South Bend 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. It holds the killing on the Notre Dame campus in 1975 that the county police still carry; the two cases the State of Indiana itself publishes for this county; the appeals Michiana Crime Stoppers has put before the public in the police's name, from a beating death in 1990 to a shooting in 2025; the two people who walked out of this city's ordinary nights and were never found; and the county's one unnamed dead man, whose grave the county opened in 2025 in the hope of giving him his name back. It ends where the record says it should end: with the ones that closed, because in this county, some of them do.

A word on the sources, printed once and plainly. Fort Wayne's police department publishes a cold-case board; South Bend's does not. The South Bend Police Department prints no named list of its open cases on its own site — it asks anyone with information to call its Detective Bureau at (574) 235-9263 or to give the information anonymously to Michiana Crime Stoppers at 574-288-STOP. 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 — the State Police's district list, the state's cold-case card decks, a prosecutor's or homicide unit's own release, or a Crime Stoppers appeal made with the investigating department. 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.