INDIANA 1972 Cold Case Solved – Her Little Girl Was Found Alive 

To continue our top headlines, Indiana State Police solved a 53-year-old cold case.  Police say 26-year-old Phyllis Baylor was driving from Indianapolis to Bluffton with her young daughter in 1972. An hour after her car was found abandoned along I-69 in Grant County, someone found her body along Shoaf Road in Allen County.

 She’d been shot to death. Her 3-year-old daughter was found next to her on her. Today, police announced Fred Lynaman from Grosse Pointe, Michigan as the suspect in the case. Thanks to DNA testing, he was 25 years old at the time of the crime. Officers say someone murdered Lynaman in 1985.  On the night of July 7th, 1972, a young mother left Indianapolis with her 3-year-old daughter for what should have been an ordinary drive to visit family. They never arrived.

 By the following morning, the car they had been traveling in was sitting on the shoulder of Interstate 69 in Indiana. It was a borrowed car, and its hood was raised, but the mother and her little girl were gone. Her family had already started searching, and police were called to the abandoned vehicle, but there was no clear answer to where the two of them had gone after leaving it.

Then, about an hour later and miles farther north, a woman driving along a rural road noticed a small child near the roadside. The little girl was alive. Nearby, in a ditch, was her mother. She had been killed. Somewhere between the abandoned car and that rural road was a part of the journey no one could explain, and it would take more than 50 years to identify the man authorities say was responsible.

But before we go back to 1972, this is Root of Crime. Subscribe for carefully researched cold cases where the story begins with the people who lived them, not the person who took their lives. Her name was Phyllis Jean Baylor. Before Indianapolis, before the Interstate, and long before her name became attached to a cold case, Phyllis Jean Miller had grown up in Bluffton, Indiana.

Her parents still lived there, and it was the place she was heading back to on the final night of her life. By 1972, Phyllis was 26 years old and living in Indianapolis with her 3-year-old daughter Jody, and had worked for several years as a legal secretary at an Indianapolis law firm. Phyllis had married Jody’s father, Richard Rick Baylor, in 1966, and by the summer of 1972, they’d been living separately for months, but Rick remained involved in their daughter’s life.

 On Friday, July 7th, nothing about Phyllis’s plan suggested that the evening would become anything more than an ordinary family trip. She wasn’t heading somewhere unfamiliar. She was taking Jody from Indianapolis to Bluffton to spend time with her parents, and her family knew she was coming and roughly when to expect her. There was only one small complication.

 Phyllis’s own car wasn’t available, so for the trip, she borrowed a Ford from a co-worker. At around 8:00 that evening, Phyllis and Jody left Indianapolis and headed north. Under ordinary circumstances, the drive should have put them in Bluffton later that evening, but the expected arrival time came and went, and neither Phyllis nor Jody was there.

Her parents tried to reach her in Indianapolis, but there was no answer. As the hours passed, what might initially have been a delay became harder to explain. So, Phyllis’s father contacted Rick, but he didn’t know where they were, either. By then, it was clear this was more than a late arrival. Somewhere along the journey, Phyllis and Jody had disappeared.

 By Saturday morning, Rick decided to search the route himself. He drove north on Interstate 69, following the route Phyllis should have taken and looking for any sign of them. For miles, there was nothing. Then, in Grant County, he saw the borrowed Ford sitting on the shoulder of northbound I-69 with its hood raised.

 Rick stopped, but Phyllis and Jody were not there. At about 10:30 that morning, Indiana State Police were called to the abandoned vehicle. The Ford could explain why Phyllis’s journey had stopped, but not where she and Jody had gone afterward. According to later accounts based on the original investigative records, troopers found a broken radiator hose that could have caused the Ford to overheat, and nothing in those records indicated deliberate damage.

 So, Phyllis may simply have broken down. But, there was another detail that made the timeline more troubling. A nearby resident reportedly remembered seeing the Ford sitting along I-69 at around 11:30 the night before. If that recollection was accurate, the car had been there for roughly 11 hours by the time police were called the following morning, and somewhere during those hours, Phyllis and Jody had left it.

Investigators came to believe that Phyllis and Jody had gotten into a car with someone else after the Ford broke down, and that it likely wasn’t someone Phyllis knew. What they had was narrower than a name. Phyllis left Indianapolis around 8:00, the Ford was reportedly on the Interstate by around 11:30, and by morning, she and Jody were gone.

Then, another call provided the next piece of the journey. Farther north, near Huntertown in Allen County, a woman driving along West Road at about 11:37 that morning noticed a very small child near the roadside, and she stopped. The little girl was standing near a ditch, and inside it was her mother. Help was called.

 The little girl was Jody Baylor, and she was alive. Authorities later described her as unharmed, although the original record reconstruction mentions a minor head injury. Either way, the 3-year-old had survived. Her mother had not. Phyllis was lying in the ditch nearby, and investigators established that she had been shot.

 The autopsy also determined that she had been sexually assaulted. Police now had two points on a map, the abandoned Ford in Grant County and West Road in Allen County. What they still didn’t have was the journey between them or the identity of the person who took Phyllis and Jody from one place to the other. They had a disabled Ford, preserved evidence, and a surviving child, but still no man to connect to the crime.

With two scenes now connected, investigators began working backwards, starting with the people closest to Phyllis, including Rick. Because he and Phyllis were separated, Rick later told NBC News that police looked closely at his whereabouts, but he was able to account for where he’d been that night, and investigators moved on from him.

Detectives also worked outward from the Ford in West Road, questioning nearby residents and motorists who might have seen something that night, and they preserved what physical evidence they could. Phyllis’s clothing was collected and retained, even though DNA profiling did not yet exist as an investigative tool.

Within days, another lead gave detectives a suspect, a man already under scrutiny for a series of alleged abductions unfolding in central Indiana during that same weekend. No one had seen him with Phyllis, and there was no known relationship between them, but the timing and the pattern of the other cases were enough to make him a serious focus of the investigation.

For years, suspicion around him did not go away, but seeming to fit the case was never the same as proving it. And detectives had a fundamental problem. No witness could place him with Phyllis, and no physical evidence connected him to West Road. Then, forensic science changed. DNA testing gave investigators a way to return to Phyllis’s preserved clothing and test the theory that had followed their suspect for years.

 Eventually, they developed a male DNA profile and compared it against him. It did not match. Eliminating him did more than remove a suspect. It forced investigators to confront the possibility that the man they were looking for was someone they had never seriously considered, and the DNA still had no name attached to it.

 The case entered another long period of uncertainty. As technology changed, investigators kept returning to the preserved evidence, and years became decades, but the unanswered question remained the same. Who had encountered Phyllis after her car became disabled on Interstate 69? By 2015, 43 years had passed since Phyllis was killed, and Indiana State Police decided to put the case back in front of the public.

 Detective Kevin Smith was working the investigation by then, and he wanted people talking about Phyllis’s case again in case someone remembered something or was finally willing to come forward. The renewed push brought Phyllis’s case back into local television and newspaper coverage, and investigators still needed evidence capable of identifying the person responsible.

 But science was also continuing to move forward. Investigators arranged for the biological evidence from Phyllis’s clothing to undergo updated DNA testing, and this time, the laboratory developed a profile suitable for comparison against law enforcement databases. They entered it, but there was no hit. The testing had produced a better profile, still without a name, though the evidence remained available as forensic methods continued to advance.

That opportunity came in 2024. More than 50 years after Phyllis was killed, investigators returned to the preserved clothing again, and the Indiana State Police Laboratory was able to develop a much stronger DNA profile from the evidence. The Indiana State Police Cold Case Team and Allen County investigators began working with Identifinders International using forensic genetic genealogy to take the profile beyond ordinary database searching.

 A genealogist with the company worked with investigators to trace genetic relatives toward the unknown man’s family and narrow the possible branches. The person they were trying to identify had left no name at the crime scene and no known relationship with Phyllis, but gradually the possible family lines began to narrow. Investigators compared those family branches with the age and Indiana connection that would have made sense in 1972, and eventually one name stood out.

For more than 50 years, that name had never been at the center of Phyllis’s investigation, and it wasn’t the man detectives had questioned for years in 1972, either. His name was Fred Allen Leinenbach. He was 25 in 1972, had been born in the Anderson area, and later had ties to Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

 What investigators did not find was any known relationship between Fred Leinenbach and Phyllis Baylor. So, one of the oldest questions in the case remained unanswered. How did their paths cross? Genealogy had given investigators a name, but now they had to determine whether the physical evidence supported it.

 Indiana State Police ultimately identified Fred Allen Leinenbach as the source of the DNA recovered from Phyllis’s clothing. After more than 50 years, the unknown male profile finally had a name. But as detectives looked into Leanaman, they discovered something that changed what could happen next. They could identify him and investigate his past, but they could never question him. Fred Leanaman was already dead.

He had been murdered in Detroit in 1985, leaving him dead for roughly 40 years by the time investigators learned his name. There would be no interview, no chance to ask how he encountered Phyllis, or what happened during the missing hours, and no arrest or trial. None of that explained how he knew Phyllis, because investigators still found no known connection between them.

A Detroit News article from 1985 documented Leanaman’s killing. He was beaten with a baseball bat during a dispute over property, then left inside a dumpster that was set on fire while he was still alive. Two men were charged in connection with his death. The circumstances of that killing didn’t solve anything about 1972, but his death created a permanent limit on what investigators could ever know.

The evidence was reviewed with the Allen County Prosecutor’s Office, and authorities said that if Fred Allen Leanaman had still been alive, prosecutors would have charged him with the murder of Phyllis Baylor. There was never a trial because Leanaman had died decades before investigators identified him. Indiana State Police nevertheless identified him as the source of the DNA recovered from Phyllis’s clothing, and as the man responsible for her murder.

For the investigation, that was as far as the case could go. For Phyllis’s family, the answer was finally about to become public. On April 16th, 2025, Indiana State Police publicly announced that the murder of Phyllis Baylor had been solved. Before the public announcement, investigators met with members of the Baylor family, including Rick and Jodie, to tell them the man responsible had been identified.

For Jody, the answer had taken almost her entire lifetime. She had been three when she was found beside West Road, and by 2025, she was in her mid-50s. Jody has not publicly described what she remembers from that night or how she felt when investigators gave her the answer, so we should not imagine it for her.

 Rick, then 79, told NBC News that learning Leineman’s identity brought relief, but Fred had been dead since 1985, so there would never be a courtroom. Rick also thought about the people who had waited for the answer, but hadn’t lived long enough to receive it. Phyllis’s parents were gone, and so was her sister. Jody was still here, and Rick described finally knowing as a blessing for their daughter.

 Solving the case after 53 years could not put Fred on trial or answer exactly how Phyllis encountered him, and some of those answers may have died with him. But the unknown DNA profile finally had a name, and Phyllis’s family finally knew who authorities said was responsible. But Phyllis’s story should not end with Fred Leineman.

 Before she became the center of one of Indiana’s longest-running cold cases, she was Phyllis Jean Miller, a daughter, a sister, and a mother. She grew up in Bluffton, the same town she was trying to reach on the final night of her life, and by 26, she was working as a legal secretary in Indianapolis while raising her 3-year-old daughter.

And on July 7th, 1972, she was doing something completely ordinary, driving home to visit her parents with her daughter beside her and family waiting for them. They never arrived. For 53 years, the abandoned Ford, West Road, and unidentified DNA became details attached to Phyllis’s name, but they are details of the investigation, not the entirety of the person at its center.

Phyllis Jean Miller Baylor had been born in Bluffton on July 13th, 1945. On July 8th, 1972, she was killed. Phyllis was 26 years old. 5 days later, she would have turned 27. If you believe cases like Phyllis’s deserve careful, complete coverage that remembers the person behind the investigation, subscribe to Root of Crime.

 Leave your thoughts respectfully in the comments and share her story with someone who should hear it.