The verdicts that never came

CHARGED IN NO COURT, OR CHARGED AND NEVER TRIED HERE

A case can fail to close in more than one way, and this section keeps the ways separate. The never-solved cases stand above. This entry holds the cases in which the machinery of verdict was reached for and did not arrive — beginning with this section's own closing case, a generation early. In December 1988, eleven months after Theresa Burns was killed in her Mishawaka home, the St. Joseph County prosecutor convened a grand jury on her death. The State named no suspect before it; six witnesses testified; and the grand jury returned no indictment. The lead Mishawaka detective's own report, written the following month, records the outcome in the record's plain words: the grand jurors "did not return an indictment and were of the opinion that one of several people could be involved in this case." For twenty-five years that non-verdict was the case's public resting place. What lifted it stands at the close of this section.

The second case in this entry stands at pointer size, because the Crime section owns it whole. Thomas Lionel Rohr, a Mishawaka coin-shop manager, was killed in his shop on August 28, 1985. The man the encyclopedias of the genre later named as his killer — Charles Thurman Sinclair, the "Coin Shop Killer" — was arrested in Alaska in 1990, charged with murders in other places, and died in an Anchorage jail cell on October 30, 1990, never tried for any of them and, in the record reached, never charged in Rohr's case at all. The attribution is a suspicion carried by the genre's databases, not an adjudication, and Rohr's killing stands unsolved in the adjudicated record: a case in which the verdict did not merely fail to come — the charge itself never did. The full account stands in the Crime section and the serial-killers leg; it is pointed to here and not retold.

A third file belongs to this entry only as a boundary. Donald Wasserman was a Mishawaka man; his case is Elkhart County's — he vanished after a meeting in Elkhart in August 1981, and in 2025, forty-four years on, two men were charged with his murder there. The charges are allegations, the proceedings are Elkhart's, and the verdict, when it comes, will be entered in Elkhart's record. It is named here so that no reader of this section mistakes the city's oldest missing man for one of its unsolved: his file has moved, at last, into a courtroom — another county's courtroom, whose record will carry it.

Sources:

1. Phillip M. Geans v. State of Indiana, Indiana Court of Appeals, Memorandum Decision 71A04-1512-CR-2341 (September 16, 2016) — the December 1988 grand jury, the six witnesses, the absence of an indictment, and Detective Craig Whitfield's January 1989 report, quoted from the record.
2. the Crime History section of this history — the Rohr killing, the Sinclair attribution and its adjudicated standing, carried whole.
3. Elkhart County Prosecutor's Office, as reported by WNDU (April 2026) — the 2025 charges in the Wasserman case, the 2024 reopening, and the case's Elkhart County standing.