Anne Harmeier

Warning. This episode contains graphic crime scene detail as well as talk of sexual assault. Please listen with discretion. All witnesses, suspects, and persons of interest are considered innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Welcome to Primetime Crime. I'm your host, Kylie. Let's talk right now in true crime, and then together we are going to work on warming up some cold cases. Let's go. Hey, guys, welcome to another episode of Primetime Crime. It's Kylie. I am coming to you back officially from Crime Con. I have so much to talk about regarding crime and Con. I'm going to be doing that in a separate episode on its own. I did want to do a little right now in True Crime to catch up. Thursday of last week, we officially got the verdict for Donna Adelson and they found her guilty on all counts. Guilty of first degree murder, guilty of conspiracy, guilty, guilty, guilty as it should be. I'm going to talk about that more on my Crime Con episode because I was actually at Crime Con. I had just gotten there when the verdict came out. So I'm going to discuss that because there is a story behind it. For sure that I need to share with you guys because you're true crime fans, and it was the craziest thing in the world where I heard the verdict, how I heard the verdict. So I'm going to be sharing all of that in my crime Con episode. We are going to keep this a little short and sweet today for right now. In True Crime. That was really the main thing I wanted to talk about. And everything else. Any other updates I will discuss in the next episode that I released next week. But I wanted to talk a little bit about Donna, and I am going to get that crime Con recap out for you guys pretty soon. And I met so many people and learned about so many cases that desperately need our attention, and I am going to be bringing you all of those stories because this is so so important to get these stories out. It really makes you realize when you're a crime con, that we do this for a reason, Like, yes, there is a entertainment aspect to true crime. People enjoy it, people like to consume it, but there is a purpose behind it. It's not just storytelling. It's not that the story ends after the podcast episode is over, or after the Netflix documentary ends, or after the sixty minute Dayline episode ends. These are real people that have real stories, and their stories continue no matter if we're listening to them or not, we're sharing about them or not. And that's why we're here, is to share these stories and educate and spread awareness and try to get the word out. That is what it is all about. I'm going to be talking more about that in my Crime Pun episode, so keep on the lookout for that, and we are going to go ahead and get into this week's episode. It is another case that desperately needs our attention and it has gone on long enough without answers, and I think twenty twenty five is the year we get answers. Okay, guys, we are jumping into a brand new unsolved case today and I'm going to be telling you about the nineteen seventy seven unsolved homicide of a twenty year old college student named Anne Harmier. Anne was a student at the University of Indiana and was going into her junior year. She was murdered in Martinsville, Indiana, as she was headed back to campus. As always, I want to start off with a little bit about Anne and her background before we go into the tragic ending of her life. Anne Louise Harmyer was born on August twenty seventh of nineteen fifty seven to her parents, Robert and Marjorie. Robert and Marjorie actually had met at Indiana University, and they were four years apart, but they were very much in love. Robert ended up getting his law degree and eventually would go on to teach at a local school following a three year stint in the army. Marjorie would go on to teach music locally. They married in nineteen forty six and had a home in Cambridge City, Indiana. They had Anne in nineteen fifty seven, and then four years later, at the young age of forty four, Robert died of a brain tumor. Marge never remarried, and Anne became her whole entire world. She did everything she could so that Anne could have the life that she deserved. She didn't let being a single mom hold her back in any way, shape or form. Anne was a natural born entertainer and love theater. Given the fact that her mom was a music teacher, they very much shared this love for entertaining the masses. Anne eventually would follow in her parents' footsteps and would go to the University of Indiana Bloomington campus. She was an honor student and majoring in music and theater with hopes of becoming an actor or teacher. Although Anne was an only child and never had any siblings, she had numerous cousins and those are the people that remain her champions to this very day. One of her cousins that I'm going to speak on a lot in this episode is her second cousin, who is named Scott. Scott and Anne's grandmothers were sisters. Anne was ten years older than Scott, putting him at only nine to ten years old. When Anne was murdered. He told ABC News that he always looked up to her and thought of her as the coolest person in his family. Scott said that Anne was kind and generous and was the real deal, and he said that she was always interested in what you were doing and would always ask questions about you. And Anne truly sounds like a wonderful person, super super talented, and she was definitely loved by her family. I can't imagine that them having to try to navigate this tragedy when they were so young and still to this day has been easy on them. So we are going to go ahead and get into the days leading up to Anne's disappearance. So the weekend of September tenth of nineteen seventy seven, Anne had come back home to Cambridge City to visit a family friend that was in the hospital. Anne had planned on leaving and going back to campus on Sunday evening, but her mom was kind of concerned about her traveling alone at night, so she convinced her to wait until Monday morning. Now, according to Google Maps nowadays, to take this drive it takes around two hours, so it's safe to say in nineteen seventy seven it was probably pretty close to that in distance and time. So Anne left on Monday, September twelfth of nineteen seventy seven to head back to campus. She had a class at ten thirty am that morning, and she was determined to try to make it. Anne took off in her nineteen seventy one Pontiac and headed home. Anne was just twenty minutes away from Bloomington when her car broke down on State Route thirty seven. Now, this was a road that Anne was very much familiar with, as she had traveled it many times since it connected Bloomington to Cambridge City, Anne missed her ten thirty class, which set off alarm bells for her classmates. Because Anne was always very responsible and on time and present for her classes, she also never called her mom to let her know that she had made it back home, which was another thing that set off alarm bells. Later that afternoon, Anne missed a rehearsal for her theater class, and this was yet another thing that was very, very odd. Anne's mom, Marge, had been diligently calling Anne's off campus apartment phone but got no answer. So this, of course really worried Marge, so she decided to take herself and a friend to Bloomington to find out exactly what was going on and look for Anne. And also, remember this was back in nineteen seventy seven, so there's no other form of communication other than house phone to house phone. There's no cell phones, there's no texting, there's no paging. There's really no technology at this point in time. So the only way that Marge could be sure that Anne was safe was to take herself to Bloomington. So Marge and her friend and headed towards Bloomington. And this was later on in the day into the late hours of the evening, so they headed towards Bloomington, and it was around midnight that they came across Anne's car abandoned and broken down. The car was locked, and they noted that they saw her clean laundry in a laundry basket and school books were in the backseat of the car. The car was locked and they couldn't get in, so they went ahead and went to the police station to report that something was wrong. As there was no trace of Anne. The Indiana State Police of the Bloomington District took it seriously and posted that Anne was missing. After failing to return to the Bloomington campus. They said her rest colored Pontiac was found parked on State Road thirty seven with the doors locked and hazard lights flashing. It was later determined that the engine was out of water and the car had simply overheated. Now Anne had known that her car was giving her some issues, I think, on this trip back home, because she had apparently stopped at a few different gas stations along the way, likely to have them look at the car. The police were able to talk with all of these people that had had contact with Anne leading up to that day, and her car breaking down, and they all seemed to check out and their stories all seemed to make sense. Anne was having issues with her car. She stopped several times along the way, but eventually ended up breaking down. Obviously, somebody stopped to render eight to Anne and then disappears into thin air. Anne's family and friends very much rallied around the situation and wanted to do everything they could to try and find Anne. Anne was very cautious and she wouldn't have gotten into a car or gone with anybody that she didn't know. Her cousin said that he was worried that Anne could have been so worried and concerned about getting to class that morning that she just accepted a ride from somebody, which typically, like I said, she would not do. But if she was concerned about missing class, this is very possible that she was willing to take that chance. They did everything they could to search for Anne, and law enforcement also went back to the site where Anne's car was found, and they stopped passerby traffic to see if anybody that traveled that route regularly had seen anything. Family and friends made and distributed flyers, and as days went by, hope dwindled more and more that Anne would be found alive. They clung to hope for a total of five weeks until on October nineteenth, a local farmer was walking through a cornfield when he stumbled upon a body. He immediately called nine to one one. The body was, in fact that of Anne Harmier. She was wearing a Indiana University T shirt and her purse was found nearby. The scene was brutal. One of her shoelaces was used to tie her hands around her back and the other was tied around her neck, and her hair brush was used to tighten the knot, which is just terrible. She was also sexually assaulted. Marge, of course, was devastated and very much lost her will for anything after Anne's murder. She could hardly function day to day knowing that what happened to her daughter happened to her daughter. The loss was just too much for her. Marge ended up passing away due to brain cancer in nineteen eighty three. Now I'm going to talk about Scott. Now, Scott is a cousin of Ann's and he was only, like I said, between nine and ten at the time of Anne's murder, and he grew up not knowing the details of what happened to Anne, but he in present day has become one of the biggest advocates for solving her crime. He recalls her funeral being very crowded and very sad. He said all of the people at the funeral were devastated by what had happened to Anne. Scott later said that the family was led to believe that Ann's caller had been caught and that the killer was no longer alive. They had believed that Anne's killer was a man named Stephen Judy, So we are going to go into the Stephen Judy rabbit hole a little bit and talk about him and why they thought that he was connected, because I do think that this is an important part of this story in the grand scheme of things, and once I get into the detail of some of Steven Judy's other crimes, it's going to make sense as to why they thought that he was possibly responsible for Ann's death as well. Stephen Timothy Judy is an American serial killer who is known to have committed several homicides between the years of nineteen seventy three and nineteen seventy nine around Indiana. He was convicted on four homicides and confess to seven, and there are ten plus that he is suspected in. I'm going to get a little bit into the crimes that he was convicted of first, because it very much has a striggling resemblance to Anne's, which is why I think they thought that he was also responsible for her death. So on Saturday, April twenty eighth of nineteen seventy nine, a woman named Terry Lee Shastein was on her way to drop off her kids at a babysitter's house before she would go on to head to work. While she was headed there, Steven Judy passed by her car and basically signaled to her that she needed to pull over. So she did pull over, assuming that there was something wrong with her car that maybe she didn't realize or know about, and Steven saw it, and she just thought he was a good samaritan and she accepted help from him. He told her that there was something wrong with her tire and said that he would fix it for her. So while he was looking at this tire, he ended up disabling the car and ended up offering Terry and her three kids a ride, and he ended up driving them to White Liane Creek. Once they got to their destination, Stephen directed the three kids towards a path and they were basically walking ahead of he and Terry, So the kids were pretty far ahead of them, and then Steven Judy attacked Terry, tied up her hands and feet, and began choking her. He also sexually assaulted her. She of course began screaming for help, and her children ended up running back to them. Later that day, investigators discovered the bodies of Terry and her three children, Misty who was five, Stephen who was four, and Mark, who was two. Evidence was found that Terry had died from strangulation and her children had been drowned. This guy is a piece of shit. Let me just say. There were several witnesses that came forward eventually to help the investigators kind of piece everything together and figure out who the murderer was. Steve and Judy ended up being executed in nineteen eighty one, but in the week before he was executed, he confessed to his foster mother, who was a woman named Mary Carr, that he had raped and murdered other women in multiple different states. He told his foster mother that he killed more women than he could even remember. He confessed to the nineteen seventy three slayings of two women in Louisiana, and that occurred while he was staying in New Orleans. He also confessed to a murder in November of nineteen seventy eight, and that was the homicide of a disco dance instructor in Indianapolis. He also confessed to another possible murder of another woman in Louisiana, who he said he raped and kidnapped. He said he ended up throwing her in the swamp and he didn't know if she survived or not. There were also two other potential murders that he committed in Indianapolis. He also admitted to raping two women in two separate incidents, and he said one of them was a victim in nineteen seventy eight, he assaulted her and then tied her to a tree in a heavily wooded area, and he didn't know if she had survived. So obviously, Stephen Judy is a pos He is a scumbag. He is the actual worst. But he did deny having anything to do with Anne's death. He did not recall her at all, So if we're going to believe him. That is the story and he is sticking to it. Now. Anne's mom, Marge, very much did believe that Steven Judy was responsible for her daughter's murder, but later on it was revealed that Stephen was in prison in Marion County the day of Anne's disappearance, so there's no possible way that he could have been involved. But it very much does mirror Terry because Terry was driving with her kids, she was flagged down, somebody offered to help, and then she was taken from the scene and assaulted and murdered along with her children. So that whole mo o very much does fit. So I can kind of see why investigators went in this direction, But little did they know it would come back that Stephen Judy was incarcerated at the time. So Anne's case is still open, but unfortunately it's gone cold. Her cousin very much believes that Stephen didn't have anything to do with Anne's death. So now we're going to get into present day. Scott has always had his cousin's case on his mind, but it wasn't until twenty eighteen when he heard a new story about the Golden State Killer being arrested that it kind of brought this case back to the forefront of his mind. He thought if the Golden State killer was active in the seventies and eighties and was just now apprehended, that it wasn't too late to catch his as an Ann's killer. From there, he decided to reach out to the Indian Estate Police and ended up filing a foil request, which was denied because the case was still active and open. Now let me just say sidebar here. If a case has been cold unsolved for I say twenty years, fifteen plus years, let the family have some access to the files. What harm is it going to do. It's sitting on a shelf, nothing is really moving. Let the family in on what you have so maybe they can figure something out. Maybe something will spark. Everybody has kind of a different outlook on things. Let the family have access to these files. So they deny his requests. There has been nobody arrested for Ann's murder, although at this point in time they still thought that Steven Judy was responsible. Nobody had been charged in Anne's murder, so it technically was still an open investigation, and Scott wanted to do as much as he could to try to investigate his cousin's case without the reports from the Indian Estate Police. So he got with some of his work colleagues and they ended up taking it on together. They started a social media campaign to bring attention to Ann's murder, but they did it a bit differently than your typical social media group that tries to bring attention to a loves one's murder. They did all of the posts and everything in the group from Ann's point of view, which they believe makes it stand out. And I agree, nobody else is doing this. This is a very interesting approach and I really like it. So there was a post made shortly before the New Year, and remember this is from Ann Harmeier's point of view. So the post reads, my new Year's resolutions aren't that much different from most twenty year olds. Eat healthier, make more time for myself, and find the guy who raped and killed me. Some people, of course, didn't really like this approach, but it did what they wanted it to do, which was to get people talking about Anne and her murder, which is what you really need in a decades long cold case like this one. I really think that this is a great idea and I'm going to link the social media below so you can follow along for yourself. In a twenty twenty three interview with NBC News and Dateline, Scott said, quote, this is going to be the forty sixth anniversary of her murder, and it marks a critical point. We're forty six years away from the time of her murder, and many of the individuals who have knowledge about the case or possible suspects are either dead or in poor health end quote. Our best bet is to raise awareness about her death and get people to start talking and remembering and hopefully coming forward with new information that would crack the case. Scott did go on to say that there was DNA collected from the scene and it has been tested, but no matches have come up yet. He said the evidence was very well preserved, despite the fact that it was collected in the nineteen seventies when DNA testing wasn't exactly a thing. They did say that they test it from time to time and they are hopeful that one day they will get a match. Scott told Dateline that he has two goals now. He said, our number one goal is to find Ann's killer, finding the guy who did this, and getting him locked away for good, if not worse, was my end goal. His other goal was a bit unexpected, and he said through researching Ann's case, he came across so many others, particularly women in Indiana who disappeared or were murdered in the seventies and eighties whose cases are also unsolved. He said he wants to raise funds to create a cold case unit to look into some of these unsolved Indiana cases. And there are many. We've covered some on this podcast. We have Dara Holts, we have Brandy Peltz, we have the Burger Chef murders. There are a lot of notorious unsolved cases in the seventies and eighties that all took place in Indiana. So Scott wanting to organize funds and kind of rally to try to help solve some of these cases. I think is such a positive thing that can come out of something so tragic, like in being brutally murdered on her way back to school. And I think in these cases something like this where Anne's life was taken, she was only twenty years old, she was in the prime of her life and everything was just taken from her instantly, and decades later her case is still unsolved, but her family and Scott kind of spearheading everything is taking what happened to her and turning it into something positive to try to help others and try to bring a spotlight back on some of these cold cases from Indiana because he realizes how much help they really need to keep these cases out there, and how many unsolved cases there truly are out of Indiana, And why is that the case. Is it just that they don't have the evidence? Is it lack of resources, is it lack of funds. There are so many different factors that go into why these cold cases don't really go anywhere, and a lot of it, unfortunately is smaller police departments and lack of resources and lack of funding. So Scott kind of taking this upon himself to try and create this cold case unit is something that I think is such a great thing to come out of this horrible tragedy. So, as of right now, Ann's case, unfortunately is still unsolved, but I do think the fact that they do have DNA and the fact that we have advancements in DNA technology on a daily basis, I do believe that the answers are out there, and I just hope that when the answers come that the person responsible for Ann's death is still living and will be able to be prosecuted to the fullest degree and spend the rest of their life behind bars. Because I've said it once, I'll say it again. I don't think you randomly just wake up on a random Monday and decide you're going to go commit a murder for the first time ever, and then you go back to your regular life and you never do it again. I think people like this that are capable of something like this establish patterns, and they have a really hard time if they've done it once, only doing it that one time. I don't believe whoever this person is, that Ann was his first victim, and I don't believe that she was his last. But Ann's story is such an important one to tell, and I very much wanted to share all of the good that is coming out of everything that Scott has now taken on trying to investigate his cousin's murder and in the process us realizing how many other cases also need this type of attention, and taking it upon himself to raise funds so hopefully this cold case unit can be formed and they can really take a deep dive into some of these cold cases and hopefully get them solved so they can mark them as closed, because that is what we want at the end of the day, every single cold case to no longer be cold, justice for the victims, answers for the families, and people to be held accountable for being heinous humans at the end of the day. So thank you guys so much for listening to Ann's story. I'm going to be posting over on my social media some photos of Anne and just the kind of girl that Anne was. It really comes through in her photos. You can tell that she was a lovely, lovely girl and she had her whole life ahead of her. Thank you guys so much as always for listening, and I will see you next week for a brand new unsolved case. Have a great weekend and I will see you then. Bye.