November 18, 1978, an employee at Burger Chef swings by the restaurant to say hi to his
workmates as they finish their evening shift.
He opens the door to find the restaurant is empty.
The lights are on and things don’t look that out of the ordinary for just after closing
time.
But, he doesn’t see any of the four staff that should be working.
Those are three teenagers and the 20-year old assistant manager.
It’s eerily quiet, so he shouts out, “Hey guys, what’s up.”
No answer.
He shouts again, now becoming just a little bit nervous as he peers at burger cartons
that should have been cleaned up.
“HEY, guys, stop messing around.”
There’s still no answer.
They aren’t in the back, either, nor are they in the office or the bathroom.
They’ve gone.
Just vanished.
The guy calls the cops, even though he’s sure they’ll turn up nearby or something.
They will turn up, and what ensues will haunt that young man for the rest of his days.
This case will become one of the most confounding crime mysteries the USA has ever seen, a story
with so many twists and turns it’ll make you dizzy trying to guess what happened that
night.
It wouldn’t be out of place in a season of Breaking Bad.
In fact, as you’ll see close to the end, Breaking Bad could easily have partly been
based on the murders.
Not long after the discovery of the empty restaurant, Indiana State Trooper Jim Cramer
got a call on his radio.
This night will become his worst nightmare, something he’ll take with him well past
retirement.
The town of Speedway, Indianapolis, population 12,500, will soon become one of the most talked-about
places in the USA.
Dispatch informs Cramer that a bunch of kids have just gone missing from the Burger Chef
restaurant.
They are: Assistant manager Jayne Friedt, 20, and workers, Ruth Shelton, 17; Danny Davis,
16; Mark Flemmonds, 16.
Cramer might not have worked on too many big cases, but one thing he is used to are bored
local kids messing around.
Still, when he gets to the restaurant he is met with the scene of a crime.
The safe is open and money bags are strewn around.
Lying near the safe is some adhesive tape that’s been used up.
Ok, he thinks, there’s been a robbery.
That’s not so unusual, but what is unusual is the fact the four staff are missing.
With hold-ups, people might get hurt from time to time, but they’ll almost always
be found on the property.
Cramer thinks that in all likelihood they might have been forced out of the restaurant
and taken someplace.
They’ll turn up sooner or later, he imagines.
More cops arrive at the scene, as does the Burger Chef manager.
He informs the police that only US$581 has been stolen, not a lot of cash even back in
1978.
It seems obvious, say the cops.
The kids took the money and have gone on a spending spree.
Maybe they took the loot and hit the road, probably after having a beef with the manager.
But then one cop starts shaking his head.
He’s seen enough TV to know something is amiss.
“If that’s the case,” he says, “Why are there bags and purses here.
Surely they would have taken them with them?”
The older cops laugh in a derisive manner.
One of them says, “Ok Columbo, maybe it was the butler that did it with the ice-cream
scoop in the toilet.”
They’re pretty well sure it’s a case of dumb kids who didn’t exactly think through
their crime.
They’re so sure that’s the case, they don’t even tell the restaurant to not open
the next day.
The next morning staff will clean up what is actually a major crime scene.
As you’ll see, this will have profound ramifications.
That young cop was right.
The kids don’t turn up at all.
They don’t call their parents or friends.
They haven’t been seen anywhere.
Two days later, a couple is out hiking in a quiet lane alongside some woods.
They see tire tracks, except it looks as if someone was in a hurry and skidded off the
lane.
They follow the tracks and head off into the woods.
This spot is about half an hour’s drive from the Burger Chef restaurant.
First, they find the bodies of Ruth and Danny.
They are face down and have been shot execution-style in the back of the head multiple times.
They’ve also been beaten around the face.
The woman puts her hand to her mouth in shock.
The man looks around, wondering if the killer might still be in the woods.
It’s then he sees something that he’ll never forget.
He says nothing to his wife and just walks towards another body.
It’s the assistant manager, Jayne.
She’s been stabbed twice through the heart.
Whoever did it used so much force the blade broke off in her chest.
The third victim, Mark, is a bit farther away near a creek.
He’s been beaten so badly he barely looks human.
His face is a bloody pulp.
It will turn out that the cause of death was him choking on his own blood.
What he was hit with is still a mystery, although a large chain will become the suspected weapon.
This is not only an astonishingly brutal crime, one that is unusual even in a country well-known
for its regularity of violent crimes, but it seems like a needless crime.
Why on Earth would someone have done that?
They already had the cash.
Ok, so they might have been seen, but even so, a quadruple murder?!
Also, given the fact that the murders were all so violent, one might assume the killer
had known the youngsters.
This looked like a revenge crime.
It just didn’t make sense, though.
The victims didn’t all have the same friends and they didn’t have any known enemies.
They were still kids, not arch criminals.
At one of the girl’s funerals, the minister, close to tears himself, looked over at the
grieving family.
Gritting his teeth he said, “Somewhere in this city, this state, this country, there
is a man or men who are the executioners of these four precious lives.
Sooner or later they will be caught and judged.”
Why, oh why, would anyone have done that to them?
Watch on, because this story is going to get wild.
The cops came under a lot of scrutiny of course.
This was the biggest story of the year.
People had just gotten used to the fact Ted Bundy was no longer prowling the streets,
and now they looked at their TVs and heard how four innocent, young kids had been viciously
killed.
Maybe it was a serial killer?
It was the 70s, the so-called golden age of serial killing.
Still, this crime didn’t have the same MO as a serial killer crime.
The place was robbed, which is not usually in the bag of tricks that deranged serial
killers take to the scene of their crimes.
Not only that, none of the victims has been messed with sexually.
Plus, they’d been killed in different ways, so the murders had separate signatures.
Ok, so let’s have a look at what could have happened.
Firstly, there were two teenagers that said they saw something strange that night.
They said they had spotted two men looking rather suspicious parked outside the Burger
Chef sometime before midnight.
It was closed, so they did wonder why someone would wait outside.
They went over to the car to investigate, whereupon the guys got out.
They demanded to see the kids’ IDs, acting like they were cops.
Once they’d seen those IDs, the men said get away from here, there’s been a lot of
vandalism in the area and they might get picked up.
The kids said both guys were white and in their 30s.
One of them had a beard and the other guy was pale in complexion and had light-colored
hair.
The cops even had the kids hypnotized, thinking an expert might help better jog their memories.
With that information surely something would happen.
Given the extreme nature of the crime, you’d think the perpetrators would have had a history
of violence, so, just go through the data and look at local men, or at least men in
the state, who fit that profile.
Well, the police did that.
They actually brought a guy in for questioning.
He’d had a beard for at least five years, but guess what, he shaved it off the night
before he was brought into the station to stand in a lineup.
The kid who’d seen the men didn’t pick him out.
This guy had been brought to the attention of the cops because of another man.
He’d been in a bar one night and had a few too many drinks.
Whilst playing pool the suspect turned around to a bunch of other guys and said he committed
the murders.
The next day, someone got in touch with the cops.
He was brought in for questioning and had to take a polygraph.
He passed it, and after a lengthy interrogation, he was no longer a suspect.
The thing was, though, let’s just say this guy wasn’t exactly an angel.
He had a bunch of dodgy acquaintances and he told the cops who he thought might have
committed the crime.
As well as the guy with the shaved-off beard, he also told them about a fair-haired guy
who was likely the other killer.
But guess what, when cops looked for him they discovered he was in prison when the murders
happened.
The police had nothing, but this story is just getting started.
We looked at Indianapolis Star news clippings from a few years after the crime and it seems
the cops thought they had their man in the mid-80s.
You see, one day they got a call from an inmate serving time at Pendleton Correctional Facility.
The man’s name was Donald Forrester.
He told the cops right out that he’d committed the murders.
Sometime later, he went with the police to where the bodies were buried.
He told them where he’d dumped each one and he told them about the broken knife – something
he shouldn’t have known because it wasn’t made public.
This guy had been in and out of prison most of his adult life.
He was serving a 95-year sentence for abduction and rape when he got in touch with the police.
He’d also abducted a woman prior to being sentenced.
She escaped from him, jumping out of his moving vehicle.
She told the police she was so sure he was going to kill her.
This was a very bad man, perhaps capable of killing four innocent people.
This is how Forrester described the night of the crime.
He said the brother of the assistant manager owed him and two others money from a drug
deal.
They went to the restaurant to get the cash from his sister, but she refused to give them
anything.
A fight broke out when one of the male staff tried to protect her.
In the melee, one of the teens fell and hit his head.
Forrester said they thought he was dead, and that’s why they executed everyone.
They’d driven out to the woods, taking Demerol for some courage, while all the time the four
victims were begging for their lives.
It sounds like something from a movie, and we hate to say it, but it’s possible the
guy was making all this up.
95 years is a long time.
Maybe he wanted to mess with the investigation, or maybe he thought he could get some years
off his sentence.
Still, when the cops spoke to the man’s wife, she told them he’d driven out to near
where those killings happened to collect firearm shell casings.
She said later he flushed them down a toilet, so the cops went to the house and looked at
the septic tank there.
Guess what they found?
Shell casings.
Cops interrogated Forrester numerous times, but then one day he refused to talk, saying
only that he’d lied to them and he hadn’t committed the murders.
He said he could help them, though.
He then asked for immunity from the crime in return for that help.
He got it, but still, no arrests were made after all the supposed help the police received.
The last newspaper clipping we could find read.
“The immunity granted by Marion county prosecutor may be voided if it is shown he did participate
in the killings.”
Why couldn’t the police charge this guy?
Well, they just didn’t have enough evidence.
Even with modern DNA technology they couldn’t make anything stick, plus the knife handle
was missing, the gun was missing, and the restaurant had had a good rubdown by those
hardworking employees.
Police did test DNA many times, and nothing led back to Forrester.
Still, how did he know things that the cops had never made public?
What about those bullet casings?
And you should also know that his cousin, who was his accomplice in the abduction crime,
lived directly opposite that Burger Chef.
It totally looked like he did it, but watch on, because you might soon change your mind.
For many more years, investigators looked high and low.
If they’d been looking for a needle in a haystack, they’d have put every last piece
of straw under a microscope.
Some locals forgot about the killings, but others, amateur sleuths themselves, never
forgot.
Word on the street said the cops knew exactly who’d done it.
Years later, Cramer, now retired, bald, wearing a white beard, said he was obsessed with that
crime.
Even now he has a lot of names in his head, a lot of questions that need to be answered.
One thing he is sure of is that the investigation was botched from the start.
He said it’s known that because the cops didn’t take photos of the restaurant on
the night of the murders, they staged the scene the day after.
They were so sure that night the kids were ok, they just didn’t do anything.
Cramer knows this case better than anyone, and he says while a lot of names have been
thrown around – the beard-shaver, the pool player, the woman abductor – it’s more
complicated than it seems.
It’s too easy to name people that look or looked guilty, he said.
In a recent interview, he also said, “I was in the dark, I'm still in the dark.”
Still, there are more twists to this tale.
As we said at the start, there’s a Breaking Bad element to this story.
We will now ask you to recall a fictional fast-food restaurant called, “Los Pollos
Hermanos.”
This is the place the character “Gus” manages at the same time as running a mega-meth
lab.
Well, police in this real case actually had evidence that a large drug ring was being
managed out of that Burger Chef.
It was investigated, but apparently, just before the murders, that ring stopped operating
there.
It gets even stranger when you hear that the dead assistant manager’s brother was in
fact later imprisoned for selling cocaine.
While serving that sentence, he had a run-in with another prisoner.
His name was Allen Pruitt.
He walked up to the brother one day and said with a wry smile on his face, “Sorry about
your sister.”
He said it in a way that suggested he knew a lot about those murders.
A prison counselor that was close by said it seemed like a taunt.
The counselor got in touch with the cops and the cops in turn contacted Pruitt.
This was a few years after the murders.
Pruitt told the investigators that he had seen what happened at the restaurant that
night, two men abducted the four youngsters and took them away in an orange van and the
assistant manager’s white car.
He said the men were called Tim Willoughby and Jeff Reed, but he also said at first he
didn’t think anything of it because he just thought they were all going out on the town.
But then he saw something that made him change his mind.
One of the older guy’s bashed one of the male teen’s heads into the side of the van.
He also said this.
Sometime after the night of the murders, he was playing frisbee close to a Dairy Queen
restaurant when he saw that orange van again.
Two guys in the van drove up to him and said do you wanna come for a smoke and a drive.
They meant a smoke of weed of course.
This now gets really messed up, because he didn’t only take them up on the offer, but
when he got inside the back of the van, the guys, plus the very stoned girlfriend of Willoughby,
all start asking him about what he saw that night.
As this was happening, the girl, named Mary Ann Higginbotham, out of her mind, started
muttering about murders of staff at the Burger Chef.
She also said the two guys in the front did it and they’d kill her if she breathed a
word of it to anyone.
Pruitt, understanding the gravity of the situation, told those guys he actually hadn’t seen
them that night.
The four of them then drove down a quiet lane nicknamed the Devil's Backbone.
They stopped the van and everyone got out.
The girl stood next to Pruitt and whispered to him, “Run!
They’re going to kill you.”
He shot off like a gazelle freed from a lion’s claws.
Behind him, he heard a gunshot, but then he jumped into a creek and swam away.
When Cramer was listening to this his impression was that Pruitt was telling the truth.
If this story couldn’t get any darker, Willoughby later disappeared off the face of the Earth.
He has since been presumed dead, but his body has never been found.
As for his girlfriend, the one who’d helped Pruitt, she was found dead and stuffed inside
a barrel in 1979.
Ok, so if that is the truth, case solved surely?
You should already know this story takes a lot of turns, and it turned out that Pruitt
would change his story over the years when talking to Cramer and documentary filmmakers.
In one of his last statements he said he definitely saw that van, but he said he didn’t see
any of the victims.
He also said he’d made the trip out to Devil’s Backbone story up.
But why would he do that?
Well, he said the cops harassed him and kept harassing him in regards to that crime.
In his own words, he said, “They just started bugging me and hounding me and pushing me
and pushing me and pushing me.
I just got to the point, I finally just started telling them anything they wanted to hear.
If I knew who killed them kids, don't think for a split second that I wouldn't rat them
out.”
Then guess what happened, the guy with the 95-year prison sentence called the cops again.
For the second time, he said he’d committed those murders.
Cramer went to the prison to talk to him and he wasn’t impressed.
He said the guy confessed alright – same story, drugs, a heroic burger maker, teens
begging for their lives – but Cramer said it was obvious Forrester was lying.
And listen to this, even though this guy might have looked guilty, a series of letters he
wrote from prison seemed to contradict that.
In one letter he got mad at a relative for telling the cops he likely did it, and in
another letter he thanked a prosecutor for putting him behind bars, telling him if he
hadn’t been locked up it’s likely one day he would have killed somebody.
In fact, the guy’s story didn’t add up at all.
One of his supposed accomplices that night couldn’t have been with him because he was
in prison on the night of the murders.
The newspapers published his confession and much of the public believed it was him, but
the police and the prosecutors understood the evidence and it looked like the guy was
a chronic liar.
One of the last thing’s Forrester said to Cramer was this:
“If you send me back to prison, you'll never solve this.”
Maybe he thought by helping the cops he could get released early, and that’s why he lied.
That’s what Cramer thinks anyway.
We won’t ever know, because Forrester died in prison in 2006.
We now have one question for you to answer.
Just close your eyes for a few seconds and imagine young Jayne, along with Ruth, Danny,
and Mark, finishing up work that night.
It’s not far from midnight and the streets are quiet.
What happens next?
Now you need to watch, “The Most Shocking Unsolved Murders In The World.”
Or, take a look at, “These Missing People Were Mysteriously Found Alive.”