One of our editors asked us to look into the case of Larry Hall, the Indiana man convicted of kidnapping fifteen-year-old Jessica Roach in 1993 and suspected of murdering as many as forty young women across the American Midwest. The Larry Hall twin question, specifically, is what drew their attention: Larry had an identical twin brother named Gary, and the investigation never seriously examined him. It is the kind of case that collapses under scrutiny, not because the evidence is weak, but because the investigation never asked the most obvious question.
Larry and Gary Hall shared the same DNA, the same face, and the same hobby of traveling to Civil War reenactments across multiple states, the very activity investigators believe Larry used to select victims. Gary was the dominant twin, the socially competent one, the one who could talk to strangers. Larry had a speech impediment, a low IQ from oxygen deprivation at birth, and a lifelong pattern of social withdrawal. Law enforcement built its entire case around Larry. Gary was never investigated.
Key Facts
- Convicted offender: Larry DeWayne Hall, born December 11, 1962, Wabash, Indiana
- Conviction: Kidnapping of Jessica Roach (1993), sentenced to life without parole
- Suspected victims: Estimated 35 to 50 young women across the Midwest, 1980s through 1994
- Twin brother: Gary Hall, identical (monochorionicIdentical twins who share a single placenta in the womb. The shared placenta may result in unequal nutrient distribution, causing developmental differences between the twins.) twin, never charged or formally investigated
- Current status: Larry Hall is incarcerated at FCI Butner, North Carolina. Gary Hall lives near Huntington, Indiana.
- Adapted in: Black Bird (Apple TV+, 2022), based on the book In with the Devil by Jimmy Keene and Hillel Levin
The Conviction That Almost Was Not
On September 20, 1993, Jessica Lynn Roach, fifteen years old, was last seen riding her bicycle near her home in Georgetown, Illinois. Her decomposed body was found on November 8 in a cornfield near Perrysville, Indiana. Police connected Larry Hall to the case after young women in the area reported a man in a Dodge van following them, and someone recorded his license plate number.
When investigators searched Hall’s van, they found a knife and a missing person poster for another young woman, Tricia Lynn Reitler, a nineteen-year-old Indiana Wesleyan University student who had vanished on March 29, 1993. Her body has never been recovered.
Hall confessed to kidnapping Roach. Then he recanted. He told investigators the next day: “I was just tellin’ you about my dreams. That didn’t really happen.” This would become his signature pattern. Over the course of his interactions with law enforcement, Hall confessed to more than thirty-five murders. He recanted every single one.
His first conviction in 1995 was overturned by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which found the trial court had improperly excluded expert testimony about false confessions. The appellate court noted that a jury with all the evidence might have concluded Hall was a “wannabe” and that the true kidnapper was still at large. Hall was retried and convicted again, receiving a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole because the kidnapping resulted in death.
The FBI Sent an Informant Into a Prison for the Criminally Insane
In 1998, federal prosecutor Lawrence Beaumont approached James “Jimmy” Keene, a former high school football star from Kankakee, Illinois, who was serving a ten-year sentence on drug conspiracy charges. The deal was extraordinary: transfer to the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, a facility housing the criminally insane, befriend Larry Hall, and extract a confession that would hold up in court. In exchange, Keene’s sentence would be commuted and his record expunged.
Keene accepted. Over months of careful manipulation, he got close to Hall. He observed Hall carving wooden falcons in the prison workshop while studying a map with marked locations, sites Keene believed corresponded to burial locations of victims. Hall eventually confessed to Keene that he had killed Tricia Reitler, but he never revealed where her body was buried. The confession was not sufficient to bring additional charges, though it contributed to Hall’s appeal being denied.
This operation became the basis of Keene’s 2010 memoir, In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption, co-written with journalist Hillel Levin. In 2022, Apple TV+ adapted it into Black Bird, a six-episode miniseries starring Taron Egerton as Keene and Paul Walter Hauser as Hall. The show earned Hauser an Emmy for his portrayal of the confessing, recanting, inscrutable Larry Hall.
What Black Bird Left Out About the Larry Hall Twin
Black Bird presented Larry Hall as a lone predator: awkward, dangerous, operating in isolation. It was a compelling piece of television. It was also, in the view of at least some people who have studied the case closely, an incomplete picture. The show largely sidelined Gary Hall, reducing him to a background figure. The real story of the Larry Hall twin dynamic is considerably more complicated.
Larry and Gary Hall were monochorionic twinsIdentical twins who share a single placenta during pregnancy. Nutrient distribution in the womb is often unequal, sometimes leading to developmental differences between the siblings., meaning they shared a placenta. According to medical accounts, Gary received more nutrients in the womb, and Larry was born with oxygen deprivation that contributed to his cognitive deficits. From birth, the twins occupied opposite ends of the personality spectrum. Gary was outgoing, dominant, and socially adept. Larry was withdrawn, had a speech impediment, struggled academically, and suffered from night terrors and bedwetting well into his teens.
Both brothers developed an interest in Civil War reenactments after high school and traveled to events across multiple states together. This is a critical detail. Investigators believe the reenactment circuit is how Larry identified and stalked his victims: young women in small towns near event sites. If both twins attended the same events, in the same vehicle, with the same face, then any witness identification of “Larry” at or near a crime scene was, by definition, also a potential identification of Gary.
The Profile Problem
Criminal profiling is not an exact science, and this article does not claim to perform a clinical assessment. But certain behavioral patterns in serial predation are well-documented in criminological literature, and the contrast between the Hall twins is worth examining against that backdrop.
The FBI’s behavioral analysis framework, developed through decades of research into serial offenders, distinguishes between organized and disorganized offenders. Organized offenders tend to be socially competent, intelligent, charming enough to gain victims’ trust, and capable of planning and concealing crimes over long periods. Disorganized offenders tend to be socially inadequate, impulsive, and more likely to leave evidence behind.
Larry Hall, by every available account, was deeply disorganized in his personal life. He had learning disabilities, could barely hold a conversation, and was described by people who knew him as “backwards.” The idea that he successfully abducted, murdered, and concealed the bodies of dozens of women across multiple states over more than a decade, all without leaving physical evidence at the vast majority of scenes, strains against the profile of a disorganized offenderA criminal offender profile characterized by social inadequacy, impulsive behavior, and limited planning ability. Disorganized offenders typically leave evidence behind and commit crimes with less sophistication..
Gary Hall, by contrast, was the dominant twin. He was outgoing, socially fluent, physically confident. He could approach strangers without arousing suspicion. He was, in the language of profiling, the one with the social tools to operate as an organized predator.
This does not mean Gary Hall committed any crime. It means the contrast was obvious, and nobody with a badge appears to have examined it.
What Larry Said About Gary
Larry Hall’s own statements about his brother add a layer of unresolved ambiguity. According to author Christopher Hawley Martin, who wrote Urges: A Chronicle of Serial Killer Larry Hall (2010) and conducted extensive interviews about the case, Larry claimed his brother was “complicit in his crimes.” When asked whether Larry had help, Martin stated: “I think it is possible, even likely.”
Larry reportedly sent Gary a letter from prison accusing him of having told police he knew where several bodies were buried. Larry’s implication, according to those who have reviewed the correspondence, was that Gary knew the locations because Gary had buried them himself. Larry told at least one person he was “tired of protecting his brother.”
Hillel Levin, co-author of In with the Devil, described the relationship between the twins as “parasitic,” claiming Gary “literally thrived at the expense of Larry.”
These are allegations from a convicted kidnapper and suspected serial killer who made a career of confessing and recanting. They are not evidence. But they are statements that, in any thorough investigation, would normally prompt at least a formal inquiry into the person being named. There is no public record of such an inquiry ever taking place.
What Gary Said About Larry
Gary Hall’s own role in the investigation is itself unusual. He is the person who first brought Larry to law enforcement’s attention, reporting his brother’s bizarre behavior and what Gary initially dismissed as fantasies about killing women. Gary accompanied Indianapolis detectives to try to get Larry to confess in person. According to Gary’s account to CNN, Larry made him leave the room but then confessed on tape to fifteen murders.
Gary has stated publicly that he believes his brother killed multiple women. “I believe Larry killed Michelle,” he told interviewers, referring to one of the suspected victims. “I believe he killed a lot of young women, I’m sorry to say.”
He has also described Larry attempting to kill him on multiple occasions. “I just woke up out of a sound sleep to see my brother standin’ over me with this humongous long limb, getting ready to smash my skull,” Gary recounted.
Gary cooperated fully with investigators, spoke to officials freely, and was never treated as a suspect. He has no criminal record. He currently lives near Huntington, Indiana, is self-employed, and is by all public accounts living a quiet life. CNN has stated that “nothing indicates anyone but Larry committed these crimes.”
It is entirely possible that Gary Hall is exactly what he appears to be: a man who had the misfortune of being born the identical twin of a serial predator, who did the right thing by going to police, and who has lived with that knowledge for three decades. That possibility must be stated plainly.
The Investigation’s Blind Spot
The question is not whether Gary Hall is guilty. There is no evidence that he is. The question is whether the investigation was thorough enough to rule him out, and the answer, based on the public record, is that it never tried.
Consider what investigators knew: identical twins attended the same events in the same regions where women disappeared. One twin was socially capable; the other was not. The convicted twin claimed the other was complicit. The other twin claimed to know where bodies were buried. Their DNA was indistinguishable by the forensic methods available in the 1990s.
In the Golden State Killer case, investigators spent decades pursuing the wrong leads before genetic genealogy finally identified Joseph DeAngelo in 2018. That case demonstrated how investigative tunnel visionCognitive bias in criminal investigations where detectives focus narrowly on one suspect or theory and fail to consider alternative explanations or evidence that contradicts their chosen narrative. can persist for generations. In the Hall case, the tunnel vision was arguably worse: the alternative suspect was not some unknown figure in a database. He was standing in the same room, with the same face, cooperating with police.
The Crumbley case showed that the legal system is capable of expanding its lens beyond the person who pulled the trigger. The Larry Hall twin question asks whether investigators were willing to expand theirs.
Larry Hall’s defense at trial raised the possibility that he was a “serial confessorA person who falsely confesses to multiple serious crimes they did not commit, either due to psychological compulsion or interrogation pressure. Serial confessors complicate investigations by muddying evidentiary waters.,” a person who claims responsibility for crimes he did not commit. The Seventh Circuit took this seriously enough to overturn his first conviction. If Larry was confessing to crimes someone else committed, or to crimes he committed with someone else, the investigation’s failure to examine the most obvious candidate for “someone else” is a significant gap.
The Bodies That Were Never Found
Of the thirty-five or more murders Larry Hall confessed to and then recanted, only Jessica Roach’s case resulted in a conviction. Only a handful of the suspected victims’ bodies have ever been recovered. Tricia Reitler’s remains have never been found, despite multiple confessions from Hall about her murder. The vast majority of cases linked to Hall remain officially unsolved.
Indiana journalist Bob Segall of WTHR investigated several of these cases and found that Hall’s recanted confessions “cast shadow over unsolved Indiana cases” involving multiple women whose disappearances overlapped with reenactment events Hall attended.
Without bodies, without physical evidence, and with a suspect whose confessions were legally unreliable, these cases exist in a kind of evidentiary limbo. The families of the missing women have no closure. The investigation has nowhere to go. And the one avenue that was never explored, whether the Larry Hall twin brother played any role, remains unexplored.
Why This Matters Beyond One Case
The Larry Hall twin case is a study in what happens when an investigation finds a suspect who is “good enough” and stops looking. Larry Hall fit a certain narrative: the quiet loner, the social misfit, the man in the van. He confessed repeatedly. He was convicted. Case closed, except for the dozens of cases that were not closed at all.
The existence of an identical twin who traveled with the suspect, who was never investigated, and who was named by the suspect himself as complicit is the kind of fact that, in a well-resourced investigation, would have generated its own line of inquiry. It did not. Whether that was because Gary’s cooperation made him seem trustworthy, because investigators lacked the resources to pursue a second suspect, or because the “quiet loner” narrative was simply more satisfying is impossible to determine from the outside.
What is clear is that dozens of families are still waiting for answers. Larry Hall is serving life without parole at FCI Butner, North Carolina. He is not going anywhere. Neither, it seems, is the truth about what happened to the women whose names he spoke and then unsaid.
Investigation Discovery’s 2023 documentary Very Scary People: The Twin revisited this question, examining the relationship between the brothers and the unresolved aspects of the case. It did not reach a conclusion. Neither can we. But the question deserves to be asked more loudly than it has been.
Sources
- Newsweek, “‘Black Bird’: Who is Gary Hall and Where is He Now?” (2022)
- All That’s Interesting, “Inside The Brutal Crimes Of Suspected Serial Killer Larry Hall”
- WTHR Indianapolis, “Recanted confessions of Larry Hall cast shadow over unsolved Indiana cases”
- United States v. Hall, 165 F.3d 1095 (7th Cir. 1999), Justia
- Grunge, “What Happened To Serial Killer Larry Hall’s Twin Brother, Gary?”
- The Cinemaholic, “Gary Hall: Where is Larry Hall’s Brother Today?”
- History vs. Hollywood, “Black Bird vs. the True Story of James Keene and Larry Hall”
- IMDb, “Very Scary People: The Twin: Part 1” (2023)
