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This is Episode 7, Time and Place. ♪
After Bob donned Janelle and Jolene's funeral service, it was obvious to everyone who attended Olive Branch United Brethren Church or lived in Lakeville, Indiana, that 17-year-old Jeff Pelley was the prime suspect. At that point, St. Joseph County Police Detective John Bowditch and Indiana State Trooper Mark Senter had no physical evidence to prove that Jeff committed the murders. So they relied a lot on what people in the community told them about the teen.
Mostly where he was at certain times, conversations people said they'd had with Jeff after the murders, and conversations they had with him or his family members before the murders. One eyewitness who'd spoken with Jeff after the murders was Irish Saunders, the Pelley's next-door neighbor. Irish said he and his wife Sheila didn't attend the funeral service, but a few hours afterwards, Irish bumped into Jeff in the Pelley's backyard. It was packed.
Place was absolutely packed. Tons of people over there. I just remember the day, and I've had this before, that day I looked over, well, I actually went over to feed Major, right? Because we were taking care of Major a while because nobody was there to take care of him, right? So, and I remember Jeff jumping over the railing, running across the parking lot. I was there with the dog and he looks at me and he says, you weren't home Saturday, were you?
And I said no. And about that time a detective came up and then Jeff never said a single word. That was the last time Jeff ever talked to me. It was right there. But I remember him saying they're trying to pinpoint on this on me, saying that I did it. So he said that before the cop came on? Yes, yes, he said that. And what I should have said is, Jeff, did you do it? But I didn't. That's one thing I've picked up on over and over again while reading through the thousands of pages of case reports and interviews in this investigation.
Rarely did anyone, and I mean anyone, actually ask Jeff to his face if he murdered his family. Every eyewitness told police they'd avoided asking Jeff that question. Which to me is kind of weird, right? I mean, I think for a lot of people at the time, they just didn't want to think that a teenage boy could do something so violent. Or at least that's the sentiment a lot of them expressed to police.
In the end, what people did or didn't talk about with Jeff and his family before or after the murders became critical to the investigator's case. Mostly, it came down to the witness accounts painting a rough timeline of where Bob and Jeff were on Saturday, April 29th. From interviews with Sheila and Irish next door, the police knew Bob had driven away from the parsonage sometime before noon to go pick up Jeff from his job at McDonald's.
Steve Diller, the man who sold a 20-gauge shotgun to Bob in 1987, told police that Bob came into his gun store on Saturday around mid-morning alone. He was looking to buy a handgun he said was going to be for Dawn. Steve told police Bob didn't end up buying a gun and left the store. By 11.30 a.m., Jeff's manager at McDonald's saw Bob pull into the restaurant and pick Jeff up.
According to reports, between 1:00 and 4:00 p.m., Bob visited several parishioners of the church, and they all accounted for him. A girl named Kim Oldenburg and her date David stopped by the parsonage around 4:45 to show Bob her prom dress and to have their picture taken. Jeff talked about this too in his 1989 May 1st interview.
Kim told police that Bob took a few pictures on his 35mm camera, and while that was happening, she noticed Jeff was there too, but he wasn't dressed for prom yet. While her group was inside, another boy from LaVille High School named Matt Miller stopped in. Matt was planning to attend prom with Kim and David and another young woman who lived on Osborne Road. After spending a few minutes inside the parsonage, Matt realized he left his corsage for his date at home, about 15 minutes away, so he left to go get it.
Kim told police that as she and David were leaving the parsonage, Bob and Don told them they were planning to go to the home of a girl named Crystal Easterday between 5:30 and 6:00. They were going to take her in her date's picture too. Kim said that she and David last saw the Pellys alive between 4:40 p.m. and 5:00, but no later than 5:00. Matt Miller's statement to police reflects almost exactly what Kim said, but with a little more detail.
Matt told officers that when he arrived at the parsonage around 4:45 on Saturday, Jeff greeted him in the garage and invited him inside. Matt saw Kim and David inside with Bob, Dawn, and the two youngest Peli girls. Matt said he stayed for five minutes, but then he realized he'd forgotten his date's corsage. At 4:45, Matt said he left the parsonage and drove the 15 to 20 minutes home to retrieve the flowers.
When he was driving back on Osborne Road around 5:15 or 5:20, he passed the parsonage and noticed Kim and David's car was gone, but Jeff's Mustang was still parked by the house. Matt continued on to his date's house to meet his friends. Fifteen minutes later, at approximately 5:30, Kim, David, Matt, and his date passed by the parsonage again, and all of them stated that Jeff's Mustang was gone at that point.
The next person police interviewed was a teenager named Crystal Easterday. She was expecting Bob, Dawn, and the girls to come to her house to take pictures of her in her prom dress at 5:30. Crystal told detectives that Bob and Dawn never showed up. Her and her date waited until 5:45, but the Pellys were a complete no-show. So Crystal and her date decided to drive over to the Parsonage instead.
At 5:50, Crystal says she and her date knocked on the Pellys' garage door and the sliding glass door in the back of the house, but nobody answered. When they left, they noticed that Bob and Dawn's cars were parked at the house, but Jeff's was gone. The next person to account for Jeff and his car was his best friend, Kurt Schaefer.
Kurt and Jeff were the same age and had been friends for about two years prior to the murders. In 1989, Kurt lived two homes away from the parsonage. I contacted him last year, and he agreed to do an interview with me. Jeff and I became good friends. Either I was hanging out at his house or he was hanging out at mine for the longest time. We spent a lot of time playing ping pong, hunting.
We did a lot together. I mean, we really spent a lot of time hanging out at each other's house. Police in Indiana have interviewed Kurt three times since 1989. Each time, his story is the same. Kurt and his cousin Ken saw Jeff driving his Mustang away from the parsonage on Mulberry Road, a neighboring road to Osborne Road. That happened sometime between 4 o'clock and 5 o'clock on Saturday.
Because Jeff was accounted for by other people between 4 and 4:45, it's safe to say that when Kurt saw him, it was most likely between 4:45 and 5 o'clock. Kurt says he was sure that it was Jeff's car that he saw going by. I just know, I mean, I knew his car. We saw his car.
Within minutes of Jeff zooming past Kurt and his cousin Ken, he's spotted by another eyewitness: a gas station clerk named Dennis Nicodemus. Dennis was a teenager who worked at the Lakeville Lakeside Amoco gas station, a store six minutes away from the parsonage in the direction of Lynette Greer's house. Dennis told police that at 5:17 p.m. on Saturday, April 29th, he checked his watch while at work
He did this because he was supposed to get off at 5 o'clock, but his replacement was late. So, like any anxious teen, he was keeping a close eye on the clock. Around the time he checked his watch, Dennis said he saw Jeff pull into the gas station and start working underneath the hood of his Mustang. He described Jeff as wearing a black Hawaiian t-shirt and jeans.
Around 5:20 p.m., Jeff came into the store, told Dennis his car was idling too high, and asked to use the store's phone to call his girlfriend. He said he wanted to tell her that he'd be running late for prom. Jeff and Darla had made plans to meet at Lynette's at 5:30, so when Jeff was working on his car at the gas station, he was still about 10 or 12 minutes away from her house. He was going to be late, no doubt.
Dennis remembered Jeff placed the call, then went back outside and fiddled with his Mustang for a few more minutes. While he was working, Dennis' co-worker finally showed up and helped Jeff before clocking in for his shift. By 5.37 p.m., Jeff had left the gas station and Dennis clocked out. ♪
So just to recap, based on all of the witnesses so far, Bob and Dawn and the girls were definitely alive up until 4.55 or 5 o'clock, according to Kim Oldenburg's statement. Kurt and his cousin saw Jeff driving away from the parsonage alone in his Mustang between 4.45 and 5 o'clock.
Matt Miller, though, told police when he drove by the parsonage at 5:15 after retrieving his forgotten corsage, Jeff's car was still in the driveway. But Dennis Nicodemus said he for sure saw Jeff at 5:17 p.m. or shortly thereafter at the gas station. Being realistic, it would have taken Jeff at least five minutes drive time to get from the parsonage to the gas station.
So, according to police's theory, that means Jeff had roughly a 10-15 minute window to shoot all four victims, pick up the shell casings, shower, change clothes, put a small load of clothes in the washing machine, pack his tuxedo, get in his car, ditch the shotgun and spent shell casings somewhere police could not find them, and then drive to the gas station.
Investigators knew that accomplishing all of that in such a small window of time was nearly impossible. But still, they were convinced Jeff could have made it happen if he planned it just right. They believed that in order for him to have pulled it off, he would have had to pre-plan every second.
Most important of all, he would have had to ditch the shotgun, spent shell casings, and any other incriminating evidence somewhere along his route in a spot they hadn't thought to check. County police officers and state troopers searched the land and roads around the parsonage, including ditches on Mulberry Road, Osborne Road, and all around the Lakeville Amoco gas station.
They took photos of shoe prints and mud that were never connected to anyone. And they even found a white t-shirt on the side of the road that appeared to have blood on it, but that later came back as not belonging to Jeff or any of the victims. Other than that, police found nothing, and I mean nothing, of any investigative value. They even sent divers into some lakes, but that too led nowhere.
This didn't deter investigators from still looking hard at Jeff. They put lack of physical evidence aside and began scrutinizing his timeline more. In light of not finding the shotgun or shells anywhere on Jeff's driving route from the parsonage to the gas station, they now thought perhaps he'd just gotten rid of the evidence somewhere else, most likely between the gas station and Lynette Greer's house. I took a closer look at that theory, though, and asked the very same question: Could he have?
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That's the voice of a man named Eric King. In April 1989, he attended prom with Jeff Pelley and Jeff's girlfriend Darla.
Eric is just one of many people over the years who has told law enforcement in depositions what they remember about Jeff the night of prom. According to police reports, Darla said Jeff arrived at Lynette Greer's home to get ready for prom sometime between 5:30 and 5:45, which makes sense because Dennis Nicodemus said Jeff's car was gone from the gas station by 5:37. While visiting Lakeville for my reporting, I timed the driving distance myself.
I just arrived at the former residence that the Greer family lived at. So this is the place that Jeff came to after he stopped by the Lakeside Emco gas station. And my stopwatch says it took about 15 minutes and 23 seconds to get here after leaving the gas station. And the average, according to the GPS maps, says anywhere from 14 to 17. So my time was kind of right in the middle of that.
Accounting for at least 21 minutes travel time on the road, add on at least 10 minutes that Jeff was at the Emiko gas station. That makes about 31 minutes in travel time after he left the parsonage. So if Jeff left the parsonage at 10 after 5...
He should have arrived at Lynette Greer's house at 540, 541, maybe a little sooner, depending on traffic and depending on how fast he was driving, which matches up with a lot of the statements from the eyewitnesses at the Greer residence. One of the people positive about when Jeff arrived at Lynette's was her date, a guy named Mark Berger.
In 1989, Mark told police that he got to Lynette's at 4:40 p.m. and around 5:20, Jeff called to let the girls know he was running late. A little after 5:30, Jeff arrived and quickly changed into his tuxedo. By 5:45, Mark, Jeff, Darla, and Lynette were on their way to meet a group of friends at the Emporium restaurant in downtown South Bend.
They were late when they got there by 6:15 p.m. and met up with Eric King and his date and a few others from LaVille High School. Tell me what type of demeanor Jeff was displaying that night. Everybody seemed like they were in pretty good spirits. I think he was a little bit stressed because of the car breaking down. How did he exhibit that? Well, it was just like when they first got there, it was like,
Everybody was like, where are they at? Kind of wondering. He kind of happened to explain himself why he was late. Right. Did he seem upset at all?
No, didn't seem really upset about it. Does he ever seem to be worried about anything? Not that I can recall, no. And you talked with him that evening? Yeah. And his demeanor is pretty much normal at this time? Yeah, just normal at this time, you know, just enjoying the evening, you know, that type of thing.
So, with all of these people's statements taken into account, Jeff Pelley was technically accounted for from 5:40 p.m. all the way until the time his family's bodies were discovered. What police had to focus on was the small window of time between 5 o'clock and 10 after 5. That was when law enforcement felt certain the Pelley's were shot to death. One huge wrench, though, in the police's theory came from a woman named Lois Stansbury.
According to Mark Center's 1989 investigative report for the state police, Lois called state troopers two days after the murders. Lois told Mark that she saw Bob Pelley standing in the driveway of the Parsonage, alive, at 5 o'clock on Saturday, April 29th. Lois lived a few homes down from the church, and on that Saturday, she'd been out running errands with her two daughters.
She told Mark that after a quick shopping trip in Lakeville and visiting her father's house across the street from the Pellys, she'd idled near the foot of the Parsonage's driveway and seen Bob standing next to a black pickup truck talking to a man inside of it. She believed Bob was holding a shovel or something that looked like a shovel. Lois said she honked a horn to get Bob's attention and gestured with a friendly wave, and he waved back, but he seemed distracted.
Lois was certain she saw Bob at 5 o'clock because she had a receipt from a Kmart store in Lakeville, time-stamped for 4:04 p.m. She estimated that her travel time and two stops she made driving back home would have put her seeing Bob at 5 o'clock. According to reports, Mark Center took the Kmart receipt from Lois to check out the information, but to this day, it has never been seen again. St. Joseph County Police lost it.
Despite this error, I wanted to drive Lois' route myself and time it out. She told Mark she started at the Kmart, then made a stop at a nursery. Then she went to her father's house, and it was right after that that she saw Bob. I wanted to know if it was really possible for Lois to be in front of the parsonage when she said she was.
I spoke with one of her daughters who was with her that day in 1989, and she told me that Lois declined my interview request. So the best I'm able to do is emulate her timeline. Okay, so I'm going to drive the route that Lois Stansbury told law enforcement in 1989 that she took after she paid for her purchases, loaded her daughters in the car at Kmart, and then made her way back toward Osborne Road.
After I did the math, here's what I found. If Lois Stansbury checked out at Kmart at 4:04 p.m., with all of her stops accounted for, at a minimum, she realistically could have seen Bob Pelley in his front yard any time between 4:50 p.m. and 5:00 p.m., which is not exactly when police believed the murders occurred. They felt Jeff committed the crime more likely between 5:00 and 10:00 after 5:00.
And I know it's literally minutes we're talking about here, but it does matter. This whole case rides on just minutes. If you think about it, Lois could have seen Bob alive at around 5 o'clock, and then he's murdered right after that. One big question Lois couldn't answer for police was whether she remembers Jeff's car at the parsonage when she saw Bob. If it was parked at the house, then that's convincing proof that Jeff was there and was the shooter.
If the Mustang wasn't there at 5 o'clock, then Jeff couldn't be the murderer. But Lois said she didn't even notice whether Jeff's car was there or not. She also didn't get a good look at the man in the black pickup truck that Bob was supposedly talking with. All Lois knew was that the guy didn't look familiar, and neither did his dark-colored truck. And that's kind of strange for a town where everyone knows everyone and what they drive. To this day, that truck or its driver has never been identified.
Lois' story that the Pellys were still alive at 5 o'clock, or even shortly thereafter, doesn't necessarily mean Jeff couldn't have still killed the family in the window of time police claimed. For example, I go back to Crystal Easterday's testimony. She said that when Bob and Dawn never showed up to take her and her date's prom picture at 5:30, she went over to the parsonage at 5:50 and no one answered.
Also, she said both Bob and Dawn's cars were parked in the driveway. That tells me they had to have been dead or detained in some way, or else Crystal would not have encountered what she did. I've also read statements from a woman who visited the church to pray around 6 o'clock, and she told police that the whole time she was there, she didn't see any activity at the parsonage. The only thing she said felt odd happened around 6:30.
She was kneeling in the sanctuary praying and heard a noise that sounded like someone had opened the church's front door. When she went to check it out, she didn't see anyone. But that was enough to spook her, so she left. I also read another statement from a man who was mowing his grass next door to the church building at 6 o'clock. And he corroborates what the woman praying says. He didn't see anyone come or go from the parsonage at all Saturday night.
Despite investigators feeling sure that Jeff killed his family, and they had a lot of circumstantial evidence, they weren't able to make a case. The prosecuting attorney refused to file charges, and by the summer of 1989, the quadruple homicide went cold. By fall, Jackie Pelley had moved to Kentucky with her maternal grandparents, Jack and Mary Armstrong. Jeff enrolled in college, and Darla joined him. Jessica went to live with Dawn's parents in Michigan.
But a year and a half after the killings, things for the surviving Pelly kids took a downturn. Jeff and Darla's relationship fell apart, and he moved back to Lakeville and got an apartment. The scrutiny of being a murder suspect in the small town got to him, and he eventually moved back to Fort Myers, Florida.
Jessica struggled to cope with the loss of her mom and sisters and began acting out, eventually winding up in foster care. She writes a lot about this and her life's trauma in her memoir, "I Am Jessica." Jackie seemed to be the only one who coasted, despite the wheels of justice churning to a screeching halt on her family's case. Everything about the Pelley murders stayed frozen in time until suddenly the case got red hot more than a decade after the massacre.
I'm getting into that next on CounterClock. Listen to episode eight, Switch and Bait, right now.
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