Criminology - The Chasteen Family Murders

Episode Date: April 18, 2020

In 1979, Terry Chasteen and her three children were living a wonderful life in Indiana. Terry had a new love interest in her life and the two had discussed marriage. On April 28th, Terry loaded up the kids to take them to the babysitter before she went to work. They never made it. Their bodies were found in White Lick creek later that day. Join Mike and Morf as they discuss the brutal and senseless murders of the Chasteen family. This family encountered a monster named Steven Judy who ended their lives in the most brutal ways imaginable. When police caught up with Judy, they realized this was a man with a long rap sheet who had received, time after time, just slaps on the wrist.  You can help support the show at patreon.com/criminology   An Emash Digital Production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Criminology is a true crime podcast that may contain discussion about violent or disturbing topics. Listener discretion is advised. Hello everyone and welcome to episode 108 of the criminology podcast. I'm Mike Ferguson. And this is Mike Morford. Mr. Morford, how are you? I'm good. Other than the technical difficulties I'm having getting started, some power outages and whatnot, but knock on wood, the power's on right now, so we're recording this. Well, a little tough to do anything, right? When your power's not.

working, especially record a podcast. It makes it extremely difficult. Yeah. In the past, I've tried to go out in my car and see how it sounds in there doing it like that way. And that was just, uh, that was just really bad.

So hopefully the power stays on. We can knock this out. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get it done. We'll get it done. We've had some great Patreon support lately, Mike. I really want to thank everybody for kind of stepping up and,

and helping us out. So let's give some Patreon shoutouts. We had Michelle. MacDonald, Helen Dogue, Einer's daughter, Joy Pearson, Angela Palma, Vanessa Shin, and Doug Kaplan. So a lot of great support. Very much appreciated. Thanks a lot.

That really helps us out a lot and we really appreciate it. And if anyone out there is considering supporting the show on Patreon, they can go to patreon.com slash criminology to sign up. All right, Morph. So you and I continue to put out episodes and we've talked about it. We think it's important. These are important distractions for people. You know, I got an email today from a woman who is an ER nurse at night.

And you know how scary that would be? You know, she's sitting across from patients who most likely have the virus. She's wearing a mask, but is it enough? And she's doing that day in and day out. And so are many other people. My absolute total respect goes out to all of them. We are trying to do our part. It's nothing like that, but we're trying to provide some entertainment, some type of distraction.

And that's what she said in her email. She said it was an amazing distraction to be able to put on the podcast in the car while she's driving to work, knowing what's waiting for her when she gets there. Yeah, that's got to be a really tough gig right now. to have to deal with all that, that stress and that, um, that weight on her. And if, if we can distract her for an hour, then, you know, I'm happy to do it. I know you are. And not just the people there, we think of them being on the front lines, but the people that are at the store that continue allow us to get gas at the gas station, let us get gas, the people that are stocking shells in the

market so we can go there and, and get whatever food we can. And they're out there risking their how to just to put stuff on the shelves. So I think everyone is just sort of pitching and doing their own part and helping all of us work together to make this a better time. Yeah, it's a great point you make. There are a lot of people that are essential, right? They've been deemed essential. And because of that, you know, they are out there really helping the rest of us cope and live and, you know, stay safe. So the appreciation goes. out to everyone. So I think it's time for us to get into this episode. In 1979, Terry Chastine of Indiana had everything to live for. She had three beautiful children, a job that she enjoyed,

and a man that she loved and was about to marry. But this life that she had built for herself, for her children, it was ripped away before she could marry the man. She could marry the man that she loved. During the spring of that year, Terry Chastin and her three children were murdered. Their killer, a man named Stephen Judy, was arrested shortly after the murders and then later executed in the electric chair. But prior to his execution, he confessed to more murders, telling authorities that he left a trail of death between Louisiana and Indiana. Terry Lee Zollers was born in in Indiana on October 6, 1957 to Edward and Maxine Zollars. She was one of five children born to the couple. When Terry was in high school, she started dating a boy named Mark Chastine. He was a senior,

and she was a sophomore at Brownsburg High School. Terry gave birth to a daughter named Misty Zollers on August 5, 1973, two months before Terry's 16th birthday. After Mark graduated high school, he attended Judson College in Elgin, Illinois, to study ministry and psychology. He left after two semesters and returned to Indiana, where he and Terry got married in June 1974. After the wedding, he worked for his grandfather, Louis Linder, who was an Indianapolis general contractor. On December 14, 1974, Terry gave birth to the couple's first son, Stephen Michael Chastine, followed by second son, Mark Lewis Chastine, on June 4th, 19, During the first three years of their marriage, Terry was a homemaker. She later worked at Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge on Harding Street in Indianapolis. She also did some part-time work through an employment agency. After four years of marriage, Mark and Terry divorced in early 1978. In April of that year, Mark enlisted in the U.S. Navy, while Terry, now a single mother, started a

working for Marsh Supermarket in Indianapolis. She and the children lived in an apartment at 5508 Portsmouth Avenue in Speedway, a town on Indies West Side. This was just a 10-minute drive from her workplace. In between spending time with her children and working, Terry found a new love interest, a man named Jack Lane. Jack was a head chef at the Howard Johnson Restaurant in downtown, Indy. The couple was in love, and they discussed married.

Early Saturday morning, April 28, 1979, Terry, who wasn't scheduled to work, got a call from the supermarket asking if she could fill in for a co-worker, and she agreed. Terry changed into her work uniform, fed and dressed the kids, and then loaded them into her car to head to the babysitter's home. But they never showed up there. Later that morning at around 9.30 a.m., about 18 miles southwest of Speedway, in the town of Mooresville, Indiana, mushroom hunters were walking along a muddy trail in a heavily wooded area when they looked down a steep embankment

and saw the body of a woman floating in white-lit creek. The body was about 250 yards from their bridge, where Indiana 67 crosses the creek. The mushroom pickers ran to call police. And when police came out and made their way down to retrieve the body, they found the bodies of three children as well. The victims were identified pretty quickly, as Terry Chastine and her three children, five-year-old Misty, four-year-old Stephen, and two-year-old Mark.

Police found Terry's purse and a savings pass book with her name on it at the scene. A small metal tool used in Mason reconstruction was also found near Terry's body. Misty's body was discovered next to the bank several yards from her mother. The boys were found about 200 yards further downstream. next to the bank. Just before noon, state police diver Ken Hicks pulled all three bodies out of the water. They were transported in a Morgan County civilian defense vehicle to Neil and Summers mortuary in Martinsville. Pathologist Harley Palmer performed the autopsies. Terry was still wearing her supermarket uniform that she had put on that morning. She had been strangled with the uniform scarf that was found nodded around her neck.

Her hands and feet were tied with pieces of cloth from her clothes, and it was determined she had been raped. Indiana State Police estimated the four had been killed around 7 a.m. The children had all drowned and were found fully clothed. Witnesses reported seeing a gray pickup truck near the scene of the killings the morning the bodies were discovered. Investigators interviewed Terry's boyfriend Jack Lane. He had arrived at work that morning at 6 a.m. He was shocked and saddened to hear the news.

of what had happened, police also talked to the restaurant manager who said Jack Lane was extremely distraught when he heard the news about Terry and her kids and that he knew how devastated Jack was because he wanted to marry Terry. Jack was not considered a suspect by police. He was very quickly ruled out. As is typical in these kind of cases, police wanted to speak with Terry's and the children's father, Mark Chastin. But they found out he was stationed in California at the time. When they found out he was there, they ruled him out. Mark later said police never even spoke with him. It was his family in Indiana that informed him of the murders. Mark was given emergency leave by the military to go to Indiana, to be with family. When he got there, Mark went to police on his own

and told them that he and Terry were talking about getting back together after he served his four years in the Navy. This was despite the fact she was in another relationship in which he planned to marry Jack Lane. Mark said that Terry called him and wrote to him regularly. He last spoke to her about a week before his family was killed. At 3 p.m. on the day of the murders, police found Terry's abandoned car a Ford Granada at the intersection of I-465 and Indiana 67. This was about 10 miles from where the bodies were found. Upon examination, police discovered a wire had been pulled from the engine to keep it from starting. The car also had a flat tire, which was found in the trunk. Police speculated the killer may have offered Terry assistance and a ride, but instead took all four

victims to White Lick Creek and killed them. News of the murder spread quickly and of the gray pickup truck seen in the area around the time of the murders. Police from the onset got phone tips about that truck, and more than one of the tipsters dropped the name, Stephen Timothy Judy, to police. The next day, police arrested the 23-year-old Stephen Judy for the murders. He was held in the Morgan County Jail without bond. At the time, Judy was already free on bond and awaiting trial on a Marion County armed robbery charge. When police questioned Judy, he told police that he had been with his girlfriend, Patty Whistle, all night and was driving around at the time of the murders. Patty initially backed his alibi, but later admitted it wasn't true, and that Stephen Judy was

actually with another girlfriend named Paula Barnes. According to her, Stephen and Paula spent the night at Paula's home, talking and smoking pot. As police started digging into Stephen Judy's background, they discovered that he had a nightmarish childhood, his biological father Vernon Eugene Judy was a construction worker and had been arrested 72 times for assault and battery. Around 1973, he escaped from the Indiana State Prison at Michigan City and became a fugitive from the law. Judy's mother was a waitress her entire life and often dropped Judy and his siblings off at a tavern where they had to wait for Vernon to finish drinking. The women who hung out at the tavern would throw the kid's popcorn to eat.

Stephen Judy had a brother named Michael Daniel and two sisters, Carolyn and Patty. Patty ran away from home, and Steve and Judy never knew what happened to her. All of the Judy kids were in and out of guardian homes and juvenile centers, and each one had been a ward of the court. After Vernon Judy abandoned his family, Stephen Judy's mother remarried. During a separation from her second husband, she moved to Florida. and then her husband joined her there. During an argument, she shot him.

They later remarried, and Stephen lost track of his mother's whereabouts. That must have been some kind of marriage, Morve. I don't know. I feel like if my wife shoots me, could we make it through? Could we work it out? Maybe. It's going to be tough. We've got to be honest with you.

It seems like there's a whole lot of stuff going on here with this family, and, you know, you can get into that debate of whether people are born bad or whether it's something that they experience early on in their life that changes them, but not to make excuses for what's to come with this guy, but he seems like he's been exposed to some really, really bad stuff. Yeah, there's no doubt. I mean, you can get into the nature versus nurture. I don't think it's a coincidence, though, that, you know, when we talk about a lot of killers, the majority of them had pretty jacked up childhoods. Now, there's a ton of people. across the world that had a jacked up childhood and grow up to do great things. And there's a ton of

killers who had a great childhood. So, you know, nothing's 100%. But by and large, a lot of the killers we talked about had some pretty nasty childhoods. Judy said his family life until about the age of 11 was filled with crime, incest, pornography, sex, alcohol, and violence. He frequently got in trouble at school and once stabbed a kid with a compass. Around the age of 11 or 12, this was when he really started to get into real trouble. He burned one of his sisters with an iron and he was arrested in 1969 for molesting three girls. He was labeled as ungovernable and sent to the Indiana United Methodist Church Children's Home. He fled the home several months later.

And then just before his 14th birthday in 1970, Stephen Judy was arrested for a butcher knife and axe attack on former indie resident Carol Imig. And apparently he followed her to her west side apartment and stabbed her 40 times, cutting off one of her fingers before he knocked her unconscious. This was an extremely brutal and vicious attack. But somehow Carol Emig managed to survive. And police caught up with Stephen Judy. And he was ultimately sent to Central State Hospital for 27 months. But he wasn't there long. Just a few months after he got there, he escaped.

Luckily, police were able to find Stephen Judy and bring him back. Stephen Judy started seeing a psychiatrist. And shortly after, Moved in with foster parents, Robert and Mary Carr. He lived with them off and on up to the day of his arrest and the murders. Stephen worked for his foster father, Robert, as a labor, for about seven years. Robert said he never had any problems with Stephen at work. Stephen's first arrest as an adult took place in Naperville, Illinois, in July 1975. It's for an aggravated battery charge. A woman named Susan Kay McFadden's car broke down on a highway, and Stephen Judy happened to come upon her.

Instead of helping her, Judy attacked her. She fought him off, but suffered a black eye, broken nose, and several cuts. Stephen Judy served 20 months in jail before being paroled in March of 1977, but just a month later, he was arrested in Indianapolis on charges of kidnapping, vehicle theft, and the commission of a felony while armed. he abducted 24-year-old Pamela Barger when she stopped at an Indy post office branch. He drove her car south on Indiana 37 until Pamela grabbed the steering wheel. She bid him, hit him in the face and in the body until she was able to get out of the car and run for help.

Stephen was held for almost a year before pleading guilty to a lesser charge and was sentenced to one year. at the Indiana State Farm, now known as Putnam Correctional Facility, but he didn't serve any more time there because he received credit for time served in jail awaiting trial. But he was returned to Illinois on a parole violation. Unfortunately, Illinois prison officials mistakenly released him in September 1978, a week before they thought his sentence was to have ended. In reality, he was supposed to be released in September 1979. After piecing everything together that they could about Steve and Judy,

investigators in the Chastain family murders were confident that they had arrested the right man. The irony was that if Steve and Judy hadn't been accidentally released a year early, Terry and her children would never have been killed. And Morph, this is something that, to me, it seems like we see quite a bit, right? as we're doing these cases, people getting very little time for what to me are extremely serious crimes. I mean, you're talking about kidnapping and assaults and things like that. And he got what, a year, time already served. Now you got shit back on a parole violation, but then they let him go. It just seems to me that when we go back into the 70s and 80s and

and even back a little bit further, slaps on the wrist. Slaps on the wrist. Okay, I get it. The first time somebody does something, they get a break maybe, depending on what it is. But when somebody has a rap sheet as long as your arm, at what point do all of those things compound on top of each other and you say, this person is a habitual criminal? We can't keep giving them just slaps on the wrist. We've got to put them away.

They're going to continue to hurt people. Yeah. What's that old saying once is an accident twice as a coincidence, three times as a pattern? I mean, here's a guy with a record a mile long for the same kinds of things. There's no way he should have been in any position to get out. It's just, it's frustrating and it's mind boggling to me. It's frustrating to us. But imagine the families of the,

victims when they find this out later on, right, that a person has a very long history of violence and yet they're out, walking the streets, able to commit the crime that, you know, takes their loved one away. That would be tough to take. In the suburbs of D.C., a woman fails to show up for work and is found brutally murdered. I wonder what's emergency? We just walked in the door and there's blood in the For the next two decades, the case remained unsolved until new technology allowed investigators to do what had once been impossible. A new series from ABC Audio in 2020, blood and water. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. After his foster son was taken into custody, Robert Carr told police that he let Stephen borrow his pickup truck on the night of Friday, April 27th,

1979, the day before the murders. He said Stephen told him that he was going to visit a girlfriend. He arrived back at the car home around 8 a.m. Saturday morning with the truck. Not long after Judy's arrest for the murders of Terry and her children, the case became known as the Flat Tire murders, which, by the way, have no connection with the Florida case. We covered a couple episodes back. Police revealed that Terry may have known. known, Steve and Judy, at least somewhat casually. He had dated one of her co-workers from the Marsh

supermarket and had visited the store while both women were there working. But police came out and said that the two were definitely not friends. In fact, they had never even been formally introduced to each other, but he had probably seen Terry at the store. Detective stated that Judy did not plan the murders or purposely follow her along I-465 prior to the flat tire. According to them, the meeting was pure coincidence. Lieutenant Morrell McKinney, the chief investigator on the case pointed out that the location where Terry's car was found on I-465 could be seen across a 38-acre soybean field from the backyard of the car home on Searly Road.

Stephen Judy's former girlfriend, 25-year-old Inez Peel, who was Terry's co-worker at the supermarket, was shocked by her ex-boyfriend's arrest, especially for the murders of the children. During the time the two dated the previous year, Stephen had watched her three young children numerous times, and she said he was wonderful with them, and she fully trusted him. Two weeks after Stephen Judy's arrest, a Morgan County grand jury called for the death. penalty in the murders of Terry Chastine and her three small children. Judy was indicted on four counts of murder and one count of rape. Not long after Judy's indictment, the school where Terry's daughter Misty attended before her death held graduation ceremonies. Even though she was no longer present,

Misty graduated along with her classmates. Then Stephen's trial began in January 1980 with jury selection, which lasted for several days. Before eight men and four women were chosen, Judy pleaded guilty by reason of insanity, even though he was ultimately found competent to stand trial. On Monday, January 14th, the trial started with witness testimony that identified Steve and Judy as the man looking under the hood of Terry Chastien's disabled car, a few hours before the bodies were found. A witness named Ernest Matthews, a truck driver from Jasper, said on the day of the murders, he drove about 35 miles per hour past Terry Chastien's stalled car on I-465, and according to him, he got a good look at the man.

Matthews also described the gray pickup truck with utility boxes on the back, parked behind Terry's car. The truck matched the description given by another witness named Charles Hargis, who said he saw a woman and some children in a truck while he was on his way to work, around 6.40 a.m. on the morning of the murders. He saw the truck several more times as he drove along I-465 and then south on Indiana 67. According to Hargis, the truck, quote, revved up pretty tight and passed him on the right. The truck swerved. It was almost as if there was a struggle for the steering wheel. At a stoplight, Hargis pulled up next to the pickup truck and the woman inside waved frantically at him and the man driving the truck glared at him.

Hargis testified that he looked away because he did not want to get involved. And what he thought at the time was a domestic dispute. Hargis also testified that while he got a good look at the driver, he could not positively identify the man as Stephen Judy. And I think this is a very tough situation, morph, that maybe some listeners, maybe a lot of listeners have been in at one point or another in their lives. Maybe it's in a car that, you know, at a stoplight and you look over at the car next to you and you see something going on.

Maybe it's something that you hear in a neighbor's house or, you know, something like that. Do you get involved? Should you get involved? I think sometimes those questions are not always. as black and white as a lot of people would like to make them out to be. Yeah, I think we all like to think that we would intervene if we saw something like that happening, but I guess until we know we're in that situation, you know, we don't know what we would do. Well, he may have thought that it was a domestic dispute of some sort.

Maybe at the very least he could have taken a license plate number or something along those lines. Yeah, I mean, I think you couldn't say that in a lot of situations. I guess, you know, the point I was trying to make is you just don't have all the facts in every situation. And now, looking back, knowing what this guy knows now, do I think he would try to help and intervene? I do. If he had known what was really going on, I believe most people would try to help. But in that kind of, In that car to car kind of voyeuristic moment, I just don't know how anybody can really know what's going on unless somebody's got a gun or somebody's punching the other person. I think it's pretty tough, especially to lay any type of blame on someone. In the first two days of the trial, over 20 people testified. one included a 15-year-old high school student named Eddie Williams. He was a passenger in a car that drove past the murder scene at around 7.25 a.m. on the morning of the murders. He and his father were headed for breakfast to a Mooresville restaurant.

Williams testified he saw a red and silver truck with a utility bed as they passed a turnoff near the Indiana 67 bridge over the creek. Williams said he knows the truck because he had seen it many times before at a construction site of a home being built in the vicinity of Grace Missionary Church School near Camby. When Williams heard about the murders, he called police to report the siding and detectives were able to pinpoint the location of the construction site. The home being built was for Detective Sergeant Barb Yarnel of the Marion County Sheriff's Department. Yarnel had seen the truck and gave detectives the name of its owner, one of the construction

contractors, the truck belonged to Robert Carr, Stephen Judy's foster father. At trial, Yarnel was shown a picture of the truck and he identified the vehicle as the one he had seen at the construction site. Investigators forensically examined the 1959 gray pickup and were able to pull fingerprints from the truck as well as from Terry's car. But none of the fingerprints were sufficient to link Stephen Judy or anyone else to the crime. Richard Dyke, a machinist in an indie factory, testified he passed the bridge on his way home from work and saw a man walking towards the icy creek with a child under one arm, a rap bundle which appeared to be a child under the other arm, and a third child standing on

a heap of dirt nearby. At the time, he considered strange that a person would have children there that early on a Saturday morning. In the courtroom, Richard Dight looked right at Steve and Judy and said his facial features were exactly the same as the man he saw at the creek. During cross-examination, defense attorney Stephen L. Harris tried to show that some of the witnesses couldn't be certain of what they saw because they were in a vehicle moving quickly past the scene. During court, Judge Bowles also responded to a request from reporters to release a transcript

from the December hearing, part of that transcript contained a conversation between Stephen and his foster mom, Mary Carr. Judy testified at the hearing and said the following. That's when I told her, I, to tell you the truth, I don't remember exactly what words I said, but that's when it come out. I told her, I think I killed them. I'm not sure. I just don't remember it. And I kept telling her, I don't remember killing any kids or anything. I wouldn't kill no kids. Mary also testified she heard her foster son say, quote, I think I did it, but I'm not sure.

Testimony at the December hearing from Steve and Judy and others also revealed he threw out a kid's coloring book from his truck along Indiana 67 near Friendswood. The prosecution claimed this was done after the murders. Several days into Stephen Judy's trial, the 12-member jury viewed photographs of the four victims and the crime scene for about 30 minutes. They often looked at Steve and Judy to see if he was showing any remorse, but he did not. He later claimed the pictures of the bodies churned his stomach, and he felt sick about it. One of the witnesses for the prosecution was an evidence technician named Daniel Moore,

and it was Moore's testimony that linked Judy to the murders through two tiny red threads of a faded blue-flowered cloth found in the pickup truck Judy was driving. The threads belonged to a red and white smock worn by Terry Chastien. Cloth from the smock was ripped into strips to bound her hands and feet before she was tossed into the water. And it was really these threads that were some of the most incriminating evidence against Stephen Judy. Moore said he found the piece of cloth on the seat of Steve. Stevens pickup truck. He neatly folded it and placed it in a bag to take to the state police lab for analysis. In his testimony, Moore didn't specify what type of bag he used, but he referred to a

plastic bag from his evidence kit. It was a type of bag routinely used to store evidence that was to be analyzed. However, in the courtroom, the cloth was in a paper sack and seemed to be wadded, not folded. Stevens' lawyer questioned more intensely about how he stored this piece of cloth. This caused an argument between Stevens' lawyer and the prosecutor G. Thomas Gray. Judge Bowles ordered the jury and Moore out of the courtroom, and he warned more not to discuss his testimony with anyone, but while Moore waited in the hallway, he briefly chatted with another state police trooper named Jerry Connor, who assisted Gray with the trial. So they had this short recess, the recess ended, and Stevens defense attorney asked more if he had discussed

his testimony with anyone. And he admitted that he had. This state police trooper Connor had asked him what kind of bag was used to store the cloth. And he answered the question. Stephen's defense attorney announced to the court that he was going to seek a mistrial saying that this hallway conversation was in direct violation of the court's order and could directly lead to the conviction of his client. The judge denied the mistrial, but he found trooper Daniel Moore in contempt of court. For violating his warning, he gave more a 30-day sentence, as well as a $250 fine, which he then suspended, and he recessed the trial for the day. When Stephen's foster parents, Robert and Mary Carr, took the stand on the 8th day of the trial,

they each testified that Stephen was moody in the hours before the quadruple murders. Robert said Stephen left their home at around 8.30 p.m. on April 27th, the night before the killings. When he returned at 8 a.m. the next morning, Robert could tell Stephen had been drinking. Stephen told Robert that he had driven around and slept for a couple of hours in the truck. Robert testified that was the first time Stephen had stayed out all night in his truck. Mary Carr testified that Stephen was in such a talkative mood on that Friday night that he made her late for her night shift at her factory job. He was happy and making plans on how he could help out more around the house.

Mary said Stephen called her from Paula Barnes home around midnight and talked about cleaning the garage and mowing the yard the next day. Mary also testified that she spoke with Paula Barnes on Saturday morning April 28th and Paula told her Judy had left her house around 3.30, 4 a.m. Paula told her Stephen was very agitated when he left. Robert and Mary's two children, Robert and Randy, testified that per their father's request, they helped Stephen clean out the garage on Saturday afternoon. The trio later took the pickup truck, loaded with trash to a Marion County landfill. The boy said they saw Stephen toss a multicolored wire out the back of the truck while at the landfill. The boy said they went with a detective to the landfill in an attempt to find that wire,

but it was never found. The prosecutor tried to imply the wire might have been an engine coil wire, that he alleged Judy pulled from Terry's car so it would fail to start after he fixed her flat tire. Before the Carr boys testified, defense attorney Stephen Harris objected to Randy Carr, testifying because he was only 10 years old. Judge Bowles asked Randy if he knew the difference between the truth and a lie, and Randy responded, quote, yes, but I can't explain it. The judge told him to try. And Randy said, quote, a lie is just not keeping your word.

and Judge Bowles was satisfied with Randy's response and allowed his testimony. Most of the evidence presented at trial included a variety of physical evidence, finger and palm prints, dirt, semen, and tire tracks. But most of it was incomplete, inconclusive, were established only a general presumption that Judy killed Terry Chastien and her children. The finger and palm prints found were smudged or insufficient to be of value, except one palm print from the trunk of Terry's car, and it didn't belong to Stephen Judy. DNA testing didn't exist in 1979, so experts could only get a blood type.

Testing done on blood and semen stains found on Terry Chastien's coat determined that her killer was type O, the same blood type as Stephen Judy. At that time, about 18% of American men had that blood type. On January 25th, 1980, four women who previously had accused Stephen Judy of beating, raping, or stabbing them, testified at trial. The women were Pamela Barger, Susan McFadgin, Mary Teeters, and Carol Emmett. Up to this point in the trial, the jury had not yet heard of Stephen Judy's criminal record or some of the things that he had been accused of in the past.

Three of the women described sexual assaults and the fourth, Mary Teeters, I identified Judy as the man who robbed her while she worked as a cashier at an Indianapolis supermarket. The most dramatic testimony, however, came from Carol Amig, a former medical technician. This was the first time in a decade that Carol was given the opportunity to identify Steve and Judy in front of a jury as the man who stabbed her 40 times with a pocket knife, knocked her unconscious with a camping axe, and raped her on April 17, 1970. Stephen Judy was only 13 years old at the time. Carol testified that Stephen tricked her into opening the door of her apartment by telling

her he was selling Boy Scout tickets. When she mentioned her husband being away, Stephen pulled out a knife, barged his way into the apartment, and forced her to take her clothes off. After he raped her in her bedroom, Carol told Judy to leave her alone, to leave the apartment. but he ignored her demands and started stabbing her. The attack was so severe that the blade of the pocket knife broke. Judy then left the bedroom. So Carol pulled out a small hatchet from a drawer and she tried to move some furniture

in front of the bedroom door. But Judy returned with a butcher knife, but he grabbed the hatchet out of Carol's hand and he started hitting her with it. As she tried to defend herself, Stephen struck her four times on the head with the hatchet, severing one of her fingers. This horrific attack left Carol mute until sometime later after she received treatment and went through therapy, Carol still had 18 scars from the assault. And she showed them all to the jury.

And I think it was powerful. I think it stunned the jury. Stephen Judy was immediately led out of the courtroom. After Carol identified him as her attacker, Carol's brave testimony caused some jurors to cry and forced a brief recess when one juror became physically ill. Perhaps one of the most stunning testimonies came from Stephen Judy himself. The court finally heard Stevens' long-awaited confession of killing the Chastin family. He recounted for the first time how he killed.

the four victims on April 28, 1979. On that day, he flagged down Terry Chastien's car as she was driving along I-465, near I-70, on Indy's west side. He motioned to Terry to pull over to the side of the road. Here's what Steve and Judy said in court. We got out of the car, and I told her it looked like the tire was about ready to fall off. I told her I could try to tighten it up, so she got a wrench from the trunk. But there was nothing more I could do for the tire. In reality, there wasn't anything wrong with the tire. Stephen continued on saying, She got back in her car, but got back out and said she couldn't get the emergency break off.

I lifted the hood. That was the first time I saw the kids in the car. That's when I pulled the coil wire off, disabling the car. I closed the hood and walked back to my truck, but she got out of a car again and said it wouldn't start. I told her I would give her a ride. So the kids got in my truck, and she slid in, and we went to. down Indiana 67 to a place by the creek. Stephen Judy's shocking statement continued.

He said, at the creek, she got out of the truck with me and I took her down to the creek. The kids were in front of us. Then I raped her. She had sent the kids on down the path downstream. I started to tie her up with parts of her red and white clothes. I tied her hands and feet together with a big long piece of cloth. with a knot in the center to make a get. She started crying and said,

Don't leave me here. And then the kids came back. They were hollering and screaming. I had the gag in her mouth, wrapped it around her throat, and strangled her. All the kids were there. I picked her up,

threw her down into the water. The jury was horrified as they listened to Stephen, Judy, conclude his gruesome recounting of the day of the murders. He said, then I grabbed Misty and I threw her in the creek, then grabbed the two boys and threw them in the creek. Stephen Judy testified that none of the crimes he committed ever bothered him, nor did the threat of prison or the electric chair. He then told the court in a soft voice that he believed he was too dangerous to be free. When asked by his defense attorney why he

killed the Chastien family, he replied, I don't know. Stephen Judy's murder trial ended on Saturday, February 2nd, 1980. Stephen asked the jury to give him the death penalty. The jury deliberated for two hours before finding Judy guilty of all four murders and the rape of Terry Chastine. The jurors took only 30 minutes to decide on the death penalty. On Monday, February 26, 1980, Judge Bowles sentenced Stephen to die in the electric chair, and he set a date for May 15th of that year. but Stephen's defense attorney argued that the death penalty in Indiana was not legal because it

violated the constitutional guarantees of due process was cruel and unusual punishment and the Indiana State Supreme Court had not adopted rules to review such cases. The death sentence was then appealed directly to Indiana's high court who stayed the execution while the appeal was considered. On Monday, October 27, 1980, the Indiana State Court ruled it would not review Stephen Judy's murder conviction, but would review his death sentence

to determine if it was properly ordered under Indiana law. They later ruled it was. Shortly after, the ACLU, along with 10 religious leaders, filed a petition for clemency with then Indiana governor, Robert D. Orr, and the Indiana clemency commission. Additionally, Amnesty International flooded the governor's office with over 700 letters seeking clemency.

On March 6, 1981, the Indiana Parole Board announced they unanimously rejected the ACLU petition for clemency. Many people believe Stephen Judy should have received mental health treatment and not the electric chair. But that's not what Stephen Judy himself wanted. He wanted to die. And Stephen Judy got his wish on March 9, 1981. Stephen, who was only 24 years old, was executed in the electric chair. He was pronounced dead at 12.12 a.m. Central Standard Time. Witnesses at the execution included his foster father, Robert Carr, and Stephen Harris, Stevens defense attorney at trial.

Terry Chastine's ex-husband, Mark Chastine, did not attend the execution. Stephen Judy was the first person executed in Indiana since 1961 when Richard Kiefer of Fort Wayne went to the electric chair. Steve and Judy was the fourth person sentenced to die in the U.S. since the U.S. Supreme Court terminated a 10-year moratorium on the death penalty in 1977. Hours before his execution, Judy's foster parents were allowed to say goodbye to their son. His father asked him one more time to reconsider his decision to accept the death penalty, but Stephen replied, I'm going to do it. The emotional farewell left the car as too shake and speak with reporters afterward.

And there's no doubt, Morph, this is somewhat strange. In most cases that we cover, when an individual is sentenced to death, the execution takes years, 15, 20, 25, 30. I've seen it take 35 years for an execution to be carried out. but that's because, you know, there are some automatic appeals and people usually fight it. They don't want to be put to death. For it to happen in what, a year's time, that's almost unheard of, especially today. Yeah, usually it's not a streamlined process like it was in Stephen's case. Weeks after her foster son's execution, Mary Carr made a startling announcement to the media.

She said that right before Stephen was executed, he confessed something to her that he insisted she not talk about until after his death. Stephen admitted to Mary that he had committed four other murders in addition to the Chastine family. Mary quoted him as saying, I was in Texas, Florida, Illinois, and Louisiana, and I left a string of bodies behind. One murder he confessed to was the strangulation of 28-year-old Linda Unverset. Linda's partially clad body was found November 4, 1978, in an abandoned house at 2,800 Cold Spring Road in Indianapolis. Stephen Judy also admitted to raping and killing two New Orleans women and dumping their bodies in a swamp while he lived there in 1976 or 1977. Stephen's brother Michael and his father of Vernon were known to be living in New Orleans at that time. As if these other murders weren't enough in his pre-execution statement, Stephen had confessed to

committing at least three rapes in the Indianapolis area. Indy homicide detective Donald Patton confirmed that Judy was afraid. Other charges would be filed and that those charges would stay his execution and he didn't want that. Stephen wanted to die on schedule. Stephen claimed that he attacked a woman and raped her in Morgan or Johnson County in Indiana. He couldn't remember exactly where, or if the victim survived after he left her for debt, or if police had found her body if she did die. He never heard anything about it. Stephen also claimed he abducted a girl on South Harding Street in Indianapolis,

took her to a wooded area, and raped her. He then left her tied to a tree, and wasn't aware of what became of her. In late August 1981, a Martinsville Indiana writer named Betty Nunn wrote a book on Stephen Judy titled Burn Judy Burn. Around the release of Nunn's book, Terry Chastine's ex-husband, Mark, was arrested for beating his second wife Betty. The two had married in April 1979, shortly before the murders. when he attacked Betty, he reportedly called her Stephen Judy. He and Betty divorced, and then Mark remarried again in the mid-1980s.

Mark passed away at the age of 50 in 2006. In the end, Stephen Judy was proven to be a dangerous and unremorseful predator, and had he not been arrested for the brutal and terrible murders of Terry Chastin and her children, he may very well have had countless other victims. And Morph, I don't know if you think about this. I think about it all the time, right? Well, actually, that's two things. How many other victims did a predator like this have that they were unwilling to talk about?

And then I think the second piece is this. What would have happened had they not been caught? I mean, I think from Stephen's own mouth, he wasn't going to stop. he was going to keep doing whatever he wanted to do. The problem was the things that he wanted to do were brutal, killing, raping, some of the worst crimes you can imagine, women, children. It didn't matter to him. I think the most tragic part of this entire case is what happened to Terry and her children,

because that's probably every mother's worst nightmare to be raped in front of her children and then be killed. And her last thoughts are, what's he going to do to my children? And it turns out that he killed them as well. The fact they had a witness their mother being raped and murdered before they were murdered themselves. It's just, it's horrible. I can't even fathom that.

Yeah. You know, when that came out at trial, you know, the jury was shocked. We talked about it. But who wouldn't be shocked to hear this man say that not only did. he raped this woman with her children there, he murdered her and they had to watch. And then he murdered them. Just extremely vicious, very brutal. And like we said, this was a guy that had no remorse and he would have continued to rape and kill for as long as he could get away with it. Thanks goes up to Debbie Buck at TruecrimeDiva.com for writing and research assistants in this

episode. If you haven't done so yet, take a minute, go out, give us a five-star rating. You can also leave a review. All of that goes a long way towards helping people find the show, as does word of mouth. Keep telling your true crime loving friends about criminology. If you want to find us on social media, we're on Twitter with the handle at Criminology Pod. We're also on Facebook. You can search Facebook for Criminology Podcast or join our Facebook discussion group, which is Criminology Podcast Discussion and Fans. All right, Morf, that is it for another episode of Criminology. But as always, you and I will be back with everyone next Saturday night with an all new episode.

So for Mike. And Morph. We'll talk to you next week. Take care, everyone.