Indiana 1997 Cold Case SOLVED — Two Sisters Walked to the Store and Never Came Home

Two sisters from Muncie, Indiana, left their apartment on a Saturday afternoon in June and walked three blocks to the corner convenience store. The older one, 24-year-old Brenda Shafer, was carrying a $10 bill and a list of four items. The younger one, 19-year-old Gina, was wearing her favorite green jacket and carrying nothing at all because she had just come along for the walk.

They had told their mother they would be back in 20 minutes. They were gone without a trace. Their mother, a woman named Shirley Shafer, called the Muncie Police Department that evening when 20 minutes became 2 hours and 2 hours became 5. Investigators attended. The corner store’s records confirmed the sisters had been there.

 The clerk remembered the green jacket, but the store had no exterior camera. What happened between the moment they stepped out of the store’s front door and the moment they were never seen again alive happened in a three-block stretch of a residential street in broad daylight, in front of houses where people were doing ordinary Saturday afternoon things, without a single witness who could say with certainty what had occurred.

 Brenda and Gina Shafer were found 11 days later in a creek drainage area near a rural highway east of the city. They had been there since the afternoon they went to the store. They were still together. For 27 years, nobody was charged. For 27 years, Shirley Shafer drove the three-block route between the apartment building and the corner store on the anniversary of the day her daughters didn’t come home.

Slowly, the way you drive a route you are trying to understand. She drove it 27 times. Then, in the spring of 2024, the answer arrived from a genealogy database and an evidence swab that had been waiting since 1997. Muncie, Indiana in 1997 was a mid-size city of 70,000 in the east-central part of the state. A manufacturing and university city on the White River that had been through the economic contractions of the late 20th century with the particular resilience and weariness of places whose identity was built around industries

that were no longer as certain as they had once been. Ball State University gave it one kind of energy. The remnants of the manufacturing base gave it another. The neighborhoods were a mix of the comfortable and the struggling of families who had been there for decades and younger people who had come for school and stayed or hadn’t.

Brenda Shafer had been in Muncie since 1993 when she had come for Ball State and had not quite finished the degree but had stayed in the city working retail and later at a dental office as a receptionist making a life with the particular competence of someone who was building something real even if it was taking longer than planned.

She was 24 organized responsible. The sister who held the list. The sister who knew where the money was. The sister who made the plan and communicated it to their mother. She had a boyfriend she had been with for 2 years. She had a savings account she added to every payday. Gina was 19 and had arrived from their home city of Anderson 30 miles west the previous winter to live with Brenda while she figured out her own next steps.

 She was the younger sister in the way of younger sisters who are more spontaneous than their elders. The one who came along for the walk because it was a Saturday afternoon and the walk sounded better than staying in the apartment. She had been looking at cosmetology programs. She had a green jacket she wore constantly through all temperatures because she had found it at a thrift store in Anderson for $3 and it was perfect and she was not going to stop wearing it just because it was summer.

She was wearing it on the afternoon of June 21st, 1997 when she and Brenda walked to the store. The store clerk remembered the jacket specifically because Gina had been leaning against the counter while Brenda paid doing nothing. Just present. And the clerk had noticed the jacket because it was a shade of green that was slightly unusual.

And because Gina had seemed relaxed and happy the way people are on a Saturday afternoon when the only task is to walk to the store and back. That was the last record of either of them. The Muncie Police Department’s investigation was led by Detective Sergeant Carl Pryor, 14 years on the force who began the case with the disquieting awareness that a three-block residential stretch with no camera and no certain witness was an extremely difficult canvas to work from.

He canvassed every house on the route and the blocks adjacent to it. He found two residents who had been outside on Saturday afternoon but who could not place either sister specifically or describe anything unusual. He found one resident who thought she might have seen a vehicle parked on the curb that seemed unfamiliar.

Dark. Possibly a van or a large SUV but could not be more specific than that. He worked Brenda’s social circle. Her boyfriend, her workplace, her extended connections in Muncie and Anderson. He found nothing that pointed toward a known conflict or a specific threat. He worked Gina’s more limited Muncie connections with the same result.

He developed four persons of interest in the first two months, none of whom produced physical evidence or were unable to account for their Saturday afternoon. Physical evidence from the creek site, collected in early July 1997 after Brenda and Gina were found, included biological material from both victims and a third unidentified male contributor.

This third profile was submitted to CODIS in 1999 when the lab achieved a submission quality extraction. No match. It sat in the system through two decades of national database expansions. No match. Shirley Shafer had been widowed in 1991 and had raised Brenda and Gina through their teenage years alone. Her husband, a man named Carl, had died of a sudden cardiac event at 50 3-6 years before the Saturday in June 1997 when his daughters went to the store and did not come back.

 Shirley had spent six years building a life around the three of them, she and Brenda and Gina, in the apartment in Muncie, the Sunday dinners, the phone calls when Brenda was out with her boyfriend, the Saturday afternoon walks to the store. She was 51 in 1997 and the loss of both daughters simultaneously was the kind of event that has no adequate description, no framework that holds it, no word in the language that is proportionate to losing two children in an afternoon in a city where you moved to be near them.

She did not collapse. She went to work. She was a bookkeeper for a small manufacturing firm in Muncie, and she went back to work after 2 weeks because the alternative was staying at home in the apartment above the one the girls had shared, which was not sustainable. She went to church every Sunday. She drove the three-block route on the anniversary, slowly, every June 21st for 27 years.

She contacted the Muncie Police Cold Case Unit every June. She kept both daughters’ photographs on her mantel in every apartment she lived in after 1997. Brenda on the left, Gina on the right. The green jacket visible in Gina’s photograph because it was the jacket Gina was wearing in every photograph from that winter and that spring, and wearing when she walked to the store.

The case file was reviewed in 2001, in 2006, and in 2012. Each review produced the same conclusion. The CODIS profile was in the system. The person of interest list was documented. There was nothing new to act on. The detective who reviewed it in 2012 resubmitted the CODIS profile with the improved parameters that had become available through a 2008 database expansion.

No match. Hutchinson had never been arrested and therefore had no compulsory CODIS entry. A man named Roy Dale Hutchinson had been a person of interest in the original investigation. Not a strong one. Not someone prior had been able to develop evidence against, but someone who appeared in the peripheral canvas of the investigation, and who had the particular quality of a person of interest that cannot be eliminated.

Unverifiable account. Vehicle consistent the witness description. Proximity to the victim’s address. He was 38 in 1997 and lived in a rental house four blocks from the sister’s apartment. He drove a dark-colored Dodge Caravan. He had a prior arrest, not conviction, from 1993 for an unspecified matter that prior had noted but had not been able to connect to the current case.

He had given an account of his Saturday afternoon running errands home by 4:00. That was unverifiable but not contradicted. He had been noted in the file and not eliminated. Not charged. Just noted in the way that a name can be noted in a file and stay there patient and unresolved for 27 years. By 2003, Hutchinson had moved to Indianapolis.

By 2010, he was in Fort Wayne. He had lived in three Indiana cities in the years since 1997. A pattern of movement that is common enough not to be suspicious on its own and specific enough in retrospect to tell a story about a man who did not want to stay anywhere too long. He was 64 years old in 2024 living in a modest house in Fort Wayne working part-time at a hardware store unremarkable to his neighbors.

A man who fixed things on weekends and watched sports and did not discuss his history and had, each time he moved, left a file behind in a previous city that he presumably hoped would stay there. Every case on this channel is the story of something left in an archive waiting for the right question to be asked.

Subscribe if you believe those questions are worth asking and leave a comment letting us know where in the world you’re watching from. Now, let’s get back to Brenda and Gina. In 2023, the Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit expanded its forensic genealogical profiling program to include all unsolved violent crimes with unmatched CODIS profiles from 1990 through 2000.

The Shafer case was in the expansion batch. The 1999 CODIS profile was submitted for genealogical analysis in the summer of 2023. Detective Corporal Renata Osay of the Muncie Police Department Cold Case Unit received the genealogical results in November 2023. The profile matched into a family network in East Central Indiana concentrated in Delaware, Madison, and Allen counties.

 The counties where Hutchinson had lived in succession since 1997. She built the tree over 4 weeks. She eliminated branches. One name remained, Roy Dale Hutchinson. He was 64 years old. Osay pulled the original prior case file. She found the notation Hutchinson Roy Dale four blocks from victim’s residence dark Caravan prior arrest 1993 account unverifiable.

She found prior’s note at the bottom of the Hutchinson section cannot eliminate. Vehicle consistent with witness description. She called Carl prior who was 72 and retired in Mooresville. She read him the name. He was quiet for a moment. He said, I tried. I just couldn’t get there. She said, you got closer than anyone knew.

A DNA sample was collected from Hutchinson through a discarded object at a Fort Wayne gas station in December 2023. The Indiana State Police Forensic Lab confirmed the match to the 1997 CODIS profile in January 2024. The biological material from the creek site that had been submitted to the national database in 1999 and matched nothing in 24 years, matched Roy Dale Hutchinson.

He was arrested at his Fort Wayne home on February 8th, 2024. He was 64 years old. He came to the door when the detectives knocked. He looked at them. He looked at the street behind them. He said, “I figured this was coming.” He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder. One for Brenda Louise Shafer.

 One for Gina Marie Shafer. He has entered a not guilty plea. Shirley Shafer received the call from Detective Osei on the morning of February 8th. She was 78 years old. She sat in the chair in her living room facing the mantle. Brenda on the left. Gina on the right. Green jacket. And she said both their names once each quietly to the photographs.

Then she said, “I will be in that courtroom every single day.” The Muncie community responded to the arrest with the weight of 27 years of accumulated grief. People who had known the sisters, who had watched Shirley drive the route every June, who had seen the anniversary notices in the paper. Gina’s green jacket, the one that the store clerk remembered, that appeared in every photograph from that winter in Anderson, became the detail that people held onto when the news broke.

Someone left a green jacket on the steps of the corner store. Nobody moved it for a week. The corner store is still there. It has different owners now and a camera above the front door that was installed in 2001, four years after two sisters walked out of it and into a Saturday afternoon that had no record of what came next.

The camera was installed because the owners at the time thought it was sensible, not because they knew anything about what had happened in 1997. Most things that would have helped were installed or discovered or invented just slightly too late. The camera, the genealogical databases, the expanded CODIS protocols.

The gap between when the tools were needed and when the tools arrived is where 27 years lived. Brenda and Gina Shaeffer walked to the store because it was Saturday and they needed four things and the walk was only three blocks and Gina came along because she had nowhere better to be on a June afternoon and being with her sister on a Saturday walk was exactly good enough.

Brenda had the list. Gina had the green jacket. They were supposed to be back in 20 minutes. They had been together in the apartment in Anderson growing up, in the thrift store where Gina found the jacket for $3, in every photograph from that winter. And they were together all the way to the end, which is the only part of this that contains anything close to comfort.

 And it is a terrible kind of comfort, the kind that does not reduce the grief, but gives it a shape. And it is the one their mother has been carrying for 27 years alongside the photographs on the mantel. Shirley Shaeffer was asked in an interview after the arrest whether she felt relief. She said she was not sure relief was the right word.

She said she felt that something that had been unresolved for 27 years had become resolved, and that she was not yet certain what she felt about that, and that she was going to take her time finding out. She said she thought Brenda would have appreciated that answer. She said Brenda was always very precise about not claiming to feel things she wasn’t sure she felt.

 The Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit has now reviewed all unmatched CODIS profiles from Delaware County dating to 1985 and submitted 23 cases for genealogical analysis. Four have returned actionable results in the 8 months since the Shafer case broke. Roy Hutchinson’s pattern of movement across three Indiana cities since 1997 is being reviewed in the context of other unsolved cases in those jurisdictions.

Fort Wayne investigators have examined two unsolved cases from the 2000s and 2010s in which Hutchinson’s residence overlapped with the incident geography. Those reviews are ongoing. Gina Shafer’s green jacket, the one the clerk remembered, the one that appeared in every photograph from that winter in Anderson, the one someone left anonymously on the steps of the corner store the morning after the arrest, and that nobody moved for a week, has been kept by the store’s current owner.

He says he does not know who left it or why. He says he did not feel it was his to remove. He says it is still there, hanging on a hook near the back office, and that he is not in a hurry to decide what to do with it. That seems right. Some things earn the time they take to resolve. Shirley Shafer still has the photographs on the mantel.

Brenda on the left, Gina on the right, green jacket. She has been asked whether she will take them down now, whether having the answer changes how she lives with the images. She says the answer does not change who the images are of. She says Brenda and Gina are still on the mantel. She says that is where they belong, and that is where they will stay.

What does it mean to lose two people at once? What does it cost a mother to drive a three-block route for 27 years trying to understand a stretch of ordinary street? And what do we make of the green jacket someone left on the doorsteps? Anonymous, unexplained, just there, and what it says about a community holding something for more than two decades.

Leave those questions in the comments. They belong to Brenda and Gina, and to Shirley, and to 27 June anniversaries on a three-block route in Muncie. Two sisters, 27 years. Subscribe if you believe that the $10 bill and the list of four items in the green jacket were always going to matter. The next case is in the description.

Thank you for watching.