On a warm night in September 1985, teenagers Kimberly Dowell and Ethan Dixon were brutally murdered in Westside Park in Muncie, Indiana. Their killer has never been charged. Early on, police focused on a family member of one of the teens as a primary suspect. The investigation even ruled out fantastic scenarios, including a theory that the perpetrator was a Dungeons & Dragons devotee. The case grew cold. Only decades later did a dogged police investigator narrow the scope to a suspect whose name has never been publicly revealed until now. Keith Roysdon and Douglas Walker, authors of Wicked Muncie and Muncie Murder & Mayhem, have followed the investigation into the Westside Park murders for decades and, for the first time, report the complete and untold story.
Keith Roysdon is a lifelong writer and journalist. He has won more than two dozen state journalism awards and two national journalism awards—many for his work with writing partner Douglas Walker. Their work includes dozens of articles about cold cases or unsolved murders. The two won the Indiana Society for Professional Journalists 2018 award for best nonfiction book for Muncie Murder & Mayhem. They also wrote Wicked Muncie. Roysdon, who also writes fiction, is married (wife Robin) and has a son (James).
Veteran journalist Douglas Walker has covered the criminal justice system in east-central Indiana for most of the past three decades. He has received dozens of awards from state, regional and national journalism organizations—many the result of his collaboration with Keith Roysdon. Walker has taken his readers to hundreds of crime scenes, scores of murder trials, two presidential inaugurations and into the death chamber at the Indiana State Prison for an eyewitness account of an execution. He is married (wife Jennifer) and has three children and four grandchildren.