Solved cold cases in Indiana
4 documented cases.
April Marie Tinsley
April Marie Tinsley, 8, was abducted on April 1, 1988 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and her body was found three days later in a DeKalb County ditch. For years her killer left taunting notes; in 2018 investigative genetic genealogy identified John D. Miller of Grabill, who pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 80 years.
Carol Jenkins
Carol Jenkins was a 21-year-old Black woman from Rushville, Indiana, who was stabbed to death on the night of September 16, 1968, while selling encyclopedias door to door in the small town of Martinsville, in Morgan County, Indiana. According to investigators, two white men in a car taunted her, then chased her down a street; one man held her while the other drove a flat-blade screwdriver into her chest, piercing her heart. She collapsed on a rain-soaked sidewalk and was pronounced dead a short time later. The killing was widely regarded as racially motivated, and despite an investigation that quickly drew in the NAACP and, eventually, state police, it went unsolved for more than thirty years. The break came not from forensic technology but from a single witness who finally spoke. In November 2001, the Martinsville Police Department received an anonymous handwritten letter naming Kenneth Clay Richmond, a career criminal and Ku Klux Klan affiliate then living in an Indianapolis nursing home, and stating that his youngest daughter had witnessed the murder as a seven-year-old child. When detectives located that daughter, Shirley Richmond McQueen, she confirmed she had watched the killing from her father's car, and she recalled a detail that had never been released to the public: that Jenkins had been wearing a yellow scarf. On May 8, 2002, Richmond was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. He was later ruled incompetent to stand trial because of terminal cancer, and he died on August 31, 2002, at age 70, before he could be tried. A second man who allegedly took part in the attack has never been identified.
Everett Armstrong
Everett Armstrong, an 84-year-old World War I veteran and well-known local banjo player, was shot to death in his mobile home in rural Geneva, in Adams County, Indiana. Neighbors reported hearing a single gunshot just before dark on August 18, 1977, and a fuel oil delivery driver found his body inside the trailer on County Road 300 West around 4 p.m. the next day, August 19. The first investigation produced no suspects, and in October 1977 four witnesses came forward to name a young local man, James A. McBride II, as the person responsible; they said he had confessed to them within 24 hours of the killing and that he had shown one of them the gun he used. The case nonetheless went cold. In 1981 the Adams County Sheriff's Department arrested three other people, only to drop the charges about six months later when it became clear they had nothing to do with the murder. The Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit reopened the file in 2013 and spent years corroborating the original 1977 witness statements. On May 14, 2025, investigators announced they had concluded that McBride, who had died in Adams County on June 3, 2024, was the killer; the Adams County prosecutor agreed that if McBride were still alive he would be charged with the murder. The case was solved not by forensic science but by the witnesses who had named the right man within weeks of the crime, almost fifty years before the conclusion was finally confirmed.
Robert Reed
Robert Reed was found beaten to death on May 22, 2002, inside his home in the 600 block of South Third Street in Elkhart, Indiana, after a neighbor noticed his front door standing open and went to check on him. An autopsy ruled the death a homicide, the result of multiple injuries to his head and neck. Investigators recovered blood at several points in the home, but for nearly two decades the case went unsolved. The break came not from a genealogy database but from the marriage of old physical evidence and new witness information: blood collected from the kitchen floor, the bathroom floor, and the inside deadbolt of the front door was found to match the DNA profile of an acquaintance of Reed named Marcus J. Love, and in 2021 a witness told police that Love had admitted beating Reed to death shortly after the killing. In 2021 an Elkhart investigator, Sgt. Greg Harder, re-examined the file and noticed a bloodstain on the back of Reed's shirt that had been overlooked; 2022 testing produced a partial DNA profile that was a mixture of Reed and Love. Love, who was already serving time at the Westville Correctional Facility on unrelated matters, was charged with murder in August 2022. On November 14, 2024, he pleaded guilty to robbery resulting in serious bodily injury, a Class A felony, and was sentenced to 35 years in the Indiana Department of Correction plus five years of probation; the murder count was dismissed as part of the plea agreement.