The twenty-one-year-old white male, John Lee Roach, was a resident of Indianapolis, Indiana, whose life was abruptly ended in the winter of 1982. He vanished on December 22, 1982, prompting immediate concern from his family and community. For six agonizing days, his whereabouts remained a mystery until his remains were discovered on December 28. His body was found discarded near Belleville in Putnam County, Indiana, situated alongside Interstate 70.
Investigators at the scene determined that he had been subjected to a frenzied attack, having been stabbed to death before being left near the highway.
The investigation into Roach's death initially struggled to find a specific perpetrator, but the nature of the crime and the location of the body eventually linked the case to a broader pattern of violence plaguing the Midwest during the early 1980s. Authorities began to suspect that Roach was a victim of a serial offender targeting young men in Indiana and Illinois. The modus operandi—luring victims with offers of alcohol, drugs, or money, and then dumping their bodies near major roadways—pointed detectives toward a suspect who would later become infamous across the region.
Years later, the case was definitively connected to Larry Eyler, a man dubbed the 'Highway Killer.' Eyler was already a known suspect in numerous other slayings of young men and had been sentenced to death for a separate murder. While incarcerated on death row, Eyler sought to negotiate with authorities, offering information on unsolved cases. In a confession provided in 1994, just shortly before his death from AIDS-related complications, Eyler admitted to the murder of John Roach. He detailed that he had acted alone in the killing, confirming the suspicions that Roach had fallen prey to his predatory spree.
John Roach was laid to rest at New Crown Cemetery and Mausoleum in Indianapolis following funeral services in January 1983. Although Eyler confessed to the crime, he never faced a specific trial for Roach's murder because he was already facing execution for other capital crimes and died in prison before further legal proceedings could be formalized. The confession, however, provided a final resolution to the investigation, closing the file on a tragedy that had remained an open wound for over a decade.
