Afrikaans
Akan
Albanian
Amharic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bemba
Bengali
Bihari
Bosnian
Breton
Bulgarian
Cambodian
Catalan
Cebuano
Cherokee
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Esperanto
Estonian
Ewe
Faroese
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Ga
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Guarani
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Interlingua
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Kinyarwanda
Kirundi
Kongo
Korean
Krio (Sierra Leone)
Kurdish
Kurdish (Soranรฎ)
Kyrgyz
Laothian
Latin
Latvian
Lingala
Lithuanian
Lozi
Luganda
Luo
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mauritian Creole
Moldavian
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Montenegrin
Nepali
Nigerian Pidgin
Northern Sotho
Norwegian
Norwegian (Nynorsk)
Occitan
Oriya
Oromo
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese (Brazil)
Portuguese (Portugal)
Punjabi
Quechua
Romanian
Romansh
Runyakitara
Russian
Samoan
Scots Gaelic
Serbian
Serbo-Croatian
Sesotho
Setswana
Seychellois Creole
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish (Latin American)
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Tatar
Telugu
Thai
Tigrinya
Tonga
Tshiluba
Tumbuka
Turkish
Turkmen
Twi
Uighur
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Wolof
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu
Downloaded from YTS.MX
I think when you have a secret, it gives you power,
and as soon as you share that secret,
you lose that power.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
A lot of people in this case have kept their secrets.
It's this all-American group of kids working at a Burger Chef,
and they are all killed brutally in the woods.
Imagine, what type of torture did they go through?
There had to be pure terror.
ANNOUNCER: It's one of the state's most infamous crimes:
the kidnapping and killing of four Burger Chef workers in Speedway.
If I knew what the hell was going on that night,
I would have walked over there and got involved.
I probably would have got shot and killed.
There's one gentleman that I think has a big secret,
and I think he knows what happened.
Open wide, America:
Burger Chef's got thick, juicy, terrific burgers for you,
a hundred percent all beef.
We really work hard...
Burger Chef was actually based in Indianapolis,
had been founded there in 1954.
Open wide America,
you never can forget,
You get more, more, more to like at Burger Chef.
Burger chef geared some of their marketing toward kids,
to bring their parents in, of course, too.
VOICEOVER: The Burger Chef family
would like to have your family over for dinner.
They were big back then.
The local Burger Chef in Speedway,
I would go to regularly 'cos my friend worked there.
Burger Chef was kind of like McDonald's.
I hung out over there.
Everybody'd go round there showing off their cars.
Burger Chef had the first Happy Meal.
They had cartoon characters: Burger Chef and Jeff.
What's a fun burger?
It's a delicious burger with a smile on the wrapper and a prize inside. Incredi-burger-ble!
I worked at the Speedway Burger Chef, 1978.
I was a back line cook.
When I started working at Burger Chef, I was nervous.
Back then, I was a very shy kid.
Burger Chef was a big-time competitor.
It was up there with McDonald's.
Loved their food. Miss it today.
My name is Aine Cain. And I'm Kevin Greenlee.
And we're The Murder Sheet.
After we cover the Burger Chef case,
The Murder Sheet will continue to investigate
different restaurant-related homicides
for the rest of season one.
In Indiana, where I live, the rumour was
that Burger Chef made their hamburgers out of worms.
And so because of this, my parents forbade me
from ever stepping foot into a Burger Chef,
which became a problem when they started selling Star Wars posters.
Hello. Welcome to Burger Chef. We'd like a Star Wars poster please. I knew it!
Finally, after I pleaded with them, they let me go in, buy a meal so I'd get the Star Wars poster,
and then I had to throw the food out immediately.
R2, I think we better leave.
Burger Chef was actually based in Indianapolis.
When we're talking about Speedway, this is the corporation's backyard.
Speedway in 1978 had the facade of being just a casual small town
on the edge of Indianapolis.
The reality was a bit darker.
There were chop shop rings and a lot of drugs moving through the area.
So while the surface was very placid
and nice and small-town Americana,
there was a lot of crime going on.
We're at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
It was hippies and bikers.
You didn't run your mouth to people if you didn't know 'em
'cos you probably would have got your butt kicked.
OK, come on in.
Dude, I was a grease monkey at the age of ten.
I started taking my dad's cars apart,
and boy, did he get (BLEEP).
Back in 1978, you know, I was hell on wheels.
I used to do burnouts around the Burger Chef.
Jayne Friedt, my friend, would get so upset
'cos there'd be so much smoke rolling off the rear tyres.
She'd open the little serve window, give me the finger:
"Don't you do that no more," and I'd be laughing my butt off.
Imagine that.
Speedway in '78
I considered a very redneck town.
We didn't have too many African Americans in this city.
Speedway, to me, was racist.
Speedway cops were notorious
for pulling over black people in the neighbourhood.
They look at it like it's their town.
That's the way I took it, you know?
KEVIN: Back in the day, Speedway was totally unprepared
for what happened out at the Burger Chef.
There was a young lady that worked
at the Speedway Burger Chef.
I thought she was cute, and I asked her out.
She was scheduled to work that night,
so she asked Mark Flemmonds to take her place,
and Mark said yes.
Believe it or not, that was my first date of my life.
November 17th, 1978 was a Friday night.
I talked with Mark and found out that he had to work that night.
His schedule changed,
so I said, "Man, will you walk home with me once you get off work?"
Speedway at night, for a black man, that wasn't good.
We were always together or with someone.
It's about 11:30, quarter to 12,
I'm like, "Well, I better mosey on across the parking lot there
and get with my buddy so we can walk on home."
Shortly after the date, we drove by the Burger Chef,
and my date noticed Jayne's car was gone.
I mean, the manager should be there on a close,
and with the store lights on, it is odd.
So I walk up to the door,
I'm looking inside, I don't see nobody.
I'm just banging on the door. Nothing.
I'm thinking, like, "Where the hell is he?
He know we had to walk home tonight."
And I got there, and I bam!
The door's open.
So I walk over, and I just stuck my head.
"Jayne, Jayne, Mark." No one ever answer.
Something just told me,
"Don't go in there, do not go in there,"
and I didn't.
I dropped my date off at her house around 12,
and I drove back to the Burger Chef.
I would come back and help them close.
The back door was cracked open and there was light shining out.
I walk in there, and nobody is there.
I checked everywhere. I checked in the walk-in, the freezer. Nobody's around.
The women's coats were left there.
I walk in the manager's office,
and the first thing I notice is the safe door is wide open.
All the dollar bills were gone.
So I called the police.
Four kids are missing.
The family members were notified. No one knew where they went.
AINE: The four missing employees are
Assistant Manager Jayne Friedt
and her crew of three employees,
Ruth Shelton, Danny Davis, and Mark Flemmonds.
Mark was a real open person.
He was big-hearted, you know.
His family was Jehovah's Witnesses,
and they was rather strict on him.
ALLEN: Jayne was a very sweet, bashful young girl.
Every time you saw her, she had a smile on her face.
I enjoyed talking to her.
I kind of always wanted her to be my girlfriend,
but it never got that far.
My brother woke me up.
He just said, "Wake up, Theresa, wake up, Ruth's been kidnapped."
My older sister, Ruth,
she was very quiet
when you first met her.
Ruth wanted to be a computer programmer.
They had just started classes at the high school back then.
Danny Davis was a 16 year old,
but he had some big dreams: he wanted to join the Air Force.
People who knew him tell us he was very new to Burger Chef.
So, you know, I'm lying in the bed sleep,
I kept hearing this knock at my window.
I get up and look. It's Mark's sister.
She said, "Well, Kirk, I'm gonna tell you now,
they believe that they've been kidnapped."
I'm like, "What the hell are you talking about?"
When Mark's sister told me that the Burger Chef employees was missing,
I walked back to the Burger Chef.
Man, there's Speedway cops all over the place,
Indiana State Police, news cameras.
I talked with the investigators.
I told them everything that I saw that night.
They took my story, and they was treating me like a suspect.
The police, they were saying
that they thought they had just taken the money
and went out to have a good time,
and that makes no sense whatsoever.
First of all, Ruth, Jayne, Mark, and Danny worked together.
They didn't hang out together.
They were different ages from different schools.
Unfortunately, they allowed the other staff from the restaurant
to come in and clean the restaurant.
They let the restaurant open up the next day.
There was no crime scene to be processed.
It was devastating to this case.
The media got involved.
It was on the radio and television that these four kids were missing.
There was a search conducted
with volunteers and police officers.
On Sunday, a man stumbles across an awful sight.
He stumbles across the bodies of Danny Davis and Ruth Shelton,
lying next to each other face down in their Burger Chef uniforms.
And a short distance away, there is the body of Jayne Friedt,
and also Mark Flemmonds.
And he's seen the news coverage,
he sees these Burger Chef uniforms, and he knows what's happened,
and so he goes and calls the police.
00:11:29.600 -- 00:11:31.360 Welcome to our house.
Oh, Hank. He's our favourite dog, named after Hank Williams Senior.
Best little dog in the world.
I was appointed to the Indiana State Police in 1972.
I was promoted to sergeant.
I spent most of my time from 1978 through '86 involved with the Burger Chef investigation.
My wife and I were driving back home
and I heard on the police radio dispatch
about kids missing from the Burger Chef in Speedway.
You could have just hit me with a brick
when I found out that they'd been murdered.
The Speedway Police Department and Indiana State Police
announced that the bodies had been discovered late this afternoon in Johnson County, Indiana.
This area right here
was where the bodies were found.
This is about 20 miles from the Burger Chef.
The fact that these kids
were driven 20 miles to this specific location
makes you wonder what the purpose was.
Perhaps the perpetrators wanted to interrogate one.
Perhaps the kidnappers panicked
and weren't really thinking straight.
In all the fast food homicides we've looked into
that involved mass murders,
the vast majority took place within the restaurant.
It's incredibly rare for a group of people
to be taken elsewhere and then killed.
So these four kids were actually killed
in three different ways.
Two of them were shot, one of them was stabbed, and one of them was beaten.
The way things occurred,
there had to be more than one person involved in this, if not three.
I truly believe Mark was outnumbered,
or they had to have a gun on him for him not to react
and try to fight his way out of a situation.
At the murder scene, it had a gravel road right here.
Danny and Ruth were just over that embankment,
lying face down, shot execution style.
The bullets were recovered from the bodies -
.38 calibre bullets, no shell casings.
There wasn't a lot to collect.
You had the bodies and what was on them or in them.
That was about the extent of the evidence.
They found Jayne about 50 to 75yd away, face down.
Her clothes weren't torn.
Somebody from behind came over her
and with two striking blows
stabbed her twice through the heart.
The knife handle snapped off at the hilt.
Mark was found to the left.
He was on his back.
His feet were bent under him.
His toes were actually like that.
It looked like somebody pulled him back,
got on top of him, and beat him.
They killed him, surely.
He actually died of a bloody nose,
strangled on his own blood.
Had he been on his side, he'd probably have survived.
There was no gun recovered.
There were no shell casings recovered.
This might suggest that whoever committed this crime
was very careful and very meticulous.
The crime scene was searched with metal detectors.
The roadway ditches were searched.
Farm buildings in the reasonable proximity, and nothing was found.
When you look at the actual crime scene,
Mark and Jayne's deaths both feel more personal.
Mark died of blunt force trauma.
Jayne was knifed to death.
When people see that, they think they were singled out on some level.
ANNOUNCER: Assistant Manager Jayne Friedt's car
was found abandoned in the morning
a few miles away near the police station.
Jayne Friedt, her car was found abandoned,
parked right here in this area.
We don't know why they chose this spot.
We don't know if they met somebody here.
We just don't know why they took her vehicle.
Somebody you go to school with, and suddenly she ends up dead,
that's a hard thing to deal with.
It shocked me.
You know, I come in, report a robbery,
the police don't know what's going on.
What I really realise is,
by the grace of God,
I wasn't one of 'em.
I could have easily walked in on that.
I maybe missed 'em by five, ten minutes.
Meet my mother here, Mrs Thompson.
When they said they found them all murdered,
man, it took the life out of all of us.
Mr Ken, he worked at the mortuary that had Mark's body...
Yeah? ..and he told me the condition of the body.
And I said, "Oh, my goodness."
They beat him to death. They beat him bad.
For years, I've dealt with that on the inside,
and...that bothered me for years.
I had nightmares back then.
I dreamed of him all the time, man.
THERESA: Ruth's funeral was... It was very hard for me.
She was young,
and a lot of people were in distress.
The funeral home had closed her casket for the night.
As my mother draped her body over that casket,
just cried and sobbed,
I couldn't help feeling that
this is the absolute worst pain
that you could ever experience.
What I wondered about was, who was there present close to the Burger Chef when this occurred?
KIRK: Indiana State Police had a lot of theories.
They would ask me, what type of person is Mark? Did Mark do drugs?
Do you do drugs?
It got to a point where, "Hey, can we take a lie detector test?"
I always felt that they tried to imply that I was lying.
You know, the police, they wanted to hypnotise me, right?
They kept trying to make him say he was in there,
and I said, "They're looking for somebody
to blame this murder on, or kidnapping or whatever,
but they're not gonna blame it on my child."
AINE: When people talk about this case,
they tend to think that either Mark or Jayne
were the primary target in the homicides,
and that's for a couple of reasons.
As the investigation went on,
there was leads that were called in
revolving around drugs,
revolving around relatives involved in drug activity.
Mark Flemmonds, there were news reports in 1978
that he was involved in drugs in some capacity.
His father reported that at one point
he found Mark in an apartment
where there was a large amount of marijuana present.
Could Mark have had a secret life that I didn't know about?
I don't think so.
But if he was involved, it never happened around me.
The big first lead that came forward was a male from Speedway,
came to the police department and told 'em,
"Hey, I was up at the Burger Chef last night.
We had a couple of guys approach me and my girlfriend, two male individuals."
They elicited a description.
Someone offered to prepare
two lifelike clay busts of these composite drawings.
The end result of releasing those
was to have phone call after phone call after phone call.
ANNOUNCER: Investigators made these clay busts.
This went national news.
It was definitely a media circus.
ANNCR: Desperate for leads, state police begged for the public's help.
Right now, they're running up lots of false leads.
We had officers from Marion County, state police, the FBI and the ATF.
It was a nightmare to try to manage it.
They had a tip line,
the phone rang off the hook in the first weeks constantly.
When you have a situation where it's like a fire hose of information coming in,
that makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff,
and it bogged down the investigation very early on.
A lot of activity was generated as a result of those leads,
but nothing much that came back to the crime in hand.
Ruth was my older sister.
We were five years apart.
I idolised her.
She seemed to do everything perfectly
and showed no fear with a lot of things.
Ruth was very much my role model.
I have hers and my high school class rings.
Look how tiny she was.
And that has always bothered me, is that someone...
This was not an adult that someone killed.
Someone saw a child and killed them.
I also have Ruth's name tags.
With the name tags, if you look,
you'll notice it says Ruth.
It doesn't say victim.
None of them...were named victim.
They each had a name.
You know, so often we hear, four victims.
If you can call someone a victim,
you've taken their identity away.
You've made it more important
of how they died than who they were.
In the first three years after the Burger Chef murders,
there were really no dramatic developments
in the investigation.
So the next big lead that erupts happens in 1981.
The scene is the Marion County jail.
A scuffle is breaking out on the floor
between two inmates.
One is James Friedt.
He's the older brother of Burger Chef victim Jayne Friedt.
The other is this small, red-headed guy named Allen Pruitt.
He had been arrested on probation violation charges, we think.
It's hard to find correctional records that far back.
James Friedt had been arrested
on a cocaine charge, a substantial charge.
The confrontation happens because
Pruitt made some sort of comment to James:
"Sorry about your sister," essentially.
As a result of this fight,
Pruitt ends up going to one of the counsellors at the jail
and telling him that, "I have information on the Burger Chef murders."
I was the last person to see them victims alive that night
at the Burger Chef.
00:22:40.440 -- 00:22:43.760 We got a call to go to the Marion County jail.
Allen Pruitt, who'd been in some type of confrontation
with James Friedt, Jayne Friedt's older brother -
Allen, he had told us a story
that he went to the Dunkin' Donuts
on the night of the Burger Chef murder,
and then he walked out and he heard a commotion over at the Burger Chef.
Me and my friend,
we were both really intoxicated.
I hadn't ate nothing all that day,
with a gutful of beer.
Burger Chef looked like it was already closed,
so we decided to go to Dunkin' Donuts,
and the Dunkin' Donuts was right next to the Burger Chef.
Came out to have a cigarette,
and I saw the orange van.
It was standing right about here, the van,
so I had a clear view shot of it.
I saw two guys that I recognised,
Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed.
I saw Jeff Reed go into the Burger Chef.
I saw Jeff Reed come out the back of the building
holding Mark by the collar of the shirt,
slammed him into the van.
I heard the thump.
Jeff Reed lowered Daniel Davis and Ruth into the van.
I saw Tim Willoughby and Jayne Friedt
come out the back door,
and they were arguing with each other.
She said something like (BLEEP).
I never heard Jayne ever cuss in her life.
I thought, well, maybe Jayne stepped on somebody's toes and (BLEEP),
and they were out here, you know, settling the score.
I didn't know anybody was being abducted.
They took off.
That was the last I saw.
If I knew what the hell was going on that night,
I would have walked over there and got involved.
I probably would have got shot and killed, but I didn't give a (BLEEP).
Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed
were the two men that Allen Pruitt named in his statement to police.
Jeff Reed was known for fighting people.
He did a lot of drugs. He seemingly was involved in the drug trade.
We've heard that he possibly acted as some sort of enforcer
for different organisations within the drug trade,
and he was not afraid to get violent.
Tim Willoughby sold drugs:
cocaine, I think, mostly, in school.
He was always acting like he was better than you.
He was just a cocky-ass type guy.
Pruitt, Jayne Friedt, and Tim Willoughby
all were graduates of the same high school.
KEVIN: Jayne was a country girl.
People who knew her talked about her smile.
People gave her the nickname Sweet Jayne.
But we have spoken with one of Jayne's friends
who knew her very well,
and she says that Jayne had gotten involved with selling drugs
and that she was entangled with her older brother, James,
who was a drug trafficker.
And so she paints a bit of a darker picture,
saying that she was going in this direction of getting more involved with the drug trade.
I'd never heard of drugs being as prevalent in Speedway.
Now, I'm probably believing
that there was a little bit more prevalence of drugs,
and I was just very sheltered.
While working at Burger Chef, I always liked Jayne.
I thought she was a super-nice manager.
But Jayne was known to up and vanish for a little bit...
..throughout the night.
I interrogated Allen Pruitt about the Burger Chef.
AINE: Allen Pruitt had very little to gain
in going to the police with this story.
He didn't get any big reward, and he didn't ask for any time off.
All of that makes him quite a credible witness.
So as Pruitt is talking to Cramer, he reveals what happened the day after the killings.
He didn't realise that any murder had been committed.
I was outside the Dairy Queen.
Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed pulled up in an orange van,
with a girl in the back, Mary Ann Higginbotham.
She was Tim Willoughby's girlfriend.
I asked Tim Willoughby,
I said, "What was the deal up at the Burger Chef?
What kind of beef did you have with Jayne?"
He kind of acted like I was his best friend.
They wanted to know if I wanted to go out riding around,
drink some beers and smoke a couple of joints.
I said, "Sure, why not?"
Jeff Reed was driving the van.
Tim Willoughby was in the passenger seat.
Mary Ann Higginbotham was in the back.
I saw a nickel-plated '38 calibre revolver.
Mary Ann seemed like she'd been crying.
And then she said, "Allen, I think they're going to kill me."
And I'm like, "Do what?"
She goes, "I think they're gonna kill me."
I didn't know what to do because I didn't know what was going on.
Tim Willoughby was whispering something to Jeff Reed,
and I thought, "Man, I'm feeling uneasy about this."
Mary Ann yelled at Tim, "You need to quit doing this stupid (BLEEP).
If you don't stop, I'm going to the cops."
Tim Willoughby reached back behind the seat
and smacked Mary Ann across the face,
told her to shut the (BLEEP) up.
I was scared to death.
The van pulls up to the bridge -
Devil's Backbone.
Walked down to the creek,
Mary Ann turned to me and said,
"Allen, run as fast as you can
because I think they're gonna kill you."
I turned around and I bolted as fast as I could.
As I was running, I heard a gunshot.
I figured at that point they were trying to kill me.
Test, test. 'On our podcast, we dug into Alan Pruitt's story.'
Through our investigation, we discovered shocking details about Mary Ann Higginbotham,
we visited the creek in Mooresville, Indiana.
KEVIN: Back in June of 1979,
a teenage boy found a sealed barrel in a creek.
He reached into the barrel
and a rotting skull came tumbling out.
Mary Ann Higginbotham's body was found sealed in a 55 gallon drum.
She had been shot and murdered.
Her remains were found
about seven months after the Burger Chef murders occurred.
According to the statement that we took from Allen Pruitt,
he would have been the last person
to have seen Mary Ann Higginbotham alive.
We're here now at the Devil's Backbone.
This is where Allen Pruitt said he was chased by Jeff Reed and Tim Willoughby.
Mary Ann Higginbotham,
she was killed by a gunshot wound to the head.
Which would fit with Pruett's story. Yes.
To this day, I still believe
Mary Ann, she knew that Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed committed them murders.
I think what he did was kill her to shut her up.
The next time I ran into Jeff Reed,
he pointed a gun at me and said,
"You know what's gonna happen if you run your mouth?"
And I said, "Yeah, I guess I do."
We know for a fact Allen Pruitt was there at the Burger Chef.
The question is, is Allen Pruitt a witness or is he a suspect?
Jim Cramer thought from the very beginning
that he had his man.
He was a (BLEEP).
Allen Pruitt, he came across as not being, uh, overly intelligent.
They wanted me to take a polygraph test,
and I passed every question they asked with flying colours.
We had him run on a polygraph,
and he didn't pass.
I think he didn't pass because he wasn't telling the whole story.
Cops gave me the sodium pentothal, which is a truth serum.
Well, that's a lie. That's funny. I've heard that before, actually.
Sitting here today, I don't know whether I believe him or not.
We know Pruitt was there, so either he is telling us the truth or he is lying.
And if he's lying, why is he lying?
Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed
were the two men that Allen Pruitt named in his statement to police.
Neither of them were brought in for official questioning afterwards.
In the case of Tim Willoughby,
he was actually missing at that point.
Willoughby went on the run
after facing charges around a car theft ring - technically a fugitive.
Now, Jeff Reed was still around.
Jeff Reed we had trouble locating.
I finally found out that he was an inmate in Danville jail.
Reed was gonna be released, and I thought, "Here's my chance."
I went to the jail. I knew he didn't have any money.
I picked him up, and I took him to get him breakfast, to talk to him.
We ate. I never accused him, but I told him, "I think you're involved."
He sat there and had his meal.
He never said one word.
He didn't say, "I didn't do this. I'm not involved." He didn't say a word.
You know, when you don't have anything to go on,
I was giving it a shot.
We really didn't have anything to go forward with.
Even with Pruitt's story, we couldn't verify it.
We didn't have any evidence to prove things.
You've got a statement there that's questionable.
He's not a believable witness.
You couldn't go forward with it.
There are a lot of rumours about Mark,
bolstered by the fact that Mark seemed to be singled out for a beating
over the course of the murders.
Was somebody targeting him specifically?
Mark often gets brought up
because there were news reports in 1978
that he was involved in drugs in some capacity.
People who knew him well pushed back against that narrative.
I never knew him to be involved with drugs.
No, don't attach that to my friend. I won't stand for it.
I will defend him until I'm in my grave.
Mark was the only African American victim.
The other three were white,
and Kevin and I feel like there's some racial undertones
when people are talking about how Mark must have been the target.
The rumours about Mark,
I really believe it was racist.
This is what I knew of Mark. This is my story.
The biggest roadblocks we had
was the lack of evidence at the Burger Chef,
the lack of evidence in the woods and no shell casings.
After so long of something not being solved,
you give up hope.
I just can't get my hopes up and let down and up and down.
I guess I've gotten to the point where it leaves you numb.
Just when the case went cold again,
it's 1989 and there's another bombshell.
Someone confessed to the murders.
So this new suspect in the case
is a man named Donald Forrester.
He is a man with a terrifying history.
Donald Forrester had been arrested.
He abducted a girl, he raped her.
Donald Forrester was convicted and sentenced to 95 years.
Forrester knew a lot of information that only the killer would know.
(TAPE RECORDER STARTS) INTERROGATOR: Today's date is January 9th, 1989.
Law enforcement took Donald Forrester
to the crime scene in Johnson County,
and he demonstrated to them where the bodies were located and how they were positioned.
Forrester said that Jayne Friedt
would visit a particular house in Speedway to buy drugs.
Forrester was actually able to give investigators something incredibly concrete.
He had taken the investigators out to a place
where he threw some shell casings.
He had flushed them down a toilet.
The house he lived at at the time
was on a septic tank,
and that means that when he flushed them down the toilet,
they just went into the septic tank just a few feet away from his house.
Detectives dig into the yard of that house
to get to the septic tank,
and they actually find three shell casings.
It's an incredible scene to picture
these detectives literally digging in filth.
Sheriff's Department worked with Forrester.
They went to this residence
where he had flushed these shell casings,
and they actually did recover shell casings.
However, they were the wrong calibre.
.22 calibre shell casings were found in the septic tank.
Ruth and Danny were killed with a .38 calibre weapon,
so that doesn't match.
His confession fell apart.
Forrester says that the victims were bound,
and there are no signs whatsoever
that any of the Burger Chef victims
were bound in any fashion.
Said he was at the murder scene.
Said he saw Jayne stabbed.
Jayne had been stabbed twice in the chest, through the heart.
Donald Forrester was interviewed
in a room that had case information,
crime scene photos or suspect photos on the walls.
He'd been spoon-fed information.
He was a con, and that's what I felt like he was doing the entire time.
He was a liar,
and we could prove he was a liar.
Donald Forrester's confession completely falls through.
Forrester actually had a very strong incentive
to keep Marion County detectives interested in him.
Donald Forrester, he had gotten this 95-year sentence for the rape.
He had been told by the deputies
that if he solved the Burger Chef case,
they could guarantee him a lesser sentence.
That's exactly what he wanted.
I told him he'd go back to prison,
and he smacked that table hard and looked at me.
He glared at me.
"If you send me back to prison, you'll never solve this case."
Now, end of story.
He's a liar.
Donald Forrester died in prison of cancer in 2006.
We have no resolution.
The case remains unsolved four decades later.
Burger Chef, that location,
after the murders their business went way down.
It eventually closed.
Burger Chef eventually was sold to parties.
The Burger Chef restaurant chain was shut down in 1982.
Burger Chef does not exist anywhere at all.
I think this case can definitely be solved
if it's kept out there in public.
Hopefully, one day somebody may come forward.
There's one gentleman that I think has a big secret,
and I think he knows what happened.
Them kids today could still be alive if I had walked over there.
I could have probably saved them kids' lives.
I knew Jayne so well,
and the way she was killed...
..and how somebody could be so damn evil
to go out and kill them four kids over nothing.
I don't really know why God keeps me...
I should have died years ago.
This case is a bit like an oasis in the desert.
You keep walking towards it,
thinking you're about to get there,
and then it just disappears.
But I think Kevin and I are both very stubborn people, so we just wanna keep walking.
Over the years, there's been a couple of false confessions.
There's been lots of family members says, "Oh, my uncle, my brother..."
But they've never solved the case. It's very frustrating.
It's been a minute since I've been inside of here.
I haven't been back here since 1978.
I have this warm feeling over me now
just looking around, man.
Wow.
I hurt for all of 'em, man. They were cool people.
None of them deserve what happened to them.
They tore my heart right out of my body, man.
It says, "Ruth Shelton. Kind, with a big heart."
This tree means that Ruth's life has not been forgotten.
I feel like if you know something about this case, it's time that you speak up.
We can't change the past, but we can change the future.
I still think about this case every day.
From the bottom of my heart,
I do not know who committed this crime.
I get upset about this.
It isn't anything compared to what the Davises or the Friedts
or the Clements or Mrs Shelton has felt.
They deserve to have an answer.
I only hope, in my remaining years, that...
..that someone gets an answer to this.
I apologise if I made any mistakes.
I apologise to the families for not being successful.
Unfortunately, the answer to this is still a secret.
And that's the problem: somebody knows.
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.