Like many fast-food chains, Burger Chef was mainly staffed by teenagers and young adults, and the closing shift at the Speedway Indianapolis store on Friday, November 17, 1978, was no different.
Sixteen-year-old Mark Flemmonds, 17-year-old Ruth Shelton, 16-year-old Danny Davis and their manager, 20-year-old Jayne Friedt, were in charge of packing up, mopping and preparing the store for the morning team.
But none of them made it home that night.
Watch: The Speedway Murders trailer. Post continues below.
Their store was found abandoned at about midnight with the lights still on and the doors flung open.
Local police initially dismissed it as just a bunch of youngsters being irresponsible and leaving the store half packed down so they could hit the town. They couldn't have been more wrong.
The bodies of Mark, Ruth, Danny and Jayne were found in nearby woods two days later, still wearing their recognisable brown and red uniforms.
Ruth and Danny had been shot in the back of the head, Jayne had been stabbed in the chest, and Danny died from choking on his own blood, possibly after knocking himself unconscious after running into a tree.
Their deaths shocked the small town of Speedway, which had historically been a place with little crime. Police explored many theories, but they botched a lot of the early investigation and eventually the case went cold.
It wasn't until 40 years later that two Australian film-makers stumbled across the case and were immediately fascinated. They spent the next five years investigating the crime, with their new docu-drama The Speedway Murders shedding light on the potential killer.
Speaking to Mamamia's True Crime Conversations podcast, co-creators Luke Rynderman and Adam Kamien explained, "The crime itself happened on the same weekend as the Jonestown Massacre. So it never really got the attention that it deserved."
It's why the pair decided to re-investigate all the old leads with fresh eyes.
The four most compelling theories.
There had been a series of burglaries at other Burger Chef and fast-food restaurants around the same time, which seemed like the obvious place to start.
As Kamien said, "It's a theory that some people in law enforcement and others still believe is the answer. I mean, it's incredibly compelling... It's very convincing."
But it didn't convince them. "We think that there are some holes in it. [The theory] assumes a lot of things," he said.
Listen to the full interview below. Post continues after podcast.
Then there was the glaring evidence that the victims were found with cash in their pockets, as well as personal effects such as jewellery and watches. The girls' purses had been left behind in the shop, and the only things taken were items from the safe — $581 in cash and other valuables.
There had also been a series of eight random bombings in Speedway in September 1978, and police looked into whether the murders could've been linked.
A man named Brett Kimberlen was convicted of the bombings, with prosecutors and police believing he went on the spree to deflect attention from an ongoing investigation into the murder of 65-year-old Julia Scyphers, who "violently disapproved" of her daughter's relationship with Kimberlin.
While he was considered somewhat of a 'bogeyman' in Speedway, and many locals liked to connect him to the Burger Chef murders, there was no hard evidence he was involved.
Another theory police investigated thoroughly involved Jayne's brother, who was involved in a motorcycle gang and the local drug trade.
Police theorised that Jayne had become involved too, potentially to help her brother pay off a debt, and that she and the others had been killed as a result. Authorities arrested her sibling, but within six days let him go due to lack of evidence.
There was one man who actually confessed to the crime on two different occasions, before re-canting his testimony. Donald Wayne Forrester was a 34-year-old sex offender beginning a 95-year sentence for rape when he first confessed, but police were initially sceptical.
They assumed he was trying to avoid a particularly unfavourable prison transfer, but they did find several .38 shell casings at his home — the same type of gun used in the quadruple murder.
He'd said Jayne had got into some trouble with drug dealers, and he and some other dealers went to put pressure on her. He says they murdered everyone because Mark died during the confrontation, and they needed to eliminate the witnesses.
Forrester was never convicted, and as Rynderman and Kamien suggest in their doco-drama, there were too many inconsistencies in his story. For example, one man he placed at the scene was actually in prison the night of the murders.
"Some of his answers didn't really correlate with how the bodies were actually found," added Rynderman. "And the talk was that he was actually shown into the war room, and got to see a lot of the crime scene photographs before he had his confession. So in the end, he recounted for a second time, [but] they didn't have enough to prosecute."
To this day, no one has ever been convicted for the murders.
The Speedway Murders bombshell.
In The Speedway Murders, a man named Tim Boyer shares a huge secret with the film-makers.
He says his friend, a man named Jeff Reed, confessed to the murders. Reed was known locally as the 'mayor of the snake pit', which was the big party that kicked off the Indianapolis Motor Speedway the town was known for.
"Jeff came up to me and he seemed a little distraught and wanted to talk. Said there was something he really needed to talk about... He said he was in trouble and didn't know quite what to do about it... to my disbelief, he said he was the one responsible for it," Boyer says.
"I don't know who else he told, I might've been the only one. It's a true secret that I've held for 40 years."
Boyer suggested that Reed went into the Burger Chef after seeing Jayne's car. Knowing she owed some money, he went inside to retrieve it and there was a "domino effect and it went south real quick".
He described Reed knocking Mark out during an altercation and "thinking he killed him", so he forced the other young employees into the cooler room before forcing them into his van.
"His initial thought was to drop them off [in the woods] so he could get away. Things went sideways and I'm not sure exactly what happened, but he ended up having to hurt the people," Boyer says in The Speedway Murders.
Reed had brown hair and a bushy beard — not dissimilar to a description that some witnesses gave to police of a man seen in the area that evening. He also drove a yellow Ford van, and multiple witnesses had described a yellow or orange van being seen at the location.
"He was like the incredible Hulk," Boyer said of his friend. "He could be real nice one minute, but if you pissed him off, he was very, very mean. There had been times where he'd hurt people... he had to be bigger and better than everyone else."
Another witness, Allen Pruitt, also placed Jeff Reed at the scene — something he told police during the initial investigations. He recognised a second man with him by the name of Tim Willoughby.
Rynderman and Kamien passed on the information Boyer (who has never spoken to the police) shared with them to authorities, but Reed is now dead. He died in 2011 from stomach cancer.
Tim Willoughby has been missing since 1978.
"Since the film has come out in the US, we've had [more] people coming forward," Rynderman told True Crime Conversations. "And we're happy to pass anything on [to police]."
"They want answers," said Kamien of the families' hopes for the film.
"They want to know [what happened]. Not knowing is the hardest part."
The Speedway Murders is streaming now on Prime Video and Apple TV+.
Feature Image: The Speedway Murders/Apple TV.
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