Patricia Sue McCabe:1982, Warrick County, Indiana
When I was first starting this project my best friend reminded me of an incident from our childhood. She asked if I remembered plans for a sleepover that had to be canceled because of some sort of a manhunt. I had not remembered that at all. In talking with one another we pieced together the story:
Several of us had been invited to a sleepover at another friend’s house. We were going to stay in their little playhouse/cabin near Selvin. But, at the last minute the get together was canceled because a body had been found nearby.
We were piecing together when it might have been. I asked if it was before or after Kathy Kohm had been murdered in another nearby town of Santa Claus, Indiana. My best friend said that she thought it was after. It is sad that Kathy’s 1981 murder had become a waypoint in our lives but it has. Kathy’s murder left a huge impact on everyone’s lives in the Tri-State area.
I began combing through the papers. In 1982 a woman’s body was found along I-64. That’s the interstate that runs past my little hometown of Lynnville. My friend and I thought the timing was probably right for this to be the incident that had worried all the parents enough to cancel the sleepover.
Don Perigo was the County Coroner then. He examined the body but did not determine a cause of death. Mr. Perigo, a very respected man in Warrick County, ran a funeral home in Chandler, Indiana. He was the elected coroner for 20 years and always won by a landslide. Dr. Bowen Hoover also signed the death certificate but her cause of death was undetermined.
The victim found there was identified a few months later through fingerprints as Patricia Sue McCabe.
Patricia Sue McCabe was born on October 19th, 1952 to Dorothy V. Smith McCabe and Matthew M. McCabe. She was from Alexandria, Virginia.
Patricia had not had an easy life. She had lived in several states. She had a history of mental illness and had been hospitalized a few times. Her death seems to be sort of dismissed by that fact. As if, just because she was depressed a few times we don't have to put much effort into investigating how she ended up being found by a road crew spraying the weeds in the Spring of 1982.
But, who killed her and left her on the side of the road? Had she gotten a ride with a truck driver?
In 1981, two teens had accepted a ride from a trucker out of Cincinnati. He began making lewd advances as they rolled into Indiana and the two girls tried to jump out. One pushed her friend out of the moving truck. The girl got up off the ground and walked in the direction the truck had been going. A few miles later she found her friend, Bridgett Marie Donae Patrick had been killed. Her death was determined to be a homicide. That happened just a bit east of where Patricia was found on I-64.
In 1982, another young woman’s body was found not far off I-70 near Jacksonburg, Indiana. That’s even further east and a couple of hours North. Connie Christensen had been in Nashville, Tennessee and was headed home to Wisconsin. She was not found right off I-70 but a mile north in a little patch of woods.
In the Summer of 1984, a girl’s body was found west of the Monrovia exit on I-70. Regina Pierce was from Monrovia and was headed home from Iowa. She had run away from home and had been trying to find a ride back.
In December of 1984, Tina Marie McKenney Farmer left Indianapolis with a trucker that we now know was Jerry Leon Johns. She was found January 1st, 1985 off the side of Interstate 75 near Jellico, Tennessee. DNA evidence would link Jerry Leon Johns to her murder in 2018.
Also found that same New Year’s Day of 1985 was another body that would go unidentified for decades. Elk Valley Jane Doe is now identified. She is Tracy Sue Walker who disappeared in 1978 from Lafayette, Indiana. I believe Jerry Leon Johns kidnapped and killed her too. I believe he left Tina Marie McKenney Farmer in that same memorable and scenic spot because he had left Tracy Walker there back in 1978.
Let’s go back to Patricia McCabe who was found near my hometown in 1982.
The articles about her discovery do not accurately exactly say where she was found. (Neither does the death certificate. They usually do these days.) They seem to say that she was found near Hwy 161. There’s no off ramps at either of the places where 161 crosses over the interstate. She may have been found at the Holland exit. Hard to say. Jerry Leon Johns could have placed her there without an exit. There is no exit where Tina Marie McKenney Farmer and Tracy Walker were left. There is a cliff, though. The point being that the lack of an exit would not have stopped him. Stopping where there is not an exit was probably a plus for him. Other people are less likely to try to stop and help out if it is an inconvenient place for them to stop as well.
Was Patricia lying on her side all curled up or was her body found lying straight? The position of the body could tell us a lot here. If the body was in a fetal position that could suggest that she died of hypothermia. Maybe she was walking and just lay down and froze to death. None of the available documents mention position.
Was she on the eastbound side of the road or the westbound side of the road? Neither the newspaper articles nor the death certificate says. Maybe there is a police report that has those details.
You might not think that the exact spot would matter, but if Jerry Leon Johns did this or it was some other trucker and by some chance we had a record of where they traveled and when they traveled; that would be a good way to potentially connect some dots here.
According to her death certificate she was buried by Koehler's Funeral Home in Lincoln Cemetery in a pauper’s grave in Boonville, Indiana. That is the Warrick County seat. Lincoln Cemetery is known as the Black Cemetery. It started as a segregated cemetery. It is pretty much connected to Boonville's Maple Grove Cemetery now. Patricia McCabe has no marker there. I took the liberty of making her a Find-a-Grave page.
What if her death was accidental? Could be. She was found in April with no coat, though. She wore a purple blouse and jeans. If she had been out there for a while she might have been there in cold weather and died from exposure. On April 7th and 8th there was a heavy snowfall. Later in the month the temperatures rose to the low 90’s Fahrenheit. March would have been cold, rainy and snowy in 1982.
Patricia was badly decomposed and they thought she was either Asian or African American at first. (Her skin may have looked very black in the decayed state that she found in.) Her hair was also a very dark color. In her high school photos it looks very dark brown to black.
The chances that a woman would be hitchhiking in early Spring along I-64 with no coat seem slim to me. The chances that a 29 year old woman was walking along the Interstate in early spring or winter in Indiana without a coat and that she just sat down and died there also seems incredibly improbable. It was 1982 and it is FAR more likely that she was hitchhiking and that she was murdered.
We know that Jerry Leon Johns traveled through Indiana in November and December of 1984 when he met Tina Marie McKenney Farmer. We suspect very strongly that he took Tracy Walker from Lafayette, Indiana in 1978. He lived in Flat Rock, Michigan, near Detroit. He traveled throughout the Midwest very frequently.
I think he killed Patricia Sue McCabe. She was left on the side of an interstate. His known victims were left on the side of the interstate. She was killed within the timeline that he was free and traveling. She was also petite. She was about 5’2” and 120 pounds. (A smaller woman is easier to overpower and easier to move once they are deceased.)
He tended to strangle his victims. Did Patricia show any signs of strangulation? Was her hyoid bone broken? We have no idea. Don Perigo was a well respected man and experienced with deceased persons. He had a degree in mortuary science and operated a funeral home for decades in Chandler. He was the county coroner. But, he was not an M.D. or trained extensively in criminal investigations, to my knowledge. He was doing his best and things were no doubt done by the book. But, Patricia was probably seen as a drifter, an accidental death and not as a murder victim.
Jerry Leon Johns’ last victim lived. In March of 1985 in Knoxville, Tennessee he kidnapped a woman as she walked to her car late one night. He strangled and sexually assaulted her. He tied her hands with strips of cloth torn from her own t-shirt. She had serious blunt force trauma injuries to her head. She was nearly dead when he left her in a ditch. But she lived and very accurately described her attacker and he was caught. Immediately, Tennessee authorities suspected him of other murders including Tina Marie McKenney Farmer. It would be decades before DNA would prove him to be Tina’s killer.(I suspect him of many murders along I-75, I-80 and other places.)
The thing that seems significant is that Patricia was not dumped into a river. She was not buried in a shallow grave or left in a dumpster. She was left in a rural area that was very quiet, beautiful and unspoiled. I think the choice of where she was left was significant in some way to Jerry Leon Johns. He died in prison in Tennessee so we cannot ask him about this now. I wonder if he was ever interviewed about things like that. If we get enough cold cases tested and solved then we won’t need to hear from him. We can piece it together ourselves.
Rest In Peace Patricia
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