WHEN I GOT back to the office, I googled Becky Bluso. Even though the Bluso murder had happened thirty years ago, there were still a number of stories about it on the web. It had been one of the most sensational murder cases ever in Indiana and that area of the country.
Becky Bluso was a high school student in Eckersville, Indiana, a small city located between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis. Eckersville was—by all accounts—an All-American town and the Blusos were an All-American family. Becky’s father, Robert, sold insurance, her mother, Elizabeth, was a nurse, and Becky was a cheerleader and an honor student at the local high school. She had two sisters, one named Betty who’d gone away to school in Maine, and another named Bonnie a year behind Becky in high school.
They lived in a quiet, bucolic neighborhood where crime was a rarity, not a part of everyday life as it was in New York. There had only been a handful of murders in Eckersville over the years, and none of them even remotely as horrific or unexplained as the death of Becky Bluso.
She was killed in her home in broad daylight on a hot summer day in August of 1990. School was about to resume in the fall, and Becky and her younger sister, Bonnie, had gone out that morning to shop for clothes. Her sister then headed to a swimming class at the local YWCA, while Becky said she was going home to try on some of her new clothes. Their parents were at work and her older sister was already away at college, so Becky was there alone in the middle of the day. But she had told her sister she expected to meet a friend at the house later.
It was the friend—a neighborhood girl named Teresa Lofton who lived on the same street—that found her when she arrived later that afternoon. The front door was open, the Lofton girl went in and discovered Becky Bluso’s bloodied body lying on the bed. She ran screaming from the house and police soon arrived onto a horrifying scene. Becky had been stabbed a dozen times. She’d been tied to the bed by rope and her clothes were mostly off, but there was no evidence of sexual assault. The ME’s office later placed the time of death at around 1:30 p.m., an hour after she’d gotten back from shopping with her sister.
The investigation was exhaustive. Hundreds of people were interviewed—friends at school, neighbors, local store owners of places Becky visited—looking for a suspect or reason for the shocking murder.
At first, police thought she might have surprised a burglar who panicked and killed her. But it was later determined that nothing had been taken from the house. Also, the brutality of the murder—the fact that Becky was stabbed a dozen times—indicated it was a crime of passion, not someone out for monetary gain.
All of her boyfriends and potential boyfriends and pretty much any other man in her life was questioned extensively. As a cute cheerleader, Becky was popular with the boys. She’d been dating one boy, recently broken off a relationship with another, and had a lot of potential suitors, too.
A few of them emerged as potential suspects for the police at first. One of them, a seventeen-year-old at her high school, had become so obsessed with her that he besieged her with phone calls and notes professing his love. A female student who was secretly a lesbian—this was long before people felt comfortable coming out publicly as gay—had come on to Becky in a school shower after gym class, but was rebuffed.
But no hard evidence was ever found to link either of these two—or anyone else—to the murder. The operative police theory though was still a stalker of some sort had gotten into the house, she’d confronted him, and the encounter turned violent. Except the police never could say who that person might be. And now, thirty years later, they still had no idea.
They also re-traced Becky’s steps in the hours and days leading up to the murder. The shopping trip with her sister. What she’d talked about with her mother and father that morning before they left for work. All the other recent things she’d done.
On the night before her murder, there had been a barbecue in the Bluso family’s backyard with several neighborhood families attending. One of the neighbors who was there—a man named Ed Weiland, who lived next door to the Bluso family—said Becky seemed distracted and quiet during the barbecue. “Like she had something on her mind” was the way he put it. But whatever that was, she never said anything about it before she was killed.
I found out all this by reading through articles at the time of the crime. It had been a big story, especially in the Indianapolis/Ft. Wayne area. There had probably been a lot of local TV news coverage, too, but back then most of that would be on videotapes stored away in a library at the station—not available on YouTube like now.
I did manage to find one video from a local station at the time online, though. In it, Becky’s mother and father are interviewed on camera talking about the death of their daughter. It was difficult to watch and brought back memories of many times I’d interviewed the family members of a murder victim or tragedy. They were crying on camera as they tried to deal with the enormity of their loss—the shocking murder of their beautiful and smart and popular seventeen-year-old daughter. My God, I thought to myself as I watched it now, Becky Bluso would be older than I was today if she’d lived.
“I know we can’t bring Becky back,” the mother sobbed on the screen. “All we can hope for at this point are some answers. Answers to how something like this could have happened. And in our own home. We want the answers to those questions so that we can allow Becky to rest in peace.”
Except the answers never came.
There was a picture of Becky Bluso on the video. She was dressed in her cheerleader outfit. A pretty, smiling teenage girl, with her whole life seemingly ahead of her and no hint of the horrible end she would soon meet at the hands of a brutal killer.
My assumption was that Marty had covered the Becky Bluso murder story while he was at the Fort Wayne paper—and had gone back after all this time looking for answers to the unsolved murder.
I was able to confirm the first part of this quickly with a phone call to the Fort Wayne paper. Marty had been the city editor at the time of the Bluso girl’s murder, and he led the coverage of the story so well that the paper won numerous awards for it. All this acclaim led to a bigger job offer from a paper on the East Coast. He moved there several months after the Bluso murder, eventually winding up as editor of the paper where I met him years later.
The Becky Bluso story had catapulted Marty’s career. I thought of how similar that was to me and the Lucy Devlin story, which won me a Pulitzer as a young reporter and made me a media star. I had never been able to rest until I got all the answers about Lucy Devlin a long time later.
I wondered if that was what Marty had been doing with Becky Bluso—going back to get answers to questions he still had about what was probably the biggest unsolved crime story he’d ever covered.
In fact, the more I thought about it, I was pretty sure that must have been what Marty was doing.
Except one thing didn’t make sense.
Marty had been obsessed with a story about New York City building corruption and about Terri Hartwell and presumably about his son-in-law’s business/political campaign dealings with her.
Was there some connection that I was missing?
No, Marty probably just got curious about what happened with the old murder, that long-ago big story he covered back in Indiana. He started looking at it again at the same time he was investigating the corruption stuff here. One thing obviously had nothing to do with the other.
But I was curious, too.
That’s the thing about being a journalist—you get curious.
Sometimes that curiosity takes you places you wouldn’t normally go.