The one that closed · Theresa Burns

JANUARY 11, 1988 — SEPTEMBER 2015 · TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS

This section ends where the record says it should end: with the case that closed. Theresa Burns was sixteen, a sophomore at Mishawaka High School, living with her family in Mishawaka. On January 11, 1988, she came home during a break in her school day and was talking with her boyfriend on the telephone; he heard her doorbell ring as their call ended. That evening her older brother Steve came home and found her on the floor. She had been shot six times in the head. There was no forced entry that the record states, and the police collected a sexual-assault kit whose analysis found no seminal material. The facts in this paragraph are the Court of Appeals' own statement of the case, and they are the whole of what this section prints of that day: a girl answered her doorbell, and the record of her killing begins there.

The investigation's course is a matter of court record, and it is printed from it. The grand jury of December 1988 — the non-verdict in the entry above — left the case with Detective Craig Whitfield of the Mishawaka police, who had it from the beginning and, by the Tribune's account in 2002, had worked on it ever since it occurred; he stood that year on the prosecutor's new Cold Case Squad, with the victim's mother in the room. In 2010 the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit took the case up as a cold case. The break, when it came, was the gun: on further examination and testing of the weapon used to kill her, the State filed its charge on December 13, 2013 — an information in the St. Joseph Superior Court charging Phillip M. Geans with her murder. The State's own path to that filing ran through evidence gathered in 1988 and re-examined a quarter-century later, and the trial record shows the defense reaching back the whole distance: the 1988 grand jury's transcripts, it emerged, could not be found — not by the prosecutor, not by the Circuit Court, not by the reporter who had taken them — and the trial court, finding that the State had made all reasonable efforts and borne no fault in the loss, let the case be tried on the witnesses and the weapon.

The jury trial began on September 21, 2015. The jury found Phillip Geans guilty of the murder of Theresa Burns, and the court entered judgment and sentence accordingly; the press of record reported the sentence as sixty years. Geans appealed, and on September 16, 2016, the Indiana Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in full. Twenty-seven years and eight months after a doorbell rang in a Mishawaka house, the case that had survived a grand jury's silence, a lost transcript, and the deaths of none of its questions arrived at the only ending the criminal record recognizes. Her mother had stood in a prosecutor's press conference in 2002, thirteen years in, asking for exactly this. The file is closed, and it is this section's honest end: proof, in the city's own record, that the open files above are a condition, not a fate.

Sources:

1. Phillip M. Geans v. State of Indiana, Indiana Court of Appeals, Memorandum Decision 71A04-1512-CR-2341 (September 16, 2016), read in full — the killing and its discovery, the grand jury and Whitfield's report, the 2010 cold-case investigation, the December 13, 2013 charge, the lost grand-jury transcripts, the trial of September 2015, the guilty verdict, and the affirmance.
2. South Bend Tribune (2002), "Toth announces Cold Case Squad" — Whitfield's continuous work on the case since 1988 and the mother's presence at the squad's announcement.
3. South Bend Tribune and wire coverage of the sentencing (2015), as summarized in the case's published record — the sixty-year sentence.