbed it and turned around and pointed it at the man in the window. But the man was already gone. I think my boyfriend saw a glimpse of the man though.
The next morning I went outside to look for footprints or evidence left behind by the man. The ground under my window was covered in pine needles. And you could see where someone had stood and where they had disturbed the pine needles when they ran away. I showed this to my sister. We didn’t call the police because we rationalized it away. No one had been hurt. What if it was the landlord back there fixing something and he didn’t mean to look in. The idea of a criminal like Greg Crim never entered our minds.
After that, I put up new curtains and blinds.
The three of us were all working and taking classes and in and out of the apartment at all hours.
Pretty soon, my sister moved to Indianapolis to do her student teaching. Our roommate also moved out. I found a cheaper apartment and moved into that with the boyfriend. I was glad to move out of that apartment because I remembered the peeping incident. I thought that if I moved across town, I was safer. I had a feeling that this was a local guy. A moving target is harder to hit was sort of what I was thinking.
I didn’t give the “Peeping Tom” much thought after that until I got a call from the police a year or so later. The Terre Haute Police Department called me to tell me that I had been the victim of a man who had been stalking women. This man was looking into windows. He was also breaking in and stealing things. The Terre Haute police had my Social Security card. They also had Social Security cards from my sister and our roommate. And they had photographs that were stolen from our home.
Greg Crim had been stealing keys from apartment complex offices. He might also have been stealing people’s hidden spare keys. I don’t remember if we had a spare key hidden outside the apartment. We were young and more trusting then. We might have. I honestly don’t remember.
I was asked to come down to the police station and identify these objects that belonged to me. I did this. I saw my own social security card taped onto a sheet of typing paper. They asked me if I had known this man or if I noticed that this was happening at the time. I told them pretty much what I have written above. We noticed missing items. We didn’t really discuss it. It was one of those things where you think you must have left it in a different bag or put it away in a different drawer or something. You think that you’ll look for it later. We just did not know that he had been breaking in.
He stole photographs from my sister and used them to make a sick scrapbook. He wrote nasty captions for each of the photographs. He referenced sexual violence against my sister in the captions. (She had ordered double prints and noticed some were missing but thought her boyfriend had taken a few out of the envelope.)
Greg Crim kept meticulous diaries. I was able to read his entry about me. He wrote in graphic detail about seeing myself and my boyfriend that night. To read that in the room with police officers was absolutely humiliating. I completely understood that they couldn’t leave me alone with this evidence. It was still evidence. The trial hadn’t taken place yet. But it was so humiliating.
My sister and our roommate and myself were not alone though. Greg Crim had been keeping records on hundreds of women. He had been turned in by his wife. And that is a strange story.
From what we heard, Crim was standing on a ladder outside a woman’s second story apartment videotaping her through the window. He fell off the ladder and injured himself. He called his wife or an ambulance or something. While he was in the hospital; his wife went through the things in his car. The trunk of his car was full of documents, videotapes, diaries, things stolen from women. She was horrified and went to the police. (She also divorced him.)
Now this is where it gets tricky. A defense lawyer would say that a wife can’t testify against her husband. The evidence was also given over freely and obtained without a search warrant. So, much of that could not be used against him. Videotapes might have been very valuable but all of that was tossed out as evidence. However, Crim also kept a large amount of documents on his computer at work. That was seized under a search warrant and that was used to convict him.
We would also learn during the trial that he would masturbate or urinate into food items like Mayonnaise and then stir them and put those items back into the refrigerator. I don’t know if he did that in our apartment. I remember getting an AIDS test a few years later and being very relieved.
It would be revealed that he had a mental illness that caused him to compulsively collect data. He went to jail for only eight years.
Fast forward 40 something years later to 2026. My sister and I were chatting about those events. She had remembered that a couple of times in that apartment she thought she saw someone in the apartment. Both of the incidents happened at night in the dark. Maybe she was half asleep. Because we were three roommates in a small place, she logically assumed that she was seeing one of the roommates. She also kind of thought it was one of our boyfriends. Everything was quiet in the house. She had a busy day the next day and so she just went back to bed.
I had never even considered the fact that he might have gotten in when we were there in the middle of the night. I always assumed that he only broke in when no one was home. All these years later it never occurred to me that he might have been inside the apartment when we were home.
One of the times she thought she saw someone in the apartment the figure dove under a blanket on the living room floor. I don’t remember if we had a blanket on the sofa. We might’ve. (I also wonder now if Crim brought a blanket with him to use if that happened. That seems unlikely but this guy was criminally unusual and nothing is off the table.)
In the decades since then I became a home safety zealot. If it can be locked then it is locked. When I had children I was very overprotective for many years.
Recently while doing this work, I became curious about what happened to him. I learned that he was only sentenced to eight years in jail. I learned that he was a married man and a grandfather when he was committing these crimes. I learned that he is free now. I found out the town that he lives in.
He is into role playing video games these days. I found that out from Facebook. That seems fitting. He seems like he might be on the autism spectrum. (I am too.) I want to pity him more than I am angry with him. But it’s also very complicated because I am kind of angry at him. It was all such a disgusting violation.
I was thinking about not writing this down. It’s embarrassing to me. It’s disgusting. It’s scary. If he is mentally unstable I don’t want to set him off. But then I also thought that he never once considered how we felt when he committed crimes against us. And I am not committing a crime by writing about what he did. The shame is his.
I had always wondered if he was getting ready to escalate his crimes. He was stalking all these women. Was he eventually going to sexually assault a woman or murder a woman?
Over the years I’ve wondered about how lucky we got. I now wonder if he is the reason why I have trust issues. After the trial and sentencing I just pretended that it hadn’t happened. I stayed busy and pretended everything was fine. After all, he hadn’t physically hurt any of us. But, did he physically hurt other women? I don’t know. There are unsolved murders in Terre Haute from that time.
When I read Michelle McNamara’s book “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark” about the Golden State Killer in California, I kept thinking about this again. I still didn’t know then about Crim being in the house with us. It’s terrifying now to think about it.
Hopefully Crim has gotten some help. Hopefully he is not victimizing any more women. I shouldn’t have any good feelings toward him but I am an empathetic person. I hope he’s okay. (Now if he comes anywhere near me I might not be able to restrain from kicking him in the groin. I will also defend myself with even more force if necessary. But, far away, I can hope he’s okay.)
I blame some of his behavior on how objectified and dehumanized women and girls were in those days. Women were made out to be dumb on television and in movies. We were to be pretty and thin and polite. It’s a little better now out there. Hopefully it will continue to be a better place for future generations. Hopefully.
I hope all the other victims are doing okay. It’s such a strange situation.
I think one of the reasons that I do this crime research is because of this incident. It has informed me. Crim didn’t kill anyone or rape anyone that we know of. But, the way he operated can inform us all about the way other criminals might operate as well. He did what he did compulsively. He did this every day. He did this while at work. It seems to be all he thought about. He did this in his free time. He probably skipped important family occasions to do it.
The whole thing has informed me about victims as well. I really wanted to pretend that this had not happened. I wanted to make it go away. I felt some of it was my fault. Why hadn’t I put up curtains right away? (There were pine trees outside the window. Someone would have to step into this grove of pines to see in. Normal people don’t do that and I never expected anyone to do that.) I felt stupid. I felt shame talking to the police. A smart woman wouldn’t be the victim of a crime. Why hadn’t I done things differently? Why hadn’t I seen the clues right in front of my face? Why did I rationalize away my concerns?
The truth is that I was smart. I shouldn’t have felt any shame. I had done nothing wrong. But, even I was victim blaming myself then because I had been conditioned to. When I was growing up and a person was murdered the conversation had a lot of sentences like: “What in the world was she doing out there?” Or “Why did he leave his doors unlocked?” Or “What was she wearing?” Or “Well, he was into some bad stuff and running with a bad crowd.” We had already assigned ourselves the role of smart non-victim. This might have happened to that poor person but it definitely won’t happen to me.
It’s hard to find a way to wrap this article up. It’s all so disconcerting and strange. It’s like a small torn place on the sofa or mark on the wall. It’s always there. It’s not that bad. You try not to think about it.
I still have that original Social Security card. They sent it back to me after the trial. It was my card that I had received as a kid. My signature looks embarrassingly childish on it. This piece of paper that I have carried for years was once in the possession of a criminal stalker. Then it was in an evidence room with so many other pieces of evidence from so many other cases. Then it came back to me. It’s all so strange.
PS; CRIM WENT TO NORTH CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL IN INDIANAPOLIS. THAT IS THE ALMA MATER OF JARED FOGEL AND SERIAL KILLER HERB BAUMEISTER.
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