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.”
