Real Work
McCarty speaks to more than 70 people who packed Crawfordsville’s Tannenbaum Cultural Center for a reading from and discussion of his book.
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?” —Daniel Stonebraker, one of four men convicted of “the Hollandsburg Murders,” from the foreward of Mike McCarty’s memoir, Choking in Fear.
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 MIKE MCCARTY WAS
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 Trooper, was pulled into the investigation, but Mike first learned about the murders from the banner headline of the afternoon newspaper: “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.” Fa l l 20 1 4
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