As Burger Chef crew members got ready to begin their shift on Saturday.

news of
the abductions-of Daniel Davis, Jayne Friedt, Mark Flemmonds, and Ruth Ellen
Shelton, had yet to reach the media. Officers at the scene told other employees that
there had been a break in at the restaurant. However, they had no idea what might
have happened. At the time of the incident, the mystery surrounding the incident
remained unclear. SO, THEY FIGURED IT WOULD BE BEST TO ALLOW THE
EMPLOYEES TO CLEAN THE STORE AS USUAL, TO BE ABLE TO OPEN FOR BUSINESS
LIKE USUAL. 

IN THE PROCESS OF READYING THE RESTAURANT FOR THE LUNCH RUSH, EVERY
SURFACE WAS WIPED DOWN AND THE REMAINING GARBAGE WAS REMOVED. 

THE ORIGINAL CRIME SCENE WAS NOT PHOTOGRAPHED, NOR WAS THE STORE
CHECKED FOR FINGERPRINTS, AND THERE WERE NO PHOTOS TAKEN OF THE SCENE.

 AND WHEN THEY REALIZED THEY MADE A MISTAKE AND RETURNED TO THE STORE
LATER.

IT WAS TOO LATE TO FIND ANY EVIDENCE RELATING TO THE FORENSIC ASPECT OF
THE CASE. 

They screwed the whole thing up from the get-go since it was a Friday night, and
people were getting ready for the weekend.

After serving the last late-night customers with a craving for char-broiled hamburgers
in the early hours of the morning, four part-time employees of Speedway Burger
Chef closed the restaurant at 11:00 p.m. with three hours before they had to get up
and go to work.

A twenty year old college student, Jayne Friedt was working as an assistant
manager in November 1978. It was quite impressive how many extra-curricular
activities she participated in during her time as a student, including yearbook staff,
choir, drama, library assistant... and so on. In fact, she was affectionately referred to
as "Sweet Jayne" by her friends and family because of her bright smile and positive
disposition. From the time that she was seventeen years old, she had been working
for Burger Chef Company.

Several days after another former employee quit the closing shift on the Friday night
of the preceding week, sixteen-year-old Daniel Davis recently joined the closing shift.
Daniel can make the team laugh with his jokes and antics. Daniel spent a lot of his
spare time taking pictures and developing film in his homemade darkroom, which
meant that he was taking pictures and developing film in his own spare time.
A sixteen-year-old sophomore from Speedway High School, Mark Flemmonds, was
standing in front of the Burger Chef grill. It was described that Mark, who was raised
as a Jehovah's Witness, was a friendly kid with six older siblings. Since it was within
walking distance of their home, he was able to get a job at the Speedway Burger
Chef as soon as he got out of college.

At the end of the evening on that chilly November night, it was Ruth Ellen Shelton
who rounded out the Burger Chef staff. In her parents' eyes she was a golden child.
Ruth was an honor student who aimed to become a computer scientist one day. She
was intelligent and driven. Along with her involvement with the youth ministries of the
Westside Church of the Nazarene, Ruth also studied music to pursue early college
credit at what is now the University of Indianapolis.

With full of promise, passion, and potential, these four kids went about their nightly
closing duties, closing the registers, counted the cash, scrubbed the cookware, and
cleaned the floors. Unfortunately, a few minutes before midnight, something went
terribly wrong.

In fact, when Brian arrived at the restaurant, the back door was ajar and the
restaurant was deserted by the time he arrived shortly after 12 am.

Cash and other valuables had been emptied from the office safe. There were still
Jayne and Ruth's purses in the office. They had over $100 in change left. The
thieves did not get all the loot if this was a robbery. There was also no sign of
Jayne's 1974 Chevrolet Vega left in the parking lot.

Despite his assumption that he had not heard the full account of the incident, Brian
called around to see if he could locate the assistant manager responsible for this
shift, Jayne. Jane has worked as a manager for another Burger Chef restaurant on
the other side of town where she’s previously worked for several years, but the
manager there hasn’t heard from her either.

Optimistic, fearful and doubtful, Brian finally called the Speedway Burger Chef head
manager and told him about the situation he had just walked into and how he felt.
After hearing his story, the manager advised Brian to call the police, which Brian
promptly did.

Despite what they found inside the restaurant that night, the Speedway police were
less concerned about what they found there. There was something odd about the
fact that the back door was wide open, and that Ruth and Jayne had left their purses
at the back door, but the responding officers chalked it up to teenage carelessness.
They assumed that the four kids had gone to party with all the cash that they had
taken from the restaurant. Friends and family of the victims were told by police they
would appear soon enough - once the cash had run out and their hangovers had
worn off - after the night's celebration was over.
As the manager is aware of the actions and occurrences of these four employees,
this assessment does not seem to jive with the knowledge that Burger Chef has
about them. But since the police appear to be handling the case, Burger Chef must
get on with its business. On the morning of the following day, the next shift of
employees came into the restaurant and scrubbed the place from top to bottom.
Despite their efforts, they had not been able to collect any evidence.

It was discovered that the crime scene had been cleaned and sanitized without any
photographic evidence to speak of. There was one horrible mistake made during the
investigation that would plague the investigation and haunt the Speedway police for
decades to come.

Detective Virgil Vandagriff from Marion County, Ohio, spoke to Indianapolis Monthly
several years later and said:

In their minds, they didn't view it as a murder; they didn't know it was a murder. At
the time, the police had no idea what was going on at the restaurant. Basically, they
muddled up the scene."

In fact, they were unaware they had committed a murder. On November 18th the
four employees were still believed to have made off with the restaurant cash and
were taking a joyride...until Jayne Friedt's car was located early in the morning.

A small, sporty two-door sedan, the 1974 white Chevy Vega was driven by Jayne.
The vehicle was found unlocked and abandoned in the town center. All parties - from
the families to the police - realized that these four people had been abducted and
were missing at this point. Police initiated an investigation.

The families had no ransom calls to respond to so all they could do was wait... and
they were not left waiting long.

The incident occurred in the early morning hours of Sunday, November 19th, when
police were called to a rural area in Johnson County, approximately 20 miles south
of Speedway. During their walk around the property, two people discovered two
dead bodies lying face down on the ground among the leaves and dirt. The
investigators were able to confirm the worst fears of the two individuals.

Several .38 caliber gunshot wounds to the heads of Ruth Shelton and Daniel Davis
were brutally executed within minutes of each other. On the other side of the road, a
body was found with a broken blade from a five-inch hunting knife protruding from
the sternum of Jayne Freidt. Mark Flemmonds, the victim of a severe beating caused
by a chain-like instrument, lay dead at the bottom of the hill. Mark had inhaled blood
and bile from himself, which had caused him to suffocate.
I couldn't tell you much about the police handling of this crime scene because it
wasn't much different than the Burger Chef restaurant. In the wake of the gruesome
murders, the investigative team expanded as word spread of the crimes.

Some drivers drove through areas that should have been sealed off as various
departments converged on the site. One of the bodies was rumored to have been
moved or being removed before the coroner or any of the experts arrived at the
scene".

Apparently, one of the investigating officers even took a piece of identification found
on a body home with him over a few weeks before realizing what he had done.

When it comes to the investigation the police didn't lack manpower in spite of the
mistakes they made. In just a few days, the Indianapolis Police, the Marion County
Sheriff's Department, the Indiana State Police, and the FBI swooped in to help the
Speedway authorities. There were two problems. The first was the integrity of the
scene was compromised entirely, and the second was that it was well past 48 hours
since the crime had been committed.

As there was little information about the murders to go on, police assumed the
deaths were the result of a robbery gone awry. He had not actually been scheduled
to work the Friday closing shift, but was filling in for another employee, after he had
taken the afternoon off to facilitate the staff meeting. The police suspected
Flemmonds may have identified the robbers, and as a result, they were all killed by
the perpetrators in order to eliminate all witnesses of the crime.

During the time of the attack, all of the victims were still in their Burger Chef uniforms
- brown and orange - and with cash in their pockets, as well as personal effects like
jewelry and watches still with them. Because of all of the valuables that were left
behind, even though robbery was the police's motive, it was not easy to justify the
conclusion that it was a robbery.  There is also something that seems a bit off about
the fact this carnage took place for a mere $581. Obviously, there have been far
worse crimes committed for far less.

The investigators did not have any evidence whatsoever in the case, except for the
testimony of two teenage witnesses who claimed to have seen two men entering the
Burger Chef during the night of the abduction.

One 16-year-old male, who had seen two men lurking about the Burger Chef
restaurant the night before, called Speedway Police on Saturday, November 18. The
male told the police he had seen the two men around the restaurant shortly before
closing time on Friday, November 17.

The boy told me that the two young men approached him and his girlfriend while
they were sitting in the parking lot of Dunkin Doughnuts, right next door to Burger
Chef, while they were in their 30s and both white and in their 30s. The men were told
to get out of there because, (quote) "there had been quite a bit of vandalism
happening around there." One of the men had a beard, and the other was blonde
and clean-shaven.was clean shaven. As the bearded man was speaking, he was
holding a handkerchief over his mouth so that he would not be seen talking.

Using composite sketches created from the witness descriptions, police

commissioned forensic artists to create clay busts of the suspects using full-sized
clay casts featuring the full-size clay busts produced by the forensic artists. If you do
a cursory Google search, you can still find some of these bizarre artworks.

It is understandable why the murders caused such a stir in the small community of
Indianapolis. The following is an excerpt from an article published shortly after the
crimes:

"After seeing the way people are getting killed here, I wouldn't be surprised if people
move out of Speedway. It seems like people just don't want to be around this area
anymore."

The fact the police were unable to crack the Burger Chef case despite the fact that
the police had already solved additional crimes earlier in the year offers little comfort
to another local:

 There was not a single murder, nor have there yet been any bombings. There will
not be a solution to this either."

In a desperate attempt for any tips or information about the case, the police
appealed to the public for assistance, and followed any lead, no matter how unlikely
it may seem.

It was reported in a newspaper article from the Kokomo Tribune on November 21,
1978, that the Speedway Investigators met with detectives from Oklahoma in an
attempt to determine if the unsolved slaying of six people at an Oklahoma City steak
house in July might be linked. The meeting did not produce any results of substance.

A $25,000 cash reward has been offered by Burger Chef Systems in an effort to
entice witnesses to come forward. Another anonymous donor contributed $10,000.
Several thousand dollars were added to the reward by Steak n' Shake, however no
one with reliable information has come forward to claim the bounty.

Those original composite drawings and clay busts did generate a few hits for the
police. 
There is a report that a man that resembles one of the sketches was overheard
bragging about committing the murders in a Greenwood bar, just south of
Indianapolis. Virgil Vandagriff, a Detective with the Atlanta Police Department, went
to the bar undercover to observe the man who contacted them. As the witness had
related, the man and the witness ended up shooting pool with one another, and just
like the witness claimed, the man was bragging loudly about the fact that Burger
Chef employees were robbed and killed. It is said that Vandagriff allegedly snapped
his pool cue over the knees of the man to demonstrate how he supposedly snuffed
out the life of one of the young men that night.

The man was arrested by the police soon after and was taken in for questioning, but
once he was in police custody he denied any involvement. During the course of the
investigation, investigators administered a polygraph test that he allegedly passed.
Polygraphs were seen at the time as conclusive evidence and not junk science,
which means the police let the man go based on the results. The police allege that
before he had left, the suspect had given them the names of a few men involved in a
fast-food robbery gang.

Upon receiving this information, the police located and arrested a bearded suspect in
Franklin, a town in the nearby area. The unnamed suspect (who was not named in
the documents released to the public) had a likeness of the composite drawing and
had no alibi for the night of the murders. Aside from that, his neighbor appeared to
be a clean-shaven, fair-haired man and he looked exactly like the second composite
sketch. A bearded man was asked by the police to come in for a line-up, but when
he arrived at the police station, his beard had been shaved for the first time in 5
years. Was that suspicious?

It was their intention to offer both of the suspects plea bargains, but they refused to
listen to them. The police were unable to continue their investigation without any
solid evidence.

Nevertheless, yet another police theory was centered on the belief that one or more
of the employees involved in the investigation dealt drugs. The night of that violent
attack in 1978, Jayne Friedt's brother, James, was arrested on cocaine charges, and
for a short period of time, police believed he might have been the reason, directly or
indirectly, behind the incident. The police let him go after six days because they
could not find any evidence to support his arrest.

A few years later, when police tracked down their most promising suspect yet, the
drug theory was further corroborated by further evidence. Speedway investigators
received a telephone call from the Pendleton Correctional Facility in November 1984,
exactly six years after the Burger Chef murders. During his 95-year sentence for
rape, Donald Wayne Forrester, 34, a sex offender starting his sentence for the
murder of Burger Chefs, had some information, and it wasn't just a tip. Forrester
wanted to confess.
There was an element of skepticism in the police approach to the meeting with
Forrester. As a sex offender, Forrester was about to be sent to Indiana State Prison
in Michigan City, which, as a result, would almost certainly be the beginning of a very
difficult time in his life. In an attempt to keep him away from Michigan City,
investigators assumed he was trying to parlay some bogus information about the
Burger Chef case into a possible prison transfer. I agree with them, that is absolutely
what he wants, except the more time they spent talking to him, the more they began
to suspect that his story might not even be bogus after all.

Donald Forrester, who was living in Speedway on November 17, 1978, had grown up
in a part of the city close to the area where the bodies of the four victims were found.
Please check.

Forrester has been on the run from Marion County detectives for six years, and with
this overwhelming evidence, they were compelled to bring him in to be directly
interrogated. When Onrester arrived at the scene, he claimed to have shot Daniel
Davis and Ruth Shelton with a .38 caliber revolver. In spite of Forrester's ability to
pinpoint the exact location of each body, detectives drove Forrester to the field
where the bodies were first discovered, and he was able to pinpoint the location of
the bodies. Let me check.

Forrester slowly began to open up to investigators with more detailed information

between 1984 and 1986. As he told them, immediately after the murders, he and his
wife drove over to the field to pick up the spent shotgun shell casings, which were
scattered around. Upon finding them, he had them drive home and he flushed them
down the toilet in his old house once they had found them.

The story was confirmed by Forrester's ex-wife. We have checked.

An investigation was conducted by police to search the septic tank of the old address
based on a search warrant. It was discovered that several .38 shell casings were
found in the sewage after they had dug through 8 years of raw sewage. They have
checked.

On November 17, 1978, Forrester offered the following account of what took place
on that night:

In fact, James Friedt had gotten in a lot of trouble with some drug dealers. It was
Friday night, so a group of dealers including Forrester went to the Burger Chef to put
pressure on Jayne, since he owed money to the wrong people. Mark Flemmonds,
16, is described as having tried to defend his sister when they showed up and began
threatening to hurt her if her brother didn't pay up.

A fight broke out between Mark and his knights, and during the melee, the Knight fell
and hit his head on the ground. It is believed that the blow knocked him unconscious,
and in a moment of panic, the perpetrators believed he was dead. Since the drug
dealers believed they were about to go to jail for murder, they decided to eliminate
the witnesses of the crime there and then. Taking all four employees of Burger Chef
into Jayne's car, they made their way to the middle of the town. Later, they dumped
Jayne's Chevy Vega and hopped into the getaway car of their getaway car.
During the investigation, Forrester informed police that they drove the kids to the
woods and they killed all of them; he described exactly how each of them died.

The confession that was made was damning. They were sure that they had a
suspect in their hands. Forder even offered three additional names of men who were
involved. It turned out, however, that somebody in Forrester's department leaked
information about Forrester to the press in November 1986. After this revelation,
Forrester shut up immediately and recanted all his statements. It was unlikely that
they would be able to find any more physical evidence against him and his
accomplices without his cooperation. Police were disappointed to discover that the
most promising lead in years had been destroyed.

It was time once again to plunge the case into the depths of icy coldness, and it
would stay there for a long time to come. Forrester passed away in prison due to
cancer in 2006.

To this day, the police continue to receive tips about the Burger Chef murders. Many
investigations have taken place over the years. A retired detective still browses
through the case files, which contain 20+ 3-inch binders of handwritten and typed
notes. There are new investigators assigned to the case every few years, hoping that
they will deliver new findings based on the fresh eyes of a new investigator.

The Indianapolis District Investigations Commander for the Indianapolis District, First
Sergeant Bill Dalton, was recently promoted to the position. He not only oversees
operations and reviews case reports in addition to all the other very important duties
he is responsible for, he is also responsible for keeping track of cold cases. Earlier in
the year, Sgt. Dalton announced that they were exploring using new forensic
technology to test evidence in the Burger Chef case.

It is noteworthy that this announcement came just a few days after Ruth Shelton's
sister, Theresa Jefferies, publicly called for anyone with information about the case
to come forward. There are 16 more suspects in the case.

There may be someone out there who knows the answers to all of our questions,
she said. There is a chance that I will have those answers before the end of my life
here on Earth."

In a public statement, Sergeant Dalton echoed Jeffries' sentiments:

Its time to take this secret off their shoulders. Someone has carried this secret for 40
years and it's time to let it go." 

It wasn't until Dalton released a picture of the blade lodged in Jayne Friedt's chest
that had previously not been widely publicized, that much more evidence became
available. There is a possibility that the release of this image might jog the memory
of someone who was a relative of one of the perpetrators of the crime. To date,
nobody has come forward with any information about the case.

In unsolved cases, the most agonizing part for the families of the victims is the lack
of closure in these cases. The police have recently made several declarations that
make them seem confident that they will uncover evidence that will lead to a
conclusion, but it is unlikely, at best, that they will solve this 40-year-old case.

Because the initial investigation was botched and lack of evidence gathered from the
crime scenes, it would seem that this case will remain unsolved for the rest of time.