On a Saturday afternoon in June 1997, two sisters left their apartment in Muncie, Indiana, and walked three blocks to a corner convenience store. Brenda Shafer, 24, carried a ten-dollar bill and a list of four items. Her sister Gina, 19, wore her favorite green jacket and had come along simply for the walk. They told their mother they would be back in twenty minutes.
They never returned. When evening came and the sisters still had not come home, their mother, Shirley Shafer, called the Muncie Police Department. Store records confirmed the sisters had been there. The clerk remembered the green jacket, but the store had no exterior camera.
Whatever happened between the store’s front door and the point where the sisters vanished occurred along a three-block residential stretch in broad daylight, in front of houses where people were doing ordinary Saturday afternoon things. No witness could say with certainty what had occurred. Eleven days later, Brenda and Gina were found 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 twenty-seven years, nobody was charged. Muncie in 1997 was a mid-size manufacturing and university city of about 70,000 on the White River. Ball State University gave the city one kind of energy; the remnants of its industrial base gave it another.
Neighborhoods were a mix of the comfortable and the struggling. Brenda had come to Muncie in 1993 to attend Ball State, had not quite finished her degree, and stayed in the city working retail and later as a receptionist at a dental office. She was organized and responsible, the sister who held the list and knew where the money was. She had a boyfriend of two years and a savings account she added to every payday.
Gina had arrived the previous winter from Anderson, thirty miles west, to live with Brenda while she figured out her next steps. She had been looking at cosmetology programs. She wore the green jacket she had found at a thrift store in Anderson for three dollars constantly, through all temperatures. The store clerk remembered the jacket specifically because its shade of green 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. Detective Sergeant Carl Pryor, fourteen years on the force, led the investigation. He canvassed every house on the route and the adjacent blocks. Two residents had been outside that afternoon but could not place either sister or describe anything unusual.
One resident thought she might have seen an unfamiliar dark vehicle parked on the curb, possibly a van or large SUV, but could not be more specific. Pryor worked Brenda’s social circle, her boyfriend, her workplace, her connections in Muncie and Anderson. He found nothing pointing toward a known conflict or a specific threat. He developed four persons of interest in the first two months, none of whom produced physical evidence or could be eliminated.
Physical evidence from the creek site, collected in early July 1997, included biological material from both victims and a third unidentified male contributor. This third profile was submitted to the national DNA database known as CODIS in 1999. It sat in the system through two decades of database expansions. No match.
Shirley Shafer had been widowed in 1991 when her husband Carl died of a sudden cardiac event at fifty. She had spent six years building a life around the three of them, she and Brenda and Gina, in the apartment in Muncie. She was fifty-one in 1997, and losing both daughters simultaneously was the kind of event for which no adequate word exists. She did not collapse.
After two weeks she went back to her job as a bookkeeper for a small manufacturing firm, because staying at home in the apartment above the one the girls had shared was not sustainable. She went to church every Sunday. Every June 21st, on the anniversary, she drove the three-block route slowly, the way you drive a route you are trying to understand. She drove it twenty-seven times.
She kept both daughters’ photographs on her mantel in every apartment she lived in after 1997. The case file was reviewed in 2001, 2006, and 2012. Each review produced the same conclusion: the CODIS profile was in the system, the person of interest list was documented, and there was nothing new to act on. In the original investigation, a man named Roy Dale Hutchinson had been a person of interest, but not a strong one.
He was 38 in 1997 and lived in a rental house four blocks from the sisters’ apartment. He drove a dark-colored Dodge Caravan. He had a prior arrest from 1993 that had not been connected to the case. He gave an account of his Saturday afternoon that was unverifiable but not contradicted.
He was noted in the file and not eliminated. By 2003, Hutchinson had moved to Indianapolis. By 2010, he was in Fort Wayne. He lived in three Indiana cities in the years after 1997, a pattern of movement common enough not to be suspicious on its own, but specific enough in retrospect to tell a story about a man who did not want to stay anywhere too long.
By 2024 he was 64, living in a modest house in Fort Wayne, working part-time at a hardware store, unremarkable to his neighbors. In 2023, the Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit expanded its forensic genealogical profiling program to include unsolved violent crimes with unmatched CODIS profiles from 1990 through 2000. The Shafer case was in the expansion batch. The 1999 profile was submitted for genealogical analysis that summer.
Detective Corporal Renata Osay of the Muncie Police Department Cold Case Unit received the 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. She built the family tree over four weeks. She eliminated branches.
One name remained: Roy Dale Hutchinson. Osay pulled the original case file. She found the notation: Hutchinson, Roy Dale, four blocks from victim’s residence, dark Caravan, prior arrest 1993, account unverifiable. Near the bottom of the Hutchinson section, Pryor had written: cannot eliminate, vehicle consistent with witness description.
She called Pryor, then 72 and retired. She read him the name. He was quiet for a moment. He said, I tried.
I just couldn’t get there. 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 that had matched nothing in the national database for twenty-four years matched Roy Dale Hutchinson.
He was arrested at his Fort Wayne home on February 8, 2024. He came to the door when the detectives knocked. He looked at them, looked at the street behind them, and said, I figured this was coming. He was charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one for Brenda Louise Shafer and one for Gina Marie Shafer.
He entered a not guilty plea. Shirley Shafer received the call that morning. She was 78 years old. She sat in the chair in her living room facing the mantel.
She said both her daughters’ names once each, quietly, to the photographs. Then she said, I will be in that courtroom every single day. The Muncie community responded with the weight of twenty-seven years of accumulated grief. 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 a camera above the front door, installed in 2001, four years after two sisters walked out of it into an afternoon that had no record of what came next. The gap between when the tools were needed and when the tools arrived is where twenty-seven years lived.
After the arrest, Shirley Shafer was asked whether she felt relief. She said she was not sure relief was the right word. She said something that had been unresolved for twenty-seven years had become resolved, and she was not yet certain what she felt about that. She said she thought Brenda would have appreciated that answer, because Brenda was always precise about not claiming to feel things she was not sure she felt.
The Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit has since reviewed all unmatched CODIS profiles from Delaware County dating to 1985 and submitted twenty-three cases for genealogical analysis. Four have returned actionable results. 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’s green jacket, the one the clerk remembered, the one that appeared in every photograph from that winter in Anderson, was kept by the store’s current owner. He does not know who left it or why. He said he did not feel it was his to remove. It hangs on a hook near the back office, and he is not in a hurry to decide what to do with it.
Shirley Shafer still has the photographs on the mantel. She has been asked whether she will take them down now that she has an answer. She says the answer does not change who the images are of. Brenda and Gina are still on the mantel.
That is where they belong, and that is where they will stay.