Father's nightmare relived

[Controlled Chaos]

 

 

A TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT

 

Father's nightmare relived

Allen Learst's son was murdered by Danny Rouse. Despite Learst's pleas, Rouse was freed. What happened next was unthinkable.

 

 

By Rex W. Huppke

Tribune staff reporter

 

January 26, 2007

 

MANKATO, Minn. -- Allen Learst's phone rang the day after Halloween. He answered, heard a woman's voice, a television reporter from Indianapolis.

 

"Is this Allen Learst?" she asked.

 

"Yes, it is."

 

"Are you the same Allen Learst whose son was killed by Danny Rouse?"

 

"Yes," Learst said. "I am."

 

Rouse. That awful name, burned like a brand on his memory nearly three decades ago. Late October 1979. Learst was told his 5-year-old boy, Jason, had been murdered, his throat slit while he slept.

 

Danny Rouse did it. He was convicted and was supposed to spend his life in a Kansas prison.

 

For Learst, justice made sense. But in 1994, after only 15 years, Rouse became eligible for parole.

 

Horrified, the father showed up before the Parole Board. He spoke of how Rouse's crime tore him and his family to pieces. He begged them to show no mercy.

 

A cycle began. Every few years Rouse would go before the board and Learst would write impassioned letters sparing no detail, forced to relive the worst moments of his life.

 

It worked. Until last year. In March, Rouse was set free, paroled to a brother's home in Indiana. Without explanation, a life sentence had been shortened to 26 years.

 

About seven months after Rouse's release, Learst got the call from the reporter.

 

"There's a girl gone missing here in Indiana," she said. "They've picked up Danny Rouse."

 

Learst winced. The room blurred.

 

Two desperate words escaped.

 

"Oh no."

 

Stephanie Wagner grew up in Royal Center, a tiny town in the pancake-flat heart of north-central Indiana. She was 16 and met Danny Rouse last fall after landing her first job as a waitress at the Indian Head Restaurant, a diner about 15 miles north of her home.

 

Rouse was a dishwasher. Quiet. The boss routinely yelled at him to work harder.

 

Stephanie was sweet and attentive to customers, always keeping busy.

 

"You don't meet many 16-year-olds who want to work hard," said owner Mike Fitousis.

 

On Halloween night, after the restaurant closed, Stephanie prepped the tables for the next morning's customers and Rouse sat in a corner booth by the gumball machine rolling silverware in white paper napkins. He didn't usually do this--it was Stephanie's job. When she saw how he'd helped, she thanked him politely.

 

She walked into the kitchen, punched her time card and headed for the door, with Rouse not far behind. Under the pink glow of the parking lot's security light, Rouse and Stephanie said good night to each other. Each got in their car and drove off.

 

That was the last time anyone saw Stephanie Wagner alive.

 

Allen Learst's son was born in 1974 in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The boy's parents were in their 20s, a couple of hippie kids trying to find their way.

 

They split in 1977. Kathryn Crowley took Jason with her to Wichita, Kan., to start a new life.

 

Learst always kept in close touch with his son by phone, and they spent time together whenever possible. In the summer of 1979, Learst was in Michigan doing fieldwork for the federal fish and wildlife service.

 

Earlier that year, Crowley had met Danny Rouse, a friend of a friend. Rouse was a native of northwest Indiana and had recently moved to Kansas.

 

He worked as a drill press operator at a Wichita factory. Crowley got a bad vibe from him at first, but eventually felt comfortable enough to let him stop by her duplex from time to time.

 

On the night of Oct. 28, Jason was tucked in bed asleep. With Halloween coming, he'd been making plans to wear a snap-button cowboy shirt and a pair of toy six-shooters.

 

Rouse came over about 8 p.m. with some beer. He and Crowley had a couple of drinks, smoked two joints and watched "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" on TV.

 

When the movie ended, Rouse asked Crowley if she wanted to have sex. She said no. Rouse said he was going to leave and asked her to get the rest of his beer from the refrigerator.

 

As she reached into the fridge, Rouse struck her from behind and began stabbing her.

 

"I didn't think he would stop stabbing me unless he thought I was dead, so I fell limp," she testified during Rouse's trial.

 

Rouse, believing he'd killed Crowley, went to Jason's bedroom and slit his throat, killing him.

 

"I heard my son die," Crowley said during the trial. "He didn't cry out or anything. It was just the sound of him dying."

 

Rouse then went to the bathroom, washed blood from the knife and from himself. He removed the empty beer cans from the trash, turned off the television, pulled down several window shades, turned off the lights and left, locking the door behind him.

 

He drove off, sold his car to a friend for $20 and boarded a bus bound for Chicago.

 

U.S. Highway 35 runs north and south through the Indiana town of Winamac, its two lanes curving past the front of the Indian Head Restaurant. On Halloween night, a cook standing outside saw Stephanie Wagner turn her green Chevy Lumina north on U.S. 35, likely to run a quick errand or stop and get gas. She would eventually head south, toward her home in Royal Center.

 

Danny Rouse left the restaurant at the same time and drove south. The cook didn't think anything of this, but it was odd. Rouse lived with his brother in Monterey. He should've taken the highway north.

 

As Stephanie made her way home, through tiny Star City, past the towering grain elevators of Thornhope, police believe her headlights shone on a SUV pulled over on the west side of the road.

 

It was Rouse's Geo Tracker. The hood was up.

 

That Stephanie would pull over on a dark, rural highway to help a 51-year-old man she barely knew was no surprise. Friends say that was just her nature.

 

Until about a year before, she was a high school student in Royal Center, a member of a public service club and a manager of the girl's basketball team. But she dropped out last November to be home-schooled, hoping to spend more time helping raise her 5-year-old brother.

 

Stephanie never talked much about college or plans for the future. Jennifer Hayden, 17, a close friend, said she lived in the moment, loved to socialize, thrilled at blowing her weekly paycheck at the nearby Wal-Mart.

 

She was trusting, helpful.

 

And on Halloween night, police say she and Danny Rouse were alone on a dark stretch of road flanked by two harvested cornfields.

 

At a probable cause hearing on Nov. 2, Cass County Sheriff's Detective Tom Wallace recounted Rouse's explanation of what happened next: "Mr. Rouse told us that this feeling that he really can't describe come over him, and that he attacked Stephanie Wagner."

 

Learst had spent the summer and early fall of 1979 roaming the tributaries of the Great Lakes for the fish and wildlife service, looking for signs of sea lamprey, an eel-like fish that preys on trout and salmon. When his boss told him the trip was being cut a day short, it was no surprise. It was a rainy fall. Their work was winding down anyway.

 

His boss knew what had happened to Learst's son but couldn't bear to tell him. When Learst returned to his apartment in the little town of Marquette, Mich., his girlfriend was waiting.

 

"I've got something to tell you," she said, "and it's going to be the hardest thing you'll ever hear in your life."

 

Jason was dead. Murdered. Kathryn was clinging to life in a Kansas hospital.

 

The words--Jason is dead--became a marker cemented in time. Learst's life was forever split into before and after, and the after became a slow parade of sorrowful events.

 

They buried Jason in eastern Michigan. It was raining at the funeral. The leaves were off the trees. Learst remembers little more than that.

 

Rouse was arrested the day after the murder, taken off a Chicago-bound bus that had stopped in Bolivar, Mo. He was convicted of first-degree murder on May 23, 1980 and was sentenced to life in prison.

 

Learst tried to move on. He continued working, but thoughts of Jason were never far, surfacing without provocation.

 

He began drinking heavily, calling it "partying." But he was trying to forget.

 

It took him years to realize that was never going to happen.

 

At 3:54 a.m. on Nov. 1, 2006, a 911 call came in to the Cass County Sheriff's Department in Indiana. Jane Gonzalez said her 16-year-old daughter, Stephanie Wagner, had not returned home from work at the Indian Head Restaurant.

 

The mother told police what kind of car she was driving, that she'd been wearing black pants, a white shirt and pink and black shoes.

 

Heidi Fitousis, who owns the restaurant with her husband, awoke to a phone call from a sheriff's deputy. He asked if she'd seen Stephanie leave the restaurant with anyone.

 

"It was really weird," Fitousis told the deputy. "She walked out with the dishwasher, Dan."

 

She said she knew Danny Rouse had served time in prison, believed he'd killed a boy and tried to kill the boy's mother, but wasn't sure of the details. They'd hired him as a favor to a waitress whose mother was dating him.

 

Law-enforcement officers began searching for Rouse. They found him at the restaurant when he arrived for work at his normal start time.

 

"That son of a b****," said owner Mike Fitousis. "At 10:30 a.m. he walked in the door like nothing happened."

 

At age 37, a decade after his son's death, Allen Learst found a new calling: writing. He quit the fish and wildlife service and went back to school in Michigan, eventually earning a graduate degree in English and teaching creative writing.

 

He fell in love with words, often writing about deeply personal experiences, including his combat service in Vietnam. But he could never find the voice to write about his son's death.

 

In 1994, a letter arrived from the Kansas Department of Corrections. Danny Rouse was coming up for his first parole hearing.

 

Learst couldn't believe it. How is that possible? Rouse was given a life sentence. It had only been 15 years.

 

Rouse was sentenced under laws enacted during a time when Americans believed more in prisoner rehabilitation. Though he was given a life sentence, his fate after 15 years rested in the hands of a three-member Parole Board charged with deciding when he was fit to re-enter society.

 

Learst wrote a letter to the board months before it met, and he and his ex-wife appeared in person to protest.

 

Rouse's parole was denied. He came up again in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2004 and 2005.

 

Each time Learst sent letters, saying Rouse's crime was "methodical and calculated," warning that the man posed a "dangerous threat to society." Each time parole was denied.

 

Until March.

 

Danny Rouse walked out of prison on the 21st of that month, paroled to his brother's Indiana home. The Parole Board's reason for releasing him is unclear. Their deliberations are confidential. Parole Board administrator Colene Fischli spoke only in general terms about the release.

 

"There comes a time when this person has absolutely done everything that they can," Fischli said. "I think there comes a time when the board feels that he or she has done everything that we've asked and they really have no other reason to deny them parole."

 

Learst was furious. He couldn't shake the feeling that Rouse was still a danger. He phoned Rouse's parole agent in Indiana and told him to keep a close watch.

 

Then, about seven months later, a TV reporter from Indianapolis placed a call to Minnesota. Allen Learst was sitting in his basement office, his world about to be torn apart yet again.

 

Rouse was taken into custody Nov. 1. Police say that during questioning he admitted murdering Stephanie Wagner after she spotted his vehicle on the side of the road and stopped to help.

 

"He said he attempted to strangle Stephanie Wagner and he thought that he had strangled her to death," Wallace, the Cass County detective, said during Rouse's probable cause hearing. "And then he noticed that . . . she was not dead and he used what he described as an 8-inch hunting knife, an 8-inch blade ... and he stabbed her."

 

Wallace testified that he drew a map and Rouse pointed out where he'd dumped Stephanie's body. She was found about a mile from her abandoned car, two rows deep in a field of corn.

 

Cass County Superior Court Judge Thomas Perrone found probable cause for Rouse's arrest.

 

"Am I going to need a lawyer?" Rouse asked the judge.

 

"Yes, sir, you will," Perrone said.

 

Rouse was formally charged with murder and criminal confinement the next day. He faces up to 65 years in prison on the murder charge. The judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf, and Rouse's attorney, Bradley Rozzi, declined to comment on the case, which is set for trial Feb. 7.

 

For all his years of writing, it wasn't until March that Learst managed to lay down words about his son's murder. They came to him just days after Rouse was paroled, perhaps swept out by a turbulent mix of anger and sadness and fear.

 

He finally typed: "My son was murdered."

 

And he acknowledged: "There are details I remember about Jason, but what troubles me is how they lose their definition, their sharp edges, like snowy winters, when the landscape is blurred."

 

Learst sobbed when he learned of Stephanie's death. He was 27 years into the horrible journey her family was just beginning.

 

"What torments me the most is that I know from that day forward, their lives are altered in ways they could never imagine," he said. "In the next year or two they're going to relive it over and over and over again. It's going to stretch them to the point where they'll wonder if they can survive."

 

The only comfort he can offer is that he has survived. He has moved on with his life, holding fast to the image of a child stuck in time. Knowing the image fades, but never disappears.

 

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Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune

[Controlled Chaos]

This POS had no business even being alive let alone being free. How do you rehabilitate someone who slices the throat of a 5 year old. I can't even imagine how this father felt when they released this man.

[Queen Prawn]

I just read this a few minutes ago. That guy should never have been paroled. Life in prison should be life in prison.

[Kid Gleason]

IMO there is never a question of it, you harm a child, you die. No remorse, no second chance, nothing. Children should always be treated sacred.

[Gregory Pratt]

I believe that parole should be a process that exists, and I do believe in rehabilitation the idea, but I can't understand how anyone can believe that a man who slit a five year old's throat can be "rehabilated" or deserves a "second chance." There's just a certain evil inherent in killing a defenseless person that makes denial of parole and life in prison and perhaps execution a no-brainer.

[Kyyle23]

is there any sort of punishment that the parole board can get for releasing this guy, if he went out and did the same thing again?

[Soxy]

is there any sort of punishment that the parole board can get for releasing this guy, if he went out and did the same thing again?

If I was that girl's family I sure as hell would want some "reckless endangerment" charges brought or something.

[GoodAsGould]

Like pretty much other people said, I believe in 2nd chances to a degree but when you kill a child there should be none. And if there was it shouldnt of been for another 20 years at the very least.

[Iwritecode]

Horrible.

 

Two things:

 

The judge entered a not guilty plea on his behalf, and Rouse's attorney, Bradley Rozzi, declined to comment on the case, which is set for trial Feb. 7.

 

Why?

 

 

 

Also, did anyone else have a bit of hard time following this story while reading it? I don't like the way the writer kept jumping back and forth...

[ptatc]

This is awful. I know all of these little towns as it's my route from my lake cottage to Indy for the 500. I can't image the horror it's caused. There is no room in humanity for a person like this.

[Omeed]

This is awful. I know all of these little towns as it's my route from my lake cottage to Indy for the 500. I can't image the horror it's caused. There is no room in humanity for a person like this.

 

I am actually from one of these little towns, Winamac, home of the Indian Head restuarant they worked at. Although I am in the military and stuck in Augusta, GA, I often talk with folks back home. Both of these little towns (Winamac and Royal Center) were in shock.

 

I really hope the Cass County judge throws the book at this guy. By the accounts in the story, he seems to have felt no remorse for killing this girl. I think the restaurant owner's response was spot on when this loser showed up to work the next day like nothing happened. It's just disgusting.

[Texsox]

I believe that parole should be a process that exists, and I do believe in rehabilitation the idea, but I can't understand how anyone can believe that a man who slit a five year old's throat can be "rehabilated" or deserves a "second chance." There's just a certain evil inherent in killing a defenseless person that makes denial of parole and life in prison a no-brainer.

 

Exactly (with edit) It just sickens me that anyone could harm a child.

[southsider2k5]

Horrible.

 

Two things:

Why?

Also, did anyone else have a bit of hard time following this story while reading it? I don't like the way the writer kept jumping back and forth...

 

Its standard procedure if the defendant either won't enter a plea, or they feel he isn't capable of making a plea.

[Controlled Chaos]

Exactly (with edit) It just sickens me that anyone could harm a child.

 

I like his comment better without the edit. Execution was a no brainer here. This guy had no right to live any longer.