In January 2005, a 10-year-old girl walked to a Dollar General store to buy a roll of toilet paper for her mother — an errand she’d made a hundred times before in her small Indiana hometown. She never came home. What followed was a five-day search, a false confession, a DNA match that cracked the case wide open, and, more than a year later, an act of prison vigilante justice that made international headlines.
An Ordinary Errand
Katlyn “Katie” Collman lived in Crothersville, Indiana, a small town of about 1,600 people roughly 70 miles south of Indianapolis. She was a fourth-grader at Crothersville Elementary School, described by those who knew her as friendly, outgoing, and always smiling. On the afternoon of January 25, 2005, Katie arrived home from school around 3 p.m. Her mother, in the middle of getting dinner ready, sent her on a quick errand to the local Dollar General store.
Katie never returned. When she didn’t come home, her family grew alarmed and contacted police. A massive search effort was launched that evening and continued for days, drawing in local volunteers, police, and eventually state investigators, as the small community rallied to find her.
A False Confession
Early in the investigation, a young Crothersville man named Charles “Chuckie” Hickman became a suspect. Hickman gave police a confession, claiming Katie had been abducted and killed to keep her quiet about methamphetamine activity he claimed was happening in a nearby apartment complex. He was arrested and charged with her murder.
But detectives soon noticed that Hickman’s account kept shifting and contradicting itself. As investigators continued working the case, they turned to physical evidence recovered from the scene, including DNA collected from Katie’s body and from a discarded cigarette butt found nearby. When that DNA was run through the database, it didn’t match Hickman at all — it matched a different local man entirely. The methamphetamine theory that had driven the investigation for weeks was ultimately discarded. Murder charges against Hickman were dropped. He was later convicted on an unrelated charge involving a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl when he was 18, a case that had surfaced while he was being questioned in Katie’s disappearance, and served time separately for that offense.
The Body Is Found
On January 30, 2005 — five days after she vanished — Katie’s body was found in a creek near Cypress Lake, roughly 15 miles from her Crothersville home, in an area between Indianapolis and Louisville, Kentucky. She had been bound, sexually assaulted, and drowned; investigators determined she had been placed in the water alive.
The Real Killer
The DNA evidence pointed investigators to Anthony Ray Stockelman, a 38-year-old married father of three from nearby Seymour, Indiana. Stockelman had actually been interviewed early in the investigation because he matched the description of a man seen with Katie, but at the time, attention had been focused on Hickman instead.
The case against Stockelman built quickly once his DNA was confirmed. Investigators traced the unusual brand of cigarette found near Katie’s body back to a convenience store where Stockelman was a regular customer; a store clerk recognized it as “his regular brand.” Police also found 14 red carpet fibers on Katie’s clothing that matched carpet inside a home belonging to Stockelman’s mother, where he had reportedly been helping her move furniture. He was also known to drive a white pickup truck similar to one witnesses described seeing near where Katie was last seen.
Stockelman was initially arrested on a molestation charge in April 2005; that charge was upgraded to murder shortly afterward, and prosecutors announced they would pursue the death penalty.
A Guilty Plea
In April 2006, Stockelman agreed to plead guilty to murder and child molestation in exchange for prosecutors taking the death penalty off the table. Jackson County Prosecutor Stephen Pierson said the deal spared Katie’s family the ordeal of a lengthy trial. As Stockelman was led out of the courtroom following his plea, his own wife, Tabitha, reportedly shouted out, “Why’d you do it, Tony?”
He was sentenced later that month to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder, plus an additional 30 years for the molestation charge. He later challenged the sentence on appeal, but the Indiana Supreme Court upheld it in 2007. Stockelman remains incarcerated at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, Indiana, a maximum-security prison, with no possibility of ever being released.
“Katie’s Revenge”
The case took an unexpected turn in the fall of 2006, when prison officials discovered that Stockelman had been forcibly tattooed across his entire forehead with the words “KATIE’S REVENGE.”
The person responsible turned out to be Jared Harris, a 22-year-old inmate at Wabash Valley who was, by coincidence, a distant cousin of Katie Collman, serving time on an unrelated burglary conviction. According to a prison affidavit, officials had transferred Harris into the same prison wing as Stockelman on September 19, 2006; over the following days, Harris reportedly threatened Stockelman’s life multiple times. On September 22, Harris slipped into Stockelman’s cell and, according to Stockelman’s account to investigators, put a hand around his throat and gave him an ultimatum: “I’m either gonna stick you and leave you bleeding or I’m gonna tattoo you.” Using a makeshift tattoo gun built from a cassette deck motor and a guitar string needle, Harris carried out the tattoo before discarding the device in a trash can.
Harris was charged with battery over the incident and had seven years added to his sentence for violating prison rules. During a later hearing, he testified that he’d framed the tattoo to Stockelman as a way to end further violence against him: “I told him if he would allow me to place this tattoo on his forehead … everything would be taken care of and he wouldn’t have to worry about any future attacks.” He also testified that other inmates had attacked Stockelman at his request because of his crime against Katie.
Two prison guards were separately fired after a photo of the tattoo — which had been taken as evidence — was leaked and ended up circulating online, including on a crime-focused blog, drawing national and international media attention to the case. A medical provider later agreed to treat and remove the tattoo from Stockelman’s forehead at no cost to taxpayers.
Katie’s father, John Neace, said at the time that he believed the tattoo was “a statement from the inmates” about how child molesters and killers are treated within the prison population, and said he wasn’t sure whether Harris had personally been involved.
Katie’s Legacy
Katie Collman’s murder left a lasting mark on Crothersville. The community built a playground in her memory, and her case has since been the subject of multiple true crime documentaries and retrospectives, drawn in part by the highly unusual “Katie’s Revenge” tattoo that followed her killer into prison.
Two decades later, Anthony Stockelman remains behind bars at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility, serving a sentence that guarantees he will die in prison. For the small town that searched for Katie for five agonizing days in the cold of January 2005, her case remains a defining, painful chapter in its history — and a reminder of how an ordinary errand to buy toilet paper turned into an unimaginable loss.
