Tag Archives: Muncie Indiana

Requiem for Muncie Mall: America’s hometown’s second gathering place is fading fast

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If you considered our downtowns to once be the gathering places for our cities and towns, then you could consider your local mall to be America’s second gathering place. That’s appropriate, because malls largely killed off downtowns.

Downtowns across the country have staged and are staging something of a comeback. They entered a steep decline in the late 1960s and early 1970s as malls were built and first retailers and then customers moved away from downtowns to the new gathering places, the mall.

In my hometown of Muncie, the mall – Muncie Mall – opened, more or less, in 1970, years later than the first U.S. mall, Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which opened in 1956. Big department stores left Muncie’s downtown, with Sears being the first anchor store to open at the mall. Downtown was, in a decade or less, pretty hollowed out and storefronts along Walnut Street were left empty or occupied by small businesses and, in one instance, an adult bookstore.

Like a lot of cities and a lot of malls, Muncie and Muncie Mall struggled mightily in the first decade of the 21st century. I was covering business at the time and retailers – some with problems nationally, like Sears – closed their doors.

I was back in Muncie over the weekend and we had to check out the mall, which has been the scene of a lot of demolition work in the past year. The three-screen movie theater, where I spent a lot of time as a young movie fan, was razed. More recently, the wings that had been occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney have been or are being demoed.

The photo above is one I took this weekend and it shows that one empty third of the mall is roped off.

There’s still a few tenants in the mall, most notably Books-A-Million, which supposedly has a five-year lease. Does that mean the rest of the structure will be pulled down around and behind it, or will BAM find a spot elsewhere or leave the city entirely? I don’t know.

If you’re interested in the lifetime of a Midwestern mall, you’ll be interested in the timeline by Robin Gibson in The Star Press newspaper that I’ll link to at the end.

I won’t wax on about what malls meant to us or Muncie Mall meant to me. You can probably find my writing about that elsewhere, including as a chapter of our third true crime book, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS. Our book covers a still-unsolved double killing of two teenagers in 1985 and I included a chapter about Muncie Mall because the mall was a big place for us back then.

Here’s that Muncie Mall timeline:

https://www.thestarpress.com/story/news/local/2020/02/12/muncie-mall-50-years-timeline/4466975002

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

November 5, 1977, a date that will live in infamy, also known as my first published article, 49 years ago today

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I could lie and say that this date 49 years ago seems like only yesterday, but truthfully it seems like eons ago.

After I woke up this morning, I opened Instagram to see video footage of author Stephen King leaving some book promotion event somewhere and I thought that King, one of my favorite authors of all time and a master of the written word, looked every day of his 79 years. He seemed a little unsteady and walked with a cane.

Funny coincidence, so do I. And King is more than a decade older than me.

If that wasn’t humbling enough, I opened Facebook memories and saw posts from 2017 and 2007, I believe, in which I noted the anniversary of my first published newspaper article from 1977.

Despite the inclination to turn over and go back to sleep at all those reminders of the passage of time, I decided to get up and, among other things, write about the 49th anniversary of my first published article.

That’s a screenshot from newspapers dot com above, and you can tell the gist of the article: friends and fellow students from Cowan High School in Delaware County, Indiana, let me interview them about what they did on a “big night out.” The gist of it was go see a movie, go see a concert, have dinner as well as a few more nefarious activities, like illegally obtaining beer – all of us were three or four years too young to buy carry-out liquor – and drinking and sometimes riding around in the rural countryside, throwing beer bottles at signs.

(I can write about this now that my son is years past the age to be encouraged to do this by my example.)

The article was hugely controversial, and a good indicator of why the less-legal activities were not attributed to anyone on the record: My school system apologized in the school newsletter to the poor students scandalized by the implication that they would do this. Somewhere, in a box somewhere, I not only have a clipping of the article but also a snippet of the apology (not from me, but from school administrators) in the newsletter.

The article came about because I had volunteered to fill in for a friend also on the school newspaper and yearbook staff. She had a ton of studying to do and wouldn’t have time to write the article for the Muncie Evening Press newspaper. (The newspaper regularly published articles written by local high school students, although most were of the “Big school fundraiser next week” variety.) I said I would and that kicked off a newspaper career that didn’t end until I took a buyout in January 2019. It didn’t completely end even then: I wrote freelance for the newspaper for a year or two even after the buyout, covering stories like Covid.

After a newspaper editor called the school guidance office (heh heh) and offered me a regular gig as the paper’s “teen columnist,” I wrote for the Evening Press all through college and for a couple of years after before they offered me a full-time reporting job in 1984. I started on my dad’s birthday, which was appropriate because my parents had never been anything but supportive of me going into writing rather than my original plan, which was to become a lawyer. My tenure at the newspaper continued even after my beloved evening paper merged with the hated morning paper in 1996.

The moral of this is: Kids, stay in school.

No, the moral is that you should take a chance every once in a while, trying something new and daring that might have an unexpected outcome.

You, too, could become a lifelong writer and pass up your chance to practice law and make far, far, far, far, far more than you ever would as a newspaper reporter.

Yeah, that’s the moral of the story.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

Vincent Price documentary on TCM captures the day he came to my hometown, Muncie

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Yesterday, I was watching the new documentary “Vincent Price: What Keeps Us Alive,” which I had DVRd from TCM’s premiere of the program Friday evening, and found it quite good. I’ve always liked Price and if you search for his name here on this site you’ll find posts about when I met him at an airport in the early 1980s and when I met his kind and generous daughter, Victoria Price, this summer here in Knoxville.

But as I was watching the documentary, I was startled to see some B-roll footage of Price talking to a large group of people and the caption read, “Vincent Price visits Ball State Teachers College 1963.”

If I’d ever known Price had visited my hometown of Muncie, Indiana, I’d forgotten that fact.

I was a pre-schooler at the time of his visit and was a few years away from becoming the huge fan of horror movies that I would become.

For his part, Price was in another of his career high points. He’d been acting on stage and screen since the 1930s and co-starred in “Laura” in 1944. He’d become, along with Boris Karloff, the king of American horror films in the mid-century, starring in a string of classic films like “The Tingler” and “House on Haunted Hill” in 1959.

His film roles in the 1960s brought him another kind of fame as he played the lead in a string of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for director/producer Roger Corman and American International Pictures. Right before his Muncie visit the latest of those films, “The Raven” had been released and more films now regarded as classics were to come.

Price was in the midst of something else in 1963. He was promoting the democratization of art as part of a promotion by huge retailer Sears to encourage people to buy prints of works of art by great artists. As part of that promotion, Price appeared in hundreds of cities and towns, showcasing the art prints available at Sears and giving talks at local colleges and universities.

Among those was Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, where the footage used in the documentary was captured. The school was renamed Ball State University in 1965.

I was curious how the local newspapers covered Price’s appearance. It wasn’t that long before the aging newspaper editors, out of touch with popular culture, would question the need to put the 1980 assassination of John Lennon, for example, on page one.

But Price had the right mixture of old Hollywood and art appreciation to convince the editors to cover his March 6, 1963 appearance.

Both the Muncie Star and the Muncie Evening Press ran announcements of his appearance in advance and covered him at receptions with the city’s leading industrialists and philanthropists like various Ball and Kitselman family members.

I’m most proud of coverage by Roy Bigger of the Muncie Evening Press, who wrote a page one story for March 7 about Price’s talk to an “overflow audience” at a Ball State convocation in which he talked about art and the public’s right to know, understand, appreciate and own art. That’s where Sears’ art collection offerings came in, of course. He talked about writers like Tennessee Williams and artists like James Whistler.

About 500 people had to be turned away from the convocation in Ball State’s Assembly Hall, Bigger reported.

So cool to discover, even 60 years after the fact, the meeting of my hometown and one of my favorite film actors.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

Ten years of true crime books! It’s the anniversary of our book WICKED MUNCIE

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Ten years has flown by.

Ten years (and two days) ago, History Press published our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE.

My longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I had, in 2015, finished working on long articles detailing the history of our town, Muncie, Indiana, for The Star Press newspaper to mark the city’s 150th anniversary. I’d written about 150 years of facets of the city like the local hospital and local industry and he’d written an article that touched on the city’s long history of crime and murder. (I say touched on because there’s too much crime to fit in one article.)

Walker got a cold call from an editor at History Press, based in South Carolina, who asked him to consider turning the article into a book. History Press was and still is a publisher of books detailing cities and regions’ histories, including colorful characters, businesses and industry and crime and they wanted a history of Muncie crime, which is as colorful as it is gruesome. He asked me to collaborate with him.

Because we’d been newspaper reporters for decades, we knew what kinds of stories we needed to tell, from infamous people to sensational murders to crimes that rocked the community.

We contracted with History Press and, in all of our spare time away from covering crime, corruption and government for the newspaper, wrote WICKED MUNCIE. The book was published on October 17, 2016.

The title, by the way, was mandated by History Press. They had a whole series of “WICKED” books, spotlighting cities all over the country.

We wrote three followups for History Press, MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM in 2018, THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS in 2021 and COLD CASE MUNCIE in 2023. The later was named after a series of articles about unsolved murders we’d written for the newspaper.

The books are truly self-produced works; we did all our own research, often working from clipped and yellowed articles in files in the newspaper’s library. We begged and borrowed photos to illustrate the book and dropboxed the photos to our editors at History Press to meet their deadlines.

The books were considerable work, in no aspect more than in finding the illustrations. Muncie newspapers had not kept prints or negatives of photos over 150 years, so we had to make do with what we could find.

With the History Press books, it was not uncommon for me to dropbox 120 or more photos to find a third or half that number that would meet History Press’ technical requirements.

Producing four true crime books focusing on the same city and county was a natural – Muncie was and is a hotbed of crime and corruption; we counted about three dozen unsolved murders as we were writing a Cold Case series of articles – but a lot of work.

As I’ve noted here, the true crime books still sell and sell well for History Press and booksellers like Muncie stores including the Orchard Shop and Aw Yeah Comics and sell well online, everywhere from Amazon to Walmart.

I’m inclined to urge people to buy their copies from bookshop dot org because they contribute to indie booksellers like Ink Drinkers Anonymous in Muncie.

Here’s the link to my books on bookshop, including the four true crime books:

https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Keith+Roysdon

True Crime: Five years later, ‘The Westside Park Murders’ still draws readers

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The past two weekends, I’ve been selling copies of my books at East Tennessee events, first the Harvest Moon Festival at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, then at the Fall Book Fest put on by the Knoxville Literary Legends book club. I’ve sold some books, happily met some other authors and learned a lot.

What I’ve learned is that true crime sells.

I know you’ll greet that with a “well, duh.” There are millions of true crime books, documentaries and even entire true crime channels/streaming services. I’m told that the latter is the case, at least; I haven’t watched a true crime program since we began writing our first true crime book, WICKED MUNCIE, which was published ten years ago by History Press. (If you’re wondering what Muncie is, it’s the East Central Indiana city where I’m from. It’s famous as where David Letterman went to college, where Ball canning jars were created, where the first half of Steven Spielberg’s CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND took place (it was not filmed there), where Garfield the cartoon cat was created and produed and for countless pop culture references.)

The Westside Park killings of September 1985 are, as the book’s subtitle says, Muncie’s most notorious cold case. No one has yet been charged in the killings. Our book, for the first time, revealed the name of the police investigators’ main person of interest.

Longtime writing partner Douglas Walker and I wrote four true crime books, WICKED MUNCIE (published 2016), MUNCIE MURDER AND MAYHEM (published 2018), THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS (our pandemic baby, published months later than intended, in February 2021) and COLD CASE MUNCIE (published 2023).

I think all the books did pretty well for History Press. For me in particular, they assured me that I could write at book length, which I began doing in earnest in 2019 when I wrote my crime novels SEVEN ANGELS (published June 2026) and THAT OCTOBER (2025).

One of the things I noted Saturday to potential buyers of the Westside book is that the Crime Junkie Podcast did a segment on the case and (thankfully) credited our book and research.

I’m proud of the true crime books, but after moving away from Muncie to East Tennessee in 2022, I couldn’t find a lot of interest in the true crime books down here. I mean, I could understand that, because the four true crime books all took place hundreds of miles and three states north.

But when I talked to fellow members of the Sisters in Crime group here in Knoxville (they’re the Smoking Guns, and they’re a great bunch of accomplished writers) they urged me to bring, in addition to copies of THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, copies of some true crime writing for possible sale at Cumberland Gap and additional festivals.

“True crime always sells,” they told me.

“But they’re true crime books set in Indiana,” I said.

“True crime always sells,” they assured me.

So for two weekends in a row, I’ve sold about as many copies of THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS as I’ve sold of THAT OCTOBER or SEVEN ANGELS or anthologies with my short stories.

I didn’t think this would be the case, but the nature of the crime in Westside has drawn attention and continues to draw attention.

On Amazon as I write this, WESTSiDE has 165 reviews or ratings with an average of 4.1 out of 5. (No, I don’t read the reviews.) The other three books have fewer than 100 reviews or ratings and similar ratings out of 5.

In other words, ten years after our first true crime book, the books sell (for History Press and for me, hand-selling copies that I purchased from History Press). They sell to strangers. They sell to people who’ve never been to Muncie or heard of Muncie.

A woman who bought the book on Saturday had been past my table earlier in the afternoon, looked at WESTSIDE and came back to get it later. “I couldn’t stop thinking about it until I came back and got it,” she told me.

It’s pretty fascinating to me. I’m glad to think that, as with all our true crime books, WESTSIDE draws readers and helps keep the case alive for survivors of those killed, who hope that they’ll one day find closure.

If you’re interested, below is a link to WESTSIDE on Amazon and through that you should be able to find other books I wrote or contributed to.

None of them has the appeal of WESTSIDE, however.

Where to find our words and signed books (scrawled in my case)

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If you’re in or near Muncie, Indiana, and missed out last week when Jill Blocker and I were in town, you can find signed copies of our books at:

Ink Drinkers Anonymous Bookstore

Aw Yeah Comics- Muncie

EB and Bertha C Ball Center

The Orchard Shop at Minnetrista Museum & Gardens

Book touring. Touring with books. Book talks. Talking about books, I’m kinda tired, can you tell?

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Okay, so this post won’t make any sense because even though I had a good night’s sleep I’m still kinda brain-fried. So prepare yourself. Head-scratching is not only likely, but recommended.

My longtime friend and fellow author Jill Blocker – she’s one of the masterminds behind Constellate Creatives and Constellate Publishing – just held two days of book talks and signings in Muncie, Indiana. We’re still groggy, and Jill has only just begun her extended book tour.

Two days, you scoff. That’s barely any tine at all.

On the contrary, we packed five book talks and signings and an afterparty event at a local martini bar, RoHo’s, into those two days. We spoke at the Ball State University-affiliated EB and Bertha C Ball Center, Carnegie Library, Ink Drinkers Anonymous Bookstore, Aw Yeah Comics and the Orchard Shop at Minnetrista, all in Muncie, where I was a newspaper reporter and editor for 40 years and Jill attended Ball State and interned at the newspaper. That’s where we met, a little less than 20 years ago, and we kept in touch. When we published our novels WHAT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND GOOD, THAT OCTOBER, SEVEN ANGELS and HAPPILY AFTER EVER – the latter two newly out this summer – we decided we’d publish books by other authors who wanted to work with us. We’ve published one other so far and have others in the pipeline – and we’re looking for more authors. Go to the Constellate Creatives website for more. (Link below.)

Anyway, the sadist who set up the Indiana portion of our book tour (raises hand) didn’t leave much room for seeing family and friends or even breathing while we were in the Hoosier state, yet we somehow managed to.

Now Jill is off to Seattle and NYC and back to her home base of Zurich, Switzerland.

At a couple of events, we were joined by our talented friend Sara McKinley, who painted the beautiful cover for THAT OCTOBER. That’s Sara on the right there.

And we’ll be doing all this again, probably next year. Hopefully with even more books by other authors.

Nest year? Man, I better get some sleep.

Muncie, Indiana … can you keep a secret?

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Muncie, Indiana – my hometown – has kept some pretty wild secrets over the years, including generations of crime and corruption that’s sent mayors and other prominent people off to jail.

It’s also been the scene of wild pop culture events. Remember Steven Spielberg’s classic “Close Encounters of the Third Kind?” The first half of the movie, where aliens abduct the little boy and Richard Dreyfus builds a mountain in his family room, is set in Muncie.

So with my friend and fellow author Jill Blocker and I planning on book talks and signings July 14 and 15, we’re planning something else … a little hang with the authors.

Hit us up if you want to learn more.

A cold case father died without justice for his son

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It’s been two years now since Calletano Cisneros died. A lot of people won’t know who he was, but he made a big impression on me. I interviewed him for our fourth true crime book, COLD CASE MUNCIE, which was published by History Press in 2023.

For those of you who don’t know, longtime writing collaborator Douglas Walker and I wrote about cold cases – unsolved murders – in the area of Muncie, Indiana for a few decades for The Star Press newspaper. This entailed going over old cases, some of them dating back decades and some of more recent vintage, and reviewing the facts, looking at old files and articles and often interviewing police investigators, prosecutors, coroners and, most importantly, surviving family members. Cold cases have an impact on all of those people but especially, of course, on surviving family members.

Sebastian Cisneros – that’s him in the upper right photo of the book cover above – was killed in April 2009 in Muncie, which is marred by dozens of unsolved murders. Sebastian Cisneros was killed outside his house on Ribble Avenue in Muncie.

We wrote about the case at the time and wrote about it as a chapter of the Cold Case Muncie book because it was a compelling story, made all the more so because I interviewed his father, 75-year-old Calletano Cisneros. When we spoke via long distance – he lived in Texas – he volunteered something that I hadn’t known when I called him: He himself had killed a man in a bar fight when he was 17 and had spent 10 years in prison before he was released by the governor. He’d lived with that past for a half-century and had, in the past several years, lived with the murder of his own son.

Calletano Cisneros told me he wanted justice for his son and wanted his son’s killer to be tried and sentenced to prison just as he had been more than 50 years earlier.

“I did my time. I’d like to see the same justice done in my son’s case.”

Calletano Cisneros didn’t live to see justice for his son. He died in January 2024.

Cold cases are cases that often don’t see justice done.

You can read about the Sebatian Cisneros case in our third true crime book:

The kids are alright – and interested in cold cases

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That’s a murder board. You’ve probably seen them in movies and TV shows. You might have made one yourself.

But have you ever seen a murder board, based on two real-life unsolved murders, put together by 13-and-14-year-olds? I didn’t think so.

Earlier this week I spoke to teacher Megan Byard’s middle-school class at Inspire Academy in Muncie, Indiana, my hometown. Ms. Byard had approached me and Douglas Walker, my longtime writing partner at Muncie newspapers and in four true crime books, including “The Westside Park Murders: Muncie’s Most Notorious Cold Case,” published by History Press in 2021, about talking to the class about Westside.

In September 1985, teenagers Ethan Dixon and Kimberly Dowell were shot to death in Muncie’s Westside Park. No one was ever charged with the crime, although police have had a person of interest for a few years now. In our book, we name that person, who is in prison following a conviction for a separate murder years after the Westside slayings. We explain the line of reasoning that prompted police to suspect him. We reached out to him in prison to ask about the case against him. He did not respond to written questions and a self-addressed, stamped envelope. In addition to naming him, our book explores many other theories and suspects connected to the case.

Since it came out, our book has received a lot of attention. Popular podcasts have been based on our book and the crime. On Amazon, the book has 163 ratings for 4 out of 5 stars. It prompted a Peabody-winning producer of non-fiction television to contact us about turning it – and some of our other writing – into a multi-part true crime series, but no networks or channels took the producer up on the pitch.

Of all the attention that our book has received, I think one of the coolest and most interesting was from Ms. Byard’s class. The students, who are interested in journalism and writing and true crime, studied the book and the crime in advance of having me do an online talk for their class. They asked good questions.

I think I was most impressed with the murder board, though. Made me feel like I was working in a police precinct, hoping for a breakthrough.

And I guess all of us are still waiting for a breakthrough.

Thanks to Ms. Byard and her class at Inspire Academy. Your interest and care made my week.

Here’s a link to the book on Amazon, although you can find it anywhere, including many libraries, including the Chicago Public Library.