Call the Surveyor: The 1979 State Line Shooting

When a South Bend cab driver took a bullet to the head, the uncertain boundary between Indiana and Michigan took center stage

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED JULY 5, 2025

It was a Friday night in South Bend. Early September. 1979. Still a week before college football season began. For the cab drivers, that meant the last quiet weekend before Notre Dame football fans filled the bars, drank too much, and then punched at payphones trying to hire a ride home.

Bill Gooley wasn't looking forward to the beginning of the football season. The beginning of football season delivered drunks who couldn't remember their addresses, belligerents looking for a fight, and the ever-present danger of an intoxicated passenger throwing up in the backseat.

Those were the kinds of dangers that Gooley expected on any given night. But when the phone rang at 11:00 p.m. on September 7, Gooley wasn't expecting that he'd be driven into a geographic no-man's land and robbed at gunpoint. He never imagined that he'd be shot in the head or make headlines in the paper. And he certainly never thought that he'd wind up as a kind of strange footnote in curious border uncertainty that exists in the narrow strip of land between certain parts of Indiana and Michigan.

If he'd had any sense that any of that was coming, he never would have taken the call.

Bill Gooley didn't deserve to become a footnote in this story. Gooley was a mainstay in South Bend's theater community — a singer, actor, and dancer who starred in shows at the South Bend Civic in the 1960s. In fact, he was one of the original members when the Civic began in 1957.

When Gooley wasn't on the stage, he was supporting productions from up in the booth, working as the Civic's lighting designer — even winning a few awards for his technical work. By 1976, Gooley was President at the Civic, a role he still held on that fateful night in 1979.

His peers described him as the “glue” that held the Civic together — a wonderful actor with a tremendous singing voice who also ran lights, took tickets, and even answered the phones whenever there was a need.

Gooley lived for the theater, and in fact, that's why he drove the cab. The job allowed him to set his own schedule. He drove the less lucrative day shift during show weeks, and when the theater was on hiatus, he was able to make a little more money in the evenings.

Unfortunately for Gooley, in September 1979, the theater was on hiatus. He took the call and stepped into his cab, never knowing that he'd come out of the vehicle on a stretcher.

By the time the police found the vehicle, there were a lot more questions than answers. The cab was parked in a ditch along State Line Road between Ironwood and Juniper. Gooley was still at the wheel, bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. There was no sign of a suspect, no clues about where the shooter might have fled.

The responding officers called in the ambulance, and they told it to hurry. Gooley was still breathing.

They called detectives. They called forensics experts. They called dispatch at the cab company to gather clues. They called the restaurant where Gooley had collected his most recent passenger.

And maybe most importantly...

…they called the County Surveyor.

John McNamara had been the County Surveyor for seven years when he received the call to check out the crime scene on the State Line. He would continue in the job for more than 40 years afterward. All told, McNamara served 50 years as the County Surveyor, and he saw a lot during his long career. But there was something sadistically unique about the night of September 7, 1979.

It wasn't usually the Surveyor's job to get involved in murder cases.

But this time was different because the crime straddled the state line, and where the shooting took place mattered to detectives almost as much as who did it.

Before we get too much further into this, I know what you're thinking, and no, you cannot get away with crimes if you commit them in places with ambiguous boundaries. The American legal system has mechanisms in place to handle scenarios where crimes can be proven even when jurisdiction can't.

But jurisdiction matters to plenty of other stakeholders. If it was decided that the shot had been fired on the Michigan side of the line, that would mean involving a whole other set of police officers, detectives, and forensic specialists. It would mean differences in legal codes that determine how those officers might find their suspect. And if the case ended with a conviction, it would mean different sentencing guidelines for the guilty party.

But most importantly, there was about to be a manhunt underway, and if there was any jurisdictional red tape that would need to be cut, that would slow things down. Slowing things down would only help the man they were looking for.

During almost every other moment of every other day of the year, the ambiguity of the Indiana-Michigan state line is little more than a curiosity. During all of those other moments, that curiosity is barely an inconvenience. The exactness of the border is a thing that doesn't really matter very much at all...

Until, suddenly, it matters a whole hell of a lot.

In the end, McNamara placed the scene of the crime squarely on the Indiana side of the state line, and the investigation continued. It was fortunate for everyone involved — except maybe the gunman — that the incident had gone down where it did. We know the state line more exactly in the north-central part of St. Joseph County than almost anywhere else along the 104-mile border.

Had the crime gone down anywhere else along the invisible line, the response would have been slower, and the outcome might have proved fatal. That's because — thanks in part to a quick response and the hard work of a lot of doctors — Gooley did not die from his injuries. It was a long recovery, and Gooley was left with some permanent disabilities, but he did live. In 1985, the Civic presented him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

For a very short time, there was a renewed fervor to guarantee the location of the state line, just in case anything like this ever happened again. But that fervor faded by the time the gunman was arrested a month later, and it had vanished altogether by the time he was sentenced to prison more than a year after that.

There have been a few attempts to address the ambiguity of the State Line, but they have yet to be realized. The confusion is still the same, and at least in some places, it's two states straddling 20-40 feet of disputed territory. It doesn't seem like much, at least until it does.

There's not a lot of public sentiment to resurvey the border — a task more arduous today than it was 200 years ago given that people actually live on that invisible line now. But John McNamara still remembers that night in 1979, and he doesn't want there to be another night like that one. He doesn't mince his words about the border question.

“They need to get it sorted out.”