Indianapolis 1989 Cold Case Solved — He Killed Her, Went to the Funeral, and Signed His Name

Indianapolis 1989 Cold Case Solved — He Killed Her, Went to the Funeral, and Signed His Name

A 16-year-old girl raped and murdered in 1989. Today, Amy Widner’s killer received a 65-year prison term as part of a plea deal with prosecutors. A cold case for 23 years comes to an end. Good evening, everyone.  Two years old. That’s how old Emily was the morning her world changed into something she would spend the rest of her life trying to understand.

Her mother, Amy Widner, was 16, a junior at Howe High School on the south side of Indianapolis. An honor student, a young mother who had already proven she could carry more than most adults twice her age. On November 13th, 1989,    Amy stayed home from school with a sore throat. Emily was with her.

Gloria had gone to work. Sometime that morning, a young man who had eaten at that family’s  table and walked through that back door dozens of times before,    came back one more time. He came to rob the house. He didn’t know Amy was home.  What happened next left a 2-year-old standing alone at the  bottom of the stairs and left her family with a question that nobody answered for 22 years.

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 Tell me where you’re watching from and whether you’ve ever heard of Amy Widner before today. I read every one. Now, let’s get into it. Indianapolis in 1989    was a city that still felt like it was made up of neighborhoods, not zip codes  or districts, actual neighborhoods, the kind where streets had their own personalities and people knew which houses had dogs and which ones left their back doors unlocked.

The South Side, especially,  felt that way. Working class, close-knit, the kind  of place where a kid could ride a bike three blocks without anyone worrying. It was also the kind of place where a family’s routines were visible, predictable,  and readable to anyone paying attention. Gloria Weidner was raising four kids alone on the South Side, working full-time, no backup plan, no safety  net.

 She had been doing it for years and she was steady at it. Amy was her second child, born  April 10th, 1973, the kind of daughter who understood the situation without needing it explained.  When Gloria left for work, Amy was already handling things,  dinner, the younger kids, the household chores, none of it assigned, all of it just done.

  Her older brother was John Paul, JP, about a year ahead of her.    Her sister, Tonya, a year younger. And Cassie, the youngest, was 12 in the fall of 1989. At Thomas Carr Howe High School, Amy was a junior, honor student, French Club,  Math Club, clarinet in the band, cheerleader for the wrestling  team.

 Her French teacher, Jody George, would say years later that what she remembered most wasn’t the grades or the activities,  it was the work ethic, the quality of just showing up and doing the  thing without waiting for someone to make you. In 1987, when Amy was 14,  something happened that most people in her life didn’t find out about  until after the fact. She got pregnant.

For five and a half months, she carried that pregnancy without telling a single  person. Going to school, sitting in class, coming home to her mother every evening, holding it completely alone. She hid it in baggy sweatshirts. Nobody noticed.  Not Gloria, not her teachers, not her friends. And then, one night, she couldn’t hold it any longer.

 She went to her mother and said the thing she had been most afraid to say. On October 25th, 1987, Amy Widener gave birth to a daughter. They named her Emily. Six days later, Amy walked back through the doors of Ho High School, caught up on everything she’d missed, and kept going. Her grades didn’t fall, they went up.

 She made the honor roll and started talking about university. Gloria thought she’d become a teacher someday. After Emily arrived, Gloria adopted her. The baby who had come into the world as a granddaughter became, in every practical and legal sense, a daughter  and a sister. That’s the kind of family this was. They absorbed difficulty and kept moving.

Nobody in that house knew that November 13th,  1989, would be the last ordinary morning any of them would ever have. It was a Monday. Gloria was up early, the way she always was. Four kids,  one income, the day doesn’t wait. Before she left, she checked on Amy, who was home with a sore throat. She asked if she should drop Emily at the babysitter.

   Amy said, no, leave her here with me. So, Gloria drove to work, sat down at her desk, and around 9:30 in the morning, she started calling the house.  No answer. She tried again, still nothing. She called a neighbor and asked her to go knock on the door.    When the neighbor called back, something in her voice said everything before the words did.

Gloria got up and drove home. The front door opened into  a house that was quiet in a way that had no explanation. And there, at the bottom of the stairs,  was Emily, 2 years old, not crying, not calling out,    just standing, looking up at her grandmother with eyes that had already taken in something they would never be able to put into words.

Gloria  picked her up, put her somewhere safe, and went upstairs to Amy’s bedroom door. What Captain Jack Gilker, one of the first officers on scene that morning, would say about it years later, was simply this,    “It was a scene you do not forget.” Amy’s bedroom told the story of a fight, not a one-sided attack, a fight.

Lacerations to her head, evidence of sexual assault, signs of strangulation. 29 separate injuries documented in the postmortem examination. Amy Widener had not gone quietly.  She had struggled and fought with everything she had. Cause of death, she bled out alone in her own bedroom    while her 2-year-old daughter moved through the floor below.

And pressed flat against the Amy bedroom wall, in Amy’s own blood, was a full, clean palm print, not a smudge, not a partial, a complete palm print left by someone who had touched that wall on his way out. Officers cut the entire  section of drywall out of the wall and preserved it as evidence. That print  would sit in storage for the next 22 years.

There is one thing about that morning that needs  to be said plainly because it matters to everything that follows. The killer was in that house with a 2-year-old girl. He saw Emily. He heard Emily or  at minimum he had the opportunity to. He made a deliberate choice to  leave her alive. Gloria would carry that question for the rest of  her life.

 Not just who, but why? Why leave the  child? What does that choice say about what was going through his mind as he walked out of that house? A few days after the murder, a detective sat with Emily and a set of small finger puppets. He didn’t ask her direct questions. She was two. She had no language for  any of this.

He just watched what she did. What Emily showed him in the way a toddler plays was a small girl moving back and forth between rooms. Her room. Amy’s room. Gloria’s room. She recreated a sequence without knowing that’s what she was doing. When Gloria later asked Emily where Amy was, the little girl answered with the only word she had available.

She said Amy was mean. She didn’t mean cruel. She meant Amy had been fighting someone. A 2-year-old had watched her mother defend herself and translated it  into the only frame she had. That Amy had been mean to someone. That was the closest thing to a witness account the investigation  was ever going to get from that morning.

The physical scene told investigators several things quickly. The back door had been left unlocked, common on that street,  common in that neighborhood, the kind of ordinary habit that had never mattered before. From JP’s  room, an expensive stereo component was missing. From the kitchen, cash Amy had been collecting for a school band fundraiser was gone.

 This was not random. The specific items taken,    JP’s equipment, the cash in the kitchen, the unlocked back door used as entry, pointed to someone who had been inside that house before. Someone who knew the layout, knew where things were  kept, and knew what the Monday morning routine looked like when Gloria drove to work.

He had been watching. He had been planning.  And he had chosen a school day because the house was supposed to be empty. He was wrong about that,    and Amy Widner paid for his mistake with her life. Detectives moved through the obvious names quickly and methodically. Tony Abercrombie, who was, as investigators would later establish, Emily’s birth father, was questioned early.

He had a motive on paper and no solid alibi, but multiple witnesses cleared  him. JP was questioned and cleared. Then  there was Troy Jackson, who lived directly behind the Widner house, and  according to investigators, was known to be familiar with the specific stereo equipment  that had gone missing.

He had left work for close to an hour on the morning of the murder and returned out  of breath. In the days following, he reportedly made references to blood on the walls, details that had not been made public. Every instinct said, “Look here.” Police photographed his  hands, no bruising consistent with a struggle.

Hair samples, no match to the scene evidence.  He sat a polygraph and passed. Every thread pulled on Troy Jackson came apart. The investigation stalled. At Amy’s funeral, detectives  were not there to grieve. They stood in the back and watched. They documented faces, collected names, studied  who came to stand over that casket and what they did when they got there.

They gathered the visitors book,  a record in the handwriting of everyone who had come to pay their respects. The killer  was in that room. He may have said he was sorry. He signed his name in that book. And that book went into the file, into the box, onto the shelf,  and waited. Gloria went home to the same house, the same stairs, the same bedroom door at the top.

  She locked the back door every night from that point forward, a small ritual against the fear that had taken up permanent residence  in her chest. Her youngest daughter, Cassie, 12 years old when Amy died, called her father and asked  him to nail the windows shut. Standing in the grocery store, driving through her own neighborhood, Gloria would look at the faces around her and think, “He’s local. He knew this family.

He could be right here.” That wasn’t paranoia. That was accurate. He was right there. He always had been. The investigation cycled through the years the way cold cases do. A lead would surface, get worked, come apart. In 2002, Lieutenant Roger Spurgeon took over IMPD’s cold case unit. Approximately 800 unsolved cases, 800 families, 800 sets of unanswered questions.

Amy Widner was one file among 800. A man called the tip line to say Amy had been visiting him in dreams. He had lived across the street.  He had feelings for her. On the morning of November 13th,  1989, he had been sent home from school early with no alibi. Now, 13 years later, he was calling police about dreams.

His DNA  was tested against samples from Amy’s bedding. No match. Then, in 2003,  Spurgeon’s team re-interviewed Tony Abercrombie as part of a fresh look at the case. He gave them a list of people he remembered from around the Widner house. People who knew the family, knew the layout, knew the rhythms of that household.

One name on that list was Rodney Dink, a friend of JP’s, a regular presence who had been through the back door enough times that nobody thought twice about it.    The name went into the file, into the 2003 interview  record, and it sat there. Spurgeon would later say with honesty  that Dink was one of dozens of names that came in during that reinvestigation,  and that with one person working 800 open cases, some threads simply  didn’t get pulled when they should have.

That explanation is true and inadequate at the same time. Because here is what it comes down to. In 2003, 9 years before this case was finally solved, the killer’s name was written in a police  file in black and white, available to anyone who opened that folder and read far enough. Nobody did.  We’re roughly halfway through this story and the second half is where it  completely changes direction because of one man who had absolutely no official reason to be involved.

 If you’re not subscribed yet, now is the  moment. Hit subscribe, drop a comment below. Are you familiar with this case?    I want to know. Back to Indianapolis. In 2011, a friend of Amy’s created a Facebook memorial page. Photos, memories,  messages from people who had known her. A small digital monument for a girl most of the world had stopped  thinking about.

The cold case detective formally assigned to Amy’s file wanted to look at the page. He didn’t know how to print from Facebook, so he walked across the hall and asked the office’s unofficial tech person  for help. Detective Sergeant William Carter had spent years in IMPD’s nuisance abatement unit.

 Quality of life violations,  overcrowded venues, underage drinking, noise complaints. He used Facebook to find illegally  promoted events. He had never worked a homicide. He had zero official connection to Amy Widner. His assignment  that afternoon was to print one page. He printed it. Then he looked at the photo at the top.

Amy Widner, 16 years old, holding Emily,    smiling in the particular way of someone who has just figured out exactly what their life is supposed to look like. Carter had grown up near  that neighborhood. Amy would have been his age. He picked up the 65-page case file. Nobody asked him to.

 No supervisor gave him the assignment. He took it home, sat at his own desk, and started from the beginning. Typewritten  pages from 1989, evidence logs, suspect interviews, Spurgeon’s 2003 notes, the list of names. His first move exposed the first problem. The entire 1989 investigation was paper,    typewritten, handwritten, nothing searchable, nothing cross-referenced in any database.

Carter digitized everything.  Every name, every address, every neighbor canvassed on the original November morning. What became clear almost immediately was  that dozens of JP’s friends, people who had spent regular time in that house, had never been formally interviewed, never given DNA samples,  never been cleared or eliminated.

 Not because they were suspects,  but simply because nobody had gotten to them in 1989. 22 years of basic work unfinished.  Carter started making calls. One of them went to a woman named Joy Haney, who had lived directly across the street  in 1989 and moved away years before. Carter tracked her down using the original canvas records.

She gave  him names. Most were already in the file. And then, at the end of the conversation, she mentioned  one more. Rodney Denk. Not as an accusation, just as someone who used to be around. Talk  to him. He was one of JP’s friends. Carter wrote the name down. And something shifted because that name was already in the file.

 It  had been sitting in Tony Abercrombie’s 2003 statement for 9 years. Two separate sources, unprompted, same name, no connection to each other. And nobody had ever made contact with him. Carter ran Denk through the system.    40 years old at that point, divorced, one son, living with his mother on the east side of Indianapolis, working at a local auto shop.

No outstanding warrants, no reason on paper  for anyone to look twice at him. Carter drove to the house. Denk wasn’t home. His mother answered the door. Carter left  his card. Routine questions about an old case. No alarm, no pressure. Denk called back the same day.  Calm, cooperative.

 Said of course he’d sit down and talk. They set a time and a date. Carter arrived at the appointed time. Rodney Denk  was gone. Not just out, gone. His mother said she hadn’t  seen him in days. He had quit his job. He had cleared out his bank account. He had walked away from  everything without telling anyone where he was going.

A man who had agreed to speak with police vanished the moment Carter left his name  at the door. Carter pulled Denk’s full arrest record. A 1991 battery charge, a 1997 larceny  charge. Both arrests had produced prints. Both were in the system. Carter took the 1997 print to the  latent print department with one specific stated goal.

 Eliminate Denk  and move on. Standard procedure. Cross another name off the list. He left  the print with forensics and went back to his desk. Later that same day, forensics  called. The bloody palm print from Amy Widner’s bedroom wall, cut from the drywall in November 1989    and preserved in storage for 22 years, matched Rodney Dink’s 1997 arrest print.

 Exact match. No ambiguity. 22 years,  multiple detectives, a cold case unit, a killer’s name sitting unactioned in a 1903 interview file for nine straight years. And it took one man,  working on his own time, 12 days of active questioning  to find what everyone else had walked past.

Carter called Gloria. He told her they had identified a suspect,    someone connected to the family. He didn’t give her the name over the phone. Gloria’s response was not relief. She asked one question. Is it someone we know? The silence that followed was its own answer.    Dink hadn’t run far.

 He had rented a car and was still somewhere in Indianapolis. But a rented car in 2012 meant OnStar,  the vehicle tracking system embedded in the rental. Police used it to locate  him. When officers found Dink stepping out of a friend’s house on the east side,  he looked up and saw them coming.

 And before anyone said a word to him, the first thing out of his mouth was,  “I didn’t do it.” Not confusion, not questions, a denial. Because some part of him had been rehearsing  for this moment for 22 years. He produced a knife and cut his own wrist before officers could reach him. He was taken to Wishard Hospital, handcuffed  to a hospital bed, and that is where the questioning began.

Over the course of 2 days, Denk spoke  on camera. His account shifted in ways investigators noted  carefully. He confirmed he had been watching the Widener house in the weeks before  the murder. He knew about the cash Amy was collecting for the school band uniform fundraiser. He knew about JP’s stereo equipment.

 He chose a Monday morning deliberately, school day, Gloria  at work, the house should have been empty. He said he had checked in at school first for attendance,  then slipped out between classes and walked to the house, going in through the unlocked back door. He was in JP’s room taking the stereo component when Amy came around the corner.

“I didn’t know she was in there,” he told detectives. At various  points during the interrogation, Denk introduced a second person into his account, someone he referred to as Bucky or Buck  or maybe not Buck, he wasn’t sure. The details around this alleged accomplice shifted with each telling. I want to be precise here because this matters.

At the time of Denk’s initial arrest, investigators publicly acknowledged that semen recovered from Amy’s bedding appeared to involve a question about a possible second person.  Denk eventually pleaded guilty and told the court he had acted alone and his DNA matched the semen evidence from the scene.

  Whether the Bucky account was a fabrication designed to muddy the investigation  or something else entirely has never been fully resolved on the public record. What is confirmed is that Denk pleaded guilty to acting alone  and his DNA matched the semen. And then, at some point during those two days of questioning, Denk stopped constructing the story.

  He looked across the table and asked quietly, “Can I just say it was me? Can I just say I did everything?” Not a breakdown,  not a dramatic confession, just a man who had been maintaining a lie for 20  years asking permission to stop. JP Widner, Amy’s brother, the boy whose room Rodney had been robbing when Amy came around the corner, the boy who had called Rodney a friend,  processed the news in silence.

And then, he said the thing that would define the entire emotional shape of this  case. “He was at the funeral with us. How do you commit this murder  and two days later sit with us and mourn?” That is exactly what Rodney Denk had done. He killed Amy on a Monday. He walked into the funeral home that same week.

 He stood among the people whose lives he had just destroyed.  He told them he was sorry. He signed his name in the visitors book. And that book went into the file, into the box, onto the shelf, where it sat for 22 years alongside the name he would also leave in a 2003 police interview. Charges were filed in July 2012. In June 2013, shortly before the case was scheduled to go to trial, Rodney Denk pleaded guilty  to the murder and rape of Amy Widner.

 He was sentenced to 65 years.    He will not be eligible for release until he is in his 70s. He was 18 years old when he killed her. During the investigation following Denk’s arrest, detectives learned something about his personal history that  nobody had been aware of. His son, Dylan Denk, was already incarcerated, serving a 20-year sentence  for killing his own mother, Rodney’s ex-wife, Mary McHenry.

 Dylan had been 16 at the time of that crime,    just 1 year younger than Rodney had been when he killed Amy. A father and son,  both convicted killers, both in the prison system at the same time for crimes committed decades apart. Gloria had spent weeks preparing herself for rage.

 She had braced for the anger she assumed would arrive the first time she stood  in the same room as the man who had taken her daughter. When they brought Rodney Denk into the courthouse, she felt something she hadn’t expected. She described it afterward,  standing outside the courthouse quietly. She said,    “I thought I was going to see a monster, but who I saw was Rodney.

”    That sentence is the entire case. He was not a stranger who appeared from somewhere unknown and vanished back into it. He was Rodney, familiar, present, the kind of person you let through the back door without thinking twice, because thinking twice about someone you already know feels like an insult.

   That familiarity was the access point, not the unlocked door, the  trust. Emily Widner, the little girl who had stood at the bottom of those stairs at 2 years old and looked up at her grandmother,  grew up inside the weight of that history. Gloria had legally adopted her not long after Amy’s death.

 The baby who came into the world as a granddaughter, became in every real sense a  a daughter and a sister. Emily graduated from Purdue University with honors, carrying her mother’s work ethic into a world Amy never got to see.  Jody George, who had taught French to both Amy and Emily,    told her at graduation that she knew Amy would have been proud of her.

Emily moved to California the year after graduating. She said she could not fully become who she was supposed to be while still in Indiana, that the place, the history, the unanswered question that had shaped her whole life made it impossible to move forward in the same space. Gloria eventually transformed Amy’s bedroom.

  The room where Amy died is now where grandchildren sleep when they  visit. One thing remains, a hat on the door. Everything else has been replaced. Gloria  said, “Amy’s not in that room anymore. Amy’s in me.” And Detective  Sergeant Bill Carter, the nuisance abatement officer who was supposed to print a Facebook  page and go back to his desk, maintains Amy Widener’s Find a Grave Memorial to this day. He created it.

 He keeps it updated.    A man who had no official assignment to this case decided on his own time to care about it anyway. Because of one decision made on a quiet afternoon in 2011, a family got the answer they had been waiting 22 years to hear. The question  this case keeps raising is a simple one that doesn’t have a simple answer.

   If Bill Carter hadn’t been the person who printed that Facebook page, if If had been anyone else, anyone who didn’t grow up near that neighborhood, anyone who didn’t look at that photo and feel something, would anyone have ever gotten to the name that was sitting in the file? Maybe.

 Maybe another detective would have eventually gotten there. Maybe the palm print  would have been re-examined in a CODIS expansion.  Maybe someone else would have made those calls. Maybe. But the honest answer is maybe not.  And maybe not is a very uncomfortable place to sit in when a family spent  22 years in it.

The institutional blind spot in this case wasn’t dramatic or corrupt. It was  structural. A cold case unit with 800 open files and one detective.  A 1989 investigation built on paper that no one could search or cross-reference. A name given to police in 2003 that nobody acted on because the backlog was too deep and the time was too short.

Rodney Denk didn’t create those conditions.  He benefited from them. For 22 years, he went to work,  raised a son, moved through ordinary life protected not by cleverness, but by the simple fact that no system ever found a reason to close the gap between his name in a file and his palm  print on a wall.

That gap is the opportunity. Every case on this channel has one. The question worth asking every time  is how wide it had to be before someone decided to close it and who finally did. Drop a comment  below. The question this case leaves open is one the source evidence never fully answered.

 Do you believe Rodney Denk acted alone because the story he started telling in that hospital room with Bucky or Buck or whoever, and the way it kept changing,  that question has never fully closed. Tell me what you think.  Tell me where you’re watching from, and if this case made you think about the cases in your own city that might have a name sitting unread in a file somewhere,  say that, too.

Subscribe if you haven’t already. We’ve got more of these. See you in the next  one.