Her Car Broke Down… 53 Years Later, DNA Revealed Who Stopped Behind Her 

Her Car Broke Down… 53 Years Later, DNA Revealed Who Stopped Behind Her 

 

 

On Friday evening, July 7th, 1972, a borrowed 1965 Ford overheated on Interstate 69 in Indiana. A woman and her 3-year-old daughter were inside. The car stopped running on a dark stretch of highway between Marion and Hartford City. Someone pulled over behind them. The next morning, the car was found on the side of the road with nobody inside.

30 miles north, a driver found a dead woman and a living 3-year-old sitting beside her on a county road. The DNA on the dead woman’s clothing sat in evidence for 53 years before anyone could match it to a name. Her name was Phyllis Baylor, though her husband Richard called her Jean, her middle name. She was 26 years old.

 She and Richard lived in Indianapolis with their daughter Jody, who had just turned three. Phyllis’s parents lived in Bluffton, in a small town in Wells County, about 120 miles northeast of Indianapolis. She had grown up there. Her sister still lived in the area. The drive to Bluffton was one Phyllis had made many times before, heading northeast on I-69 through the flat farmland of central Indiana.

The highway between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne cut through corn and soybean fields that stretched to the horizon on both sides. At night, between the towns of Marion and Hartford City, the road was dark and empty. A driver could go 15 minutes without seeing another set of headlights. The small towns along the route were spaced far enough apart that the stretches of road between them felt isolated after dark.

The 1965 Ford wasn’t Phyllis’s car. She had borrowed it for the trip to her parents’ house. A 7-year-old car in 1972 was well past its prime. And the engine overheated on I-69 in Grant County before she reached Bluffton. When the car stopped running, she was stranded on the highway with a 3-year-old and no way to call for help.

In 1972, there were no cell phones and no roadside call boxes. If a car broke down on the road at night, the driver either flagged someone down or waited until morning. Phyllis never made it to Bluffton. Her parents expected her Friday night. When she didn’t arrive and didn’t call, they started worrying. By Saturday morning, they were on the phone to Richard in Indianapolis.

 He hadn’t heard from her, either. He got in his car and started driving north on I-69 trying to retrace the route she would have taken looking for the borrowed Ford along the shoulder. At 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 8th, as someone reported an abandoned vehicle on northbound I-69 in Grant County, the 1965 Ford was sitting on the shoulder with the hood up, empty.

The keys were gone. Cars broke down on the interstate regularly, and the raised hood was a common distress signal. A state trooper logged the vehicle and noted the plate number, but nothing connected it to anything criminal, yet. About an hour later and roughly 30 miles north, a woman driving on West Road in Allen County, just northeast of Huntertown, spotted something alongside the road near the intersection with Shoaff Road. She pulled over.

In the grass beside the road, she found Phyllis Baylor’s body and sitting next to her, Phyllis’s 3-year-old daughter, Jodi. Phyllis was dead. Jodi was alive and unharmed. The child had spent the night outside on a rural road in Allen County and next to her mother’s body. Emergency services arrived and photographed the scene before moving the body.

 They documented the position of Phyllis’s clothes, the condition of her body, and collected physical evidence from the ground around her. They noted tire marks on the shoulder of the road near where the body had been placed. The Allen County Police Department and the Indiana State Police responded immediately. The autopsy confirmed that Phyllis had been sexually assaulted and killed by a gunshot wound.

 Jody had not been physically injured. She had been left beside her dead mother on a rural road in a different county from where the car had broken down. Whether the killer left her there intentionally or simply saw no reason to harm a child too young to identify him was something investigators could only speculate about.

 Yet, the geography told investigators something important. The abandoned car sat on I-69 in Grant County, but the body was found on West Road in Allen County, in a different county entirely. Someone had moved Phyllis and Jody from the highway to a rural road. That meant the killer had his own vehicle. It also meant the crime wasn’t a quick roadside assault.

 Phyllis and her daughter had been taken from the Ford, driven north for half an hour through dark farmland, and left on a road outside Huntertown. The killer had taken them a significant distance from the breakdown site, which suggested he knew the area. Investigators worked the case from every angle available to them.

They canvassed the area around both locations, working outward from the stretch of I-69 where the car was found, and from the rural roads near Huntertown where the body had been left. They knocked on farmhouse doors along West Road and the surrounding county roads. They asked whether anyone had heard a vehicle on the road during the night, whether anyone had noticed headlights turning onto West Road at an unusual hour, whether any dogs had barked.

 In rural Indiana in 1972, the roads were quiet enough at night that a car passing through would have been noticed by anyone who happened to be awake. They talked to gas station attendants and truck drivers who had been on the highway that Friday night and asked whether anyone had seen a car with its hood up on the northbound shoulder between Marion and Fort Wayne.

 [ __ ] they checked whether any other motorists had reported stopping to help a stranded driver. They looked at Phyllis’ personal life, her contacts in Indianapolis, anyone who might have known her route that evening or had a reason to want to harm her. They had a primary suspect early on, someone who had drawn enough suspicion to be named a person of interest.

Detectives focused on this individual for a period of time, interviewing him and checking his movements on the night of July 7th. The details of who this person was and why they attracted attention were never made public. But in 1972, there was no way to compare biological evidence from the crime scene to a specific person.

The technology to do that wouldn’t exist for another two decades. Without a scientific test that could confirm or eliminate the suspect, so the case relied entirely on circumstantial evidence and witness statements, and neither produced enough for an arrest. The leads ran out. The case went cold. The physical evidence from the scene, including the clothes Phyllis had been wearing that night, was sealed and stored in an evidence locker at the Allen County Police Department.

 The case file was filed alongside other unsolved homicides, and the years began to accumulate. The detectives who had originally worked the case retired or moved on to other assignments. New investigators inherited the file over the decades, read through the old reports, and hit the same wall at the end of every lead.

Nobody had seen anything useful on the road that night. Nobody could place a specific person at the scene. The primary suspect had never been charged. And Richard Baylor drove north from Indianapolis on Saturday morning, retracing the route Phyllis would have taken. He had gotten the call from Phyllis’s father early that morning.

 Nobody had heard from her since she left Indianapolis the night before. What Richard found at the end of that drive was a dead wife and a living daughter who had spent the night beside her mother’s body on a county road. Jody was 3 years old. She was too young to understand what had happened and too young to tell investigators anything about the man who had killed her mother.

Whatever she saw that night on I-69 and on West Road, none of it could be translated into a description or a name. She grew up without Phyllis. Richard raised her alone. He called his dead wife Jean, the middle name she’d gone by in life. He waited for answers that didn’t come in 1973, or 1980, or 1990, or 2000.

Every year brought the same silence from the detective’s office. He called when he had a reason to call and sometimes when he didn’t, and the answer was always the same. Jody grew from a toddler into a child, then a teenager, then a woman with her own life and her own family. The question of who had killed her mother and why she had been left alive followed her through every stage of it.

She had been found sitting beside a dead woman on a rural road at 3 years old. She carried that fact through her entire childhood without understanding what it meant. And through her entire adult life knowing exactly what it meant. Phyllis’s parents in Bluffton had been expecting their daughter and granddaughter for dinner the night she disappeared.

Friday night passed without a call. So Saturday morning arrived without a car in in The phone calls started. That weekend of searching turned into months without answers, which turned into decades. Both of Phyllis’s parents died without ever learning who killed their daughter. Her sister died without knowing either.

By 2025, the only members of the family left to hear the answer were Richard and Jody. Everyone else who had carried the weight of the murder was gone. 53 years had passed, and the circle of people who needed to know had shrunk to two. The man who killed Phyllis Baylor was a stranger. There was no connection between them.

They had never met. The murder was a random act of violence committed by a man who happened to be driving on the same road at the same time. His name was Fred Allen Leineman. He was 25 years old in July of 1972. He was born near Anderson, Indiana, about 40 mi northeast of Indianapolis. By 1972, he was living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb east of Detroit.

 He was a man from Michigan driving through Indiana on a summer night, and Phyllis was a woman from Indianapolis whose borrowed car broke down on the highway. Their lives intersected for the first and only time on a dark stretch of I-69 in Grant County. The most likely reconstruction is straightforward. Phyllis’s car overheated on I-69.

She was stranded on the shoulder with her daughter and a raised hood signaling distress in the dark. Leineman was driving on the same road and stopped. He may have offered help. He may have offered a ride to a gas station or a phone. What happened next ended with Phyllis dead on a rural road in Allen County, and her daughter alive beside her.

And the distance between the car and the body suggests he drove them in his own vehicle north through Grant County and into Allen County along rural roads that cut through farmland and small towns. Lineman had what investigators described as a lengthy criminal history, though the Indiana State Police did not release specific details about what that history included.

He had been 25 years old at the time of the murder, living in a different state and driving through Indiana for reasons that were never established publicly. After the night of July 7th, 1972, he left Indiana and returned to Michigan. He went back to his life in Grosse Pointe. Nobody investigating the murder ever came across his name.

 He was never questioned or interviewed about the case. Yet, he lived in Michigan while the evidence from the crime scene sat in an Indiana storage locker holding a profile that matched his DNA. He lived another 13 years after the murder on I-69. On April 30th, 1985, Fred Allen Lineman was murdered in Detroit.

 He was 37 years old. Two men named Clifford John Copley and Kevin Reese beat him with a baseball bat in Copley’s basement during an argument about property. Neighbors heard screaming coming from inside the house. When the beating was over, Lineman’s arms were broken and his face had been sprayed with silver paint. Copley and Reese dragged him out of the basement, put him in a dumpster, and set it on fire while he was still alive.

He died 3 years before DNA fingerprinting was first used in a criminal case anywhere in the world. So, the man who killed Phyllis Baylor on a dark highway in Indiana was himself killed in a basement in Detroit 13 years later. For more than 50 years, the evidence from the murder sat in storage. The clothes Phyllis had been wearing on the night of July 7th, 1972, were sealed and preserved in the same containers the crime scene technicians had packed them into the morning after her body was found.

They sat through the rest of the 1970s, through the 1980s, through the 1990s, through the 2000s and 2010s. The case file changed hands multiple times as detectives came and went. The evidence stayed in the same locker, holding biological material from a man whose name nobody knew. DNA testing became available to law enforcement in the early 1990s, two decades after the murder.

At some point after the technology arrived, yet the Indiana State Police developed a partial DNA profile from the clothes. That partial profile was enough to do one important thing. It eliminated the primary suspect who had been the focus of the investigation since the early 1970s. Investigators had spent years looking at a person of interest, someone with enough circumstantial evidence pointing at them to earn that label.

The DNA said it wasn’t him. The man they had been focused on for years was excluded by the science. The case was left without any direction at all. The partial profile wasn’t strong enough for a reliable search through CODIS, the FBI’s national database of convicted offender DNA. CODIS matches crime scene profiles against profiles collected from people convicted of qualifying offenses.

If the person who left DNA at a crime scene has been entered into the system, then the database flags it. Leeman had been dead since 1985. He had been murdered years before CODIS existed. His profile was never collected and never entered into any system. The database couldn’t find a man who had been dead for more than a decade before it came online.

In 2024, the Indiana State Police Laboratory went back to the clothes with better technology. Advances in DNA sequencing over the previous decade meant that labs could now extract full profiles from degraded biological material that earlier methods couldn’t process. The ISP lab developed a much stronger profile from the evidence, a complete one that gave investigators something to work with beyond elimination.

The ISP Cold Case Team and the Allen County Police Department took that profile to Identifinders International, a forensic genealogy company based in California. Just the company was founded in 2011 by Dr. Colleen Fitzpatrick, one of the founding figures in forensic genetic genealogy. The process works by comparing a DNA profile against public ancestry databases to identify biological relatives of the unknown person, then building a family tree using public records until the branches narrow to a specific individual.

The genealogy search identified relatives of the unknown male in the ancestry databases. Investigators worked the family tree backward and outward, following branches through birth records, marriage certificates, and death records across multiple states and decades. Each layer narrowed the possibilities. They focused on Indiana connections, Michigan connections, men who were the right age in 1972, men with criminal histories who had been in the right part of the country at the right time. Yeah, the work took weeks.

The tree kept narrowing until they reached Fred Allen Leineman, born near Anderson, Indiana, living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, in 1972, and dead since 1985. The identification was confirmed in early 2025, 53 years after the murder. On April 16th, 2025, the Indiana State Police Fort Wayne Cold Case Unit announced that the murder of Phyllis Baylor had been solved.

 Sergeant Wes Roulater of the ISP Fort Wayne Post stood at a podium and confirmed that Fred Allen Leoneman had been identified as the contributor of the DNA found on Phyllis Baylor’s clothes through forensic genetic genealogy. The Allen County Prosecutor’s Office stated that if Leoneman were alive, he would have been charged with murder.

 He had been dead for years by the time anyone matched his name to the crime, and there would be no arrest and no trial. The case was closed administratively with the killer identified but beyond the reach of the criminal justice system. Richard Baylor told reporters he had very mixed emotions about the identification.

He said he was totally relieved that it was uncovered and that they finally found out who the person was, but upset that the man had died before he could be held accountable. 53 years of waiting and the answer pointed to a man who had been in the ground since 1985. Richard also said it was a blessing for their daughter Jody to finally know.

Jody Baylor was 3 years old when she was found beside her dead mother on a county road outside Huntertown. She had no memory of that night and no memory of her mother beyond what photographs and stories could provide. And by the time the DNA identified the man who put them there, she was 56. She had lived her entire adult life with that question.

 The answer came more than half a century late, but it came. Richard wished Phyllis’s parents and her sister were still alive to hear the news. They weren’t. The people who had waited the longest for the answer were gone before it arrived. A borrowed 1965 Ford that broke down on I-69 on a summer night in 1972. That was the moment everything turned.

It took 53 years to find out who stopped on the highway behind her. If you enjoyed this case, go check out the other solved cases in the playlist.