Buried Alive: The School Bus That Vanished - Episode 65

The Letter He Never Sent: The Triple Murder of Robert Gearse, Robert Hinson, and James Barker

A microfilm company open for barely one month. Three men bound, gagged, and killed one by one in their own home on a Tuesday night in Indianapolis. When police arrived, both wallets were still on the table — cash untouched. Whoever did this didn't want money. They wanted something else entirely, and they waited inside that house until every last one of them came home.

In this episode, we explore a sealed confession letter discovered two years after the man who wrote it died, a refused polygraph that investigators flagged within three weeks of the murders and could never force, and a pair of boots buried in a backyard in 1971 whose owner's wife never asked why. Who ordered three men killed over a business that was barely a month old, and why did the answer sit in a dead man's drawer for over thirty years?

Case Details

Victim: Robert Gearse, 34, co-owner of B&B Microfilm Service Company; Robert Hinson, 27, co-owner of B&B Microfilm Service Company; James Barker, 27, close friend and frequent resident of the home.

Date: November 30 — December 1, 1971.

Location: 1318 North LaSalle Street, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

Case Status: Exceptionally cleared in 2003 after a posthumous confession letter named Ted Uland as the man who ordered the killings and Fred Harbison as the man who carried them out. Both men were deceased by the time the clearance was granted. No criminal charges were ever filed.

Episode Key Points

- All three victims were bound at the hands and ankles before their throats were cut, yet not a single piece of furniture in the house was overturned, indicating the killer or killers were already inside when the men arrived home.

- Ted Uland held life insurance policies worth one hundred fifty thousand dollars on two of the victims — policies that were set to expire within days of the murders — and refused every polygraph request between December 1971 and January 1972.

- The confession letter naming Uland as the man who ordered the killings was written by Fred Harbison before his death in 1998 but never mailed; his daughter found it sealed among his possessions two years later.

- Approximately seventy-five percent of the physical evidence collected from the scene was inadvertently destroyed in the mid-1980s despite an active hold stamp on the case files.

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