A Heavy Weight

Halloween night, 1981. Sixteen year old Debra Mae “Debbie” Fulton leaves her house in Hammond, Indiana, with a little cash and a simple plan: walk to the Roller Dome, skate with friends, come home. She never makes it. The next day, a boy playing under the Calumet Avenue bridge spots a body in the Grand Calumet River. Debbie has been killed by a blow to the head. Within weeks, her case is being use...

In 1974, a young woman was found shot and hidden beneath a mattress off a rural road in South Bend. It took six months before anyone knew her name: Victoria Lynne McDonough. No arrests were ever made. This episode revisits Victoria’s life, the investigation that failed her, and the questions that still haven’t been answered. https://www.in.gov/isp/crime-reporting/cold-case-investigations/cold-case...

Episode 10 brings together the most unsettling pieces of Joseph Smedley’s case — the late-night messages, the odd cell phone pings, the missing belongings — and confronts the gaps that remain. This episode is a call for truth, transparency, and for anyone holding a piece of the story to finally come forward.

For Joseph’s family, this is year ten. Ten years of rereading the same note. Ten years of asking for his case files. Ten years of watching other IU students’ cases become national stories while his slips out of view. Coverage sits inside that imbalance. We talk about media bias and what it means to keep showing up for a family long after everyone else has moved on. Thank you for listening, sharing...

In this episode we return to the death of Indiana University student Joseph Smedley, whose body was found in Griffy Lake with a backpack weighed down with rocks. Drawing on a twenty year study of suicide by drowning and the insight of forensic pathologist Dr Darin Wolfe and forensic aquatic death investigator Andrea Zaferes, we ask how likely it really is that Joseph died by suicide in the way his...

Joseph Smedley’s death was ruled a suicide by drowning, with alcohol and cannabinoids listed as contributing factors. In this episode, we slow down and examine that conclusion through the lens of Joseph’s autopsy and toxicology reports. Forensic pathologist Dr. Darrin Wolfe and drowning expert Andrea Zaferes walk us through what those reports can and can’t tell us in a decomposed body recovered fr...

Joseph Smedley vanished from Indiana University on September 27, 2015. Five days later, he was found in shallow water at Griffy Lake with a backpack full of rocks strapped to his chest. Police pointed to suicide. His family, and many friends, do not agree. In this episode, we revisit the early investigation handoff from IUPD to BPD, the decision to route updates through Joseph’s father, the autops...

Episode 5 rebuilds Joseph Smedley’s final hours: 11:30 p.m. last seen, 4:15  a.m. text to his sister, a note found later, and a phone path toward Old State Hwy 37.

A recovered group chat, a shifting timeline, and a discovery at Griffy Lake reframe Joseph Smedley’s final week. In Episode 4, we examine digital evidence recovered from Joseph’s laptop: a fraternity group chat from the days he was missing. The conversation’s tone and priorities raise hard questions about what people knew—and when. We then trace the search to Griffy Lake, where Joseph was found wi...

In this episode, we step deeper into the growing confusion surrounding Joseph’s disappearance, the conflicting stories, the strange notes, and the data that didn’t add up. Detectives traced Joseph’s last cell-phone pings to two vastly different locations: one in the center of Bloomington’s busy nightlife district at 7th and Walnut, and another miles away on Old State Road 37, near the woods surrou...

The morning after Joseph Smedley vanished, his sister received a text message from his phone: “Viv, I’m sorry. I have to leave the country…” Hours later, police discovered a handwritten note in his room, signed Smedley and dated a day after he disappeared. In this episode, we follow the first week of the investigation: the confusion, the missteps, and the rumors that began inside Joseph’s fraterni...

On the tenth anniversary of Joseph Smedley’s disappearance, we return to Bloomington, Indiana, to re-examine the night it all began. Under the eerie glow of a rare Blood Moon, Joseph left his off-campus house and vanished. Five days later, his body was discovered in Griffy Lake, weighed down by rocks. In this first episode, we hear a never-before-released 911 call, revisit Joseph’s last known hour...

On June 12, 1994, twenty-year-old Delmar Wilson was found shot in his car on Radcliff Road in Washington County, Indiana. The engine was still running. The headlights still on. His foot still pressed on the brake. Police believe Delmar knew his killer. But in the three decades since, the case has passed from detective to detective, with no arrests and no answers.

On December 27, 2004, 37-year-old Michelle Asher was last seen walking along Route 33 out of Russellville, Illinois, heading toward Vincennes, Indiana. Two weeks passed before she was reported missing. By then, police and volunteers searched the countryside, but no clues turned up. Five months later, fishermen on the Wabash River made a discovery: Michelle’s body tangled along the riverbank. The o...

July 2007. A Nashville truck stop. Police approach a mustard-yellow cab and arrest a long-haul trucker suspected in murders across multiple states. But this isn’t a story about him. It’s about the women. We investigate the unsolved 1997 murder of Andrea Michelle Hendrix-Steinert in Gibson County, Indiana, and ask: when predators use the highway, who is left behind?

On a cold morning in October 1997, the body of 28-year-old Andrea Michelle Hendrix-Steinert was found in a ditch along County Road 350 in Gibson County, Indiana. Andrea was a mother, a daughter, and a pharmacy clerk who was just turning her life around. Years later, a prison inmate confessed to her killing, but no charges were ever filed. This episode of A Heavy Weight tells Andrea’s story in full...

In May 1976, the body of 18-year-old Bennett Brown was found in rural Lawrence County, Indiana. He had no identification — only a set of keys, $1.05 in coins, and a name stitched into his clothes. Who was Bennett Brown? How did a college freshman from Evanston, Illinois, end up murdered and left in a wooded ravine nearly 300 miles from home? This episode of A Heavy Weight dives into Bennett’s stor...

In February 1981, 31-year-old Juanita Boyd vanished after a night at Snyder’s Corner Tavern in LaPorte, Indiana. A week later, she was found strangled and stabbed in the trunk of her green Pontiac Catalina, abandoned off a muddy rural road. Her killing remains unsolved more than forty years later. In this episode, we retrace the timeline from her last sighting to the 2013 cold-case re-examination,...

In the summer of 1979, a rusted barrel bobbing in a shallow Indiana creek revealed a secret the town had almost forgotten: the skeletal remains of 21-year-old Mary Ann Higginbotham. She had vanished without a trace a year earlier. No missing persons report. No search parties. No headlines. As police began unraveling the threads of her disappearance, they uncovered a web of stolen cars, criminal in...

In 1993, 16-year-old Rayna Rison walked out of her after-school job and vanished. Thirty-three days later, her body was found in a pond. No signs of trauma. No suspect in custody. For decades, the case haunted LaPorte, Indiana—tainted by rumors of sexual abuse, cover-ups, and silence. Then in 2014, prosecutors convicted Jason Tibbs, Rayna’s former middle school boyfriend. Case closed. Or so it see...

In 1987, 10-year-old Linda Weldy got off her school bus in rural Indiana and vanished. Her body was found just a few miles from her home. Her murder remains unsolved nearly four decades later. But Linda’s story is more than a cold case—it’s a reflection of the cracks in small-town systems, where children fall through and justice stalls. In this episode, we revisit Linda’s case and examine how comm...

Jessica. Holly. Linda. Rayna. These girls never met. But they may all be connected by the same man. In this episode, we examine Larry Dewayne Hall: a man suspected in over 40 abductions, but convicted in just one. His words led to search warrants, graveyard digs, and hope for families desperate for answers. But when it came time to testify… he claimed it was all a dream.

A grave digger. A Civil War re-enactor. A man with a van full of rope, duct tape, and maps marked with X’s. In this episode of A Heavy Weight , we reveal the man who may have haunted the Midwest for over a decade—Larry Dewayne Hall. Though convicted of kidnapping Jessica Roach, he’s suspected in the disappearances of more than 40 young women, including Holly Ann Anderson, who was found murdered ju...

On a cold January morning in 1992, 18-year-old Holly Ann Anderson was found stabbed to death on the side of an empty rural road in Vermillion County, Indiana. Her case went cold almost immediately. No suspect. No motive. Just silence. Nearly two years later and just three miles away, 15-year-old Jessica Roach disappeared while riding her bike home from school. Her body, discovered weeks later in a...

In 1978, Mary Beth “Pixie” Grismore — a 26-year-old mother and former pageant star — vanished from her Indiana farmhouse, just hours before she was set to start a new life. Seventy-one days later, her body was found 180 miles away, strangled and abandoned in the trunk of her car at a motel in Ohio. This is more than a cold case. It's a haunting portrait of how women’s voices were ignored, how...