The tragic story of Ralph Lobaugh, the innocent man who spent 30 years in prison

INDIANAPOLIS — The brutal murder of three women in Fort Wayne, Indiana, had been unsolved for more than two years when Ralph Woodrow Lobaugh walked into a police station and said he was the killer.

"I have an urge to kill," he told police, according to news reports. "Something tells me to kill somebody."

Lobaugh's confession on that summer night 75 years ago triggered one of the most tangled, tragic and — as one former Indiana governor put it — "sordid messes in the history of the state."

At the center of it all was Lobaugh, a 30-year-old factory worker who repeatedly confessed to crimes, only to promptly claim innocence. He confessed and retracted several times, setting off a years-long legal saga and media circus. His story highlighted weaknesses in the criminal justice system during an era when DNA testing was still decades away and investigators leaned on now-debunked tactics like truth serum tests.

Lobaugh was sentenced to die just four months after he first confessed, a lightning speed unheard of in today's system of justice. But the case — built solely on the ever-changing confessions of a troubled man to investigators desperate for an arrest — quickly began to unravel.

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New evidence of his innocence surfaced, and investigators began to doubt whether the man doomed to die killed anyone at all.

One lie detector test showed he did; another showed he didn't. Another man was convicted, and another confessed.

Throughout it all, Lobaugh remained Offender No. 24221 — at one point, housed in the same prison with a man convicted of the same crime nobody believed they committed together.

The crimes and confessions

Wilhelmina Haaga staggered to a rural farmhouse seeking help one winter evening in 1944. She was bloody and disheveled. The 38-year-old factory worker and former vaudeville singer made her way to the home after being left for dead in the snow a few miles from where she worked, according to news reports.

She lived for three days in the hospital.

Haaga's killing was the first of four that happened in a span of a year in wartime Fort Wayne, stumping police detectives and driving the public into a mass hysteria.

Anna Kuzeff lay lifeless in a field not far from her home the following spring. Near the 20-year-old factory worker's body were a man's belt buckle and a pocket comb.

Summer came, and a 17-year-old high school senior suddenly disappeared. Hunters found Phyllis Conine just outside the city, according to news reports. A man's dirty trench coat lay near her body.

Dorothea Howard clung to life for 11 days after she was found in an alley in early 1945, according to news reports. Witnesses saw the 30-year-old talking to two men — a soldier and a civilian — inside a tavern the night she was last seen alive.

There were conflicting media stories on whether the first victim, Haaga, was raped. The other three were.

All were bludgeoned to death.

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In media interviews, officials warned of a killer next door, or of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character with the dual personality of a "respectable" man and a "ruthless mad-dog."

Tips poured in, theories abound, dozens were questioned, but no one was charged. Then, in 1947, Lobaugh showed up at the Kokomo Police Department, about 80 miles from the crime scenes, and begged to be locked up.

He claimed he met Haaga at a bar, left with her and killed her in the country. He said it was his belt buckle and pocket comb that were found near Kuzeff's body, according to news reports. He said he was one of the two men — the civilian — who was with Howard at the tavern. As for the high school student, Lobaugh said he didn't kill her.

Lobaugh signed a confession "without hesitation," Fort Wayne Police Chief Jule Stumpf told reporters, adding that he described one of the crime scenes with "almost unfaltering accuracy." Stumpf, though, acknowledged that Lobaugh could've read details of the widely publicized crimes in media stories.

The following day, Lobaugh recanted, claiming he was drunk when he confessed, according to news reports. Three days later, he said his original confessions were true, a retraction of the retraction.

A week later, he was indicted for murder.

Lobaugh pleaded guilty in late October 1947. On the same day, he stood silently as an Allen County judge sentenced him to die and set his execution date for the following February at the Indiana State Prison.

But Lobaugh soon backtracked again, telling his attorneys he "absolutely did not" kill the women, the Muncie Star Press, a part of the Paste BN Network, reported.

By January 1948, weeks away from death, Lobaugh "had once and for all repudiated the confessions he has alternately avowed and disavowed," the Kokomo Tribune reported.

His attorney, who was frantically filing motions to set aside the death penalty, hinted at what's to come.

"There will be sensational developments in the Lobaugh matter within the next few days," Fort Wayne attorney Robert A. Buhler, told reporters without elaborating further.

Who was Ralph Lobaugh?

A high school drop out who became a menial laborer, Lobaugh was "an erratic, mixed-up oddball with a failing marriage, sex hang-ups and a drinking problem," reporter and Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame member Al Spiers wrote in one of the last stories published about the infamous death row inmate.

Lobaugh was married and divorced twice. It's unclear if he had any children.

During his first marriage, he lived with his wife's family outside Fort Wayne and worked with his father-in-law at the Eel River Cemetery. They divorced in 1944 after five years of marriage, according to media reports.

Lobaugh moved to Kokomo, where he met his second wife while working as a restaurant cook. They married in 1947, just a few months after they met. She filed for divorce that same year, after Lobaugh confessed and was arrested. Their marriage lasted only a few weeks.

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She described him in media reports as "nervous and moody" but also "unusually kind and considerate" during their brief marriage.

By the time he confessed, Lobaugh was "in a fit of depression," wrote Spiers, who had interviewed and gotten to know Lobaugh. Court-ordered psychiatric exams found him to be "emotionally unstable but not insane," according to media reports. Psychiatrists who examined him also told reporters he drank a lot because he couldn't deal with day-to-day life.

In the spring of 1948, reporters watched as two prison doctors gave Lobaugh a truth serum, a tactic once used by investigators to try to extract confessions. While supposedly under the spell of the drug cocktail, Lobaugh again proclaimed innocence, according to media reports. He said his confession was a bizarre attempt at suicide.

In a telegram to the governor, Lobaugh seemed to accept death:

I am not guilty, but am willing to die for somebody else. The truth will never be known. Thank you kindly.

Ralph Lobaugh

As Lobaugh sat on death row, Fort Wayne had a new police chief who told reporters there were discrepancies in his confessions. New evidence uncovered by his attorney — evidence that police seemed to miss — also threw a wrench into the already questionable prosecution.

The nights the first and second victims, Haaga and Kuzeff, were killed in 1944, Lobaugh was not even in Fort Wayne. That's according to affidavits from Lobaugh's first wife, to whom he was still married at that time, and her parents. They attested he was living with them in Churubusco, Indiana, a tiny town 15 miles away, and could not have killed the women.

Lobaugh also could not have killed Howard, the last victim. The owner of the Fort Wayne tavern where Howard was last seen said in an affidavit that Lobaugh was not one of the men who was with her that night.

By the end of 1948, two other men had come under suspicion.

A soldier and a civilian

Charles Dodson, a soldier stationed at a military airbase near Fort Wayne, and Robert Christen, the son of a local drugstore owner, were indicted in late 1948 for Howard's murder.

Dodson had come forward and told police he and Christen were the soldier and civilian who were with Howard at the tavern. They lured her into the alley, Dodson said, although he claimed he later left. Another witness reported seeing Christen with the victim.

Charges against Dodson were dropped. Christen, who denied killing Howard, was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He briefly served time at the Indiana State Prison with Lobaugh, until the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that evidence against Christen was based on conjecture.

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Christen was freed. Lobaugh remained behind bars, although the possibility of execution was slowly fading.

"I am convinced that a full-scale investigation of the whole procedure should be undertaken before the death penalty should be invoked," Gov. Henry Schricker said in 1949 after postponing the execution for the fifth time.

Then, came another confession.

'I am the murderer'

"My Dear Wife," Franklin Click, a farmer, wrote in August 1949 in a letter to his wife, "I want you to be the first to know and learn from my own lips that I am a murderer."

Click told his wife he killed Haaga and Kuzeff, the first and second victims who Lobaugh admitted killing two years earlier. Click also said he killed Conine, the high school student.

"No other person was with me or participated in either of these murders ... I am the murderer," Click wrote, telling his wife to hand over his confession to the police chief, which would guarantee her $15,000 in reward money.

Media reports described Click as the more likely suspect. He lived across the street from Kuzeff. He and Haaga worked at factories a few blocks from each other.

Click was promptly indicted for the three murders, although he was tried only for Conine's death. He was convicted and sentenced to die in 1949.

At 12:05 a.m. Dec. 30, 1950, Click was strapped to a chair as 2,300 volts of electricity passed through his body.

'The man is institutionalized'

In 1977, 30 years after Lobaugh showed up at the Kokomo police station, Gov. Otis Bowen granted him clemency.

Carrying everything he owned, including a pair of shoes in one hand, a couple of books in the other, Lobaugh walked out of the Indiana State Prison a free man. He was 60 years old.

An Associated Press photograph shows him with thinning hair and glasses.

Lobaugh had spent half his life behind bars, most of it on death row. His requests for clemency had been denied multiple times, leading to bouts of deep depression and a two-year stay at the Norman Beatty Mental Hospital, where he received electric shock treatments. His case had been investigated and re-investigated. After one such probe, an investigator concluded that Lobaugh "is not a fit person to be free on the streets of any city, but not guilty of killing any of these women."

Meanwhile, he finished high school and took college classes. He became a model prisoner teaching bookkeeping and accounting and handling clerical work, wrote Spiers, the reporter who had gotten to know Lobaugh.

"I want to forget the past and look to the future," Lobaugh told Spiers. "I'm sure I can cope with life outside ...

I'm not going to get into any new trouble. I've paid too dearly for the old."

Ralph Lobaugh

But the outside world proved to be too foreign, too far from the comforts of his old cell, the company of his old friends, and the familiarity of his old job at the maximum-security prison he had called home.

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Lobaugh asked to be put back in after a brief stint sweeping floors in Indianapolis and South Bend, Indiana, according to media reports. He was free for only two months.

A headline that appeared in the Indianapolis Star, a part of the Paste BN Network, in October 1977 read: "Freedom Too Much For Broken Man"

"The man is institutionalized," Harold G. Roddy, then the director of Indiana's work release program, told reporters. "He's just been locked up too damn long."

Two years later, Lobaugh was moved to a small halfway house run by a pastor in New Carlisle, Indiana. The Rev. Abe Peters described him as a quiet man who worked in the garden everyday.

Lobaugh spent his last days in a nursing home in South Bend. He died in 1981 at age 64.

"He's finally at peace," Spiers told the Associated Press. "His case is a classic in the annals of Indiana justice ... or the lack of it."

 Follow Kristine Phillips on Twitter: @bykristinep.