Who Murdered The Newlyweds?

Student Journalists Re-Open A Case That Was Thought Solved

(CBS)  Dyke and Karen's burned-out bedroom was a gruesome crime scene, but it produced no forensic evidence at all implicating the two men convicted of murder. The eyewitness testimony that was apparently enough for the juries wasn’t enough for the students.

"It did not happen the way the state’s witnesses said that it did," says Krista Larson.

For one thing, they doubted Herrington’s story, which had put the murders at shortly after midnight; the students tracked down witnesses who challenged that timeline. One had been a neighbor of the Rhoads', Ben Light.

"You would think that with the house located just 100 yards away, we would have heard something," says Light.

"This crime occurred much later in the night, at a time when Randy Steidl and Herb Whitlock were nowhere near the scene," says Protess.

And there’s one other thing that doesn’t quite add up: Herrington told police that after the murders, he was standing by the Rhoads’ garage with Steidl. But Reinbolt also says she stood by the garage with Steidl. Remarkably, the two eyewitnesses never say they saw each other.

"It could have happened that way, matter of fact, must have happened that way," says McFatridge. "That argument was presented at trial to two different juries by two different defense attorneys. The juries found the defendants guilty."

McFatridge may not find this odd, but his star witness, Debra Reinbolt, sure did. "I thought, somebody’s made this up, somebody’s lost their mind, this is the town drunk. There is no way this man was there," she says.

But what about Reinbolt’s own story? Her testimony was key to the guilty verdict. After all, she said she had seen the murders and even said she helped.

In 1996, nine years after the convictions, Reinbolt matter-of-factly stated in a sworn statement to Steidl’s lawyer that she had lied on the stand. Asked by the lawyer what parts of her story were untrue, Reinbolt said on tape, "Oh, I don’t know that Randy was there, I don’t know that Herbie was there."

As for those impressive details she had provided about what she had seen inside the house, Reinbolt told the lawyer she had actually never been inside the Rhoads house.

But in a head-spinning reversal, Reinbolt later insisted that she actually was lying on the tape, and that her original eyewitness account of being at the scene of the crime was and is true. Is it? Well, it’s pretty hard to know. Over the years, Reinbolt has changed her story more than half a dozen times.

Why has she changed her story so many times? "Basically wanting to get out of this, just wanting it over. The bottom line is I can’t change a story that’s true," she says.

Bill Clutter, an investigator working on the Steidl case, thinks he has proof, beyond her various accounts, that Reinbolt never saw the murders at all.

Remember that broken lamp?

"The prosecution used the lamp as the centerpiece of their evidence, corroborating Debra Reinbolt’s account of what happened this night," says Clutter. "It made her believable."

Reinbolt testified the lamp was broken when she got to the Rhoads’ bedroom, before fire tore through the home. After the fire, black soot covered the crime scene.

But Clutter says the broken inside parts of the lamp were white. He says had the lamp been broken before the fire there would have been soot on the pieces.

In the same 1996 statement, in which she denied being at the crime scene, Reinbolt also said police fed her the information about the lamp. "And they would come up with, ‘Well, there was a broken vase or broken lamp there.’ And then I’d say ‘Well, okay. So there was,’" Reinbolt said on tape.

For the students, it all added up to more than a reasonable doubt, especially when they started turning up other witnesses the police never had talked to.

One of those witnesses, a woman, pointed the students in an entirely new direction.

The woman let the students videotape her, but was so frightened she asked 48 Hours to conceal her identity. "I noticed two men standing opposite of the street light by Dyke and Karen’s house. Now what caught my eye was they had trench coats on in July. And it was very, very hot, and I wondered why they had trench coats on," she said.

She said she saw them around 9 o’clock the night before the murders. "And one of them was a big guy with blond hair, and the other guy was small-framed and looked like he had dark hair. But they were just standing there looking toward Dyke and Karen’s house."

The woman thinks she saw the same two men the next night, the night of the murders. "This car started coming around, and it was white with a gold stripe down it. And it had Florida license plates. It would just go by, turn in front of Dyke and Karen’s house, stop. And I seen them looking, you know? And then take off. They did this about ten times, just, I mean, continuously. Why would anyone be doing that?"

Across town, the students also tracked down a gas station attendant who worked the night shift and who remembered selling a lot of extra gas to a man driving a car with Florida plates. He told them he had sold someone 21 gallons of gasoline at 3 a.m. that morning, in seven three-gallon cans.

An hour later, the Rhoads’ house was ablaze. Police had interviewed the gas attendant, but the Florida connection went nowhere. The police never even knew about the other witness, who over the years did not volunteer the information.

But what would the killers' motive be? The students came up with a new theory, one that focused on Karen, not Dyke.

"Karen had told several family members and friends that she had seen something at work that had scared her," says Kirsten Searer.

Karen may have seen something in the parking lot of the pet food plant where she worked, an incident involving other people from the factory. "She had seen large amounts of money and a gun put in a trunk that was on its way to Chicago," says Kristen.

According to a friend the students interviewed, Karen was very worried.

Protess wonders if there could be a link between what Karen saw and the shadowy men from Florida.