One of the most vicious murderers convicted of killing a victim in Randolph County invoked his constitutional right to an appeal in 2002. The Supreme Court of Indiana tagged the case as Anthony G. Hernandez v. State of Indiana.
Here is the background:
When Antonio Hernandez was a boy, his then-neighbor on South Columbia Street in Union City disliked him making a pest of himself trespassing on her property. She chewed him out.
Hernandez became a petty thief. He served three days in jail in 1974 after being found guilty of shoplifting in Darke County, Ohio.
That neighbor was Berenice L. Keffer, born March 8, 1897. She was the widow of dentist Clarence Crume Keffer.
They wed June 1, 1921, when her maiden name was Berenice Ruprecht. She served as assistant librarian at the Union City Public Library.
Mrs. Keffer was a disciplinarian who could shush a patron fast if a stern look didn’t suffice, several former patrons recalled. She decorated the library’s main room like a parlor. She personally inspected new books before entering them in the wooden card catalog.
Keffer graduated in 1914 from Indiana University Dental College. He won third prize for prosthetic dentistry achievement.
After military service in the Great War, he put out his shingle in Union City. He served more than 50 years on the Union City library board.
Mrs. Keffer retired in 1972 as library director after 57 years. Doctor C.C. Keffer died two weeks after a stroke on April 29, 1977.
Mrs. Keffer was 85 years old on May 30, 1982, when a Sunday visitor went inside her home on South Columbia Street and found an unthinkable crime scene.
Randolph County coroner Terry Collum investigated. Mrs. Keffer probably had been raped and suffocated. A pillow silenced her screams. Residents discussed setting up a block watch, frightened knowing a killer threatened the community.
Local and state law enforcement investigated. Lots of interviews followed, but the case went cold.
Nearly 14 years later, an ex-wife and a brother of a former Carter Street resident (in Union City) fingered Anthony G. Hernandez as the likely killer of Mrs. Keffer. They long had held a secret. Hernandez told them he’d possibly killed “an old lady.”
Hernandez was “plain mean, drunk that night, and out to hurt someone” on a late Saturday night when he took out his life’s frustrations on a former neighbor, a former Union City police chief recalled. The informants “finally were conscience-stricken,” he said.
Hernandez trespassed the night of the murder just as he had as a boy. The property lacked a fence. He came in through a back door and stormed the back door. He likely left a footprint on the crime scene and little other evidence.
He returned by stealth to his own house.
Hernandez took a wife. In time, they moved to Texas and divorced.
Armed with the confidential tips, Indiana authorities extradited the 235-pound Hernandez from a jail in Hidalgo County, Texas.
He had been using two pseudonyms. He had arrests for credit card fraud and ownership of a sawed-off shotgun.
Unfortunately, state police destroyed evidence in the Keffer cold case, but not before one technician photographed much of it.
With the evidence so old, Hernandez almost got away with murder. Beginning in 1999, two juries deadlocked after hearing testimony from police and two of the defendant’s brothers.
The State went for a third trial July 24, 2000, and charged Hernandez with one count of murder.
Four days later, the jury deliberated and requested a photo of a footprint and evidence.
At 8:30 p.m. on July 28, 2000, a jury gave the trial court a verdict of Murder 1.
The apparently revenge killing was as bizarre, vicious, and senseless as any case local law enforcement could recall.
Hernandez, sentenced to 60 years in the state penitentiary, appealed the conviction to the Indiana Supreme Court on a technicality, He and his Bloomington attorney alleged inappropriate communication between jury and the court during the third trial.
The Supreme Court denied Hernandez’s appeal as, in effect, a harmless error in procedure that had no bearing on the trial’s outcome.
Case closed.