Retro Indy: The 1978 Burger Chef murders remain unsolved

At 11 p.m. on Nov. 17, 1978, four young people were closing up a Burger Chef restaurant at 5725 Crawfordsville Road in Speedway.

Jayne Friedt, 20, was the assistant manager on duty that night. The other employees were Ruth Shelton, 17; Daniel Davis, 16; and Mark Flemmonds, 16. They were scheduled to stay a couple of hours past closing to clean up and get things ready for the morning shift.

The Burger Chef chain doesn't exist anymore, but at the time was an Indianapolis-based company with about 600 restaurants nationally. In the early 1980s, it was absorbed by Hardee's.

Around midnight, one of them opened the back door to take out the garbage. What happened next is not fully known, but none of the kids made it home that night.

Their bodies were found two days later in a hilly, wooded area in Johnson County near Center Grove High School. That was about a 40-minute drive from the restaurant where they'd been abducted.

Police theorized it was a robbery gone bad. Maybe one of the robbers was recognized by one of the kids, or maybe it was something else that made the robbers decide to eliminate the witnesses. They took $581 from the safe, but left hundreds more in change and didn't bother to rob the employees themselves.

Friedt's car was outside and the robbers used it to abduct the four employees, still alive at this point. Police said there had to be more than one robber — maybe three or four — so they would have used two cars. They abandoned Friedt's car not far away, probably where they'd left another vehicle parked.

The robbers took their captives to the then-remote area of Johnson County that at least one of them was probably already familiar with. That's where they killed them.

The bodies lay there undiscovered for two days until some hikers came by on the afternoon of Nov. 19. Ruth Shelton and Daniel Davis were lying side by side and had been shot execution-style. Jayne Friedt had been stabbed several times, the knife still in her chest. Mark Flemmonds had run about 75 yards from the scene and ran into a tree. He choked to death on his own blood. The women were not sexually assaulted. The four were found still clad in their brown and orange uniforms.

As it happened, Indianapolis residents were learning about the Burger Chef murders on the same day they were learning about the mass suicides in Guyana at the "Jonestown" compound of the Rev. Jim Jones, who had originally formed his People's Temple cult in Indianapolis. The front pages of the two Indianapolis newspapers were dominated by these two tragic stories.

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For the next few weeks, Speedway and Indianapolis police chased every lead they could find but came up empty each time. A few prison inmates claimed to know something, but nothing they said panned out.

Lots of people speculated that the killings must be connected to a series of bombs that went off in Speedway that summer, or to a recent murder in Speedway only a short distance from the Burger Chef.

Police chased those theories also. The Speedway bombing case was eventually solved, but police found no evidence suggesting it was related to the Burger Chef case.

Burger Chef offered a $25,000 reward and The Indianapolis Star set up a way for potential informants to keep their identities secret while still being eligible for the reward.

Nothing came of it and the case went cold. It remains unsolved.

In 2018, stymied over four decades in their efforts to solve one of Indianapolis' most shocking crimes, police released a photograph of a knife blade.

The blade itself is 4 and 1/2 inches, but the photo of the blade, unveiled at a news conference, was enlarged. Investigators wanted the image to make an impression on the public. They hoped it would jog someone's memory.