The Murder That Copied a TV Show Filmed in That Same Room - Episode 38

The Man Who Drove Away in Her Car: The Murder of Malvina Krutz

Two women watched a stranger reverse Malvina's Buick out of her own driveway at 1:45 in the afternoon. Less than four hours later, her husband found her body in the bathtub — still warm. The investigation would produce four suspects, three failed polygraphs, one confession that collapsed within days, and a case that has never been charged in over sixty-six years.

In this episode, we explore a mysterious phone call answered by an unidentified man with a southern accent while Malvina was still alive, a yellow lead pencil branded with the name of an electric cooperative ninety miles north of Indianapolis found near her body with human hairs near its point, and a second anonymous letter that sat unread in a police file for more than two years before anyone noticed it described a man ditching her car keys at a street corner. Was Malvina killed by someone who knew exactly when her son would leave for school — or by someone she let into that house herself? The timeline and the physical evidence point in two directions that cannot be reconciled.

Case Details

Victim: Malvina Krutz, 41, homemaker, Indianapolis resident.

Date: January 29, 1958.

Location: Meridian-Kessler neighborhood, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.

Case Status: Unsolved and classified as a cold case. No charges have ever been filed. The case remains officially open with active tip lines maintained by Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana and the Indiana State Police Cold Case Unit.

Episode Key Points

- Two witnesses watched an unidentified man drive Malvina's Buick out of her driveway at 1:45 PM — yet her body was found still warm at approximately 5:00 PM, compressing the murder into a window investigators have never fully closed.

- A man with a southern accent answered Malvina's phone at 12:45 PM while she was audibly alive in the background — and the same accent was later reported in anonymous hang-up calls to her husband three nights after her death.

- The only formal confession to the murder contained a detail the confessor got wrong: he said he used cold water in the tub, but the body was found in lukewarm water — and his timeline placed him there ninety minutes after witnesses saw the car already leaving.

- Leroy Penick, a renovation worker who failed three polygraphs and reportedly told a tavern owner he had "slapped a girl around and left fingerprints all over the place" the day of the murder, was released for insufficient evidence — and four years later was convicted of second-degree murder in a strikingly similar death.

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