It was May 31st, 2000, and nineteen-year-old Jill Behrman, who had just completed her freshman year at Indiana University in Bloomington, decided to go on a bike ride, as she often did. She left her home shortly after nine a.m. and set off on her usual route. Approximately half an hour later, motorists reported seeing her on her bicycle at the intersection of Moffet Lane and Harrell Road.
Jill was due to work a noon-to-three p.m. shift at the university’s Student Recreational Sports Center, and she had also made plans to meet her father and grandfather for a late lunch after her shift ended. She didn’t show up for either appointment, and failed to return home that evening, at which point her father phoned the police and reported her missing.
No sign of Jill turned up until two days after she vanished. On Friday, June 2nd, a passerby found Jill’s bike in a cornfield more than ten miles from the spot where she was last seen, and lying in an area where Jill would never have normally ridden to. Even more ominously, a radio that she had been carrying was later discovered in the parking lot of a Bloomington church, and several members of the church reported to authorities that they had seen a suspicious black Ford pickup truck peeling out of the lot on the same day the radio was discovered.
During the course of the search for Jill Behrman, another chilling clue came to light in the form of an unnamed eighteen-year-old woman who reported that two weeks after the disappearance, she had narrowly escaped being abducted by a white male in a black pickup truck, who had attempted to drag her into his vehicle by her arm. This occurred in a town called Elletsville, only three miles from the field where Jill Behrman’s bicycle was found.
Investigators undertook a search for the mysterious assailant, operating under the assumption that Jill had either been abducted, or perhaps that a passing driver had hit her accidentally and panicked, hiding her body and dumping the bike. This latter scenario seemed less likely than the former, however, as the bicycle bore minimal damage.
Despite their best efforts, police were unable to discover what had become of Jill Behrman. In 2002, a woman came forward and told authorities that she had been riding in a vehicle with a man named Uriah J. Clouse on the day that Jill disappeared; she claimed that Uriah had hit Jill on her bicycle, and though the impact did not kill her, Uriah was afraid of being arrested for the crime, so stabbed Jill to death, tied her body with bungee cords, and tossed it into Salt Creek. Though the FBI looked into this possibility, Uriah Clouse—who was serving time at the Brown County Jail on an unrelated charge at the time of the confession—denied any involvement, and the woman who had initially come forward later recanted her statement.
On March 9th, 2003, a hunter discovered the partial skeletal remains of Jill Behrman in the woods in Morgan County. It was determined that she had been killed by a single shotgun blast to the back of the head. The perpetrator had evidently shot her at the spot where her body was eventually discovered.
Throughout the course of the investigation, police were interested in a man named John Myers II, who drove a white work van similar to the one seen in the area on the day Jill went missing, and was also attempting to help authorities with the case, reporting to them in 2001 that he had found a human bone and a pair of women’s underwear stuffed in a tree near the spot where he was fishing. And in March of 2002, he told a correctional officer at Monroe County Jail—where he was incarcerated on an unrelated charge—that he had discovered some letters about Jill Behrman’s disappearance among stacks of food trays at the jail; he further seemed suspiciously interested in the investigation, reportedly compiling lists of where the then-missing young woman might be.
In 2006, Myers was arrested for the Jill Behrman murder and placed on trial. The prosecution argued that Myers had killed Jill in misdirected rage after breaking up with his girlfriend. In October of the same year, he was convicted, and sentenced to sixty-five years in prison.
But then, in 2019, a judge vacated the conviction, citing ineffective counsel, and for a time, it seemed that Myers might be released. In June 2022, his attorney Lindsey Lusk appeared in federal court requesting a new trial, but in October 2023, Myers was denied his petition for a writ of habeas corpus and remains in prison as of this writing.
Crime Immemorial 