Shelley Ann Werner was 15 years old the last time she was seen alive at Wilt’s grocery store in Mishawaka on June 15, 1980. Ten days later, her body was found, partially clothed with a gunshot wound to her head, near an abandoned set of train tracks on Madison Road.
Despite interviewing nearly 150 people in the initial years of the case, police did not identify any suspects as Werner’s disappearance made regional and national headlines. On Wednesday, after 43 years, cold case investigators now believe they’ve solved Werner’s murder.
Based on information provided by a key witness, cold case investigators with the Mishawaka Police Department say they’ve identified three men who were involved in Werner’s abduction and murder. The men are all now deceased so no criminal charges will be filed, but police hope the knowledge of who the perpetrators likely were brings closure to Werner’s family and the community.
“The fact that these subjects were deceased didn’t change a thing. We wanted to get the closure to the family,” said James Campbell, a former South Bend police detective who now volunteers on cold cases in Mishawaka.
Officials did not identify the suspects since they are deceased, but detectives said they were all me, around five to 10 years older than Werner and that she would have known them, but wasn’t friends with them.
Investigators struggled for years with no conclusive DNA evidence to go on. That changed, detectives said, a few years ago when a key witness came forward with information about Werner’s disappearance. Campbell, who worked the case along with David Dosmann, Tim Corbett, Sam Walsh and Donna Newcomer, said the witness was a woman who was intimidated by the suspects and only when two of them died, did she feel comfortable talking to police.
“The reason some of these things take so long is the fear and threats these suspects put towards witnesses,” Campbell said. “They threaten them and their families and that’s exactly what happened in this case.”
Investigators then set up to corroborate the leads from the witness and found the third suspect had also died in 2018. The case was first looked at by the St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit, but then moved to the Mishawaka Police Department’s cold case team when the homicide unit disbanded in late 2021.
Wednesday’s announcement marks an end to the 43-year-old homicide, though Mishawaka’s cold case unit is currently looking into seven other unsolved murder cases and asks anyone with information to contact law enforcement.
