On a balmy night in August 1975, Kathie Rottler, 14, talked her best friend and sister into trying their luck at hitchhiking to go to a teen hangout near their hometown of Cumberland, Ind.
Rottler, her best friend Kandice Smith, 13, and Kathie’s kid sister Sheri, 11, were out for the first time without adult supervision — and they were excited.
“We could have walked,” Kathrie recalls now. “We should have walked.”
They managed to flag down a man in a white station wagon, climbed into the front seat of his car, and sped off into the night.
However, instead of dropping them at their destination, the man drove past it and told the girls he would hold them for ransom. Panicked, when the girls tried to open the door, they realized there was no handle.
“The screws, bolts and the door paneling had been taken off,” says Kathie, now 64, who appears in the next episode of People Magazine Investigates, “The Indiana Slasher,” airing on Investigation Discovery on Monday, Dec. 30, at 9/8c and streaming on Max.
What happened next would haunt all three women for nearly 50 years. After a terrifying 15-minute drive that ended in a cornfield, the driver — brandishing a knife and a gun — tied the girls’ hands.
On the ground in front of the car, he raped Sheri before stabbing each of them repeatedly. He then left the barely conscious girls for dead and drove off.
“It felt like we were all going to die,” says Kathie.
Crime scene in a cornfield near Cumberland, Ind.
Indianapolis Police Department
Minutes after their assailant fled, Kandice spotted Kathie on the ground and dragged herself toward her. Initially convinced that Sheri had been abducted, the two staggered onto a nearby highway and flagged down a car for help.
Retired Indianapolis police detective Greg Maxey still remembers when he pulled up and soon saw the rows of slashes on their necks. “It looked like somebody was opening up a small accordion,” he says.
He soon found Sheri in the cornfield where the attack occurred, bleeding badly but clinging to life.
Gary Maxey on duty in Indiana.
Indianapolis Police Department
The heinous crime shook the community and the press dubbed the villain the ‘Indiana Slasher.’ “I had 12 cuts to my throat and probably about 300 stitches,” recalls Kandice, 63.
Even though all three survived, the horror of that night didn’t end there. Investigators in their rural Indiana community were not able to identify the attacker — something that would haunt the girls for decades to come.
At the crime scene, investigators found rope, a handkerchief and a cigarette butt and initially zeroed in on a recently released inmate whom the girls were convinced was their assailant. He would later be cleared.
The investigation petered out. “Our case was put on the back burner,” says Kandice. “It’s like they didn’t care.” Says Sheri Rottler Trick, now 61: “I just went on with life. We tried to have just as normal of a life as we could.”
“I can only presume,” says Steve Gibbs, a former detective with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office in the 1990s, “that they felt alone, abandoned and disrespected.”
The trauma of the night, compounded by a stalled investigation, took an emotional toll on the women over the years. “I had so much anxiety,” says Kathie, “I ended up quitting school shortly after. . . . It screwed us all up.”
Sheri Rottler Trick, Kathie Rottler and Kandice Smith.
Courtesy Sherri Rottler Trick; Courtesy Kathie Rottler; Courtesy Kandice Smith
But Kathie, who was haunted by guilt for getting her sister and friend in a dangerous situation, hounded investigators for answers. “I always felt like since it was my idea to hitchhike,” she says, “I owed it to both Sheri and Kandice to keep pushing.”
She continued to telephone detectives and stopped by police headquarters to remind them that she wasn’t going away. “I could feel the sadness and pain,” says Sgt. David Ellison, who oversaw the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department’s cold-case homicide unit.
Kathie’s tenacity wasn’t wasted. In January, nearly 50 years later, investigators were able to identify their attacker—Thomas Williams, who died at the age of 49 in 1983 while serving time in Texas for a bank robbery.
He had been identified through DNA evidence from the women’s clothing from the night of the attack. In January, when the women got the call about the identity of their attacker, it was a bittersweet moment: Their attacker from five decades ago had a name and a face. But he had been dead for 41 years.
“He did not pay for the crime that he did to me, my sister and my friend. He did not pay for that,” says Sheri. “I do forgive him. And I’m so thankful he’s dead and can’t do it to anyone else. It’s over. It’s finally over.” For more on this case, pick up this week’s People magazine, on newsstands now.
