Third Street in Terre Haute, Indiana, is an unremarkable stretch of road that leads from I-70 into the city’s fading downtown. Little distinguishes it from any other busy commercial street in any small midwestern town–you could be on Milwaukee Avenue in Niles or Mannheim Road in Rosemont. There’s a Denny’s, a Wendy’s, and a Phillips 66 station; there are realtors, car dealerships, lube shops, and a house with a cracked glass door and a sign advertising “therapeutic massages.” Outside the Midtown Motel a sign reads, “God Bless Our Guests.” The only building that might cause you to stop and take a second glance is a one-story brick structure across the street from a tattoo parlor. It looks as though it might contain a travel agency or a small accounting firm, but a closer inspection reveals that the windows are boarded up. And, partly covered by a blue tarp, there’s a graffito spray-painted on the charred brick walls: REMEMBER TIMMY MCVEIGH. The Oklahoma City bomber was executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute in 2001.
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Investigators say that the arson is an isolated incident. Terre Haute was a hotbed of Ku Klux Klan activity in the 1920s, and it’s not uncommon to see Confederate flags on the grills of trucks barreling down I-70, but hate crimes, locals say, are rare here now. And though there have been reports of white supremacist activity in towns just a quick drive away from Terre Haute (the Southern Poverty Law Center places an active Klan group in the area), Vigo County’s chief deputy prosecuting attorney, Jim Walker–a lifelong resident of the region–says he has no recollection of other crimes of this nature. The major issue for law enforcement in Terre Haute over the past five years has been methamphetamine abuse, he adds.
Eva Kor, however, has more complicated memories of the town.
Kor says her family’s Jewishness made them the target of harassment for over a decade in the 60s and 70s. “Kids would start Halloween at our house on October 1,” she recalls. “It wasn’t only corn or soap or toilet paper. They would throw bricks at the roof, they would plant white crosses in the front yard, they would set leaves on fire and paint swastikas on the house and write, ‘Go home, you dirty Jew.’ It traumatized my kids a great deal; the kids often said that it was like a war zone.
“One society in the 1940s rejected me for being who I am, for being born Jewish. I never understood then why that was a crime, and now another society was accepting and respecting me for who I was,” she says. “People would stop me at the grocery store and apologize for having harassed me.” The worst thing that happened in those years, she says, was that she had trouble getting a real estate job because of her accent.
When I talked to him last month, Stockett appeared behind a plate-glass window in the Vigo County lockup wearing an orange jumpsuit and bearing a file folder filled with documents downloaded from the Web and notes and poems scribbled on scraps of paper. He claims to be an admirer of the writings of Noam Chomsky and Nat Hentoff and says he’s a devout Christian and pro-lifer. He also admits to having reached out to white supremacists. But, he says, those efforts did not reflect his own views; instead he hoped to mobilize them against the war in Iraq, which he feels is being waged in part to strengthen Ariel Sharon’s position in Israel. “The only thing that I might have as a basis for agreement with the Klan might be their views on Israel,” Stockett says. He categorically denies that he is a racist, a Holocaust denier, or an anti-Semite (a word he pronounces see-mite), proferring as evidence that he was married to a black woman throughout much of the 80s. He claims to have been set up on the weapons charge by the feds.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Lloyd DeGrane.
