By Johnny Magdaleno for Mirror Indy.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the Mirror Indy-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration.

There’s a simple patch of grass in section 94, lot 276 of the Crown Hill Cemetery that has perplexed Rebecca Robinson and her two sisters for their entire adult lives.

Their grandparents rest there in unmarked graves.

If a grave marker did exist, it might say Dr. Earle Robinson was a top physician at the old Veterans Administration Hospital on Cold Spring Road. Or that Gwendolyn Robinson left behind multiple grandchildren who, now in their 50s and 60s, can still remember how she encouraged them to read.

So why doesn’t the couple have a tombstone honoring their bright spot in the sisters’ family — and in Indianapolis history?

It’s not the only mystery the sisters have been trying to bring to a close. The other one has burdened them for decades and remains unsolved despite multiple attempts by Indianapolis law enforcement to find an answer.

Why would anyone want to murder them?

There have been many theories as to why the elderly Robinsons — Earle was 70, Gwendolyn, 69 — were stabbed to death in their Riley Towers apartment in August 1975.

Many theories, but zero arrests.

One theory, eventually discarded by law enforcement, was that a disgruntled patient targeted Robinson and his wife.

Another was that Robinson was mistaken for his son — an OB-GYN named Earle Robinson Jr., who fathered the sisters and three other children. Family members say Robinson Jr. may have been a target because he was among the first doctors to provide abortions in the Indianapolis area, according to Diane King, one of the sisters.

The simplest theory is that a home robbery ended in the worst possible way. Police said as much when interviewed by The Indianapolis News a month after the murders, according to old newspaper archives. But even that theory isn’t flawless.

On one hand, it makes sense that Riley Towers would be targeted by burglars. Just over a decade in age, the high-rise apartment buildings were pitched to potential residents as the embodiment of modern, luxurious living. Only “reputable and responsible citizens” would reside there, reads an 11-page advertisement in The Indianapolis Star from May 1963.

Yet strangely, nothing of value had been taken from the Robinsons’ apartment when the couple’s bodies were found. Mattresses were ripped open. Beds were flipped over. Drawers were pulled out and emptied on the floor. And money, jewelry, radio sets and televisions were all still there when police went inside to inspect the crime scene.

Police discarded narcotics as a motive for the break-in. They said Robinson didn’t keep large quantities of drugs in his apartment. They also said whoever did it likely didn’t know he was a doctor, according to newspaper archives.

Rebecca Robinson, 51, is a visual artist who has dedicated much of her creative output to elevating themes of social justice and Black dignity. She wonders if her grandparents’ murders should be thought of not as a one-off, random attack, but as a manifestation of a larger social issue.

“Two affluent Black people living in Riley Towers,” she told Mirror Indy. “Was it just hate?”

New DNA test deflates hopes

City authorities at the time wanted this case solved, Indianapolis police recently told her. Earle Robinson Sr. mattered to the medical community.

As director of admissions at the VA hospital, he oversaw the patient intake process under “rigid standards” imposed by Congress, wrote retired Col. H. W. Buchanan in a September 1975 letter to the editor in The Indianapolis Star.

“He was impeccable in appearance, generous of heart, and totally dedicated to the welfare of his associates and patients,” Buchanan continued. “In visiting the hospital, many veterans and their families would stop by his office to say ‘hello,’ and as busy as he was, he always took time to extend a warm welcome and a concern for their welfare.”

Investigators searched and searched. They interviewed “hundreds” of people, the Star reported. They collected biological evidence from the crime scene that is still preserved in Indianapolis police cold case archives to this day.

Yet after 50 years of painful uncertainty, the Robinson family still hasn’t caught a break. Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officers invited the family in for an interview in 2023 and committed to testing old evidence samples, possibly tied to the killer, for DNA.

The result: no new information, no new hope.

“The case remains open and Unsolved Homicide Unit detectives continue to follow up on any leads that arise,” IMPD spokesperson Amanda Hibschman told Mirror Indy.

At this point, the family isn’t expecting criminal charges. They’re not waiting for news of an arrest.

They’re looking for a reason to stop wondering — for the relief of knowing more than nothing about who did it, or why.

“Whoever did it is probably dead right now,” acknowledged King, Rebecca’s stepsister and one of the surviving granddaughters. “There’s no recourse or any kind of penalty or charges they can be charged with now.”

“All we want is some kind of closure.”

A gruesome discovery

Don’t turn on the TV.

Michelle Robinson Smith’s mom gave that command to her older brother all those years ago. She was 10.

She was the youngest daughter of five children from Earle Robinson Jr. and his first wife. Rebecca Robinson, the only child Robinson Jr. had with his second wife, Rena, was just 9 months old at the time.

Despite a bitter divorce, the five older siblings still maintained loving relationships with their paternal grandparents.

It’s why Robinson Smith’s mom tried to protect them from news broadcasts that day in August 1975, when she called the older Robinson siblings on her way home from work.

Don’t turn on the TV.

“It was all over the news and the paper,” remembers Robinson Smith.

People close to the family started showing up at their house. One of her mom’s best friends was in tears, Robinson Smith said.

Then their mom arrived. She asked King, Robinson Smith and the other siblings to come upstairs with her. As they gathered together in their brother’s room, she told them the unfathomable news.

Understandably, she did not tell her children just how depraved the killings were.

Earle was stabbed 11 times in the chest. Gwendolyn, 17 times in the chest. Both had slashes on their arms. They were found on the ground, laying next to each other in their nightclothes. Autopsy results suggest they fought with whoever did it.

A Riley Towers building superintendent named Jerry L. Smith discovered their bodies. “I just want to get away from here,” Smith told a newspaper reporter at the scene.

Earle Robinson Jr. was called into the apartment by police to identify his parents, according to a blog he maintained toward the end of his life.

The first thing he saw as he ascended the stairs was a hand sticking through the bannister. He steadied himself.

Then he saw the carpet soaked deep red. Then, the blood on the walls. Once they came fully into view, he could tell his mother and father had been stabbed over and over again.

In the decades that followed, Robinson Jr. rarely said a word about that day. The senseless attack on his family plunged him into grief. His ex-wife was also reticent about what happened.

The three sisters were kept in the dark about the murders. But as they got older, they resolved to fill the gaps left by their parents’ silence.

Family silence leads sisters to investigate

Each became an informal detective.

As teenagers, Robinson Smith and King scoured newspaper archives at the Indianapolis Public Library downtown. As an adult, Rebecca Robinson visited Riley Towers to see if she could get a glimpse of their grandparents’ apartment layout.

But it was King, the oldest of the three sisters, who brought them close to their biggest break.

In 2023, King was talking with a friend who works at a sheriff’s department near her home in Georgia. She started asking about how to get information from law enforcement on a cold case, and shared some details about her grandparents. That friend asked King to send her an email containing specific details.

Within the next few days, King got a call from an IMPD officer. “I was surprised how quickly it happened,” she said.

In the summer, she met with Sgt. David Ellison, an Indianapolis police detective who helped close multiple years-long cold cases before retiring in 2023. Rebecca Robinson was at that meeting. So was their 91-year-old father, Earle Robinson Jr.

Without knowing it was the last interview he’d ever give police, Robinson Jr. spoke about that day in 1975 “like it was yesterday,” said Rebecca Robinson.

In his frail voice, he told detectives about arriving at the apartment and being questioned by police. He talked about how his mom wasn’t wearing her hairpiece — a possible sign that whoever killed them took them by surprise.

King said it was the first time she’d heard him speak in detail about what happened. But a look back at all that transpired for him and his family around the time of the murders helps explain why it took him nearly 50 years to open up.

‘Much of me died along with them’

The murder of Earle Robinson Jr.’s parents marked a clear before-and-after in his life.

Like his father, he had established a career as a physician in Indianapolis. He was one of the many Black doctors and nurses who in the mid-20th century mastered their skills at the Homer G. Phillips Hospital in St. Louis — also like his father.

But after his parents were killed, he seemed to be “always looking over his shoulder,” King said.

He organized a security detail to follow his family around. He started sleeping with a gun under his mattress.

He became distant, said Robinson Smith. “Not because we had done anything … it was just a lot,” she said.

Robinson Jr. talked about the turning point in his blog. “Whatever happens to me I look at as being on borrowed time from that day in August 1975,” he wrote in 2009. “Much of me died along with them.”

He missed his parents’ funeral because he had a severe cardiac arrhythmia on the day they were buried, landing him in the hospital. In other words, his heart was beating too quickly.

The murders were sufficient on their own to alter the course of his life and his family.

But then came a series of threats that made them wonder if the violence wouldn’t stop at Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson.

A threatening letter

You and your baby are next, read the letter sent to Rebecca Robinson’s mom.

I hate you, wrote its author in purple, cursive letters on the heels of the murders. My friends are watching you.

Then came the threatening phone calls targeting Robinson Smith and King’s mom. King later learned that police set up a phone tap on her family’s line to gather info about who was dialing in the threats.

Nothing ever materialized from those threats. Nor did they ever learn if police found out who the caller was.

For the letter, Rebecca Robinson says they knew who wrote it. It was a disgruntled and distant family member who may have held a grudge against Earle Robinson Jr.

Rebecca Robinson’s mom had said she thought the woman was struggling with mental health issues.

But Rebecca Robinson hasn’t completely ruled out that family member, or whoever the caller was, as possible suspects — either directly responsible for her grandparents’ killings or involved in some tangential way.

She was a baby when the murders happened. The added stress of those warnings marked the rest of her young life.

“Certain parents, I remember they wouldn’t allow me to play with their kids,” Rebecca Robinson said. “Like the public knew something, and I was always shunned.”

Earle and Gwendolyn’s family legacy honored

This year marks the beginning of the sixth decade without an arrest in the cold case of Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson.

With the family uncertain if police will ever find who did it, the only option they have now is to honor the life they all lived together before the summer of 1975.

Earle Robinson Jr. died in March 2024. Throughout his life, he’d made it clear to his daughters that he didn’t want a marker or headstone for his parents. Nor did he want to visit where they are buried.

He said it was because he could visit them in his heart. King suspects the real reason is the same one that kept him from ever mentioning the brutal nature in which their grandparents were killed.

“It was just too painful for him,” she said.

In 2023, with the help of King, Rebecca Robinson located her grandparents’ unmarked graves at the Crown Hill Cemetery for the very first time. She stuck two small stakes with hummingbird figures in the dirt as markings.

They respected Earle Robinson Jr.’s wishes while he was here. But now that he’s gone, they’ve made a decision.

It’s a decision to honor memory over trauma, and family legacy over an Indianapolis mystery that may never get solved.

They’re getting a headstone later this year.

Anyone with information about the murders of Earle and Gwendolyn Robinson should call the IMPD Unsolved Homicide Unit at 317-327-3475 or call Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-TIPS.


Johnny Magdaleno wrote this article for Mirror Indy.


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Some 7,000 people are expected to attend this week's Psychedelic Science conference in Denver and public health activists are spotlighting the potential for mind-altering medicines to help address the nation's overdose crisis and end decades of mass incarceration.

Amanda Hall, senior director of national campaigns for the advocacy group Dream.org, said Colorado is on the front lines of psychedelic drug therapies, which she said can improve mental health, treat post-traumatic stress disorder and help people overcome addiction to opioids and other harmful substances.

"Psychedelics can help with substance use disorder, help people really get on that road to recovery and get their life back," Hall explained. "We've seen studies that it can reduce alcohol consumption by over 80% for heavy drinkers."

In 2022, Colorado voters decriminalized the use of psychedelics, including psilocybin mushrooms, mescaline and DMT for people 21 and older. The state has started licensing healing centers, expected to open as early as this summer.

Psychedelics are still illegal under federal law, but U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has supported decriminalization.

Hall believes psychedelic therapies forged in Colorado could work hand in hand with efforts to reverse the punishment-based approach in what she called the nation's "failed war on drugs." In addition to addressing addiction, Hall emphasized it is important to make sure people arrested for drug offenses have access to resources which could improve their chances to reenter and remain in communities.

"To recovery resources, to housing, to employment," Hall outlined. "Things that research show actually makes us safer as well, as opposed to just continuing to incarcerate people."

Drug offenses are a leading cause of arrests in Colorado and across the U.S., and people of all ethnicities and backgrounds use illicit drugs. Those who are prosecuted are disproportionately people of color. The U.S. has the world's highest incarceration rate, with more than 2 million behind bars at any given time. Nearly two million are Black, up from 360,000 during the 1970s.


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A new study highlights the high price of incarceration, and says the annual total cost to families of Americans behind bars is nearly $350 billion.

The study from the nonprofit FWD.us says one in two American adults has seen incarceration in their immediate family, with higher rates among Black Americans.

Families with a member in jail or prison spend about $4,000 a year, and the report says for Black families, the cost is more than double due to longer sentencing.

Zoë Towns - executive director of FWD.us - said expenses like phone calls, care packages, long-distance travel, and new costs at home all contribute to the exorbitant price.

"It also includes depressed wages over the lifetime of the person who's incarcerated, who's no longer able to contribute," said Towns. "But also to all the other members of the family who oftentimes are also now experiencing lower pay, just because of all of the shock of incarceration and the disruption that comes with that."

She added that the children of people behind bars usually see their own wages depressed throughout their lifetime, even after a parent is released.

Wisconsin's incarceration rate is among the highest in the nation. Black Wisconsinites are locked up at a rate nearly 12 times higher than whites, despite making up just 6% of the state's population.

The report shows incarceration rates are also higher for people in poverty, with subsequent expenses eating up more than a quarter of the family income.

Towns said the stigma around incarceration often means it's overlooked in discussions about household budgets.

"This report comes at a time when lawmakers and the American public are really thinking seriously about spending, about the price of everyday costs, they're thinking about affordability," said Towns. "And this is just one of those key drivers of affordability that is pretty significant and also under-discussed."

Towns noted that after 15 years of bipartisan criminal justice reforms to reduce incarceration, some political leaders are pushing to re-embrace it.

But she pointed out that states that have reduced incarceration have seen faster declines in their crime rates.

"And this is just another reminder of the harms of going backwards," said Towns. "It's not just that we don't need it, that it can't be defended on public safety grounds, it's also that it's coming at an extraordinarily high cost - not just to taxpayers, but directly out of the pockets of family members who are impacted by it, which is a great many people in America."

Towns said she hopes the research lifts up the stories of these families so policymakers can begin to address the issue more fully.



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By Alyssa Burr for the Michigan Independent.
Broadcast version by Chrystal Blair for Michigan News Connection reporting for the Michigan Independent-Public News Service Collaboration

Renee Chelian, founder and CEO of Northland Family Planning Center in Sterling Heights, has been an abortion provider for more than 50 years. During that time, she says, anti-abortion groups have harmed and harassed her, as well as her staff, patients and family, with constant threats of violence, including large blockades, arson attempts, and even death threats.

It wasn’t until the federal government enacted the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which sought to address the harm individuals obtaining and providing abortion care were facing, that she saw the violence lessen.

“Once the law went into effect, the violent blockade stopped immediately,” Chelian testified during a May 22 state Senate Civil Rights, Judiciary, and Public Safety Committee hearing. “We still had protesters, but they were not physically attacking our clinics, staff and patients.”

Three decades after the FACE Act took effect, Democrats in the Michigan Senate are working to create state-level safeguards that would protect Michigan abortion care providers and their patients in the event that the Republican-led Congress struck it from the books.

Republican-sponsored legislation to repeal the FACE Act is currently moving through the House of Representatives. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump pardoned 23 individuals who had been convicted of violating the FACE Act on charges of harassing pregnant patients, physically blocking clinic entrances, and breaking into medical facilities. Four of the pardons were for individuals charged with blockading Chelian’s Sterling Heights clinic in 2020.

Recalling the day of that blockade in committee, Chelian said that patients were stuck in their cars, including three women who had come in for abortions following the detection of fatal fetal anomalies in their pregnancies.

“One woman was leaking amniotic fluid and blood and was scheduled for the second day of a two-day procedure, and she needed immediate medical care. She huddled with her mother and her husband, trapped in the parking lot while extremists plastered signs of fake fetuses on her car windows and shouted, ‘God loves you, God loves your baby,’” Chelian said.

She added that day was traumatic for herself, her staff and her patients, with some even seeking mental health treatment. After Trump pardoned those convicted of attacking her clinic, she said it left them reliving their trauma and “feeling abandoned by the government.”

In March, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Royal Oak Democrat, introduced Senate Bills 154 and 155, which mirror the FACE Act. The bills would do three things: prohibit a person from threatening, intimidating or interfering with someone obtaining or providing an abortion; prohibit an individual from intentionally damaging a health care facility that provides abortions; and create penalties for those who violate the bill’s provisions.

The legislation does allow certain exemptions for picketing or other demonstrations protected under the First Amendment, and it also specifies that a parent wouldn’t face any penalties so long as their interference is only directed toward their minor child.

“We cannot rely on federal protections that are actively being dismantled and pardoned away,” McMorrow said during the May Senate committee hearing.

The committee hearing featured testimony from Chelian, as well as other Michigan abortion providers who fear that extremism from anti-abortion groups could severely escalate if the FACE Act is repealed.

Dr. Neha Thawani is completing her obstetrics and gynecology residency at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Since beginning her medical training eight years ago, she said, she’s passed through dozens of medical facilities offering a wide range of services, but it wasn’t until she spent time providing abortions in an outpatient clinic that she was “exposed to emergency lockdown protocols, a daily gauntlet of protesters, or saw patients escorted through side doors for their safety.”

Shelly Miller, executive director of the Scotsdale Women’s Center, a clinic in Detroit, said abortion providers have to go further than other parents in teaching their children safety measures: “It is not safe to open the mailbox alone. Never open a package without your parents, and you should certainly never discuss your parents’ line of work.”

“I need you to know there is nothing peaceful about these groups,” Miller told the Senate panel. “These are not kind-hearted people praying outside. These people scream horrible things at our patients, their chaperones and our staff. They shove their bodies close to us and our building entrances with force. … They post photos on social media, send hateful mail to our homes and aggressively run up on people as they try to get out of their cars. They have made recordings and then edited those recordings to use against us. They have been responsible for fires and bombings and ultimately killings of clinic staff and doctors around the country.”

If it enacted the law, Michigan would join 14 states and Washington, D.C., in providing legal protections to abortion clinic staff and patients from harassment or physical harm, according to McMorrow.

Genevieve Marron, legislative director for Right to Life Michigan, an anti-abortion group, submitted written testimony to the committee in opposition to the bills. In her letter, she said that the legislation is a “solution in search of a problem” because the FACE Act already covers the same area of law and that it would limit the reach of “sidewalk counselors,” anti-abortion activists who stand outside clinics and try to convince patients not to have abortions.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the federal right to an abortion, Michigan lawmakers have taken steps to preserve reproductive health care in the state, including enshrining abortion access in the state constitution.

Even though the current bills are unlikely to make it through the Republican-controlled Michigan House of Representatives, McMorrow said the issue isn’t about ideology or politics; rather, it’s about continuing to provide basic safety and access to medical care.

“When activists can physically block patients from entering clinics, when they can break into medical facilities, when they can harass vulnerable patients without consequence, we have failed in our duty to protect both patients and health care providers,” McMorrow said.


Alyssa Burr wrote this article for the Michigan Independent.


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