The murder of Everett Armstrong

The decisive break in the murder of Everett Armstrong was not a scientific advance but human testimony, and remarkably it had been available almost from the start. Armstrong was found shot to death in his mobile home in rural Geneva on August 19, 1977. The earliest investigation, conducted in the days and weeks after the killing, did not identify a suspect, but it did capture a crucial fact: neighbors had heard a single gunshot just before dark on the evening of August 18. Two months later, in October 1977, four witnesses came forward to investigators and named the same young man, James A. McBride II, as the person who had killed Armstrong. According to investigators, McBride had confessed the shooting to all four of them within 24 hours of the crime, and one of the witnesses said McBride had gone so far as to show him the gun used in the murder. The accounts the witnesses gave were extremely specific and contained details that had not been made public, and, critically, those details were related before the Bluffton Banner published its article about the crime on August 20, 1977, meaning the witnesses could not have drawn them from press coverage. The witnesses also described McBride behaving erratically immediately after the killing. Despite this, no charge against McBride followed at the time, and the case stalled. The investigation then took a wrong turn that would cost years: in 1981 the Adams County Sheriff's Department arrested three people in connection with the murder. About six months after those arrests, the charges were dropped; it had become clear the three had nothing to do with Armstrong's death. The case went cold again and stayed that way for decades. In 2013 the Indiana State Police reopened the investigation through its cold case efforts, and over the following years detectives worked to corroborate the information the four witnesses had provided back in 1977. That corroboration ultimately satisfied investigators that the original witnesses had been right all along. James A. McBride II, who had been born in Decatur, Indiana, in 1954, died at his home in Adams County on June 3, 2024, before he could be charged. On May 14, 2025, the Indiana State Police and the Adams County prosecutor announced that the circumstantial evidence showed McBride had murdered Everett Armstrong, and that if McBride were still alive he would have been charged with the killing. After nearly forty-eight years, the case was declared solved on the strength of the witnesses who had named the right man within weeks of the crime.