A 16 year old Burger Chef employee is kidnapped and murdered On a November night in 1978, 16-year-old Mark Flemmonds was covering a shift for a coworker at the Burger Chef restaurant on Crawfordsville Road in Speedway, Indiana. He was working alongside the assistant manager, 20-year-old Jayne Friedt, and two other teenage employees, Ruth Ellen Shelton, 17, and Daniel Davis, 16. It was a Friday, and the four were on the closing shift.
Sometime after the restaurant closed at 11:00 p.m., all four employees vanished.
The next morning, when another employee arrived to find the restaurant empty, the back door ajar, and the safe open, the initial thought from police was that the young workers had taken the money and left. However, as the hours turned into a day and none of the four returned home, a more sinister reality began to set in. The discovery of Friedt's Chevy Vega abandoned in town heightened the growing concern. A frantic search for the missing crew was launched, but it would be two days before their fate was known.
On November 19, the bodies of all four employees were found in a wooded, rural area in Johnson County, about 20 miles away from the Burger Chef. The scene was brutal and bewildering. Daniel Davis and Ruth Shelton had been shot multiple times with a. 38 caliber weapon. Jayne Friedt had been stabbed twice in the chest with such force that the knife's handle broke off. Mark Flemmonds was found a short distance from the others, suggesting he may have tried to escape. He had been severely beaten and died from asphyxiating on his own blood.
The investigation into the Burger Chef murders was plagued with difficulties from the start. Crucial evidence was likely lost when the restaurant was cleaned and reopened the day after the abduction. Though robbery was a suspected motive, with about $581 missing from the register, the killers had left behind the victims' personal valuables. Over the years, investigators have looked into various leads and suspects, including a group known for robbing fast-food restaurants at the time. Eyewitnesses reported seeing two men near the Burger Chef before closing time, and police released composite sketches, but these leads never resulted in an arrest. There have been confessions that were later recanted and theories connecting the crime to a drug deal involving a relative of one of the victims, but none could be substantiated. To this day, the murders of Mark Flemmonds and his three coworkers remain unsolved, a lingering shadow over the community of Speedway.
