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1988–2016
Theresa Burns, sixteen years old, was killed in her Mishawaka home on January 11, 1988. She was home on a school break, on the telephone with her boyfriend, Shawn Matthews, who heard her doorbell ring as the call ended; her brother Steve found her that evening. She had been shot six times in the head. The sexual-assault examination found no seminal material. The case then did what cold cases do: on December 12, 1988, a St. Joseph County grand jury was convened on her death and returned no indictment — the fact preserved in the January 1989 report of Mishawaka Police Detective Craig Whitfield, the lead investigator — and the file waited twenty-two years. The facts in this entry are the Indiana Court of Appeals' own, from its 2016 opinion in Phillip Geans's appeal; where the entry adds the sentence, the source is named.
The St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit reopened the case as a cold case in 2010. Further examination and testing of the gun led, on December 13, 2013, to an information charging Phillip M. Geans with the murder. At the jury trial that began September 21, 2015, James Lewis testified that he had seen Geans steal the gun from a friend's house before the killing, and that both men had handled and fired it at a gravel pit. The jury convicted Geans of murder. The case's published accounts report a sentence of sixty years. Geans appealed — on the lost transcripts of the 1988 grand jury proceedings, on the exclusion of witnesses, and on a denied mistrial — and on September 16, 2016, the Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction entire (Geans v. State, No. 71A04-1512-CR-2341, memorandum decision, Najam, J.; appeal from the St. Joseph Superior Court, Judge Jerome Frese presiding below).
One strand of the case's afterlife is labeled at its strength: the television accounts of the investigation say detectives once weighed a traveling serial killer among their theories. The adjudicated answer was narrower and nearer — a local man, a stolen gun, and a grand jury's 1988 silence reversed by a laboratory a generation later. The theory is printed because the accounts carry it; the record that governs is the opinion.
Sources:
- Geans v. State, No. 71A04-1512-CR-2341 (Ind. Ct. App. Sept. 16, 2016) — memorandum decision affirming the conviction; trial cause 71D03-1312-MR-14; read first-hand
- Published accounts of the case (Investigation Discovery's "On the Case with Paula Zahn" and its published summaries) — the sixty-year sentence and the serial-killer theory, at the strength stated