Mishawaka Cold Cases and Unsolved Mysteries: The Open Files

Unsolved Mysteries · The Open Files

The Crime section of this history closes its cases: the trials, the verdicts, the sentences. This section is its companion — the cases that never closed, and the record that keeps them. It holds one killing the press of record has carried as unsolved since 2010 and no authority has since closed in public; a Mishawaka woman who vanished on a Mishawaka street in 2011 and was found dead across the state line, in a case that is another county's to solve; a young man killed in a parking lot full of people in 2021, in an investigation the homicide unit's own commander said would not be solved quickly; the two men whose names stand at the long end of the state's missing-person bulletin; and the case this section exists, in part, to end honestly — the schoolgirl killed in 1988 whose file stayed open for twenty-seven years and then closed, in a courtroom, for good. It also holds a correction. The most famous "unsolved" story attached to this city's name — the two missing girls of the podcast record — is not a case at all, and the proof of that stands at the end of this section, where the record says it belongs.

A word on the sources, printed once and plainly. Mishawaka's police department publishes no cold-case board and no list of its open cases; neither does South Bend's. The named public record of this county's open cases reaches the public through the State Police's district list, the state's missing-person bulletin, the prosecutor's and homicide unit's own releases, Michiana Crime Stoppers' appeals, and the press of record's standing accounts. So this section is an assembly, and its rule is stated here so the reader can hold it to account: a case stands in this section only where an authority has published it as open, or where the press of record carries it as unsolved and no authority has published its closing. Each case is carried at the size its public record supports, and nothing has been added to any case that its record does not state. Where the record stops, the entry stops, and says so.