A man his missing; his girlfriend is found in a 55 gal drum In the summer of 1978, a 24-year-old white male named Timothy Willoughby vanished from his home in Clayton, Indiana. He was last seen on June 6, 1978, along with his 22-year-old girlfriend, Mary Ann Higginbotham. The couple's disappearance initially raised few alarms, with some speculating they had simply left town. Willoughby had some minor scrapes with the law, including a recent arrest for auto theft, which fueled theories that he had fled to escape his legal troubles.
A year later,
the grim reality of the situation began to unfold. On June 5, 1979, a teenage boy discovered a 55-gallon drum in White Lick Creek in Mooresville. Inside the welded-shut barrel were the skeletal remains of Mary Ann Higginbotham. She had been shot in the back of the head. The discovery immediately turned the focus of the investigation toward her missing boyfriend, Timothy Willoughby, with police initially considering him a prime suspect in her murder. However, as the days turned into years, there was still no sign of Willoughby, and a different, more sinister narrative began to emerge.
Four years after the couple's disappearance, a breakthrough in the cold case came from a confidential informant. The informant, later identified as the ex-wife of one of the alleged perpetrators, told police that both Willoughby and Higginbotham had been murdered. She claimed the motive was to silence Willoughby, who was allegedly trying to extort money from two associates, Ronald C. Tomasik and James L. Kellam, in connection with an auto theft ring. According to the informant, Higginbotham was killed at their home, and her body was placed in a barrel. Willoughby was then reportedly lured from the home, shot, and also sealed in a drum.
Based on this new information, investigators shifted their focus away from Willoughby as a suspect. In 1983, both Ronald C. Tomasik and James L. Kellam were arrested and charged with the murders of Timothy Willoughby and Mary Ann Higginbotham. The informant even provided police with rings that had belonged to Higginbotham as evidence. Despite the informant's detailed account, the case against the two men crumbled due to a lack of sufficient evidence, and the charges were ultimately dropped. Timothy Willoughby's body has never been found, and his case remains an unsolved presumed homicide. No one has ever been convicted in connection with the deaths of either Willoughby or Higginbotham.
