THE SHOTGUN KILLER SPEAKS

PHOTO - 5 (2 COLOR)Guards lead a shackled Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl through a gate at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City. (COLOR)(JEN FRIEDBERG/POST-TRIBUNE)Ben-Yisrayl, formerly known as Christopher Peterson, displays his new name on the pocket of his jump suit. Convicted of four killings, Ben-Yisrayl continues to appeal his convictions. (COLOR)(JEN FRIEDBERG/POST-TRIBUNE)Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl of Gary is appealing his death sentences while on Indiana State Prison's Death Row. He wears a Yuruba warrior's mask on a necklace as a protective talisman to help him fight through his appeals.

THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED VERSION.

Number 922005.Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl.It is a name most wouldn't recognize.He is better known by the name Peterson, Christopher Peterson.Others refer to him as "The Shotgun Killer," although it is a title he takes none too cordially.

"The shotgun killer," Ben-Yisrayl wrote in a letter, "That's not who I am; it's what I've been convicted of. The two should be distinguishable."

His ankle trip cuffs jingle as he enters the room, his arms held in front of his body resting against his chest.

He complains about the heat in the room to a nearby prison official.

"They didn't tell me you were coming today, or I'd have brought my papers down for you to see ... it's hot in here," Ben-Yisrayl says to a reporter.

Ben-Yisrayl has been here on X-row - known commonly outside these brick and steel confines as Death Row - for more than six years.

He was sent here as Christopher Peterson, the Shotgun Killer.

Two juries convicted him of killing four people. He was acquitted in three of seven killings in the late fall and early winter of 1990.

The random, sporadic shootings of the so-called Shotgun Killer had Northwest Indiana residents hiding beneath their blankets, jumping at shadows.

The shootings captured national attention.

A killing spree

The horror began Oct. 30, 1990, when Lawrence Mills, 43, of Hammond, was gunned down outside the American Legion Post No. 66 in Griffith at 7:30 p.m.

Less than three hours later, Rhonda Hammersley, 25, was slain outside the gas station where she worked in Cedar Lake. The killer shot at, but missed, a Cedar Lake woman in the next car.

Two other people were shot at that night, but survived: A teenage girl near Cedar Lake in St. John and a Schererville woman in Griffith.

The killings didn't stop there.

On Dec. 13, gas station attendant Harchand Singh Dhaliwal, 54, of Gary was killed at work in Portage.

Two days later, motel clerk Marie Meitzler of South Haven was gunned down at the check-in desk at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge in Portage.

Minutes later the same night, Ora L. Wildermuth, 54, of Lake Station was shot and killed at an automatic teller machine in Gary.

And just an hour later, on the Indiana Toll Road, a 48-year-old toll booth attendant at the Calumet Avenue toll plaza was wounded by a single shotgun blast.

Less than a week later, brothers Eli Balovski and George Baloski (they spell their names differently) were killed by shotgun blasts in the late afternoon Dec. 18 near their tailor shop at 45th and Broadway in Gary.

Some doubts remain

Christopher Peterson was sentenced to the death penalty twice in these cases, for two murders in Porter County, two in Lake County.

But doubts about his guilt remain.

Until Ben-Yisrayl's January 1991 arrest, a 45-member task force investigating the killings was looking for a white man with stringy hair as shown in a composite drawing. And a Gary man allegedly has come forward to say he was outside the tailor shop at 45th and Gary and saw a man in a car suspected to be the killer's. He says that man was not Ben-Yisrayl.

An expert in false confession who has reviewed the transcript and confession Ben-Yisrayl gave has deemed it false.

All these issues will be rehashed in Ben-Yisrayl's appeals.

This October, Ben-Yisrayl and his public defenders have reserved a week of Judge Thomas W. Webber's Superior Court time for a hearing. He is expected to seek a new trial on his murder convictions in the deaths of Dhaliwal and Meitzler.

The Indiana Supreme Court has upheld both of his death sentences.

Who is Ben-Yisrayl?

"It's hot in here," Ben-Yisrayl complains again.

After he settles in, Ben-Yisrayl talks of a Christopher Peterson who was an everyday kind of guy, the son of an Army career soldier.

He tells of a normal boy's life, graduating from high school, hitching up with the Marines.

On the other side, you have the continually self-educating Ben-Yisrayl, who after several years in prison has adopted an aura of eastern philosophy, religion and mysticism.

"Eclectic spiritualism," Ben-Yisrayl calls it. "From a bond of Eastern religions, Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Confucianism.

"There is truth in everything, even the false," he says.

On an Internet Web site for disgruntled prisoners, he calls himself "a Hebrew Israelite and a conscious New Afrikan freedom fighter."

Christopher Peterson legally changed his name to Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl in February 1997 - Obadyah being worshiper, Ben being son, and Yisrayl signifying Jacob.

In one of his challenges, Ben-Yisrayl says, Jacob had to struggle with an angel sent by God - an angel that might have been God.

"I fight with the angel every day until liberation comes," Ben-Yisrayl says.

Military youth

As the son of a career Army soldier, Ben-Yisrayl moved with his family from post to post, from Cleveland to Fort Riley, Kansas, to El Paso.

"I led the typical, rebellious life like any other child, fighting. But I was less of a fighter in high school. I was a social individual," says Ben-Yisrayl, who attended Calumet and Roosevelt high schools, eventually graduating from Lew Wallace.

He wasn't an athlete other than sprinting in events such as the 100- and 200-yard dashes.

"I wanted to be a distance runner, but I didn't have the endurance," he says.

After graduation, Ben-Yisrayl says he went to Atlanta to live with an uncle while working in security at the airport parking lot. In May 1988, he was inducted into the Marine Corps and sent to San Diego for basic training, then on to infantry training.

Ben-Yisrayl said he was first stationed at the Naval station at Guantanamo in Cuba. Later, he was assigned to Camp LeJeune in N.C.

It was there disillusion about the Marines set in. He says he found the Marines to be filled with hypocrisy and factionalism, racism and impersonalism.

At the same time he was trying to cope with the death of his son, Christopher, who was born July 8, 1988, and died in January 1989.

"It left a lasting scar for me about the Marine Corps. They didn't care, there is no healing, Marines are not supposed to ... (suffer). But people are human. I was 19. There is nothing in life like losing a child," he says.

Miserable and depressed, Ben-Yisrayl went AWOL and headed back to Gary in May 1990.

He made his living selling drugs.

"I still had the Colonial Commons mentality you get from being born and raised in the projects," he says.

He recalls those days

Ben-Yisrayl said he remembered being fearful of the shotgun attacks in 1990.

"I read about them in the newspapers," Ben-Yisrayl said, saying the murders seemed to be "coming closer to Gary."

Living in the hardened inner-city, news of shootings wasn't that much of a surprise, either, he says.

"Then the shootings on 45th street, that's when people really started talking about it, when it hit home in the neighborhood," Ben-Yisrayl says.

Ben-Yisrayl was asked why the killings stopped after his arrest.

"Let me ask you, if you were the shotgun killer and you saw somebody else was arrested and going to be convicted, would you stop killing knowing they'd stop looking for you?"

Rebirth behind bars?

Ben-Yisrayl says he has put on 25 pounds since his incarceration.

They are lean pounds, with his muscular biceps and forearms stretching the symbolically cosmic tattoos that decorate his skin.

"My rebirth came here. X-Row is a very unique place," he says.

He said his day starts at 5:30 a.m. with prayer, meditation and exercise.

He is porter on his tier for 16 of 46 prisoners on X-Row. He cleans the tier, delivers food and whatever else needs to be done.

The bookshelf in his cell, like his religion, is eclectic, having to do with Eastern thought, revolution and Greek philosophy.

A sampling from Ben-Yisrayl's would divulge "Way of Chang Tzu," a book of Tao parables on the stealing of the mind; George G.M. James' "Stolen Legacy; the Republic of Plato"; Eric Fromm's "The Sane Society"; Jean Paul Sarte's "The Wall"; George Johnson's "Blood in My Eye"; and "Soledad Brothers."

"I like the deep kind," Ben-Yisrayl says.

Wounds are deep

Time hasn't healed for family members of the victims of the Shotgun Killer.

The wounds were easily opened.

Hearing of Christopher Peterson, now being known as Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl, and his upcoming fall hearing, did nothing more than churn underlying emotion.

Many friends and relatives have disappeared from the telephone book over the years.

Others, such as Tom Kajmakoski, Eli Balovski's son-in-law, could only say "I don't want to talk about it," before hanging up.

A few, however, did want to talk.

"He should be dead now, for as many as he killed," said Jay Beckett, brother of Rhonda Hammersley.

Peterson was acquitted of Hammersley's murder, but an accomplice, Ronald Harris, was convicted.

That makes no difference to Beckett.

"He deserves nothing, and he's Christopher Peterson, no matter how you cut it," Beckett said.

"I think we've spent an awful lot of money on him, and he's beneath it."

Beckett, 38, lives in Crown Point with his wife, Audrey, and daughter Jessica, 8.

"My sister was taken during my wife's pregnancy. She was looking forward to the baby as much as we were," Beckett said.

"My daughter never got to know her aunt." Beckett said.

The son of shooting victim George Baloski still feels the pain.

"You're talking to someone that's been really hurt. I have to think this should have been over for a long time," said Ted Baloski.

"It's something I can't forget," he said.

"We're here struggling with life, trying to adjust ... my father was a good man who would hurt no one. He was an honest man who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time," Baloski said.

"I don't know how he can change his name, he's going to be the same person," he said.

"I was at the trial, I saw the shotgun that was in his closet. Why would I believe anything else?" Baloski said.

Bad seed

Ben-Yisrayl was told there are many who will be angered by seeing an interview with him in the newspaper, those who have had no closure.

"Closure. Where do you get closure?" he asked. "I feel for them. I feel sorry for those individuals who were killed, their families. I had nothing to do with it," Ben-Yisrayl said.

"The shotgun killer is a term of demagoguery, a seed planted of hatred," Ben-Yisrayl said.

"Thank you. I just wanted to put a face on me. Not how I seem to be, but the real me," he said.

A prison official indicated the time for the visit had ended.

"I do wish I had known you were coming. I have papers I wanted to show you," Ben-Yisrayl said, looking down to maneuver the manacles around the chair.

He made a jingling noise as he walked across the expanse of the room, where a guard waited patiently, holding the door back to X-row open.

THE SHOOTINGS

1990

Oct. 30 - Lawrence Mills, 43, an insurance agent from Hammond, is killed by a shotgun blast as he sits in his car outside of American Legion Post 66 in Griffith.

Oct. 30 - Rhonda L. Hammersley, 25, of Lowell, a clerk at the Petro Mart convenience store-gas station in Cedar Lake, is killed by a shotgun blast as she walks to her car in the parking lot.

A young woman named Carrie Jillson is also shot at as she sits in a nearby car. She ducks and is missed, but she pretends to be dead. She identifies the shooter as a white man with stringy hair.

Dec. 13 - Harchand Singh Dhaliwal, 54, of Gary, a clerk at the Hudson Oil Service in Portage, is shot and killed by a shotgun at work.

Dec. 15-Marie Meitzler, 48, of South Haven, a clerk at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge on the north side of Portage, is killed by a shotgun blast at the check-in counter.

Dec. 15 - Six minutes after Marie Meitzler is killed, Ora L. Wildermuth, 54, a steelworker from Lake Station, is killed outside a Miller area bank.

Dec. 15 - Robert S. Kotso, 49, director of Hammond Water Works and an Indiana Toll Road booth attendant at Hammond, is missed by a shotgun blast fired into his toll both.

Dec. 18 - Eli Balovski, 60, of Crown Point, and his brother, George Baloski, 66, of Gary, are killed in a building next to their tailor shop at 45th and Broadway in Gary.

1991

Jan. 28 - Ronald Niksch, 53, of Merrillville, a manager of Diamond Dave's Taco Company restaurant in Southlake Mall, is wounded in the face by a pistol shot as he uses a night depository of a mall bank.

Jan. 28, 29 - Christopher Peterson and an associate, Antoine McGee, are arrested for the mall shooting, with Peterson implicated as the wanted "Shotgun Killer."

NINE STEPS TO DEATH

Christopher Peterson was acquitted or found not guilty in the Oct. 30, 1990, shotgun killings of Lawrence Mills and Rhonda Hammersley, and in the Dec. 15, 1990, murder of Ora L. Wildermuth.

In March 1992, Peterson was convicted by a Porter County jury of murdering Harchand Singh Dhaliwal and Marie Meitzler and sentenced to death.

In May 1992, Peterson was convicted by a Lake County jury of murdering brothers Eli Balovski and George Baloski and sentenced to death.

According to prison officials, there are nine judicial steps before offenders sentenced to die are given lethal injection.

1. Sentence by trial court

2. Direct appeal, State Supreme Court.

3. Writ of Certiorari (the sending back to a lower court for further review), U.S. Supreme Court.

4. Post Conviction Relief, Trial Court.

5. Post Conviction Relief, Appeal, State Supreme Court.

6. Writ of Certiorari, U.S. Supreme Court.

7. Writ of Habeas Corpus (a test of constitutionality), U.S. District Court.

8. U.S. Court of Appeals, 7th Circuit Court.

9. Writ of Certiorari, U.S Supreme Court.

(There are rare occasions when steps 4 and 7 may be repeated)

An Indiana Department of Correction spokesman said Christopher Peterson (Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl) is at Step 4 in his Porter County appeal process, step 5 in his Lake County appeal process.

THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED VERSION.