5725 Crawfordsville Rd, Speedway, IN 46224
ADVERTISEMENT
This page contains affiliate links. We may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Author: Jewls Krueger
On the night of Friday, November 17, 1978, four young employees at a Burger Chef restaurant in Speedway, Indiana, were abducted from the restaurant after closing and driven roughly 20 miles south to a wooded field in Johnson County, where all four were killed. A botched initial investigation, in which the crime scene was cleaned and the restaurant reopened before authorities realized what had actually happened, effectively destroyed the physical evidence and left the case unsolvable in real time.
More than 40 years later, no one has ever been charged in what remains one of the most infamous unsolved crimes in Indiana history.
The four employees working the closing shift that Friday night were assistant manager Jayne Friedt, 20, a college student and longtime Burger Chef employee known by friends as "Sweet Jayne"; Ruth Ellen Shelton, 17, a high school senior and honor student at Northwest High School who was just weeks away from her 18th birthday; Daniel Davis, 16, a junior at Speedway High School; and Mark Flemmonds, 16, a Speedway High sophomore and the youngest of seven children in a Jehovah's Witness family.
The four had been working the 11 p.m. closing shift at the Burger Chef at 5725 Crawfordsville Road, a busy fast food location just west of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
At around 12:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, an off duty Burger Chef employee named Brian Kring stopped by the restaurant to visit his coworkers before heading home. He found the lights on, the back door ajar, all four cash register drawers open, and the safe standing open. The restaurant was empty. Kring called around trying to reach the assistant manager Jayne Friedt, then called the Speedway Police Department. The purses of Friedt and Shelton had been left behind on site. Roughly $581 was missing from the register.
Speedway police, believing they had a case of teenage petty theft, made an early and consequential decision. Assuming the four employees had simply cleaned out the till and gone out for a night on the town, they allowed morning staff to clean the restaurant and open for business as usual. No crime scene photographs were taken, no evidence was collected, and any physical evidence that had been at the scene was destroyed.
The Burger Chef Four - Public Domain
When the four employees still had not returned by Saturday afternoon, and Jayne Friedt's Chevrolet Vega was found abandoned a few blocks away on West 16th Street, concerns began to grow. Their families reported them missing, and by Sunday morning a search was underway.
On Sunday afternoon, November 19, 1978, a local property owner walking through a rural wooded area of Johnson County, roughly 20 miles south of Speedway, discovered the bodies of all four employees, still dressed in their brown and orange Burger Chef uniforms. Daniel Davis and Ruth Ellen Shelton had been shot in the back of the head with a .38 caliber firearm. Jayne Friedt had been stabbed twice in the chest. Mark Flemmonds' body was found about 50 yards away from the others; his cause of death was determined to be blunt force trauma, apparently from hitting his head on a tree.
Investigators believe the initial mistake of allowing the restaurant to be cleaned effectively destroyed the case. Speedway police officer Buddy Ellwanger, who was later assigned to the investigation, admitted plainly that "we screwed it up from the beginning." Over the next four decades, the Indiana State Police and FBI followed thousands of leads across Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Texas. Burger Chef's corporate parent company offered a $25,000 reward that was never claimed.
Further Reading
The most promising lead came in November 1984, when a 34 year old sex offender named Donald Wayne Forrester, who had just begun serving a 95 year sentence at the Pendleton Correctional Facility for rape, contacted Speedway investigators and offered a confession. Forrester claimed that Jayne Friedt's brother James had owed money on a drug deal and that he and three associates had come to the restaurant to threaten her, only for the encounter to escalate into the abduction and murder of all four employees. He named three men he said had killed Friedt and Flemmonds, claimed responsibility for shooting Davis and Shelton, and led investigators to a river where he said he had thrown the gun. A thorough search of the river turned up no weapon. His ex-wife would later tell investigators that Forrester had driven her out to a wooded area shortly after the murders and retrieved several shell casings, which he then flushed down a toilet. Forrester was never charged in the case and died in prison.
Investigators later came to believe the murders were most likely carried out by a small crew of experienced restaurant robbers, and that assistant manager Jayne Friedt had likely recognized one of them from another Burger Chef location where she had previously worked. Retired Indiana State Police 1st Sergeant Stoney Vann, who was the lead investigator on the case from 1998 until his retirement in 2018, said in a 2023 interview that he believes he knows who was responsible, but that a conviction is no longer possible without physical evidence. "This is the type of case that I will take to my grave," he said. The Indiana State Police continue to keep the case open.
The original Burger Chef restaurant at 5725 Crawfordsville Road in Speedway, Indiana, remained standing for more than four decades after the murders, occupied by a series of small businesses and, most recently, a CashLand pawn shop that closed in 2016. In January 2024, the Town of Speedway announced that the building would be demolished. Crews tore it down on March 21, 2024. Speedway town officials told the Associated Press in December 2023 that the site would be redeveloped as a dental office, though Google StreetView shows the site as an empty lot.
Burger Chef Memorial Bench - Creative Commons: HezOnIt500
A permanent memorial to the four victims was dedicated at Leonard Park in Speedway on November 10, 2018, one week before the 40th anniversary of the murders. It consists of four red oak trees, each planted with a bronze plaque bearing a brief biography of one of the four victims, and a nearby marble bench dedicated to their families and friends. The memorial was funded by community donations raised by Speedway resident Alex Wisemiller through the Speedway Parks and Recreation Department's Tribute Tree Program.
Leonard Park is a small public park at 5300 West 14th Street in Speedway, open to the public during daylight hours. Please be respectful of the surrounding community, follow all posted signage during your visit, and remember that the victims' families continue to live in the Speedway area.
On July 18, 1984, a lone gunman killed 21 people and wounded 19 more at a San Ysidro McDonald's before a police sniper stopped him.
The site of the Austin Yogurt Shop Murders where 4 teenage girls were murdered in 1991.
A 1974 robbery went wrong and ended with 4 people dead in Ogden, Utah
A Quick Note From Our Founder
Morbid Tourism is independently researched and maintained by one person. Every location is fact-checked, verified, and mapped so you can find exactly what you're looking for. If this page helped you, a coffee keeps the research going.
