INFAMOUS: Indiana Dunes Disappearances

0:00Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And we actually have a special guest today. If you hear a little whimpers or tiffy taps or anything. Or snores. For the first time since like early days crime junkie, old man Chuck is in the room while we're recording. So please forgive us. But our 14-year-old man wanted to cuddle today and I'm allowing it. Totally. And it's not going to keep me from telling you an incredible story. And that story is a mystery right out of our home state of Indiana. But listen, Britt, the circumstances of this are so foreign that I've heard this story, but it always felt so far away to me.

0:38We're talking horse mobsters, illegal medical boats operating out in open waters. There has been no case like this before or since. And that's why it's one of Indiana's most infamous cases.

1:22The workday has barely started on Monday, July 4th, 1966, when Indiana Dunes State Park, which today is surrounded by Indiana Dunes National Park, like it's like a whole thing anyways, Superintendent William Svedek is getting a panicked call on his office phone. The caller IDs himself as Harold Blau, and he's like, look, my daughter and her friends were at your park on Saturday. It's Monday now, and they haven't come home. My wife and I are super worried. Now, all of these are, you know, these are three young women. Harold's daughter, Patricia, she's 19. Her friends Ann Miller and Renee Broll are around the same age, like 21 and 19, respectively.

2:03But Patricia still lives at home, and she wouldn't leave for days without giving her parents a heads up. And Patricia had even told her mom Saturday that morning when she left that she would be home that night for dinner. And the other girls were supposed to be home, too. But none of them returned to their Chicago homes just over the state line. Svedek tells Harold, OK, listen, I'll look into it. But this uneasy feeling starts to creep in his belly because he might already know something about the missing girls. And it could be bad. You see, two days before, on Saturday, a park ranger had brought a bunch of random items into his office saying that there were things that had been left on the beach of Lake Michigan by three women who went into the water and boarded a boat around noon that day, but then never returned.

2:52How did they know that? Because there were witnesses. There were some teenagers nearby that had seen them get onto the boat. They saw them leave their stuff. And then they alerted the ranger when they were like those teenagers were getting ready to go and the stuff was still there because it seemed like this is the kind of stuff that you like wouldn't you would leave only if you were planning to come back. Right. Like there's like the thermos, some sunglasses, lotion, those kind of things. Even more significant items, too, like cash, a purse, clothes, a pair of shoes. Like they should have been back.

3:21Right. Now, at the time, the ranger wasn't especially concerned when he collected these things, though the Chicago Tribune reports that he did get a description of the boat, at least, which they said was a small boat with white exterior and a blue interior, maybe turquoise-ish blue. And it had an outboard motor. They even gave the ranger a description of the driver, which they say was a tan, dark-haired young man. But listen, people leave stuff on the beach all the time, especially on crowded days like the Saturday before the 4th of July. So at the time, he just gathered the things up and dropped them in Svedek's office.

3:59But no one was like out manning a massive search or trying to find the owners of these items at the time. Now, everyone kind of thought that whoever it was that owned these things would eventually come looking for this stuff at some point. But now, with this phone call, a darker thought washes over Svedek. Lake Michigan is notorious for its strong, unpredictable currents. Like, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the women, maybe even their captain too, had gone for a swim or gotten into an accident and found themselves outmatched by Mother Nature. Like, we live here, so many people underestimate Lake Michigan.

4:37Yeah. Yeah, so once he hangs up with Harold, Svedek starts rifling through the items. He's looking for clues. And I mean, to be fair, he doesn't even know that the women who left these things were Patricia Ann and Renee. It just, like, to him feels too much like of a coincidence not to be. But that's the first order of business, right? Now, when he finds a keychain with car keys and a miniature Illinois license plate and realizes that the plate has what looks like a pretty legitimate plate number, he gets this idea. He calls a few employees, sends them out to check the parking lot near the dunes.

5:12And sure enough, there is a car with that exact plate in the lot. And sure enough, when they run down the plate number with Chicago PD, Svedek gets the confirmation he needs. The car in the parking lot is registered to Ann Miller from the Chicago suburb of Westchester, Which makes this official. He has got a triple disappearance on his hands. And something of that magnitude is above his pay grade. So that's when seasoned Indiana State Police investigator, Detective First Sergeant Edward Burke, steps in to help the investigation. And he doesn't waste any time. One of his first moves is to go through the purse that had been left on the beach.

5:53And it turns out that purse belonged to Renee. And he knows it's hers because inside he finds this rather intriguing letter. Now, Anne and Patricia lived at home with their parents. But 19-year-old Renee is actually married and lives with her husband at the time. And this letter that they find was addressed to him. Is he, like, away somewhere? No. So they lived together. I mean, I assume they see each other, like, on the daily. But it seems like maybe they were a couple that liked to get thoughts down on paper when there were, like, big things. which I think is what this was. Because basically in this letter, there are some issues that she brings up, like her husband spending way too much time with his buddies tinkering with hot rods, which like sounds light and almost cute, but it wasn't either of those things to Renee.

6:38She even threatens to split up over this. But it looks like, I mean, maybe she had second thoughts about giving this to him because according to the date scribbled on this letter, it's like two weeks old by that point, like when he's seeing it. So Sergeant Burke isn't quite sure what to make of it, But he also doesn't have time to really ponder this. Feeling like Svedek might be right about the woman's fate, he calls the U.S. Coast Guard to search the lake near the park, way at the southern end. And boy, does the Coast Guard have their work cut out for them because Lake Michigan is enormous. I said, you guys, everyone underestimates it.

7:12Lake is like not even the right word. Over 22 ,000 square miles enormous is how big we're talking about. And even if you've seen the lakes on, like, a map in school or geography or whatever, like, it doesn't give you a sense for it. No, like, standing on the shore, it honestly looks like an ocean. An ocean. I mean, you can get out there at some point and literally not see land on any side of you. It is huge. So it's not all that surprising when they end the day empty-handed. So first thing next morning, Sergeant Burke gets a huge ground search going to complement the Coast Guard's efforts. He wants every last square inch of the park covered and also a good stretch of shoreline beyond the park.

7:54It's a hell of a task. And for it, he assembles a hell of a search party. A bunch of troopers and park rangers, obviously, and even soldiers from a nearby base. Deputies from Porter County Sheriff's Office, citizen volunteers who will eventually be joined by their bloodhounds. And with the Coast Guard still at it, they're searching literally plane, train and automobile here. And maybe not literally, but almost. You get what I'm saying. And by the end of the day, the searches have covered 40 percent of the park almost. And still, there is just nothing. Now, the Chicago Tribune reports that while the search is put on hold overnight, Sergeant Burke orders a patrol to man the shore until sunrise.

8:35The thinking being that, like, if the women maybe drowned, their bodies could wash up soon. And while drowning from a boating accident is only one theory, it's not at all out of the question that they also could have met with foul play. So they got to find this boat, like if they're going to know either way, right? And while there are some sightings of white boats with blue interiors, they don't find a boat that could have been in the area, like the boat, when the girls went missing. Are they sure they even got on a boat in the first place? I know we have that one sighting of the three girls getting on the boat, But did anyone else see that happen?

9:11They're not sure of anything. I mean, you're right. All they have to back up even this boat story, like from the beginning, is just the word from those teenagers who alerted the ranger. But I will say over the first couple of days as this goes on, like when the story starts making news, people start coming forward. They start getting some more witness tips. And that does seem to support the boat story. More people who say they saw the women climb onto a white boat with a dark-haired, well-tanned man that day. And actually, there are even a few reports of them being seen on a larger boat, like this time with three men.

9:44And that was at some point as well, like that same afternoon. But for some reason, I think that like those are mostly discounted. So a few days into the search, the idea of some sort of fatality causing boat accidents starts to gain traction. But according to more reporting in the Chicago Tribune, random boat debris starts washing up on shore not far from the park. Pieces of seats, styrofoam, scraps of metal, plywood, turquoise plywood. And they can tell that this wreckage came from what the reporting refers to as a quote-unquote outboard motorboat. And like I said, this stuff isn't washing up hours away.

10:22It's washing up like three miles away near some sort of power plant. Now at this time, there haven't been any reports of a missing boat. No reports of a crash or of missing or injured boaters. which some find kind of strange. But it also might just mean that the guy who owned the boat isn't around to report it missing or couldn't call it in before something happened. Right. Or destroying the boat was intentional because they find something weird among the wreckage. The debris is strewn with cans of oil and gasoline. Some of the plywood is even doused in it. so it feels like something fishy is afoot and yet pretty quickly authorities announced that the wreckage couldn't have anything to do with the missing women because there were no reports of a boating accident all the more reason to be suspicious i mean something clearly happened here the boat didn't douse itself in gasoline and it only gets worse from there because the The Terre Haute Star reports that soon authorities announced that the wreckage is from a rowboat, a metal rowboat.

11:41A metal rowboat that was also made of turquoise plywood and collided with something with enough force to just completely disintegrate it into pieces. Yes. Right. Like it feels like there's some tunnel vision going on here because the Terre Haute Tribune reports that when investigators are asked about three different possibilities, right? So like drowning, foul play, or a planned disappearance. Their response is telling. They say that there is no evidence of drowning or foul play. So now they think the women peaced out on purpose? Well, at first they play it coy, but by the one week mark, Sergeant Burke is like, yeah, we're pretty sure this was all orchestrated.

12:25The boat stuff too? Like they blew it up or that's unrelated still? Still unrelated. They're not even trying to make sense of the wreckage. And I get why they start doubting the drowning theory. Like maybe a little premature, but I mean, they've devoted so much manpower to searching the southern end of Lake Michigan. And from like every angle to they've got those ground searches, boats or whatever, like divers are even in there. And with everything, they're thinking like if the women did drown, like someone should have found something by now that indicated that. Okay, so not drowning, but no evidence of foul play based on what?

13:03On the fact that there's no evidence? But there's also no evidence that it wasn't foul play? I know. I feel like we've done this dance before. Yeah. Anyways, the whole idea of it not being foul play because there's no evidence of foul play, like, to me, that's bananas, especially when the one thing that might have been the evidence of foul play has been discounted, right? Yeah. And listen, I get that walked off on their own is always a theory when you have a person go missing. But to me, it seems super far fetched to think about three women with three different lives, three different sets of circumstances, all committing to disappearing at once on purpose.

13:44It's not not possible. It's just. It's like it's way less likely. Yeah. Yeah. I think mostly they think this because there start to be some supposed sightings, I guess, like near and far. One like on a bus or like in a bar or a club or whatever. And these are like miles and miles away with strange men. Sometimes they're even seen like hitchhiking, according to the Chicago Tribune. And all of these, like, they never turn out to be legit. But investigators run each one down and they keep coming in. So I'm sure that's playing a role here. But I also suspect that it has a lot to do with the letter that they found in Renee's purse, the one to her husband.

14:27The one about the hot rods? Yeah. So they decided basically that she may have wanted to just skip town on account of her marital discord. She didn't even give him the letter, though. And that does nothing to explain the other two disappearing with her. I know. And they obviously questioned the husband, by the way. Like, he's in the clear. So her loved ones are like, okay, we hear you. But also, are you serious right now? Like, she's 19 years old and her feelings were hurt over, like, something you can probably work through. And that was weeks ago. And again, I say it has nothing to do with why Anne and Patricia would have left.

15:08Like, they're not giving up their lives in, what, solidarity over a husband's hobby? Yeah, not maybe in solidarity. The Chicago Tribune reports that according to Sergeant Burke, all three, Anne and Patricia included, have quote-unquote personal problems. But he wouldn't say what those are. Which isn't to say, like, we don't know what he's getting at. Because long story short, what we know is that Patricia's sister, Janice, tells Dateline in a recent interview, so like we find this out way later, that Patricia had been canoodling with a married man. And Anne had supposedly told friends that she was three months pregnant and might enter a quote unquote home for unwed mothers, which is very much a thing in 1966.

15:5366. But it is such an antiquated concept in like the year of our Lord 2025, well, at least for now, that I asked you to do some digging and give the crime junkies a quick explainer for the young folk listening. Can't know where you're going unless you know where you've been, right? So being a pregnant, unwed woman in the 60s, give it to us. Obviously, like you said, like I knew about the concept, but I wanted to read up a little bit before this episode. So I found an article on Scary Mommy, which I'll link to if you want to go deeper. There's even like a book on this. But basically, there were these homes where families of unmarried pregnant girls and women hid their daughters away while they were pregnant.

16:28So no one would have to see them because— God forbid. God forbid. What a shame. And where were the men who got these women and girls pregnant? Obviously, they were out there living their lives. The women were the ones forced to wear the scarlet letter in the form of that baby bump. Then once they gave birth and their babies were adopted out voluntarily or otherwise, then and only then could the women and girls be returned to polite society. Love it. So these are supposedly some of the personal problems that Sergeant Burke is referring to. Although put a pin in that because we're going to circle back to it later.

17:08But personal problems are not the women's families don't agree. And they are just more convinced by the day that the disappearances weren't by choice. And on July 14th, this is just 12 days in, that fear starts to gain traction when a brutal crime captures the attention of, well, everyone. Now, it's very different, but it involves multiple young women being held and killed at a single time by a single person and from the same area where the women are from, Chicago. So it at the time does feel worth looking into. And let me just give you a little, like, the spark notes on this case. Corky Shumashko reports for NBC News that around 11 p.m.

17:52on the night of July 13th, a man armed with a gun and a hunting knife climbed through the first floor window of a Chicago townhouse where six student nurses were sleeping in two upstairs bedrooms. He crept up the stairs, woke up all six, and corralled them into a third bedroom, binding their hands behind their back. And he spent the next few hours walking them out of the room one by one and killing them one after another. Some of them by stabbing, some by strangulation, and some by a combination of the two. And I don't know why this next detail bothers me so much, but his victims weren't even just the six women in the house when he broke in because three more residents had the great fortune of being gone when the bloodshed started and the even greater misfortune of coming home while it was unfolding.

18:46Shumashko writes that eight women were tortured and killed over like four and a half long hours that night. At least one victim was sexually assaulted, although I would wager that she probably wasn't the only one. Wouldn't it be nine victims if six were already there and then three came home? It would have if one woman didn't have the right combination of courage, quick thinking, and honestly, maybe sheer luck to survive. Her name was Corazon Amaral, and seeing her last chance at survival, she actually crawled under one of the beds while the killer was out of the room. And from her hiding spot, she heard each of her roommates get marched out of the room, followed by what Shamashko describes as muffled cries and then silence.

19:33And somehow, he just didn't notice. Like, there were so many victims that this dude lost count. And so when Corazon crawled back out at around 6 o 'clock in the morning, it was just carnage. Shemashko writes that she was so traumatized and so terrified that she climbed onto the ledge of a second-story window and just started screaming. I mean, for all she knew, the killer was still inside somewhere. So once she was safe, she gave police a pretty damn detailed description of the perp, right down to his born to raise hell tattoo. And that ends up being the key because just two days later, a Chicago physician feels his blood go cold when he sees the same four words on a patient's forearm.

20:24This patient was 24-year-old Richard Speck. Having grown up in Texas, Speck is new to the Chicago area, where he's been staying with his sister and her husband. And like so many killers before him, he's like, no, officers, I swear to you, you have the wrong guy. Absolutely not. Which, like, they absolutely do not because his prints are all over the crime scene. Shumasco reports that the assistant DA who eventually prosecutes him for eight counts of capital murder gives him the dubious distinction of being the country's first random mass murderer. Random being the operative word, since organized crime was definitely a thing in Chicago before this guy, but you get what I'm saying.

21:08So this random massacre happens to a group of women from the same area just two weeks after the Indiana Dunes women go missing. And everyone's like, hey, maybe you should look at this, because you got, truly at this point, nothing else other than they walked away, and nobody's buying that. ISP Superintendent Robert O 'Neill is like, yeah, listen, we're checking on it, but like, don't get your hopes up. And Sergeant Burke is even blunter, saying like there is no suggestion Speck was near, let alone at Lake Michigan the day that the women went missing. And even if he was, let's just say that in addition to not being a criminal mastermind, Speck isn't tall, dark or handsome.

21:50and he doesn't have resources to get his hands on a boat or even to charm or lure three victims aboard a boat. I will admit that it's a little intriguing that he worked as what the Chicago History Museum calls a quote-unquote apprentice seaman, but I won't waste any of your time on him. Like at the end of the day, it is decided by all that this is just an intriguing coincidence and nothing more. so the next theory that comes up it's it might even be more of a stretch i guess is what i should say and it all starts with this guy named dick wiley who according to the new york daily news was supposedly the first reporter on the scene the morning that the women were reported missing now he only covered the case briefly it's not like he was deeply involved and within a few years of the disappearances, he quit journalism altogether and jumped into a career in law enforcement down in Florida.

22:50But he couldn't get the disappearances out of his mind. Like, they became his own personal Roman empire, if you will. So Dick Wiley believes, are you ready for this? I'll answer it for you. No, you're not. He believes that the women died aboard an abortion boat. A what? Wiley is absolutely certain that the disappearances can be traced back to an abortion boat. You just keep repeating that like it's going to make more sense the second time around. What the f is an abortion boat? It's exactly what it sounds like. He says it's a boat on Lake Michigan where illicit abortions are performed. Is that a real thing?

23:29If you ask Dick Wiley, yes. And the theory he has behind this abortion boat is wild. Now, we know that Anne may have been pregnant and that Patricia may have been seeing a married guy, right? Mm-hmm. Well, Wiley posits, what if Anne and Patricia were both pregnant by married men? Nothing to back this up, I assume. Just kind of a combining of their two possible scenarios. It seems that way. Like, he doesn't give any explanation other than, like, a what if. Okay. I'm not sure how or why, but basically he just says that in the course of his personal investigation, he learns that that's the situation.

24:11Now, he says that puts them both in a pickle because it was 1960-whatever, and years before Roe v. Wade gave us, you know, brief bodily autonomy before controlling women became everyone's top priority again. And we've already talked about what a moral stain out of wedlock pregnancies were back then. And in all seriousness, back-alley abortions absolutely were a thing in 1966. Botched back alley abortions were too. So basically, Wiley believes that there was this married couple operating an illicit abortion clinic in Gary, Indiana. For those of you who don't know, that's on the coast of Lake Michigan near Chicago and Indiana Dune.

24:51So like right in that area. Can we prove that that part is real, this duo and their clinic? I actually had the same question. Google couldn't tell me. So I reached out to the Indiana State Police. They were super duper helpful. And they confirmed that the couple he's talking about was a real couple. Their names are known by police. But as far as the whole illicit abortion operation part of it goes, police don't know. They say that they have never been able to substantiate that part of Wiley's story. But the story goes that one of the women's procedures went south, either Anne or Patricia. They died.

25:27And with this being an illegal enterprise, the other two had to just be disposed of. Is he saying that they did this procedure on the boat? Or like the boat that picked them up and was supposed to take them to where the abortion would happen? Well, okay, so supposedly that young, dark, handsome captain was actually this couple's relative. And the thought is that he escorted them to a larger boat. And remember if you, like a couple of witnesses saw them on a larger boat. and the thinking is maybe like that's where the procedures happened or were supposed to have happened. Where is Wiley getting all this from?

26:04This is the thing. We don't know. And we tried to get to the bottom of it, believe me, because all you got to do is spend a few minutes on Google to realize like how wide this theory has spread. Not so much in traditional reporting, more like in blogs and on web forums and all of that stuff. And so, of course, we thought like, OK, what better way to evaluate these claims than to go straight to the source? I mean, Dick Wiley is still alive and kicking. So we did our damnedest to talk to him about this case. Our reporter, Courtney, was like straight up giddy at the prospect of interviewing him. And she reached out to him on Facebook.

26:42She called every number she could find. No dice. Like there was one person she even got on the phone. We got like a very like gruff wrong number before they hang up. So all we know is that he claims to have interviewed more people more times and with more tenacity than the actual investigators, he says. And based on those interviews, this is what he has uncovered. But the more we dug in, the more it seems like all roads on the abortion theory just lead back to Wiley himself. Like this man talks a big game. There is no doubt about that. But I don't know if he actually has the work to show, like show your math, right?

27:23Like how did you get the answer? I don't think he's been able to do that. And he supposedly had plans to publish a book on this case, like since the early aughts. There's even an Amazon listing for it still. It's called Life and Death Through the Lens, which, and it had like a publication date way back in 2004, I think, except the book is not available, not on Amazon, not anywhere else in the World Wide Web that we could find. And there's a 2012 New York Daily News interview with Wiley that references a, quote, I think it was like 120 ,000 word manuscript. But here we are like 13 years later and that manuscript has yet to see the light of day.