You Never Can Forget: The Fiasco

Murder Sheet

MurderSheet

True Crime, Murder, Unsolved Case, Killing, Murderer, Cold Case

3.8 • 2.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2021

⏱️ 107 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

There's a reason why we rarely speak about the modern day investigation into the Burger Chef. We have no confidence in the abilities of the officer who is currently tasked with looking into this high-profile quadruple homicide. And today, in the interest of transparency, we're going to tell you exactly why that is.

Bill Dalton is the current lead investigator on the Burger Chef for the Indiana State Police. Ashley Flowers is a millionaire serial plagiarist who also makes true crime podcasts, most notably Crime Junkie. Together, they came up with Red Ball, a four-part podcast on the Burger Chef murders that ran in November of 2019. It was badly-written copaganda, but the backstory behind the series is even worse.

You see, Flowers handed over complete editorial control of her show to the state police. In exchange for this puffery, Dalton allowed Flowers to exclusively read and monetize investigative case files that not even the families of the victims have ever been permitted to see. And the Indiana State Police collectively shrugged their shoulders at the misconduct.

In this episode, we'll get into Flowers' reputation within the true crime community. We'll talk to true crime podcasters Robin Warder and Esther Ludlow, who Flowers plagiarized, as well as journalist Cathy Frye, who blew the whistle on the scandal. We'll tell you about all the unprofessional nonsense between Flowers and Dalton that Kevin witnessed firsthand. And we'll break down why exactly all of this should horrify anyone who cares about unsolved cold cases in Indiana.

Because, to put it bluntly, the ISP seem to have learned the wrong lesson from this mess.

Listen to Esther Ludlow's episode "Let's Taco 'Bout the Crime Junkie Plagiarism Scandal": (shorturl.at/pBDGS)
Read Cathy Frye's series "Caught in the Web" about the murder of Kacie Woody: (shorturl.at/lvzI0)
Watch Dalton's Burger Chef press conference here: (shorturl.at/aiqsD)
Here's Adam Wren's story for the Indianapolis Monthly: (shorturl.at/klD36)
Here's the Flowers interview by Tracy Hazzard of Authority magazine: (shorturl.at/eBXZ5)
Here's the Flowers interview that ran on Her Campus: (shorturl.at/hoILT)
Here's the article about Crime Junkie from Peter White that ran in Deadline Hollywood: (shorturl.at/ajBRV)
Here's the recent article on Flowers' business moves from Variety's Todd Spangler: (shorturl.at/ouzHU)
Here's Spangler's reporting on the Crime Junkie plagiarism scandal: (shorturl.at/fmxJK)
Here's the New York Times report on the Crime Junkie plagiarism scandal from Derrick Bryson Taylor and Christine Hauser: (shorturl.at/jJKV5)
Here's the Buzzfeed article on the Crime Junkie plagiarism scandal from Stephanie McNeal: (shorturl.at/qwDJM)

Check out the Trail Went Cold from Robin Warder (shorturl.at/evwS4) and Once Upon a Crime from Esther Ludlow (shorturl.at/joxMX) wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Content warning, this episode contains discussion of the murder of a child and general murder and violence.
0:07.0	It also contains some profanity.
0:09.0	Shortly after taking over the Bergerchev case for the Indiana State Police, Bill Dalton made an inexplicable choice.
0:19.0	Supposedly without telling any of his superiors, he decided to share all the confidential files in the case
0:27.0	with a podcaster named Ashley Flowers, so that the two of them could create a show about the case called Red Ball.
0:35.0	Perhaps the reason for Dalton's costly error could be his own investigative and experience.
0:42.0	When he was promoted in 2018 to serve as the Indianapolis District Investigations Commander,
0:49.0	the ISP press release did not tout even one investigative success during his time in the state police.
0:56.0	Instead, it boasted that Dalton played an important role in special events planning and coordination.
1:02.0	In short, he did things like plan security for events like the bicentennial torch relay.
1:09.0	Maybe he was good at that sort of thing, but it doesn't seem to have prepared him for making intelligent choices about the Bergerchev case.
1:16.0	And working with Flowers seemed like an unexpected decision as well.
1:22.0	The South Bend Indiana native told the website Entraprenista in April 2021 that she briefly worked with, quote,
1:31.0	worms and spider DNA in a lab for a bit before moving to a medical device startup and then a software sales position.
1:41.0	She founded AudioChuck, her production company, in October of 2017, and has served as its CEO ever since.
1:50.0	At some point, she landed on the board of Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana and began appearing on the Indianapolis radio station WNOW for a program called Murder Monday,
2:03.0	according to a variety article from Todd Spangler.
2:07.0	The reason why we're talking about all this now is that Dalton's decision to favor Flowers would have far-ranging consequences.
2:18.0	He would be publicly reprimanded and embarrassed. But more importantly, other investigations would suffer.
2:26.0	State troopers, scared of repeating Dalton's blunder, would become wary of spreading the word about their own cases,
2:34.0	and so people with potentially actionable information about those cases never even got a chance to hear about them.
2:42.0	You may have noticed that this episode is much longer than normal.
	...

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