A 10 yr old newspaper boy is abducted and killed In the pre-dawn hours of October 3, 1970, 10-year-old Jerry Michael 'Mike' Bayles Jr. embarked on his paper route for the Indianapolis Star, a task he had taken over for his older brother. It was a decision that set in motion a tragic chain of events that would end his young life. A Caucasian male with red hair, Mike was a fifth-grader at Nathanial Hawthorne School 50.
That morning, after delivering only a couple of newspapers, he was abducted from South Harris Street in Indianapolis.
The search for Mike began after he failed to return home. Later that same morning, at approximately 8:55 a.m., his body was discovered in a roadside ditch in rural Henry County, about 40 miles from where he was last seen. He had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen and back, and his body was found nude except for his socks. An autopsy determined the cause of death to be internal hemorrhaging from the stab wounds.
The investigation into Mike's murder spanned decades, growing to a case file of over 5,000 pages, yet it remained unsolved. Early in the investigation, a man named Albert Garcia was arrested in Kentucky on unrelated charges of molesting two other newspaper carriers and was questioned in connection with Mike's murder. However, he passed a polygraph test and was ruled out as a suspect. Another man, who was on work release from a mental hospital, was also considered a suspect but a grand jury found insufficient evidence to charge him.
A significant break in the cold case came in 2015 when a woman contacted a website dedicated to solving Mike's murder. She claimed that her father, who was a witness in the original investigation, was the real killer. She recounted a childhood memory from the day after the murder of seeing her father with bloody clothes and a knife, which he then hid in a wall. She also stated that her father would often threaten his children by referencing what he did to 'that newspaper boy.' Despite this new lead, the woman's father had since passed away, and with little physical evidence remaining, the case remains officially unsolved.
