The Burger Chef Murders

1978 was a challenging year for the Indianapolis, Indiana enclave of Speedway. In a town that boasted less than two homicides in collective memory, a sudden bizarre string of crimes that year left residents shaken. However, these incidents were nothing compared to the horrific murders of four Speedway teenagers working at a fast-food restaurant called Burger Chef on November 17, 1978…

A little after midnight on November 17, 1978, a teenager named Brian Craine was driving to his home in Speedway, Indiana when he decided to stop by his workplace to visit his coworkers. He worked at the Speedway Burger Chef, and knowing the restaurant closed at 11 pm, he wanted to pop in and see if his friends needed help closing the shop.

When he got there, he found the restaurant empty, but it wasn’t closed. The four employees scheduled to work that night, 20-year-old Jayne Friedt, 16-year-old Daniel Davis, 16-year-old Mark Flemmonds, and 17-year-old Ruth Shelton were all absent, but the door was left open and the lights were still on.

After calling around in search of the assistant manager Jayne, Brian called the Speedway police, who quickly decided it was a case of petty embezzlement. A bunch of irresponsible teenagers walked off the job and went out for a night on the town.

When none of the four teenagers showed up at home or their next Burger Chef shifts, the families became extremely concerned. Jayne Friedt’s Chevy Vega was located in the middle of town the next morning, and the severity of the situation became clear. The police kicked into gear and launched a search for four missing persons.

On Sunday, November 19, 1978, two days after Brian Craine entered the abandoned Speedway Burger Chef restaurant, police received a devastating call. Twenty miles south of Speedway, in Johnson County, four bodies had been discovered in a rural field, shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned to death. They were all clad in orange and brown Burger Chef uniforms…

This is the story of the Burger Chef Murders.

The first question you might have is, “What the heck is a Burger Chef?”

Burger Chef used to rival McDonalds and Wendy’s in the United States. It was a massive fast-food chain that had over 600 locations nationwide, but in the late 1980s, Hardee’s purchased the chain. The last Burger Chef location closed in the 1990s.

If you’ve heard of Speedway, Indiana, it’s probably because you’re familiar with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indy 500 race. Most people don’t even know Speedway is a town. Incorporated in the 1920s, Speedway was built to support the automotive industry. It is hardly distinguishable from Indianapolis; Speedway is located just west of the downtown area and is surrounded by Indianapolis suburbs. In 1980, their population was just over 12,000 people. They have their own police force, post office, and public school system.

Before 1978, Speedway was considered a peaceful place to live, but a string of violent crimes put the town in the national spotlight. On July 29, 1978, a 65-year-old woman named Julia Scyphers was shot to death inside her garage. The homicide shocked residents because it seemed so random, and murder was incredibly uncommon in the town.

Then, between September 1st and September 6th, a series of eight bombings occurred. The bombs were placed in trash cans, beneath a police patrol car, in the town bowling alley, and finally, in a gym bag in the parking lot of Speedway High School. The bombings only injured two people, but the injuries were devastating; the final bombing blew off the leg of a Vietnam veteran and severed an artery in the leg of his wife.

By November, these crimes were still unsolved, and public confidence in the police was low. Then, Burger Chef happened…

The night of November 17th was a Friday, and people were gearing up for the weekend. After servicing the last late-night customers with a craving for char-broiled burgers, four part-time employees at the Speedway Burger Chef closed down the restaurant at 11 pm.

Jayne Friedt, the assistant manager, was twenty years old and a college student in November 1978. Her list of extracurriculars was long and distinguished: yearbook staff, choir, drama, library assistant… and the list goes on. Her nickname was “Sweet Jayne;” people remembered her because of her beaming smile and positive disposition. She’d been working for the Burger Chef company since she was seventeen years old.

Daniel Davis, a sixteen-year-old high school junior, recently joined the Friday night closing shift after another employee quit a week prior. He brought jokes and laughter to the team. In his spare time, Daniel explored photography, taking pictures and developing film in his own homemade darkroom in his spare time.

On the Burger Chef grill was Mark Flemmonds, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Speedway High School. Reared as a Jehovah’s Witness, Mark had six older siblings and was described as a friendly kid. His parents allowed him to get a job at the Speedway Burger Chef because it was within walking distance of their home.

Last but not least, Ruth Ellen Shelton rounded out the Burger Chef staff on that chilly November night. She was a golden child to her parents. Intelligent and driven, honor student Ruth aspired to be a computer scientist one day. In addition to participating in several youth ministries at the Westside Church of the Nazarene, Ruth studied music at what is now the University of Indianapolis to earn early college credits.

These four kids, full of promise, passion, and potential, went about their nightly closing duties, closing the registers, counting cash, scrubbing the cookware, and cleaning the floors. But, sometime before midnight, something went terribly wrong.

By the time Brian arrived shortly after 12 am, he found the backdoor ajar and the restaurant deserted.

The safe in the office was wide open and empty, cleared of $581 cash and other valuables. Purses belonging to Jayne and Ruth were still in the office. Over $100 in register change sat untouched. If this was a robbery, the perpetrators did a poor job getting all of the loot. Jayne’s 1974 Chevrolet Vega was also gone from the parking lot.

Assuming he simply didn’t have the full story, Brian called around to see if he could track down Jayne, who was the assistant manager in charge of the shift. He called another Burger Chef restaurant on the other side of town where Jane had previously worked, but the manager there hadn’t heard from her either.

Finally, as worry, fear, and doubt crept into Brian’s mind, he called the head manager of the Speedway Burger Chef and told him what he’d walked into. That manager told Brian to call the police, which he promptly did.

The Speedway police were less concerned by what they found inside the restaurant that night. Sure, it was odd that the back door was open, and that Ruth and Jayne had left their purses behind, but the responding officers choked it up to teenage carelessness. They assumed the four kids had taken the cash from the restaurant and gone out partying. They’d turn up soon enough, police told friends and families of the victims, once the cash ran out and the hangovers wore off.

This assessment didn’t jive with what the manager knew about these four employees, but since the police seemed to have the case in hand, Burger Chef needed to get on with business. The next morning, a new shift of employees came into the restaurant and scrubbed the place from top to bottom. Not a single scrap of evidence had been collected.

The crime scene was cleaned and sanitized without any photographic evidence to speak of. It was a terrible mistake that would plague the investigation and haunt the Speedway police for the next four decades.

Years later, Marion County Detective Virgil Vandagriff told Indianapolis Monthly:

“They didn’t process it as a murder; they didn’t know it was a murder. Police didn’t have a clue what was going on at the restaurant. They kind of messed up the crime scene.”

Indeed, they didn’t know they had a murder on their hands. They were still blissfully content with believing the four employees had run off with the restaurant cash and were on a joyride… until Jayne Friedt’s car was located early in the morning on November 18th.

Jayne drove a 1974 white Chevy Vega, a small, sporty two-door sedan. Police found the car unlocked and abandoned in the middle of town. At that point, it became clear to everyone from the families to the police that these four people had been abducted and were missing. Police launched a search.

No ransom calls came in, so all the families could do was wait… and they didn’t have to wait long.

On the morning of Sunday, November 19th, police received a call from a rural area in Johnson County, about 20 miles south of Speedway. Two people walking around their property had discovered dead bodies lying face down in the leaves and the dirt. When investigators arrived, their worst fears were confirmed.

Ruth Shelton and Daniel Davis were side by side, brutally executed via several .38 caliber gunshot wounds to their heads. A few yards away, the body of Jayne Freidt was found with a broken blade from a five-inch hunting knife protruding from her sternum. Down the hill, Mark Flemmonds lay dead from a severe beating with a chain-like instrument. He had asphyxiated on his own blood and bile.

Police handling of this crime scene wasn’t much better than at the Burger Chef restaurant. As word of the horrific murders spread, the investigative team grew. In a 2019 book titled The Burger Chef Murders in Indiana by Julie Young, she wrote:

“As various departments converged on the site, some drove through areas that should have been sealed off. There were rumors that one of the bodies was moved before the coroner or evidence technician arrived at the scene.”

Allegedly, one of the investigative officers even took a piece of identification found on a body home with him and didn’t realize it until several weeks later.

Despite the mistakes, the police didn’t lack manpower when it came to the investigation. Within days, the Indiana State Police, the Marion County Sheriff's Department, the Indianapolis Police, and the FBI swooped in to aid Speedway police. The problem was the integrity of the crime scene was compromised entirely, and the first 48 hours of the investigation were long gone.

With little to go on, police assumed the murders had resulted from a robbery gone wrong. Mark Flemmonds hadn’t actually been scheduled to work the Friday night closing shift; he was covering for another employee. Police wondered if maybe Flemmonds had recognized the robbers, and as a result, the perpetrators killed all of them to eliminate any witnesses.

The victims were all still fully clothed in their brown and orange Burger Chef uniforms; a few of them even had cash in their pockets and personal effects like jewelry and watches still on their persons. Even though robbery was the motive police wanted to reach for, because of all of the valuables left behind, it was not the easiest conclusion to justify.  It’s also hard to reconcile the fact that all of this carnage took place for a measly $581. But, people have been murdered for much less...

Other than two teenage witnesses who claimed to see two men around the Burger Chef the night of the abduction, investigators had zero evidence in the case.

On Saturday, November 18, a 16-year-old male called Speedway police and told them he had seen two men lurking about the Burger Chef restaurant shortly before closing time the night before.

According to the boy, the men, who were both white and in their 30s, approached him and his girlfriend as they were sitting in the parking lot of the Dunkin Doughnuts next door to the Burger Chef. They told them to get out of there because, (quote) “there had been lots of vandalism going on.” One of the men had a beard, and the other was blonde and clean-shaven. The bearded man did the talking, and he kept a handkerchief over his mouth while he spoke.

Based on the composite sketches created from the witness descriptions, police did something unusual; they commissioned forensic artists to carve full-sized clay busts of the suspects. You can still see these bizarre sculptures by doing a cursory Google search.

Understandably, the murders rocked the small Indianapolis community. One resident who spoke to a newspaper shortly after the crimes said,

“I wouldn’t be surprised if people start moving out of Speedway if people don’t stop getting killed here. People just don’t want to come into this area.”

To another local, the police’s inability to solve the other crimes from earlier in the year offered little comfort that they would be able to crack the Burger Chef case:

 “They didn’t solve the one murder or the bombings. They won’t solve this one either.”

Police desperately appealed to the public for any tips or information related to the case, and they followed any lead, no matter how unlikely.

According to a November 21, 1978 newspaper article from the Kokomo Tribune, the Speedway Investigators met with detectives from Oklahoma to see if there was any connection to an unsolved massacre of 6 people at an Oklahoma City steak house in July. Nothing of substance came from the meeting.

To help compel witnesses to come forward, the Burger Chef Systems company posted a $25,000 cash reward for any information leading to an arrest. Another person donated $10,000 anonymously. Steak n’ Shake added several thousand to the reward as well, but no one with any reliable information came forward.

Police did get a few hits from those initial composite drawings and clay busts. 

Reportedly, a man who resembled one of the sketches was overheard in a Greenwood bar just south of Indianapolis bragging about committing the murders. Someone contacted the police, and Detective Virgil Vandagriff went to the bar undercover to observe the man. He ended up shooting pool with the suspect, and just like the witness had said, the man was bragging loudly about robbing and killing the Burger Chef workers. According to Vandagriff, the man even snapped his pool cue over his knee to illustrate how he snuffed out one of the young lives that November night.

Police arrested the man soon after and brought him in for questioning, but the man denied all involvement once in police custody. Investigators administered a polygraph test, and he allegedly passed it. At the time, polygraphs were seen as conclusive evidence and not junk science, so police let the man go. Before he left, however, he allegedly gave police the names of a few men involved in a “fast-food robbery gang.”

Based on this information, police located a bearded suspect in the nearby town of Franklin. He (unnamed in documents released to the public) had a likeness to the composite drawing and didn’t have an alibi for the night of the murders. What’s more,  his neighbor was a clean-shaven man with fair hair and a dead ringer for the second composite sketch. Police asked the bearded man to come in for a line-up, but when he showed up, he had shaved his beard for the first time in 5 years. Suspicious?

They tried to offer both suspects plea deals, but they refused to talk. Without any hard evidence, police had to drop the inquiry.

Yet another police theory was centered around the belief that one or more of the employees may have been dealing drugs. In March 1981, Jayne Friedt’s brother, James, was arrested on cocaine charges, and for a brief moment, police thought he might have been the reason, directly or indirectly, behind the violence that night in 1978. Within six days, police let him go due to lack of evidence.

The drug theory was further corroborated a few years later when police scored their most promising suspect yet. November 1984, exactly six years after the Burger Chef murders, Speedway investigators received a call from Pendleton Correctional Facility. Donald Wayne Forrester, a 34-year-old sex offender beginning a 95-year sentence for rape, had some information, and not just a tip; he wanted to confess to the Burger Chef murders.

Police went into the talk with Forrester with a healthy dose of skepticism. Forrester was about to be transferred to the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, which, as a sex offender, was almost certainly going to be a very bad time for him. Detectives assumed he wanted to parlay some bogus information about the Burger Chef case into a possible prison transfer to keep him out of Michigan City. They were right; that’s exactly what he wanted, except the more they talked to him, the more they began to realize that his story might not be bogus at all.

On November 17, 1978, Donald Forrester was living in Speedway, but he had grown up near the area where the four bodies were discovered. Check.

For detectives who had been grasping at straws for six years, this was compelling enough to bring Forrester to Marion County for direct questioning. Once there, Forrester claimed to be the one who executed Daniel Davis and Ruth Shelton with the .38. Even more compelling, detectives drove Forrester to the field where the bodies had been found, and he was able to pinpoint exactly where each body had been originally located. Check.

Between 1984 and 1986, Forrester gradually opened up to investigators with more information. He told them that right after the murders, he and his wife drove out to the field so he could pick up the spent .38 shell casings. Once he found them, they drove home, and he flushed them down the toilet of his old house.

Forrester’s ex-wife confirmed the story. Check.

Police got a warrant to search the septic tank of the old address. They dug through 8 years of raw sewage and found several .38 shell casings. Check.

Forrester offered this version of events of what happened the night of November 17, 1978:

James Friedt was indeed in bad with some drug dealers. He owed money to the wrong people, so that Friday night, a group of dealers, including Forrester, went to the Burger Chef to put pressure on Jayne. When they showed up and began threatening to hurt her if her brother didn’t come up with the cash, 16-year-old Mark Flemmonds tried to defend her.

His chivalry started a fight, and during the melee, Mark fell and hit his head. The blow knocked him unconscious, and in a moment of panic, the perpetrators believed he was dead. Thinking they were about to go down for murder, the drug dealers decided then and there to eliminate the witnesses to the crime. They put all four of the Burger Chef employees in Jayne’s car and drove to the middle of town. Then, they dumped Jayne’s Chevy Vega and hopped into their getaway car.

Forrester told police they drove the kids to the woods and executed all of them; he described how each one died in detail.

This confession was damning. Police were sure they had their man. Forrester even offered three other names of men involved. But, tragically, in November 1986, someone in the department leaked information about Forrester to the press. He clammed up immediately and recanted his statements. Without his cooperation, they weren’t able to locate any more physical evidence to make a case against him and his accomplices. The most promising lead police had had in years crashed and burned.

The case was plunged yet again into the depths of icy coldness, and it would stay cold. Forrester died of cancer while in prison in 2006. Whatever else he knew about the case died with him.

Police still get tips about the Burger Chef murders to this day. Investigators have come and gone. Retired detectives still leaf through the 20+ 3-inch binders of hand-written and typed notes on the case file. Every few years, a new investigator is assigned to the case in hopes that fresh eyes will yield new developments.

Most recently, First Sergeant Bill Dalton was promoted to Indianapolis District Investigations Commander. Along with a slew of other very important duties like overseeing operations and reviewing case reports, he is also in charge of keeping up with cold cases. In 2018, Sgt. Dalton announced they were looking into using new forensic technology to test evidence in the Burger Chef case.

This announcement came on the heels of a public plea by Ruth Shelton’s sister, Theresa Jefferies, for anyone with information about the case to come forward. She was quoted as saying:

"We don't have all the answers. And there's someone out there that does," she said. "I hope that before my time on Earth is gone that I have those answers."

Sgt. Dalton echoed Jeffries in a public statement:

"Somebody knows. Somebody has carried this secret for 40 years. And it's time to unload that secret." 

Dalton even released evidence that hadn’t been widely publicized before: a picture of the broken blade lodged in Jayne Friedt’s chest the night she died. Police hoped the release of this image might jog the memory of someone related to one of the perpetrators. So far, no one has come forward.

The most agonizing part for families of the victims in unsolved cases is the lack of closure. These recent declarations by police make them seem confident that they will uncover evidence leading to a conclusion, but the likelihood of solving this 40-year-old case is slim, at best.

Given the botched initial investigation and the lack of evidence collected from the crime scenes, it seems this case might remain forever unresolved.