Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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This is Episode 5: Retrace. At 2:30 in the afternoon on April 30, 1989, 17-year-old Jeff Pelley, his girlfriend Darla Emmons, and about a dozen other Laville High School students were inside of Six Flags Great America theme park in Gurnee, Illinois. What the teenagers didn't know was that officers from Gurnee Police Department were close by, roaming every aisle of the amusement park's parking lot, trying to locate their cars.
In particular, the police wanted to find Jeff's 1984 two-door silver Ford Mustang. According to reports from Gurney police back in 1989, patrolmen found Jeff's car on the Daffy Duck Row shortly after 2:30 p.m. An hour later, two teens from Lakeville who'd been with Jeff and Darla in the park were leaving to get in their own car, and the officers stopped them. These two teens were Lynette Greer and Mark Berger.
Lynette and Mark will become pretty important witnesses in this case, but I'll get more into why in the next episode. For now, all you really need to know is that when Lynette and Mark were stopped at Great America, police asked them where Jeff and Darla were. They told the officers that they weren't sure, but gave the cops a description of what Darla and Jeff were wearing. Around 4:15, 45 minutes after stopping Lynette and Mark, security guards and Gurney police found Jeff and Darla in a gift shop.
The couple was with a bunch of other teens who'd attended prom together the night before. Gurney police rounded up the teens and took all of them to the police station for questioning, but they kept Darla and Jeff in a security office at the theme park. St. Joseph County Police Detective John Bowditch specifically asked Gurney police to detain Jeff and Darla in isolation and not to interview them.
Authorities in Illinois were told to get statements from all of the other teens, but leave Jeff and Darla alone until John arrived. John and his colleague Jerry Rutkowski also requested that Jeff and Darla's vehicles be impounded and sealed off until they arrived. Between 4:15 and 4:30, Jeff asked Gurney police three separate times what was going on and if he was in some kind of trouble.
The officers didn't speak to him, and they definitely didn't tell him that his father, stepmother, and two stepsisters had been murdered. Just after 4:30, Gurney officers finally decided to break the news to Jeff. According to police reports, they told Jeff that only Bob and Dawn were murdered. They intentionally left out the fact that Janelle and Jolene were dead too.
The Gurney officer wrote in his report that he withheld that information because St. Joseph County had not positively identified the little girls yet. The report states that when Jeff heard the news of Bob and Dawn's deaths, he quietly sobbed in his seat and Darla tried to console him. A few minutes later, Gurney police transported Jeff and Darla from the amusement park security office to the actual police department.
During the car ride, Jeff continued to ask Ernie police officers what exactly had happened to his parents and how they were murdered. They wouldn't tell him anything. Jeff continued to pepper them with questions and wanted to know how his sister Jackie would be notified. He told them that she would need someone to go get her at Huntington College and bring her back to Lakeville. He also asked if Bob was really dead.
All questions I think maybe anyone would be asking if you just heard your parents were murdered. When Jeff and Darla were finally at the Gruney police station, he asked to call his maternal grandparents, Mary and Jack Armstrong. These were his biological mom, Joy's parents, but police told him no.
Hours went by, and Jeff and Darla just sat in silence. Around 8:30 p.m., John Bodich and Jerry Rutkowski arrived from Indiana. They immediately took some statements from a few other teens that were in the park, then went to check out Jeff and Darla's cars. Police reports state that John and Jerry went through both vehicles, but did not find anything of any evidentiary value.
I emphasize that because it's going to be very, very important a little later on in this case. Around 9 o'clock, the detectives spoke separately with Darla and Jeff for two and a half hours. By 11:30 p.m., John, Jerry, Jeff, and Darla were leaving Illinois and headed back to Indiana. At no point the entire day and night were Jeff or Darla ever in custody or under arrest.
They could have walked out of the Gurney police station at any point, but according to reports, they never asked to leave. John and Jerry didn't get back to Lakeville with Jeff and Darla until around 2 o'clock in the morning, so technically the next day, May 1st. At that point, they allowed Darla to speak with her parents, who told her to cooperate with police. She was released shortly thereafter. Jeff, on the other hand, was not released.
By 4:00 in the morning, his grandparents, the Armstrongs, had arrived from Kentucky and signed Guardian consent forms allowing John Bowditch to officially interview Jeff.
I just want to hear his story, where he was, what he might have saw before he left. You have somebody that's none of age, you have to have a parent or guardian there. Well, we had grandparents there, and they were good people. They would like to know what happened, too. But if you were a suspect in a case and you got mom and dad on this side or grandma and grandpa on this side, I mean, you might as well have your baby blanket on you.
Because, you know, you're protected. That's why the questions that I did ask him, it was more of a fact-finding thing for me, just to see how he reacted and how he answered the questions. And according to John, Jeff had a lot to explain.
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Robert Jeffrey Pelley. And your date of birth? 12/10/71. St. Joseph County Police Detective John Vodich conducted the first and only videotaped law enforcement interview with Jeff Pelley. John wanted to hear from Jeff himself about his relationship with Bob, Dawn, and the rest of the blended Pelley family. At this point, authorities had finally informed Jeff that his stepsisters, Janelle and Jolene, were the other two victims found inside the parsonage.
John used the interview as a way to figure out if Jeff had murdered his family. At that point in time, Jeff was law enforcement's prime suspect. At the beginning of the hour-and-a-half long conversation, John didn't start with a direct line of questioning. He asked Jeff simple stuff, like who he'd seen in the last 24 hours, what he'd done Saturday all day, and right before prom. And Jeff answered. I went to work at 5 o'clock that morning.
And I got off at 11. My dad picked me up about 10 after quarter after he was running a little bit late. Me and dad and Janelle and Jolene ate lunch right about 12, 12:30. We ate together.
We ate lunch. Me and Janelle and Jolene washed my car. That's your sisters? Two step-sisters, my two youngest step-sisters. And then we came inside and ate lunch with Dad. And then Dad left and he went visiting. He didn't come back until almost 4 o'clock. I think he went to Johnny Howell's and the Dillard's. I'm not sure of his name.
I watched a baseball game on TV for a little bit between Dodgers and Cardinals. That part, what Jeff just said, is true. I checked. From 12:30 until 3:45 p.m. on Saturday, April 29, 1989, the St. Louis Cardinals did play the L.A. Dodgers, and the Cardinals won. Jeff also volunteered accurate information about where Dawn had been all day on Saturday.
She had a Girl Scout meeting that day. She left about 9.30, I believe. According to Jeff, Dawn returned to the parsonage around 3.30, shortly before Bob did. I have the log sheet from Dawn's Girl Scout meeting and can confirm that it took place in Plymouth, Indiana, about a 20-minute drive from the Pellys' home, and it started at 9.30 a.m. and ended around 2.45 p.m.
According to the sign-in sheet and several women who attended, everyone signed out around 2:45 p.m., but Dawn and a few other women lingered to talk. Witnesses stated Dawn left around 3 p.m., which means she would have gotten home, not making any stops, around 3:20 or 3:30.
By 4:30 p.m., it's undisputed that Jeff, Bob, Dawn, Janelle, and Jolene were all together at the parsonage. This is confirmed by eyewitness statements police took from some of Jeff's high school friends. These people showed up at the parsonage between 4:30 and 5:00. The group of teens was wearing their prom dresses and tuxedos, and they came by to visit with their pastor and have him take their pictures. Bob was an amateur photographer and owned a nice 35-millimeter camera.
That's the one I told you about that was eventually seized as evidence. Here's Jeff remembering that moment in 1989. Kim Oldenburg came over with David Shoemaker because I used to date Kim Oldenburg and my dad and her are real good friends. My dad wanted to see her in her dress.
Her mom and her brother and her brother's friend were with them. And then Matt Miller stopped by while they were there. He was just there for one minute and he had to run back out because he forgot the flowers for his date, so he had to go back home. They left about quarter till, I suppose, and I must have left four or five minutes after them. I put my tux in the car and put my radio in the car and I left right after they did.
Jeff explained in his interview that the plan on Saturday was to meet Darla at Lynette Greer's house across town. They were going to get ready there and take photos before heading to dinner and eventually the dance. We were going to dinner at the Emporium. We had dinner reservations for 6.30. I knew I'd need clothes for after prom, and I was spending the night at a friend's house, so I knew I'd need clothes for that. So I packed all that and got the car ready to go.
Jeff claimed that he left the parsonage between 4.50 and 5 o'clock. On his way to Lynette's, he stopped by a convenience store to fix something on his car. I had to stop along the way because I'd been fooling with the idle on the car. It wasn't idling right. But the car was idling too high when I tried to stop it. It didn't want to stop right. John Bodich used Jeff's answer about his car problems as a springboard to push Jeff harder on one very important point.
Why was Jeff even driving his Mustang to begin with? Wasn't he grounded? Why had he and his car been at Great America at all? We had found out that Bob had told numerous people down there, church people, elders, that, you know, he's not going. He's in trouble. He's not going anywhere. He took the insurance off the car. He disabled the car somehow. Jeff had an answer. Bob had simply changed his mind at the last minute. At first he kept saying no, and then he finally agreed to let me go.
He told me Wednesday and Thursday that there was a good chance that he'd let me go, and then he told me Friday for sure that I could. And when did you let all your friends know that? I talked to Darla Wednesday night, because usually when my dad starts deciding something, as long as you keep up what you're doing, keep being really good and stuff, then he'll go through with it. So I let her know that I'd probably be able to go, that there was a really good chance that I could, and we redid the dinner reservations and stuff.
Jeff saying that he talked to Darla a few days before prom on Wednesday night is accurate. Phone records from the parsonage show that someone used the Pelley's line to call Darla's residence on Wednesday, April 26th, and the conversation lasted for over an hour. That seems like a high school lovesick teenager weeknight call to me. But the problem for John Bowditch and other St. Joseph County investigators was that it just seemed like Jeff had a convenient answer for everything.
They knew Bob and Jeff had been having a lot of disagreements prior to the murders. Mark Center, the Indiana State Trooper helping John Bowditch investigate the crime, said that before the murder, Bob had actually asked him to help straighten out Jeff's bad behavior. Jeff was involved with, he broke into a home of a friend's and stole some money and used that money to go to Florida for spring break. So Bob called me and he said, Mark, I need a favor. I
My son's done this, and I need you to intervene in this and take a case report. And so I did. And we interviewed Jeff and Bob. We were interviewed in the pews of the sanctuary of the church, believe it or not, about the burglary. He admitted to it. I sent my case to the prosecutor's office. It would have gone to juvenile probation.
And that was it. That was probably, I don't have an exact date, but I would say early March, mid-March. So six weeks before the actual murders. Court records show that Jeff never faced any charges or penalties for that burglary because he confessed to it and the victim, a friend of Jeff's named John Herseg, worked out a deal with Jeff.
Jeff speaking openly in his interview with police about his thievery and juvenile delinquency wasn't surprising.
Jackie Pelley, Jeff's younger biological sister, as well as many other people in the Lakeville community, knew about Jeff's bad behaviors and the fact that he'd stolen from John Hersek. She remembers that the week leading up to prom, Bob and Jeff were in the midst of working out an appropriate punishment. Dad would ground you, and he knew that he overreacted. And so he was the first one to say, if I ground you for the rest of your life or whatever...
Wait until we both calm down, if you feel like it was unfair, then come back and we'll negotiate until we get to something that we both agree on. And so from whenever it was that Jeff got grounded until up to prom week, I knew they were negotiating. That's just the way things worked in our house. Jackie says that nothing was escalating between father and son leading into prom weekend. In fact, according to Jackie, Jeff was more independent than anyone knew.
It's frustrating because everybody has this opinion of Jeff being rebellious and blah, blah, blah. Jeff was done with school. Jeff could have left and gone to Florida and stayed if he wanted to, or he could have moved to Kentucky with my grandparents or something. There was nothing keeping him there. He did not have to go to school every day, even for attendance. He was done. He was just waiting for graduation.
But Mark Senter and John Bowditch felt positive that Jeff and Bob's relationship wasn't on the mend. They believed the 17-year-old was lying about everything. They believed he was allowed to go to the prom dance, but nothing else. They had a gut feeling that Jeff was the only person who had motive to want to see Bob, Dawn, and anyone else who got in his way dead. John believed Jeff's motive was anger.
Anger towards his stepmother. I didn't accept her. It wasn't that I didn't like her. When they got married, they wanted us to start calling Don mom and stuff, and it was really hard to accept. Anger towards his father. My dad kind of went through a personality change when he remarried. He wasn't the same father that I'd always grown up with. And anger about being banned from driving himself and his girlfriend to prom.
The reason John Vodich didn't believe Jeff is because an overwhelming mountain of circumstantial evidence was building.
And interview after interview with witnesses was narrowing down a timeline that convinced the police Jeff and only Jeff. He thought he was smarter than everybody. Was behind the trigger that killed his family. I took a close look at this timeline and uncovered not everything lines up. Listen to episode six, No Clues to Waste, right now.
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Toyota, let's go places. A more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. From earth tones to vibrant colors, Ashley stores have an array of eye-catching furniture for every room in fun and trending hues that will leave a lasting impression. So it's easier than ever to express your personal style and design a vibrant home that feels just like you. Your more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. Shop in-store or online at ashley.com.