On Valentine’s Day 1977, a crime beyond rural Indiana’s imagining was committed near the town of Hollandsburg by a sociopath who terrorized two Indiana counties and terrified his own accomplices.
Mike McCarty has written an accurate and detailed account of the events that are the most shameful of my life. I have participated in this endeavor in hopes that the society I have offended may know the facts, come to their own conclusions, place the blame, and maybe answer the most elusive question: “Why?”
Mike McCarty ’89 was nine years old. The murder of his Parke County neighbors that night haunted him for years, compelling him to befriend the lone survivor and one of the murderers and to write a recently published memoir of the crime.
Mike McCarty was nine years old on February 14, 1977, growing up in tiny Waveland, IN, and worrying about a speech he had to give for his campaign for school class president. That evening three men and their leader, Roger Drollinger, stormed into the Parke County mobile home of Betty Jane Spencer, just four miles from the McCartys’ home. They lined up Spencer, her son, and her three stepsons face down on the floor, and then pumped 11 shotgun rounds into them. One blast blew off Spencer’s wig, leaving the assailants to believe they had shot off part of her head. She was the sole survivor.
McCarty’s father, an Indiana State Troop-er, was pulled into the investigation, but Mike first learned about the murders from the banner headline of the afternoon news-paper: “Four Young Parke Men Executed.”
When he asked who the killers were, his father said he didn’t know. He tried to allay his son’s growing concern. But McCarty went to bed “scared to death.”
“The fear was overwhelming,” he writes in Choking in Fear: A Memoir About the Hollandsburg Murders. “The stranglehold would only tighten as details of the crime unfolded. Unfortunately, I would have to wait 18 years for the real truth.”
As readers of Choking in Fear discover, McCarty’s dread was more prescient than paranoid. Years later while interviewing Daniel Stonebraker—one of four men convicted of the murders—McCarty learned that the killers had, in fact, driven by the McCarty home that Valentine’s Day evening.
“We drove right past your house,” Stonebraker tells him. “Roger said we should stop at your house and kill a pig and his family.”
McCarty flashes back to the fear he’d had as a boy that Valentine’s Day night—the fear of unknown killers lurking outside his bedroom.
“Now I knew how close to my bedroom window they had actually been.”
But Choking in Fear isn’t about his family’s narrow escape from tragedy, but an attempt to understand a tragedy suffered by others and to get at that question: “Why?”
As recounted in the book, McCarty befriends Betty Jane Spencer, is amazed at how she transformed her terrible loss into the beginning of the Victim’s Rights Movement. But her sorrow is palpable. She shares with McCarty (and the reader) letters she wrote to her sons when she was grieving in a Terre Haute hospital after the murders.
He develops a friendship, too, with Stonebraker, whose recollection of the days leading up to the murder are disturbing:
“The day before the murders, we pulled up next to a dog running down the road and Roger shot and killed it,” Stonebraker says. “Just to show us how easy it was to kill.”
The book both explains and affirms McCarty’s interest and career in law enforcement and security, first as a detective in the domestic violence unit of the Nashville, TN, police force, then as CEO of Break the Cycle, a domestic violence prevention organization. Today he is CEO of Safe Hiring Solutions, an international background-screening firm.
Choking in Fear is a revision of McCarty’s original volume on the Hollandsburg murders. Rewriting the book as a first-person memoir was a risky step suggested by a friend, but it proves effective and true to the role the tragedy has played in his life and the lives of those involved—a literal “coming to terms” with an event that haunted his childhood but shaped his vocation.
Photojournalist and writer Donna Ferrato—author of the seminal work on domestic violence, Living With the Enemy—calls Choking in Fear “the final word on murder in small-town America.” Many readers, especially men, will recognize themselves in McCarty’s rural American childhood, at least until the events of Valentine’s Day 1977.
McCarty himself concludes:
After spending more than 15 years on this project, I have been able to answer many of the questions that have gnawed at me since I was a child choking in fear. I can tell you, with 100 percent confidence, that this was a totally random crime where mass murder was the only motive.
I’m not sure that makes me sleep better these days. It means we live in a world where killing for sport is still possible.
It also raises questions about how guys like Roger Drollinger are created. Is it genetics or society that shapes these monsters?
I am completely confident that Roger Drollinger was a sociopath. This was a man who had no conscience, no remorse, and no feelings for other human beings. Dan Stone-braker told me that after they pulled out
of the driveway following the murders, Drollinger began talking about stopping at another home and killing the family… Drollinger turned on the interior dome light, and Dan said he was literally glowing. The excitement was pouring out of his eyes.
If there is a lesson in this tragedy, it is that Dan Stonebraker, Mike Wright, and David Smith would have never murdered without the influence of Roger Drollinger. This is an important lesson for us. There are lots of young boys teetering on the fence between right and wrong and all it takes is the influence of a sociopath like Drollinger to make them capable of murdering a family.
The line between someone who commits a crime like this and someone who does not is not as wide as one might think.