Prosecutor Disputes Claims About Reopening Slaying Case

by Newport (AP)

A Chicago author’s claim her book on convicted killer Larry Eyler prompted the reopening of the eight-year-old Steve Agan murder case is incorrect, Vermillion County Prosecutor Larry Thomas says. And Eyler’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner assailed the book as exploitive. Eyler has pleaded guilty to Agan’s murder and is scheduled to appear in Vermillion Circuit Court Friday at 2 p.m. for a sentencing hearing.

Eyler is under the death sentence in Illinois for another murder. “Leading people to believe her book caused this investigation to take place is completely incorrect.” Thomas told the Terre Haute Tribune-Star Wednesday. Thomas referred to a report in the Chicago Tribune that Geraline Kolarik, author of “Freed to Kill, The True Story of Larry Eyler,” believes the publication of her book “jarred investigators out of a state of complacency.”

Thomas reopened the Agan case in March 1987, the newspaper reported, and secretly recruited Sheriff Perry Hollowell. then a sheriff’s deputy, to begin renewed efforts for an in-depth investigation early in 1988. He began collecting and sifting through pertinent information in 1989 before bringing all the evidence against Eyler in more than 13 unsolved murder investigations together in October.

Thomas said secrecy was the key that allowed him and Hollowell to accumulate, sufficient hard evidence against Eyler in the Agan murder. “I didn’t tell Kolarik we were working on the Agan case. She didn’t even know the case had been reopened until she talked to a reporter from The Tribune-Star.” Hollowell said Kolarik wrote very little about the Agan murder since she had only limited knowledge about it. He and the prosecutor agreed not to go on record with the news media until the Agan case was near completion.

“We didn’t want to turn this thing into a media circus. Now every time she calls me, she says, ‘Don’t forget to mention my book.” Zellner said Eyler Is appalled that the author of a book he hasn’t read is trading on the misery of victims’ families. “Kolarik has never exchanged a single work with Larry Eyler and never will,” Zellner said. “Eyler told me he thinks it Is pathetic that someone Is attempting to profit from the misery he caused.”.