THE SPEEDWAY MURDERS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Speedway Murders, Vertical

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 20, 2024

Four young people, between the ages of 16 and 20, went missing from the restaurant where they worked on the night of November 17, 1978 in the town of Speedway, Indiana. About 36 hours later, their bodies were discovered in a forest in a nearby county, where all four had been murdered. Since then, no one has been charged with, let alone prosecuted for, the killings, and The Speedway Murders exploits this tragic mystery to partake in some amateur sleuthing.

Actually, it feels like a stretch to suggest that what directors Adam Kamien and Luke Rynderman are doing here resembles any kind of detective work. They put forth a bunch of theories that evolved in the decades since the crime, none of them more convincing than the original and simplest of the suspicions the police had shortly after the murders were committed. They assumed a gang of robbers, which had targeted fast-food joints like the one from which the four victims were taken, set out to steal cash from the restaurant, and when something went wrong, the thieves abducted the workers, drove them about 20 miles away, and killed them.

The bigger question than what happened to Jayne Friedt, Daniel Davis, Mark Flemmonds, and Ruth Ellen Shelton, then, is why this case has gone unsolved for almost 50 years. The answer is also relatively simple: The police failed to do their work. The restaurant was apparently robbed around the time the four employees were closing shop, and when someone noticed that a back door was open, the restaurant had been ransacked, the lights were still on, and the workers were nowhere to be found. By the morning, the cops had already decided the scene was nothing to worry about and told the manager to open for business as usual.

The retired police officers and detective, both at a local and state level, interviewed here admit as much, but since the filmmakers only care about such subjects as a way to introduce and bolster these assorted theories, there's no interrogation about how and why the initial investigation failed so thoroughly. Evidence could have and almost certainly had been lost, tampered with, or contaminated between the robbery and after the bodies were discovered. There's a horrifying admission that the supposed crime scene photos had been staged, since the mess the robbers left behind had been cleaned up by the time someone took them.

Those are two of the most significant questions about these murders pretty much answered at the start of the documentary. The rest of the movie puts forth increasingly unlikely notions, made up of hearsay, eyewitness accounts from more then 40 years ago, and testimonies of people who sure do seem to be enjoying the fact that a camera is on them.

People like talking in small towns, and some people like being the center of attention, especially if it makes them look like the most important person around. For as much as Kamien and Rynderman throw at the wall here, they seem fundamentally uncurious about the specifics and broad details of the case, as well as the possibility that some of their interview subjects might have forgotten, misremembered, or, in one particular instance, just made up some things.

Every theory comes across as valid in the minds of the filmmakers, who stage assorted re-creations of different people showing up at the restaurant on the night in question. A couple contradictions stick out, such as how two eyewitnesses say that two men approached them across the street from the joint and told them leave. That's what they said and still say, but for another theory to be credible, only one man would have spoken to them. The movie presents that possibility and doesn't even acknowledge that it doesn't line up with the established facts of the case.

We might as well throw that out the window, as we should with another theory tying the murders to a string a bombings in the town months prior and definitely want to when the filmmakers go so far as to suggest that one of the victims got herself and co-workers murdered over a drug debt. The only evidence anyone has for bringing up such a notion is that her brother had a criminal record. It's distasteful, but what else does one expect from such wild theorizing?

The Speedway Murders makes another, particularly objectionable choice by having the victims, as played by actors in the re-creations, serve as detectives for their own murders. A family member of one points out that the perpetrators of heinous crimes are more often remembered than their victims, and here, they're treated primarily as a narrative gimmick.

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