This isn’t Stipps Hill Road, but it’s not far off.
We ride Vanetta Hollow and Sanes Creek, tracing a familiar route having hills that test our legs and our will. Along the way we pass roads with names made familiar during our years of covering Fayette and Franklin counties. There’s Elm Tree, Quarry, and Johnson School roads. We aren’t thinking when we push through the intersection of Riebolt Road, which connects to Buena Vista Road and, farther south, Hamburg Road. The latter two are divided by an east-west stretch of pavement — Stipps Hill Road.
It’s there five people were recently murdered, each shot to death.
“Police are investigating the deaths of five people Sunday afternoon that occurred in rural Franklin County,” reported the Brookville American-Democrat. “According to neighbors to the site and press releases from the Indiana State Police, the three men and two women were found at two separate properties off Stipps Hill Road.”
We talk of the killings on this fine October day, riding under blue skies and through fair temperatures, passing over hills and down into valleys where the beauty of the rolling countryside is juxtaposed with the raw edge of the territory. There are no million-dollar homes on today’s course, only blue-collar dwellings, including a plentiful supply of mobile homes and trailers, often with unkempt yards watched over by mixed-breed mutts, canines quick to give chase.
It’s hard to ride some of these roads without flashing back to the gritty reality captured in Winter’s Bone. Imagery of people bonded together by kinship. Scenes of lives torn apart by secrets, shame and lawlessness. Just as drugs permeated the story of Ree and her Ozark Mountain kin, they play a role here as well, in out-of-the-way places, behind locked doors, at all hours.
Drugs, it is believed, led to the killings on Stipps Hill Road.
We ride unafraid, trusting that such things happen only to other people, that we are safe in a perilous world. And maybe we are. Or it could be we are just naïve.
Road Bike: 29.87 miles — Fayette and Franklin counties.
