“There was this two hour period from 11:30pm at night, when they went missing, until the time of their death at 1:30 pm. It was like this hole opened up in the universe and swallowed them and then spat them out,” said The Speedway Murders co-director Luke Ryndermann.

On the night of 17 November 1978 four young employees at the Burger Chef fast food restaurant in Speedway, Indiana went missing. Their deceased bodies were found two days later 32-km away from the restaurant. 

More than 40 years have passed and the case still hasn’t been solved. But Melbourne writers and directors Luke Ryndermann and Adam Kamien’s new film The Speedway Murders may just represent a huge step forward.

“We found it (the case) on Unsolved Mysteries - the old TV show - and I’m a true crime tragic and obsessive. Adam’s background is in journalism and I ended up sending him an email asking if he thought it was something worth pursuing. He then used his skills and ended up in a Facebook group that had relatives of the victims and police officers and potential suspects,” says Ryndermann.

“We eventually saved up $10 000, got ourselves a Director of Photography and went over there.”

Being Australian gave the duo an advantage as they were investigators with zero ties to the existing case and became a light of hope for the families still begging for closure on the deaths of these young kids.

“There was very little movement on the case,” says Kamien. “The strategy of the police was just to hold a press conference every year on the anniversary and hope that some more information would come in that would change the case. So I think the families were really pleased.”

The film is structured in a way where you relive the night multiple times from the perspective of each different theory. Kamien and Ryndermann realised that a big issue with the case was that there were different groups of people with alternate theories of what happened, but someone had never collected all of these theories to possibly construct a bigger picture of the case. 

“We looked at it and thought, if we collated all the information, we could cross reference things then perhaps we could shed some new light,” says Kamien.

As you journey through the film you are exposed to the different theories, one after the other, and each time you are convinced that this particular theory will be the one. But then there is always something that doesn’t add up.

The film uses interview footage and it also, interestingly, employs actors to play the victims and basically help tell the stories of their own deaths. It is an ingenious device that also allows the victims’ personalities to shine through the screen so that by the end you feel like you know who these people were.

“We decided early on that we didn’t want the victims to become footnotes in their own story and just mention potential perpetrators. So, the way we did that was to recreate the restaurant and have them inside there forensically trying to figure out their own murder. And that also allowed us to recreate the period and the actual building,” says Ryndermann.

The duo found an old Chinese restaurant in Adelaide scheduled to be demolished and used it to reconstruct the Burger Chef restaurant. They based it on real blueprints for a Burger Chef restaurant, they found the real uniforms which would have been worn and found every American car from the 70’s in the area. Everything was as close to real as could be possible.

The way the directors combine the documentary format with the scripted scenes give the film an emotionality that other documentaries just can’t have. It also creates a haunting atmosphere that permeates through the screen. Despite the case still not essentially being closed, the ending of the film allows for a sense of catharsis while simultaneously making a huge statement about the future of the case.

“These kids should have gone to work and gone home and instead this terrible thing happened to them and it makes you think about your own mortality because anything can happen to anyone,” says Kamien.

The Speedway Murders will be available to stream later this year.