Are women at Indiana University safe?

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Just outside this college town, Jill Behrman took her last bike ride.

In neighboring Morgan County, her remains were found in a swampy thicket nearly three years later.

Through downtown, a path has several noteworthy points — a bar, an upscale apartment building, a row of townhouses — that were Lauren Spierer's last-known stops. The final one was a dark corner she turned before walking out of sight forever.

And now Bloomington has the hotel where Hannah Wilson partied with friends the night she died and the house where a cab dropped her off one last time. Just off a narrow country lane in nearby Brown County is the place where her body was found.

Memorials mark the spot now — flowers and trinkets, a poem, a ceramic angel.

In and around here is a grim and growing list of such landmarks, places where a young female student at Indiana University was last seen, where she disappeared, where she died or where her body was discovered. They are the locations for a series of tragedies that sometimes fade in collective memory but never quite disappear.

What to make of the grisly array is difficult to say, but together they raise some important questions.

Does Indiana University and Bloomington, the city of 83,000 residents that surrounds it about 50 miles southwest of Indianapolis, have a problem with young women falling prey to murdering opportunists?

Or because of what one scholar describes as the "missing white woman syndrome," do the cases garner an outsized amount of media attention that distorts the risks of violent abductions that young women face in college towns?

No one can discount the tragic nature of the crimes that befell the three women.

The string of cases began in 2000, when Behrman, who was 19, went for her morning bike ride north of Bloomington and never came back. Investigators concluded that John R. Myers II, at the time a 24-year-old man from Ellettsville, Ind., a town about seven miles from campus, killed her out of anger over a failed relationship.

He's now in prison.

During the nearly three years that Behrman was unaccounted for, her case drew national attention. Features appeared in People magazine and on the TV shows America's Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries.

Her story was told on the national morning news. At the time, The Indianapolis Star described the Behrman saga as "the most-publicized missing person case in Indiana history."

Then that unwanted distinction fell to Lauren Spierer in 2011.

Spierer, 20, disappeared after a night out drinking with friends downtown. One of them said she set out for the short walk to her apartment in the middle of an early June night. That was nearly four years ago, and she hasn't been seen since.

Massive searches, billboard campaigns, features on crime shows and countless news articles spread her story far and wide but yielded little. Even her parents acknowledge she's probably dead.

With the latest case, the time frame was much more condensed. The frenzy over another missing young woman never had time to materialize.

A cab dropped Hannah Wilson, 22, was dropped off at her Bloomington home early on a Friday morning. Her body was found hours later in Brown County, in a patch of grass along a lonely country lane.

The coroner said she had been beaten to death. That same day, police arrested Daniel Messel, a 49-year-old man who lived about seven miles southwest of Bloomington.

Police say they found his cellphone near Wilson's body and blood in his car. How Messel came into Wilson's path isn't clear.

Speculators in the media and the blogosphere raised the question of whether Messel might have ties to Spierer's disappearance. But police have urged caution in jumping to such conclusions.

Even so, the loss of another student has prompted a renewal of the discussion of student safety at Indiana University, of drinking and of the real risks students face.

Jisoo Kim, a 24-year-old graduate student, and friend Jin a Lee, 22, are two of a shrinking number of students who remember the immediate aftermath of Lauren Spierer's disappearance. The hyper-vigilance about safety following the Spierer saga has waned, they said. At the same time, the party scene intensified.

Kim said alcohol makes some more vulnerable to being victimized than they should be. Her conclusion: "I feel like the frequency of crime has been going up."

Rachel Scott, a junior from Valparaiso, Ind., who is a resident adviser in a dorm, remembers hearing the story of Lauren Spierer when she arrived as a freshman. She expects the safety warnings will be updated now to mention Wilson.

But she sees both Indiana University and Bloomington as safe places and rejects the notion that crime victims or their friends somehow deserve the blame for situations such as Hannah Wilson's.

"I don't believe it's IU's fault," Scott said. "There's going to be sick, terrible people wherever you go."

Jim White, a public safety lecturer at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, said he doesn't see a trend in what has happened in Bloomington — in part because of the years separating the incidents.

"I don't think people should be afraid to go out at night," he said. "But I would say to everyone to have situational awareness."

A Bloomington Police Department spokesman, Lt. Brad Seifers, said he found it difficult to discuss the safety issue without getting into specific cases. But Seifers has a daughter at IU himself and said he had no concerns about her safety.

As with many crime issues, perceptions about campus safety do not always match up with reality, said James Alan Fox, the Lipman family professor of criminology, law and public policy at Northeastern University. About 1,500 alcohol- or drug-related deaths occur on on college campuses each year and another 1,000 suicides, Fox said.

By contrast, the number of homicides is in double digits.

Statistically speaking, college students face far greater risks from alcohol poisoning or sexual assault than they do murder, he said.

On a campus with more than 40,000 students, about 170 students have died since 2000, said Mark Land, an Indiana University spokesman. Most deaths in that period were from car crashes, unintended overdoses of alcohol or drugs or accidents, such as falls from balconies or buildings.

Yet the notion persists that college students — particularly young, attractive white women — are disproportionately vulnerable to being violently abducted or murdered.

"The idea of the missing white woman is a national phenomenon," said Sheri Parks, associate professor at the University of Maryland's Department of American Studies. She says cases involving missing men or even missing black women often fail to generate the media buzz. "To the degree that they are white, young and attractive and one more — respectable — then they become the damsel in distress."

When attractive white women go missing or are found murdered, Parks said, it often draws considerable attention.

This presents a couple of problems. When other people go missing — men, minorities, older people, someone with questionable character — their cases may get little notice.

The other is that young women see stories that get blasted across the news landscape — and retold in fictionalized versions on prime-time TV crime dramas — and they become more afraid than they should, Parks said.

"So, in a way, they become more victimized," she said.

Land, IU's spokesman, said tragedies such as the disappearance of Lauren Spierer or the death of Hannah Wilson are cause for concern — incidents that are frightening and that create a sense of pain across the university community. But he said they are anomalies.

Accidents, overdoses and suicides are the bigger risks, he said.

Courtney Harris, a freshman from Texas, had lunch with her mother, Jackie Harris, just off campus earlier this week. Last summer, before Courtney came on campus, her mother had talked to her about about having a buddy when out at night.

The buddy system proved helpful when men in a passing car approached her and another female student, wanting to give them a ride, Harris said. Together, they moved on.

But over time, as her confidence grew, Harris would go out by herself at night — at least on campus, if not downtown. In recent days — in the wake of Hannah Wilson's death — she's changed course: no night walks alone.

"Now, I would never do that again." she said. "And I just feel so lucky that it wasn't me."