Rising Tension
Before that morning, the last time Hall saw Kiritsis was around June 1976, when Kiritsis came to Meridian Mortgage for what became a tense meeting in which Kiritsis and Hall’s father, who also worked there, were “about ready to come to blows,” according to Hall’s 2017 memoir, Kiritsis and Me: Enduring 63 Hours at Gunpoint.
Kiritsis had financed property with Meridian Mortgage for several years but now claimed the company was trying to cheat him out of a profitable piece of land. Kiritsis was behind on his mortgage payments, and the Halls refused to further extend his loan.
“There was obviously, clearly tension before [February 1977],” says Lisa Hendrickson, a writer and editor who worked with Hall on his memoir. “Tony also had a reputation as a hothead.”
On the morning of February 8, 1977, Kiritsis showed up at Hall’s office carrying a box containing the so-called “dead man’s wire” (which later became the title of a 2025 film adaptation of the ordeal). Kiritsis had been working more closely with Hall’s father, but he was vacationing in Florida at the time.
Situation Unfolds on Live TV
From Hall’s office, Kiritsis called the Indianapolis Police Department and, in a lengthy tirade, explained the hostage situation, repeatedly telling police he wanted to “make things right,” according to Kiritsis and Me. Police were already on the scene when the two exited the building. Then came the media.
Scott Watson followed the events live from Indianapolis as a 14-year-old. Watson, who later became Hall’s friend and helped with his book, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that the situation “gripped the city…at a time when we were beginning to get live television for the first time.” National TV news networks that covered the story took a risk—if the shotgun fired, viewers across the country would see it in real time.
During the hostage negotiations, Kiritsis outlined demands, including a public apology from Meridian Mortgage, a release from his $130,000 mortgage loan and immunity from prosecution. At one point, Kiritsis pulled Hall into the driver’s seat of an empty police car, its door left open, and directed him toward his Crestwood Village apartment complex in western Indianapolis, where they spent much of the next three days.
Radio Station Airs Controversial Interview
Though law enforcement set up a perimeter around the complex, any attempt to enter would have triggered explosives that Kiritsis set up in his apartment, The New York Times reported.
Kiritsis wanted to specifically talk with Fred Heckman, news director of Indianapolis radio station WIBC-AM. The radio station faced an unprecedented dilemma: “Should the media give into the demands, allowing an armed gunman to have live access to viewers and listeners?” wrote journalist Tom Cochrun, who reported to Heckman in 1977 as a WIBC reporter. “Some argued it was appropriate if it saved a life.”
Some of Kiritsis’s obscenity-filled conversations with Heckman were later broadcast on radio and replayed by TV news networks. Heckman began acting as a mediator between the police and Kiritsis.
Meridian Mortgage issued a public apology 12 hours after the abduction began though later stated it was a purely tactical move. On the second day of the ordeal, local prosecutor George Martz offered Kiritsis immunity from state prosecution in exchange for Hall’s release, but Kiritsis’s request for federal immunity was rejected by U.S. Attorney General Griffin Bell. (Martz later said he never intended to honor the terms of the immunity agreement.)
Crisis Diffused
On the night of February 10, 1977, Kiritsis emerged from his apartment—along with Hall, still connected to the wire—for an impromptu press conference inside the apartment complex. Before a swarm of reporters and a live national audience, Kiritsis vocalized his qualms with Meridian Mortgage and apologized for humiliating Hall—“although he must have surely had it coming,” he added.
Hall was released from the wire in a side office, and then Kiritsis fired the shotgun to prove it was real before being apprehended by police officers.
What Came Next
Kiritsis was tried in October 1977 on state charges of kidnapping, armed robbery and armed extortion but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The verdict was broadcast on live national TV.
In such cases, Indiana law in 1977 placed the burden on the prosecution to prove a defendant’s sanity beyond a reasonable doubt. Nile Stanton, Kiritsis’s chief defense counsel at the time, tells A&E Crime + Investigation he showed the jury that “when [Kiritsis] started thinking something, he could get real under the influence of that thought.”
“I knew how to calm him down, or to make him cry, or to make him laugh, or to make him angry—I knew what to say, the sorts of questions [or] things that bothered him,” Stanton says.
The case led to changes in Indiana state laws that placed the burden of proving insanity on the defendant rather than the prosecution. Other states followed suit, especially after John Hinckley Jr. was found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity after his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in March 1981.
Kiritsis was turned over to the state Department for Mental Health and committed to an institution. He was released in 1988 and died at home of natural causes in 2005.
Hall died in 2022 after a brief illness. In his memoir, Hall wrote that the emotional consequences of his hostage experience were “difficult to quantify.”
“Because of Tony Kiritsis, almost every aspect of my life was thrown upside down. The fact that one man could walk into my office and turn all that effort and preparation into turmoil still bothers me,” Hall wrote. “I feel I have endured quite a lot since that morning in February 1977.”
