Justice at Last

Kidnapped and left for dead as teens by the Indiana Slasher, two sisters and their friend fought for nearly five decades to identify their attacker

- JOHNNY DODD

Strong Survivors From left: sisters Sheri Rottler Trick and Kathie Rottler with their friend Kandice Smith. Inset: the women as teens.

On a warm summer night in August 1975, Kathie Rottler, 14, her best friend Kandice Smith, 13, and Kathie’s kid sister Sheri, 11, were walking to a teen hangout called the Barn near their hometown of Cumberland, Ind. It was to be their first night out without adult supervision, and the girls were brim-ming with excitement. Then Kathie persuaded her companions to try their luck hitchhiking to their destination. “I talked them into it,” she recalls. “We could have walked. We should have walked.”

Kathie stuck out her thumb, and a man in a white station wagon soon pulled over. He told the three girls to climb in the front seat and then sped off. As he roared past their destination, he told them he was going to hold them for ransom. Kathie recalls screaming for Kandice to open the car door. But when her friend reached for the han-dle, “there wasn’t one,” says Kandice. “The screws, bolts and the door paneling had been taken off.”

Police Search "I was just worried about Sheri. She was my baby sis," says Kathie, who told detectives (here, at the crime scene in 1975) where to look.

What happened next was an attack so vicious that it would haunt all three women for nearly 50 years. After a terrifying 15-minute drive that ended in a cornfield, the driver—brandishing a knife and a gun—tied the girls’ hands. On the ground in front of the car, he raped Sheri and then stabbed each of them repeatedly before leaving the barely conscious girls for dead and driving off. “It felt like we were all going to die,” says Kathie, now 64.

Case Closed Police used DNA to identify mechanic Thomas Williams (in a mug shot) as the rapist and kidnapper.