Menu
Horror of Hollandsburg recalled in library talk
Nearly 40 years after one of the most heinous crimes in Hoosier history unfolded in southeastern Parke County, the thrill-kill Hollandsburg slayings clearly still impact the people of west-central Indiana.
That was never more apparent perhaps than Wednesday evening during a Putnam County Public Library Authors Series program featuring Mike McCarty, author of "Choking in Fear: A Memoir of the Hollandsburg Murders."
Even before the 47-year-old McCarty, son of an Indiana State trooper, started to detail the crime and punishment of the case that has dominated his life from age nine, the terror associated with the killings of the four sons of Keith and Betty Jane Spencer gripped the room.
A middle-aged woman sauntered up to McCarty just as he was standing in front of the room, about to begin his presentation. She introduced herself to him as Debbie Nichol, telling the audience that Roger Drollinger nearly killed her 37 years ago.
McCarty explained that Drollinger, the acknowledged ringleader of the gang of four Montgomery County heathens who went to prison for the Feb. 14, 1977 murders, was in a car with accomplices Michael Wright, David Smith and Daniel Stonebraker, rolling along Interstate 74 when Drollinger ordered Stonebraker to point his shotgun at a woman driving the Volkswagen they were passing somewhere between Crawfordsville and the state line.
At that moment, however, another vehicle crested the hill and the weapon was mercifully withdrawn.
"I've always called her 'one lucky girl,'" McCarty told the PCPL audience after Nichol departed.
It was one of several examples of the lingering effects of the Hollandsburg slayings expressed at the session.
Another audience member shared that his grandfather never again slept without a loaded shotgun next to the bed in his Russellville home after that, warning his grandson to honk the horn before picking him up for a necessary trip to the hospital in the middle of the night. Otherwise he might have found himself staring at the business end of a shotgun.
Even retired former Putnamville State Trooper Investigator Dick Rice recalled the chilling effect it had on his department in the days following the random killings.
"The only time we ever rode two (troopers) to a car was during that time," Rice said Wednesday night, talking about how they patrolled northern Putnam County on the lookout for suspicious vehicles and suspects.
"We didn't know who they were," Rice added, "but we knew they were crazy."
McCarty revisited the chilling details of how Drollinger and his three henchmen drove around the area in search of a home to target just for the sake of killing the inhabitants.
One house they drove right past was the McCarty home at Waveland, four miles north of the murder scene, where the ISP patrol car of the author's trooper father was parked outside.
McCarty, who interviewed Stonebraker in prison for his book, said the convicted murderer told him Drollinger had said, "We ought to stop and kill a 'pig' and his family."
The three weeks between the killings of Ralph, 14, Reeve, 16, and Raymond Spencer, 17, and their stepbrother Gregory Brooks, 22, and their killers' arrests created a climate of fear in west-central Indiana due to "the enormity of the unknown," McCarty said.
"I was the son of the State Police officer," he said. "I'd never been scared of anything up until that point."
But he also knew things were different when his father would return home from patrol and instead of putting his gun and badge away for the night would leave his weapon out on his nightstand.
At the time, residents of the rural area never suspected the killers could come from their own backyard, McCarty told the PCPL audience.
"It had to be somebody from Indianapolis, someone from outside the community," he said of the prevailing notion of the time. "Nobody from our community could have committed such a crime."
But they had indeed, in a case People Magazine later included among "The 20 Most Shocking Crimes in American History," McCarty noted.
"It was a pure thrill kill," McCarty assured,"there was no other motive whatsoever."
Stonebraker confirmed as much to the author, laying to rest one early myth that the killings were drug-related.
"The investigative leads dispelled that," he continued, "and came back to Drollinger and a random killing," the author added, noting, "it's easy to think of it as drug-related perhaps because that's not as scary as a random thrill killing."
The Hollandsburg murders were the culmination of the killers' "week of terror in west-central Indiana," McCarty said.
That started with the I-74 gun-pointing incident. "The only reason they didn't pull the trigger," he said, "was that another car crested the hill."
They apparently did the same thing to the driver of an RV, who ducked and lost control of his vehicle, which went off the highway and crashed.
After that the violence escalated to home break-ins, including one at Kingman, where the intruders wore masks and bandannas, lining up the victims on the floor as they would later do at the Spencer home but only roughing them up a bit and stealing their shotguns and other items.
"They weren't quite ready for murder," McCarty allowed.
But that changed at Hollandsburg when Drollinger chose the Spencers' modular home by pointing and saying "that's the house" when he spotted a number of nice cars parked outside and thought they might not only kill the occupants but walk away with substantial cash from a poker game.
Then as the gang readied for the home invasion, Drollinger ripped the bandanna from Stonebraker's face, telling him it wouldn't be necessary because there would be no survivors.
He was wrong, of course. Betty Jane Spencer survived, gave police sketch artists uncanny descriptions of her son's killers and saw them arrested and put away for life.
Drollinger, who had pointed a shotgun at each of his three accomplices to assure "everybody shoots or you get killed," ordered additional shotgun blasts even after the execution-style killings seemed over.
Stonebraker told McCarty he was the one who pointed his weapon at Mrs. Spencer, intentionally aiming high and hitting the couch behind her. Trailing buckshot, however, ripped the wig from her head, which in the darkness made the intruders think they'd blown her head off.
McCarty said the killers weren't done. They had planned another home invasion somewhere that night.
But when Mrs. Spencer bravely struggled to her feet and stumbled to a neighbor's home to call police, the four killers overheard the information on the police scanner they had with them.
"It was meant to be like the Tate-LaBianca murders," McCarty said of the gruesome killings orchestrated by Charles Manson, whom Drollinger was known to idolize.
"The only thing that kept that from happening," the author added, "was Betty Spencer surviving and running next door."
McCarty said without the presence of Drollinger "those other three guys were not really capable of murder."
"Not without that one ingredient, the sociopath Drollinger.
"The lesson out there," he said, "is there are lots of Rogers out there and it points out what a person can be capable of if they end up with the wrong crowd.
"There's a number of people," McCarty said, "who ran with this gang who could have been there that night."
He said he has asked some of them what they would have done had they been in that car with Drollinger pointing a shotgun at their heads.
"The most common answer I get," he said, "is dead silence as they contemplate that. They know what their answer would be."
Drollinger died of apparent natural causes at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility last January.
Stonebraker, Wright and Smith all remain incarcerated for life at Pendleton.