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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By Garrett Bergquist for WISH-TV.
Broadcast version by Joe Ulery for Indiana News Service reporting for the WISH-TV-Free Press Indiana-Public News Service Collaboration

Mentors who work with troubled youth on Tuesday said a proposed expansion of Marion County’s curfew might work but only if it’s combined with both enforcement and a place for children to go.

On Monday night, city-county councilors introduced a draft ordinance that would extend curfew hours for children under 18. Anyone under age 15 could not be in a public place anytime after 9 p.m., a change from the current 11 p.m. Children ages 15 to 17 could be in public places until 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and 9 p.m. the rest of the week. The curfew for all ages would run until 5 a.m. The policy would apply throughout Marion County.

Kareem Hines, the founder of the New Breed of Youth mentoring and youth development program, said young people he’s talked to are still processing the trauma from the shooting early Saturday morning that killed two teens and wounded five others. He said the extended curfew hours should be enforced but the approach should not be punitive.

“These young people need a voice. They need to be heard. They need to be nurtured. I think they need to be cultivated and they need to be loved,” Hines said. “I know that might sound crazy after that mass shooting but if we’re going to round these young people up, I don’t think taking them to a detention center is the answer.”

The language of the ordinance exclude an enforcement mechanism.

Its author, Democratic Councilor Leroy Robinson, said he will consider adding enforcement language during the committee process. Robinson said that language could include fines for parents if their child repeatedly violates curfew or even getting the Marion County prosecutor and civil courts involved for the most serious cases.

The Rev. Charles Harrison of Indy Ten Point Coalition said curfews won’t do any good without an enforcement mechanism. He said the city has tackled the problem of lawless youth downtown before. Each time, he said the solution was a combination of rigorous curfew enforcement and working with community organizations such as churches to give youth a place to go.

“The problem is not just the youth downtown past curfew hours,” he said. “We have also a parenting issue when you have hundreds of unsupervised youth downtown.”

Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department officials have said the only place they can take young people who violate curfew is the family services center at the Community Justice Campus. Hines and Harrison both said churches and other community organizations could provide IMPD with an alternative. Hines said, even if it’s well past midnight, youth need a place where they can find food, connection or even activities until their parents or guardians can come pick them up.

“Now, I’ve established a connection where I’m loving on them but I’m still requiring them to sit and have a conversation with me over a meal,” Hines said. “You’d be surprised how I can hold a young person accountable over a meal.”

He said such places could even provide transportation home if necessary and then follow up with the child and their family a few days later to find out what else is going on in the child’s life that needs to be addressed.

The council’s next public safety committee hearing is scheduled for July 16, and the full council could vote on the proposal as early as its next meeting, set for Aug. 11.


Garrett Bergquist wrote this article for WISH-TV.


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A new law on the books will help Hoosier renters saddled with an eviction on their record get some relief.

Senate Bill 142, which took effect July 1, includes a provision allowing automatic dismissal of an eviction with some exceptions. Research site Eviction Lab reported nearly 71,000 filings in Indiana in 2024.

Jenny Terry, senior attorney for the nonprofit Indiana Legal services, said the eviction cases most eligible for sealing are those where the tenant never faced a legal judgment resulting in eviction.

"The case is filed as soon as the tenant gets behind in rent," Terry explained. "But whether it's because of rental assistance or just with additional time, the tenant is able to get caught up, and so that case is resolved."

The presence of the legal record on a case is still viewed by some landlords as an eviction even when the tenant did not leave, Terry pointed out. She added it may work against tenants seeking new housing opportunities.

Supporters of the law say an eviction permanently showing on a renter's record has more severe consequences than records of credit card debt or bankruptcy filings, which are deleted after seven years. Terry noted Sen. Liz Brown, R-Fort Wayne, helped move the bill forward amid some backlash.

"There was definitely was some debate about some aspects of the bill as it went through the legislature, but by and large, this was a bipartisan effort," Terry observed. "We were pleased that the next step was able to be taken with regard to this moving eviction sealing forward."

Under the law, new eviction cases will be sealed automatically if they were dismissed, the tenant won the case, or the case was overturned on appeal. Older cases can be sealed upon request if no money is owed or the case involves a matter other than rent and is older than seven years.

Eviction Lab data showed nearly 29,000 eviction filings to date as of June 1, 2025. Anyone needing more information can log on to IndianaLegalServices.org.


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By Doug Livingston for The Marshall Project.
Broadcast version by Farah Siddiqi for Ohio News Connection reporting for the Marshall Project-Public News Service Collaboration

To appeal his conviction for burglary and related charges, James Bishop needed the legal papers a Jefferson County court clerk had mailed him in prison. But mailroom staff at Ohio's Noble Correctional Institution decided there were too many pages.

They gave Bishop two options: Have the legal documents destroyed, or pay $4.61 in postage to send them back to the court.

When he refused either choice, correctional officers labeled the more than 60 pages from the court "contraband" and charged Bishop with "abuse of the mail system." After filing a formal complaint, officers put Bishop in a lockdown cell for four days with a man accused of "inflicting harm on another inmate" and manufacturing a weapon, according to court and prison disciplinary records.

"I got a ticket for contraband," an incredulous Bishop told The Marshall Project - Cleveland after getting out of the segregation unit in April. "Yeah, for the court sending me mail."

As of mid-June, Bishop remains incarcerated, still waiting for the records he needs to appeal his conviction.

Prison walls shouldn't stop a person from appealing a conviction or alleging civil rights abuses while incarcerated. But a 2021 pandemic-era crackdown on drug smuggling in the mail has delayed or prevented basic legal documents from reaching people inside Ohio's 28 state prisons.

The rights to petition the courts, to due process, and attorney-client privilege are pillars of the American justice system. "Having policies that unnecessarily restrict that is a big problem, and that's true under the federal Constitution and our state constitution," said Ben Cooper, a Columbus attorney who successfully challenged how the state prison system is handling what used to be protected mail.

Access to information, including a person's own legal records - which are usually available online to the general public - is significantly restricted in Ohio prisons.

Incarcerated people might get a couple of hours a week to conduct research on a prison law library computer. However, there's no unfettered access to the internet to search for legal arguments or visit a court website to view case files. Instead, there's LexisNexis, a third-party legal research tool. It doesn't always show every time-stamped entry on a court docket, including prosecutorial motions and lower court judgments that, if responded to in time, could aid people convicted of crimes in future appeals.

That's why incarcerated people rely heavily on the mail. Under the enhanced scrutiny though, legal records can take weeks or months to arrive, instead of days. Public court records, now treated like regular mail, can be denied for delivery if they exceed five pages. Because these records are now scanned, letters previously handed over in person are sometimes delivered to the wrong person, have pages missing, or come with a bill for copying and printing costs.

The Marshall Project - Cleveland interviewed or reviewed lawsuits and official complaints filed since 2021 by 33 people confined in nearly half of Ohio's state prisons. They said staff violated their rights by opening and reading their legal mail. Prison disciplinary records showed that correctional officers punished those who criticized the mailroom or filed lawsuits claiming their mail was mishandled.

Staff at Marion Correctional Institution, for example, disciplined Chad Messenger twice in 2022 for "disobeying a direct order" and "use of telephone or mail to threaten, harass, intimidate or annoy another." He had repeatedly supplied the mailroom with stamped envelopes and postage funds to forward legal mail to his family instead of returning it to the courts or having it destroyed. Messenger even filed a court motion accusing a local county clerk of dereliction of duty.

The conduct reports, or prison rules violations, could be used against an incarcerated person when they seek an early release from prison.

"Sometimes our cases are determined on our behavior in here, as well as our past history," Messenger said of early release and parole requests. If the people rack up too many conduct reports, "it looks bad."

Incarcerated people who challenge the handling of their mail in court are rarely afforded attorneys. They represent themselves, often losing, based on judgments that grant the prison system the latitude to keep facilities secure and free from contraband.

"Courts have consistently held that the maintenance of prison security and prevention of contraband from entering the prison are 'legitimate penological' interests," U.S. Magistrate Darrell A. Clay ruled in February.

The state prison system adopted tighter restrictions for legal mail in 2021 to keep out paper dipped in hard-to-detect synthetic drugs.

Drug seizures traced to legal mail - a tiny fraction of drug activity documented by correctional staff - did fall sharply, from 165 seizures in the first half of 2021 to 35 total in the next three years. Overall drug seizures, however, have continued to climb.

"They're trying to say that they want to do this to prevent introduction of contraband and the drug problem," said Richard Whitman, who is incarcerated at Belmont Correctional Institution. It's "worse than it ever was with the previous legal mail policy."

Incarcerated people, advocates and defense attorneys say the 2021 legal mail policy is an unconstitutional violation of the attorney-client privilege. The Marshall Project - Cleveland found that judges regularly extend filing deadlines for incarcerated people who miss filing deadlines due to slow-arriving court mail. Even with deadline extensions, people suing the state prison system or trying to overturn convictions are left with days, not weeks or months, to prepare and respond to complex legal questions and arguments raised by judges, prosecutors and attorneys who defend state-employed correctional staff.

"All they do is lie to us, and spin us," said Jason Monaco, an incarcerated man who works in the law library at Noble Correctional Institution, where he helps others, like Bishop, fight for their mail. "These people do not care about the Constitution or anything it stands for."

Monaco is among dozens of incarcerated people suing state prison officials, wardens and mailroom staff for disobeying a 2024 court order to deliver all federal court mail with as little interference as possible.

And it's not just incarcerated people who are complaining. Last month, lawyers with the Ohio Justice & Policy Center alleged in a lawsuit that, despite their staff attorneys following the new rules, staff at 11 prisons have been opening their confidential letters to clients for months.

State prison officials declined to comment for this story due to pending litigation. Under oath in a lawsuit settled last year, a top corrections administrator defended new restrictions on legal mail as "pretty clear" and "narrowly constructed to go after a particular issue."

Regular mail, which generally cannot exceed five pages, is scanned on site or forwarded to a processing center in Youngstown, where a private company opens, reads and scans the mail to be delivered electronically on digital tablets. Legal mail must be opened in front of the addressee, checked for contraband and, if clean, handed over without being read.

In order to send legal mail, which, unlike regular mail, is certified as delivered and processed swiftly, the 2021 policy required attorneys and court staff to obtain a control number from the prison system. Each number expires in 21 days, can only be used once, and verifies legal mail when placed on the outside of an envelope.

Under the old policy, which larger prison systems in California and Texas also use, legal mail only needed the valid return address of a law office or court.

In the early days of Ohio's new policy, prison mailrooms lacked guidance on how to handle court mail, which generally involves publicly available entries on court dockets. A one-page memo in September 2021 directed all mailroom staff to process all court mail as regular mail. Unless court staff marked the mail as confidential and requested a control number, the letters would be opened, scanned and read before the incarcerated person knew it had arrived.

The narrower definition significantly reduced the volume of legal mail, slashing the pieces arriving in the months before the new policy from over 10,000 to less than 3,000 by the end of last year, according to state data filed in the Ohio Justice & Policy Center lawsuit.

State prison officials could allow defense attorneys and courts to send confidential legal mail directly to incarcerated people on their electronic tablets, which would cut out the paper altogether. But there's no immediate timeline to implement that solution.

Four years after the start of the 2021 policy, the Ohio Supreme Court and a smattering of county courts use control numbers, even though it takes additional staff, time and resources. Several courts, including Cuyahoga County Common Pleas, do not, which means the timely delivery of court mail depends almost entirely on where an incarcerated person was convicted.

"I handle a lot of the inmate mail, but not all of it," said Susan Ayers, chief of compliance for the Hamilton County clerk of courts office. "And I will tell you that we almost exclusively send control numbers on there. I always assumed that was for ease of routing."

Several court clerks surveyed by The Marshall Project - Cleveland pointed to the 2021 memo from prison officials stating that they don't need control numbers because they're not sending legal mail.

"We don't even know how to do that. We don't do that. We just file what the judges give us," said Alicia Anderson, office manager at the Jefferson County Clerk of Courts Office, which repeatedly mailed Bishop envelopes that the prison mailroom labeled as "contraband" because they "were too large to scan."

In June 2024, federal Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr., of the U.S. Southern District of Ohio, approved an agreement between Ohio prisons Director Annette Chambers-Smith and El-Barseem K. Allah, whose federal court mail had been withheld by the mailroom at Southern Ohio Correctional Institution. All federal court mail would be treated as legal mail "whether or not it was assigned a control number," the agreement stated.

The Ohio prison system, however, is not consistently holding up its end of the bargain, according to multiple incarcerated people who have referenced the ruling in subsequent lawsuits. Bishop, for example, sent The Marshall Project - Cleveland a photo and scanned copy of mail from a federal courthouse in Cleveland. The mail was opened and read outside of his presence, then scanned and delivered with two pages missing.

"I know they are in contempt," Bishop said.

In a lawsuit deposition last year, Brian Wittrup, the chief of strategy and policy for state corrections, told attorney Robert Salem that he could not say how many prisons were adhering to Judge Sargas' order.

"It is up to 28 separate prisons and their leadership to enforce those things and know whether or not they're being followed," Wittrup said. "There's just no way for me to know every day if policy is being adhered to, and that's true of any policy we have."

Attorneys with the Ohio Justice & Policy Center say that despite using control numbers, staff at 11 prisons have in the past few months started opening, scanning and reading attorney-client legal mail. In their May lawsuit, they argue that effective legal counsel requires clients who "feel comfortable communicating fully and frankly with their attorneys."

While visiting the Lebanon prison, attorney Angela S. Larsen, a lead attorney on the Ohio Justice & Policy Center lawsuit, said the prison staff told her to give the warden copies of papers her client needed to sign.

"No, this is confidential," Larsen said. "They just don't seem to get it."


Doug Livingston wrote this article for The Marshall Project.


This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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