Junior High Librarian Linked to Eyler
Ex-librarian Receives $17,000 Settlement
by Scott Hall
Decatur Township school officials will not say why a Decatur Junior High School librarian was paid more than $17,000 upon his resignation this month. Michael J. Olds, 39, has left his position as “media center specialist” at the junior high, where he had worked since the beginning of the 1989-90 school year. The register of claims from the February 12 school board meeting shows that Olds was paid $17,007.80 from the district’s debt service fund. Olds was mentioned in connection with the Larry Eyler murder case in a December 19 story in the Indianapolis Star.
Eyler is on death row in Illinois for the brutal murder and dismemberment of a young male prostitute in August 1984, and he is the prime suspect in more than 20 similar murders committed in the Midwest in the early 1980s. Decatur administrators would not comment on whether Olds was asked to resign, whether he had taken any legal action to win the payment, or whether Olds’s resignation had any connection with his possible involvement in the Eyler case.
The district has filed no charges against Olds, and personnel director Brad Eshelman said Olds listed “only personal reasons” for his resignation. A February 1 memo from Eshelman to Superintendent G. W. Montgomery cites February 20 as the last workday for Olds, but Montgomery said Olds’s last day in the building was December 19, the day the Star article was published. Reached at his northwest side Indianapolis home Thursday, a man who identified himself as Olds also declined to comment on his resignation.
Decatur Township Librarian Linked to Eyler Case
by Scott Hall and Rick Moore
A man who resigned this month as librarian of Decatur Junior High School had ties to a convicted killer and once testified before a grand jury investigating a series of bizarre murders. The librarian, Michael J. Olds, 39, is a former roommate of Larry W. Eyler, a convicted murderer believed responsible for at least 23 brutal stabbing deaths committed in the Midwest in the early 1980s. The Eyler case is detailed in Freed to Kill, a 1990 book by former WLS-TV reporter Gera-Lind Kolarik. Kolarik was the first to alert authorities about similarities between murders in Illinois and Indiana.
According to the book, Eyler was indicted by a Lake County, Ill., grand jury in 1983 for the brutal murder of Chicago resident Ralph Calise in August of that year. Eyler was released in February 1984 after a judge ruled that crucial evidence had been obtained illegally. In August 1984, the dismembered body of Danny Bridges, a 15-year-old Chicago Street hustler, was found near Eyler’s apartment.
Eyler was convicted and is now on death row in Illinois for that crime, and in December 1990 he confessed to the 1982 murder of Stephen Agan of Terre Haute. ISU professor charged Eyler also implicated Robert D. Little, chairman of the library science department at Indiana State University, in Agan’s death. Little has been suspended from the university and is awaiting trial April 2 in Vermillion County.
