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MAN IN FILM:I was speeding down the road on my motorbike,
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devil on horseback, way out of sight.
Good evening, everyone.
Tonight is the last of our series of...
Having extra spending money
for those special occasions can sometimes be a real problem.
But I solved it with a part-time job at Burger Chef.
At Burger Chef, they gave me a work schedule
to fit the hours that I could work
and they may be able to do it for you too.
And it's fun to work at Burger Chef!
Hey.
Big Shef up!
Welcome to Burger Chef. What can I get you?
Yeah, everybody behind the counter,
everything seemed normal.
Just up there laughing and joking with them and...
I mean, just like a typical Friday night at Burger Chef.
It was, like, 11:30 or 12:00 and I knew they'd be closing up.
I get over there to the Burger Chef and...
..I don't see nobody.
Hey, Mama.
Speedway Police thought this was just four kids
who just, like, bailed
and didn't wanna clean up after the night.
So, of course, what'd they do?
They washed down the restaurant
and opened it up for breakfast the next morning.
The Speedway Police, they fumbled and bumbled that case
all the way to hell, man.
If I had the ability of hindsight...
And would I make different decisions?
Absolutely.
I can't do anything about what was done 40 years ago.
Alright, bye-bye. I love you.
Love you.
I can stay.
The fact that no-one has been held responsible
burns a hole right through me.
Usually when I start having nightmares,
it's...it's getting colder
and it's just my heart just sinks.
And...and I remember that she's gone.
On November 17, 1978,
four employees of the Burger Chef restaurant
in Speedway, Indiana were abducted.
Two days later, on Sunday afternoon,
a person found their bodies in rural Johnson County, Indiana,
where they had been murdered.
Ruth and Danny were both shot
face down, execution style.
Jayne was stabbed twice in the chest.
And then Mark was beaten.
The bodies of Jayne C. Friedt,
Mark Flemmonds,
Daniel R. Davis
and Ruth E. Shelton
have been discovered late this afternoon in Johnson County.
REPORTER:The crime still remains unsolved...
REPORTER:..just hours after closing time,
four employees ages 16 to 20...
They were found murdered
a few days later in Johnson County.
No-one has been charged with the crime.
One of the most infamous crimes
in state history.
Somewhere, somebody knows what happened.
Speedway's an interesting town
because forever, it's been the home of
the greatest spectacle in motor racing
since, you know, 1912.
And that was always the claim to fame.
The town of Speedway, named after
the Indianapolis 500 Motor Speedway.
In the late 1970s, all of a sudden
it was getting rocked by all this crime
and all this attention that was coming to
this sleepy little suburb.
This was four young people who disappeared out of thin air
and then to be found so brutally slain
36 hours later
just brought up all kinds of terror
not only in the community as a whole
but for every parent and every teenage kid out there
who was making a few dollars
working at a fast-food restaurant after school
that this could happen to them.
It is still seared into the minds of the people
that the bogeyman's going to come get you.
Well, in this case, the bogeyman came
and took four children away -
and 40 years later, we still don't have that solution.
It put a lot of fear in everybody -
the whole community,
myself and my family.
I am paranoid in my old age.
Of course, my paranoia started
at a young age
with the Burger Chef murders.
So I'm not a crazy old woman with guns.
I have my guns for self-protection.
Ruger .22, long barrel.
They are all loaded.
This is where I sit most of the time,
so I definitely wanna have something in reach here.
And this is my 9mm.
This is my curly-hair tarantula.
His name is Chewy.
Get him!
It was a...
..pretty terrifying experience.
My name's Todd McComas.
I'm a retired detective with the Indiana State Police.
I became a detective in 1998
and I was assigned to the Indianapolis District,
which is where this crime happened.
This case is probably one of the saddest things
I've ever seen in my career.
You know, I'm a dad.
And you can just imagine
what their parents and their family went through
when they found out that news.
I think Ruth wanted to be 18
just because that 18 meant you were an adult.
She was 30 days away from being 18
when she was taken.
Ruth was five years older than me.
I looked up to her.
I thought she was the perfect picture of a teenager.
And that's the last memory I have of her.
It was only maybe four or five black kids in the whole school,
so we kind of stuck together.
We rode to school together,
we walked home from school together,
we hung out together.
So it was pretty devastating to me.
It was just rough, man.
Wait. Hold on, y'all, hold on.
Shh, shh, shh.
You hear that?
That's the Galaxy calling out to me.
"Mark, Mark."
What's the Galaxy?
It's the under-21 club across the street
where all of Mark's imaginary girlfriends are.
OK, Jayne.
Honestly, nothing good happens there, Danny.
You're not missing anything on anything.
-Have you been? -I've heard all about it.
Don't knock it till you try it.
SONG:♪ I'll be lovin' you, girl... ♪
Mark and I had planned to go to the Galaxy that night
to play some games, listen to some music.
You know, have some fun and come on back home.
Once Mark get off work,
I'mma meet him and we gonna walk back home because...
..black kids don't walk by themself
in Speedway at night, you know?
I'm just walking across the parking lot. It's dark.
I don't see nobody.
So I do what I normally do -
I knock on the door, because they would let me in.
No answer.
Like, "Damn, I just saw y'all over here!"
As I go towards the back of the building,
I see the back door laying wide open.
So I stop.
I say, "They might be trying to scare me,
"hiding behind the door."
So I'm hollering in the building.
"Mark, Mark, Mark! Jayne!"
Nothing.
Quiet as a mouse in there.
I'm like, "Shit, I'm not going in there."
So I just turn around and walk home.
The cops get here about half an hour after
someone comes and notices we're gone.
The safe is open.
$500 in notes are missing but not the coins.
Our jackets are gone from the coat rack
but my purse and Ruth's purse are still here.
The cash drawers are on the floor and the back door is open.
A crime scene, right?
Not so fast.
The Speedway Police Department
immediately dismissed this as
"Ah, they're just being teenagers.
"They probably went out to that under-21 club,
"having a good time.
"They'll be back. Why don't you go and shut the doors, lock up?
"And you can open for business tomorrow."
A couple days later,
after they find our bodies in the woods,
the police come back and re-stage the crime scene.
They take photos and say they were taken
on the night we disappeared.
I don't know if I'd characterise it as re-staging.
I know that there was an attempt to pass off photographs
as if they were actual crime-scene photos.
I worked the Burger Chef case for the...
..better part of 21 years -
continuously from 1981 through '86
and then I still had my hand in it
from '86 through '99 when I retired from the department.
It became common knowledge amongst all the investigators
that the crime scene at the restaurant,
the Burger Chef, wasn't... wasn't handled properly.
Four people missing.
An apparent robbery.
There should have been pictures, fingerprints.
People should have been interviewed -
witnesses and so forth -
and I don't believe much was done.
The part of this case that
I'm probably the most familiar with
is the crime-scene photos.
When you look at Ruth,
the first shot
entered the side of her neck from the back
and exited the front.
You see that in Danny as well.
The first shots went through his trapezoid from the back
and then exited the front.
Then the killer approaches Ruth,
puts the gun to the back of her head
and ends it.
And Danny literally is touching shoulders,
he's that close to Ruth.
Turns toward Danny sideways and puts two shots,
one in the side of his neck and one into his jaw.
And those ended his life.
When the shots rang out,
Jayne and Mark bolt.
Someone grabbed Jayne from behind,
reached over and stabbed her
twice in the chest.
And on that second blow,
probably as they went to the ground,
it broke off.
They never found the handle,
but the blade was left in her chest.
So Mark was found at the base of a tree
on his back,
and his hands were like this above his head.
And he was positioned
on a decline.
Now, the injuries that he received
were all through this area of his face
and it looked to me
as if it was almost one single blow.
He dropped right where he stood.
He choked on his own blood.
Asphyxiated.
He died from a broken nose.
I think...
..Mark hit that tree.
These aren't just victims.
That was my sister.
These are real people
with real families,
with real friends,
that deserve justice.
Well, I'm chasing answers.
I'm chasing answers for Theresa
and for the family members.
They deserve closure.
All these theories are out there
and at one time had validity.
But the reason they all exist
is there was a lot of crazy shit
going on in Indianapolis in 1978.
And when you look at them individually,
they fell in comparison to this most famous unsolved case.
So whenever something bad happened to anybody
or anyone threw away a gun in somebody's yard
or anyone came home with blood on 'em around that time,
people wanted to connect that to the Burger Chef murders.
Hey, Mama?
I was just wondering if I could stay back to help close.
But they need my help here.
Please.
I know, I know. Um...
Alright. 'Bye, Mama. I love you.
I can stay.
Right on!
I think the answer is right in our face
and that's what burns me up the most.
There was a crew of five guys interchangeably
that were robbing all the Burger Chefs
up to three weeks before this one happened.
I am 99.9% convinced
that the original investigators
had the right theory.
The robbery crew.
That that crew are responsible.
One of the more prominent theories -
even though robbery was pretty prominent
in Indianapolis at the time,
is a specific group from Johnson County.
It was a group of 4-5 guys - they kinda
rotated out which ones were involved at any given time -
that would rob Burger Chefs and Kentucky Fried Chickens.
Had a MO similar to kind of what is theorised happened
at the Speedway Burger Chef that night.
I got off work at the Dunkin' Donuts early that night,
somewhere around 11:00,
and I had a little time
before my dad was gonna come pick me up.
So I called George to come up there.
We dated...a year and a half?
-Yeah. -Close to two years.
Right.
Had a lot of wild and crazy times.
We were gonna smoke a joint and drink a little bit.
We needed matches to light the joint.
I looked over at the back of the place.
The back door was cracked a little bit.
And I went to the door and it was open.
Well, I went in.
Just one person that came up
and they gave me the pack of matches.
George Nichols was the last person to see any of them
before they were taken.
The robbery crew would
park their car some distance away,
then they would approach the restaurant
or the target location on foot.
You know, we lit up
and that's when them two guys came down.
I thought they smelled it.
That's why I...
That's kinda what freaked me out about them.
I remember hearing somebody clear their throat
and when I looked up, one of 'em spoke and said,
"You kids need to get out of here
"because there's been a lot of vandalism going on."
I thought we were gonna go to jail, actually, at that point.
I went back inside to wait for my dad.
-And you walked home. -Yeah.
The one that did not speak
was tall.
I'd say 6' to 6'2".
Clean-shaven.
The other man was shorter, maybe 5'8"-ish.
He had a beard.
Scruffy-looking.
The sketches became known as
the Clean-Shaven Man and the Bearded Man.
And they took it a step further
and did the clay busts.
Tomorrow, police are expected to release
two three-dimensional busts of the men in the composites
hoping this will give a better indication
of what they look like.
Since the two haven't come forward,
police are more convinced thanever that these are the killers.
Based on this young man and young woman's description,
a couple of these members of the robbery crew.
S.W. Wilkins looks very much like the Bearded Man's composite
and Gregg Steinke looked very much like
the Clean-Shaven Man's composite.
Almost eerily so.
S.W. Wilkins
did case that particular Burger Chef
three different times
prior to it getting robbed.
He was a bad guy.
I mean, he committed a butt-ton of robberies, armed robberies,
where he put people in fear for a very long time.
These guys robbed all kinds of other places,
including Burger Chefs,
but no-one ever got murdered.
So why did these four kids
get taken 25, 30 minutes away
out into rural Johnson County
and executed in the woods?
S.W. Wilkins
worked at a railway in Avon, Indiana.
Jayne Friedt did at one time work at that Burger Chef
in Avon, Indiana.
It's quite likely he went there.
Maybe she recognised him
and that made things turn for the worse.
The problem here is that the entire case against these guys
is circumstantial.
I don't even know that guy.
The police say the only reason he even recognised you
is because he worked close to where you worked
and probably, maybe, might have
got a sandwich from there from time to time.
So these guys arrive on foot.
One of them recognises me, then what? They have to kill us all?
And then what?
They have to get us 30 miles away to Johnson County.
If you're an experienced criminal
and you're gonna have to
take some kids against their will,
you're probably gonna go to an area you're familiar with.
Just so happens
S.W. Wilkins and Gregg Steinke lived
literally just within minutes
of where those murders happened.
They lived in Johnson County, Indiana.
I'll tell you this - you don't find that spot by accident.
Get the Fun Village.
This is one of the biggest mysteries in this case.
They take my car from the restaurant here...
..presumably to where they left their car
right by the Speedway Police Station.
That's a 25-minute walk.
And either they take one person
in my car to a waiting van and bring that van back...
..or, like some people say, we all get in my car.
So two, maybe three fully-grown men and four kids?
You got a clown car?
It was very common for the robbery crew
to steal an employee's car
to drive back to where their getaway car was.
And then they would leave the employee car there
and drive off in their car.
The mystery of it is how does her car end up over by the park
which is just across the street
from the Speedway Police Department?
If you're gonna dump a car, why are you gonna dump it
across the street from the Police Department?
The key was in my pocket when they found me.
The driver's side was locked. I always locked my doors.
Passenger side was open, though.
We do know that her keys were found in her pocket
at the crime scene
when she was found dead with the others.
So at some point,
those keys were returned to her.
Look, the cops' whole case on this is
there were guys robbing restaurants in the area,
so they must have done it.
So where's the evidence?
It's just frustrating that we didn't have all that.
As far as a case, you can have all the leads,
but if you don't have the evidence to prove it,
you're...you're just stuck.
Yep.
Here we go.
Hey, Mama.
I've gotta stay back. We're short.
Someone didn't come in.
I know. OK, Mama.
OK, thanks.
I can stay.
Right on!
I think we had the right person
and I was convinced enough
that I felt that we had enough to proceed with prosecution
and get a conviction
on Don Forrester.
You just take it easy now!
You see this?
That says 'Assistant Manager'.
That means I'm your boss.
Well, you're very good at your job, Jayne.
Um, excuse me, Jayne.
Just to let you know, I have to be gone by 11:30.
I know, buddy.
We'll have you home in no time.
I came into the Burger Chef investigation...
..um, in the mid-'80s.
Originally we got the information from a jail snitch
that wanted to talk to us
about Don Forrester.
Forrester was known to be a bad guy.
We got a call from him here,
that he wanted to talk to us, and then...
..said he had some things to say
about the Burger Chef.
He told us details
about the murder scene
and who was shot and how many times
and who was laying next to each other.
Told us all that.
Can you get that in?
Yeah.
This is the badge that Jayne left at my house
the day she went to work on the day that she was murdered.
We'd get either lovey-dovey
or talk about the day and...
"What are we gonna do this weekend?" type thing.
But she remarked that day,
"No, I just wanna sit on the couch and be close and hug."
And I said, "OK, but, you know, is something going on?"
"No, not really."
I let it go.
I didn't pursue it
'cause time was short and we had to go to work.
And then I spoke with her later on that night
and things had turned around.
She was upbeat.
Maybe she was getting off work in a couple hours or something.
I don't know.
But now, as I look back,
I wonder if something wasn't going down
that she was worried about
but she just wanted to be secure in some way
about just being close and holding each other.
Maybe she was afraid of something.
I called her
later on that evening
and she said, "It's dead,"
which...those words haunt me to this day.
Some of the contacts
or people that Forrester had brought up to us was...
..Jayne Friedt's brother.
Jimmy...
I think he was in trouble a lot
throughout his life.
Don Forrester was aware of him and knew him.
He was an enforcer for that drug gang,
or whatever you want to call it.
Hello?
-Sorry. What can I get you? -That's alright.
Hey, could I get a Big Shef?
Of course. That'll be...
-Please. -Sweet. Thank you.
Blue? That's new.
I heard orange.
Well, we've heard a lot of things.
I heard orange.
So yellow with a primer red according to one witness.
Chevy?
It was a Ford.
Snub-nosed Econoline.
One guy even said it was a board van.
Get inside!
No!
I was scheduled to work the 17th.
Mark did like me a lot.
There was another boy working there,
his name was Brian,
and he had asked me out on a date.
So I called Mark and I said, "Hey, Mark,
"you know, Brian wants to take me out on Friday night.
"Would you work in my place?"
And Mark said, "Sure."
Around 4:30, Mark called me
and he told me that something had come up
and he couldn't work for me.
I said, you know what?
Mark said that he was gonna work for me,
so he's gonna work for me.
Now, I did try to back out of Ginger's shift
at the last minute
and people assumed it was 'cause
I knew the Burger Chef was gonna get hit
and that my brother was involved.
I just wanted to go to the Galaxy.
REPORTER:Flemmonds's 16-year-old son Mark
was the victim now believed to have forced the kidnapping
by immediately fighting to protect another of the victims,
Jayne Friedt.
I heard it out of her own mouth.
She said...
I didn't pay too much attention. "Mark's my protection."
Jayne Friedt said Mark was her protector?
I heard her say it at the Burger Chef
when I went there to get some hamburgers one time.
What did she need protection from?
Now, that's the point.
I never even dreamed, you know?
You don't think about anything like that.
No, I didn't even think about it at the time.
Friedt was the restaurant's assistant manager
and detectives believe she may have had
information about a drug debt
the assailants had gone to the restaurant to collect.
Later that evening,
we drove by the Burger Chef
and realised things weren't quite right.
It was probably around midnight.
And we were driving by.
We see all the lights were on
but Jayne's car was gone.
Brian says, "Let's stop in and see what's going on."
And I said, "I can't.
"I gotta be home by midnight or my dad will freak out."
So he dropped me off,
and then Brian's the one that came back to Burger Chef
and realised that the back door was open
and went in and saw things weren't...right.
So then Brian called the manager.
So then the manager called the police.
It was unusual that Jayne... the manager's car being gone
and the lights being on in the restaurant.
We're gonna get through this, buddy, OK?
God is watching over us
and he won't let anything bad happen to us.
I spoke to my mom just before.
I asked her if I could
stay back and help close.
So if something bad happens to me, Ruth...
It's OK. It's OK.
..they'll think it's their fault.
It'll be OK, Danny, you'll be back with your mama
again in no time, OK?
This'll all just be like a bad dream.
We verified through his ex-wife
that he actually did take her
to the homicide scene
and collect shell casings
that was in a stream at the entrance to this road
that goes up to where the children were murdered.
He did take those shell casings to their house
and flushed them down the toilet.
What he wasn't aware of, though, that it was on a septic
and they were still in...in that septic tank
when we recovered them.
Forrester's gun was a .22.
The killer used a .38.
He said he shoved us in the storeroom
and at least one of us was tied up with some kind of wire,
but there were no ligature marks on any of us.
What the heck is he doing,
going back to the scene of the crime days later,
with his wife, to collect shell casings?
They found them in his poop tank.
Gross!
Look, Pendleton Prison was tough as hell
and when he started talking to Willsey,
they moved him up to Michigan City
and I think he liked it there.
So he confessed to a quadruple murder
that could get him in the electric chair?
Listen.
The prosecutor had access to the confession
but still decided not to prosecute.
They forced me to change
what was the truth
and give them a lie.
If I had did that, you know,
I would never have talked to them in the first place.
We had a meeting with the prosecutor of Marion County
here in the Sheriff's Department.
We were confused why they...they didn't proceed.
And like I said, their excuse was...
..or their reasoning was
that he was already doing 99 years.
And mine was...
..I think the families
need to know
so they have some sort of closure.
And...
..it never happened.
There's a reason Forrester was never convicted.
There are too many inconsistencies to his story.
He confessed twice and then took them back both times.
Right. And one of the guys he named in his crew
was in jail the night this all went down.
I heard that when he was interviewed
by Marion County cops,
they put him in the war room
where all of the crime scene photos
and evidence were on the wall.
He could see it all.
It was poorly done.
I'll just give you an example.
"You witnessed this stabbing take place?" "Yes."
"How many times was the person stabbed?" "Once."
"Well, who stabbed her the second time?"
You know, it's pretty leading.
And by that time, I thought he'd been fed
a big part of this case anyway.
I'd sit right here today and tell you
Donald Forrester could have killed those kids.
He was that kind of person.
He was a coward. He was a liar.
I'm not saying he didn't do it.
I'm saying he never said anything credible.
Hey, Mama.
I've gotta stay back to help close. Is that OK?
Alright.
I love you. Bye-bye.
I can stay.
Right on!
Welcome to Burger Chef. What can I get you?
More, more, more, America!
The number one taste you love.
Serving up juicy, terrific burgers, hot and delicious
with an icy soda and crispy fries.
You want your Big Shef some special way?
You'll get it with our works bar.
Have it your way at Burger Chef.
In order to understand
why the Burger Chef murders so shook the town of Speedway,
it's necessary to understand
what was going on here at the time.
REPORTER:A six-day bombing spree
rocked the town of Speedway in early September of 1978.
It left two people seriously injured.
When we had the Speedway Bombing
across the street from the Burger Chef,
Ruth worked that night.
We had bunk beds.
And she came home
and that bed shook all night long.
She was so nervous.
The apartments complex that we lived in at that time
was called Big Eagle.
Once we got to know Mark
and we realised that we lived in the same apartments...
We're sitting at home one night
and, you know, we're watching the TV.
And I'm like, "I wonder, is a bomb gonna go off tonight?"
10 minutes later, sure as shit.
Boom!
Damn police Speedway cop car blew up.
On September 6, a gym bag
blew up in the parking lot of Speedway High School.
Several people were hurt, including Carl DeLong,
who had to have his leg amputated.
There was a football game that night.
We just walked from the parking lot to the gate
and I heard a loud boom and I saw the flash.
And thought, "Oh, my God, what just happened?"
Then I heard the people screaming
and people running around.
It happened right in here, in this general area.
There was a car parked,
and when that car backed out and left,
it exposed a gym bag.
And a gentleman, Carl DeLong, kicked it.
A guy I went to high school with, DeLong,
his dad kicked the bag and blew his damn leg off.
REPORTER:The victim has lost a leg
and later, plagued by constant pain,
committed suicide.
His wife, she got burnt real bad.
But I can remember just listening to people screaming
and just...just chaos.
This guy was going around Speedway
just bombing the hell out of places, man.
Jayne,
that night, when I spoke with her,
we talked about the bombings.
But she said, "Yeah, one of my employees said
"that she thought that she saw
"Brett Kimberlin go through the drive-thru."
Brett Kimberlin has always been in the background,
in the periphery of the Burger Chef case.
His crimes were so off the wall and didn't make any sense
just like Burger Chef didn't make any sense.
You go from Brett Kimberlin to Burger Chef -
there were a lot of things happening on that side of town.
Brett Kimberlin...
Brett Kimberlin is who I think is behind all...
If it's drug related, it's Brett Kimberlin.
REPORTER:Authorities speculate the bombings were
to distract them from investigating a murder.
The victim, a Speedway grandmother
who reportedly had threatened
to blow the whistle on Kimberlin's drug dealing.
In late July of 1978,
a man came to see a woman named Julia Scyphers
about an item at her garage sale.
The elderly woman was shot in the head and killed.
Julia Scyphers was the mother
of a girl that was dating Brett Kimberlin
and she didn't like the relationship
and she was wanting her daughter
to break up with Brett Kimberlin.
And Brett Kimberlin didn't like that.
And...
I don't know this for sure, but I think that Brett Kimberlin
had Bill Bowman kill Julia Scyphers.
Her husband witnessed it...
..but he died before anything could be taken to trial.
I think he's evil.
Yeah. He has no conscience.
Um...
But I think even monsters still feel,
and I don't think he even has any feelings.
If there's anybody to be scared of, it's Brett Kimberlin.
Even today.
Hi, guys.
That's alright. I got him.
Didn't expect that one.
Oh, look, there's Ozzie.
Ozzie the pig.
So we have 13 animals.
We have three dogs, four cats, a guinea pig.
We have a chinchilla,
two hamsters,
a Russian tortoise.
We had two pigeons. They both died. It was heartbreaking.
We now have them on the mantle in there.
Uh, we had them cremated.
And we also had another cat named Rascal
and the damn mail truck ran over him a few months ago.
Broke my kid's heart.
Um...
So I think that's the extent of our, um...
..our menagerie here.
REPORTER:Yesterday, as Brett Kimberlin headed
back to the Marion County Jail, surrounded by newspeople,
he claimed innocence of the Speedway Bombings
and promised an appeal.
I was in prison for 14 or 15 years
over the bombing case.
I had absolutely nothing to do with the Speedway Bombings.
I did not commit them. I did not build them.
I did not manufacture them. I did not detonate them.
I had absolutely nothing to do with
the death of Julia Scyphers.
I had nothing to do with the Burger Chef murders at all.
I did not know those people.
I'd never been to that Burger Chef at all.
That's...that's just flat-out fact.
It was police putting this garbage,
lies, false narrative,
'fake news' as they call it nowadays,
into...into the media.
And they had my pictures
with stories involving
the Burger Chef murders
and somehow saying that I was involved.
It was like 'Twilight Zone'.
I mean, really, this was 'The Twilight Zone'.
Brett Kimberlin was kind of a bogeyman in Speedway.
Bunch of folks think it was him who killed us.
He's a dead ringer for the sketch of the Clean-Shaven Man.
But there are some problems with this theory.
It was the '70s and a lot of people were smoking pot.
And there was a large market, so I started selling pot.
I didn't have any issues with...
..really with customers or with...
..police or anything
until this whole thing...
..you know, crashed down on me.
But I supposedly became a suspect in the bombings
and got arrested.
I never got out after that.
And gave me 50 years.
He was shipping tonnes of marijuana
across international borders.
So why the heck would he deal dime bags to kids?
The fact that they never solved the Burger Chef murders...
I'm just floored
that four beautiful kids could be killed
and no-one would be held responsible.
You know, he wasn't even in the gosh-darn papers at this point.
So, how did I recognise him?
And besides, what was his motive?
I try to force myself
not to think about how she died.
But a lot of times, you know,
I just can't seem to get it out of my head that,
you know, she was... laying there,
told to...to lay face down, and she did.
And what was going through her head?
What was she thinking?
Had they said, "You just lay down here,
"there's a house over there
"that you can run to, but you've gotta count to a hundred"?
Or what?
Did she believe that she was going to be allowed
to go somewhere, but they wanted to get away first?
And I just...
That's basically my... my nightmares.
I don't ever...
You know,
I don't ever hear the gunshot.
Hey, Mama, uh, can I stay and help close?
OK. I love you, Mama.
Uh, I can stay.
Right on.
The only person who ever came forward and said,
"I was at the Burger Chef and I saw this,"
was Allen Pruitt.
And we can prove beyond any doubt whatsoever he was there.
In late '80, or early '81,
we were called to the Marion County Jail.
And a counsellor said, "Hey,
"there's been an altercation between Allen Pruitt
"and the brother of one of the victims from the Burger Chef,
"James Friedt, and we think you guys
"probably need to talk to this Allen Pruitt."
And that's how we first became aware of him.
He told us a kind of a rambling story
about being at the Dunkin' Donuts
next door to the Burger Chef that night.
Well, I was in a cell block
and one day I heard them announce over the intercom,
"James Friedt," you know, "Come to the door."
And I thought, "James Friedt," you know, I thought,
"I wonder if that's Jayne's brother," you know?
I kind of recognised him with that black curly hair
and, you know, beard.
I said, "Are you Jayne Friedt's brother?"
"Yeah, I am. What about it?"
I said, "Word is, I heard you got your sister
"and them three other kids killed up at the Burger Chef."
"Oh, what the fuck you talking about, man?"
He goes, "Who the hell did you hear that from?"
You know, what if it is true?
What if he did get his sister and them kids killed?
Because I heard back in school days he was a coke dealer.
You know, maybe he got his sister involved
and some shit went wrong.
Now, what he says he saw,
that's hard... that's difficult to prove.
Is he telling the truth?
Gosh, I don't...I don't know.
David Adams stopped by,
visited at my mom and dad's house.
He said, "What do you want to do tonight?"
I said, "Hell, man, I don't know."
"Well, let's go get some damn beer."
David was driving in his Pinto
and I said, "David, I need to get something to eat."
So we go to Dunkin' Donuts.
His ex-girlfriend Mary Rein worked there.
Burger Chef looked like it was already closed,
because they had the big hamburger man out in front
that they normally lit up all the time at night,
it was off.
Now, there were lights on in the restaurant,
but I think a lot of places they leave lights on like that.
I saw that goddamn van that night.
And I will never forget that fucking van
because of the white wheels.
'Cause I'm thinking, you know, I'm thinking,
"Man, you know, that looks fucking stupid."
I mean, it just... It always stood out in my head. Always.
They were bright white.
I remember them wheels like it was yesterday,
and I remember some kind of a weird window
on the side of that van.
You know, it was a long distance, and it was dark,
and just the way the parking light was shining
it looked like Jeff Reed.
Jeff Reed, the driver of the van.
He looked like a pro football player, just buff, big arms,
big chest, big neck, you know, and I,
"You know, he might be a helpful buddy to have around
"just for, you know, protection."
You know, if somebody tries to whoop on you.
Well, I saw this guy with the door open
on the passenger door,
and I looked and I thought,
"Damn, I know who that is."
Tim Willoughby.
That was him I saw
on the passenger side of that van that night.
Tim Willoughby, I mean, he just...
He was strange-acting.
I mean, if you just looked at the guy,
you got really funny vibes.
This is the testimony of Allen Pruitt.
It says here that Pruitt was at the Dunkin' Donuts
with his buddy, David Adams.
He's drunk and he feels sick.
So he goes outside for some air
and says he "heard some racket next door at Burger Chef there.
"And I walked around to the side of Dunkin' Donuts
"to see what was going on
"and seen the orange van sitting there."
So this is the guy?
If he wasn't leaning against the wall of the Dunkin' Donuts,
he'd fall over.
So, it says here that he named two guys -
Jeff Reed and Tim Willoughby.
So let me get this straight.
Pruitt just happens to know the two guys who did this
and just happens to be there when it all goes down?
What's it say?
"Jeff Reed grabbed the black boy by the back
"and threw him toward the van..."
"..and went down and hit his head
"on the back corner of the van,
"and I guess it either killed him or knocked him out.
"Jeff picked him up,
"put him in the back of the van."
"Tim, Jayne and the other girl..."
That would be me.
"..walked to the east side of the building.
"I seen a white Vega pull out with him driving.
"I seen him as they pulled out of the parking lot."
My car.
That's my car! I...
Look, the cops said
Pruitt was the only one who saw what happened.
Right, but his story's changed
so many times over the years.
One time he said it might have even been
your brother Jimmy he saw, not Jeff Reed.
Right, and what about the time he said there was another car
and two black guys?
So why would Pruitt lie?
Depends who you ask.
I heard he was a lookout.
He was in and out of jail too.
He passed a dang polygraph.
OK, so this is where shit gets crazy.
Allen Pruitt told us, about four in the afternoon
he was at this Dairy Queen in Avon,
which was the local hangout.
The van he had seen
at the Burger Chef the night before pulled in,
and that Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed were in the van.
He said he got in, and in the back of the van
was Tim Willoughby's girlfriend, Mary Ann Higginbotham,
and that she was dishevelled, she appeared to be high.
And he says that Mary Ann
kept rambling on about them killing these kids,
and that they tried to get her to shoot one of them,
so she'd be as guilty as they were.
They ultimately got out of the van
and that Mary Ann told him,
"Run, they're gonna shoot you too."
And he did. He fled.
He said there was a gunshot.
It gets weirder.
Tim and Mary Ann couldn't have been in the van.
They were meant to be dead.
Tim Willoughby was supposedly dead at the time.
Common thought, because his girlfriend,
Mary Ann Higginbotham,
had been found in Morgan County, Indiana,
sealed in a barrel earlier that year.
The common belief was that Tim was dead.
His body's never been found.
And to date he's not reappeared.
They thought that he had died in June of '78,
right before the Burger Chef murders.
That's crazy, man.
So, according to this,
they were there to collect money from me.
What?
Her brother would come up to visit
and they would leave the restaurant and go get high.
Burger Chef was supposed to be a drug drop in the bathrooms.
I was on break
and I went up and I bought a hamburger for my lunch
and I left my wallet on the counter.
Went back up, it was gone.
Six months later, I'm cleaning the bathroom
and I look up and I see the ceiling tile is not straight.
So I climb up on the toilet to straighten it up
and my wallet falls out.
Oh.
Could that be the drug drop?
I don't know the extent of what was going on.
I just know that she would leave with him frequently,
be gone for 20, 25 minutes,
and come back with a whole new attitude.
It's ridiculous.
So I was some sort of drug kingpin?
Come on!
Well, what about Jimmy?
My brother was into some bad shit with some bad people,
but I can't believe he would let me die
because of a drug debt.
Jayne had a brother, Jimmy.
It was common knowledge where he would...
..he would sell drugs.
Pot or maybe cocaine.
I hate to say black sheep, but he was.
Would she have done something for him?
Could she have got hooked up with...with Jimmy
and done a favour for him and sell bags of pot
or something through the drive-up?
Probably. Because she did love him.
My theory is that it was a drug deal...
..with Jayne's brother.
There was another side of Jayne.
She didn't treat all the employees
very kindly all the time.
She could get pretty angry.
Pretty, um...
I don't know what words to say, and I really feel bad
about talking bad about somebody that has passed,
but she could get in your face and I've...
She pointed her finger in my face a few times.
At one point, she left the restaurant
during working hours.
It was night, we were closed, we were cleaning up,
and she was going to walk out of the restaurant
for a little while.
And she got in my face and pointed her finger.
"Don't you tell a soul that I'm leaving, and if you do,
"I will make your life a living hell when I get back."
What about your brother?
He does time for armed robbery a few years from now.
And the apartment building where you live
is basically a halfway house for every crook in Speedway.
Jayne, stop.
OK, the black guys did it. Nice.
When they dusted my car for prints,
the only one they found besides mine
belonged to a buddy of your brother,
so get off your high horse.
Guys!
I'm sorry if this offends you,
but we keep hearing this shit about you.
Is it true?
-Did you owe people money? -Hey!
This is not helping.
Danny's right, guys.
We want to believe you, Jayne, but we keep hearing shit.
We can't look at this whole thing
without looking at you too.
But people talk about me like I was living two goddamn lives.
I was just trying to work stuff out like everyone else.
I just wanna go home. Just like all of you.
I'm not just some footnote in a murder mystery.
Some curio for people to speculate about.
"Oh, I knew that girl who died at the Burger Chef,"
or, "I took AP Bio with that dead girl."
I'm me!
I feel like that, a lot of times,
we hear all about the bad people's names
and their lives and what they were into.
And then we call everyone else the victim.
Um...
That's not... That's not right.
They weren't victims.
They were my sister, Ruth,
her manager, Jayne,
Mark and Danny.
Nobody had 'victim' across their name tag.
Why are we notarising
the people who may have been responsible
and forgetting that the people that they killed
were real people?
You know, I used to wear ankle weights
under my pants every day
so I could jump higher on the basketball court.
I remember I'd take them off at the end of the day
and I felt so light it's like I could fly.
Dang, I wish I felt like that right now.
Did it work?
Yeah, but I got cut from the team
'cause I wouldn't cut my hair.
Believe that?
There's another witness.
Jean Bland.
We were driving down Crawfordsville Road.
We slowed down
and tried to kind of see what was going on.
And that's when I noticed a single-file line of kids
walking to a van from the side door.
I see a man in the lead,
and then there was someone holding the door open
for them to walk out of.
And I told my husband and my sister-in-law,
"There's something strange about that."
The next morning we saw the news,
and he immediately called the Speedway Police Department.
Spoke to him one time.
From that point on, we never heard anything else.
Every time they had an anniversary,
my husband would call in again and he'd be like,
"We seen this.
"We could tell you the colour of the van,
"the description of the person."
He's like, "Why hasn't anybody talked to me?
"We have pertinent information
"that could have helped you locate these people."
She and her husband tried for years to talk to them,
but the police didn't care.
So it couldn't have been long
that they must have got them in the van,
he ran out and got in the van, because they caught up with us.
I seen the side view, his profile,
his hair colour.
It looked like he had dark sideburns,
which could have been a beard,
'cause I didn't see the front of his face.
But they turned right on Lynhurst,
disappeared into the night, and we went on home.
Was Tim Willoughby alive November 17, 1978?
I don't know.
I know that Allen Pruitt says that's who he saw there.
If he's lying about this,
he needs to have the courage to come up and say,
"I heard some yelling over there,
"but I have no idea what was going on."
Maybe I was talking shit,
you know, because, you know, I was just pissing them off,
because all they kept doing was harassing the hell out of me.
And, my God, did that
just make my blood pressure roll right there.
I mean, the hell they had put me and David Adams through,
almost a year worth of harassment,
polygraph tests.
Because I did not like cops, OK?
They all acted like,
"Oh, we know you guys did it and we're gonna prove it."
We couldn't afford lawyers, you know?
We were poor kids.
And, you know,
we were really getting to the point
where we was getting scared
if we said, you know, the wrong damn word,
you know, they're gonna use it against us.
I will never, to the day they put me in a grave,
I will never forget that frickin' van.
Never.
If there's anything I can do to help with this case,
I'm here for that reason.
We know he was there.
He's the only person that ever said,
"I was there," that we can prove was at the restaurant.
If he's got some involvement beyond that,
I hope that, before he dies, he has enough courage to confess.
Somebody has carried this... this secret for 40 years,
and...and it's time.
It's time to...to unload that...that secret, that burden,
and give us that...
..give us that piece of information that we need
to be able to, uh, to hold somebody accountable for this.
Hey, Mama, I'm just calling you to tell you
that I have to stay tonight.
Alright.
OK.
I love you.
He had called
'cause he wasn't supposed to work till only 10 o'clock.
That's the state law, 'cause he's 16.
And he called us and said
could he work another hour or so to help her close up.
And we conferred, said, "Well, yeah, go ahead."
'Cause he said, "I want the money for Christmas.
"Christmas presents."
So you kind of blame yourself for that.
You know, why...why did you tell him...
Why didn't you tell him, "Come on home," but I didn't.
And we both agreed,
you know, for him to go ahead and work.
I can stay.
This is where the rubber meets the racetrack.
♪ And I often sit and wonder what we should do... ♪
Back in the 1970s, we went to the racetrack,
the track was open the whole month of May,
so we had a little clique
that we called the Riff Raff Social Club.
And our whole clique was race fans,
and basically the whole month of May,
pretty much partied constantly.
So that's what we did.
The parties in the Snake Pit were pretty radical.
I mean, it was tits and ass and beer and weed.
We had a lot of fun and it was different women every night,
different women every day, so, yeah,
but we...we had a... we had a good time,
probably more fun than we were supposed to have.
We called Jeff Reed the Mayor of the Snake Pit.
He pretty much was the enforcer.
If anybody had any problems,
well, Jeff was the one to go to to take care of the problems.
He was a big teddy bear that'd have your back
and he was a trusted friend if you were in his side.
You had his back, he definitely had your back.
He could be like the Incredible Hulk.
He could be real nice one minute,
and if you pissed him off,
he could be very, very mean the next, so...
There had been times where he had hurt people.
He was always bigger and badder than everybody else.
Yeah, that's the van, no doubt about it.
The one I saw at the Burger Chef that night,
which I want to make this absolutely clear, OK?
I always said it was orange,
but I've learned over the years
when something is sitting under these parking-lot lights,
it puts off, like, an orange cast.
To me, it looked like a rust colour.
My husband always said it was a light colour,
but I remember, like, a rust-ish coloured van.
I think it would have taken a large vehicle.
It's very likely that something like a van
was involved in that crime.
Jeff had a yellow-ish Ford van back in the day that he drove.
Econoline. I think it was an Econoline van.
We used it quite often.
It was nice to have something you could put everybody in
and take it to one place.
If they can't even get
the colour of the van right, then...
-Wait! -What?
Light, dark.
Red, orange, yellow.
It's the same van.
They all saw the same van.
When it came in, it looked dark.
And then orange because of the light.
And then yellow as it catches the light
from the inside of the restaurant.
Right.
So in a discussion with Mark Reed
in regards to his brother, Jeff,
he does claim that he had a vehicle
that very closely matches that description -
a '70s model Ford Econoline,
a yellow colour but with a red primer as well.
So especially under certain lights,
you could certainly mistake it for lots of different colours
in that spectrum.
Which makes it very interesting,
because Allen Pruitt mentioned a van
that was orange in colour,
as well as one being that kind of make and model.
There's supposedly footage,
that I don't know that any of us have seen,
while a news crew
was filming the Burger Chef following the murders
where a man that fit the description of the Bearded Man
was seen in an orange van
and then out up near the Burger Chef building.
And kind of as soon as he realised
the cameras were on him,
kind of got skittish about being there.
You know, kind of claimed
that they really shouldn't get him on camera and took off.
Well, we hung out at White Castle.
It was like a hangout
for everybody in the evenings or whatever.
And Jeff had came up to me and he seemed a little distraught
and wanted to...wanted to talk.
So, he said there was something
that he really needed to talk about.
And I could tell by Jeff, he wasn't the type
that was real loose with his tongue or even, you know,
worried about anything.
So I said, "Yeah, well, we can talk."
We went back to my house at the time,
and said that he was in some trouble
and didn't know really quite what to do about it.
But I think he was more or less
trying to get it off his chest a little bit
to relieve some of the, you know,
what was going through on his mind.
And I don't know who else he even told.
I might have been the only one.
I'm still reluctant to tell you this now.
But I think everybody that knew Jeff well enough
knew if you did talk,
then something bad would happen to you.
Like I said, it's been a true...
..a true secret that I've held for 40 years.
And he said, "Well, I had... I was there that night
"and...I really don't know what to do."
So I just kind of stepped back and I didn't know what he meant.
I just thought maybe he was there
as, you know, a customer,
and to my disbelief,
he actually said that he was...
..was the one that was responsible for it.
I think Jeff knew that...
..had possibly drove by and seen her car there
or whatever and said, "Hey!
"I know this person owes some money.
"If I can get it, then all the better."
And like I said, the domino effect started,
and it just... it went just south real quick
when somebody stuck their nose into somebody else's business.
Hey.
Guys?
Look.
Jeff Reed?
They're all the same guy.
The guy Pruitt saw is the same guy
who confessed to his buddy, Tim Boyer.
You can ask me when I'm dead and gone,
if I get sent to hell, I will always say
it looked like Jeff Reed and Tim Willoughby.
And I'll never change that. Never.
And the guy that Jean lady saw driving.
Yes, I'm certain this is the guy.
'Cause I have a really good memory for faces.
You don't forget that.
And the one the Dunkin' Donuts chick
said was behind the restaurant.
Now, out of these pictures...
..this one is the one that resembles the Bearded Man
that came up to us that night.
I'll never forget the eyes and the nose.
The person in this 30-second video,
I cannot say with 100% certainty,
but he bears a striking resemblance to Jeff Reed.
He was never charged.
The person with him was a fellow named Tim Willoughby.
He said that he went to Burger Chef to collect a debt.
They owed money to Brett Kimberlin, the Speedway Bomber,
which was who a lot of us
were getting our marijuana from at the time.
While trying to collect the debt,
an individual came running at him
in...in a threatening way.
And I guess Jeff, in his usual fashion,
knocked him out.
He thought that he might have killed him.
And after doing so,
things started going totally sideways and he didn't know...
Well, everybody's adrenaline would jump in
and just straight panic.
He said they took the guy and put him in the back of the van.
And at this point, he tried to gather his thoughts,
looks up, and I guess
there's all the people in... in the Burger Chef
staring out the window.
And so, in the frantic state he was in,
collects the employees.
He said he stuck them in the cooler or something there
to kind of contain them so he could get his thoughts
on what he was actually going to do.
The car that was at the Burger Chef,
they didn't want to leave it there,
so he called somebody to come pick the car up
to get it out of sight and sell it.
We had some people that would chop cars,
but I don't think that they actually knew
that it was urgent.
And during this time, I guess he decided
that, from what I understand,
he was going to take them on a ride,
you know what I mean?
And take them out to the woods or whatever.
And his initial thought was to drop them off,
you know what I mean, just to get away
and then figure out what to do afterwards.
And things went sideways
and I don't know exactly, he didn't tell me what happened,
but somebody evidently tried to escape
or assault him or...or something,
and he ended up having to hurt the people.
I know the police said... or the reporter had said
that one of the individuals
I guess they'd thought had run into a tree
and killed himself, and Jeff laughed about that
and said, "No, it was a Louisville Slugger
"that he got hit with."
On the drive back from Johnson County,
he drove around for a while
and they put the weapons in a bag
and dropped it in a field in Hendricks County,
which...the area where he said
would be a big retail store.
I've never seen the police. I never talked to the police.
They never questioned me.
From what I understand, they didn't question anybody.
I've kept this under my hat for 40 years.
I have kids now, grandkids.
I believe there is a time for closure
for the families.
It was just a bad... a bad day, a bad, bad scene
that went totally, totally, totally bad.
The number one killer of people in America
is meddling in people's business.
Like, kind of what happened there.
It was after 1986
Jeff Reed got arrested in Hendricks County.
I became aware of it.
Somebody from the jail knew that I was interested in him.
He didn't have any money. He didn't have any place to stay.
I got a voucher from a community group
that puts up travellers and stuff that are destitute.
Got him a room.
Picked him up the next morning and bought him breakfast.
I actually lied to him. I told him I was retired.
I said, "Hey, I just want to know the answer to this."
And I went through what I believed happened
and, you know, accused him of murder.
Didn't read him his rights.
I said, "It's gonna be between you and me.
"I want to know the answer is all.
"The only reason we're sitting here."
He never said one word.
I know if somebody was accusing me of a quadruple murder,
I would have had something to say.
He never said a word.
I gave him a ride to somewhere and dropped him off,
and I never saw him again.
I think we've been close.
We just, we don't have the evidence to prove anything,
and you don't have...
..don't have the forensics to back things up,
you're just, you're...you're, uh, paddling upstream.
It's real frustrating.
But it's not near as frustrating...
Give me just a second.
The family members.
It's more frustrating for them not knowing.
It's... It's not fair.
These were children,
and you just looked at them and decided
that their lives didn't matter and took that away.
My mother used to cry about the fact
that they didn't just take her daughter away,
they took all of her grandchildren away.
I feel that Ruth was just an innocent person
that...that shouldn't have been in that situation.
No-one should have been in this situation.
She just was unlucky enough
to have been at work that night
and paid the ultimate price for it.
I don't know what closure feels like. It's...
It depends on the day.
You know, one day, I can be fine,
and then the weather's gonna change soon
and it's gonna get colder,
and then I'm gonna start having nightmares again.
And...
So...
..then there isn't closure at that time.
I believe...
..I believe the case is solvable.
40 years is a long time.
But I do believe that it's possible
to hold somebody accountable.
MAN: OK. OK.
My name's Ginger Anderson.
I worked with your son at Burger Chef, yes.
I just wanted to say hello.
Happy, friendly, loving, kind.
-Big-hearted. -Yeah.
-Well, thanks. -Always a smile on her face.
Wherever life took her,
it changed the way we lived, though, didn't it?
It did.
Changed my outlook on life some.
Definitely.
So...
..something you just never forget.
He was very friendly, had a great heart.
You know, good attitude about life.
Once, you know, we began going to school together,
you really get to know a person, and that was my friend.
He was just a happy kid.
He woke up smiling. He woke up happy.
At night he came in from school
and the first thing he said was, "Hey, Ma!"
The other two kids were not that way. They were more sober.
And if you said something to them in the morning,
they were grumpy.
But he wasn't. He was just very cheerful.
December 19, 1977,
which was her 17th birthday,
says, "Mom and Dad got me a dress. I'm 17 now.
"It's hard to believe next year I'll be 18."
After that, my mom had written,
"Ruth Ellen Shelton never lived to be 18.
"I love you and miss you so much."
You're supposed to find the bad guys.
That's the way the movie's supposed to end.
-See you, guys. -'Bye.
'Bye, Danny.
Hey.
-How was your shift? -It was good, man.
♪ Ooh-ee, baby
♪ You set me on fire
♪ Make me want to move towards something real
♪ Happy to see I still have the desire
♪ Of expressing the way that I feel
♪ I'm moving in a circle
♪ Round your love
♪ Moving in a circle round your love
♪ Ooh-ee, baby
♪ You don't understand me
♪ Want you to know how I feel about you
♪ Something going on
♪ To be perfectly honest
♪ I don't know where it's leading me to
♪ I'm moving in a circle
♪ Round your love
♪ Moving in a circle round your love
♪ You got me in the circle
♪ Of your love
♪ You got me in the circle
♪ Of your love
♪ I'm moving in a circle
♪ Round your love
♪ Moving in a circle round your love
♪ Round your love
♪ Round your love. ♪