Someone They Knew: The Amy Weidner Story

When a young mother is brutally killed in her Indiana home, the case takes more than 2 decades to solve.

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Transcript

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On November 13, 1989, 16-year-old Amy Widener wasn't feeling well and decided to stay home from school. It was a decision that would alter the lives of her and her family forever. Amy's mother offered to take Amy's two-year-old daughter to daycare so she could rest, but Amy insisted on keeping her toddler home with her. Gloria, Amy's mother, left the family's Indianapolis home for work that morning, not realizing it was the last time she would see her daughter alive. This is the story of Amy Widener, someone they knew. The Amy Widener story. Later that morning, Gloria called the house to check on her daughter. No answer. This is long before the days of cell phones and text messages. You gotta remember, this is 1989. Gloria was living in Indianapolis with her four children. She was a single mom with four kids. She had three daughters and one son. Amy was the second oldest. She had one older brother and two younger sisters. And when she became pregnant and had her daughter at 14, her mom thought that was the worst possible thing that could ever happen. Well, she was wrong. Later that morning, she called to check on her daughter, no answer. Because there was no cell phones, no text messages, she was calling a house phone. She tried again. No answer. Maybe Amy was asleep. But surely Emily, the two-year-old, would be awake by now. So she called again. No answer. She asked a neighbor to go knock on the door. No answer. Gloria returned home to find a scene that no mother should ever have to find. Her 16-year-old daughter was dead in her bedroom. There was a bloody palm print on her bedroom wall, and Emily, her two-year-old daughter, was unharmed. Thank the Lord. Gloria called 911 and took her granddaughter into her arms. From that moment forward, Emily became her daughter. It would be up to her to fight for justice for Amy and ensure Emily knew what an amazing mother she was born to. I can't imagine the horror of not only having to bury your child, but to find your child murdered in such a horrific and violent fashion. Although DNA testing was in its infancy in 1989, detectives had the smarts to collect the evidence that could contain DNA evidence. This included Amy's bedding and semen found inside her indicating a sexual assault. Amy had been raped, beaten, and strangled to death in her own home while her child was helpless nearby. Amy was one of four kids, like I mentioned, and her daughter Emily was born to her at 14 years old, and she was fathered by a friend of her older brother's. In fact, a lot of her older brother's friends hung around, and sometimes Amy would get in trouble by hanging out with her older brother's friends. Gloria would get a little frustrated with this. Gloria was a single mom. She was just doing the best that she could under the circumstances. Amy's brother had some stereo equipment missing and some cash stolen on the day that Amy was murdered. So it was believed that the motive for the crime was a robbery gone wrong. But there was no suspect. There was this bloody handprint and some potential DNA evidence, but there was nothing to compare it to. Emily's father had to be ruled out as a suspect, and so he was, but they ruled him out pretty quickly. He had a pretty rock solid alibi. They investigated several of her other brothers' friends and other people, but they followed hundreds of leads and it got nowhere. And Amy's case, unfortunately, like many others, it goes cold and it becomes one of Indiana's many, many cold cases. In the meantime, Gloria adopts Emily and she becomes one of the Widener children. She raises Emily as her daughter, but of course, she always knows about Amy and the mother that she was born to and how much her mother loved her. She struggles to remember Amy, being only two years old when her mother died. Um and Amy's family struggles because they don't they didn't have any peace for so long. Like, could this person that killed their sister be standing next to them at the grocery store? Could it be somebody they knew? Could it be uh, I mean, like the uncertainty is torture. Like, how do you know who did this? And 1989 turned into the 1990s, and the 1990s turn into the 2000s, and before you know it, it's 2011, and there's still no justice for Amy Widener, and it's now been decades. And her daughter's grown up and is is an adult and has moved to California, and there's still no justice for Amy. In 2011, a remember remember Amy Widener Facebook page was created by Amy's friends and family. Cold case detectives wanted to utilize pictures from it, but they weren't really familiar with the application. 2011, Facebook wasn't like it is now. Um, it was pretty popular then, but it wasn't quite as dinosaur ish as it is now. They asked a nuisance abatement officer for help because he was more familiar with Facebook, Detective Sergeant William Carter, and he helped print out um pictures from the page. And when he did, he just kind of got intrigued, like we all do, you know. He got bit by the true crime bug and he became obsessed with Amy's case. He went down that rabbit hole and he became determined to solve it. So even though he is a true detective, he kind of became sort of an armchair detective on this case, um, because he was used to solving cases like, you know, splitting up parties where there's underage drinking and things like that. He wasn't used to murder cases, but he was deep diving into this one. Um, and like any good detective, he was seeing things that were missed the first time around. And there were things that were missed the first time around. There were a lot of uh Amy's brother JP's friends that were not interviewed and DNA was not collected from. And so he started there, and then he also went back and looked at the canvas of the neighborhood that was done from the original murder investigation. Now, by 2011, almost all of the neighbors had moved. There was nobody there from 1989, but he was able to track some of the neighbors down and he did some re-interviews, and there was one name that popped up um that hadn't really been interviewed before, and the name that popped up was Rodney Denk. And it was interesting because the name had actually popped up before, it had popped up before um in the original investigation in 1989 by the father of Emily. He had mentioned that name as somebody who hung out at the Widener home with JP, Amy's older brother. Um, so the name Rodney Dank was brought up, and um this was a person who hung out at the Widener house. It wasn't really a suspect, it was just somebody that they thought they should talk to. Uh, Rodney Dank was born in 1971. He grew up in Indy in the Indianapolis area and was friends with Amy's older brother. Police never talked to him before, but Detective Carter was about to change that. He made an appointment with Dank to speak to him, but when he went to Dank's house, Dank had taken off. Researching Dank, Carter found prior arrest in 1991 for battery in 1997 for larceny. When comparing the 1997 arrest prints to the bloody handprint from Amy Widener's wall, Sergeant Carter found, wouldn't you know it, it was a match. So I guess my question is I guess things weren't computerized even in '97. And maybe they still aren't. Maybe you still have to request it to be looked at. But I guess there's no computerized way of like, okay, we have this bloody handprint, let's put it into a computer system, and then when there's an arrest made that matches this handprint, then we'll know this person committed this crime. Because, like, if if they had had this handprint in a computerized system, I know this didn't exist then, but let's just say it did. If they had had a handprint in a computerized system in 1989, as this is a murderer, so if this person gets arrested that matches this handprint, we know they're a murderer. And then in 1997, he got arrested, had his handprint, and it matched, they could have charged him in 97 with this murder. But I guess nothing worked like that then. And I don't even know if it works like that now, or if you have to still request that those prints be compared. Do you know what I'm saying? I don't know if they even still computerize all of that stuff, but apparently they didn't then because they had to ask for those to be compared. Confident that Rodney Dank was the man who killed Amy Widener decades earlier. Authorities now had to locate him. They tracked his credit card to a rental car equipped with OnStar. Police were able to use the OnStar system to track Rodney and arrest him. Upon approaching him, he attempted to cut his wrist and said, I didn't do it. So I mean, he ran. He clearly knew as soon as they said they want to talk to him about Amy Wagner, he knew he was cooked, man. He knew it. He didn't even try to talk to them and deny it. Like he knew. He ran instantly, then tried to slit his wrist. He knew his cookies were baked, man. He knew it. Once in the emergency department of a local hospital, Rodney made a confession saying, I didn't know she was in there. I was in John Paul's room. I took the radio. I went around the corner and I hit her in the head. He later made more confessions. He told Detective Carter. Um, and you know, it took Detective Carter 12 days of working on this two decade two decades plus old case. He worked it for 12 active days and solved it. Now, that's not to say that the original investigators were incompetent. Sometimes it just takes a set of fresh eyes. And that's why I think like couch chair detectives and true crime people like those of us who are obsessed sometimes are able to solve cases because it's fresh eyes. Um, it's not that detectives are incompetent, it's just that sometimes fresh eyes on things makes a big difference. And sometimes I think he just got lucky. And Rodney, dank man, he could have denied that shit and maybe got away with it. Man, all he had to do was talk to the to officer Carter and bullshit him a little bit, and he probably could have gotten away with this, but he gave himself away by acting a fool. Um I mean he gave it away pretty quickly there. Like all he had to do was keep his appointment and you know, say a couple things, but you know, him taking off prompted Officer Carter to check the prints and compare them, and that's how they caught him. So I don't know. If he didn't run, he maybe wouldn't have gotten caught. I don't think. But Rodney Denk uh admitted to acting alone, and he was sentenced to 50 years for the murder and 15 years for the rape. He will not be eligible for parole until January 1st of 2043, at which time he will be 72 years old. But this is only eligibility, so it's not guaranteed. So I think he'll probably spend the rest of his life in prison. And if you've ever wondered if these things are nature versus nurture, in 2009, 17-year-old Dylan Denk, Rodney's son, beat his mother, Mary McHenry, to death in his western Kentucky home with a baseball bat. He was sentenced to 20 years in the Kentucky Department of Corrections in 2011. Rodney had been a great source of support to him during his prosecution, only to face his own prosecution for the 1989 murder of Amy Widener shortly after. So, right before he got caught for Amy's murder, he had been supporting his son as his son faced prosecution for beating his mother to death with a baseball bat. Seriously. Unpack that. And still, that really doesn't answer the question of nature versus nurture, except for the fact that maybe it's nature because he didn't raise his son, but also there's allegations that his son was abused by his mother, so I don't know if that really fits the fits the bill either. I guess we would see on that. I don't know. Nature versus nurture. But I've got pictures of Dylan and Rodney, and they look quite a bit alike, just FYI. I don't know if you're interested in that kind of thing. I get interested in those things. Um, you can check out pictures um of both Rodney and Dylan and Amy as well on the website www.themidwestcrimefile.com. 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