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Things were bustling around the Pelley family home going into the weekend of Friday, April 28, 1989. Not only was 17-year-old Jeff getting ready for his senior prom, but his step-sister, 9-year-old Jessica Toronjo, was heading out of their Lakeville, Indiana home for a sleepover & his 14-year-old sister, Jaque, was also away for the weekend. However, by the time Jessica came home only two days later, on Sunday, her life was changed forever; her stepdad, her mom & her two younger sisters had been brutally murdered inside the family home. She found that in the blink of an eye, she became an orphan.
Four years earlier when Jessica, who now goes by Jessi, was 5-years-old, her father passed away & her mom, Dawn, eventually went on to remarry Bob Pelley, the minister of Olive Branch Church in Lakeville, Indiana, which is situated 12 miles (19 km) north of South Bend at the southern part of the state, only about 20 miles (32 km) from the Michigan border.
Dawn & Bob came together after their respective spouses passed away 1985.
In 1984, Bob was living & working in Florida with his family, his wife, Ava & their two children, 13-year-old Jeff & 9-year-old Jaque, when Ava was diagnosed with skin cancer. The couple met at an Ohio church in the 1960s & were married in 1970. The family relocated to Florida in 1980 after Bob secured a computer programming job in Cape Coral. After a brief remission, the cancer sadly came back with a vengeance & Ava passed away on February 24, 1985, leaving Bob a widower with two children.
Meanwhile, Dawn Huber lost her husband, Edward Huber, in a freak carbon monoxide accident; an incident police believe happened when he was intoxicated. At the time, the couple had three daughters, 5-year-old Jessica, 4-year-old Janel & 2-year-old Jolene.
It was during a trip to Ohio when a then 27-year-old Dawn was introduced to Bob Pelley through a mutual friend & they connected over the recent loss of their spouses. After only a few months of dating, they began discussing marriage & were married on November 8, 1985.
Sadly, it wasn’t immediately happily ever after as the blending of two families was not easy since the children hadn’t met each other before they were married. On top of that, both sets of children were still grieving; only 10 months had passed since Edward died unexpectedly & eight months since cancer ravaged Ava.
Adding to the many changes & ongoing grief the five children were dealing with, they also moved one year after the wedding in November 1986 after Bob was offered a minister job in Lakeville.
From the outside, things may have looked perfect within the lives of the seven members of the blended family, but behind closed doors, there were struggles in finding their footing & disagreements over child rearing. Dawn felt that Bob was a harsh, oppressive & strict disciplinarian who set unrealistic expectations for his family. These rigid rules led to a lot of animosity & tension between Bob & his teenage son. Some neighbors were witness to cracks in the foundation when they saw Bob punching Jeff during one disagreement.
Tensions only rose when in April 1989, 17-year-old Jeff was arrested for stealing cash & CDs from a local home. When Bob learned of what his son had done, he was understandably furious & forbade him from attending any of the upcoming events surrounding prom. Bob told Jeff he could attend the actual dance itself, but nothing before & nothing after. This meant that Jeff would no longer be able to go to the pre-prom dinner with his friends or their planned trip to Six Flags Great America for the day after prom, Sunday, April 30.
Bob wanted to be sure that Jeff obeyed his punishment & explained that he would drive him to the prom & pick him up when the dance ended. He even disabled his son’s gray Ford Mustang to be sure he couldn’t sneak out & use it.
Meanwhile, 9-year-old Jessi planned to spend that prom weekend at a friend’s house while her step-sister & Jeff’s younger sister, Jaque, was away at church camp. When Jessi left the house that Friday evening, April 28, 1989, she said goodbye to her stepdad, her mom, & her two younger sisters, Janel & Jolene, never imagining that as she walked out the door, she would never see them again.
The Pelley family lived in a parsonage, a home provided by the church, where they encouraged their church members & neighbors to come & go & feel welcome to stop by as they liked. A young member of the church, Stephanie Fagan, had a Sunday routine that included going to church between 9-9:15 am, but before the service would start, she would stop over to the Pelley’s for breakfast. Dawn always put out a big spread of food & welcomed anyone to stop by for a bite. However, that Sunday morning, April 30, 1989, she was confused when she found the door locked, something that never happened.
When she walked back to the church, Stephanie just assumed that the family must have slept in that morning, but after she told the other members of the congregation, they were immediately concerned. One member utilized the master key & went back to the home; they came back shortly after & told everyone that they needed to pray.
By the time Jessi came home, she found police everywhere, crime tape blocked off her home while everyone was in tears. At first she worried that something happened to her dog, until a friend’s mother was tasked with breaking the devastating news that her whole family was gone & she’d lost everything.
Parishioner David Hathaway had taken the master key, walked over to the house & knocked on the Pelley’s door after Bob was notably absent from his usual post of greeting parishioners outside the church for the 9:30 am mass. When his knocks went unanswered, he walked around the home in an attempt to look inside through the windows, but found all the blinds pulled down & all the doors locked.
He gained entry into the home with the master key & walked into the scene from a nightmare. He came across Bob, who was laying in the upstairs hallway after he had been shot twice, once in the face & once in the chest. His glasses were laying on the floor next to his body, likely blown off from the gunshot. David immediately ran from the house & called the police, who made a second gruesome discovery on their arrival.
Officers found that Dawn, Janel & Jolene had all been shot in the face at close range with a shotgun. It was an absolutely tragic scene; Dawn’s arms were still draped around her girls, 8-year-old Janel & 6-year-old Jolene, in a heartbreaking attempt to protect them. Investigators soon learned that three members of the family had not been home & had been spared: Jeff, Jaque & Jessica.
When investigators tracked Jeff down, he was over four hours away at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, Illinois, celebrating prom weekend after he spent the night at a friend’s house. By this time, investigators had spoken to neighbors & learned of his punishment, so Jeff was asked why he was there & explained that his dad changed his mind & allowed him to go after all.
One day earlier, Saturday, April 29, Jeff’s friends gathered at the Pelley house to take photos before they headed to the dance. Kim Oldenburrg, Jeff’s classmate, recalled arriving at the house at 4:45 pm where Bob snapped pictures with his 35mm camera. She later described the atmosphere as tense & said that Jeff seemed angry & sullen. Jeff’s other friend, Matt Miller, had also been at the house during this time, but left before 5 pm after he realized he’d forgotten his date’s corsage.
After they all took photos at the Pelley home, Bob & his family were supposed to go over to another family’s home to take more pictures, but they never arrived. When someone else stopped by the Pelley home at 5:45 pm, Bob’s car was in the driveway, but Jeff’s car was gone & the house was dark.
Based on witness accounts, no one had seen Dawn, Bob, Janel or Jolene alive after 5 pm that Saturday.
Investigators came to find that they had little to go on; there was no murder weapon & no eyewitness accounts as to who was responsible for murdering four members of the family. Jessi told investigators that when she left the house on Friday, she remembered that the gun rack on the wall held both a bow as well as a shotgun, but after the murders, the shotgun was missing, never to be found. The home showed no signs of a break-in or a struggle so it didn’t look like a burglary or a home invasion.
When Jeff was interviewed in the presence of his grandparents the following day, May 1, 1989, he denied having anything to do with his family’s murders. He admitted that he & his dad didn’t often see eye-to-eye, but they always managed to work things out. He described his relationship with his stepmother as more surface level & said that they tolerated each other.
Since investigators lacked any evidence against Jeff, the prosecutor’s office chose not to file charges against him & time moved on while no arrests were made. Jeff & Jaque went to live with family members on their dad’s side while Jessi went to stay with her maternal grandpa in Michigan. After the murders, she didn’t have much of a relationship with Jeff or Jaque.
As she arrived in Michigan, Jessi got the sense that her family wanted her to forget & move on, something that rather than protecting her as they hoped, only made her feel isolated. Feeling desperate & alone, Jessi eventually ran away & was placed in a foster home. She felt like a drifter who didn’t belong anywhere, but by age 13, she tried to take control of her life & in the process, she pushed down her feelings, tried not to think about the past & found herself happy & outgoing with friends.
Five years after the murders, when Jessi was 15 & Jeff was about 22 or 23, he called & invited her to visit him in Florida where he was living with his wife, Kim. The couple owned a home & he had a great job working with a computer business.
The first thing Jeff asked Jessi when she arrived was, Who do you think did it? Jessi admitted that she always believed that Bob had murdered his family & then turned the gun on himself, but as quickly as the subject came up, it was dropped & they moved on with their visit.
Grappling with such a sudden loss at the tender age of nine, Jessi always assumed her stepdad must have been the person responsible for her mom & sisters’ murders because she always felt that he wasn’t very nice to her & often spanked her in punishment. Investigators, on the other hand, knew this wasn’t feasible since there was no murder weapon near Bob which ruled a murder/suicide out as a possibility.
Jessi also remembers holding on to a lot of anger toward her mom for a long time since her little sisters were supposed to be with her at her friend’s house that weekend. Since she was so young when they were murdered, there are a lot of small details Jessi has forgotten about her mom & sisters as the years have gone by. She remembers jokes & teasing & the games they would play together.
Meanwhile, time moved on & by 18-years-old, Jessie used her inheritance to purchase her very first house. She felt an absolute sense of relief having a place that was all her own & where she truly felt she belonged. It wasn’t long before she met her husband, Tyson, & they had a son & a daughter together. Though her children were aware that their mom’s family was gone, she never gave them a full explanation as to what happened to them.
It wasn’t until 2002, 13 years after the murders, when Jessi heard a knock on her front door & found two detectives standing on her doorstep. They explained that the case was being reopened & when she told them that she’d always assumed Bob had been responsible. When they told her this wasn’t possible, Jeff suddenly popped into her mind. She’d always known him to be quick to anger, eager to fight, using his fists in the process; one time, he would even shoot her cat with a BB gun.
Detectives confirmed that they were pursuing Jeff & theorized that there was underlying anger between Jeff & Bob which had been escalating in the weeks before the murders. After Bob learned that his son was responsible for a burglary, he was banished from all prom activities other than attending the dance itself & the dam burst for Jeff, his rage pouring out in a sudden act of violence.
From the beginning, investigators believed that Jeff was responsible, but due to the lack of forensic evidence, the prosecutor’s office had chosen not to file charges against him. However, 13 years later, a new prosecutor believed otherwise & a then 30-year-old Jeff Pelley was arrested & charged with four counts of murder in August 2002. In the thirteen years he’d been a free man, he’d moved to Cape Coral, Florida in 1990, got married, had a son as well as a successful career working as a consultant for IBM.
Investigators learned that after Jeff relocated to Florida, he tried to get access to his $48,000 inheritance that had been put in a trust that allowed him access once he turned 23, but Jeff wanted the money sooner. When he reached out to the trustee, his stepmother’s father, Ed Hayes, in 1991, his request was denied.
Jeff lied & told Ed that he’d been diagnosed with skin cancer & claimed that his treatments had left him $20,000 in debt. Ed wanted to see a copy of the bill to verify what he was being told & Jeff sent him a document that appeared legitimate. However, as Ed did more investigating, he came to find that Jeff & his mother-in-law had falsified the bill. With this, Jeff was convicted of wire fraud & sentenced to probation in July 1994.
The trial began in 2006, seventeen years after the quadruple homicide & the prosecution relied fully on their circumstantial evidence. The home showed no sign of a break-in, there hadn’t been a struggle & nothing outside of the family’s shotgun appeared to be missing.
The timeline of the muder was very tight & investigators believe Jeff would have only had about fifteen minutes to commit the four murders. Many of Jeff’s friends had stopped by that Saturday night to show off their prom outfits & take pictures, but everyone had left by about 5 pm. It was clear that the family had been killed sometime between 5-5:20 pm.
Jeff claimed that he left the house before 5 pm, but witnesses testified to seeing his car parked outside his home after this time.
At 5:20 pm, Jeff stopped by a gas station to address car trouble; he walked inside & asked the clerk if he could use the phone. He called his girlfriend, Darla, & told her he was fixing it so he could come & pick her up. Jeff pulled out of the gas station at 5:37 pm & when he arrived at a nearby friend’s house, he wasn’t wearing his tux.
Jeff’s date testified that while they had been at Six Flags on Sunday, he seemed troubled & when she asked him what was wrong, he said he felt as if something bad had happened at home. He would have had no reason to feel such a thing unless he was aware of his family’s fate.
Jessi testified about noticing the shotgun on the gun rack on the wall when she said goodbye to her mom on Friday.
Police testified about a damning statement Jeff made during an untaped interview, If I tell you what happened, would I get the death penalty..
The prosecution’s theory was that Jeff murdered his dad out of anger from being forbidden to attend the weekend’s much anticipated prom activities. He simply killed Dawn & his two step-sisters because they were witnesses.
Meanwhile, the defense argued the lack of motive, opportunity & murder weapon which in their eyes, equated to no case. They also referenced the tight timeline & the likelihood that a teenager would have the criminal intelligence to murder four people, pick up all of the shotgun shells, clean himself up in the shower, throw his clothes into the wash & dump any evidence in a 15-20 minute window between about 4:55-5:15 pm. Witnesses attested seeing the family alive shortly before 5 pm on Saturday & the gas station clerk had seen Jeff somewhere around 5:17-5:20 pm at a location five minutes from his home.
While Jeff was at prom, his friends described him as having a good time & acting completely normal. Defense attorney Alan Baum felt it ridiculous to suggest he could be having fun like a kid after murdering his family.
There were also questions as to whether Bob’s shotgun had actually been in the home at the time of the murders. While Jessi recalled seeing it as she left on Friday, this was something Jaque couldn’t confirm since she had no reason to look for it.
The jury broke for deliberations on a Wednesday afternoon at about 2:30 pm & didn’t return with a verdict until after 8 pm on Friday, July 21, 2006. Jeff Pelley was found guilty on four counts of murder. In October 2006, he was given 40 years for each murder which totaled 160 years.
In April 2008 Jeff’s conviction was reversed & remanded by the Indiana Court of Appeals due to belief that the case had been mishandled. Meanwhile, Jeff remained in custody.
When Jeff’s friends came to the Pelley home on Saturday night for prom photos, they indicated he was wearing a pink shirt & blue jeans. Jeff argued that prosecutors lied about the jeans being found in the washing machine after the murders. He indicated that the police placed them in a paper bag when they were seized & had they been taken from the machine, they would have been wet. There were also 34 coins & a legible receipt in the pocket that would have been damaged during the wash.
Sources indicate that review of the case file shows no police officers reported finding the jeans in the washer & according to FBI lab results in 2006 found no blood on the jeans which were soiled & unwashed. Luminol testing of the washing machine cylinder did not determine whether there had been blood or even laundry detergent in the machine that day to prove that he’d actually tried to clean his bloodied clothes.
Jeff also claimed that his attorneys had been ineffective in looking into possible connections his father had with organized crime syndicates in Florida. Prior to moving his family to Lakeville to work as a pastor at Olive Branch United Brethren Church, Bob worked in information technology at a Florida bank that federal officials investigated for money laundering.
One woman was interviewed by prosecutors in 2003 & spoke of Bob’s shady Florida financial dealings & how he’d voiced his fear of being murdered by his clients.
In February 2009, the Indiana Supreme Court upheld Jeff’s conviction & sentence.
In 2019 Jeff’s lawyer filed a motion for post-conviction relief to allow for an evidentiary hearing in which the evidence could be presented again, but in 2024 a judge denied this.
The sudden, violent deaths of four members of the Pelley family in April 1989, shattered the quiet town in Lakeville, Indiana & despite justice being served, some question if Jeff was wrongfully convicted. Jeff’s sister, Jaque, maintains the website justiceforjeff.org to assert his innocence.
References:
- CBS News: Survivor continues to heal decades after her family’s prom night murder
- South Bend Tribune: Prosecutors say ‘prom night murder’ conviction should stand in final filings
- Ranker: Jeff Pelley & the prom night murders: A complete timeline of the case
- 88.1 WVPE: No new trial for ‘Prom Night Murders’, judge rules
- South Bend Tribune: True crime podcast reignites 1989 ‘prom night murders’ as Jeff Pelley seeks new trial
- South Bend Tribune: Testimony begins in ‘prom night murders’ hearing as Jeff Pelley seeks new trial
- Ati: Jeff Pelley, the 17-year-old who reportedly murdered his family in cold blood – then went to prom right after
- Midland Daily News: Cherished life
