SPEEDWAY — Forty-five years have passed since four young Burger Chef employees disappeared from a restaurant on Crawfordsville Road.
An off-duty co-worker found the restaurant open sometime after midnight, on Nov. 17, 1978.
The workers on duty — Jayne Friedt, 20, Ruth Shelton, 17, Mark Flemmonds, 17, and Daniel Davis, 16 — were gone.
Their bodies were found two days later in remote area of Johnson County.
Four-and-a-half decades later, the Burger Chef murders remain one of Indiana's most notorious and confounding unsolved crimes.
"I think about it often. I dream about it sometimes," said retired Indiana State Police 1st Sgt. Stoney Vann. "This is the type of case that I will take to my grave."
Vann was the lead investigator in the Burger Chef homicides from 1998 until he retired in 2018. He held the case longer than any investigator before or since.
There has been plenty of speculation over who killed the four victims, but no one has ever been arrested.
Four missing workers
Burger Chef was a national fast-food chain headquartered in Indianapolis. The last restaurant closed in 1996.
About 12:30 a.m. on an early Saturday morning 45 years ago, an off-duty employee went to the Burger Chef in Speedway and found the doors open and the restaurant empty, according to FBI records.
The back door, usually shut and secured with a metal bar, was ajar about three inches, according to the FBI.
The four cash register drawers were open; the cash was gone, but the change remained. The robbers took about $500, the FBI said.
The workers were gone too. Friedt was the assistant manager. The others were high school students.
Police found purses belonging to Friedt and Shelton, but records say Friedt's car was gone.
About four hours later, officers found Friedt's Chevrolet Vega just blocks away in the 5500 block of West 16th Street, according to the FBI.
The employee who found the place empty that Saturday morning called a manager, who called Speedway police, according to the FBI records.
Four bodies in Johnson County
Two days after the workers disappeared, Sunday Nov. 19, 1978, FBI records said a resident walking a dog found two bodies side-by-side in a Johnson County field and called police.
The bodies were those of were Ruth Shelton and Daniel Davis. Each had each been shot multiple times with a .38-caliber handgun, Vann told WRTV.
Police found Jayne Friedt's body about 75 yards away from where Shelton and Davis had been executed, Vann said. She'd been stabbed multiple times. The knife blade was still in her chest, the handle broken off.
Police found Mark Flemmonds' body about 150 feet away, Vann said. He was lying on his back near a tree. There was blood on his face and the coroner later found he died of asphyxiation, according to records.
Investigators think Flemmonds may have run full speed into the tree and knocked himself out, fell face up and choked on his own blood, Vann said.
A sister's pain
Theresa Jefferies was home with her brother Gordon when their parents broke the news 45 years ago that their sister, Ruth Shelton, was dead.
"They walked into the dining room and both Gordon and I were there," Jefferies said. "And she just looked at me and said 'Ruth Ellen is in heaven with your grandma and grandpa.'"
Jefferies was 12 at the time. Shelton was a few weeks shy of her 18th birthday. As the years pass, she still clings to hope that police will someday solve the crime.
"I've always had some hope, but I guess there's a difference between hoping and believing," Jefferies said. "I know there's always that chance this could actually be solved. But I'm not going to hold my breath for it."
Jefferies now spends less focusing on the crime and more time thinking about the lives taken far too soon.
"Not a single one of them had victim across their name tag," Jefferies said. "They're people. They deserve to be remembered for who they are, rather than what happened to them."
The investigation
In the first hours after the workers went missing, Vann said Speedway police assumed they were "irresponsible kids" who had taken off for a night out with the stolen cash.
"(Police thought) they're being irresponsible and they're going to show up in a few hours," Vann said. "So not a lot of investigation was done."
Ignoring the fact that young women don't typically leave purses behind when they go out, officers didn't call crime scene technicians; they didn't dust for fingerprints; they didn't take pictures of the scene.
Ten years after the murders, former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith sharply criticized the work of Speedway police.
"That Burger Chef quadruple murder stands out as the most alarming example of mayhem in our city that hasn’t been solved," said Goldsmith in November 1988. He had been recently elected Marion County prosecutor in 1978 when the Burger Chef workers were killed.
"Everyone knows about it, everyone knows how serious it was, and represents not the best in police work and not the best in terms of violence in our community," Goldsmith said. "It’s a very frustrating crime that looks now that it will go unsolved forever."
The FBI was called in about 11 hours after the workers were abducted, records show.
The investigation didn't ramp up until the bodies were discovered. Several dozen detectives from various agencies would assist in the weeks that followed, according to media reports.
Investigators soon found a witness who saw two men in the alley behind the business about an hour or so before the robbery and abductions, according to the FBI records.
One of those men, a guy with a bushy beard and mustache, asked the witness if she had any identification, then told her to "get out of here because there's been a lot vandalism," according to FBI records.
The witness said the second man, with short dark hair and clean-shaven face, said nothing.
A police artist made a sketch of these men. Later, detectives enlisted the aid of Purdue University's art department to create clay busts of the suspects.
Those gray likenesses of a pair of suspected killers are now kept at the Indiana State Police Museum on the far east side of Indianapolis.
Who are they?
Vann, the detective who investigated the Burger Chef killings for more years than anyone else, thinks he knows the identities of the killers.
But for a detective, knowing something is far cry from being able to prove it in a courtroom. In two decades, Vann was never able to build a strong enough case to make an arrest.
Vann believes the killers were part of a group of five people suspected in a string of Burger Chef and other fast-food restaurant robberies in the 1970s.
These suspects were known to hit a place in pairs, Vann said. They'd wait behind the business before closing and ambush a worker taking out the trash.
They go inside through a back door, clean out the registers and leave, Vann said.
"Sometimes this group would steal a vehicle, drive the vehicle back to their getaway car, and then leave," Vann said. "There was a lot of information that matched identically to the Speedway Burger Chef robbery."
The robbery crew used a .38-caliber handgun in at least one other crime, Vann said.
They'd never killed in prior crimes, so why did they have to abduct and kill these victims?
Vann thinks one of the employees, Assistant Manager Jayne Friedt, recognized one of the robbers as a customer from when she had worked at another Burger Chef location.
Faced with the possibility of going to prison, Vann said he believes the robbers turned to murder.
They convinced the four employees to leave with them in Friedt's car; switched to their get-away vehicle; drove to Johnson County and marched the victims to the field where they shot Ruth Shelton and Daniel Davis, Vann said.
After the gunshots, Friedt and Flemmonds ran, Vann said. The killers ran out of bullets in the six-shot .38 revolver.
They chased Friedt and stabbed her to death with a knife, Vann said.
They may have thought Flemmonds got away, Vann said.
"It's pitch black, so when the assassinations occurred between Ruth and Danny, did Jane run in one direction and Mark run in another direction?" Vann said. "Did they even find Mark? Did they think he got away when in fact he hit that tree?"
Flemmonds death was an unfortunate twist of fate, Vann said. Had he not hit that tree, had he fallen on his side instead of his back, he might have survived to tell what happened, Vann said.
After the murders, Vann said, this crew never robbed another restaurant.
Vann said he interviewed one of these robbery suspects decades later. That suspect admitted that his crew might have been responsible for the Speedway Burger Chef murders, Vann said, but stopped short of confessing.
"But what he said was, 'I don't know if they was (responsible) and I wasn't there,'" Vann said.
Three of these suspects are dead, Vann said. One had a heart attack; another died of suicide and the third was a victim of a homicide.
Vann believes two others are still alive and living in Johnson County.
Vann declined to tell WRTV the names of the suspects.
"They are just persons of interest," Vann said. "This is just Stoney Vann's theory, and believe it or not, I've been wrong before."
Active investigation
Vann handed the Burger Chef investigation to a new detective after he retired in 2018. That detective declined to be interviewed, but a State Police spokesman said the case won't be closed until the victims have justice.
"The case is still under active investigation," Sgt. John Perrine said, noting investigators have been turning the handwritten documents in the case into a digital database that can be easily searched.
There's also hope that improvements in DNA and other scientific methods of gathering clues might give investigators the break they need to finally solve these murders.
Vann told WRTV there are two items of evidence in this case that he hopes will be continually tested for DNA because they might have been touched or worn by one of the killers — a fleece -lined denim jacket and a brown-and-orange Burger Chef uniform shirt that was found near, but not on, one of the victims.
"Technology has changed in the past 45 years on how we investigate crimes like this and it continues to get better," Perrine said. "We're hoping that we're on the cusp of technology that will give us substantial leads in this case and so that we can get some closure for these families 45 years later."
A link to the full FBI file on the Burger Chef murders is available below.
Contact WRTV reporter Vic Ryckaert at victor.ryckaert@wrtv.com or on X/Twitter: @vicryc.
