Kruthersville, Indiana. A quiet town in the heart of the American Midwest, a place where hardworking farmers and factory workers raised their families in peace. With a population of only 1,500, it was the kind of community where everybody knew everybody, where doors were left unlocked, and where violent crime was something that happened in faraway cities, not in your own backyard.
It’s a fairly small community like any other little town. Quiet. Everybody knew everybody.
It’s Indiana farm country. There’s a lot of creeks and small rivers running through the area.
For many years, the entire area of Jackson County, Indiana, had enjoyed a remarkably low crime rate. We used to like to say people would move here because this is peaceful and quiet and relatively crime-free. In 2005, the worst things the local police typically dealt with were an occasional theft, a break-in, or 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 usage.
Murder hadn’t happened here in probably 30 or 40 years.
That all changed in January of 2005.
On the west side of town lived John Nice and his wife Angie, along with their two daughters, Jessica and 10-year-old Caitlyn, nicknamed Katie for short. The baby of the family, Katie was known throughout the neighborhood for her outgoing nature, her wide smile, and her love of her dog.
She loved coloring, playing, riding bicycle, playing with her dog. Katie was like a normal 10-year-old child. She loved playing.
She was respectful, happy. She was a 10-year-old, joyful, very outgoing, gregarious individual. Never met a stranger she didn’t like.
January 25th, 2005, started like any other day for the Nice family. Katie got a ride to school from her father, John, who dropped her off with the usual morning routine.
Dropped her off and told her that I loved her and I’d see her that evening.
The afternoon passed quietly and without incident. The only sound was the voices of children’s laughter as the local school let out its students for the day. When school was over, Katie returned home.
Her mother asked her to run a simple errand at a nearby store, no more than 250 yards from where she lived. The store owner recognized Katie from the neighborhood and helped her with her purchase. It was the kind of small-town interaction that happened every day, the kind that nobody ever thought twice about.
At 4:00, when Katie didn’t come home from running the errand, John and Angie Nice started to worry.
I had went into work at 3:00 that day and later that evening my wife had called me and said that Katie was gone. I said, “What do you mean she’s gone?” She told me that she went to the dollar store and didn’t never come back.
I immediately called the sheriff’s department.
The initial information that was received was that she was last seen walking away from the store heading towards what was called Covenor Street in Kruthersville, Indiana. That was around 4:00 in the afternoon and nobody had seen her since.
Immediately, police sent out search parties to look for Katie Coleman. Their response was to go out, canvas the neighborhood, and see if they could locate her. Consequently, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department became involved, and the Indiana State Police Department became involved.
News of Katie’s disappearance spread quickly through the townsfolk of Kruthersville. Their reaction was much like what you would expect for a missing child. They were upset.
They organized local efforts to find Katie. Everyone was involved and worried about her and interested in finding Katie again.
As different leads would come in, investigators would talk mostly with John over at his house, gathering information and possibilities of where she might be or who she would be with.
My first thought was that she was probably a runaway.
Police spoke with John and Angie Nice. They insisted their youngest daughter would never run away from home. She had loving parents.
She had a family that cared very much about her.
As the night wore on, fear about Katie’s disappearance gripped the entire community. At the Nice home, John and Angie were facing every parent’s worst nightmare.
I told my wife stay by the phone because Katie knew the phone number. And if she was at a friend’s house, maybe she went to sleep and fell asleep and she would show up at school the next morning. I said, “Just in case I stay by the phone.”
I was very shook up because it’s my daughter, you know, and I didn’t know where she was at.
Angie waited anxiously at home while the search parties continued their hunt for signs of Katie. The community rallied around the search for Katie and around Katie and her family tremendously. The fire station was used as the headquarters for the investigation, and people from the community brought in all kinds of food for the searchers.
For the next 48 hours, search teams worked around the clock looking for Katie Coleman. A lot of the community spent sleepless hours searching for Katie. Pretty much looked everywhere we could think of.
I initially went and checked a few areas, some areas that hadn’t been checked yet. Got a picture of her and was showing around to a few of the communities a little bit away from there and just asking people or just looking for any possible lead anybody might have seen her.
January 27th arrived with no luck and very few leads. The FBI was brought in to assist with the investigation. Leading the investigation was Special Agent Tony Cidle.
We established a tip line and an Amber Alert went out after we became actively involved in the investigation. There was a lot of information that was coming in from the public that had to be assessed.
Agent Cidle compiled the information to help piece together Katie’s movements on the afternoon of her disappearance. Along the way, they determined she stopped at an apartment building that was along the route she would have traveled. She went to the Dollar General store.
She returned by the same route, returning to the same apartment complex.
Police discovered Katie went to the nearby apartment to visit school friends just after 4:00 p.m. Officials believed this was the last anyone saw of Katie.
Tips from the public continued to pour in. But one of the things that comes along with every Amber Alert is that people call if they have any inkling that they might be in possession of useful information. There were a lot of tips that came in from the public.
Every single one of those tips was investigated. Every single one.
January 28th brought a startling development. An eyewitness came forward with the information that she had seen Katie in a white pickup truck with a man. The woman recognized Katie but did not recognize the driver of the white pickup truck.
That struck her as a little odd. Thank goodness she was a very observant woman, and she was able to give the police an excellent description of the man.
We followed that lead. A composite sketch was prepared of the driver of that vehicle. We had some physical characteristics we were looking for in both the truck and the driver of the vehicle.
The initial composite was put out with a description of a white Ford F-150 and gave a description of a skinny white male, possibly wearing glasses and smoking a cigarette.
Armed with this eyewitness account, police focused their investigation on locating the truck. The first thing they did was run through the State Bureau of Motor Vehicle Records to find every white pickup truck and then hunted those people down and talked to them about what happened.
Police released the composite sketch of the driver to the media, and the image of the slender white male appeared on television reports and newspapers across the state. Investigators interviewed several men fitting the description, but none of them could be connected to the crime.
With each passing day, police hoped for the best but began to suspect the worst.
You just kind of get that feeling that this is not looking good. And then two or three days pass, then you kind of shift gears into a different mode.
My initial reaction was, well, she’s probably with a friend or maybe she’s mad and ran away and is hiding out someplace there in town and she’ll turn up in a day or two. But when that didn’t happen, it was obvious that something bad had happened to her.
The investigation grew in size and scope. Several police departments were now actively involved in the search for Katie Coleman across the state. They were looking all over the place here in town and then eventually expanded that to some of the more rural areas.
January 30th, while patrolling an area 20 miles north of Kruthersville, State Trooper Martin Me spotted something in Cypress Lake.
We got the call at about 10:00 on Saturday morning at our command post. He had spotted something that he believed might be a body that was in a spillway on the south side of Cypress Lake. And Cypress Lake is an area where they have found bodies in the past.
What began as a routine inspection of the area resulted in the discovery of the most 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 murder the people of Kruthersville had witnessed in over 40 years.
January 30th, 2005, Kruthersville, Indiana. 10-year-old Katie Coleman had been missing for 5 days. The FBI had issued an Amber Alert for Katie while local police continued to work around the clock chasing leads and processing tips from the public.
While patrolling an area 20 miles north of Kruthersville, State Trooper Martin Me had spotted something in Cypress Lake.
Officials wasted no time arriving on the scene.
I went up and spoke with Marty and he pointed out what he was looking at, and it was very difficult to see what he was seeing. It was a body dressed similarly to how Katie was, approximately the same size as Katie’s size. Her last known description was of her wearing a light blue coat, like a down coat.
You could see that in the water.
When the state police divers came in and got into the water and pulled Katie’s body out, it was confirmed that it was Katie, and it was just sad. A lot of people standing around had tears in their eyes, me included.
The tragic discovery of Katie’s body closed one chapter of the heinous crime and forced the police to shift the focus of their investigation.
We have to completely change gears to a homicide investigation to find out who did this to this girl.
Battling the cold January weather, police worked quickly and efficiently to secure the area, documenting every element of the crime scene exactly as it was found.
I had a little small camera just trying to take some pictures of how the scene was laid out. We had an evidence technician that came and took photographs there.
Crime Scene Investigator Chris Lewis was one of the first to arrive on the scene. Part of the job of crime scene investigator is documentation of that scene, which includes still photography and video keeping of the scene. So you can basically recreate this scene at other places for other people.
You want to be able to document where exactly the body was, the position of the body, and the condition of the body.
She was still completely clothed, and I don’t remember seeing any external injuries, you know, where you could see any knife wounds or bullet holes or anything else.
Special Agent Tony Cidle led a team of experts to collect physical evidence. The Indiana State Police evidence technicians recovered a large amount of debris from along the route that led to Cypress Lake. They spent hours combing those areas, searching for anything that might have been discarded that might link Katie to the scene or to the individuals that were responsible for Katie being deposited there.
Being a public area with 24-hour access to the public, there was a lot of potential evidence there. What a normal person may consider trash, soda cans, beer cans, straws, cigarette butts, documents, ATM receipts, was all collected, cataloged, photographed, and noted where it was found. A very professional and thorough job on everything that was picked up was done there because, as it turned out, they were going to do DNA testing on all of the objects that seemed appropriate for that.
The brutal nature of Katie’s murder shook even the most experienced police officials.
The circumstances of the recovery of her body in a body of water with her hands bound behind her back was very overwhelming for the investigators, I think, and perhaps for the evidence technicians. I know they see a lot of really bad things, but I was seeing a lot of grief in the investigators. I don’t know that you’re ever ready to see a little girl being pulled out of water.
I think that initially as you’re doing this, you’re holding on to some type of hope that she might be alive and you can get a return to appearance, but then to see as they’re bringing her body across the water, you can see her hands behind her back.
News of the discovery of Katie’s body spread quickly through the town. Now faced with a child killer in their community, the people of Kruthersville reacted with shock, fear, and anger.
Everybody was outraged. Her classmates from school were upset. The parents of other children were upset.
When you live in a small town like that, you have a certain sense of security that while children may be abducted and murdered somewhere else, it doesn’t happen in Kruthersville, Indiana.
I’m not sure how you deal with the loss of a child, let alone the murder of a child.
The FBI came to the house along with the chief of police here in town, and they informed us that they had found a body, and my heart fell out of my body. Quite honestly, I wanted to die, and then I wanted to find out who ever done it.
News media from across the country descended on Kruthersville to capture the story of the murdered schoolgirl. The town was overwhelmed by the sudden attention.
The coverage here was unheard of. This is a small community, and we may on occasion get regional news coverage here. But we had every TV station from Kentucky to Indianapolis here shooting footage with their trucks and all.
Word 𝓵𝓮𝓪𝓴𝓮𝓭 out to the media. We always talked about what was going to be released. There was a formal press conference later that same day.
The release was limited to the body had been recovered, where it had been recovered, and the fact that the investigation was continuing.
At the Kentucky State Medical Examiner’s Office, forensic scientists performed the lengthy autopsy on Katie’s body. The results provided some crucial clues to the mystery surrounding her murder.
We have the cause of death is drowning. That means we have a murder scene right there at Cypress Lake instead of somewhere else.
The autopsy contained further key details, helping investigators piece together the puzzle.
Her body was evaluated for trace evidence in the forms of hairs and fibers. We collected red fibers from Katie Coleman’s torso at the autopsy.
Every piece of microscopic evidence was collected and cataloged, but the most important discovery from the autopsy’s report was both troubling and telling.
There were samples and stuff taken from the autopsy that showed the presence of semen, and we knew that she had been sexually assaulted.
At the state police lab, forensic scientist Paulita Maguire developed a DNA profile from the evidence.
It was consistent with an unknown male individual at that time. So we did have some of the material present. We did have a DNA profile from that, but at the time we did not know whose DNA that was.
Police began to build a profile for the unknown murderer using both the evidence from the crime scene and psychological profiling.
There are not many people who will kidnap, sexually assault, and murder a 10-year-old child who has not in some meaningful way interacted with them previously. And clearly the murder was done to cover up his guilt and for no other reason.
Faced now with catching a child rapist and killer, Special Agent Tony Cidle doubled his efforts.
From that point, I requested and received a list of all the registered 𝒔𝒆𝒙 offenders for bordering counties and within Jackson County. And then we cross-referenced that to individuals, registered 𝒔𝒆𝒙 offenders, who might have had access to or had white Ford F-150s.
But on February 2nd, police got an unexpected break in the case. A startling confession to the murder of 10-year-old Katie Coleman.
February 2nd, Jackson County, Indiana. Police were investigating the brutal rape and murder of a local schoolgirl, Katie Coleman, found dead in a lake 20 miles from her home. After a week of following leads and tips from the public, investigators got a sudden break in the case.
20-year-old Kruthersville resident Charles Hickman called the police with a stunning confession.
On February the second, he confessed to being responsible for Katie’s death. He gave details that fit with what we knew based upon our investigation relative to her knowing that she had drowned. We hadn’t released that.
Armed with a sudden confession, police got ready to make an arrest. Unemployed and a known 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 user, Charles Hickman had a reputation for being less than credible. But the police could not afford to take any tip lightly.
They interrogated Hickman, careful not to reveal too much about the crime.
What you try to do is hold back something that the public wouldn’t know. And in this case, it was the fact that Katie’s hands were tied behind her and the manner in which they were tied.
He told us how she had drowned and where she drowned. Individuals involved identified the white Ford F-150 that was used to transport her to Cypress Lake. He had a home right there on the main drag, not far from where Katie lived.
So he would certainly have known Katie.
We examined the information. We presented a probable cause hearing with several police officers in front of Judge Vance, who then issued an arrest warrant, and Chucky Hickman was charged.
In the first of several interviews, Charles Hickman told police that on the afternoon of January 25th, Katie Coleman accidentally witnessed his illegal 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 use on her way home from the dollar store.
The apartment building that Katie had visited had at least one apartment in there that was involved in the production or manufacturer of methamphetamine and also the use of methamphetamine. She had perhaps encountered individuals using or producing methamphetamine. They panicked.
He came forward and confessed to the murder, claiming that Katie had been brought to his home. Hickman told his interrogators that he and his friends tied Katie’s hands behind her back to intimidate her into not going to the police.
He claimed that he had taken her to Cypress Lake to scare her, and he couldn’t recall whether she had fallen into Cypress Lake or if he had accidentally bumped her into Cypress Lake. And that she died because of that.
Hickman’s story was that she had accidentally fallen in and drowned, which was consistent with the way the body was recovered.
Right away, police started to build their case against Charles Hickman by compiling the evidence.
He frequented the apartment complex where we know she was last seen. He was friends with the occupants there. He had a friend who had a white F-150 truck.
But despite the strong evidence, investigators began to question several inconsistencies in Hickman’s confession.
Some of the things that he was saying from the very beginning didn’t match up. The composite came out shortly after she was missing and didn’t match Chucky Hickman. I think there was some disbelief just because everyone pretty much knew Chucky.
He was a high school dropout. Didn’t work. Just hung out.
Most significant, the DNA from Katie’s body didn’t match the blood sample Hickman provided. This was final and undeniable proof of his innocence.
Frustrated, police shifted their investigation once again.
When Hickman was arrested, we thought at that moment that we had solved the case. However, that turned out that we didn’t have the case solved. We weren’t even close.
We were fooled for some reason that I certainly don’t understand. Maybe out of some misguided desire to have the case solved, he came in and gave a confession.
Chucky Hickman made the whole thing up. His confession was based upon what he had read in the newspapers and what he had seen on TV.
That’s probably one of the other big questions of this whole tragedy. Why would you admit to a murder you didn’t commit?
Eventually, Charles “Chucky” Hickman was cleared of all charges relating to the murder of Katie Coleman. The people of Kruthersville reacted in shock and anger.
I was just beside myself. I just couldn’t believe that we had one person that had confessed to killing a 10-year-old child and then being told that no, he’s actually not the one that killed her.
With a child killer still at large, fear and terror continued to grip the small Indiana community.
Everybody started keeping a closer eye on their children because they realized just how fragile the peace is and what a slim line there is between your child’s safety and a brutal and vicious death.
Under pressure to make up for lost time, investigators continued to pursue drivers of white pickup trucks and process evidence recovered from the crime scene.
I looked at over 300 items of evidence. The actual amount of evidence was overwhelming because there were so many different leads in the case and we were going in so many different directions for a while.
DNA evidence is very accurate because no two people have the exact same DNA except for identical twins. Forensic scientists focused their efforts on the traces of DNA found on the cigarette butts close to where Katie’s body was discovered.
There were 10 collected from the actual crime scene. It was brought up that maybe we should just test the ones that were closest to Katie’s body. But the difference between two cigarette butts and 10 cigarette butts to a DNA analyst is minimal.
I’d rather just do all 10 of them.
And one of those actually came back and matched the semen material found in Katie’s body. And it actually ended up being one of the ones that was furthest away from her body that we got the match on the cigarette butt to.
Well, that was very big for a few reasons. It placed whoever molested Katie at the scene where she was killed. What we did not know was who had committed the crime.
The cigarette with the matching DNA was a rare brand available only at specialty stores.
It was a brand that I hadn’t heard of. I talked to other investigators. They had not heard of that brand.
So we contacted the manufacturer of the brand, determined that there were four local distributors of that particular brand, and notified them and requested their assistance.
I met with the managers there, and I requested that they call me if somebody came in here buying Roger cigarettes. It wasn’t very long after that I received a call, and the message was that a white male came into their store and purchased a carton of Roger Light 100s. Said he didn’t get his name, but he was driving a white Ford F-150.
And here’s the plate.
State Trooper Rob Simpson ran a check on the license plate through a dispatcher, and the plate returned to Anthony Stockman.
I knew he was a person of interest early on. So I called to the command center and talked to Tony and said, “Hey, you know, this is what it is and this is who it’s come back to. I mean, you know, this could be something good.”
Police now focused their investigation on Anthony Stockman, a factory worker from the neighboring town of Seymour, Indiana. Since he had a white truck and matched the composite sketch, he was one of the many persons of interest questioned by police early in the investigation. At the time, the 39-year-old father of two had a solid alibi provided by his wife.
With the license plate matching his white pickup truck, Anthony Stockman was now the number one suspect in the murder of Katie Coleman. Police got ready to close in on their suspected killer.
Kruthersville, Indiana. Police investigating the murder of Katie Coleman were one step closer to solving the brutal crime that had terrified this peaceful Indiana community for several weeks. Armed with DNA evidence that placed the smoker of a rare brand of cigarettes at the scene of the crime, police closed in on factory worker Anthony Stockman.
Went to his residence and recontacted him to determine if he would consent to a sample of DNA. And I remember pulling up to his house. We went to go interview him, and soon as we drove in, I seen the white Ford F-150, and again it was even described as an older white Ford truck, and everything matched, just completely the way that that was initially described to us by this witness.
I think he was shocked that we were back. He thought he was home free. He knew one individual had been arrested, had confessed, and he thought he was off the hook.
Police questioned Stockman at his house, insisting that he was innocent. Stockman repeated his story from the first interview, telling police why he was in Kruthersville at the time of Katie’s disappearance.
What took him to this particular location at the time of Katie’s disappearance was he was moving furniture out of a family member’s residence. That’s the reason he had his truck at that particular location. He did not volunteer any information except that he hadn’t been to Cypress Lake in 8 to 10 years.
So that he couldn’t possibly be responsible for placing Katie’s body up at Cypress Lake.
Stockman willingly provided a sample of his DNA, proof of his innocence or involvement in the crime.
This is a homicide of a 10-year-old child. DNA results can be obtained in just a couple days if that’s all you’re doing. That’s all you’re working on.
And on this particular case, I worked on it solid every day that I came in the laboratory.
Police waited in anticipation for the results. The single DNA findings could potentially sum up months of tough police investigation. The mood was tense.
You’re in the DNA room. People don’t just come in there. They’re waiting outside for the results.
Everyone kind of wanted to know if we had actually finally solved the case after we tested 73 male individuals.
And 2 days later, I called them back and said, “We have a match.”
You know, I had cold chills when we finally got this guy. You could just tell from his manner that this was him.
Special Agent Cidle contacted local prosecutor Steven Pearson and arranged for an affidavit for the arrest of Anthony Stockman. As final proof of Stockman’s role in the murder, Cidle conducted a test using the rare brand of cigarette found at the crime scene.
In an effort to disprove what amounts to some kind of an alibi by Stockman, Tony Cidle set up an experiment where he put cigarette butts out and 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 them in the same area at the same time of year. I had already determined from the manufacturer that it was only available in the area for approximately the last 5 years. I also determined that it was not possible for his cigarette to have survived out there for 8 to 10 years.
That cigarette would have degraded to the point that it wouldn’t have been recoverable.
With the arrest warrant in hand, police prepared to close in on Anthony Stockman. Together, Trooper Rob Simpson and FBI Special Agent Tony Cidle drove to Stockman’s house to make the arrest.
Upon our arrival, nobody was home at that time. We was kind of sitting there watching the place, and I called him on his cell phone. Detective Simpson asked him where he was at because we needed to speak further with him about his DNA.
He said, “Well, you know, he was down at the Karate studio with his son.” He agreed that, yeah, come by and we can talk again.
So Tony and I are the only ones that went over there to meet him again. We don’t want to do anything to spook him too bad. Plus, he’s in a karate studio with other kids.
Don’t know what his mindset is. And obviously, our belief is that he killed Katie Coleman.
Stockman was waiting for the officers in the parking lot of the karate studio. After he agreed to get inside the car, Detective Rob Simpson began to drive to another isolated parking lot.
Tony was in the front seat passenger side, and Anthony Stockman was sitting right behind Tony. Agent Cidle reached around and said, you know, shake my hand or something, and so he did that and grabbed a hold of his right hand, and we have an arrest warrant for you and you’re under arrest for the molestation of Katie Coleman.
April 7th, 2005. Anthony Stockman was arrested without incident and put in jail where he was held without bail.
Throughout the interrogations, Stockman maintained his innocence.
Tony Stockman was not informed that his DNA was on the cigarette that was recovered at that particular time. He was informed that his DNA had been recovered from the body of Katie Coleman. His response was incredulous.
He didn’t understand how it could be on Katie Coleman. He did not even know her. He’d never spoken to her.
A press conference was held to release the news of Stockman’s arrest and charge to the media. Once again, the small town was besieged by reporters from across the country.
We were inundated with network news and large city daily papers. At times it was a media circus. The large trucks with TV antennas and cameras were a regular feature here in Kruthersville for a while.
It was something totally different than we’d ever had before.
With accused rapist and murderer Anthony Stockman safely behind bars, authorities planned for what would be a difficult and controversial trial. With Charles Hickman having confessed to the crime, would the prosecution’s case stand up in court?
Charged with the sexual assault and murder of 10-year-old Katie Coleman, factory worker Anthony Stockman was behind bars awaiting trial.
I had my suspect, and I started working on the trial immediately because we did ask for the death penalty initially, and that takes an incredible amount of work.
Prosecutors set to work building their case and sifting through the evidence.
We had a witness who said that they saw Katie in a white Ford F-150 truck within approximately half an hour of her disappearance. The composite sketch was Tony Stockman, a tall, thin white man with short hair, smoking.
Furthermore, Stockman’s alibi that he was helping his mother move out of her house now provided police with further proof of his guilt.
He was at the residence 137 feet from where Katie was last seen. At least have class characteristics on several of the fibers collected from Katie Coleman’s clothing and her body that matched back to the class characteristics of the red fibers in the carpeting of Anthony Stockman’s mother’s home. In my mind, that sealed the fate of Tony Stockman.
What that told us was the sexual assault occurred in the back bedrooms on that red carpet.
But the defendant evidence was the DNA evidence. There were three sources of the same DNA. They had taken a swab from Stockman himself.
They had DNA from the cigarette butt, and they had DNA from the semen found on Katie’s body.
Despite the evidence against Anthony Stockman, there were several challenges facing the prosecution. When police first questioned Stockman, his wife had provided a solid alibi.
Initially, she backed him. In fact, I think it was her quote, you know, “I back him 100%.” She stood beside him and said that I know he didn’t do this.
But that wasn’t real long that she was convinced that, I think just from the fact, not by us, you know, we didn’t go trying to convince her. I think just from knowing the facts that we had against him, she knew he was lying.
But the biggest challenge was the confession from Chucky Hickman.
I fully expected that the defense would try to point the finger at Chucky Hickman and say he confessed. He’s the one that did this. Pay no attention to the DNA evidence.
Chucky Hickman is the murderer. Why are they picking on my client?
Prosecutor Steven Pearson had an enormous task ahead of him. Not only must he prove beyond a reasonable doubt Stockman’s guilt of the crime, he must also convince the jury of Hickman’s innocence.
But after months of negotiations, the case never made it to trial. On the advice of his lawyers, Anthony Stockman accepted a plea bargain.
But he agreed to plead guilty again. I think it was in exchange for life without parole instead of the death penalty.
April 20th, 2006, the day of the hearing and sentencing for Anthony Stockman. The mood in the packed courtroom was tense and highly charged as those in attendance waited for the proceedings to start.
The courtroom was filled with family, friends, community members, and investigators that had a vested interest in this investigation. It was very emotional for all of the individuals who were sitting in the gallery in the courtroom and for all the individuals that testified because it was the culmination of months worth of work.
Anthony Stockman was brought into the packed courtroom. The crowd hushed and leaned in for a better look at the accused child killer.
Everybody maintained a level of being calm throughout that, which I think you can’t imagine how difficult that would be, sitting there right across the room from someone who took your child away from you. He was very stoic. He was very unemotional.
Seemed disinterested. Seemed bored.
When he was brought into the courtroom, I remember hearing someone yelling out, “Why’d you do it, Tony?” It was his wife. But he never answered why.
And I think to this day, everyone is still wanting to know.
After a thorough presentation of the facts of the case, presiding Judge Vance listened to a victim impact statement from Katie’s father, John Nice.
I just told the judge that they want to say that Tony’s kids are the biggest losers in this whole ordeal. I beg to differ. They’re actually the biggest winners because they don’t have to live their life wondering if their father’s going to mistreat them.
Katie is ultimately the biggest loser. She paid the ultimate price with her life.
After listening to all of the evidence and the testimonies, Judge Vance delivered his sentence.
The sentence that Stockman received was life without parole for the murder of Katie Coleman, and I believe he received 30 years for the child molesting as well.
The community reacted quickly to the sentencing.
There are some folks in this and other communities that think because of the crime he committed against a 10-year-old girl that he ought to be put to death. My view though is sometimes there are things worse than death, and being in a prison as an admitted child molester is one of them. There is such a thing as jailhouse justice.
It’s swift. It’s frequent. And there’s no court of appeals.
The public is safe. Mr. Stockman is not going to get out, and the Nice family is at peace.
His life in the free world will never be again. He can’t get out here and hurt any more kids. He’s just done.
Anthony Stockman is behind bars for the rest of his life with no possibility of parole. For many, life in this peaceful Indiana town will never be the same.
I mean, we’ve had murders, but they’re so infrequent, and they were adults then. This happened to a 10-year-old little girl, and it meant something different. It meant something more profound.
It’s just stripped away another layer of innocence that perhaps we could claim.
The case of Katie Coleman, the joyous little girl with the wide smile and generous spirit, has left a lasting impression on those involved.
Every time I drive by that lake, it all comes back, and I go by that lake all the time. Just a tough case.
What stands out most that I take with me on a daily basis in this case is the strength of community. The family is still an important part of the community down there, and I think it made that community stronger.
She’s still here. I mean, she may not be here in body, but she’s here in spirit. Every moment, she’s right here with us.
