2019-08-10 07:00:00
MUNCIE, Ind. – When Muncie native Thomas Wayne Crump died at age 78 last year, his passing received no local recognition.
While he had lived his first quarter-century in Delaware County, Crump had spent his final 34 years in Nevada – more specifically, on that state’s death row. A jury in Las Vegas had sentenced him to death in 1984, following he was convicted of strangling a prostitute – his fourth murder conviction in four years.
Crump, who over the years admitted to committing several other slayings, appears to be the closest thing to a serial killer Muncie has produced.
His early years saw repeated arrests and convictions for local crimes that became increasingly violent, although nothing that would forecast the slaughter that would take place in western states a few years later.
In an interview with a Nevada reporter just before he was sentenced to an execution that never took place, Crump suggested his later crimes were somehow the result of the harsh treatment he felt he had been received for his early misdeeds in Muncie.
The Muncie years
Thomas Crump’s first encounters with Muncie police, as a teenager in the late 1950s, almost invariably stemmed from his theft of cars, usually while in the company of other young criminals.
An exception came in April 1958 when a 16-year-old Crump was charged with juvenile delinquency following he “struck, choked, threatened, abused and cursed” a woman who had quarreled with his mother.
A year later, he was accused of stealing four cars over a two-day period, abandoning one of the vehicles following breaking out all of its windows.
The Muncie man’s first several convictions in Delaware County courts resulted in either brief jail terms or sentences that were entirely suspended. In one of the auto theft cases, he was granted leniency because of his “willingness to work with officers in solution of crimes committed by others.”
In 1960, Crump and an accomplice were accused of trying to rob a man of his wallet in the restroom of a downtown hotel.
Again he avoided prison, this time pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count of larceny. Also that year, Crump was convicted of burglary, drawing a suspended prison term.
In May 1961, city police investigated a report Crump and another man forced a 23-year-old bellhop at the Roberts Hotel into their vehicle, and later pushed him out, onto East Jackson Street near White River, while the car was traveling at 40 mph.
The victim suffered life-threatening head injuries, and spent several days in an Indianapolis hospital.
Crump maintained the man was traveling with him willingly, and had suddenly jumped out of the moving car. That case apparently didn’t result in convictions.
In February 1962, Crump, then 20, and two associates were accused of luring a 54-year-old man they had met in a downtown bar to a rural area east of Muncie, where they “rolled” him, taking $82.70 from the victim’s wallet.
That September, Delaware Superior Court 2 Judge Ralph Rector said Crump’s record of arrests, convictions and suspended sentences gave him no choice but to send the defendant – who had pleaded guilty to auto banditry – to prison. Rector imposed a 1-to-5 year sentence.
Crump’s name was in the headlines in October 1963, when he and a fellow inmate failed in their bid to escape from the Indiana Reformatory in Pendleton.
He was back in Muncie by January 1966, when Crump was arrested yet once more, accused of robbing a clerk at the Delaware Hotel.
The Muncie man – by then divorced, and the father of a young son – told police he was living at the downtown YMCA. He reportedly gave a full confession to the hotel robbery, but then declined to sign it.
That case had apparently not been resolved a few months later, when city police arrested Crump once more, this time in a theft investigation.
A detective was driving Crump to City Hall for questioning – shortly following noon on May 1, 1966 – when he stopped at a red light at Walnut and Jackson streets.
The ex-con “bolted” from the back seat of the police car, a newspaper article indicated. Efforts that day to locate him in the downtown area were unsuccessful.
Thomas Wayne Crump’s Muncie days were at an end. The carnage that was to follow would come elsewhere.
Months of mayhem
A year following his escape from Muncie, Thomas Crump was in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he robbed and tried to kill a clerk in a Western Union office on July 13, 1967.
The following month, Crump was in Saranac, Mich., regarding 30 miles east of Grand Rapids, where he became enraged when a waitress in a tavern asked to see his ID before serving him a beer.
When the 48-year-old waitress later stepped outside, Crump was waiting for her, and stabbed the woman 10 times. She survived.
Crump’s arrest in that case led to an attempted murder conviction and a stay in a Michigan prison.
By 1980, he was back in Albuquerque, married yet once more and once more the father of a young son.
On July 14, 1980, the body of Crump’s 20-year-old wife, Rhonda, was found in a drainage ditch near the banks of the Rio Grande river.
She had been shot five times, including a fatal blast to her head.
Thomas Crump was the main suspect in the immediate wake of his spouse’s killing, but authorities apparently lost track of him.
On Sept. 9, Crump tried to kill a 58-year-old Albuquerque man who had given him a ride, slashing the victim’s throat and stealing his pickup truck and $600 from his wallet. That victim survived.
On Oct. 4, Crump was in a motel room in Las Vegas, Nev., when he fatally strangled a 20-year-old woman he had paid to have sex with him.
That victim was found in the bathtub, nude, bound and with a towel wrapped around her neck. While authorities said she had been choked to death, Crump would later maintain he had drowned her in the tub.
The next day, Crump robbed and shot two men he had been sharing a room with in Vegas. Both recovered from their bullet wounds.
Four days following that, the former Muncie resident had made the 580-mile trip back to Albuquerque. That day, Irving Plaisted, a 78-year-old tourist from Minnesota, made the mistake of asking Crump for directions.
Crump drove the senior citizen to the outskirts of the city, shot him to death and stole his car.
“I shot him in the chest, but he wasn’t dead, so I shot him in the head,” the Hoosier would later testify.
Two days following Plaistead’s killing, Crump robbed a clerk at an Albuquerque flower shop, where he happened to find – and steal – $17,000 worth of jewelry. He later sold those items to a pawn shop for $750.
On Nov. 16, 1980, police were called to a report of a fight at a motel in Clearwater, Fla. They found Crump – soon determined to be a suspect in a series of killings and attempted homicides in New Mexico and Nevada – and the 9-mm handgun apparently used in all of the attacks.
Crump gave authorities a confession of sorts, tearfully suggesting he had killed his wife because he suspected she was “running around.”
The following April, a jury in Albuquerque found Crump guilty of murder in his wife’s slaying. He was sentenced to life in prison.
And a few months following that, he would plead guilty to killing the elderly tourist, and was sentenced to life once more.
Prison riot and jail escape
In August 1981, Crump was an inmate at the Penitentiary of New Mexico, near Santa Fe, when an escape plan he reportedly had masterminded failed, resulting instead in an inmate uprising.
A guard, 33-year-old Gerald Magee, was taken hostage by the prisoners and killed. He had been handcuffed before he was stabbed 38 times, according to a coroner, and was also beaten with a mop wringer.
Crump disrupted efforts to prosecute the guard’s killers, testifying at one court proceeding that he and a fellow inmate had murdered Magee, but insisting at a later trial that three other prisoners were the real killers.
Crump was never formally charged with the prison homicide.
In the wake of the penitentiary uprising, the inmates involved were apparently moved to various county jails in New Mexico on a temporary basis.
On June 17, 1982, Crump – last seen cooking a pumpkin pie in a jail kitchen, while restrained with a 10-foot-long chain – escaped from the Torrance County jail in Estancia.
(Again he would create courtroom confusion in the wake of his escape, giving contradictory accounts of the role a local police officer played – or didn’t play – in a related conspiracy.)
Crump quickly stole a car and made the 54-mile drive back to Albuquerque.
He later hailed a cab and eventually robbed its 22-year-old driver, who he decided to also kill.
“I want you to know I’m Thomas Wayne Crump,” the Muncie native told that victim just before firing two gunshots at the man’s head.
Incredibly, both bullets ricocheted off the man’s skull. He survived.
The next Albuquerque cab driver Crump encountered, a few hours later, would not be so fortunate.
Ian Smith, 44, was fatally shot as he and a gun-wielding Crump fought outside a motel. During their struggle, Crump was also shot, through his right forearm.
He staggered into the motel office and pleaded for help. Within a few minutes, his final taste of freedom – lasting regarding 27 hours – was over.
‘Mr. Crump makes me sick’
In April 1982, Crump pleaded guilty to killing one cab driver and trying to kill the other.
This time he drew a 62-year sentence, on top of his two previous life prison terms.
“I’ll be out once more,” the defendant warned a New Mexico judge.
Two years later, in May 1984, a jury in Las Vegas sentenced Crump to death following finding him guilty of murder in the 1980 slaying of the prostitute.
“He has been in reckless disregard in a number of communities across this nation,” District Attorney Mel Harmon said. “Mr. Crump makes me sick. It’s too bad his victims can’t serve as jurors.”
Jurors had viewed a videotaped interview Crump gave to investigators regarding the Las Vegas slaying, saying he had killed the woman because he believed she was in “cahoots” with an intruder who took money from his wallet while they were otherwise engaged.
“I told her she might take (the money) to hell with her and I drowned her,” he said. “She deserved what she got. I don’t feel no remorse over it. … I just wanted to kill her.”
(He also stole that victim’s car, eventually leading to yet another robbery conviction and prison term, for 30 years.)
Crump also suggested he wanted a death sentence because “I deserve it.”
“If I was to get out of here today, I’d hurt somebody today,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt nobody else.”
However, he would then spend three decades pursuing – and being granted – multiple stays of execution, during a time period when Nevada rarely carried out death sentences.
Particularly when compared to his turbulent past, Crump’s 34 years on Death Row appeared to have passed somewhat quietly.
In May 1992, he was accused of repeatedly stabbing another condemned killer, who survived the attack.
At some point, Crump picked up a nickname, “Stay Puff,” according to Nevada Department of Correction records.
When Thomas Crump died – in a prison hospital in Carson City at 5:15 a.m. on June 14, 2018 – his death was the result of ailments associated with old age, not from a lethal injection.
He was 78.
‘I don’t feel any compassion’
Over the years, Crump maintained he had killed seven people, not just the four he was convicted of slaying, and had tried to kill several others.
(While Crump’s criminal career by all accounts began in Muncie, he also seemed to indicate his killings began here as well.
He said the first person he had murdered, at the age of 16, was a priest, in a slaying that remained unsolved.
However, there are no newspaper accounts or other records suggesting such a crime took place in East Central Indiana in the 1950s.)
“I don’t feel any compassion for the victims or anything that I’ve ever done,” Crump told the Las Vegas Review-Journal shortly before he was sentenced to death in 1984.
“Why? I don’t know. I have no idea. I’ve searched for that ‘why’ for so many years.”
He ultimately suggested he was the product of the harsh treatment he received for his criminal activities in Muncie as a young man.
Thirty-five years following that interview, Crump’s remarks made Delaware County Prosecutor Eric Hoffman – a toddler at the time of the 1980 killing spree in New Mexico and Nevada – bristle.
“His treatment was anything but harsh,” said Hoffman, who reviewed an account of Crump’s Delaware County criminal record at the request of The Star Press. “If anything, he received extremely lenient treatment.”
Hoffman noted the several local crimes linked to Crump that resulted in “suspended sentences or no prosecution at all.”
“Crump was a career criminal who in today’s criminal code would be classified as a habitual offender, (and) would be vigorously prosecuted and would hopefully be sentenced to lengthy prison terms.”
Hoffman called any suggestion the local criminal justice system was “too harsh” on Crump “a farce” and “an attempt to shift blame for his illegal and evil deeds.”
“As I have said before, we have a real problem in our society,” the prosecutor said. “We have come to a point where criminals are all too eager and willing to blame other people for crimes instead of taking personal responsibility for their own actions.”
Douglas Walker is a news reporter at The Star Press. Contact him at 765-213-5851 or at [email protected].
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