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The last time anyone saw 22-year-old Indiana University senior Hannah Wilson was in the early morning hours of Friday, April 24, 2015 when her friends said goodbye as they put her in a cab home from the bars. She’d only just taken the last final exam of her college career when she vanished.
Not only were Hannah & her friends celebrating the final chapter of their time at school with graduation looming only a couple of weeks away, but the campus was a flurry of activity & excitement since they were hosting their annual Little 500, also known as The World’s Greatest College Weekend. The event is modeled after the Indianapolis 500 where bike riders compete in four-person teams where the men race 200 laps (50 miles) while women race 100 laps (25 miles).
The race was scheduled to begin at Bill Armstrong Stadium on IU’s campus in Bloomington, Indiana & with it came a massive party along the streets & within the campus bars.
After her last final exam on Thursday, April 23, 2015, Hannah & two friends started their night having drinks at the off-campus house Hannah shared with some of her Gamma Phi Beta sorority sisters. She left sometime between 8:30-9:30 pm & took an Uber to the Hilton Garden Inn where some of her friends who had graduated the previous years were staying. This included Alex Wonjo, who was back in town for the Little 500. Despite their breakup, he & Hannah remained friends & while they were at the hotel alone together that night, they hooked up.
Sometime after 12:30 am, now in the early morning hours of Friday, April 24, Hannah, Alex & some other friends made the 5 minute walk from the hotel to Kilroy’s Sports Bar downtown. As they made their way to the bar, the group noticed that Hannah was having a hard time walking & was far too drunk to continue the party. They figured it would be a bad idea to bring Hannah into a crowded bar & felt it would be best if she went back home & got some sleep.
As they were getting ready to call an Uber, a cab just happened to pull up just before 1 am. According to Alex, Hannah was stumbling, but able to walk on her own so he felt confident she could make the ride home on her own & get herself safely into her house. He & his friend, Tyler Dunlap, helped Hannah into the cab, sent her on her way & this was the last time they ever saw her.
According to the cab driver, Wes Yeatman, when he was flagged down by two guys & a girl, Hannah was not ready to go home & wanted to continue to party with her friends, pleading with them to stay as they assisted her into the car. Hannah wanted Alex to come back with her, but instead he handed Wes a $20 bill to cover the $6 fare & headed off to another bar with Tyler. Wes indicated that she was drunk & clearly had too much to drink, but she remained coherent.
Hannah Wilson was born on April 2, 1993 to parents Robin & Jeff Wilson, who at some point, divorced. Jeff worked as a physician at an urgent care clinic in Indianapolis while Robin was a veterinarian in Noblesville, Indiana. During her time at Hamilton Southeastern High School in Fishers, Indiana, Hannah was a varsity basketball cheerleader all four years & after graduation, she moved on to Indiana University.
Hannah had a younger sister named Haley & while she was away at college, they stayed in close contact & FaceTimed most every night. Sadly, right before her big sister disappeared, Haley was working as a counselor at Camp Tecumseh & since she didn’t have good cell reception, they were only able to text one another.
In 2015, Hannah was preparing to wrap up her time on campus where she was getting ready to complete her degree in psychology. Since she had a passion for supporting the LGBTQ Community, she planned to pursue her psychology career in this area.
During her time on campus in Bloomington, Hannah was a member of her sorority & according to her mom, Robin, she had always been her own unique, individual person. With graduation looming, it was a bittersweet time since she’d had such an amazing four years on campus & wasn’t quite ready for her time at IU to come to an end.
Hannah’s sorority sisters described her as a natural born leader, even when she joined the sorority as a freshman. During her senior year, she was in charge of recruiting new pledges into the sorority. She was the glue that held her group of friends together & the type of person who could walk into a room knowing not a soul, yet walk out with 100 new friends. She was bubbly, fun & the person everyone fell in love with immediately.
After graduation, Hannah was planning on working as a coach for the junior varsity cheer team at Fishers High School, a position she planned to hold for about a year until she went back to school to pursue a master’s degree. It was her goal to save up some money & meanwhile she could be a positive role model for the cheer squad.
Since Hannah had been working tremendously hard to prepare for finals, when she finished her last exam & thought she’d done well on it, she was ready to let her hair down, have fun with her friends as they got ready to enjoy the weekend & the bike races.
According to Hannah’s taxi driver Wes, she never gave him an exact address to her house, possibly not wanting a stranger to have this information or possibly because she was intoxicated. Instead, she directed him to an intersection near her house where he dropped her off. Wes said he watched as Hannah walked around cars & onto the sidewalk, but since campus was bustling due to the races that weekend, he never actually saw her go inside her house as he quickly drove off back in the direction of downtown to pick up more fares.
Meanwhile, Allison Eschbach, one of Hannah’s roommates, who was also a close friend, was asleep upstairs in bed when she heard the front door open right around 1 am. Assuming it was just one of her roommates coming home, she thought nothing of it & quickly went back to sleep, not recalling hearing the door close.
About five minutes later, Hannah’s friend, Colt Burnette, got a call from Hannah at 1:05 am, but because he was inside a loud bar, he was unable to hear anything from the other end. He later testified that after he hung up, he texted her back at 1:06 am, but never got a response. Sadly, these were the last moments anyone could account for Hannah.
Hannah’s sister, Haley, had texted her a picture from camp that night, but she also never got a response. When she texted again on Friday afternoon & still didn’t hear back, she figured her sister was probably sleeping late with all the end-of-year festivities happening.
Later that Friday morning when Allison woke up for the day, she noticed that the front door of the house was wide open & when she went into Hannah’s room, although it didn’t look like her bed had been slept in, her purse & cell phone were on her bed.
As the day wore on & no one had seen or heard from her, Hannah’s roommates filed a missing person report with the Bloomington Police Department.
Meanwhile, at about 8:30 am, a woman named Carol Bridges headed out to pick up milk that foggy morning. She drove down Indian Hill then along Plum Creek when she noticed something lying on a corner lot about ten feet off the road that looked like a pile of clothes laying in a heap on the ground. Carol decided to turn her car around for a closer look & pulled into a little driveway. She was horrified to see a woman’s clothed body, face down with a piece of cloth covering her head while a black cell phone in a red case was lying on the ground at her feet.
Carol quickly said a prayer, jumped into her car & drove straight back to her house to all 911 since she didn’t have a cell phone. She told the dispatcher that she saw a dead body in a field at State Road 45 & Plum Creek Road in rural Brown County, about 25 miles away from campus. It appeared to be a woman & she specified that she hadn’t touched the victim.
Police arrived at the field in question at 8:35 am & like Carol, they immediately noted a cell phone lying under the female victim’s right foot. Since the victim didn’t have any identification on her, the officers assumed the phone belonged to her & hoped they would be able to identify her. An Indiana State Police investigator called Monroe County Central Dispatch & asked them to trace the number.
Investigators were told that the phone did not belong to a young female, rather, it was traced back to a 49-year-old man named Daniel Messel. Because the owner of the cell phone had called 911 just after 4 am in 2014 to report that his SUV was hung up on a stump on Grant Street, his number was able to be traced.
When officers went to the mobile home where Daniel lived with his step-father, Gerad Messel, at 8161 W. Ison Road southwest of Bloomington, he wasn’t home. They asked a neighbor to contact them when he came home & ten minutes later, the neighbor let them know he was back.
As officers made their way back to his house & pulled up, they saw Daniel Messel coming out of his house carrying a white plastic bag full of clothes & a pair of shoes & they immediately noticed markings on his arm. The officer pulled out a gun & ordered him to show his hands; as he did, he tossed the bag of clothes he’d been holding toward the carport.
As investigators inspected the bag’s contents, they noted blood & hair on the men’s clothing inside that included a red long-sleeved IU pullover and a pair of underwear. When they later inspected Daniel’s silver Kia Sportage, they found a clump of dark hair on the console with blood spatter on the driver’s side.
When officers came upon the body of a female lying in the field, at that point they didn’t yet know that it was Hannah Wilson, but they noted her long dark hair was matted with blood; she wore a gray shirt, leggings & black Converse shoes.
When investigators began looking into Daniel Messel’s background, they discovered that he had a violent history. In 1985 he was accused of hitting a man in the face with a miniature baseball bat. In 1986, he was charged twice with confinement & battery charges involving a teenage girlfriend. In 1991, he slapped, bit & pulled the hair of another teenage girlfriend. After pleading guilty to battery, he was sentenced to one year in prison.
In 1994, he was accused of chasing two men with his car & crashed his own car in the process. During an argument with his own grandmother, he hit her with such force that he broke a bone in her face. On another occasion, he got into a fight with a man & as his wife tried to intervene, Daniel knocked her to the ground & began punching her in the face. After he grabbed a 2-by-4, he beat her in the head with it, leaving the woman with a broken nose & a severed artery. Daniel was sentenced to three years in prison.
Daniel Messel’s DNA was first collected by the state in July 1997 from prior felony convictions involving violence towards women.
However, it’s likely he was involved in many more violent incidents he had never been charged with as after his photo was released to the public, other potential victims began calling in in regards to other, unsolved cases.
On August 29, 2012 at 1:23 am a woman reported that Daniel had driven up to her twice asking her for directions as well as if she needed a ride. He then asked her a highly inappropriate question & left the area. Daniel’s name was noted in the report, but no arrest was made.
Days later, on September 1, 2012, a 22-year-old woman woke up in Daniel’s SUV & had no idea how she’d gotten there; she last recalled being alone & intoxicated. She immediately sensed that something wasn’t right & after he parked his car in a secluded area, he grabbed her by the hair & threw her to the ground. He tried to force her to perform oral sex, but she was thankfully able to fight him off after he punched her in the face. He took her credit card & other belongings before he drove off.
Despite the fact that investigators found DNA evidence under the victim’s nails during the medical exam after she scratched her attacker, the DNA was never run through Indiana’s or the FBI’s databases because there was not sufficient quantity for comparison at the time.
No one was charged for the attack back in 2012, but after Hannah’s murder, the victim contacted authorities & in 2016, the state police lab ran the DNA which was a match for Daniel Messel. With this evidence, he was charged with attempted rape, criminal deviate conduct, confinement, battery & theft.
Another incident happened on November 3, 2012 that involved an 18-year-old IU freshman, Chelsea Sarnecki, who had been out after a night of drinking with friends in celebration of Halloween. Since she wasn’t yet 21 she was denied access to Kilroy’s on Kirkwood so she headed back to her dorm by herself, still dressed in her witch costume. She admits that because it was a cold night & she was intoxicated, she accepted a ride from a man in an SUV who expressed his concern that she was out by herself.
Once inside the car, he grabbed her by the back of the neck & pulled her face into his lap, suggesting she perform oral sex on him. His pants were unzipped & as she bucked her head back, the man began to slam her head against the steering wheel & dashboard, but she managed to jump out of the car & as he sped away, she crawled to the side of the road.
Bloomington detectives question Daniel in relation to this assault, but because the woman allegedly wasn’t able to provide a good enough description of her attacker, they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.
Only a month later, on December 2, 2012, a 21-year-old woman & her friend were walking home from the bars in the early morning hours when they saw a silver SUV circle back around, stop & ask them for directions. The woman had a terrible feeling from the man, who they indicate pulled up on the sidewalk & basically tried to accost them. They ran away & called 911 as they did.
The girls were able to catch his license plate & when he was pulled over that night, officers discovered the driver, Daniel Messel, had his pants down. However, for unknown reasons, the officer allowed him to go after speaking with him.
Daniel Messel was arrested on Friday, April 24, 2015, the same day Hannah went missing & was found murdered & after he was charged with first-degree murder, he entered a plea of not guilty.
An autopsy proved that Hannah had been struck in the head about four times & the back of her skull had been crushed. Her face was bruised & there were scrapes to her arms & hands that proved she struggled with her attacker before she was beaten to death by a blunt object that was suggested by prosecutors to be a Maglite flashlight. She was fully clothed & showed no signs of sexual assault. Her blood-alcohol content was 0.225% (2.8 times the legal limit).
Dr. George Weir, the pathologist who conducted the autopsy, believes that Hannah was likely lying motionless on the ground when she suffered the fatal wounds to her head.
According to the IndyStar, Daniel was single & looking for love; he had a post up on the website sugardaddyforme.com. His post indicated that he was a 49-year-old man who was looking for IU girls. He was seeking a sugar baby between 18-40 years old. Despite the fact that his post indicated he earned between $100-200,000 a year, in reality, he worked at The Fine Print shop in Bloomington earning $15.50/hour or about $32,000 per year. At the time of Hannah’s murder, he had less than $100 in his bank account & had recently filed for bankruptcy.
Investigators learned that earlier on the night that Hannah was out with her friends, Daniel had dinner with his step-dad Gerald at Cheddars at about 6 pm. They went back to their trailer after & then Daniel left at 8 pm to play trivia with friends at Yogi’s Grill & Bar only blocks away from where Hannah lived. According to his step-father who he lived with, he hadn’t returned home after.
According to Colin Gregory, the emcee at Yogi’s, Daniel was a regular who liked to arrive early for trivia in order to secure a spot for himself & his friends. That night, he noticed him having fun, laughing with his friends, in a better mood than usual. According to a waitress, Daniel had two or three Upland Wheat Beers while he played trivia.
Members of Daniel’s trivia team said he was wearing a red shirt, jeans & the dark shoes he always wore that night which matched the clothing that police found in the trash bag he was carrying out of his house.
Daniel’s trivia team member & co-worker, Matthew Brighton, told investigators that Daniel drove him home from Yogi’s at about 11:30 pm. On their way, they drove past the chaos happening at Kilroy’s & as he dropped him off he mentioned possibly going out for Little 500 after.
Daniel previously told Matthew that he owned a Maglight flashlight that he kept in his car for self-defense, but he’d never actually seen it. Investigators have never located the flashlight or other possible murder weapon.
The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place as to Hannah’s last movements in the early hours of Friday morning before she was murdered.
After Alex & Tyler flagged down the cab that drove Hannah in the direction of her house, Alex ended up meeting a woman & the two headed back to his hotel room, leaving Tyler out alone. At this point Tyler texted Hannah an explicit message hoping she would meet up with him, but she never responded.
Later that Friday morning Daniel’s sister, Jerri Goodwin, stopped by his house to drop her son off. While she was there, Gerald told her he was concerned that Daniel hadn’t come home from trivia the night before.
As employees from The Fine Print came in that morning, they were surprised that Daniel wasn’t there as scheduled since he’d worked there for years & had never been a no call, no show before.
When Jennifer Lentz, an Indiana University professor & teammate on Daniel’s trivia team who had known him for five years, heard from his co-workers that he hadn’t come in or called that day, she headed to his house to check on him. When she arrived at about 3 pm, she saw three police cars & several officers there.
When Hannah’s sister Haley came home from camp on Friday afternoon, she took a nap & when she woke up, she noticed that she missed a flurry of texts & phone calls. Hannah’s friends wanted to know if she’d spoken to her sister & told her they’d filed a missing person’s report, something that Haley was baffled by. Soon, she got a phone call from her dad who also said that Hannah’s friends were unable to find her so he’d left work & was heading to Bloomington.
When Haley called her mom, she was also on her way to Bloomington & despite the fact that at the time, Haley assumed her sister was fine, she headed to the IU campus with her best friend Alexis, to join her parents. As they drove, Alexis was checking social media, noticing more & more posts about Hannah missing & Haley’s worry began to grow.
While Haley was sitting in traffic, her mom called & told her to go back home, but she continued on. At the time, she didn’t know that her mom made that call after she learned the devastating news that Hannah was dead. Robin wanted Haley to wait in Fishers for a police escort, but as she arrived at the police station, she found her father sobbing outside.
Brown County Prosecutor Ted Adams speculated that after cab driver Wes Yeatman dropped Hannah off, she made it to her house, opened the front door, something her roommate, Allison, heard at about 1 am. She went to her bedroom & set her purse & cell phone down on her bed. Her cell phone records prove that the last call Hannah made was to her friend in the loud bar at 1:05 am when he was unable to hear her.
It’s heartbreaking to know that she made it safely inside, but for reasons that will likely never be known, Hannah went back outside & encountered Daniel Messel, someone she didn’t know before that night.
Surveillance video depicted Daniel’s silver Kia Sportage driving behind the taxi that brought Hannah back to her house from Kilroy’s. She somehow ended up in his car & eventually, they ended up at the open field on Plum Creek Road in Brown County. According to a nearby woman, she woke up at about 3:19 am to the sound of her dogs barking, likely the moment that Hannah was fighting off her killer.
Daniel Messel had been trolling around IU’s campus since 2012, trying to get girls into his silver SUV that he purchased on June 21, 2012. According to Brown County Prosecutor Ted Adams, Daniel appeared to have an attack zone in a four by five block area in Bloomington that stretched from 8th Street to Kirwood & between Dunn & Walnut.
Six young women had contacted police; one reported an attempted rape, another was the victim of sexual battery. He targeted women who were vulnerable, alone & under the influence of alcohol yet Bloomington Police issued no warnings to female students.
One woman contacted Bloomington police on at least three occasions to make complaints & is furious that the man continued to harass young women & got away with it until he committed murder. She indicated that authorities treated her like a hysterical woman who had no reason to be calling the police.
Four months after her beloved big sister’s murder, Haley Wilson began her first semester as a freshman on IU’s campus in Bloomington just as Hannah had four years earlier. According to Haley, at that point in time she still spoke of her sister in the present tense, unable to come to terms that she was gone, knowing that eventually she would have to accept it, but still wanted to believe that Hannah was only away on vacation. Being on the same campus her sister had spent time on made Haley feel closer to Hannah.
Many people asked Robin how she was able to send her younger daughter to the same school where her older daughter lost her life, but she was firm on the fact that she didn’t want Daniel Messel to prevent another Wilson from living their life. She wasn’t going to allow him to win.
Two summers before Hannah’s murder, Robin had a dream that Hannah was going to die before she had a chance to graduate. When she woke up, she headed straight to her daughter’s bedroom to reassure herself that she was okay. When she told Hannah about the dream, her daughter only laughed as she told her mom that if she died, she would never want to be in a stuffy funeral home; she wanted gerber daisies on her casket & she wanted a party to be thrown.
One Sunday after Hannah’s murder, they did just that; with the help of Hannah’s Gamma Phi Beta sorority, they hosted a concert at Dunkirk nightclub & danced. There were gerber daisies on her casket during her funeral.
Robin often visits the grassy field in Brown County where her daughter’s remains were found, a place that she feels closest to Hannah’s spirit. On the other hand, it’s a location that Haley doesn’t find peaceful at all as she shudders to imagine her sister’s last moments. When she feels sad, Haley goes to the tree & the bench dedicated to Hannah’s memory.
As Haley began her college career in the fall of 2015, she looked ahead to graduation & feared the moment she would walk across the stage to receive her diploma, something her sister never had the chance to do. Hanna’s life is frozen in time at age 22, but even after Haley passed that age, she knew that she would always be Hannah’s little sister.
Hannah’s murder came nearly four years after another IU student, 20-year-old Lauren Spierer, vanished during a night out with friends where she was last seen on June 3, 2011. Her body has never been found & no criminal charges have been filed.
Prosecutor Ted Allen believes that Daniel Messel is guilty of much more than Hannah’s murder & could potentially be responsible for Lauren’s disappearance. She was last seen intoxicated, walking downtown toward her Smallwood Plaza apartment sometime around 4:30 am.
Daniel Messel’s trial began on August 1, 2016 in Brown County, Indiana. The jury heard about the DNA & blood evidence in the case; red spots on the windshield, the hood & the inside driver’s side door of his Kia proved to be Hannah’s blood. The red IU cotton pullover that Daniel was carrying in a bag as officers arrived to his house had both Daniel & Hannah’s DNA on it. Hannah’s DNA was also found on his jeans. Long dark hair found on both the console & backseat driver’s side door of the Kia also came from Hannah.
After eleven days, the jury deliberated for about six hours before finding Daniel Messel guilty of murder on August 11, 2016. On September 22, 2016 he was sentenced to 80 years in prison, 60 years for murder plus an additional 20 for being a habitual offender.
Despite the solid physical evidence in this case, he maintained his innocence throughout the trial as well as during his sentencing.
Haley was given the opportunity to address him as she said, You will die alone. Just like Hannah died alone.
When Robin was given the chance to address her daughter’s killer she said, Why Hannah? Where did you cross paths? How did you get her in your car? Did you feel pleasure when you heard my daughter’s skull crack? Was Hannah your first or have you killed before?
Hannah hadn’t just been gorgeous on the outside, but she was just as beautiful on the inside. According to those who loved her, she had an amazing heart, a crazy sense of humor & you couldn’t help but smile when you were around her. She believed in compassion & acceptance, loved everyone & was unable to believe that people could be evil.
In order to honor Hannah & to have something positive come from her death, the Wilson family paired with the Indiana Canine Assistant Network (ICAN) & a black Labrador puppy was named Hannah, who will become a service dog. They realize that the work the organization does to help others is something that Hannah believed in & would have wanted.
The Wilson family started a GoFundMe where their $50,000 goal was reached which will be used to pay for Hannah the Labrador’s two years of training as well as will be used to help expand ICAN’s program to train additional dogs.
References:
- Legacy/Indy Star: Hannah Noel Wilson
- The Herald-Times: Brown County prosecutor suspects Messel linked to Spierer, other cases
- IndyStar: A day of difficult images in Hannah Wilson murder trial
- The Herald-Times: Witnesses fill in details of night Hannah Wilson died
- IndyStar: Jurors learn details of Hannah Wilson’s brutal slaying
- Indiana University: Little 500
- IDS: The little sister
- IndyStar: Hannah Wilson murder weapon may have been flashlight, prosecutors allege
- CBS News: Police: Blood, phone link suspect to slain Indiana student
- The Herald-Times: Testimony concludes in Daniel Messel’s trial
- 13 WTHR: Daniel Messel sentenced to 80 years in Hannah Wilson’s murder
- 13 WTHR: Questions swirl around history, DNA of Bloomington killer
- The Herald-Times: Brown County prosecutor suspects Messel linked to Spierer, other cases
- Gofundme: The Hannah Wilson Fund
- Medium: The horrific case of Hannah Wilson that shocked Indiana
- Courier & Press: Prosecutors: Blood links Hannah Wilson to murder suspect
- Reporter-Times: Hope takes root in field where Hannah Wilson’s body was found
