June 16th, 1973. Jeff Thomas and his wife Carol were on their way home from visiting relatives in Chicago. They were a young couple, both 22, with a love for adventure but not much money, and they decided to hitchhike home to Evansville, Indiana. At the intersection of 3rd street and I-70 in Terre Haute, the young couple stood with their thumbs out, just a few hours from home. It was 9 pm, a sweltering Saturday night. A blue 1968 Chevy pulled to the shoulder and they climbed in.
Although there are still plenty of daring travelers who choose to hitchhike, the numbers are not nearly what they were in the sixties and seventies. There was a time when Kerouac-devotees lived for the road and exalted in the thrill of climbing into a car with a complete stranger for a free ride to wherever they were going, but it only took a few highly publicized bad trips for hitchhiking to fall out of favor.
Serial killers like Keith Jesperson, Ed Kemper, Robert Rhoades, and Harvey Carignan, whom I covered in episode three of Tales of True Crime, all targeted hitchhikers to one degree or another. In 1977, Colleen Stan was abducted while hitchhiking in California, held captive for almost seven years, and confined to a wooden box for long stretches, up to 23 hours per day, before she finally escaped in 1983.
The case of Jeff and Carol Thomas could be another cautionary tale.
According to a story in the Evansville Courier & Press published in 2019, the driver of the blue Chevy, a young man with light brown hair, offered them a ride and they spent most of the two hour trip in silence. They arrived at the driver’s farm and he got out of the car, reached under the front seat, and emerged with a pistol.
“Now the way I want us to do this is to be real quiet,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to make a noise.”
He fired a cautionary shot into the air.
“Just so we understand each other.”
The driver tied the couple with rope and imprisoned them in a grain bin. He claimed he wanted to rob them but they were just starting out in life… The Thomases had just married two weeks prior and they literally didn’t have two dollars between them.
Their captor went into the rundown farmhouse to formulate a new plan and the couple managed to free themselves. They were just about to flee when he returned with a roll of wire. He restrained Mrs. Thomas once again and told the couple he would take Mr. Thomas to withdraw $400 dollars, after which he would release them.
The man then forced Jeffrey Thomas into a car and drove away. With the men gone, Mrs. Thomas attempted to untie herself. Put yourself in that position… your hands shaking as you try to free yourself, wondering if your fingers will ever work they way they’re supposed to again, panicked that your captor could walk back in at any second…
Mrs Thomas escaped and ran to a nearby farmhouse and called police. The authorities staked-out the man’s farm, and when he returned home he was identified as Jeffrey Lynn Hand.
The police interrogated Hand and he agreed to lead them to Jeffrey Thomas’ body. Thomas was found in the tall weeds along a country road, his hands tied behind his back. He had been brutally murdered in a cruel execution… shot in the face, his throat slashed, and stabbed eight times in the stomach and chest.
The cold thoughtlessness of the murder… the thought of what he might have had in mind for Carol when he returned to the farm… When Carol Thomas freed herself and fled, she truly escaped with her life.
Tales of True Crime, episode 14:
Jeffrey Lynn Hand: Black Intentions
Hand was arrested and charged with murder in the death of Jeffrey Thomas. His kidnapping of Carol Thomas was charged in a different county and would be brought to trial separately.
Contemporary print media reported Hand acted up throughout his arraignment and trial, at times appearing catatonic and unable or unwilling to speak. At other times he was prone to outbursts. On one occasion, he struggled with the bailiffs who escorted him into the courtroom because he objected to the presence of cameras. He caused a scene and refused to leave the courthouse on another occasion, until officials found a way to cover his face before parading him out in front of reporters. They covered his head with a makeshift hood made from their handkerchiefs.
Doctors appointed to examine Hand and determine his competency, disagreed–with one judging him sane, and another deeming him wholly incompetent for trial. In a shocking verdict, on October 18th, 1973, a jury deliberated less than two hours and found Jeffrey Hand innocent of Mr. Thomas’ murder by reason of insanity.
Hand’s continued legal proceedings were tangled with hearings and changes of venue, and he was reportedly combative with his own representation and the court. It was February 5th, 1975, almost 18 months after his acquittal on murder charges when Hand was finally ruled mentally competent to stand trial for kidnapping.
That summer, on June 13th, The Princeton Daily Clarion reported Hand’s new attorney filed a waiver of arraignment in his kidnapping case, essentially alleging Hand’s murder and kidnapping charges should have been tried together, and the jury’s acquittal by reason of insanity on the murder charge should also apply to his kidnapping charge.
In August, 1975, Judge Ernest Tilly ruled in favor of Hand’s defense with the opinion that the murder and kidnapping charges should have been incorporated in one trial. Judge Tilly sent Hand to the Norman Beatty State Mental Hospital under a temporary commitment order.
Hand’s attorney later pointed out the state had only ten days to request a hearing to make the temporary commitment permanent, but for reasons unknown, they failed to do so. When the state of Indiana realized their mistake 45 days later, they filed for Hand’s permanent commitment to the State Hospital, but it was too late. Hand’s legal team was threatening a lawsuit for false imprisonment and the state flinched.
In June of 1976, Hand was released from the State Hospital under the condition that he spend 60 days in the Veteran’s Hospital in Marion, Indiana, and that he waive his right to sue for false imprisonment. Hand was in custody from his arrest in the summer of 1973 until his release in summer of 1976. 36 months. 3 years. Far too slim a penalty for the intentional murder of Jeffrey Thomas. Later reached for comment, Hand’s attorney reported the killer was trying to live a quiet life with his wife Becky and two sons.
Unfortunately, a quiet life was not in the cards… but the next time the authorities had to deal with Jeff Hand would be the last time.
A Killer’s Last Day
It was Tuesday, January 24th, 1978, when Susan Matlock encountered the killer in Block’s Department store in Kokomo, Indiana. It was a cold day, and a good six inches of snow blanketed the ground. Jeff Hand had only been out of the State Hospital for a year and a half, and on this day he was lurking in the store, searching for a target.
According to a story by Kim Dunlap of the Kokomo Tribune, published May 12th, 2019, Susan Matlock acknowledged Hand with a polite smile and a “hello.” A store employee, Kathy Graham, would later say she observed Hand stalking Matlock in the store.
“He would pick a tag up,” she said, “But he wasn’t looking at the tag. He was watching her.”
When Susan Matlock left the store, Graham saw Jeff Hand immediately follow her out. She watched as Hand caught up with Matlock, intercepted her in the parking lot and shoved her into her 1977 Pontiac Firebird.
While Kathy Graham called police to report an attempted abduction, Hand made demands of Matlock. He wanted to go the South Bend.
“I have a gun and a knife and I’m not afraid to use them,” he said. He was angry and claimed he had just been taken in a drug deal gone wrong.
Thinking he intended to steal her Firebird to get to South Bend, Susan Matlock told Hand she would drive him to the nearest bus station where he could get a ticket. But Hand’s real goal was not to get where he was going. No, based on the man’s history, we can be certain he had considerably black intentions.
“Just get over on the other side and pretend you’re with me,” Hand said.
Matlock moved to the passenger seat and Hand pulled a gun.
“I have to figure out what to do,” he said.
Kathy Graham would later say, while she spoke with police, she had the phone cord stretched as far as it would go so she could see out the window and watch what was happening in the parking lot. She saw Jeffrey Hand, sitting in the drivers’ seat, turn and look toward the store. The clock was ticking. He knew Kathy Graham had likely called the police and he didn’t have long. Hand drove Matlock’s Firebird to a nearby store and stopped in the parking lot.
Kokomo was what most consider a small town in 1978, with a population of about 45-thousand, and it didn’t take long for the police to spot a car matching the one described by Kathy Graham in the parking lot of the local Service Merchandise store. As Hand haggled with Susan Matlock, a Kokomo patrol car pulled up behind Matlock’s Pontiac.
Hand stepped on the gas and fled the scene with Matlock along for the ride.
Officer Jerry Kassel pursued in his squad car and called for backup. When Howard County Sheriff’s Deputy Vern Baugh heard the call on his mobile scanner, he jumped into action, even though he was off-duty.
The roads were slippery and the pursuit was short. Hand lost control of the car in the snowy conditions and crashed the vehicle into a snowbank. The driver’s door flew open and Hand fled on foot, his breath visible in the cold January air.
Officer Kassel elected to check on Susan Matlock while Deputy Baugh pursued the suspect. Baugh caught up with Hand just a short distance away, within view of Matlock’s car, and ordered him to stand in front of his Sheriff’s Department vehicle. As Deputy Baugh reached into his car to radio the capture, Hand drew a gun and shot the Deputy, first in the right hand, then in the torso. It’s not clear why Hand was not immediately restrained–perhaps Deputy Baugh, off-duty at the time, didn’t have his handcuffs on him. Or maybe it was simply a costly oversight. Whatever the cause, when Hand engaged the officer, Deputy Baugh returned fire and the scene turned chaotic. Baugh dove into a ditch for cover, but not before he shot Jeff Hand and punctured his lung. Hand leaned over the squad car and fired three more shots at the Deputy. All three shots missed and Hand fled.
Officer Kassel heard the shots, then Deputy Baugh’s voice as he said “I’m hit!” Kassel saw the Deputy on the ground and Hand fleeing toward the railroad tracks. Kassel raised his weapon and fired three shots. It was a running gunfight.
Jeffrey Hand dropped to the ground and shimmied under a boxcar parked on the tracks. Hand made it another thirty feet before he went down, wounded by both Kassel and Baugh.
The End of the Story for Jeffrey Lynn Hand?
Jeffrey Lynn Hand met his end where a man like him deserves to die, on the cold, frozen ground, surrounded by police officers who took note of every detail and photographed his body where it lay as his life ebbed away. In the pocket of his heavy winter coat they found a long piece of rope. In the car he left in the parking lot of Block’s Department store, they found the tools of a killer. Extra ammunition, stocking caps, masking tape, flashlights, leather gloves, and most damning, photos of recently engaged couples he had clipped from the newspaper.
In 1980, Deputy Baugh, who suffered lasting injuries from his altercation with Hand, filed a lawsuit against the state of Indiana and Indiana mental health officials alleging neglect of duty for Hand’s release from custody in 1976, and for allowing Hand to register weapons. He sued for 120-thousand dollars in damages, but I was unable to find any account of the outcome of the case.
At the time of his death, Jeff Hand was a known killer of one, Jeffrey Thomas, and he had attempted to kidnap two women, Carol Thomas and Susan Matlock. With his death, his fate was sealed and it was assured he would never harm anyone again. Most assumed it was the end of the story. A sick man’s plot foiled by the police, his life ended in a hail of gunfire.
But Jeff Hand was not done. It would take nearly 50 years for another victim to reach out from beyond the grave and point the finger at her killer.
Indiana State University. Fall, 1972.
Turn the calendar back, past Hand’s fatal gunfight with police in 1978. Keep going, beyond the summer, 1973 attack on hitchhikers Jeffrey and Carol Thomas.
In September of 1972 Pam Milam disappeared on the campus of Indiana State University. It was a new school year and students were reconnecting with old friends and making new ones as the leaves changed and the mercury dropped.
Pam normally stayed at her parents’, but on this particular night, she had planned to stay on campus and attend a number of Rush Week events and parties with her Sigma Kappa sorority sisters. According to a 2019 story in the Springfield News Sun, Milam was last seen when she went to move her car to a parking lot closer to her sorority’s rooms.
She didn’t show up for dinner, and missed her shift at work the next morning.
The next day, worried friends and family mounted a search for Pam. Around 7pm they found her car, a red 1964 Pontiac Tempest with a vanity plate that read “Jesus,” backed into a spot in a parking lot not far from the Lincoln quad. Pam’s glasses and purse were in the back seat of the car. Pam’s sister Sheila and her father Charles were called to the scene with a spare set of keys. It was about 8:30 pm when Charles Milam opened the trunk and found his daughter.
Pam Milam had been bound, strangled with clothesline and gagged with a cloth. Debris found on her body indicated she had been sexually assaulted in a wooded area, then placed in the trunk of the car. Her injuries told the story of a young woman who had fought her attacker.
Detectives noted and collected a number of pieces of evidence. Duct tape, soil samples, and her blouse, stained with the killer’s bodily fluids.
In 1972, prior to the era of forensic evidence, an effective investigative tactic would be to trace evidence back to a killer through a purchase at a store, with an eyewitness identification by a cashier. Unfortunately for investigators, the items found in Pam Milam’s car were her property. She had used the clothesline and duct tape to help decorate for the sorority party she planned to attend that night. There were no witnesses, no descriptions of a suspect. A spot along the banks of the Wabash River was investigated for reasons unknown, and a nearby break-in was investigated too, but no solid leads developed.
For seven weeks, everyone wondered who had perpetrated such a terrible deed on Pam Milam, and the young women of Indiana State were on edge, because a predator was still at work. A number of women were abducted at night, taken to a wooded area and raped, then released again on campus.
In November, 1972, police arrested Robert Wayne Austin for the series of sexual assaults on young women at ISU and the consensus was immediate. Everybody believed they had found the man who killed Pam. But there was this one thing… even though he admitted to the attacks for which he would eventually be convicted, Austin denied attacking Pam Milam.
Austin went to prison, sentenced to life, and despite his denials, most believed he had been Pam’s killer, they just hadn’t been able to prove it.
Decades passed and Pam Milam’s family got no answers. They wondered whether they would ever know for sure who killed Pam.
In 2001, Shawn Keen was promoted to detective in the Terre Haute PD, and with other investigators, he took a fresh look at Pam’s case. They tested the stain on her blouse for DNA and were able to develop a profile. The investigators naturally wanted to test it against Robert Austin’s DNA as soon as possible, and tracked him down. He had spent about 20 years in prison for his crimes before he was paroled. To their surprise, he agreed to provide a DNA sample.
It didn’t match Pam’s killer.
It was back to square one.
Investigators submitted the DNA profile of Pam’s killer to the FBI’s CODIS database. No match. Using lighting technology not available in 1972, investigators were able to reveal a fingerprint on a lens of Pam’s glasses. They entered it into AFIS–the automated fingerprint identification system–and got no match.
It wasn’t square one, it was less than square one.
When they began, they had a suspect–Robert Wayne Austin. Now, they had ruled Austin out and had no suspects.
Detective Keen, today the Chief of Police in Terre Haute, never stopped working the case.
In 2017, technology took Keen down the wrong investigative path. He attempted to use the killer’s DNA to develop a phenotype profile of the killer. The results told Detective Keen he should be looking for a man with dark eyes, and medium to dark skin. Three months later, a phenotyping profile developed by a different lab, the now-well-known Parabon Nanolabs, responsible for the testing that led to the capture of the accused Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo, indicated something entirely different. Parabon’s phenotyping profile indicated the killer was fair-skinned with either green or blue eyes and blonde to light brown hair.
Unsure what to make of the phenotyping profile, Keen pursued forensic genealogy in an attempt to identify relatives of the killer. The effort paid off.
Two suspects were identified, but one of them had been only 13 years old at the time Pam Milam was murdered. Relatives of the other suspect provided DNA samples and assistance in building their family tree until, in 2019, Chief Keen was sure he could name Pam’s killer.
By this point, you know who it is, right?
Jeffrey Lynn Hand.
Hand’s widow and his two sons provided their DNA for good measure. As a matter of fact, Detective Keen would later say they went out of their way to be helpful. Their DNA samples sealed the conclusion in the eyes of the law, without a shadow of a doubt.
Even After Death, Jeff Hand Claims a Victim
Before he attacked the Thomases hitchhiking in 1973, and before he was shot to death in his attempt to abduct Susan Matlock in 1978, Jeff Hand, just 23 years old, brutally raped and murdered Pam Milam on the campus of Indiana State University and left her body in the trunk of her car for her father to find. Terre Haute police have said, if Hand were alive today, the evidence against him would be sufficient to issue an arrest warrant. Chief Keen’s full, nearly hourlong press conference is available online if you’re interested in going all the way down the rabbithole. It’s very informative.
Pam’s sister Charlene, said “It’s been a long 46 years, seven months and 20 days. Many of us, as we got older, thought we would die before we ever learned who had killed our sister. We were happy to know he hasn’t been out there living a great life for 47 years.”
Answers to longstanding mysteries are so rarely delivered, we recognize their special value.
Their significance.
After authorities identified Hand as Pam’s killer, many wondered whether he was responsible for other killings in the midwest between his 1976 release from the Indiana State Hospital and his death in January, 1978.
As of this writing, Indiana State Police are investigating whether Hand was responsible for the murder of Indiana University student Ann Harmeier, who disappeared in September 1977. Her car had broken down, overheated. It was found on the side of the road, hood up, by her family who had gone out looking for her… but there was no sign of Ann. A Martinsville-area farmer found her decomposing body in his field in October of that year, not far from where her car had been found. It was only four months later that Hand was killed in the shootout with Kokomo Police Officer Jerry Kassel after trying to abduct Susan Matlock. And it’s a strange, maybe eerie coincidence, barely worth noting, but Ann Harmeier also drove a Pontiac. Just like Susan Matlock and Pam Milam.
We know very little about why Jeffrey Hand chose to kill… why he chose a life as a predator. So frequently we can point to a killer’s traumatic childhood of abuse, a fractured or nonexistent relationship with parents who don’t know how to love. But with Jeffrey Hand, we know very little. There are hints at his motivation… his attack on the Thomases and the photos of recently engaged couples found in his car suggest he sought sadomasochistic pleasure in inflicting pain on others. Like the Zodiac Killer did with his attack on a young couple at Lake Berryessa, Hand sometimes concocted improbable stories to maintain control of his victims and make them think he would release them.
However, Jeffrey Hand was a disorganized killer. Although he kept a toolkit in his car, his known attacks suggest his victims were targets of opportunity, and Hand, who worked as both a postman and a delivery driver to record stores around the Midwest, traveled a lot and had many potential opportunities to kill. As of 2020, Hand is reportedly a suspect in a number of additional cases, including a murder case in Wisconsin. We now know for certain, Hand was not just a killer, he was a serial killer, and you can bet, as more testing is conducted, his body count will likely grow in the years to come.
If you enjoy Tales of True Crime, please review and subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Lock your doors. I’ll talk to you again in two weeks.
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[credits]
Voice of Jeffrey Lynn Hand by John B-C
For transcripts, sources, credits and occasional cat pictures, follow me on Twitter at True Crime Troy. Image voice: Bonnie Amistadi
[music]
Ghost Processional, Right Behind You, Stay the Course, Long Note Three, The Descent, In a Heartbeat, Fantastic Dim Bar, Dark Standoff, The Dread, and Sovereign Quarter by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com. Creative Commons License via FilmMusic.io
[sources]
Princeton Daily Clarion, Princeton, Indiana, Feb 5, Jun 13, 1975
Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, Oct 20, 1975
Daily Republican Register, Mount Carmel, IL, Oct 15, 1976
Terre Haute Star, Sep 22, 1972
Kokomo Tribune, Jan 11, 1980
The Reporter Times, Martinsville, IN, Sep 17, 2007
Forever linked: Kidnapped woman thanks her saviors | Local news
Police looking for link between ISU student killer and IU murder cold case
A KOKOMO CONNECTION: How a possible serial killer was stopped
Oldest Terre Haute cold case solved
Dead killer identified through DNA as suspect in 1972 slaying of Indiana…
A jury could have stopped a suspected Evansville-area serial killer in 1973 | Webb
The Journey to Justice: Part One
The Journey to Justice: Part Two
Terre Haute Police solve 47-year-old cold case, suspect from Princeton
