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Passed through · formed here in part · 1986–1989
A pastor who came in 1986, and a stepson the courts sent away for 160 years; the ties are fixed exactly so neither grows. The Reverend Robert "Bob" Pelley was not born, raised or formed here: he moved his family to Lakeville in 1986 to take the pastorate of the Olive Branch Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and lived in the parsonage beside it. On the evening of 29 April 1989 he, his wife Dawn, and her daughters Janel (8) and Jolene (6) were shot dead in that home; he was found absent when he did not appear for Sunday service. His stepson Robert Jeffrey "Jeff" Pelley, who had come with the family in 1986 and was a seventeen-year-old high-school senior in the parsonage that spring — formed here in part, and no more than that — was convicted in July 2006 of the four murders, committed on the evening of his senior prom: the Prom Night Murders. He was sentenced to four consecutive forty-year terms, 160 years; the Indiana Court of Appeals reversed in 2008, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 2009, and he has maintained his innocence; no murder weapon was ever recovered. The murders' whole course belongs to the crime leg; they stand here because the nation's record files them under this town's name, and the tie — a pastorate of three years, a stepson of three years — is the whole of it.