Around the region

Bayer offers a million square feet for a buck\nELKHART -- Nearly two-dozen companies from as far away as Japan are expressing interest in buying Bayer Corp.'s enormous Building No. 1. And who could pass it up for the asking price of $1?\n"The whole idea of offering the building for a dollar was to get someone to come in quickly. And we've had every imaginable type of company come to us," said Joe Martin, a Bayer senior vice president.\nWith one million square feet of office, laboratory, warehouse and manufacturing space, the building will be emptied by Bayer by spring 2003, when the company's Consumer Care Division in Elkhart shuts down.\nA new owner could take over the building, which dates to 1937, sometime next year.\nSo far, overseas inquires have come from Europe, Japan and elsewhere in Asia for the building, which is part of a project called Develop Northern Indiana. The company hopes to select one organization to take over the building by April.\nSecond jail escapee caught after crime spree in many states\nGOSHEN -- An escaped inmate wanted in a multistate crime spree was captured by police as he left his brother's home in Indiana, but authorities continued to search Thursday for a South Carolina woman he is suspected of abducting.\nChadrick E. Fulks, 25, was arrested Wednesday afternoon after he came out of his brother's house in Goshen and got into a car. He was caught by a police officer after a short chase on foot.\nFederal agents had notified Goshen officials that Fulks might be headed there because his father and brother live in the area.\nFulks' brother and a woman driving the car were being questioned, and agents were checking the car and home for clues.\nFBI spokeswoman Kathy Guider said the missing woman's car was found in a rural area outside of Goshen, about 90 miles east of Chicago, on Wednesday evening. It has been towed to FBI offices in Merrillville to be searched, Guider said. She said the car did not give any immediate clues about where 44-year-old Alice Donovan might be.\n"We still have every hope and prayer that she is alive somewhere," Guider said.\nInvestigators believe Donovan was kidnapped last week from a Wal-Mart parking lot in Conway, S.C., by Fulks and another escaped inmate, L. Branden Basham, who was captured Sunday. Police said the woman's ATM card had been used near Raleigh, N.C., last week.\nGroundhogs cause destruction at Angel Mounds\nEVANSVILLE -- An American Indian mound that once gave tribal chiefs a commanding view of their village is being damaged by erosion caused by groundhogs' burrowing nature.\nUndergrowth on the 44-foot tall "Mound A" at the Angel Mounds State Historic Site has given shelter to the critters, whose excavated burrows are now mark the earthen mound with eroded gullies.\n"Some of these problems have been there 50 or 60 years, but the gullies are the biggest concern right now," said Site Manager Michael Linderman.\nHe hopes the mound erosion can be reversed next year with a major stabilization campaign.\nBales of straw line some of the gullies as a temporary fix in the first such attempt since the area became a protected site in 1938.