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The Indiana State Police publishes its cold cases by county and district. St. Joseph County sits in the Bremen District, headquartered at 1425 Miami Highway, Bremen, Indiana, with a cold-case hotline at 1-800-453-4756 and ispcoldcase@isp.in.gov. The Bremen District list was read whole. It carries exactly three cases: Vickie McDonough, 27 November 1974; Darlene Hulse, 17 August 1984; and Brandie Peltz, 11 December 1986. Two of the three belong to Marshall County on the State Police's own county field — Hulse, twenty-eight, taken after a knock at her door and a struggle, found the next day in woods about six miles from her home; and Peltz, eleven, found dead in her Argos home, face down in a bathtub, her upstairs bedroom set on fire, cause of death strangulation. Both are excluded from this county's count on the list's own wording. The third case is this county's, and it is the most consequential entry in this section.
Vickie McDonough, State Police case 12F3548, is listed with County: St. Joseph. She was twenty-two. Her body was found on 27 November 1974 on a railroad access road approximately three hundred feet south of Brick Road in Clay Township, covered by old mattresses near a railroad access lane; the body had been placed there several days before it was found; she had been shot twice in the back of the neck. This is new official-record evidence against the banked crime fragment, and it is flagged as such here and in this run's closure file, loudly: the banked fragment closes this ground's homicide record at exactly two cases, the 2013 Patel case and the 2021 Heritage Square shooting, and a 1974 body recovery in Clay Township does not sit inside that close. What the State Police text does not settle is stated with equal plainness. It does not settle whether the Brick Road railroad-access spot lies inside the Granger CDP line — Clay Township extends well beyond the CDP, and the entry gives no cross-street, mile marker, or coordinates. It does not settle where the killing occurred: the body was placed where it was found, days after death, so the recovery scene is a disposal scene and the homicide scene is unknown. And it states no prosecution. The honest disposition is therefore a flag, not a rewrite: the two-case close must be re-examined against State Police case file 12F3548 and the St. Joseph County Coroner's 1974 file, which together would fix the recovery location against the CDP line, and this section does not add McDonough to the CDP homicide count on the present record.
Two defects in the state's own pages are printed whole, because a list read whole includes its errors. First, the case number conflicts between state publications: the current Bremen District page gives McDonough as case 12F3548, while the older Department of Correction cold-case deck, second edition, carries her as case 12F3538. Second, the State Police page for Brandie Peltz repeats McDonough's location text verbatim — "Railroad access road approximately 300 feet south of Brick Road in Clay Township" — in its location-of-offense field, although Peltz's own county field reads Marshall and her home was in Argos. That duplication is a copy error on the official site; Peltz is excluded from the St. Joseph count on her county field, and the duplication is recorded so no later reader builds a second Clay Township case out of it. The same older state deck carries one further St. Joseph County case absent from the current district list: Lawrence (Larry) Howard Groves, forty, case 24-24378, reported missing 28 January 2003 from his home in downtown Lakeville, the home found locked, his body found in June 2003 in the home's crawl space, closed in with a rug over the opening. Lakeville is in Union Township, in the county's south, outside the CDP; Groves is carried here as a case that has fallen off the current board, and he returns in this section's era and omission articles. The State Police list is, by its construction, a list of State Police cases; it does not carry county or city cases, which is why this ground's open 2021 case is not on it — the subject of the omission article below.