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THE STATE POLICE DISTRICT PAGE, READ WHOLE, NOVEMBER 2026
The state keeps a list; this city is not on it: The Indiana State Police publish their cold cases by district. St. Joseph County falls in the Bremen District, and the district's page, read whole for this section in November 2026, lists three cases. Only one of the three is this county's: Vickie McDonough, found on November 27, 1974, near a railroad access road south of Brick Road in Clay Township — South Bend ground, carried whole in the South Bend record of this history. The other two — Darlene Hulse, killed at Argos on August 17, 1984, and Brandi Peltz, an eleven-year-old killed on December 11, 1986, in her home — are Marshall County cases, and they are printed here only as a boundary line, so that no reader mistakes the district's page for this county's list. No case seated in Mishawaka stands on the State Police's list. That is a finding about the list, not about the cases: the State Police publish the cold cases their own district works, and Mishawaka's open files, in this section, are worked by the county police and the city's own department, whose names appear in the entries below.
The state's second publication points the same way. The Indiana Cold Case Homicides playing-card decks, issued by the Department of Correction with the State Police — fifty-two unsolved homicides and missing persons per deck, distributed through the state's prisons — carry two of this county's cases in their second edition, Vickie McDonough and Lawrence Groves of Lakeville, and no Mishawaka case in the editions read for this county. The decks themselves caution that hundreds of other cases are not profiled in them. The state's whole published word on the cold cases of this county, by both of its instruments, names no Mishawaka file.
Sources:
- Indiana State Police, Bremen District Investigations (cold cases by county), read whole November 2026 — the district's three listed cases, with the McDonough case page (county: St. Joseph) and the Peltz and Hulse case pages (county: Marshall) read in full.
- Indiana Department of Correction / Indiana State Police, Indiana Cold Case Homicides Playing Cards, 2nd Edition (2010) and 3rd Edition (2013), as read for the South Bend record of this history — the county's two deck cases, and the decks' own caution.