Still wearing their orange-and-brown Burger Chef uniforms, four teenagers were found murdered in a forest outside their Indiana town in the US in 1978.

It was November 18.

The still-unsolved crime in Speedway, home to the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway – the oldest operating racetrack in the US –  happened the same weekend as the Jonestown mass-murder-suicide, where more than 900 people died.

Five years ago, Australian filmmakers Adam Kamien and Luke Rynderman found the cold case on the TV series, Unsolved Mysteries, and couldn’t let it go.

With an initial budget of $10,000 (with eventual support from Australian screen funding bodies), the Melbourne duo flew to Indiana, re-investigated the old leads, interviewed family, friends and police and came home with a potential blockbuster.

The finished product is a feature-length documentary drama, The Speedway Murders.

What happened?

Local kids Mark Flemmonds, 16, Ruth Shelton, 17, Danny Davis, 16 and their manager, 20-year-old Jayne Friedt, were at the end of their nightshift when they were kidnapped before being found two days later.

There were countless theories about what happened, a drug deal gone wrong, allegations of police botching lines of inquiry, and identifying multiple suspects without any charges laid.

“What attracted us to the case was the fact that it was unsolved … we decided, ‘let’s take a closer look at this’ … we developed relationships and in developing those relationships, it became an obsession,” writer and director Kamien (Spirited Away, The Case Against Malka Leifer) said.

“We felt that law enforcement had abandoned the families and that somebody had to take up the cudgels and say ‘this is not a meticulously planned crime by criminal masterminds, this was something that happened probably in the heat of the moment’.

“It doesn’t make sense that it’s not solved … the investigation had been mismanaged. There was no co-operation between different counties.

“We thought if we can come and start to put these pieces together, maybe it is attainable, maybe we can get that bit of information that blows the case wide open.

“And in a way, we did.”

One of the US’s most baffling crimes

The Burger Chef murders remain one of Indiana’s most notorious unsolved crimes.

“I think about it often. I dream about it sometimes,” retired Indiana State Police sergeant Stoney Vann told WRTV last year, who served as the lead investigator on the quadruple murder for 20 years.

“This is the type of case that I will take to my grave.”

Kamien, an investigative journalist, and film production designer, Rynderman (a buyer dresser on Clickbait), dusted off the files and came up with four compelling theories after several trips to the US.

“Having access [to police, family, friends] has been essential in telling this story authentically … on those trips we were able to film at the key places where the crime took place, such as the restaurant – which is now abandoned – and the forested area where the bodies were found,” Rynderman said.

They recreated the original Burger Chef restaurant in Adelaide [inside an old Chinese restaurant], and employed four young actors to play the victims, each telling the story of their own death.

Kamien says there’s “kernels of truth in each of the theories that feature in the film … you can’t dismiss any of them completely out of hand.

“We were getting these wildly different stories and people were absolutely adamant that they had the answer. And we thought ‘they can’t all be right’. But also they’re not all wrong, which is what’s interesting about this story.

“Even the conclusion that we present at the end of the film is a little bit open-ended, which is the nature of this whole thing.”

Allen Pruitt recounts what he knew about the murders to the Australian filmmakers. Photo: Umbrella Entertainment

The suspects

Speaking to Mamamia’s True Crime Conversations podcast,
the pair showcase a number of possible motives and suspects.

There had been several burglaries at other Burger Chef restaurants and fast-food restaurants around the same time, and at least eight random bombings in Speedway that month.

One man was convicted of the bombings but there wasn’t enough evidence to link him to the murders. Another confessed to the crimes but later recanted his testimony.

The four victims were found wearing their watches and jewellery and cash in their pockets.

Then the filmmakers hit gold.

Subsequent investigations and calls for help from the public did not result in charges. Photo: Umbrella Entertainment

One local shares a huge secret, saying his friend, Jeff Reed (who died of stomach cancer in 2011), confessed to the murders.

Reed was known as the ‘mayor of the snake pit’, the party held on one of the corners at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

“I don’t know who else he told. I might’ve been the only one. It’s a true secret that I’ve held for 40 years,” he said.

Another witness Allen Pruitt said he saw Reed in a van in the car park that night.

“The reality is [the families] never will have closure … but they absolutely deserve to know what happened,” Rynderman said.

Added Kamien: “This was a spontaneous crime. There should have been clues, and it should have been solved.”

The Speedway Murders is streaming now on Prime Video and Apple TV+