September 25, 2025 • 61 mins
Please enjoy this re-release of a premium show from 2022!Late on the night of November 17, 1978, Speedway, Indiana teenager Brian Kring stopped by his workplace, the Burger Chef fast food restaurant, to visit with his friends and offer them help closing up for the night. But when he arrived, he found the restaurant empty. The four employees working that night, 20-year-old Jayne Friedt, 16-year-old Daniel Davis, 16-year-old Mark Flemmonds, and 17-year-old Ruth Shelton were all gone, but the door was unlocked and all of the lights were still on. Unable to reach the assistant manager, Jayne, by phone, Brian finally called the police. But when the police arrived, they were surprisingly cavalier. In their opinion, a group of irresponsible teens had taken the cash from the till and gone off for a night of fun.
Join us at the quiet end for our discussion of the 1978 Burger Chef Murders. The next day, the police would realize that they had made a big mistake. None of the employees arrived home and their parents were frantic, but the police had not bothered to treat the abandoned restaurant as a crime scene. Two days later, four dead bodies were discovered about 20 miles south of the scene. The young Burger Chef employees had been stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned to death. Now, forty-three years later, no one has been arrested for these murders.
Sources:
American Crime Journal, “Forrester Confession”https://www.insider.com/burger-chef-murders-unsolved-speedway-indiana
Indianapolis Monthly, “Next in Line: The Burger Chef Murders”The Burger Chef Murders in Indiana, by Julie Young
The Burger Chef Murders in Indiana, by Julie Young
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-brewery--4126935/support.
Record your voicemail at tiegrabber.com for our feedback segment or send us an email to truecrimebrewery@tiegrabber.com
We love receiving your feedback and most of our case choices come from listener suggestions!
Join us at the quiet end for our discussion of the 1978 Burger Chef Murders. The next day, the police would realize that they had made a big mistake. None of the employees arrived home and their parents were frantic, but the police had not bothered to treat the abandoned restaurant as a crime scene. Two days later, four dead bodies were discovered about 20 miles south of the scene. The young Burger Chef employees had been stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned to death. Now, forty-three years later, no one has been arrested for these murders.
Sources:
American Crime Journal, “Forrester Confession”https://www.insider.com/burger-chef-murders-unsolved-speedway-indiana
Indianapolis Monthly, “Next in Line: The Burger Chef Murders”The Burger Chef Murders in Indiana, by Julie Young
The Burger Chef Murders in Indiana, by Julie Young
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-brewery--4126935/support.
Record your voicemail at tiegrabber.com for our feedback segment or send us an email to truecrimebrewery@tiegrabber.com
We love receiving your feedback and most of our case choices come from listener suggestions!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
True crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I just feel like, you know, here's this particular area.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone,
and that makes people uneasy.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Four young people murdered after they were kidnapped from work
at the Burger Chef restaurant in Speedway.
Speaker 5 (00:47):
The Speedway Police Department and the Indiana State Police announced
that the bodies of Jane C. Free, age twenty, Marcus Flemens,
age seventeen, Daniel R. Davis sixteen, Ruthie Shelton, aged seventeen.
I've been discovered late this afternoon in Johnson County, Indiana.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
It's been thirty five years, but Teresa Jeffries can't forget
losing her older sister and the chill in the air when.
Speaker 6 (01:14):
It fall hits when the weather starts getting cold again.
The day after she was buried was Thanksgiving.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
I have two children alive and one in home together.
Sister and mother share family memories. The dress Ruth wore
in the family photo.
Speaker 6 (01:33):
The last dress that my grandmother had made.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
For her, and a high school ring are keepsakes they'll cherish.
Speaker 6 (01:40):
She was my only sister. I idolized her. I wanted
to be just as happy and go lucky as she was.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Jeffrey says she still has nightmares thinking about how her
sister and the three other Burger Chef employees were brutally murdered.
Speaker 6 (01:57):
I honestly believe that it will never solved.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
The scene was never really processed as a crime.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
Scene, but it was a crime scene. Assistant manager Jane
Fried's car was found abandoned in the morning a few
miles away near the police station. Then two days later,
a couple found the four young people murdered, their bodies
twenty miles away, scattered in a wooded area off State
Road thirty seven in Johnson County. They were killed three
(02:23):
different ways, shot, stabbed, and possibly beaten with a chain.
A wreath on the Burger Chef door marked the restaurant
closed until all four were laid to rest.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery. Ti Grabbers, I'm Jill and
I'm Dick. On Friday, November seventeenth. Back in nineteen seventy eight, Speedway, Indiana,
teenager Brian Kring stopped by his workplace, the Burger Chef
fast food restaurant, to visit with his friends and offer
them help closing up for the night, but when he arrived,
(02:57):
he found the restaurant empty. The four employees working that night,
twenty year old Jane Fright, sixteen year old Daniel Davis,
sixteen year old Mark Flemons, and seventeen year old Ruth Shelton,
were all gone, but the door was unlocked and all
the lights were still on. Unable to reach the assistant manager,
(03:19):
Jane by phone, Brian finally called the police, but when
the police arrived, they were surprisingly cavalier. In their opinion,
a group of irresponsible teens had taken the cash from
the till and gone off for a night of fun.
Join us at the Quiet End for our discussion of
the nineteen seventy eight Burger Chef murders. The next day,
(03:42):
the police would realize that they had made a big mistake.
None of the employees arrived home and their parents became frantic,
but the police had not bothered to treat the abandoned
restaurant as a crime scene. That Sunday, four dead bodies
were discovered in a clearing in the woods about twenty
miles so of the scene. The young burger chef employees
(04:03):
had been stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned to death. Now it's
forty three years later and no one has ever been
arrested for these murders. So let's talk about it, see
if we can figure anything out.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Well, we can certainly try, and I think people have
kind of thought they had have figured out. But the
usual suspects are all dead, right, so it's going to
be difficult.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Well, it's close to impossible that anything will happen at
this point.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah, somebody said the only way they probably would solve
it now would be to get a deathbed confession.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Right, yes, but some of the people they suspected are already.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Dead, well, most all of them are dead.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
But we can certainly talk about it and give our opinions,
which we are apt to do.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Well, we got plenty of opinions, right, yes, Okay? For
a beer, Indiana beer, right, I decided to go with
Alpha King from three Floyd's Brewing Company in Munster, Indiana.
This is an American pale ale. It's six point sixty
six percent alcohol by volume. This beer is a copper color,
(05:08):
nice white, had plenty of lacing aroma of pine and citrus,
and the taste is grapefruit and pine. Very simple. It's
a medium bodied, fairly happy beer.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Sounds really good.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
See it is, and you'll like this one.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
All right. Down here at the quiet end, thankfully, we
do have a fireplace, which we need. It's very chilly.
It's a cool day, it really is. I'll be happy
when spring comes.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
You got a ways to go, yes.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Although it comes sooner down here than it does up
in Maine. Okay, why don't you get us started?
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Okay? So. The town of Speedway, Indiana, is the home
of the famous Indianapolis five hundred car Race. It was
built in the nineteen twenties to support the automotive industry.
It is located just west of downtown Indianapolis, and in
nineteen seventy eight, the population was just over eleven thousand people.
Speedway was seen as a fairly safe place to live
(06:10):
until nineteen seventy eight, and that's when several violent crimes occurred.
In July, a sixty five year old woman was shot
to death in her own garage, a shocking and random killing,
and then in September, there was a series of bombings,
seven or eight of them, and one of them severely
injured a Vietnam veteran and his wife. Then in November,
(06:31):
with these crimes still as yet unsolved, the Burger Chef
murders occurred. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
So if you were a teenager in the nineteen sixties
or nineteen seventies and you lived in a small town,
you might have worked in a Burger Chef.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yeah. That was Burger Chef's model, open stores and small towns,
not big ones. So, and they were largely a Midwest
restaurant chain.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So it was founded in nineteen fifty seven and grew
quite rapidly. In nineteen seventy two, twelve hundred locations were
surpassed only by McDonald's sixteen hundred locations, and the next
several years saw a decline in business. In nineteen eighty two,
the owners divested themselves of the chain, gradually selling to
(07:14):
the owners of Hardy's. So the last Burger Chef restaurant
closed down in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, this one, the Speedway One, I think was briefly
a Hearty's and then they sold it to I think
it's an automotive parts store or something right now, but
the building still does exist.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Okay. So it was eleven pm on November seventeenth, nineteen
seventy eight, and the Burger Chef on Crawfordsville Road in Speedway,
Indiana had just closed for the night. The four young
employees were cleaning up in preparation for the next day,
a Saturday. Daniel Davis had changed out of his uniform
shirt and he was in the process of bagging up
(07:54):
the garbage. Jane Fright, the assistant manager, took cash from
the drawers and placed the money in a safe in
the manager's office. Now, Jane was one of those real
go getter types who did well in school while she
held down this job, she also was participating in a
lot of extracurricular activities and she worked as a teacher's
(08:15):
aide and a library assistant. So she just had a
great work ethic and was promoted to an assistant manager
position after working at the burger shaft for just three months.
She worked upwards of fifty hours a week and when
she was in the store, she was basically in charge
of everything. Jane wasn't aware that she was going to
(08:36):
be promoted to store manager. But that was the plan,
and that would have been quite an accomplishment because she
was only twenty years old.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
I got a chuckle. I mean, her manager was praising
her and talking about what a great worker she was
and how they were all part time workers. And then
I'm saying that she worked up was a fifty hours
a week, which seems to me more like full time
than part time.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well sure, but they don't want to qualify by her
as a full time Well we don't want to be
getting into any benefits or anything, of course, not sure,
but yeah, those are a lot of hours to work
when you're doing all that other stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
I mean, she's I think she's finished high school and
I was in college at this point, but right she
was twenty. It's a lot of stuff. And then the
other thing that struck me was that even though she'd
only been working there a short time, she is in
line for a managerial position. So she must have been
quite something.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Sounds like it.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Ruth Ellen Shelton seventeen was another one of those driven
students who was already planning her career in computer science.
She had turned in her resignation feeling overworked and underpaid,
but at the request of the store manager, she had
agreed to work through the holidays, so that had to
kind of weigh on her family's hearts after everything that happened.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
In the back of the store, short order cook Mark Flemons,
a sixteen year old, was cleaning up the grill and
he was supposed to be off for the night, but
he had agreed to fill in for a friend who
needed the night off.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah, and then he wanted to renege on that agreement
because he got an offer for something going on that
Friday night, but the manager said, you know, I'm sorry.
You agreed to work for the girl. You gotta work.
So that's how he ended up being there.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Well, yeah, that's generally how it works, right, But anyway,
the store manager, Robert Gillat, considered them an exceptional crew
who worked really hard and they never gave him any trouble.
So these were good kids.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
These were very good kids, according to Gillat. Just after
midnight that Friday night, Brian Kring drove by the burger
chef He was also employed there, as you said earlier, Joe,
and when he saw some lights on, he decided, I'm
going to stop and visit with the people working. So
he walked around the back of the building to knock
on the door and found the door partially opened, which
(10:55):
should not have been and this is a door to
be locked at all times of course. Yeah, so he
walked in. He called out a greeting, no response, no answer,
and as he went towards the front of the store,
Brian saw that the cash drawers were lying empty on
the floor, and then when he went into the manager's
office it looked like it had been tossed. So Brian's thinking, wow,
(11:17):
this place got robbed, and then his second thought is, well,
where's the rest of the people.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Well, yeah, because even in a robbery, generally the staff
are left behind, whether they're hurt or not. Right, So
Brian called nine one one, and when the police arrived,
they found two empty currency bags and a roll of
adhesive tape next to an open safe.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
So when the.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Store manager showed up, he said there was about six
hundred dollars missing. The police initially hypothesized that the robbery
could have been an inside job. Gilly, the store manager,
said there was no way that the crew could have
committed the robbery. There had to be another explanation. Since
the rear door was to be locked at all times,
there was a good possibility that the robbers had gained
(12:01):
entrance while the trash was being taken out.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Yeah, and I think that's a pretty valid supposition the
way things turned out, right, So for a small town,
and the population back then was what around eleven thousand,
I think you.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Said, Yeah, eleven or twelve, I've heard, But.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Speedway had seen its share of recent mishaps. On July
twenty ninth, nineteen seventy eight, Julia Ciphers was shot to
death in the garage at her home, and they're investigating
her death, and the police came to feel that her
murder had been a professional job. And it turned out
there was a local businessman who employed Cipher's daughter, and
(12:42):
the feeling was that he had become a little too
friendly with the daughter of Cypher's daughter. So Cypher's granddaughter
worked there and it didn't work there. Cypher's granddaughter attracted
the attention of this guy, so Cypher's moved his granddaughter
into her home just to get her out of the
line of fire of this guy, and was thinking about
filing charges against the businessman and police's theory was that
(13:04):
this guy had hired a hitman to take out Cypher's.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
So Julia was in her sixties, her granddaughter was how
old she was lateeen's, early twenties, and this guy was
a middle aged man. Yeah, so creepy, a creepy middle
aged man. Before arrest could be made, there were three
explosions on September one, followed by five more explosions over
the next few days. Police felt that the same individual
(13:30):
or individuals was responsible, and they quickly focused on one
man who had purchased the detonators. It turned out to
be the same man suspected of being involved in Cipher's killing,
but it would take another three years before the business
man and his associate would be charged in the bombings
and murder.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yeah. So, obviously in this small town, you'd like to
try to connect all the cases and say that they
were all related to each other. But in this situation,
it looks like the killing of Ciphers and the bombs
that went off in dumpsters and so on, those were connected,
but they were not connected to the burger chef robbery
(14:10):
and killings.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Right, But when the burger chef incident happened, those weren't
solved yet, so.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
No, no, they didn't, and it took a few more years,
but eventually they apparently got it right and the guy
and his associate were charged and found guilty.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
So understandably, giving these recent crimes, the police wanted to
solve the disappearance of the four young people as quickly
as possible, so the first thing to do was to
notify the parents. But none of the parents had any
pertinent information for the police, so they couldn't help. But
of course they were very worried.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, I mean, the police are shown up at their
homes in the middle of the night and telling them
that it looks like there's been a robbery at the
burger chef and your child is missing. Right, that's not
a great way to start things.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
But the police didn't seem to take it seriously enough.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
No, they didn't. Their initial thought was that the teens
had just decided to rob the store and go party.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
But even if you're thinking that, you don't disregard all
the proper police work, which they apparently did. Yeah, they
didn't fingerprint nothing. They actually allowed the next shift to
come in and clean the place, so that's not very good.
But then They finally did mount a large scale man
hunt and Jane's car, a white nineteen seventy four Chevy Vega,
(15:34):
was found around four thirty am, but there were no
substantial clues found in her vehicle. Police at this point
were working on the idea that the suspects gained entry
into the burger chef as someone was taking out the trash.
Then after taking the money, they forced the kids into
Jane's car and they drove off with them, with the
car they had come in following behind. So Jane's car
(15:57):
was then abandoned. So did the suspects then draw off
with the four young people in their car? Apparently they did.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Well, it's a real mystery at this point and trying
to figure out what the heck's going on, how it
could have happened.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Well, yeah, if you're going in to rob a fast
food joint, usually you get the money and you leave.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, you're not going to take hostages or prisoners, right,
not normally No.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
And even if you were going to hurt the crew,
why would you take them away to do that?
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So you have to think maybe when they left with
the kids, they weren't planning on necessarily killing them. All,
maybe they weren't sure.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Yeah, I've had a difficult time trying to figure out
why they took them with them.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, not only you, everyone has.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
One of the thoughts was that a worker recognized one
of the.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Robbers, but they still could have killed them there. Why
would they take them with them?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
That's what I figured. I was looking at that and said, well, sure,
if that's the case, why complicate things even further by
taking them out? I mean, just if you're planning after
finding out that you've been recognizing, you say, well, we
need to get rid of these kids, kill them in
the store and take off.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, but is it even worth killing someone because you're
recognized doing a robbery. I don't know what the punishment
is for robbing a store at gunpoint, but it can't
be as bad as murdering four people.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I wouldn't think it'd be anywhere near what it would
cost to be convicted of.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Murder, right exactly. So that's very odd too.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
That's an oddity. Yes, I mean, there.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Has been discussion that there was some kind of drug involvement,
like maybe one of the kids owed money for some
drugs they bought, but they didn't seem like the kind
of kids who even did drugs.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
No, they weren't, although we'll find out some differences later.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
So daylight arrived Saturday morning and the next shift came
into the restaurant, the burger chef to start working. These
kids were told that a robbery had taken place the
night before. Okay, but then for whatever reason, they were
allowed to clean the place up and open for business. Now,
at this point, nobody had gotten any evidence, no photographs,
(18:08):
no fingerprints, no duesting, nothing. They showed up and like
you said, this supposition was that it was an inside
job and the kids were having a good time on
burger chef's money. But they did nothing to start the investigation.
And one of the people involved said, quote, we screwed
it up from the beginning end of quote.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yes, well, certainly I see it that way. But even
if they thought the kids took the money and left,
you think they would do an investigation because it is
a crime either way.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yeah, I mean, it's just there's so many things that
left me scratching my head. Yes, in this, but that's
another one. Even if that's what you think, you still
investigate it, right exactly?
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, Well didn't, especially since the kids hadn't been located.
You might want to just shut the place off until
you find them and at least speak to them.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Yeah, you would, but they didn't.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
So it was just very poorly handled, to say the least.
About an hour before Brian Kring had stopped by the
burger chef and found the rear door ajar, another couple
had walked past the restaurant. A sixteen year old boy
was walking his girlfriend home and they sat behind the
restaurant to talk or maybe they were kissing, who knows.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
I think the way this was written up, yeah, they
decided let's just stop here and make out for.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
A little bit, okay, But then they were approached by
two men. These were white guys who were poorly dressed,
so I guess kind of homelessly looking. I'm not sure
what that meant exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
I don't think it was quite to the level of
homeless dress, but not well dressed. And one of them
had a scruffy old beard. The other one was clean shaven.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
So they were a little bit scary for these young
people night.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
I would imagine, oh, it's sweat ten o'clock at night
or so, and you sitting there trying to get the
first base on your date and these guys come walking up,
I'd be a little nervous.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, So one of these men told the kids that
it wasn't safe for them to be there, and they left.
But you have to think what did he mean by
that wasn't safe for them to be there because they
were planning to do a robbery. But then if they
were planning to do a robbery, would they really approach
and speak to someone. It's a little puzzling.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Just more things that you're supposed to interpret here.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I suppose. And then the next day, that sixteen year
old boy did call the police. Both he and his
girlfriend were questioned, but they really didn't provide anything else
that was useful, just that they'd seen those two guys
and one of them told them it wasn't safe to be.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
There, right, And they ended up being the sources of
the composite sketches.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yes, and then they eventually made busts as well, I believe.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah. That was after some time investigating the case where
things hadn't happened, yet nothing was shown up that was important.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So of course, the search for the four missing employees continued,
and there was no success. On Saturday, Then on Sunday afternoon,
Fred Heger and his wife Rosemary were out for a
walk on their heavily wooded property when they came across
four dead bodies. Now from the uniforms they were wearing,
the couple saw that they were likely those Burger Chef employees,
(21:28):
so of course they called for help in the area
was soon run over with police. But you know, not
a lot of evidence was found, although they did find
out that these kids were brutally murdered.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
They were I and two of them had been shot,
one had been stabbed in the heart, and one had
been beaten. His face and head were a mess. So
and as the one, you know, some people thought he'd
run into a tree trying to escape. Some people have
said that he was beaten with a chain. He was beaten.
(22:02):
So they looked like there were three different methods of
killing these kids. Yeah, gunshot, stabbing, and ludgeoning.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Well, I guess we're pretty sure it was more than
one person. Had to be at least two people doing this.
I would imagine at least two. Yeah. So Complicating the investigation, though,
were the inevitable turf battles over the jurisdiction because the
Speedway Police were taking the lead at the restaurant, but
the bodies had been discovered in Johnson County, so technically
(22:35):
the Sheriff's department had jurisdiction there.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah, except for one little problem sort of when Fred
Hager called his discovery and he ended up calling the
Indiana State Police before he called the Sheriff's department, and
the state police were let's just say, they were reluctant
to share the investigation. So you've got at least three
(23:02):
departments investigating the robbery.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And murders of the kids and maybe not communicating as
well as they should have with each other.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
No. I mean, the excellent book I read didn't go
into it too much except to kind of indicate that
there was a lot of jealousy between the departments and
everyone wanted their department to be the one that solved
the case.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, that's extremely unprofessional and immature. Well, it happens, and
as it turns out, this crime scene also became compromised.
They didn't handle that very well either.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
No. See, so it wasn't just the local police, it's
the state police that fucked up. Also.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, cars drove over areas that should have been cordoned off,
and one of the bodies had been moved before the
medical examiner even arrived. The medical examiner found that Ruth,
Allen and Daniel had been shot numerous times in the headneck,
and shoulders. The assistant manager, Jane, had been stabbed twice
(24:04):
in her heart, and it was done so vigorously that
the blade actually broke off inside of her body. Mark
had died after being bludgeoned so struck repeatedly in the
head to the point where he was very disfigured and
covered in blood. So of course investigators believed at that
point that more than one person was involved. I mean,
(24:25):
for one thing, how would you get the four people
to go with you if you were one person, right?
Speaker 3 (24:30):
And how are you going to follow Jane's car with
another car?
Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's another big one. Sure you're not going to trust
one of the employees to drive one of the cars,
that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
So it's at least two.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Well, I guess you could if you rode in the
car with your gun on someone, maybe you could get
someone else to lead the way or follow you, just
based on the safety of the other person. Yeah, but
it doesn't seem likely. It seems like there were at
least two people, Like, we.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Said, no, there has to be at least two.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, there's definitely a consensus on that. But the motive
for the crime was kind of confounding for investigators. They
thought it unlikely that they had been killed for less
than six hundred dollars. No kidding, right, but people have
been killed for less though.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Really well, they certainly have. But still, let's suppose you're
a professional robbing group and you go around robbing these
fast food places.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
You're not going to kill them, no, not if that's
all you're doing, right, So there's probably more behind it,
exactly right. Several investigators were thinking that the kids were
killed because they recognized the robbers. That was a big theory.
You know, Mark was not supposed to be working that night,
so maybe he recognized one of the robbers and they
didn't expect him to be there.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah, when I was looking into this, that sounded reasonable.
If you're kind of casing the place out and deciding
when it would be the best time to rob it
and how to do it, you would see that there
was the same crew that worked nights, and now all
of a sudden you go in to rob the place,
and there's a new guy there who you wouldn't recognize
and didn't recognize, and he knows who you are and
(26:10):
he's going to finger you.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
So yeah, well, yeah, that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
I thought that idea, Jill.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
That doesn't explain why they took them away. No, why
wouldn't they just shot them right there?
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I can't figure that out at all.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
No, So, the media and the public were becoming pretty
disgruntled over the perceived lack of transparency that the police
were giving them.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Well, they weren't giving them anything. That was the main problem.
They had nothing to write up or think about. So
the police decided, well, let's see if we can show
the public and the media that we are working on
this and really trying to solve it. So they released
the composite drawings of the two men that had interacted
(26:53):
with the teenagers that night, the ones who said, you know,
it's dangerous to be out here at night.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, So tell me a little bit about these guys.
Were they were they young? Were they older?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
They were on the younger side, but not.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
High school or college aged.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
No, they were in their thirties maybe forties.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Oh, well, that's quite a bit older, and.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
The police were careful to call them people of interest
and not suspects.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
I didn't know they were doing that back in the seventies.
I thought that was more of a new thing. That's
what they did.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Huh, that's what I read about.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Okay, so two men thirties or forties, that's pretty vague. Yeah,
what else have we got?
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Well, we got some thirty eight caliber slugs that had
killed Ruth and Daniel, but they didn't have a gun
that matched the bullets. So we've spent shellcasings and no gun.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
So just one gun was involved. They're not sure, Well
there was only one type of slug.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Yeah, well you can do different slugs and different guns.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Well, sure, so they were thinking it might have been
more than one thirty eight. You're saying they.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Found some slugs that were thirty eight caliber and that
he hadn't found any weapons that could have been used.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Right, I'm just wondering if they had more than one gun,
why would they have bludgeoned and stabbed people. That's my
only thought, right is there was probably only one gun
or everyone would have been shot.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Yeah. I like that. Although one of the numerous theories
was that when they got to where they killed the kids,
and they were in the process of shooting two of them.
The other two tried to run away, and they tackled
Jane and stabbed her, and the other kid ran into
a tree and knocked himself out. That was one of
(28:38):
the theories.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
That's pretty wild theory. I don't know about that. Was
there a tree with blood on it? Is there a
reason why they thought that? Nope, that's a little bit
weird of a thing to come up with in my mind.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Yeah. Yeah, apparently he had died by aspiating his blood.
So they're trying to think of ways that you could
do that, but I don't know. So we've got different
methods of execution, we've got the composites of the two guys,
we've got slugs and Burgerschef also decided that they would
offer a twenty five thousand dollars reward for any information
(29:12):
leading to a conviction. And this wasn't very helpful because
it got all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, did they set up one of those numbers to
call with tips?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, they had so many that they were trying to
get people to write in their tips and put a
code name at the bottom of the write up.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
What do you mean? I don't understand that.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
You can write up your information for the police to
investigate and put on the bottom one, two, three, four,
five six that's your ID number, and you keep a
copy of that number so that if the tip turns
out to be relevant, we can call up the person
who submitted that number and give the reward to that person.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Okay, I've never heard of a system like that neither. Okay.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
So, once the bodies were buried, people of Speedway tried
to resume their daily lives, but it was difficult, and
Speedway was and is a small town, so there's always
reminders going on about what happened with these kids. And
then the parents of the victims were overrun with mail
and phone calls, most of them crank calls. The manager
(30:21):
of the burger chef had made some changes to the
store so everyone's more safe. They were closed for a
short time, but eventually they did reopen. With these changes,
hopefully we're going to prevent or at least make it
tougher for this type of thing to happen again. So
we're going along. We've got hours going into days, days
(30:43):
going into weeks, weeks going in the months no progress.
Trying to get something going, the authorities had commissioned bus
to be made of the people of interest from the drawings.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Yeah, that's kind of an unusual thing to do. I'm
a little surprised by that me too, because these weren't
even really very good suspects.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
No, these were just two guys, basically, two random guys.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
And that was probably what a good hour before the
actual robbery. I know, we're not sure of the exact time,
but yeah, maybe they didn't kill them at the restaurant
because of the noise it would have made.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
That's possible. Yeah, but they didn't get anywhere see that far.
So looking at a few of the results from the
drawings and bus, they had two men who had been
arrested in Chicago for aggravated battery, and there were several
people who thought that these two guys resembled the men
(31:41):
in the description from the teens, but they turned out
to have solid alibis and were eliminated as suspects and
just another couple of things, one or two things. Investigators
also traveled to Cincinnati so that they could interview a
prisoner there who resembled the beer in the composite sketch. Now,
(32:02):
this guy had lived near the burger chef at the
time and had people saying that he dyed his hair
and beard right after the murders. Suspicious stuff. So this
man passed a polygraph and he also had an alibi
for the night of the murders. But he did tell
police that there were two other men who were responsible,
and he said the plan was simply to rob the restaurant,
(32:24):
but the perpetrators decided to murder the four kids when
one of them recognized one of the robbers.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
See, that's still a stretch to me. I don't know
if I really believe that. No, And it seems like
a big jump in behavior.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Doesn't it. And the police didn't look at it that
way anyway. They thought he wasn't involved. He was really
just trying to find a way to reduce his sentence. Okay,
So because he didn't tell him anything, it wasn't already known.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Well, yeah, he didn't have any information that only a
participant would never.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Right, That's obviously that's what you'd like to get. Yes,
if you're withholding information from the public and the media,
you're hoping that someone comes forward with information that could
only be gained from firsthand knowledge.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
So a letter was sent to the Indianapolis Star on
November twenty ninth, and the writer alleged that what started
out as a basic robbery whenever a basic robbery is
somehow went wrong. The writers said there were three people involved,
but the three had split up and were no longer
in Indiana at all. Police thought this information was credible.
(33:33):
So what they did is they just begged the individual
to come forward. But why would the person come forward?
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Well, and he didn't that anyway, So this was.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
An anonymous letter, right, and they weren't able to trace it.
Sometimes that's fairly easy to do.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Well, they weren't. And before this person came forward, another
person came by the newspaper office who wanted to talk,
and he was interviewed by police and gave them the
names of two people who he said were involved. But
the police were not real sure that this was credible information.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Well did they look into it? They did and nothing
was connected.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Nothing was connected. But then another letter arrived. This was
from the first letter, the one that they were trying
to get the guy to come forward. So the way
it turned out was they got this letter, they wanted
this person to come forward and give more information.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
The first letter.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
The first letter, okay, and he finally sent this second
letter and he said he wasn't going to be able
to help him anymore.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
So how did they know the letter was from the
same person.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
He said he was the same person. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Well, there was no new information, you're saying, basically, that's
what it boils down to you. No, but the author
of that letter said he couldn't help either. And while
police were happy to get some leads, they were really
disheartened because there was no progress and none of the
leads were panning out.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah, nothing was working. I would have felt incredibly frustrated
at this point because they're not getting anything that's going
to help with the investigation. So we've gone another few weeks,
there's still no progress, and the police is starting to
scale back the investigation a bit.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but they remained committed to solving the crime, they said,
And at this point they must have been really trying
just about anything they could think of.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, I think they're starting to grasp its straws right.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Well, I don't know about straws, but they're definitely grasping.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
For things definitely are grasping, and.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
They consulted with a psychoanalyst to get an opinion, and
this specialist concluded that the murderers were likely unproductive men
between the ages of sixteen and twenty five, and that
at least one of them could be considered a psychopath. No,
I'm sorry, but I don't find that at all helpful.
Anybody could say that that's based.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
On what exactly it's based on. I think it's based
on them trying the authorities, trying to do something that
showed they were working the case.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Right, I suppose, But why that that doesn't seem help now.
I mean, if you want to get a psychological profile
of these people, for one thing, I think it's pretty impossible,
because these are people that just walked in and robbed
a restaurant. Yeah, it's not like a serial killer where
you're getting patterns, you're getting evidence. They really have nothing
to go on other that someone came and robbed it
(36:21):
and that these young people were killed in another area.
They don't even really know for sure how they got
there or if they were all alive when they went.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
I know, and even forty some years later, that's where you're.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Still at Yeah. So there was some discussion that the
Burgerschef murders were related to the killing of that woman
in her garage, the grandmother, and those seemingly random bombings,
but then that was ruled out by the authorities. And
police also questioned two other people who looked like the
composite drawings and did know the area, but they never
(36:55):
got enough evidence to charge them either. So it's very frustrated.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Yeah. Well it boiled over by the end of nineteen
seventy nine, still with no charges or any real credible
leads against any individuals for the murders. The Board of
Police Commissioners voted to fire the speedway chief of Police,
that's Robert Copeland, for lack of leadership.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Okay, so now is that something that really was his
fault because you told me earlier that the state police
were also involved.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yeah, but he's going to bear the brunt of it
because he's not solving it.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Okay. So that's when they created the task force.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Right, so this is like a year later, Yeah, the.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
End of seventy nine. Yeah, so they put together a
seven man task force and their job was to look
into the Burger Chef murders and within a fairly short
amount of time, they were reinvestigating a suspect. Besides this person,
the task force was looking at two men who liked
to rob fast food restaurants who used similar methods to
(38:01):
the Burger chef robbery slash murders. But none of these
people could be the real perpetrators, so they either had
alibis or they were ruled out for other reasons.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
In October of nineteen eighty, the task Force said they
had another suspect who looked really solid. They also announced
they were looking into the murders being a result of
some kind of drug debt. So that's something that had
been considered for a while.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Yeah, it was one of the ideas, but it took
more credence when they got some more information.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Right, So, apparently Mark Flemons was worried he might be
beaten or even killed because he had a seven thousand
dollars drug debt.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Now that's huge, that's huge, And this is a what
sixteen seventeen year old high school kid?
Speaker 2 (38:47):
So is that real? So is that proven to be
a real thing.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
I don't I'm just not sure how credible that is.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
It's hard to believe it.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Really is who's going to float that much money as
a low into a sixteen year old.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Well, I wouldn't think it would be all in one shot,
but it would let him build up that kind of
a debt, right, And why would he Yeah, there was
no history of him being a real druggie or anything. Now,
at autopsy, Jane Fright did have marijuana in her system.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Yeah, so that's what really gave this whole idea of
drugs being involved with some traction.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
So they had a person of interest with a history
of selling narcotics and this person was also familiar with
the area. But the only problem was the police were
unable to arrest this guy because he kept disappearing.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, so that's suspicious, right there, I be thinking maybe
we got somebody because we can't find this guy.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Well yeah, but if he's a drug dealer, would he
really want to hang around anyway?
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Well, no, you're right, he wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But he was eventually tracked down and eventually cleared of
any involvement in the crime. Still, though, investigators did believe
that drugs were probably involved based on what we don't
really know.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Well, based on the supposition that the one kid was
worried that he was going to be beaten up or
killed for his drug debt, and that Jane had some
traces of marijuana.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
I would think half the kids that you would test
in nineteen seventy eight would have traces of marijuana.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
They probably could be. So they also got a little
more interested in this with Jane's brother, James Fried, because
he was arrested for dealing cocaine.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Well, now that I could take a little more seriously.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Right, And he also at least sort of resembled the
bearded man in the composite picture. Okay, Now they investigated
apparently thoroughly, and James was cleared of any involvement.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
But he was a cocaine dealer, he was.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
And then just another interesting fact, Mark Flemon's brother was
arrested in nineteen eighty one and charged with robbery and murder.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
So tell me a little bit about that. Was that
anything similar? What did he do?
Speaker 3 (41:03):
No, that was just by the way, we got a
family member who's a criminal.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, but what did he rob and who did he kill?
And when did that happen.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
It has nothing at all to do with the Burger
chef robbery and killings. It's just built by association well, the.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Next two or three years passed without any new developments
in the case. Big surprise. Then, in December of nineteen
eighty four, reporter Dan Luzzeer of the Indianapolis Star met
with an inmate at the Marion County Jail because this
inmate was looking at some serious time for burglary and
had some information he thought might be helpful. This inmate
(41:43):
said he knew who had been involved in the burger
Chef murders, and he named two men who he said
were responsible for the crime. One of these men the
police had already eliminated as a suspect, but the other
one was a man who investigators knew nothing about it.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
That can be a good lead, Yeah, he would think, Aha,
we got some fresh stuff going here. So maybe. So
the guy that the investigators had no information about was
a guy named Ronald Donald Ray Forrester. And this is
a guy who's a career criminal in and out of
prison since he was an eighteen year old. Now, Forrester
(42:21):
said the motive for the robbery was drugs and homosexuality.
So they investigated, and they found that certain parts of
Forrester's story did hold up. And then all of a sudden.
Forrester said, oh, I changed my mind. I don't want
to talk to you guys anymore. So they went back
and forth and he did eventually agree to cooperate and
he needed to get something in return, and we'll find
(42:44):
out what that was, okay, And he named someone he
said was involved in the murders.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
So on August seventh, nineteen eighty five, detectives picked up
Forrester at the jail and the plan was to take
him to Speedway in the hopes that he would remember
some details of the crime. But this turned out to
be a waste of time. The police were starting to
think they were just one a wild goose chase. He
didn't have any information, and the new direction with Forrester
(43:11):
was just another lead that went nowhere.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It's certainly going nowhere, but Forrester is persistent. So we
got two new informants showing up in nineteen eighty six.
What are we eight years into it now, right? And
some of what they said agreed with Forrester's story, and
other things contradicted his story. So they're looking at and
(43:34):
the the investigators are getting more convinced that Forrester somehow
is involved in the murders. They just have to get
him to admit it. So he meets with the investigators
in November of nineteen eighty six, and Forrester says, okay,
I'm ready to come clean. And he actually gave information
about the murders that could only be known by one
of the participants. And this is like the positioning of
(43:57):
the bodies, how they were arranged at the murder scene,
and he knew about the various wounds that each one
had suffered, and that wasn't common knowledge. Forrester told the
investigators that the gun that had been used in the
crime had been thrown into the White River, and then
he confessed. He said, it's me. I shot Ruth Allen
(44:19):
Shelton and Daniel Davis. They looked in the river and
they could not find a gun. Of course, again, this
is eight years after the fact, and who knows with
river currents and silt and stuff being deposited. But he's
basically saying I was involved in the crime and I
killed two people.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Okay, But he's not saying who was with him that
killed the other two people, which I would see as
a big hole in his story That makes it much
less credible to me.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
Well, and that's how they ended up and it turns
out to be nothing. But he had him going for
a while, So.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Positioning of the bodies. I wonder how specific he got
on that, because I don't know. Plus there's always the
idea that when he was talking to the police, they
may have kind of led him along. Oh sure, either
on purpose or accidentally. Because it was only one week
later when Forrester recanted his confession and said he'd been coerced.
(45:13):
So that has to make you wonder.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, well, what we'll find out, and this took the
author of the book a while to come up with
it was that Forrester had some serious mental health issues, right, Yeah,
so basically everything he told him was probably bullshit.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Well, he maintained that he had spoken with the killers
and had helped them, but now he was saying he
didn't participate.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
Yeah. Right, So we've gone in a week from saying
I was in on it and I killed two people and
now nothing there.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Well, Plus if he's not able to name his accomplice,
I don't give him a lot of credence.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Yeah, but he still told him enough stuff that they
thought he had to be involved in some way.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I suppose I could see that or at least had
heard about it from someone. Yeah, but a review of
an old case would lead investigators to the link that
they were looking for.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Well, a link they were looking for in terms of
eliminating him as a suspect, right, right, Because it turns
out that in nineteen sixty nine, Forrester was out with
a friend and the friend's girlfriend and they stopped and
picked up a fourteen year old girl who knew the
couple but didn't know Forrester. And after they dropped off
(46:22):
the couple, Forrester raped the girl. I was a little
lucky he was able to plead guilty to assault and battery.
But what he was hoping was that what he talked
to the authorities about the burger chef murders was going
to be enough information to be useful to the authorities
and they would get rid of his record for rape.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
But no one had ever told them that they would. No.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
Plus, the other stretch is that nothing he's given the
authorities was information. It was useful exactly, so so much
for him.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
So despite that lack of evidence implicating people Forrester had named,
investigators worked convinced that he was involved in some way
despite all that.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Despite all this, all
this stuff, they've been through with him time and time
again to get their hopes up, and then they get
their hopes dashed. They're still thinking, well, he's got to
know something about it. Now. Despite the fact that people
at Forrester had named his perpetrators, nothing had come of that. Somehow,
(47:25):
the investigators are still convinced that he was involved, so
they asked Prosecutor Steven Goldsmith to bring charges against Forrester,
which he was reluctant to do. His way of thinking
is is going to be very difficult to find Forrester
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well, no kidding, no.
Speaker 3 (47:43):
Kidding, because there's nothing here. This is also a problem
for Forrester because if he wasn't charged, he's going to
get sent back to the prison where he was and
he didn't want to be there. He was afraid for
his wife. And the other thing was that if he
wasn't charged, he's going to lose all chances to revisit
his prior conviction for rape or assault, battery, whatever you
(48:05):
want to call it.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
If he wasn't charged, he was Yeah, why.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
If he wasn't charged. They're just not going to think
about looking into that. I don't know that they made
a deal, but the understanding was that if things came
to fruition, that they would find a way to revisit
the charges against him or his conviction. So he's not
got much going for him.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, so it's weird because even though he'd recanted his confession,
he was hoping he'd be charged.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yes, a burger chef murder, isn't that weird?
Speaker 2 (48:33):
It's very unusual. Yes, Ultimately Goldsmith did bring charges against
Forrester for the Burger Chef murders. Ultimately, Goldsmith did not
bring charges against Forrester for the Burger Chef murders. He
didn't feel they had enough evidence to get a guilty verdict,
and he was likely correct.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
I'm no doubt that he was correct. This guy was
all over the place.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
So now we get to November seventeenth, nineteen eighty eight,
and the Burger Chef murders are reaching a tenth anniversary
with really nothing in the way of solving it.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
No. Dan Luzader, the newspaper guy, interviewed Forrester in prison
on this tenth anniversary and over time, Forrester had continued
to feed information to others. Again, nothing that came to
anything of use, and Forrester's mental state was pretty precarious.
At this point, no one really knew what was believable
(49:28):
and what was unbelievable. Forrester himself claimed he had been
implanted with a device that controlled his thoughts. It's the
warning sign, don't you think yes? And he was unable
to stop his device. And over time, with all this,
he was still receiving his weekly doses of thorozine. I
think they need to up the dose. Well.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
Nineteen ninety three mark the fifteenth anniversary of the case,
still nothing. Jim Kramer of the Indiana State Police gave
his thoughts on the case. At that point, now he
was the only original detectives still working the case. Pramer
and others who worked the case feel that it started
off as a robbery, but then things deteriorated when one
(50:09):
of the crew recognized one of the robbers. The robbers
then kidnapped the employees and they drove away in Jane
Fright's car. Then they transferred to another vehicle. The robbers
then drove the crew to an isolated wooded area where
they killed them in three different ways, and the bodies
were discovered the next day by the couple who were
(50:30):
out walking. Now, this is pretty much things that they'd
known since nineteen seventy eight. Nothing new there, right, there's
nothing new, and it's not all really definite either. A
lot of its theory, right, because.
Speaker 3 (50:42):
Kramer himself is going to admit or has admitted, there's
never been a conclusive motive established, and they are not
at all certain that one of the employees recognized one
of the robbers, and so this is all kinds of
supposition exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
They have no way of knowing that.
Speaker 3 (50:58):
Nope.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
So there does seem to have been two camps among investigators,
one believing that scenario and the other camp thinking it
was perpetrated by a group who had a history of
robbing fast food restaurants. In fact, Kramer himself interviewed Forrester
several times, and he didn't think that Forrester provided any
useful information. There's no way to be certain that he did.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
And I kind of liked the idea of a group
who had a history of robbing fast food restaurants. But
then why the murders, Because these robbers are just interested
in hitting up restaurants and getting away.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
Well, they're saying that the murders because someone was recognized.
Speaker 3 (51:40):
Yeah, I just I don't know, but there's.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
No way of knowing that that's really just a guess.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Yeah, it is, because they're guessing to fill in the
deficiencies in the story, which I understand.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
But maybe it's better to just say we really don't know,
because you know the problem Well, yeah, the problem with
making up something or just citing that it was probably
something could make you go off in the wrong direction, right,
because there's nothing to support it.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Plus, it gives hope to people involved, like the parents,
that maybe they're actually going to solve the case.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
Well, and maybe that's what they were trying to do though, well,
perpetuate hope.
Speaker 3 (52:16):
Yeah. How many times do you do that before the
people wise up and say, you know, you've told me
ten different people that are suspects and nobody's been charged yet.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Sure. Well, and it does happen that murders are unsolvable.
It happens quite a bit. I think that the reason
this is more difficult is because they didn't do anything
right in the investigation. If they'd done everything right and
still had no actual suspects or convictions, then, you know,
unfortunate but understandable.
Speaker 3 (52:46):
Exactly. That's a wonderful point, thank you. I wasn't trying
to curry favor with you, Joe, although you show me
favor all the time any anyway, But no, I think
that's a very reasonable point to make.
Speaker 2 (53:02):
Well, yeah, I mean, you can guess at all kinds
of different things, and I think it's worth considering it.
But to put that out to the public, that's not wise.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Noe.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
No, So today we're forty three years after these murders
and not very likely they're going to be solved.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
No. I read somewhere, I forget exactly where that the
only way that they can see it being solved now
is that somebody makes a deathbed confession. Right.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
It just seems to be this perfect combination of unfortunate
events coming together to make the case unsolvable, including maybe
a well executed robbery we don't know, multiple investigative errors
that we do know, and maybe just some bad luck.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
So it does happen. That's why the murder clearance rates
are not one hundred percent across the country.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Oh, it certainly can happen. That's right.
Speaker 2 (53:55):
Yeah, I think the worst part is just the way
it was handled, because that way you think, I think
maybe it could have been solved. Yeah, maybe people could
have been saved. He knows what happened.
Speaker 3 (54:05):
To be the tough thing to kind of swallow that
they hadn't screwed up the investigation from the beginning, maybe
we wouldn't be at this point.
Speaker 2 (54:13):
Yeah. I think something as simple as some fingerprints might
have been helpful, But no chance at that, No.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
It would be tough. Just in case you're thinking that
this is just an isolated incident, that there are no
unsolved murders in Indiana, I got a couple for you
that I picked.
Speaker 2 (54:30):
Out somewhere quite familiar with.
Speaker 3 (54:32):
We've done podcasts on both of them. So there are
unsolved murders still in Indiana, and one is Lauren Spier.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
We did a podcast on that. That was a twenty
year old sophomore college sophomore who disappeared from her campus
in the small hours of June second, twenty eleven. Remember,
Lauren had been out partying and was visibly intoxicated, and
a friend of hers suggested that she stay at his place,
but she wanted to go home.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
According to him, Yeah, and she could hardly walk.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
Yes, So this friend accompanied her to about three blocks
from her apartment and then left her. Now that's what
he said. And she has not been seen since. With
this case, a popular theory is that she overdosed and
died and that her friends got rid of her body,
possibly putting it in the river, although her remains have
(55:25):
never been found. No, and then, of course, the most
famous case recently would be the disappearance of Abby Williams
and Libby Jerman on February thirteenth, twenty seventeen. Very different
from Lauren's case, of course, these girl's bodies were found
the next day, kind of a ritualistic possible serial killers situation.
(55:48):
And what really sticks out about this is that one
of the girls had recorded the murderer speaking and walking
on her cell phone.
Speaker 3 (55:57):
Yeah, it's a chilling scene.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Chilling and there have been many leads, but we don't
have anyone for that yet either.
Speaker 3 (56:06):
No, there's there's a new maybe right.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
Well, yeah, in the last several months.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
Yeah, this is a guy named James Brian Chadwell. So
he's a guy. He lured a nine year old girl
into his home in April of twenty twenty one, he
beat her and sexually assaulted her, planning to murder her.
Police officers somehow got notified and found the girl locked
into the guy's basement, and she did survive, with a
(56:33):
lot of bruising and strangulation marks on her neck and
a dog bite.
Speaker 2 (56:38):
Well, yeah, I think the way he lured her in
was to pet his dog or his dogs, right. He
did plead guilty to attempted murder and child molestation get
ninety years in prison. There was an additional twenty years
because of the fact that he was an habitual offender.
So he's locked up and he won't be eligible for
parole until twenty ninety one. So at least if he
(57:01):
is responsible, he's not out to do it anymore. Some
observers had pointed out that Chadwell has some tattoos of
two girls' faces on his arms that look like they're
crying blood, and one of these faces does resemble Libby German.
But investigators have not publicly connected Chadwell to these murders.
Speaker 3 (57:21):
But I'll bet they're trying like hell to be able
to do that.
Speaker 2 (57:23):
Well, it would wrap it up neatly if it was,
but life doesn't always work that way.
Speaker 3 (57:28):
Yeah, it would solve the case if that's who it was.
Speaker 2 (57:32):
Yeah, but I think if it was him, they'd probably
know because I thought they had some DNA.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
Well, we're supposing that doing is that true that there
is some DNA?
Speaker 2 (57:40):
I think there is.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
Then if there is, it's either his or not his,
and he's either the perpetrator or not.
Speaker 2 (57:47):
Well, that's why I'm saying he's probably not the perpetrator
because I think if it was him, they would have
proven it by now and he could have confessed and
maybe gotten some benefits for that. I think you're right,
which he didn't do, so I'm kind of leaning away
from it being him.
Speaker 3 (58:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, unfortunately, So that means there's probably that mad man
is still out there. But it's just amazing that one
because the video.
Speaker 3 (58:11):
Yeah, and again, this is like a speedway. It's a
small town. Everybody knows everybody, Yes, so you would think
if everybody's got access to the picture of the guy
on the cell phone that somebody would recognized him.
Speaker 2 (58:24):
Well, that's what leads me to think it wasn't a local. Yeah,
but you know, that guy looks like your average Indiana
rural guy. You know the bridge guy. Yeah, and you
can't really see his face.
Speaker 3 (58:36):
I don't know about rural Indiana, but just a regular guy.
There's nothing real distinctive.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
No, No, there isn't, although I would think if you
knew him you'd know. But that's a whole different way.
Speaker 3 (58:47):
Yeah, but that gets into a whole new bunch of.
Speaker 2 (58:50):
Topics, that's right. Yes, so fascinating case. Just too bad
that it isn't solved, and there's probably it won't be solved,
doesn't Yeah.
Speaker 3 (58:59):
I wish we could report something differently, but it's not
going to be no, and might.
Speaker 2 (59:05):
Not be no if these guys were in their thirties.
Speaker 3 (59:08):
Well, I think I read that every parent of the
kids who were killed, every parent has succumbed to various illnesses. Really, yeah,
so there's no parents left.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Yeah, they would be quite elderly. So that's just really
sad they never found out what happened.
Speaker 3 (59:24):
Yeah, terrible, It.
Speaker 2 (59:25):
Really is terrible, all right, Dickie. Well, kind of a
heartbreaking case. But fascinating, that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (59:33):
Well, fascinating and frustrating.
Speaker 2 (59:35):
Absolutely, yes, very frustrating. You always want to get to
a point where you figure it out.
Speaker 3 (59:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (59:41):
Yeah, so you can imagine how frustrating it is for
people working in law enforcement these cases. Oh absolutely, let's
drive you mad. Yeah, yes, absolutely, So thanks for discussing
it with me today, Dickie. I appreciate it well and
thanks for putting up with me. And we'll be back
soon with another regular episode of True Crime Brewery So
(01:00:01):
we'll see you next time at the quiet Ed.
Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
We'll save you some seats.
Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
Hurry up, yep. Thanks for your support, Tig Revers. Bye guys,
Bye bye
True crime Brewery contains disturbing content related to real life crimes.
Medical information is opinion based on facts of a crime
and should not be interpreted as medical advice or treatment.
Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I just feel like, you know, here's this particular area.
Speaker 3 (00:33):
If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone,
and that makes people uneasy.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
Four young people murdered after they were kidnapped from work
at the Burger Chef restaurant in Speedway.
Speaker 5 (00:47):
The Speedway Police Department and the Indiana State Police announced
that the bodies of Jane C. Free, age twenty, Marcus Flemens,
age seventeen, Daniel R. Davis sixteen, Ruthie Shelton, aged seventeen.
I've been discovered late this afternoon in Johnson County, Indiana.
Speaker 4 (01:07):
It's been thirty five years, but Teresa Jeffries can't forget
losing her older sister and the chill in the air when.
Speaker 6 (01:14):
It fall hits when the weather starts getting cold again.
The day after she was buried was Thanksgiving.
Speaker 4 (01:25):
I have two children alive and one in home together.
Sister and mother share family memories. The dress Ruth wore
in the family photo.
Speaker 6 (01:33):
The last dress that my grandmother had made.
Speaker 4 (01:36):
For her, and a high school ring are keepsakes they'll cherish.
Speaker 6 (01:40):
She was my only sister. I idolized her. I wanted
to be just as happy and go lucky as she was.
Speaker 4 (01:49):
Jeffrey says she still has nightmares thinking about how her
sister and the three other Burger Chef employees were brutally murdered.
Speaker 6 (01:57):
I honestly believe that it will never solved.
Speaker 5 (02:01):
The scene was never really processed as a crime.
Speaker 4 (02:03):
Scene, but it was a crime scene. Assistant manager Jane
Fried's car was found abandoned in the morning a few
miles away near the police station. Then two days later,
a couple found the four young people murdered, their bodies
twenty miles away, scattered in a wooded area off State
Road thirty seven in Johnson County. They were killed three
(02:23):
different ways, shot, stabbed, and possibly beaten with a chain.
A wreath on the Burger Chef door marked the restaurant
closed until all four were laid to rest.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
Welcome to True Crime Brewery. Ti Grabbers, I'm Jill and
I'm Dick. On Friday, November seventeenth. Back in nineteen seventy eight, Speedway, Indiana,
teenager Brian Kring stopped by his workplace, the Burger Chef
fast food restaurant, to visit with his friends and offer
them help closing up for the night, but when he arrived,
(02:57):
he found the restaurant empty. The four employees working that night,
twenty year old Jane Fright, sixteen year old Daniel Davis,
sixteen year old Mark Flemons, and seventeen year old Ruth Shelton,
were all gone, but the door was unlocked and all
the lights were still on. Unable to reach the assistant manager,
(03:19):
Jane by phone, Brian finally called the police, but when
the police arrived, they were surprisingly cavalier. In their opinion,
a group of irresponsible teens had taken the cash from
the till and gone off for a night of fun.
Join us at the Quiet End for our discussion of
the nineteen seventy eight Burger Chef murders. The next day,
(03:42):
the police would realize that they had made a big mistake.
None of the employees arrived home and their parents became frantic,
but the police had not bothered to treat the abandoned
restaurant as a crime scene. That Sunday, four dead bodies
were discovered in a clearing in the woods about twenty
miles so of the scene. The young burger chef employees
(04:03):
had been stabbed, shot, and bludgeoned to death. Now it's
forty three years later and no one has ever been
arrested for these murders. So let's talk about it, see
if we can figure anything out.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Well, we can certainly try, and I think people have
kind of thought they had have figured out. But the
usual suspects are all dead, right, so it's going to
be difficult.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Well, it's close to impossible that anything will happen at
this point.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
Yeah, somebody said the only way they probably would solve
it now would be to get a deathbed confession.
Speaker 2 (04:37):
Right, yes, but some of the people they suspected are already.
Speaker 3 (04:40):
Dead, well, most all of them are dead.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
But we can certainly talk about it and give our opinions,
which we are apt to do.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
Well, we got plenty of opinions, right, yes, Okay? For
a beer, Indiana beer, right, I decided to go with
Alpha King from three Floyd's Brewing Company in Munster, Indiana.
This is an American pale ale. It's six point sixty
six percent alcohol by volume. This beer is a copper color,
(05:08):
nice white, had plenty of lacing aroma of pine and citrus,
and the taste is grapefruit and pine. Very simple. It's
a medium bodied, fairly happy beer.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
Sounds really good.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
See it is, and you'll like this one.
Speaker 2 (05:30):
All right. Down here at the quiet end, thankfully, we
do have a fireplace, which we need. It's very chilly.
It's a cool day, it really is. I'll be happy
when spring comes.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
You got a ways to go, yes.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
Although it comes sooner down here than it does up
in Maine. Okay, why don't you get us started?
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Okay? So. The town of Speedway, Indiana, is the home
of the famous Indianapolis five hundred car Race. It was
built in the nineteen twenties to support the automotive industry.
It is located just west of downtown Indianapolis, and in
nineteen seventy eight, the population was just over eleven thousand people.
Speedway was seen as a fairly safe place to live
(06:10):
until nineteen seventy eight, and that's when several violent crimes occurred.
In July, a sixty five year old woman was shot
to death in her own garage, a shocking and random killing,
and then in September, there was a series of bombings,
seven or eight of them, and one of them severely
injured a Vietnam veteran and his wife. Then in November,
(06:31):
with these crimes still as yet unsolved, the Burger Chef
murders occurred. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
So if you were a teenager in the nineteen sixties
or nineteen seventies and you lived in a small town,
you might have worked in a Burger Chef.
Speaker 3 (06:45):
Yeah. That was Burger Chef's model, open stores and small towns,
not big ones. So, and they were largely a Midwest
restaurant chain.
Speaker 2 (06:54):
So it was founded in nineteen fifty seven and grew
quite rapidly. In nineteen seventy two, twelve hundred locations were
surpassed only by McDonald's sixteen hundred locations, and the next
several years saw a decline in business. In nineteen eighty two,
the owners divested themselves of the chain, gradually selling to
(07:14):
the owners of Hardy's. So the last Burger Chef restaurant
closed down in nineteen ninety six.
Speaker 3 (07:21):
Yeah, this one, the Speedway One, I think was briefly
a Hearty's and then they sold it to I think
it's an automotive parts store or something right now, but
the building still does exist.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Okay. So it was eleven pm on November seventeenth, nineteen
seventy eight, and the Burger Chef on Crawfordsville Road in Speedway,
Indiana had just closed for the night. The four young
employees were cleaning up in preparation for the next day,
a Saturday. Daniel Davis had changed out of his uniform
shirt and he was in the process of bagging up
(07:54):
the garbage. Jane Fright, the assistant manager, took cash from
the drawers and placed the money in a safe in
the manager's office. Now, Jane was one of those real
go getter types who did well in school while she
held down this job, she also was participating in a
lot of extracurricular activities and she worked as a teacher's
(08:15):
aide and a library assistant. So she just had a
great work ethic and was promoted to an assistant manager
position after working at the burger shaft for just three months.
She worked upwards of fifty hours a week and when
she was in the store, she was basically in charge
of everything. Jane wasn't aware that she was going to
(08:36):
be promoted to store manager. But that was the plan,
and that would have been quite an accomplishment because she
was only twenty years old.
Speaker 3 (08:44):
I got a chuckle. I mean, her manager was praising
her and talking about what a great worker she was
and how they were all part time workers. And then
I'm saying that she worked up was a fifty hours
a week, which seems to me more like full time
than part time.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
Well sure, but they don't want to qualify by her
as a full time Well we don't want to be
getting into any benefits or anything, of course, not sure,
but yeah, those are a lot of hours to work
when you're doing all that other stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
I mean, she's I think she's finished high school and
I was in college at this point, but right she
was twenty. It's a lot of stuff. And then the
other thing that struck me was that even though she'd
only been working there a short time, she is in
line for a managerial position. So she must have been
quite something.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Sounds like it.
Speaker 3 (09:27):
Yes.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Ruth Ellen Shelton seventeen was another one of those driven
students who was already planning her career in computer science.
She had turned in her resignation feeling overworked and underpaid,
but at the request of the store manager, she had
agreed to work through the holidays, so that had to
kind of weigh on her family's hearts after everything that happened.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Oh, I'm sure.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
In the back of the store, short order cook Mark Flemons,
a sixteen year old, was cleaning up the grill and
he was supposed to be off for the night, but
he had agreed to fill in for a friend who
needed the night off.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah, and then he wanted to renege on that agreement
because he got an offer for something going on that
Friday night, but the manager said, you know, I'm sorry.
You agreed to work for the girl. You gotta work.
So that's how he ended up being there.
Speaker 2 (10:19):
Well, yeah, that's generally how it works, right, But anyway,
the store manager, Robert Gillat, considered them an exceptional crew
who worked really hard and they never gave him any trouble.
So these were good kids.
Speaker 3 (10:32):
These were very good kids, according to Gillat. Just after
midnight that Friday night, Brian Kring drove by the burger
chef He was also employed there, as you said earlier, Joe,
and when he saw some lights on, he decided, I'm
going to stop and visit with the people working. So
he walked around the back of the building to knock
on the door and found the door partially opened, which
(10:55):
should not have been and this is a door to
be locked at all times of course. Yeah, so he
walked in. He called out a greeting, no response, no answer,
and as he went towards the front of the store,
Brian saw that the cash drawers were lying empty on
the floor, and then when he went into the manager's
office it looked like it had been tossed. So Brian's thinking, wow,
(11:17):
this place got robbed, and then his second thought is, well,
where's the rest of the people.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
Well, yeah, because even in a robbery, generally the staff
are left behind, whether they're hurt or not. Right, So
Brian called nine one one, and when the police arrived,
they found two empty currency bags and a roll of
adhesive tape next to an open safe.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
So when the.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
Store manager showed up, he said there was about six
hundred dollars missing. The police initially hypothesized that the robbery
could have been an inside job. Gilly, the store manager,
said there was no way that the crew could have
committed the robbery. There had to be another explanation. Since
the rear door was to be locked at all times,
there was a good possibility that the robbers had gained
(12:01):
entrance while the trash was being taken out.
Speaker 3 (12:04):
Yeah, and I think that's a pretty valid supposition the
way things turned out, right, So for a small town,
and the population back then was what around eleven thousand,
I think you.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
Said, Yeah, eleven or twelve, I've heard, But.
Speaker 3 (12:17):
Speedway had seen its share of recent mishaps. On July
twenty ninth, nineteen seventy eight, Julia Ciphers was shot to
death in the garage at her home, and they're investigating
her death, and the police came to feel that her
murder had been a professional job. And it turned out
there was a local businessman who employed Cipher's daughter, and
(12:42):
the feeling was that he had become a little too
friendly with the daughter of Cypher's daughter. So Cypher's granddaughter
worked there and it didn't work there. Cypher's granddaughter attracted
the attention of this guy, so Cypher's moved his granddaughter
into her home just to get her out of the
line of fire of this guy, and was thinking about
filing charges against the businessman and police's theory was that
(13:04):
this guy had hired a hitman to take out Cypher's.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
So Julia was in her sixties, her granddaughter was how
old she was lateeen's, early twenties, and this guy was
a middle aged man. Yeah, so creepy, a creepy middle
aged man. Before arrest could be made, there were three
explosions on September one, followed by five more explosions over
the next few days. Police felt that the same individual
(13:30):
or individuals was responsible, and they quickly focused on one
man who had purchased the detonators. It turned out to
be the same man suspected of being involved in Cipher's killing,
but it would take another three years before the business
man and his associate would be charged in the bombings
and murder.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
Yeah. So, obviously in this small town, you'd like to
try to connect all the cases and say that they
were all related to each other. But in this situation,
it looks like the killing of Ciphers and the bombs
that went off in dumpsters and so on, those were connected,
but they were not connected to the burger chef robbery
(14:10):
and killings.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Right, But when the burger chef incident happened, those weren't
solved yet, so.
Speaker 3 (14:17):
No, no, they didn't, and it took a few more years,
but eventually they apparently got it right and the guy
and his associate were charged and found guilty.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
So understandably, giving these recent crimes, the police wanted to
solve the disappearance of the four young people as quickly
as possible, so the first thing to do was to
notify the parents. But none of the parents had any
pertinent information for the police, so they couldn't help. But
of course they were very worried.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Yeah, I mean, the police are shown up at their
homes in the middle of the night and telling them
that it looks like there's been a robbery at the
burger chef and your child is missing. Right, that's not
a great way to start things.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
But the police didn't seem to take it seriously enough.
Speaker 3 (15:03):
No, they didn't. Their initial thought was that the teens
had just decided to rob the store and go party.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
But even if you're thinking that, you don't disregard all
the proper police work, which they apparently did. Yeah, they
didn't fingerprint nothing. They actually allowed the next shift to
come in and clean the place, so that's not very good.
But then They finally did mount a large scale man
hunt and Jane's car, a white nineteen seventy four Chevy Vega,
(15:34):
was found around four thirty am, but there were no
substantial clues found in her vehicle. Police at this point
were working on the idea that the suspects gained entry
into the burger chef as someone was taking out the trash.
Then after taking the money, they forced the kids into
Jane's car and they drove off with them, with the
car they had come in following behind. So Jane's car
(15:57):
was then abandoned. So did the suspects then draw off
with the four young people in their car? Apparently they did.
Speaker 3 (16:05):
Well, it's a real mystery at this point and trying
to figure out what the heck's going on, how it
could have happened.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
Well, yeah, if you're going in to rob a fast
food joint, usually you get the money and you leave.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, you're not going to take hostages or prisoners, right,
not normally No.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
And even if you were going to hurt the crew,
why would you take them away to do that?
Speaker 3 (16:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (16:26):
So you have to think maybe when they left with
the kids, they weren't planning on necessarily killing them. All,
maybe they weren't sure.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
Yeah, I've had a difficult time trying to figure out
why they took them with them.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Well, not only you, everyone has.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
One of the thoughts was that a worker recognized one
of the.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Robbers, but they still could have killed them there. Why
would they take them with them?
Speaker 3 (16:49):
That's what I figured. I was looking at that and said, well, sure,
if that's the case, why complicate things even further by
taking them out? I mean, just if you're planning after
finding out that you've been recognizing, you say, well, we
need to get rid of these kids, kill them in
the store and take off.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
Yeah, but is it even worth killing someone because you're
recognized doing a robbery. I don't know what the punishment
is for robbing a store at gunpoint, but it can't
be as bad as murdering four people.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
I wouldn't think it'd be anywhere near what it would
cost to be convicted of.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
Murder, right exactly. So that's very odd too.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
That's an oddity. Yes, I mean, there.
Speaker 2 (17:28):
Has been discussion that there was some kind of drug involvement,
like maybe one of the kids owed money for some
drugs they bought, but they didn't seem like the kind
of kids who even did drugs.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
No, they weren't, although we'll find out some differences later.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:43):
So daylight arrived Saturday morning and the next shift came
into the restaurant, the burger chef to start working. These
kids were told that a robbery had taken place the
night before. Okay, but then for whatever reason, they were
allowed to clean the place up and open for business. Now,
at this point, nobody had gotten any evidence, no photographs,
(18:08):
no fingerprints, no duesting, nothing. They showed up and like
you said, this supposition was that it was an inside
job and the kids were having a good time on
burger chef's money. But they did nothing to start the investigation.
And one of the people involved said, quote, we screwed
it up from the beginning end of quote.
Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yes, well, certainly I see it that way. But even
if they thought the kids took the money and left,
you think they would do an investigation because it is
a crime either way.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yeah, I mean, it's just there's so many things that
left me scratching my head. Yes, in this, but that's
another one. Even if that's what you think, you still
investigate it, right exactly?
Speaker 2 (18:50):
Yeah, Well didn't, especially since the kids hadn't been located.
You might want to just shut the place off until
you find them and at least speak to them.
Speaker 3 (18:58):
Yeah, you would, but they didn't.
Speaker 2 (19:01):
So it was just very poorly handled, to say the least.
About an hour before Brian Kring had stopped by the
burger chef and found the rear door ajar, another couple
had walked past the restaurant. A sixteen year old boy
was walking his girlfriend home and they sat behind the
restaurant to talk or maybe they were kissing, who knows.
Speaker 3 (19:22):
I think the way this was written up, yeah, they
decided let's just stop here and make out for.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
A little bit, okay, But then they were approached by
two men. These were white guys who were poorly dressed,
so I guess kind of homelessly looking. I'm not sure
what that meant exactly.
Speaker 3 (19:40):
I don't think it was quite to the level of
homeless dress, but not well dressed. And one of them
had a scruffy old beard. The other one was clean shaven.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
So they were a little bit scary for these young
people night.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
I would imagine, oh, it's sweat ten o'clock at night
or so, and you sitting there trying to get the
first base on your date and these guys come walking up,
I'd be a little nervous.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Yeah, So one of these men told the kids that
it wasn't safe for them to be there, and they left.
But you have to think what did he mean by
that wasn't safe for them to be there because they
were planning to do a robbery. But then if they
were planning to do a robbery, would they really approach
and speak to someone. It's a little puzzling.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
Just more things that you're supposed to interpret here.
Speaker 2 (20:30):
I suppose. And then the next day, that sixteen year
old boy did call the police. Both he and his
girlfriend were questioned, but they really didn't provide anything else
that was useful, just that they'd seen those two guys
and one of them told them it wasn't safe to be.
Speaker 3 (20:46):
There, right, And they ended up being the sources of
the composite sketches.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Yes, and then they eventually made busts as well, I believe.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah. That was after some time investigating the case where
things hadn't happened, yet nothing was shown up that was important.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
So of course, the search for the four missing employees continued,
and there was no success. On Saturday, Then on Sunday afternoon,
Fred Heger and his wife Rosemary were out for a
walk on their heavily wooded property when they came across
four dead bodies. Now from the uniforms they were wearing,
the couple saw that they were likely those Burger Chef employees,
(21:28):
so of course they called for help in the area
was soon run over with police. But you know, not
a lot of evidence was found, although they did find
out that these kids were brutally murdered.
Speaker 3 (21:38):
They were I and two of them had been shot,
one had been stabbed in the heart, and one had
been beaten. His face and head were a mess. So
and as the one, you know, some people thought he'd
run into a tree trying to escape. Some people have
said that he was beaten with a chain. He was beaten.
(22:02):
So they looked like there were three different methods of
killing these kids. Yeah, gunshot, stabbing, and ludgeoning.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
Well, I guess we're pretty sure it was more than
one person. Had to be at least two people doing this.
I would imagine at least two. Yeah. So Complicating the investigation, though,
were the inevitable turf battles over the jurisdiction because the
Speedway Police were taking the lead at the restaurant, but
the bodies had been discovered in Johnson County, so technically
(22:35):
the Sheriff's department had jurisdiction there.
Speaker 3 (22:38):
Yeah, except for one little problem sort of when Fred
Hager called his discovery and he ended up calling the
Indiana State Police before he called the Sheriff's department, and
the state police were let's just say, they were reluctant
to share the investigation. So you've got at least three
(23:02):
departments investigating the robbery.
Speaker 2 (23:06):
And murders of the kids and maybe not communicating as
well as they should have with each other.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
No. I mean, the excellent book I read didn't go
into it too much except to kind of indicate that
there was a lot of jealousy between the departments and
everyone wanted their department to be the one that solved
the case.
Speaker 2 (23:27):
Well, that's extremely unprofessional and immature. Well, it happens, and
as it turns out, this crime scene also became compromised.
They didn't handle that very well either.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
No. See, so it wasn't just the local police, it's
the state police that fucked up. Also.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, cars drove over areas that should have been cordoned off,
and one of the bodies had been moved before the
medical examiner even arrived. The medical examiner found that Ruth,
Allen and Daniel had been shot numerous times in the headneck,
and shoulders. The assistant manager, Jane, had been stabbed twice
(24:04):
in her heart, and it was done so vigorously that
the blade actually broke off inside of her body. Mark
had died after being bludgeoned so struck repeatedly in the
head to the point where he was very disfigured and
covered in blood. So of course investigators believed at that
point that more than one person was involved. I mean,
(24:25):
for one thing, how would you get the four people
to go with you if you were one person, right?
Speaker 3 (24:30):
And how are you going to follow Jane's car with
another car?
Speaker 2 (24:34):
That's another big one. Sure you're not going to trust
one of the employees to drive one of the cars,
that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
So it's at least two.
Speaker 2 (24:41):
Well, I guess you could if you rode in the
car with your gun on someone, maybe you could get
someone else to lead the way or follow you, just
based on the safety of the other person. Yeah, but
it doesn't seem likely. It seems like there were at
least two people, Like, we.
Speaker 3 (24:56):
Said, no, there has to be at least two.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, there's definitely a consensus on that. But the motive
for the crime was kind of confounding for investigators. They
thought it unlikely that they had been killed for less
than six hundred dollars. No kidding, right, but people have
been killed for less though.
Speaker 3 (25:15):
Really well, they certainly have. But still, let's suppose you're
a professional robbing group and you go around robbing these
fast food places.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
You're not going to kill them, no, not if that's
all you're doing, right, So there's probably more behind it,
exactly right. Several investigators were thinking that the kids were
killed because they recognized the robbers. That was a big theory.
You know, Mark was not supposed to be working that night,
so maybe he recognized one of the robbers and they
didn't expect him to be there.
Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah, when I was looking into this, that sounded reasonable.
If you're kind of casing the place out and deciding
when it would be the best time to rob it
and how to do it, you would see that there
was the same crew that worked nights, and now all
of a sudden you go in to rob the place,
and there's a new guy there who you wouldn't recognize
and didn't recognize, and he knows who you are and
(26:10):
he's going to finger you.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
So yeah, well, yeah, that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (26:16):
I thought that idea, Jill.
Speaker 2 (26:17):
That doesn't explain why they took them away. No, why
wouldn't they just shot them right there?
Speaker 3 (26:21):
I can't figure that out at all.
Speaker 2 (26:23):
No, So, the media and the public were becoming pretty
disgruntled over the perceived lack of transparency that the police
were giving them.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
Well, they weren't giving them anything. That was the main problem.
They had nothing to write up or think about. So
the police decided, well, let's see if we can show
the public and the media that we are working on
this and really trying to solve it. So they released
the composite drawings of the two men that had interacted
(26:53):
with the teenagers that night, the ones who said, you know,
it's dangerous to be out here at night.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
Yeah, So tell me a little bit about these guys.
Were they were they young? Were they older?
Speaker 3 (27:04):
They were on the younger side, but not.
Speaker 2 (27:06):
High school or college aged.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
No, they were in their thirties maybe forties.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
Oh, well, that's quite a bit older, and.
Speaker 3 (27:13):
The police were careful to call them people of interest
and not suspects.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
I didn't know they were doing that back in the seventies.
I thought that was more of a new thing. That's
what they did.
Speaker 3 (27:23):
Huh, that's what I read about.
Speaker 2 (27:25):
Okay, so two men thirties or forties, that's pretty vague. Yeah,
what else have we got?
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Well, we got some thirty eight caliber slugs that had
killed Ruth and Daniel, but they didn't have a gun
that matched the bullets. So we've spent shellcasings and no gun.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
So just one gun was involved. They're not sure, Well
there was only one type of slug.
Speaker 3 (27:49):
Yeah, well you can do different slugs and different guns.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Well, sure, so they were thinking it might have been
more than one thirty eight. You're saying they.
Speaker 3 (27:57):
Found some slugs that were thirty eight caliber and that
he hadn't found any weapons that could have been used.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Right, I'm just wondering if they had more than one gun,
why would they have bludgeoned and stabbed people. That's my
only thought, right is there was probably only one gun
or everyone would have been shot.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Yeah. I like that. Although one of the numerous theories
was that when they got to where they killed the kids,
and they were in the process of shooting two of them.
The other two tried to run away, and they tackled
Jane and stabbed her, and the other kid ran into
a tree and knocked himself out. That was one of
(28:38):
the theories.
Speaker 2 (28:39):
That's pretty wild theory. I don't know about that. Was
there a tree with blood on it? Is there a
reason why they thought that? Nope, that's a little bit
weird of a thing to come up with in my mind.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
Yeah. Yeah, apparently he had died by aspiating his blood.
So they're trying to think of ways that you could
do that, but I don't know. So we've got different
methods of execution, we've got the composites of the two guys,
we've got slugs and Burgerschef also decided that they would
offer a twenty five thousand dollars reward for any information
(29:12):
leading to a conviction. And this wasn't very helpful because
it got all sorts of people coming out of the woodwork.
Speaker 2 (29:18):
Yeah, did they set up one of those numbers to
call with tips?
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah, they had so many that they were trying to
get people to write in their tips and put a
code name at the bottom of the write up.
Speaker 2 (29:32):
What do you mean? I don't understand that.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
You can write up your information for the police to
investigate and put on the bottom one, two, three, four,
five six that's your ID number, and you keep a
copy of that number so that if the tip turns
out to be relevant, we can call up the person
who submitted that number and give the reward to that person.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Okay, I've never heard of a system like that neither. Okay.
Speaker 3 (29:58):
So, once the bodies were buried, people of Speedway tried
to resume their daily lives, but it was difficult, and
Speedway was and is a small town, so there's always
reminders going on about what happened with these kids. And
then the parents of the victims were overrun with mail
and phone calls, most of them crank calls. The manager
(30:21):
of the burger chef had made some changes to the
store so everyone's more safe. They were closed for a
short time, but eventually they did reopen. With these changes,
hopefully we're going to prevent or at least make it
tougher for this type of thing to happen again. So
we're going along. We've got hours going into days, days
(30:43):
going into weeks, weeks going in the months no progress.
Trying to get something going, the authorities had commissioned bus
to be made of the people of interest from the drawings.
Speaker 2 (30:57):
Yeah, that's kind of an unusual thing to do. I'm
a little surprised by that me too, because these weren't
even really very good suspects.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
No, these were just two guys, basically, two random guys.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
And that was probably what a good hour before the
actual robbery. I know, we're not sure of the exact time,
but yeah, maybe they didn't kill them at the restaurant
because of the noise it would have made.
Speaker 3 (31:21):
That's possible. Yeah, but they didn't get anywhere see that far.
So looking at a few of the results from the
drawings and bus, they had two men who had been
arrested in Chicago for aggravated battery, and there were several
people who thought that these two guys resembled the men
(31:41):
in the description from the teens, but they turned out
to have solid alibis and were eliminated as suspects and
just another couple of things, one or two things. Investigators
also traveled to Cincinnati so that they could interview a
prisoner there who resembled the beer in the composite sketch. Now,
(32:02):
this guy had lived near the burger chef at the
time and had people saying that he dyed his hair
and beard right after the murders. Suspicious stuff. So this
man passed a polygraph and he also had an alibi
for the night of the murders. But he did tell
police that there were two other men who were responsible,
and he said the plan was simply to rob the restaurant,
(32:24):
but the perpetrators decided to murder the four kids when
one of them recognized one of the robbers.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
See, that's still a stretch to me. I don't know
if I really believe that. No, And it seems like
a big jump in behavior.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Doesn't it. And the police didn't look at it that
way anyway. They thought he wasn't involved. He was really
just trying to find a way to reduce his sentence. Okay,
So because he didn't tell him anything, it wasn't already known.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
Well, yeah, he didn't have any information that only a
participant would never.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
Right, That's obviously that's what you'd like to get. Yes,
if you're withholding information from the public and the media,
you're hoping that someone comes forward with information that could
only be gained from firsthand knowledge.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
So a letter was sent to the Indianapolis Star on
November twenty ninth, and the writer alleged that what started
out as a basic robbery whenever a basic robbery is
somehow went wrong. The writers said there were three people involved,
but the three had split up and were no longer
in Indiana at all. Police thought this information was credible.
(33:33):
So what they did is they just begged the individual
to come forward. But why would the person come forward?
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Well, and he didn't that anyway, So this was.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
An anonymous letter, right, and they weren't able to trace it.
Sometimes that's fairly easy to do.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Well, they weren't. And before this person came forward, another
person came by the newspaper office who wanted to talk,
and he was interviewed by police and gave them the
names of two people who he said were involved. But
the police were not real sure that this was credible information.
Speaker 2 (34:08):
Well did they look into it? They did and nothing
was connected.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
Nothing was connected. But then another letter arrived. This was
from the first letter, the one that they were trying
to get the guy to come forward. So the way
it turned out was they got this letter, they wanted
this person to come forward and give more information.
Speaker 2 (34:29):
The first letter.
Speaker 3 (34:29):
The first letter, okay, and he finally sent this second
letter and he said he wasn't going to be able
to help him anymore.
Speaker 2 (34:38):
So how did they know the letter was from the
same person.
Speaker 3 (34:41):
He said he was the same person. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Well, there was no new information, you're saying, basically, that's
what it boils down to you. No, but the author
of that letter said he couldn't help either. And while
police were happy to get some leads, they were really
disheartened because there was no progress and none of the
leads were panning out.
Speaker 3 (34:59):
Yeah, nothing was working. I would have felt incredibly frustrated
at this point because they're not getting anything that's going
to help with the investigation. So we've gone another few weeks,
there's still no progress, and the police is starting to
scale back the investigation a bit.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but they remained committed to solving the crime, they said,
And at this point they must have been really trying
just about anything they could think of.
Speaker 3 (35:24):
Yeah, I think they're starting to grasp its straws right.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Well, I don't know about straws, but they're definitely grasping.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
For things definitely are grasping, and.
Speaker 2 (35:32):
They consulted with a psychoanalyst to get an opinion, and
this specialist concluded that the murderers were likely unproductive men
between the ages of sixteen and twenty five, and that
at least one of them could be considered a psychopath. No,
I'm sorry, but I don't find that at all helpful.
Anybody could say that that's based.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
On what exactly it's based on. I think it's based
on them trying the authorities, trying to do something that
showed they were working the case.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
Right, I suppose, But why that that doesn't seem help now.
I mean, if you want to get a psychological profile
of these people, for one thing, I think it's pretty impossible,
because these are people that just walked in and robbed
a restaurant. Yeah, it's not like a serial killer where
you're getting patterns, you're getting evidence. They really have nothing
to go on other that someone came and robbed it
(36:21):
and that these young people were killed in another area.
They don't even really know for sure how they got
there or if they were all alive when they went.
Speaker 3 (36:29):
I know, and even forty some years later, that's where you're.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Still at Yeah. So there was some discussion that the
Burgerschef murders were related to the killing of that woman
in her garage, the grandmother, and those seemingly random bombings,
but then that was ruled out by the authorities. And
police also questioned two other people who looked like the
composite drawings and did know the area, but they never
(36:55):
got enough evidence to charge them either. So it's very frustrated.
Speaker 3 (37:01):
Yeah. Well it boiled over by the end of nineteen
seventy nine, still with no charges or any real credible
leads against any individuals for the murders. The Board of
Police Commissioners voted to fire the speedway chief of Police,
that's Robert Copeland, for lack of leadership.
Speaker 2 (37:20):
Okay, so now is that something that really was his
fault because you told me earlier that the state police
were also involved.
Speaker 3 (37:28):
Yeah, but he's going to bear the brunt of it
because he's not solving it.
Speaker 2 (37:33):
Okay. So that's when they created the task force.
Speaker 3 (37:37):
Right, so this is like a year later, Yeah, the.
Speaker 2 (37:40):
End of seventy nine. Yeah, so they put together a
seven man task force and their job was to look
into the Burger Chef murders and within a fairly short
amount of time, they were reinvestigating a suspect. Besides this person,
the task force was looking at two men who liked
to rob fast food restaurants who used similar methods to
(38:01):
the Burger chef robbery slash murders. But none of these
people could be the real perpetrators, so they either had
alibis or they were ruled out for other reasons.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Correct.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
In October of nineteen eighty, the task Force said they
had another suspect who looked really solid. They also announced
they were looking into the murders being a result of
some kind of drug debt. So that's something that had
been considered for a while.
Speaker 3 (38:28):
Yeah, it was one of the ideas, but it took
more credence when they got some more information.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
Right, So, apparently Mark Flemons was worried he might be
beaten or even killed because he had a seven thousand
dollars drug debt.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
Now that's huge, that's huge, And this is a what
sixteen seventeen year old high school kid?
Speaker 2 (38:47):
So is that real? So is that proven to be
a real thing.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
I don't I'm just not sure how credible that is.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
It's hard to believe it.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
Really is who's going to float that much money as
a low into a sixteen year old.
Speaker 2 (39:01):
Well, I wouldn't think it would be all in one shot,
but it would let him build up that kind of
a debt, right, And why would he Yeah, there was
no history of him being a real druggie or anything. Now,
at autopsy, Jane Fright did have marijuana in her system.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Yeah, so that's what really gave this whole idea of
drugs being involved with some traction.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
So they had a person of interest with a history
of selling narcotics and this person was also familiar with
the area. But the only problem was the police were
unable to arrest this guy because he kept disappearing.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
Yeah, so that's suspicious, right there, I be thinking maybe
we got somebody because we can't find this guy.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Well yeah, but if he's a drug dealer, would he
really want to hang around anyway?
Speaker 3 (39:46):
Well, no, you're right, he wouldn't.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But he was eventually tracked down and eventually cleared of
any involvement in the crime. Still, though, investigators did believe
that drugs were probably involved based on what we don't
really know.
Speaker 3 (40:01):
Well, based on the supposition that the one kid was
worried that he was going to be beaten up or
killed for his drug debt, and that Jane had some
traces of marijuana.
Speaker 2 (40:14):
I would think half the kids that you would test
in nineteen seventy eight would have traces of marijuana.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
They probably could be. So they also got a little
more interested in this with Jane's brother, James Fried, because
he was arrested for dealing cocaine.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
Well, now that I could take a little more seriously.
Speaker 3 (40:33):
Right, And he also at least sort of resembled the
bearded man in the composite picture. Okay, Now they investigated
apparently thoroughly, and James was cleared of any involvement.
Speaker 2 (40:46):
But he was a cocaine dealer, he was.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
And then just another interesting fact, Mark Flemon's brother was
arrested in nineteen eighty one and charged with robbery and murder.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
So tell me a little bit about that. Was that
anything similar? What did he do?
Speaker 3 (41:03):
No, that was just by the way, we got a
family member who's a criminal.
Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, but what did he rob and who did he kill?
And when did that happen.
Speaker 3 (41:12):
It has nothing at all to do with the Burger
chef robbery and killings. It's just built by association well, the.
Speaker 2 (41:20):
Next two or three years passed without any new developments
in the case. Big surprise. Then, in December of nineteen
eighty four, reporter Dan Luzzeer of the Indianapolis Star met
with an inmate at the Marion County Jail because this
inmate was looking at some serious time for burglary and
had some information he thought might be helpful. This inmate
(41:43):
said he knew who had been involved in the burger
Chef murders, and he named two men who he said
were responsible for the crime. One of these men the
police had already eliminated as a suspect, but the other
one was a man who investigators knew nothing about it.
Speaker 3 (42:00):
That can be a good lead, Yeah, he would think, Aha,
we got some fresh stuff going here. So maybe. So
the guy that the investigators had no information about was
a guy named Ronald Donald Ray Forrester. And this is
a guy who's a career criminal in and out of
prison since he was an eighteen year old. Now, Forrester
(42:21):
said the motive for the robbery was drugs and homosexuality.
So they investigated, and they found that certain parts of
Forrester's story did hold up. And then all of a sudden.
Forrester said, oh, I changed my mind. I don't want
to talk to you guys anymore. So they went back
and forth and he did eventually agree to cooperate and
he needed to get something in return, and we'll find
(42:44):
out what that was, okay, And he named someone he
said was involved in the murders.
Speaker 2 (42:50):
So on August seventh, nineteen eighty five, detectives picked up
Forrester at the jail and the plan was to take
him to Speedway in the hopes that he would remember
some details of the crime. But this turned out to
be a waste of time. The police were starting to
think they were just one a wild goose chase. He
didn't have any information, and the new direction with Forrester
(43:11):
was just another lead that went nowhere.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
It's certainly going nowhere, but Forrester is persistent. So we
got two new informants showing up in nineteen eighty six.
What are we eight years into it now, right? And
some of what they said agreed with Forrester's story, and
other things contradicted his story. So they're looking at and
(43:34):
the the investigators are getting more convinced that Forrester somehow
is involved in the murders. They just have to get
him to admit it. So he meets with the investigators
in November of nineteen eighty six, and Forrester says, okay,
I'm ready to come clean. And he actually gave information
about the murders that could only be known by one
of the participants. And this is like the positioning of
(43:57):
the bodies, how they were arranged at the murder scene,
and he knew about the various wounds that each one
had suffered, and that wasn't common knowledge. Forrester told the
investigators that the gun that had been used in the
crime had been thrown into the White River, and then
he confessed. He said, it's me. I shot Ruth Allen
(44:19):
Shelton and Daniel Davis. They looked in the river and
they could not find a gun. Of course, again, this
is eight years after the fact, and who knows with
river currents and silt and stuff being deposited. But he's
basically saying I was involved in the crime and I
killed two people.
Speaker 2 (44:37):
Okay, But he's not saying who was with him that
killed the other two people, which I would see as
a big hole in his story That makes it much
less credible to me.
Speaker 3 (44:46):
Well, and that's how they ended up and it turns
out to be nothing. But he had him going for
a while, So.
Speaker 2 (44:53):
Positioning of the bodies. I wonder how specific he got
on that, because I don't know. Plus there's always the
idea that when he was talking to the police, they
may have kind of led him along. Oh sure, either
on purpose or accidentally. Because it was only one week
later when Forrester recanted his confession and said he'd been coerced.
(45:13):
So that has to make you wonder.
Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yeah, well, what we'll find out, and this took the
author of the book a while to come up with
it was that Forrester had some serious mental health issues, right, Yeah,
so basically everything he told him was probably bullshit.
Speaker 2 (45:29):
Well, he maintained that he had spoken with the killers
and had helped them, but now he was saying he
didn't participate.
Speaker 3 (45:35):
Yeah. Right, So we've gone in a week from saying
I was in on it and I killed two people and
now nothing there.
Speaker 2 (45:42):
Well, Plus if he's not able to name his accomplice,
I don't give him a lot of credence.
Speaker 3 (45:46):
Yeah, but he still told him enough stuff that they
thought he had to be involved in some way.
Speaker 2 (45:52):
I suppose I could see that or at least had
heard about it from someone. Yeah, but a review of
an old case would lead investigators to the link that
they were looking for.
Speaker 3 (46:02):
Well, a link they were looking for in terms of
eliminating him as a suspect, right, right, Because it turns
out that in nineteen sixty nine, Forrester was out with
a friend and the friend's girlfriend and they stopped and
picked up a fourteen year old girl who knew the
couple but didn't know Forrester. And after they dropped off
(46:22):
the couple, Forrester raped the girl. I was a little
lucky he was able to plead guilty to assault and battery.
But what he was hoping was that what he talked
to the authorities about the burger chef murders was going
to be enough information to be useful to the authorities
and they would get rid of his record for rape.
Speaker 2 (46:42):
But no one had ever told them that they would. No.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
Plus, the other stretch is that nothing he's given the
authorities was information. It was useful exactly, so so much
for him.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
So despite that lack of evidence implicating people Forrester had named,
investigators worked convinced that he was involved in some way
despite all that.
Speaker 3 (47:03):
Yeah, that's exactly what I said. Despite all this, all
this stuff, they've been through with him time and time
again to get their hopes up, and then they get
their hopes dashed. They're still thinking, well, he's got to
know something about it. Now. Despite the fact that people
at Forrester had named his perpetrators, nothing had come of that. Somehow,
(47:25):
the investigators are still convinced that he was involved, so
they asked Prosecutor Steven Goldsmith to bring charges against Forrester,
which he was reluctant to do. His way of thinking
is is going to be very difficult to find Forrester
guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
Well, no kidding, no.
Speaker 3 (47:43):
Kidding, because there's nothing here. This is also a problem
for Forrester because if he wasn't charged, he's going to
get sent back to the prison where he was and
he didn't want to be there. He was afraid for
his wife. And the other thing was that if he
wasn't charged, he's going to lose all chances to revisit
his prior conviction for rape or assault, battery, whatever you
(48:05):
want to call it.
Speaker 2 (48:06):
If he wasn't charged, he was Yeah, why.
Speaker 3 (48:09):
If he wasn't charged. They're just not going to think
about looking into that. I don't know that they made
a deal, but the understanding was that if things came
to fruition, that they would find a way to revisit
the charges against him or his conviction. So he's not
got much going for him.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
Yeah, so it's weird because even though he'd recanted his confession,
he was hoping he'd be charged.
Speaker 3 (48:31):
Yes, a burger chef murder, isn't that weird?
Speaker 2 (48:33):
It's very unusual. Yes, Ultimately Goldsmith did bring charges against
Forrester for the Burger Chef murders. Ultimately, Goldsmith did not
bring charges against Forrester for the Burger Chef murders. He
didn't feel they had enough evidence to get a guilty verdict,
and he was likely correct.
Speaker 3 (48:51):
I'm no doubt that he was correct. This guy was
all over the place.
Speaker 2 (48:56):
So now we get to November seventeenth, nineteen eighty eight,
and the Burger Chef murders are reaching a tenth anniversary
with really nothing in the way of solving it.
Speaker 3 (49:05):
No. Dan Luzader, the newspaper guy, interviewed Forrester in prison
on this tenth anniversary and over time, Forrester had continued
to feed information to others. Again, nothing that came to
anything of use, and Forrester's mental state was pretty precarious.
At this point, no one really knew what was believable
(49:28):
and what was unbelievable. Forrester himself claimed he had been
implanted with a device that controlled his thoughts. It's the
warning sign, don't you think yes? And he was unable
to stop his device. And over time, with all this,
he was still receiving his weekly doses of thorozine. I
think they need to up the dose. Well.
Speaker 2 (49:49):
Nineteen ninety three mark the fifteenth anniversary of the case,
still nothing. Jim Kramer of the Indiana State Police gave
his thoughts on the case. At that point, now he
was the only original detectives still working the case. Pramer
and others who worked the case feel that it started
off as a robbery, but then things deteriorated when one
(50:09):
of the crew recognized one of the robbers. The robbers
then kidnapped the employees and they drove away in Jane
Fright's car. Then they transferred to another vehicle. The robbers
then drove the crew to an isolated wooded area where
they killed them in three different ways, and the bodies
were discovered the next day by the couple who were
(50:30):
out walking. Now, this is pretty much things that they'd
known since nineteen seventy eight. Nothing new there, right, there's
nothing new, and it's not all really definite either. A
lot of its theory, right, because.
Speaker 3 (50:42):
Kramer himself is going to admit or has admitted, there's
never been a conclusive motive established, and they are not
at all certain that one of the employees recognized one
of the robbers, and so this is all kinds of
supposition exactly.
Speaker 2 (50:56):
They have no way of knowing that.
Speaker 3 (50:58):
Nope.
Speaker 2 (50:58):
So there does seem to have been two camps among investigators,
one believing that scenario and the other camp thinking it
was perpetrated by a group who had a history of
robbing fast food restaurants. In fact, Kramer himself interviewed Forrester
several times, and he didn't think that Forrester provided any
useful information. There's no way to be certain that he did.
Speaker 3 (51:22):
And I kind of liked the idea of a group
who had a history of robbing fast food restaurants. But
then why the murders, Because these robbers are just interested
in hitting up restaurants and getting away.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
Well, they're saying that the murders because someone was recognized.
Speaker 3 (51:40):
Yeah, I just I don't know, but there's.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
No way of knowing that that's really just a guess.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
Yeah, it is, because they're guessing to fill in the
deficiencies in the story, which I understand.
Speaker 2 (51:51):
But maybe it's better to just say we really don't know,
because you know the problem Well, yeah, the problem with
making up something or just citing that it was probably
something could make you go off in the wrong direction, right,
because there's nothing to support it.
Speaker 3 (52:05):
Plus, it gives hope to people involved, like the parents,
that maybe they're actually going to solve the case.
Speaker 2 (52:12):
Well, and maybe that's what they were trying to do though, well,
perpetuate hope.
Speaker 3 (52:16):
Yeah. How many times do you do that before the
people wise up and say, you know, you've told me
ten different people that are suspects and nobody's been charged yet.
Speaker 2 (52:25):
Sure. Well, and it does happen that murders are unsolvable.
It happens quite a bit. I think that the reason
this is more difficult is because they didn't do anything
right in the investigation. If they'd done everything right and
still had no actual suspects or convictions, then, you know,
unfortunate but understandable.
Speaker 3 (52:46):
Exactly. That's a wonderful point, thank you. I wasn't trying
to curry favor with you, Joe, although you show me
favor all the time any anyway, But no, I think
that's a very reasonable point to make.
Speaker 2 (53:02):
Well, yeah, I mean, you can guess at all kinds
of different things, and I think it's worth considering it.
But to put that out to the public, that's not wise.
Speaker 3 (53:12):
Noe.
Speaker 2 (53:12):
No, So today we're forty three years after these murders
and not very likely they're going to be solved.
Speaker 3 (53:20):
No. I read somewhere, I forget exactly where that the
only way that they can see it being solved now
is that somebody makes a deathbed confession. Right.
Speaker 2 (53:29):
It just seems to be this perfect combination of unfortunate
events coming together to make the case unsolvable, including maybe
a well executed robbery we don't know, multiple investigative errors
that we do know, and maybe just some bad luck.
Speaker 3 (53:46):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (53:47):
So it does happen. That's why the murder clearance rates
are not one hundred percent across the country.
Speaker 3 (53:53):
Oh, it certainly can happen. That's right.
Speaker 2 (53:55):
Yeah, I think the worst part is just the way
it was handled, because that way you think, I think
maybe it could have been solved. Yeah, maybe people could
have been saved. He knows what happened.
Speaker 3 (54:05):
To be the tough thing to kind of swallow that
they hadn't screwed up the investigation from the beginning, maybe
we wouldn't be at this point.
Speaker 2 (54:13):
Yeah. I think something as simple as some fingerprints might
have been helpful, But no chance at that, No.
Speaker 3 (54:19):
It would be tough. Just in case you're thinking that
this is just an isolated incident, that there are no
unsolved murders in Indiana, I got a couple for you
that I picked.
Speaker 2 (54:30):
Out somewhere quite familiar with.
Speaker 3 (54:32):
We've done podcasts on both of them. So there are
unsolved murders still in Indiana, and one is Lauren Spier.
Speaker 2 (54:42):
We did a podcast on that. That was a twenty
year old sophomore college sophomore who disappeared from her campus
in the small hours of June second, twenty eleven. Remember,
Lauren had been out partying and was visibly intoxicated, and
a friend of hers suggested that she stay at his place,
but she wanted to go home.
Speaker 3 (55:01):
According to him, Yeah, and she could hardly walk.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
Yes, So this friend accompanied her to about three blocks
from her apartment and then left her. Now that's what
he said. And she has not been seen since. With
this case, a popular theory is that she overdosed and
died and that her friends got rid of her body,
possibly putting it in the river, although her remains have
(55:25):
never been found. No, and then, of course, the most
famous case recently would be the disappearance of Abby Williams
and Libby Jerman on February thirteenth, twenty seventeen. Very different
from Lauren's case, of course, these girl's bodies were found
the next day, kind of a ritualistic possible serial killers situation.
(55:48):
And what really sticks out about this is that one
of the girls had recorded the murderer speaking and walking
on her cell phone.
Speaker 3 (55:57):
Yeah, it's a chilling scene.
Speaker 2 (56:00):
Chilling and there have been many leads, but we don't
have anyone for that yet either.
Speaker 3 (56:06):
No, there's there's a new maybe right.
Speaker 2 (56:10):
Well, yeah, in the last several months.
Speaker 3 (56:12):
Yeah, this is a guy named James Brian Chadwell. So
he's a guy. He lured a nine year old girl
into his home in April of twenty twenty one, he
beat her and sexually assaulted her, planning to murder her.
Police officers somehow got notified and found the girl locked
into the guy's basement, and she did survive, with a
(56:33):
lot of bruising and strangulation marks on her neck and
a dog bite.
Speaker 2 (56:38):
Well, yeah, I think the way he lured her in
was to pet his dog or his dogs, right. He
did plead guilty to attempted murder and child molestation get
ninety years in prison. There was an additional twenty years
because of the fact that he was an habitual offender.
So he's locked up and he won't be eligible for
parole until twenty ninety one. So at least if he
(57:01):
is responsible, he's not out to do it anymore. Some
observers had pointed out that Chadwell has some tattoos of
two girls' faces on his arms that look like they're
crying blood, and one of these faces does resemble Libby German.
But investigators have not publicly connected Chadwell to these murders.
Speaker 3 (57:21):
But I'll bet they're trying like hell to be able
to do that.
Speaker 2 (57:23):
Well, it would wrap it up neatly if it was,
but life doesn't always work that way.
Speaker 3 (57:28):
Yeah, it would solve the case if that's who it was.
Speaker 2 (57:32):
Yeah, but I think if it was him, they'd probably
know because I thought they had some DNA.
Speaker 3 (57:36):
Well, we're supposing that doing is that true that there
is some DNA?
Speaker 2 (57:40):
I think there is.
Speaker 3 (57:42):
Then if there is, it's either his or not his,
and he's either the perpetrator or not.
Speaker 2 (57:47):
Well, that's why I'm saying he's probably not the perpetrator
because I think if it was him, they would have
proven it by now and he could have confessed and
maybe gotten some benefits for that. I think you're right,
which he didn't do, so I'm kind of leaning away
from it being him.
Speaker 3 (58:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:02):
Yeah, unfortunately, So that means there's probably that mad man
is still out there. But it's just amazing that one
because the video.
Speaker 3 (58:11):
Yeah, and again, this is like a speedway. It's a
small town. Everybody knows everybody, Yes, so you would think
if everybody's got access to the picture of the guy
on the cell phone that somebody would recognized him.
Speaker 2 (58:24):
Well, that's what leads me to think it wasn't a local. Yeah,
but you know, that guy looks like your average Indiana
rural guy. You know the bridge guy. Yeah, and you
can't really see his face.
Speaker 3 (58:36):
I don't know about rural Indiana, but just a regular guy.
There's nothing real distinctive.
Speaker 2 (58:42):
No, No, there isn't, although I would think if you
knew him you'd know. But that's a whole different way.
Speaker 3 (58:47):
Yeah, but that gets into a whole new bunch of.
Speaker 2 (58:50):
Topics, that's right. Yes, so fascinating case. Just too bad
that it isn't solved, and there's probably it won't be solved,
doesn't Yeah.
Speaker 3 (58:59):
I wish we could report something differently, but it's not
going to be no, and might.
Speaker 2 (59:05):
Not be no if these guys were in their thirties.
Speaker 3 (59:08):
Well, I think I read that every parent of the
kids who were killed, every parent has succumbed to various illnesses. Really, yeah,
so there's no parents left.
Speaker 2 (59:19):
Yeah, they would be quite elderly. So that's just really
sad they never found out what happened.
Speaker 3 (59:24):
Yeah, terrible, It.
Speaker 2 (59:25):
Really is terrible, all right, Dickie. Well, kind of a
heartbreaking case. But fascinating, that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (59:33):
Well, fascinating and frustrating.
Speaker 2 (59:35):
Absolutely, yes, very frustrating. You always want to get to
a point where you figure it out.
Speaker 3 (59:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (59:41):
Yeah, so you can imagine how frustrating it is for
people working in law enforcement these cases. Oh absolutely, let's
drive you mad. Yeah, yes, absolutely, So thanks for discussing
it with me today, Dickie. I appreciate it well and
thanks for putting up with me. And we'll be back
soon with another regular episode of True Crime Brewery So
(01:00:01):
we'll see you next time at the quiet Ed.
Speaker 3 (01:00:04):
We'll save you some seats.
Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
Hurry up, yep. Thanks for your support, Tig Revers. Bye guys,
Bye bye
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