I didn't think I'd ever stand here on this corner talking about it.
I suggested that we hitchhike and I stuck my thumb out.
I went to reach for the door handle, and there wasn't one.
It was just screws and bolts.
He found a nice dark spot to do his evil.
He meant to murder all three of the young ladies.
I said, "Now what?"
Blood just... [imitates whoosh]
Keeps stabbing me.
They were stabbed close to 60 times.
People were frightened. When that happened, it was lockdown.
You don't want your kids to be a victim.
With the Indiana Slasher at large,
the girls live in a constant state of fear.
Forty-nine years for us waiting.
All them years.
If it was the last thing I did while I was on this earth,
it would be to have somebody find my sister.
[theme music playing]
[Gary Maxey] In 1975, I was with the Marion County Sheriff's Department,
Indianapolis, Indiana.
This actually looks a lot like the way it looked in 1975.
This is where it all happened.
All the carnage that happened that night.
To be two foot away from it and see it...
Numerous lacerations of her neck.
It's burned in your mind.
It's just terrible, but it just goes to show
that these things can happen when you least expect it.
My name is Kathie Rottler.
I'm from the suburbs of Indianapolis, Indiana.
I would love to go back to '75
and live like we did back then.
Back then, everybody knew everybody.
We rode our bikes everywhere.
There was a creek. We'd play in the creek.
Go to people's houses,
and we would build forts in the backyard.
Smoke our cigarettes.
It was just the thing to do back then.
All these kids, we smoked.
It was just a fun place to be.
[Kandice] I met Kathie in junior high school.
I was 13 years old in 1975.
Our birthdays are the same day.
But she's a year older than I am.
[Kathie] First of all, her birthday is the same day as mine,
so she can't be too bad.
[chuckles]
She just seemed easy to get along with
and liked to do some of the things
that me and my other friends liked to do.
None of us liked being at home,
and she was one of us.
Let's go.
[Kandice] Throughout the years we would just get together
and walk around the neighborhood and go places.
She was just a good friend.
She was a kid like me.
[Johnny Dodd] 1975 was a different time,
especially in a little town like that.
You leave your house in the morning
and you come back maybe in time for dinner.
[Kandice] There were a lot of cornfields.
It was quiet for the most part.
You could go to bed at night
and leave your windows open and your front door.
It was safe.
I had five sisters.
I'm the fourth.
Sheri's the youngest.
She was three years younger than me.
Sheri always looked up to me.
She used to tell me I was her rock.
We didn't grow up with my mom,
so there were times it was difficult.
Dad, he taught us how to be independent.
I think that's where we learned as sisters to always be for each other.
[Wendy Naugle] One evening, in the summer of 1975,
Kathie makes plans to go to a local hangout called the Barn
with a friend of the family.
[Kathie] The Barn was actually in the shape of a barn.
It was an old building
and somebody bought it
and turned it into this arcade.
And they called it the Barn.
I had a friend that was going up there that night
and said that he could teach me how to play pool.
And I had only been up there once,
and I wanted to go back up there.
But I never went anywhere by myself.
I was just too shy.
[ringing]
Kathie called me up and she asked me to come over
and go with her to the Teen Barn.
She was going up there to meet a friend
to learn how to shoot pool.
So I got my brother
to drive me over to their house and drop me off.
I was getting ready to leave,
and my dad, he was engrossed in a TV show
and he said, "Well, take your little sister with you."
So reluctantly, I had to bring my little sister Sheri with me.
Of course, she's happy to get out and go anywhere with me.
That night, at about 9:30 pm, the three young girls,
14-year-old Kathie, 13-year-old Kandice
and little 11-year-old Sheri head out for the evening.
The plan is to walk the short distance to the Barn.
The Barn was probably a mile, if that.
It wasn't very far up the road.
I was very excited to go out without supervision.
[Kandice] Me and Kathie and Sheri, her younger sister,
we decided to walk down to a gas station.
[Kathie] I didn't have any cigarettes,
so we walked up to Bond gas station,
which was two blocks, basically.
And so we got some cigarettes.
When we left the gas station, I suggested that we hitchhike.
And Kandi's like, "No,"
and Sheri didn't even know what it was.
[Kandice] I never had hitchhiked before,
so I said, "No, it's not that far. We can just walk."
[Kathie] But I talked 'em into it.
And I stuck my thumb out.
We could have walked.
We should've walked.
It only seemed like a couple of minutes
after she stuck her thumb out to hitchhike
that the guy pulled over to pick us up.
It was an old car, like a 1970s station wagon.
He pulled over and he motioned for all of us to get in the front seat.
Like, he didn't want us opening the back doors,
so he had all of us get in the front seat with him.
I was just hoping we'd get to where we were going.
[Kathie] I went ahead and got in,
and then Sheri got in after me,
and then Kandi got in.
And then he started driving off
and asked us where we were going,
and I said, "We're going to Post Road to the Barn."
And so he started driving in that direction.
I could see him a little bit
because there was street lights,
so I could kind of see a shadowy figure.
[Kandice] The car itself smelled like chemicals,
and I thought he had on a mechanic outfit.
He had a striped shirt on
and had little pinstripes like he was a mechanic.
And he smelled like grease.
"You seem quiet."
I asked him to turn the radio on,
and he said, "You don't need to listen to the radio."
He seemed like he was nice,
and then all of a sudden he wasn't nice.
[Kathie] I didn't notice anything until
we were almost where he needed to turn into the Barn.
One of us told him, "It's right here. Now you turn."
And he sped up and went past it.
And that's when we knew something was up.
[Kandice] I think all of us were panicking
trying to figure out how we were going to get out of this car.
And he wouldn't say nothing.
And he kept driving and driving.
So finally I said, "If I don't get home in time, I'm going to be grounded."
And he said, "Well, I'm gonna call your parents
and get ransom money from them."
I said, "Well, my parents ain't got no money."
[Kandice] He said he was gonna demand ransom money,
like he was holding us hostage,
and he asked us where we all lived.
And I, like, elbowed Kathie
'cause I didn't want him to know where I lived.
I started yelling at Sheri and Kandi:
"Open the door! Get the door open!"
I went to reach for the door handle, and there wasn't one.
It was just screws and bolts.
It was like the whole door paneling had been taken off.
So then it's like, "Oh, shit, we're stuck in here."
Now what are we gonna do?
I was just worried about Sheri.
She was my baby sis.
And she's in this position that I had put us in.
I said, "If you're not going to turn around,
then I'm gonna cause you to get a wreck."
And I grabbed his steering wheel,
and the next thing I know, there's a gun.
And he's telling me, "Scoot over and shut up,
or I'm gonna blow your head off."
[Kathie] I thought he was going to call our parents for ransom.
I didn't know what he was doing
or what was going to happen.
I knew we couldn't get out.
It was pretty scary
not knowing what the next move's going to be.
The two young teenagers, Kathie and Kandice,
along with Kathie's 11-year-old sister, Sheri,
are driven about 15 minutes down the road
from where they were picked up.
The car pulls down a dirt road and into a cornfield.
[Kandice] He goes down a little ways to where his car
can't be seen from the road.
And he shuts his car off.
He reached behind, in the backseat, got some rope.
He ties us, our hands up with the rope,
and then he gets out of the car
and he walks around to the passenger door.
And he got out a pocket knife.
He asked us our names and our ages.
I said, "I'm Kathie. I'm 14.
"This is Kandi. She's 13.
"And that's Sheri. She's 11."
And he said, "Well, Sheri, you're first.
"You're the youngest. You're first."
Before he took Sheri out of the car,
I whispered into her ear that he's got a gun,
do whatever he says so that he won't kill you.
I didn't want nothing to happen to her.
And that was my main concern.
[Kandice] He took her out of the car,
and then...
he took her to the front of the car
and proceeding to rape her.
I just couldn't watch it.
[Kandice] That was pretty hard.
That was hard to watch.
I felt real helpless.
[Kathie] I was so freaked out.
I was just worried about my sister.
We just had to sit there.
I mean, there was nothing we could do.
We were just stuck in this position that I have put us in.
It felt like we're all going to die.
He came back to the car and he untied Kandi,
and he took Kandi walking towards the front.
I looked up and Sheri wasn't around.
I don't know where she was.
[Kandice] He tells me, "Lay down in front of the right tire,"
you know, the front of the car.
So I laid down and then he just starts stabbing me with a knife.
He stabbed me about 12 times in my throat.
After a couple times of stabbing me,
I didn't feel it.
Like, I think my nerves got cut in the top of my throat.
Separating my lip, cut me across my chin.
I came up once and hit him in the face,
and then he cut my arm open.
Then I just held my breath and acted like I was dead.
[Kathie] He came back and he says,
"You need to get out of the car."
I get out of the car and he said, "Sit down."
So I sat down Indian-style with my legs crossed
and I looked up and I said, "Now what?"
And at that point, when I said, "Now what?"
The blood just... [imitates whoosh]
I knew that he was stabbing me.
He continues stabbing me a couple more times.
So I started holding my breath.
He picked up my arm and just dropped it.
Picked me up by my feet and just tossed me into the cornfield.
I hear scuffling around.
I kind of look up and I see the vehicle.
[engine starts]
And he starts backing up.
I was like, laying with my head like this on top of my arms,
and I watched him back out of the cornfield and leave.
Someone grabs my ankle...
and scared the living daylights out of me.
I didn't know what was in that cornfield grabbing me.
And then she says, "Kathie, it's Kandice."
And I said, "Where's Sheri?"
[Kandice] We stood up and started looking around for Sheri,
and we didn't see her.
We're not finding her.
But we gotta get out of here and get help.
And then we started walking out of the cornfield.
[Kathie] After we had gotten out of the farm,
we were in the entrance parking lot of the National drive-in.
I had lost a whole bunch of blood.
I looked over and there was a guy in the box office taking tickets,
and there was people coming in to go to the movies.
And then we get there...
It's pitch black, not a soul.
Nobody in the box office, no cars, no nothing.
I hallucinated all that.
Seen all that... that wasn't really there.
[Kathie] It's totally dark.
No cars, no attendants, nothing.
So we go ahead and get on the highway,
and we're like, "What do we do now?
"How are we going to get help?"
I said, "Let's wave our arms."
So we started waving our arms like this, "Oh, help!"
Twelve cars passed us by before one finally stopped.
Finally, a car full of young men from a neighboring town
on their way to a liquor store saw them and pulled over,
and the guys get them in the car.
[Kathie] You could tell they were in shock.
I mean, we had been bleeding for so long.
[Kandice] I remember telling everybody in the car I was gonna die,
that I wasn't gonna make it.
The guy in the passenger seat, he grabbed my hand
and he said, "You're gonna make it. Jesus Christ is with you."
All I do is see like a black tunnel,
and it's real quiet,
and at the end of the tunnel, there's light,
and it's my grandfather, my dad's dad.
And he died three months before I was born.
So his face comes at the end of the tunnel.
It's like, "Kandice, you're gonna make it. You're gonna live."
And then his face goes away.
[Kathie] They took us to this Motel 8 up the road.
The night attendant called the police.
In 1975, I was a new deputy at 25 years old.
I was sitting someplace in Cumberland,
and all of a sudden,
they called and they said that there was an injured woman
and the fire department was on the scene,
and I went that way.
I'm pulling up to the scene
when I see all these firemen in their bunker pants
all around this one little area.
You know, you get out, you adjust your gun belt,
you walk up there and say, "Boys, what have we got?
There's a gurney.
And they just said, "Get a load of this."
And that fireman very gently took her chin
and he raised it,
and it just seemed like it was slow motion.
But as he raised her head up,
I saw an unbelievable sight.
All the little slits this guy had put in her neck,
it looked like somebody was opening up a small accordion,
which I just couldn't believe.
I said, "What in the world happened to her?"
And he says, "No, no, no.
"There is two of them, not just one, two.
"We've got two people just like this."
With her last ounce of strength,
Kathie begs the police to go back to the cornfield
to find her little sister Sheri.
[Kathie] The more I talked,
the more I was losing my capability to talk.
So Kathie is fighting to stay conscious.
She's lost huge amounts of blood.
[Kathie] If it was the last thing I did when I was on this earth,
it would be to have somebody find Sheri.
I wanted her found. I wanted her home.
I wanted her to be okay.
And I thought, "Oh, my gosh,
there's another one out there.
"Is she dead?"
[Naugle] Kathie and Kandice are rushed to the hospital,
and police on the scene
need to find Kathie's 11-year-old sister, Sheri.
Officer Maxey realizes time is of the essence,
and he grabs one of the young men
that can direct him back to the spot where they picked them up.
[Maxey] The minute they said, "cornfield,"
I asked where,
and they said that they picked them up
or found them
right out in front of the old drive-in theater.
Well, guess what?
We've got thousands of acres of corn out there
where that location is.
[siren wailing]
I just grabbed this guy and took him.
I said, "You're going to take me back there. We're going there."
He showed me the location in front of the drive-in
and then we turned into a side road.
We're driving and we went back about, I'd say, a quarter mile.
I turned my spotlight towards the west,
and then all of a sudden,
it was just like, boom, here it was,
as perfect as you could see is two long tire marks.
I said, "Looky here, I think this is the place."
So we jump out of the car.
Time is running.
You know, she could be bleeding out
and you're thinking all these things.
And we're flying down through the rows,
going like 20, 30, 40, 50 feet in this row.
Turn and come back, and we're yelling out,
"If you can hear us, say anything, do anything.
"If you can't talk, make a noise."
And then we stopped.
And I told the guy to stop.
Don't do nothing, to stop.
And then we heard her moan.
And I think she gave it all she got.
And once she did, I was able to lock onto where she was at.
There I saw her body laying there in between the cornrows.
The adrenaline is pumping so much
that I just grabbed her completely up.
She didn't weigh nothing.
I just laid her across the back end of my police car.
See that she's breathing.
But she wasn't really moving that much.
She just laid there.
[Naugle] By now, more police are responding to the scene,
and before long, an ambulance arrives to take Sheri to hospital.
You're looking out over the horizon.
The little blue lights, they're coming,
and they're coming hard,
and boom, they was there.
They grabbed her and was gone.
[siren wailing]
I felt so good that we at least found her.
[Dodd] While all this is going on,
Kathie is at the hospital with Kandice
and they've got to have emergency surgery.
But even worse for her,
she has no idea what's happened to her sister.
I remember talking to God, praying to God.
"Please help find my sister."
And then I did hear that they had found her.
Felt like a ton off my shoulders.
And I just... I had a feeling
that she was going to be okay, too.
I'm Sheri Rottler-Trick.
I'm a survivor.
I was stabbed, raped and left for dead.
I was 11.
There's not a day that goes by that I don't think about it.
I see it in the mirror every single day,
and I have since 1975.
I don't talk about things with people
probably like I should.
I pretty much don't talk to anybody but Kathie about this.
Because nobody knows more about it than Kathie and Kandi.
[Kathie] I don't think you were brought to the hospital yet,
or you might have been in there.
I just didn't know yet that you were found.
And Dad came in and I looked at Dad.
He looked awful.
He looked like he just could collapse.
That's what I've heard.
And the first thing I said to him is, "Am I grounded?"
And he was just like...
I don't think he could answer me.
Probably glad we were just alive.
-No, but can you imagine asking after all that? -No.
I can't imagine being a parent and seeing what they seen.
I was raped.
When he was finished...
he sat me down on the ground...
and he got in his pocket
and he got his pocket knife out
and he started stabbing me in the neck
and I passed out.
I don't know what happened, but he come back
and he put his hand on my... on my heart
and I immediately opened my eyes
because that's what natural reaction is, I reckon.
And then he just started stabbing me in the chest,
and he stabbed me 17 times in the chest.
And...
I passed out again.
[siren wailing]
And the next thing I know,
I'm hearing sirens and seeing lights
and hearing people talk.
And I guess I started moaning
because I was trying to... trying to talk.
And then they found me.
Thank you, Lord.
Indianapolis did not have a big murder rate at the time,
and the fact that three young girls
were picked up and assaulted sexually and by stabbing,
was the biggest news of the day.
The lead item on every newspaper.
Cumberland closed down for a while.
People weren't going out, not out in their front yards.
Kids are staying in the house.
You got some rogue out here grabbing kids,
you don't want your kids to be one of them.
They may have been random victims,
but it's not a random act.
He was hunting a target.
He was driving a car that was set up for a kidnapping.
The knobs and levers on the passenger front door were all missing.
They tripped into his web.
Think of it as a spider with a web out.
Puts you in her trap.
I think the intent is very clear.
He meant to murder all three of the young ladies,
and he found a nice dark spot to do his evil.
The police return to the cornfield and begin combing,
looking for some evidence,
and they find rope, a handkerchief
and they find cigarette butts.
The police also take the girls' clothing
and enter all that into evidence.
The police desperately need to talk to the three girls,
but for now, they remain at the hospital in serious condition.
I had stitches in my arm.
Then I had to get stitches across my chin.
I had the 12 cuts to my throat.
Probably about 300 stitches.
After I was in there for about a week,
Sheri was moved to my room.
I think we were up there 10... 10 or 12 days.
I could have gone home earlier,
but I stayed so she wouldn't be up at the hospital all by herself.
[Dodd] Police meet with the girls,
and they're able to give them a description of the attacker.
[Kandice] He seemed to be between about 35 and 45 years old.
His hair was black with gray in it,
and it was like real thick.
I told 'em what he looked like and that's what they drew.
It was good enough to put together something.
[Gibbs] This is the artist rendering
what the girls told the detectives.
And this is what they ended up with.
Prominent nose,
was not wearing glasses, clean shaven.
They placed him in the 40s, late 30s to 40s.
It was on the news all the time for months.
It was in the newspapers.
It was on the radio.
At this point, the local press dubbed this case "The Indiana Slasher."
[Maxey] Everybody was talking about it,
hoping they could give any kind of information,
to rid themselves of it,
so they didn't have to live with it anymore.
What will it take to bring the Indiana Slasher to justice?
They were leaving no stone unturned trying to find this guy.
Before long, a police officer
in nearby Shelbyville, Indiana,
notices that the sketch strongly resembles
one of their former inmates,
a man named William J. Williams.
He had been in jail in Shelbyville for shoplifting,
and was released just three days
prior to the girls' attack.
[Dodd] Police end up tracking down his wife,
who paints an intriguing story about
how she seems to be suspicious of her husband.
The wife claimed that he had a car fitting the description.
That he had a striped shirt and that he burned it after the attack.
She mentions that one of their kitchen knives has gone missing
and he had recently replaced their clothesline
that was quite similar to the rope that was used in this attack.
Even more intriguing was that Williams' wife
mentions that their station wagon
had a missing door handle.
[Naugle] The police are able to confirm
Williams does own a station wagon.
But if the door handle had been missing,
it has since been repaired.
As for the knife and the clothesline,
they remain unaccounted for.
They had him in a physical lineup for the girls to look at.
It was kind of scary.
I didn't like looking at him.
It made me nervous.
[Kathie] The guy from Shelbyville,
yeah, I picked him out.
I recognized him,
and I just felt like it was him.
He had a lot of resemblance to what the man looked like.
Kathie and Kandice picked the suspect out of the lineup,
and that's enough for police to arrest Williams
and file charges against him
for three counts of kidnapping and attempted murder.
But investigators had made a crucial mistake.
Before the lineup, the girls were shown the suspect's mug shot.
It's just too suggestive.
"They picked him up because that's the guy whose photo you showed 'em."
"You told 'em that was the guy."
And if they were to swear on a stack of Bibles,
the courts would say, "Nope."
The officer made a major error
and the courts would not have taken the case.
[Naugle] With the lineup a bust,
the case quickly unravels,
and prosecutors are forced to drop the charges against Williams.
[Gibbs] No physical evidence to put him there,
and they couldn't use the wife in this state against him.
Spousal privilege, they call it.
A wife cannot testify against the husband and vice versa.
So there's no case to file.
[Kandice] The police came out to my parents' house.
They said they didn't have enough evidence to prove it was the guy,
and they let him go.
And they left.
[Kathie] I never understood that.
But I was just a kid, so I really didn't understand what they need for evidence.
And I didn't stop thinking it was probably him.
I really thought it was him.
So I was let down when they told me they let him go.
[Naugle] As the months turn into years with no new leads,
the case goes cold,
leaving the three women with little hope of ever getting justice.
Our case was put on the back burner
and there was not any more said about it.
It's like they didn't care.
[Sheri] They had leads, but they all ended up dead ends.
I just went on with life.
That's what it was like.
We tried to have just as normal of a life as we could.
I presume they felt alone and abandoned. Disrespected.
I expect they had no good feelings
for the criminal justice system at all,
and I wouldn't blame them.
[Naugle] With the Indiana Slasher still at large,
the girls struggle to resume a normal life well into adulthood.
[Kandice] A reporter printed our names in the paper,
and I didn't think that was right.
Some people felt sorry for us
and they would be like,
"We wish this didn't happen to you" and all that.
And then there was other people that's like,
"Well, you shouldn't have been out
that late at night."
You know, "If you weren't hitchhiking, it wouldn't have happened."
[Kathie] I had had surgery again.
I had a tube and it was draining the infection.
There was a classmate,
and he said, "Hey, Rottler, are you Mrs. Frankenstein?"
And I threw my lunch tray at him and I left.
Not everybody was like that,
but there were some people that were pretty cold-hearted.
I ended up quitting school shortly after that.
I couldn't do it.
I had so much anxiety.
I said, "That's it."
Getting in that car.
It was my stupid idea.
Well, we were all there and we were all party to it.
I know, but you were 11 years old.
It was not your fault.
Screwed us up.
Yes, it did.
Did I have any expectations that they would ever find him?
Nope.
I think we just pushed it behind us, pushed it way back,
and way back and way back and pushed it way back,
so that we could continue with life.
[Dodd] There were no similar crimes in the vicinity.
Police were mystified that somebody could just perform
this one horrific act of violence and then never repeat it.
For the next 15 years,
the case just grows colder and colder.
But Kathie makes a promise to herself
that she's going to see this through to the very end
and resolve this.
Although she has no idea how that's going to happen.
[Kathie] I felt like it was my ideal to hitchhike,
and I needed to make it right.
I felt like I owed it to both Sheri and Kandi.
For years, I had made calls and wasn't getting anywhere.
And then, all of a sudden,
Steve Gibbs started talking to us.
I was not a cold case detective then.
I was straight homicide.
We didn't have a cold unit.
It was an infamous case.
They asked for volunteers,
and a foolish person I was, I always raised my hand.
I started by calling the girls up
and asking them to come downtown for fresh interviews.
And then I started looking for the physical evidence,
found it had not been processed or anything done with it.
We had to start from the very beginning.
It was bags full of junk.
I mean, the girl's clothes
and anything they picked up at the crime scene.
Detective Gibbs organizes and processes the evidence
and builds out the case file.
But with DNA technology still in its infancy,
he is unable to develop any new leads
before he retires in 2008.
[Gibbs] It's always about the victim.
Doing your best job for them and their family that you can do.
I didn't do it. I'm ashamed of that.
But I did my best at the time.
[Kathie] I was disappointed that it didn't get solved,
even though I understood he did what he could.
But it pushed me to continue for years.
I've read a lot to see what was out there.
In 2017,
I ran across a story on the backlog of rape kits and doing DNA on them.
I don't think that the department, at that time,
was doing DNA because it's not cheap
and they have to have the funds to be able to do it.
[Dodd] Kathie is not giving up
and continually phoning the police department and saying,
"Come on, work with me. Help me.
"We've got to solve this."
In 2018, the Indianapolis Police Department gets a federal grant
that paves the way to allowing them
to test the DNA samples that were found on Sheri's clothing.
[Kathie] I was told it may take a year for this. Just be patient.
So I learned to have more patience. [chuckles]
And I waited.
Investigators are able to isolate the DNA profile of the attacker
on the evidence that Detective Gibbs had processed years earlier.
Police track down the original suspect's family and test their DNA,
and ultimately,
he is cleared of any involvement in the attack.
So then they went over to CODIS.
The whole United States uses this CODIS for convicted felons,
and there was no match in the CODIS.
[Dodd] His DNA had never been entered into the crime database.
It left detectives scratching their heads.
[Naugle] But by 2023, investigators have a new tool at their disposal:
genetic genealogy.
I get a phone call from the Marion County Sheriff's Department
that it was imperative that all three of us come in.
[Kandice] I start getting real happy
that they could possibly be able to solve our case.
[Kathie] We were told there will be a press conference.
The DNA profile had been matched to someone.
[Kandice] Forty-nine years...
for us waiting.
All them years...
to finally get an answer.
[Naugle] Indianapolis Police announced their findings
at a press conference in January of 2024
alongside Kathie, Sheri and Kandice.
The genealogist used websites
such as GEDmatch.com to identify the ancestors and, most importantly,
a daughter and a son of the suspect.
[Sheri] We found out it was through children
that they were able to get the DNA results,
which I was very thankful for.
Because without that, I don't think we'd be where we are today.
The suspect has been identified
as Thomas Edward Williams.
[Dodd] The police finally make the announcement
that these women have been waiting for forever,
that they've finally placed a name to the Indiana Slasher.
He was confirmed to be in Indianapolis in August of '75.
We were told that he actually
didn't live too far from us at the time.
He would have been 41 at the time of the attack.
He worked as a mechanic.
He spent some time in prison for a bank robbery.
He had actually been released from jail here in Indiana
a couple of days prior to it happening to us.
[Kandice] Once I looked at that picture, "This is him."
The composites, the sketches and all that,
I think we did a really good job of matching it up.
The girls did very well.
I think there's a strong resemblance.
[Dodd] Thomas Edward Williams, ironically,
had the same last name as the man that the three women
spent decades believing was their assailant.
But that was the only connection.
They had the same last name.
[Naugle] Although the three women
now know the name of their attacker,
he will never have to answer for that crime.
Thomas Edward Williams passed away in 1983 at 49 years old,
while serving a prison sentence in Texas for bank robbery.
I was angry at first
because I deserved, we deserved,
to stand up in front of him
and give an impact statement.
I wanted to tell him exactly how I feel, what he had done to me,
whether he cared about it or not.
[Kandice] He was never charged with the crime.
So when he dies, he goes down as a bank robber.
That's the only problem I have with that today.
I do have PTSD and depression from this happening to me.
I think I'm still healing.
After all these years.
He did not pay for the crime that he did
to me, my sister and my friend.
He did not pay for that.
I have said that I want to go to Texas and spit on his grave.
I'm only human.
No, I'm not gonna do it.
I talked to God.
God said, "Don't lower yourself."
And that took a great big, huge relief off my shoulders.
I do forgive this man.
I had to in order to continue to live my life.
And I do forgive him. [sighs]
It was horrible what he did to me,
and I'm so thankful that he's dead
and he can't do it to anyone else.
-It's over. -Yep.
Finally over.
I think it was God's decision.
I do too.
I think he knew when we needed to know.
Yep.
I am getting chill bumps head to toe.
[Kathie] And you know what?
-You say I'm your rock. -Yes.
You're my rock, too.
You're gonna get me teary-eyed.
Don't be crying on me.
I'm not crying. You're just gonna get me teary-eyed.
Okay.
I want to give you a hug.
Well, come here.
[sniffles]
[Sheri sobs]
[Kathie] Don't cry.
[Sheri] If you've got something horrible that's happened,
bring it to light.
Let somebody know.
Let somebody help you.
Let somebody put their arms around you and say it's going to be okay.
Because eventually, hopefully, God willing, it will.
[Naugle] Nearly 50 years after they were attacked,
Kathie, Kandice and Sheri return to the same street
where they were first picked up by Thomas Edward Williams.
We went down by the bank. That's not there anymore.
And that's where he picked us up at.
I didn't think I'd ever stand here on this corner with you two,
-talking about it. -I didn't either.
-Since it's been solved... -We can do this.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
-We can do this. -Yes, we can.
-And here we are. -You're right.
[Sheri sobbing]
-And I love y'all. -I love you too.
I can't believe we're here.
[Kathie] What's next?
Lots of love.
-Lots of love? -Lots of love.
I don't know other than that.
Thank you, Kathie, for never giving up.
[Kandice] Yep. Thanks, Kathie, for never giving up.