Lauren leaving her Smallwood Apt for the evening
Vanished
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. The distance Lauren Spierer covered on the last night anyone saw her can be walked on a hot day without breaking a sweat, spanned with a decent golf shot and traversed -- it turns out -- without shoes.
That a young woman could disappear -- seemingly off the face of the earth -- from such a small area that was trafficked by people and vehicles even in the wee hours of the morning would seem to defy every probability. Especially in a city that, on the night of June 2 and the early hours of June 3, never really went to sleep.
Yet more than three weeks after a friend said Spierer rounded the corner at 11th Street and College Avenue, the 20-year-old woman with the blinding blonde hair and the rich blue eyes is still missing, vanished not without a trace, but seemingly with very few.
The course she followed that last night, it turns out, says much about the rhythms of a college town and of the exuberance of youth. But it also reveals that even in a carefree college town, there are unfriendly faces, dark alleys and hidden corners that, once you take them, there's no going back.
The last available photo of Spierer -- taken in the hallway of her apartment building just a few hours before she was last seen -- captured so much. It's of a college woman going out for the night. She's wearing a white V-neck blouse with butterfly sleeves and black leggings with silver zippers at the ankles. But the feature that is most memorable is her smile. She looks like she's having the time of her life and heading out for a promising evening.
As with so many details, Bloomington police have said very little about the photo -- exactly when it was taken and where they think Spierer was headed at that moment. But what's clear from the accounts of police, friends and others is that, about 12:30 a.m., Spierer left her residence at the decidedly upscale Smallwood Plaza student apartments with a friend named David Rohn, who also lived there.
They walked about 31/2 blocks up to 5 North Townhomes, a row of five townhomes on 11th Street. It would be a hub for much of the evening. Known for its back-to-school block parties and free-flowing alcohol, it was a place where some of her friends had been gathering in the corner residence occupied by, among other people, friend Jay Rosenbaum.
In keeping with the open-door party policy at 5 North, two friends from a couple of doors over -- Corey Rossman and Mike Beth -- soon joined the gathering. Whether they were drinking, or how much, isn't known.
But they -- Spierer, Rohn, Rosenbaum, Rossman and Beth -- were part of a group that had spent Memorial Day weekend camped out in the infield of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, sleeping in tents and having a good time. The outing at the race track was the place, in fact, where Spierer had first met Rossman and Beth. Friends say they seemed to have hit it off.
After an hour or so of hanging out with the group, Spierer and Rossman set out alone on a five-minute walk along 11th Street, across College Avenue and over to Walnut Street to one of downtown Bloomington's favorite watering holes, Kilroy's Sports Bar.
In some ways, Kilroy's is a place with a split personality.
Inside, it has all the trappings of a typical sports bar -- wood floors, round tables, dark lighting, multiple TVs tuned to the night's sporting events and murals of Indiana University sports heroes. There's an abundance of neon, a wooden pirate and IU logos.
But half of the establishment has garage bay doors that open to the outside. Tons of sand have been spread across the courtyard and inside up to the beach bar. It's a place adorned with fake palm trees, Adirondack chairs, beach furniture and other seaside furnishings. It's an ideal place to kick off your shoes, stick your toes in the sand and enjoy a beverage with friends.
Here, Rossman, who is 21, and Spierer, who is 20, stayed for 41 minutes. Police won't say whether they were drinking alcohol or how much. The bar is being investigated for possible alcohol violations. But when they were done, Spierer, with Rossman at her side, walked barefoot across the sand and out the door, leaving her shoes behind, along with her cellphone, which would ring away the next morning with text messages from Spierer's boyfriend, Jesse Wolff, whom Spierer never seemed to connect with that night.
Spierer and Rossman walked downhill along Eighth Street on one of two sidewalks, one cracked and broken on the side nearest Kilroy's, the other smooth and solid across the narrow lane.
Arriving at the corner of Eighth and College Avenue, they faced two structures standing on opposite sides of the road -- the Monroe County Sheriff's Office and the Smallwood Plaza Apartments.
Smallwood isn't a dorm. It isn't anything like what college students from even a generation ago would imagine as a student residence. It is an eight-story apartment building with a red-brick facade, its own self-contained parking garage and a fitness center. Rents range from $1,500 to $3,000 a month.
As Smallwood spokesman Ernie Reno puts it, the clientele it serves "clearly is a higher-income demographic."
For a college town in Southern Indiana, Smallwood has an inordinate number of students from the Northeast.
Spierer is a native of the New York City suburb of Greenburgh. Her roommate, Hadar Tamir, is from Long Island. Amanda Roude, another of Spierer's friends, is from Chappaqua, N.Y., which Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton call home.
In Smallwood, residents from New York and elsewhere find apartment styles with names like the Carnegie and the Manhattan, units furnished with oak cabinets, ceiling fans in every room and stainless steel kitchen appliances.
It is also a place with $700,000 worth of video surveillance equipment -- 156 cameras covering every nook in the hallways, parking garage and common areas.
Those cameras captured footage that Bloomington police were so interested in grabbing that they broke down the doors to Smallwood's data room, causing several thousand dollars' worth of damage, even though a maintenance man with a key was on his way to let them in, Reno said.
Police haven't described exactly what happened at Smallwood. But they captured two days' worth of video. And one of the main points of interest seems to be a confrontation between Rossman and some other young men police haven't identified.
From available information, this is what's known to have happened at Smallwood:
Spierer and Rossman entered the complex at 2:30 a.m. and spent 12 minutes there, according to police.
Rossman entered Smallwood despite having a "no trespass order" banning him from the place, Reno said. In October, he said, Rossman and another young man were arrested after wandering the halls while drunk. In early May, Rossman had urinated in the parking garage and had been shown the street by security guards.
During the confrontation with the group of young men on the night of Spierer's disappearance, Rossman was hit or punched in the head and, according to his attorney, left with a split lip and a lost memory of the moments around the encounter.
Rumors have swirled around Bloomington about the young men who wanted a piece of Rossman. As with so much else, police have revealed almost nothing. What's clear is that Spierer and Rossman -- her new friend from the Indy 500 and companion for the evening -- trudged on toward Rossman's place.
Six minutes after they left the gaze of Smallwood's surveillance, they fell into the view of a phalanx of cameras lining a small north-south alley just off 10th Street, an alley wedged between two apartment buildings.
This isn't a trash can alley. It's a corridor for residential parking. It has speed bumps. There's a pool alongside the alley that Spierer herself had used in visiting other friends. It's not a scary place, just an alley.
As Spierer and Rossman emerged from the alley, they could have taken the direct route across a rocky gravel lot, but that might have been problematic for a girl with no shoes. They could have continued straight in a narrower, less inviting stretch of the alley. Or they could have taken a clearer but less direct path over to Morton Street up to 11th Street, and Rossman's place at 5 North.
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