2 of 20: Crime and Case
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This is Episode 2: Crime and Case. On April 30th, 1989, around 9 o'clock in the morning, families and staff of Olive Branch United Brethren Church in Lakeville, Indiana started arriving to the sanctuary. The small country church at 22750 Osborne Road shared a gravel parking lot with a matching White House, the pastor's parsonage.

The home was just steps from the sanctuary, and it's where 39-year-old Bob Pelley, his 33-year-old wife Dawn, and their five kids lived. There was 17-year-old Jeff, 13-year-old Jackie, 9-year-old Jessica, 8-year-old Janelle, and 6-year-old Jolene. In the last episode, I took you guys through how exactly the Pelley family ended up in Indiana. If you haven't listened to that, it's important to start this season from the beginning, at episode 1.

In November 1986, Bob had accepted a pastoring job in Lakeville, leaving behind sunny Florida and a lucrative job at Landmark Bank's data processing center in Fort Myers. The change of scenery and income for the family was definitely stark. According to records, as a pastor, Bob made a meager salary somewhere in the ballpark of $1,300 a month. His job in Fort Myers paid nearly double that, plus benefits and bonuses.

The family's living conditions took a step down, too, after the move. Long gone was their Cape Coral house with a pool, open floor plan, and garage. The parsonage was surrounded by cornfields and bogs. The floor plan was dated, simple, and cramped. Three of the youngest Peli girls had to share one room, and all five kids shared one bathroom.

The only thing that wasn't cramped were the pews in the sanctuary. The rural church Bob was now the leader of wasn't highly attended. The congregation was maybe 40 to 50 members on a good Sunday. Both buildings on the church's property still stand today, and they look a lot like they did in 1989. The church's main sanctuary building butts up next to neighboring homes and is walled in from the back by a large cornfield.

The entire deal — Osborne Road, the church, the house, everything combined — screams quintessential country Midwest. It's all very simple: cornfields, church, and a quiet neighborhood. There's not a palm tree or a sandy beach in sight. On April 30th of '89, a man named Dave Hathaway was in charge of making sure parishioners filed into the church on time, and the service started at 9:30 sharp.

Dave recently passed away in his mid-90s, so I couldn't interview him for the show, but I've read through all of his documented statements to police and investigators over the years. His account of April 30th, 1989 is critical to understanding the first few hours of the crime scene and police investigation. Dave was the Sunday school superintendent for the church and was Pastor Bob's right-hand man. On Sunday mornings, Dave had a habit of arriving earlier than the rest of the congregation.

He liked to be one of the first people to greet Bob, who also had a habit of arriving to the sanctuary by 9:00 a.m. Dave had a military background and had served in several wars, so his strict routine when it came to being on time for church was just part of his personality. On April 30th, though, Dave broke his routine and arrived at church 10 minutes later than usual, around 9:10 a.m. He'd been running late and that bothered him.

By 9:15, 9:20, something else was bothering him too. Pastor Bob and the rest of the Pelly family were nowhere to be found. Dave hadn't run into Bob at all, and the family's usually lively three youngest girls were missing from the mix of people filing into the church. Dave knew it was strange that Pastor Bob wasn't in the sanctuary yet. He always was inside the church by 9:00 a.m.

Right as Dave noticed their absence, other staff members started to recognize that something was wrong too. Reality set in. Church was minutes away from starting, and their pastor was a no-show. Right around this time, an 11-year-old girl named Stephanie Fagan, who was friends with the Pelley girls, was at the back door of the church parsonage. She'd ran over from the church around 9:15 to see if Jessica, Janelle, and Jolene wanted to hang out before service.

According to her statements to police, this was something Stephanie always did on Sundays. But when she got to the back door that normally would let her into the family's garage, it was locked. She thought that was weird and tried the door handle on a sliding glass door on the back of the parsonage, but that didn't open either. Figuring the Pellys were back over in the church and she'd just missed them somehow, Stephanie darted back to the sanctuary.

According to Dave Hathaway's statements to police, he and Stephanie's father, a man named Henry Fagan, talked about what was going on and figured that maybe the Pellys had just slept in. By 9:30, Dave decided to ask a young man in the congregation to lead the service while he tried to figure out what was going on with Pastor Bob. Dave walked over to the parsonage by himself and knocked several times on the back and front doors, but no one answered.

He walked around the outside for about five minutes and looked in the windows but couldn't see anything. All of the blinds were pulled down and the curtains were shut. Dave returned to the church and sat in the back row, but something just didn't feel right to him. With every passing minute and hymnal sung, he grew more anxious about the missing pastor and finally, after a few more minutes, decided to get another staff member to help check out the parsonage a second time.

By 9:45, Dave and a man who worked for the church named Wilmot Tisdale decided they would try and use a spare key for the church to get into the parsonage. Because Dave did a lot of caretaking for the church, especially in the winter when he had to deliver fuel and take care of the furnaces inside, he had a spare key. He wasn't sure, but he believed his key also would fit the locks on the parsonage doors.

Dave drove to his home just down the street on Osborne Road to get it and within a few minutes was back at the parsonage. When he and Wilmot tried the key in the back door leading to the garage and the home's front door, it didn't work. While they were troubleshooting, a woman who worked at the church named Lydia Easterday walked over and offered them another key. According to her statements to police, Lydia's key came from her husband, who was a staff member of the church.

That key didn't budge the parsonage's back door, but when Dave walked around to the front door and pushed it in that lock, it worked. At that point, it was about five minutes after 10 a.m. Dave, anxious but calm, walked into the parsonage through the front door. He'd left Wilma and Lydia on the back side of the house at the still-locked sliding glass door. He told them that once he was inside, he'd walk through and let them in.

But Dave made it only a few steps into the house before he knew something was horribly wrong.

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According to Dave Hathaway's police interview transcripts, the first thing he saw when he walked into the front hallway of the parsonage was Bob's thick eyeglasses laying on the carpet. To better understand the layout of the home and the scene Dave walked into, go to our website counterclockpodcast.com and a diagram of the parsonage is there. There are also a few photos of the church and house that I think will make visualizing this part of the episode much easier.

Where Dave entered the house was through the front door on the first floor. When he got inside, he was standing in a short hallway, with the living room immediately to his right and an open doorway to the dining room and kitchen directly in front of him. Bob's glasses were laying at the foot of that doorway.

Dave took a few steps towards the glasses and by the time he was standing over them, he looked to his left, down a hallway that led to bedrooms, and saw Bob lying face up in a pool of blood. Bob's head was closest to Dave and his feet were towards the far end of the hallway. According to Dave, the doors to the three bedrooms off of that hallway were all open. It was approximately 10 minutes after 10 o'clock when Dave discovered Bob.

He said he took one or two small steps towards the body, saw blood all over the walls, and that part of Bob's face was missing. That's when Dave realized Bob was dead. Dave said he then went through the dining room and kitchen to the back door of the house to let Wilmot and Lydia inside. He told both of them that Bob was dead and that they needed to call 911. Wilmot picked up the Pellys' home phone in the kitchen and dialed 911 for help.

The dispatcher who picked up routed the information to St. Joseph County Police Department. While Wilmot was on the phone with 911, Lydia was standing next to him and Dave had moved away through the kitchen and towards a back door that led into the garage. As he was walking, Dave peered down the stairs leading to the basement and saw two feet wearing white socks sprawled at the bottom of it.

He says it was too dim in the basement to make out anything else, but just from the little bit he saw, his heart sank. Not having run into any of the Pelley kids or Don, Dave knew in his heart they were probably down there, dead. Before he could go any further down the stairs, Wilmot called him back toward the kitchen.

Bob's dead body being just a room away got Wilmot so rattled that he couldn't coherently tell the 911 operator the address of the parsonage. So Dave got on the line and relayed the correct information. Within a few minutes, three paramedics arrived and Dave let them in through the back door. St. Joseph County Police were still on the way.

So just to recap here, because I know this is a lot of information to take in. There are three exterior doors to the Pelley home. One is the front door. The second is a sliding glass door on the backside of the house that lets you into the dining room slash kitchen. And the third door is just off the kitchen that leads into the garage. There's also an exterior door from the garage to the outside of the house. A picture of that from 1989 is on our website too.

According to police reports and witnesses, all of the doors were locked prior to Dave entering the home. Once paramedics got to the scene, Dave told them not to touch anything because, quote, he felt there had been a murder, end quote. After that, everyone cleared the house, including Dave, Wilmot, and Lydia. Before he left, though, Dave says he never actually saw if any of the EMTs touched anything or not.

He saw them go check on Bob in the upstairs hallway and go into the basement and turn a light on, but he never saw them touch anyone or move anything. By 10:30 a.m., St. Joseph County police officers had arrived on scene. According to reports, the only people who physically had entered the crime scene before the cops got there were Dave, Wilmot, Lydia, and the three paramedics.

It didn't take police long to confirm that Dawn, Janelle, and Jolene were dead in the basement. It was obvious at that point that Bob was dead from two gunshot wounds, one to his chest and another to the right side of his face. Dawn and the girls had died from gunshot wounds to their heads. I'll get more into their injuries and autopsies in the next episode.

After the first responding police officer gathered the basic information about how many victims they were dealing with and the likely cause of death, he radioed for a detective. Shortly before 11 a.m., St. Joseph County Police Detective John Bodich arrived at the parsonage.

I was building a home in Lakeville, a matter of fact, probably three miles maybe from the Parsons itself. And I just pulled up in the drive to do work, and I get a phone call from our department, St. Joe County Police Department, that says, you know, we've got a homicide on Osborne Road. It's a church, Olive Branch Church. You need to get there. And I drove right to there.

There were several police officers there from our department, and there was church members there. Of course, they were getting ready to have church, so they were all there. And I waited for a couple of our detectives to show up and technicians, and they had basically told me what one of the gentlemen at the church found. John quickly began assessing what looked like a quadruple family massacre. We went in the house. I went in with a technician first just to do a walkthrough before they did anything else to collect any evidence or anything.

We saw something, or I saw something that day that nobody should ever have to see. Bob was upstairs in the hallway. He looked like he had been shot twice. His glasses were off of his head on the floor there beside of him. Dawn Pelley was on her knees, had a girl in each arm trying to protect him, and it was a pretty devastating sight. In addition to the four slaughtered Pelley family members, the next thing John noticed was what wasn't in the home.

We went through the rest of the house. Nothing was in disarray. There was any ransacking, no furniture overturned. I mean, basically it looked like a normal home. Normal, with the exception of one glaring thing. There were three Pelley children still unaccounted for: Jeff, Jackie, and Jessica. There to help figure out where those three were was Indiana State Police Trooper Mark Senter.

Mark is retired from law enforcement and is the current mayor of Plymouth, Indiana, a small town 10 minutes south of Lakeville. He and John worked the Pelley murder case together and still talk about it often. Mark got to the crime scene and joined John at 11 a.m. that Sunday. And he wasn't just walking into another murder scene. Mark was walking into the house of a man he knew. Bob was a member of the Lakeville Lions Club, as was I, and, uh,

For a while, we were actually meeting at the church. So that's how I got to know Bob. Bob was fairly new in town, but just a normal guy. I mean, obviously a pastor is a part of the community, a larger part of the community, and he was a leader of not only his church, but parts of it. If he's in Lions Club, he's obviously a part of the community in that regard. And so I really didn't have anything negative about him or bad.

just a guy who was trying to do his best for the community. After talking with several people from church, Mark and John learned that nine-year-old Jessica had been staying at a friend's house for the weekend and was due to be dropped off at the parsonage any minute. Here's how Jessica remembers arriving to the chaotic scene in her home. My friend's mom was taking me home for church on Sunday morning and, you know, we were pulling up in front of the house and getting ready to pull into the driveway.

I just remember seeing the yellow caution tape and I thought something had happened to my dog. So we pulled in, she stopped the van, a police officer came to her window, asked her to get out. She did. She went to the front of the van and I could see him talking and she was just sobbing. And, you know, as a kid, you don't see a lot of adults do that. They try to do it behind closed doors or, you know, try to hide it from you.

And she didn't, so I just didn't know what was happening. And then that's when she came, opened the door, put me in the front seat and said, "You know, your whole family's gone." Like Jessica, Jackie too was also located safe and sound. She'd been about an hour and a half away from Lakeville at Huntington College most of the weekend, visiting friends from a church camp. A bishop from Olive Branch United Brethren drove to the school and picked Jackie up that Sunday afternoon.

He came to the dorm room that I was staying at and told me. I don't remember his exact words, but I do remember that the way that he worded it made me think my sisters were still alive. That's hard. The way he worded it, I just thought they'd been kidnapped or something. So I had to have said something because he did clarify it then. But I did know on the car ride home that they were dead.

I don't even know that I knew which of the three girls it was, though, because I don't remember knowing that Jessica was going to be gone for the weekend. The last Pelly child John and Mark needed to track down was 17-year-old Jeff. From their brief interviews with church members, they learned he'd gone to his senior prom the night before. But beyond that, he and his 1984 Ford Mustang were unaccounted for. That is, until they spoke with Jessica. And what she told them...

She told them Jeff was at Great America. Took the investigation in the direction of a prime suspect. In his mind, he never would get caught. But first, police needed to focus on the evidence and bodies inside the parsonage. Listen to Episode 3, Evidence Race, right now.

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Toyota, let's go places. A more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. From earth tones to vibrant colors, Ashley stores have an array of eye-catching furniture for every room in fun and trending hues that will leave a lasting impression. So it's easier than ever to express your personal style and design a vibrant home that feels just like you. Your more colorful life starts at an Ashley store. Shop in-store or online at ashley.com.