With the current fascination for documentaries and podcasts looking back at old and infamous crimes, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would get around to doing something on the so-called Burger Chef murders that rocked the nation nearly 50 years ago and which remain unsolved to this day. For those who are unfamiliar, on November 17, 1978, four young people—Jayne Friedt, Mark Flemmonds, Ruth Shelton and Daniel Davis—employed at a Burger Chef franchise in the town of Speedway, Indiana seemingly disappeared while preparing to close up the place for the night. Initially, the police decided it was just a case of the kids bailing on their jobs and going off to party and they allowed the restaurant to clean up and reopen the next morning. A day later, their brutally murdered bodies were found in a wooded area 20 miles away—two of them were shot in the head, one was stabbed (with the broken-off blade found in her chest) and one was hit in the head so hard that he literally choked to death on his own blood. Realizing their fuck-up, the police tried to restage the crime scene (even taking photos that they tried to pass off as the real thing) and would pursue a number of theories as to what went down all those years ago, all to no avail.
In The Speedway Murders, co-directors Adam Kamien and Luke Rynderman take a look at the theories surrounding the case by examining the evidence and interviewing a number of people connected to the case, ranging from still-grieving friends and family members to possible witnesses to former and current cops who have been convinced from time to time that they had leads—there is even a confession at one point—that they nevertheless are unable to pursue due to lack of tangible evidence. One theory posits that it was a robbery committed by a gang of guys who had been hitting other Burger Chef restaurants in the area that somehow went wrong. Another suggested that the murders were the result of a drug deal gone bad that one of the victims might have been involved in. Perhaps the wildest theory suggested that it might have been the work of a man named Brett Kimberlin, a local drug dealer who was also suspected of the murder of the mother of an acquaintance and a series of bombings that were rattling the area at the time. (Although not charged with the Burger Chef killings, he would serve time for the bombings and later become infamous for claiming that he supplied vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle with marijuana when he was in law school.)
The whole story is heartbreaking, horrifying and infuriating in equal measure and Kamien and Rynderman have clearly done a lot of legwork in their attempts to revisit both the crime and those involved (an interview with Kimberlin is especially chilling) in the hopes of digging up something new that might be the case’s much-needed break—whether they find it or not, I will leave for you to discover. However, there is one aspect to the film that is in dubious taste and that comes in the form of hiring a quartet of young actors to play the four victims and placing them in a replica of the restaurant so that they can mull over the various evidence and theories for themselves. Yes, I know that a lot of documentaries along these lines make use of reenactments—Errol Morris made effective use of them in his landmark The Thin Blue Line—and I can understand the thinking behind utilizing them here but the end result is more off-putting than audacious. For the most part, however, The Speedway Murders is an interesting and undeniably upsetting work that tries to do something genuinely noble—solving a crime that has frustrated people for decades—and comes a lot closer to accomplishing that goal than one might expect.