Oct. 25, 2002 - published in The Brazil Times

I see Anthony Bruce is back in town. His face flashed across my TV screen early one morning this week. Bruce is writing a screenplay about the Hollandsburg murders.
In case you forgot, back in the late 1970s, four men were convicted of murdering four boys in the living room of the family’s home in the Hollandsburg area of Parke County.
I met Bruce a couple years ago when he came home to Indiana to scout possible movie locations for his screenplay. He hoped to film it all on location. He was living in California at the time.
When the killings occurred, Bruce was a boy and remembers being very much afraid they would come and do something similar to him, because he lived a short distance from the Terre Haute hospital where the murdered boys’ mother, Betty Jane Spencer, was taken.
She had suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was probably allowed to live because the gang’s leader, Roger Drollinger, thought he had shot the top of her head off when her wig moved at a gunshot blast.
The entire sordid story has been recounted by David Smith, an inmate at the Pendleton, Ind., Correctional Facility. You can read the five-part interview I did with him at the Crawfordsville newspaper Web site: http://www.journalreview.com. Search for Frank Phillips or David Smith or Hollandsburg — any of those key words should bring up the interview. (Be sure to search from the year 2000 to the present and ask for the maximum number of search returns.)
I was granted an interview by Smith after I did the interview with Bruce.
When Bruce’s story was published, Smith sister-in-law called me and asked me to tell Smith’s side of the story. At the time, he had never told his story to a reporter.
Al, an intern photographer, and I made the trip to Pendleton one day. We had been granted a two-hour interview with Smith. Instead, Smith answered questions for four hours.
I remember it all being a very grisly business. I also recall Bruce as being an unsavory sort of individual with whom I desired as little contact as possible.
In the interview, Bruce told me about his childhood fears of the Drollinger gang. He also said he saw a vision of his dead mother while doing a live TV interview on a Terre Haute TV station.
As a Christian, I believe in spirits, but as fairly rational newspaperman, I also tend to discount those who see spirits.
As I say, the Bruce and Smith interviews left me with feeling very disagreeable.
I remember sitting in the Journal Review newsroom transcribing the Smith interviews. As he described his barbaric acts, claiming he was being controlled by Drollinger and drugs at the time, I would periodically tear the headphones from my head and walk away from my desk in disgust.
I am not a heavy drinker and I have never been drunk. But during the time my editor, Howard Hewitt, and I worked on the Smith interview, I went home more than one night and had a stiff belt of peach Schnapps left over from a New Year’s Eve party.
Finally, another reporter told me, “If you’re going to be in this business, you just have to get used to these things.”
Get used to mass murder? Get used to dealing with a screenwriter who hopes to produce a movie about the Hollandsburg murders? I hope I never get used to such things!
Bruce has certainly gotten used to them. He told me he had purchased a CD filled with images taken at crime scene investigations. Why? To steel himself to look at the Hollandsburg murder photos.
I nearly always am happy to see people succeed. I believe very strongly in the old adage, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Success makes people able to stand on their own and help those less fortunate than themselves.
But I hope Bruce’s movie project fails, miserably. I hope that one day the Hollandsburg murders will become nothing more than a dim memory.

Frank Phillips is The Times managing editor. He can be reached at frankphi@hotmail.com.