Speedway

One is the Burger Chef murders.

It was November 17th, 1978, when four young workers aged 16 to 20 vanished from a Burger Chef restaurant in Speedway, Indiana, near the end of their shift.

Two days later, their bodies were found nearby.

They were all still dressed in their restaurant uniforms.

Now remember, Richard Allen was already known to them.

It was a filing error for an employee from the FBI that gave Richard Allen a community unable to recover.

Living in Indianapolis, Indiana, close to the towns where both the Speedway and Delphi murders took place, Ms. Cain and Mr. Greenlee have seen firsthand the impact unsolved murders can have on a community.

It's harmful and traumatic for the community as it can spread paranoia, says Ms. Cain.

One is the Burger Chef murders.

It was November 17th, 1978, when four young workers aged 16 to 20 vanished from a Burger Chef restaurant in Speedway, Indiana, near the end of their shift.

Two days later, their bodies were found nearby.

They were all still dressed in their restaurant uniforms.

Now remember, Richard Allen was already known to them.

It was a filing error for an employee from the FBI that gave Richard Allen a community unable to recover.

Living in Indianapolis, Indiana, close to the towns where both the Speedway and Delphi murders took place, Ms. Cain and Mr. Greenlee have seen firsthand the impact unsolved murders can have on a community.

It's harmful and traumatic for the community as it can spread paranoia, says Ms. Cain.

By midnight, every single one of them had vanished, and no one heard a thing.

The Speedway Burger Chef held a secret that wouldn't surface for days, and when it did, it would shake an entire community to its core.

Welcome to Crime House 24/7.

I'm Vanessa Richardson.

And every Thursday is a throwback, where we reopen a chilling case from before the age of DNA, a crime that's haunted us for generations.

Today, we're reopening the case of the Burger Chef murders, and this case still isn't closed.

Nearly half a century on, the 1978 quadruple homicide in Speedway, Indiana remains officially unsolved, with no charges ever filed.

Detectives working the case today still disagree on who did it, and a broken knife recovered from the scene has never been definitively tied to a suspect.

[laughs] It's so great, though.

And so, you know, before the 500, he had already kind of reported on this, and so now afterwards this year, we find out that once again, uh, Speedway's, uh, wastewater treatment plant, uh, had difficulty dealing with the chemical content of everyone peeing while they are at the Indy 500.

Yeah.

All those, all those beers had to go somewhere.

Yeah.

And you are only allowed to discharge so much of that into the White River, and you have to have this state permit and, and agree to that.

And so for the fifth year in a row, the Speedway wastewater treatment plant has exceeded the amount of pollutants that they were allowed to discharge into the White River, and now they're kind of on this, um, new plan to try to fix that.

Speedway's agreed to undertake a $14 million expansion and modernize its wastewater treatment plant to hopefully help with this.