On the morning of November 13, 1989, a sixteen-year-old girl named Amy Wiedner was home from school with a sore throat. She was a junior at Thomas Carr Howe High School on the south side of Indianapolis, an honors student who had already proven she could carry more responsibility than most adults twice her age. Her two-year-old daughter Emily was with her. Amy’s mother Gloria had gone to work.
The family’s back door was unlocked, as it usually was, a common habit in that working-class neighborhood. At some point that morning, a young man who had eaten at that family’s table and come through that door dozens of times returned again. He came to rob the house. He did not know Amy was home.
What happened next left a two-year-old standing alone at the bottom of the stairs and left a family with a question no one would answer for more than two decades. Amy’s bedroom told the story of a struggle. The attack was not one-sided. She had suffered 29 separate injuries documented by the autopsy: lacerations to her head, evidence of sexual assault, and signs of strangulation.
Amy did not go quietly. She fought with everything she had. The cause of death was bleeding to death, alone in her bedroom, while her daughter moved around downstairs. Pressed clearly into the wall of Amy’s room, in her own blood, was a full and clean palm print.
Not a smear, not partial, but a complete print left by someone who touched that wall on his way out. Officers cut the entire section of drywall and kept it as evidence. It would remain in storage for the next 22 years. The killer was in that house with a two-year-old.
He saw her, heard her, or at least 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 did that choice reveal about what was going through his mind as he left that house? Days after the crime, an investigator sat with Emily and a set of small finger puppets. He did not ask her direct questions.
She was two years old. He simply watched what she did. What Emily showed him through her play was a girl moving back and forth between rooms, recreating a sequence of events without knowing she was doing it. When Gloria later asked Emily where Amy was, the child used the only word available to her.
She said Amy was “mean. ” She did not mean cruel. She meant that Amy was fighting with someone. A two-year-old had watched her mother defend herself and translated that through the only framework she had.
The crime scene told investigators several things quickly. The back door was unlocked, common for that street, for that neighborhood. From the brother’s room, an expensive stereo component was missing. From the kitchen, money Amy had been collecting for a school band fundraiser was gone.
The specific stolen items, the unlocked back door used for entry, all pointed to someone who had been inside that house before. Someone who knew the layout, knew where things were kept, and knew what a Monday morning routine looked like when Gloria went to work. He had been watching. He had been planning.
He chose a school day because the house was supposed to be empty. He was wrong about that, and Amy paid for his mistake with her life. Investigators moved through the obvious names quickly. Tony Abercrombie, who would later be proven to be Emily’s biological father, was interviewed early.
He had motive on paper, but multiple witnesses cleared him. The brother was questioned and cleared. Then there was Troy Jackson, who lived directly behind the Wiedner home, known for his familiarity with the specific stereo equipment that was missing. He had left work for nearly an hour on the morning of the crime and returned out of breath.
In the days that followed, he reportedly mentioned blood on the walls, a detail that had not been released to the public. Police photographed his hands. No bruises consistent with a struggle. Hair samples did not match the evidence.
He took a polygraph and passed. Every thread pulled around Troy Jackson broke. The investigation stalled. At Amy’s funeral, investigators 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 collected the guest register, the record of everyone who came to pay their respects. The killer was in that room.
Perhaps he said he was sorry. He signed his name in that book. Then the book went into the file, into the box, onto the shelf, and waited. The case went cold as cases do.
In 2002, Lieutenant Roger Spurgeon took over the cold case unit of the Indianapolis police. Around 800 unsolved cases, 800 families, 800 sets of unanswered questions. Amy’s case was one file among 800. A man called the tip line to say Amy was visiting him in his dreams.
He had lived across the street. He had feelings for her. On the morning of November 13, 1989, he had been sent home from school early without an excuse. His DNA was checked against samples from Amy’s bedding.
It did not 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 names of people he remembered around the Wiedner home. People who knew the family, knew the layout of the house, knew the rhythm of life there.
One of the names on that list was Rodney Dink, a friend of the brother, a regular presence who had come through that back door so often that no one thought twice about it. The name went into the file, into a 2003 interview record, and stayed there. Spurgeon later stated honestly that Dink was one of dozens of names that surfaced during the reinvestigation, and that with one person working 800 open cases, some leads simply were not followed as they should have been. That explanation was true and insufficient at the same time.
In 2003, nine years before the case was finally solved, the killer’s name was written in the police file in black and white, available to anyone who opened that folder and read deeply enough. No one did. In 2011, a friend of Amy’s created a memorial page on Facebook. Photos, memories, messages from people who knew her.
A cold case detective formerly assigned to Amy’s file wanted to look at the page. He did not know how to print from Facebook, so he walked across the hall and asked for help from the office’s unofficial tech expert. Sergeant Investigator William Carter had spent years in the Indianapolis Police nuisance unit, dealing with code violations, underage drinking, and noise complaints. He used Facebook to find illegally promoted events.
He had never worked a murder case. He had no official connection to Amy Wiedner. His task that afternoon was to print a single page. He printed it.
Then he looked at the photo at the top. Amy Wiedner, sixteen, holding Emily, smiling. Carter had grown up near that neighborhood. Amy could have been his age.
He picked up the case file, 65 pages. No one asked him to. No supervisor assigned him. He took the file home, sat down at his own desk, and started from the beginning.
Typed pages from 1989, evidence logs, suspect interviews, Spurgeon’s 2003 notes, the list of names. His first step revealed the first problem. The entire 1989 investigation was paper, printed and handwritten, nothing searchable, nothing cross-referenced in any database. Carter digitized everything.
Every name, every address, every neighbor scanned from the original November morning. What became clear almost immediately was that dozens of the brother’s friends, people who spent regular time in that house, had never been formally interviewed, never given DNA samples, never cleared or ruled out. Not because they were suspects, but simply because no one had reached them in 1989. Twenty-two years of basic work left undone.
Carter started making calls. One went to a woman named Joy Haney, who had lived directly across the street in 1989 and moved away years earlier. Carter tracked her down using the original survey records. She gave him names.
Most were already in the file. Then, at the end of the conversation, she mentioned another name, Rodney Dink. Not as an accusation, but as someone who was around, someone she had spoken to. He was one of the brother’s friends.
Carter wrote down the name and felt something shift, because that name was already in the file. It had been sitting in Tony Abercrombie’s 2003 statement for nine years. Two separate sources, without prompting, the same name, no connection between them, and no one had ever contacted him. Carter entered Dink’s information into the system.
He was 40 years old, divorced, had a son, living with his mother on the east side of Indianapolis, working at a local auto shop. No warrants, no reason on paper for anyone to look at him. Carter drove to the house. Dink was not home.
His mother answered the door. Carter left his card. Routine questions about an old case. No concern, no pressure.
Dink called back the same day. Calm, cooperative, of course he would sit and talk. They set a time and date. Carter arrived on schedule.
Rodney Dink was gone. Not just out, but vanished. His mother said she had not seen him in days. He had quit his job.
He had emptied his bank account. He abandoned everything without telling anyone where he was going. A man who agreed to speak with police disappeared the moment Carter left his name at the door. Carter pulled Dink’s full arrest record.
A 1991 assault charge, a 1997 theft charge. Both arrests produced fingerprints. Both were in the system. Carter took the 1997 print to the latent prints section with one specific purpose: rule out Dink and move on.
Standard procedure, cross another name off the list. Later that day, forensics called. The bloody palm print from the wall of Amy Wiedner’s bedroom, cut from the drywall in November 1989 and kept in storage for 22 years, matched Rodney Dink’s 1997 arrest print. Exact match.
No ambiguity. Carter called Gloria. He told her they had identified a suspect, someone connected to the family. He did not 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 the answer.
Dink had not gone far. He had rented a car and was still somewhere in Indianapolis. But renting a car in 2012 meant OnStar, the vehicle tracking system. Police used it to locate him.
When officers found Dink coming out of a friend’s house on the east side, he looked up and saw them approaching. Before anyone said a word, the first thing out of his mouth was, I didn’t do it. No confusion, no questions, just denial. Because part of him had been rehearsing this moment for 22 years.
He pulled out a knife and cut his wrist before officers could reach him. He was taken to Wishard Hospital and restrained to a hospital bed, where the interrogations began. Over two days, Dink talked on camera. His story changed in ways investigators noted carefully.
He admitted he had been watching the Wiedner home in the weeks before the crime. He knew about the money Amy was collecting for the band uniform fundraiser. He knew about the brother’s stereo equipment. He deliberately chose a Monday morning.
A school day, Gloria at work. The house was supposed to be empty. He said he had checked in at school first, then slipped between classes, walked to the house, and entered through the open back door. He was in the brother’s room stealing the stereo when Amy came around the corner.
He told investigators, I didn’t know she was there. At various points during the interrogation, Dink introduced a second person into his account. Someone he referred to as “Bucky” or “Buck” or maybe not “Buck. ” He was not sure.
The details about this alleged accomplice changed every time he told the story. When Dink was first arrested, investigators acknowledged publicly that semen found in Amy’s bedding raised questions about a possible second person. Dink eventually pleaded guilty and told the court he had acted alone, and his DNA matched the semen sample at the crime scene. Then, at some point during those two days of interrogation, Dink stopped telling the story.
He looked across the table and quietly asked, Can I just say it was me? Can I just say I did everything? It was not a breakdown, not a dramatic confession, just a man who had been pretending to live a normal life for 20 years asking permission to stop. The brother, J.
P. Wiedner, the boy whose room Rodney was robbing when Amy appeared, the boy who had considered Rodney a friend, received the news in silence. Then he said the thing that would define the emotional character of the entire case. He was at the funeral with us.
How do you commit this murder, and two days later sit with us and share in the mourning? That is exactly what Rodney Dink did. He killed Amy on Monday. He walked into the funeral home the 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 guest register. That register went into the file, then into the box, then onto the shelf, where it remained for 22 years next to the name he had also left in a 2003 police interview.
Charges were filed in July 2012. In June 2013, shortly before his trial date, Rodney Dink pleaded guilty to the murder and rape of Amy Wiedner. He was sentenced to 65 years in prison. He would not be eligible for release until his seventies.
He was 18 when he killed her. During the investigation following Dink’s arrest, detectives discovered something about his personal history that no one had known. His son, Dylan Dink, was already incarcerated, serving a 20-year sentence for killing his mother, Mary McNeary, Rodney’s ex-wife. Dylan had been 16 at the time of that crime, just one 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 spent weeks preparing herself to face her anger. She prepared for the rage she assumed would flood through her the first time she stood in the same room as the man who took her daughter. When they brought Rodney Dink into the courtroom, she felt something she did not expect.
She described it later, standing quietly outside the courthouse. She said, I thought I would see a monster, but what I saw was Rodney. That sentence captured the entire case. He was not a stranger who emerged from nowhere and disappeared back into it.
He was Rodney, the familiar and present one, the kind of person you let in through the back door without thinking twice, because thinking twice about someone you already knew seemed like an insult. That familiarity was the point of entry. Not the unlocked door, but the trust. Emily Wiedner, the little girl who stood at the bottom of those stairs at two years old and looked up at her grandmother, grew up carrying the weight of that history.
Gloria adopted her legally not long after Amy’s death. That child who came into the world as a granddaughter became, in every real sense, a daughter and a sister. Emily graduated from Purdue University with honors, carrying her mother’s work ethic into a world Amy never had the chance to see. Her French teacher from childhood told her at graduation that she knew Amy would have been proud.
Emily moved to California the year after she graduated. She said she could not become fully who she was supposed to be while still in Indiana, that the place, the history, and the unanswered question that had shaped her entire life made it impossible to move forward in the same space. In the end, Gloria changed the look of Amy’s bedroom. The room where Amy died became the place where grandchildren slept when they visited.
Only one thing remained, a hat hanging on the door. Everything else was replaced. Gloria said, Amy is not in that room anymore. Amy is inside of me.
As for Sergeant Investigator Bill Carter, the nuisance officer who was supposed to print a Facebook page and return to his desk, he still maintains the Find A Grave memorial page for Amy Wiedner to this day. He created it himself. He makes sure it is updated. A man with 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 received the answer they had been waiting 22 years to hear. The question this case persistently raises is a simple one, but it does not carry a simple answer. If Bill Carter had not been the person who printed that Facebook page, if it had been anyone else, anyone who did not grow up near that neighborhood, anyone who did not look at that photo and feel something, would anyone have ever reached that name sitting in the file? Perhaps.
Perhaps another investigator would have gotten there eventually. Perhaps the palm print would have been re-examined in an expansion of the CODIS system. Perhaps someone else would have made those calls. Perhaps.
But the honest answer is: perhaps not. The institutional blind spot in this case was not dramatic or born of corruption. It was structural. A cold case unit with 800 open files and one investigator.
A 1989 investigation built on paper that no one could search or cross-reference. A name given to police in 2003 that no one acted on because the caseload was heavy and time was short. Rodney Dink did not create those conditions. He benefited from them.
For 22 years he went to work, raised his son, lived an ordinary life, protected not by his cleverness but by the simple fact that no system had 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. The question worth asking every time is how wide that gap was, and who finally decided to close it.