On December 30, 1987, Wayne Kline heard the doorbell ring.
He was in bed. His daughter, 20-year-old Marie Kline, answered the door at their home southeast of Elkhart, Indiana. Wayne heard her go to the door. He heard her return to her room. And then, he said, he heard what he thought was her boyfriend’s car.
That sound stayed with him.
Because Marie never came back.
Two days later, her body was found in a field off County Road 17. She had been killed with a shotgun blast. The reporting from the time describes a father left with one unbearable question: what would have happened if he had gotten up and answered the door himself?
That question is where this episode begins.
Marie’s case is not only about the night she disappeared. It is about everything that followed. The grief. The waiting. The investigation. The frustration. The sense, voiced again and again by her father, that something had gone wrong not only in Marie’s death, but in the way the search for answers unfolded.
For years, Wayne Kline pushed for the case to keep moving. In 2001, The South Bend Tribune described him as a father still holding onto hope after 13 years, standing behind a detective who continued searching for Marie’s killer. The article also showed the emotional toll of the case: Wayne remembering Marie as a child, remembering her music box, and remembering the baby ring and charms he had given her that were taken from the home.
But the investigation itself became part of the story.
Reports from 2001 describe conflict inside law enforcement, questions about a search warrant, and concerns over whether evidence had been submitted properly. Indiana State Police were eventually asked to review the case. The reporting shows that this was not simply a cold case sitting untouched on a shelf. It was a case with evidence, with suspects, with internal disagreement, and with a family watching all of it from the outside while waiting for someone to get it right.
In 2002, there was finally a major break.
DNA evidence linked Dennis M. Leer to Marie’s 1987 murder. Prosecutors also said DNA connected him to another attack, the attempted murder of Marcia Egenes. According to The Truth, Leer was already in jail on another charge when the DNA link was announced. For Marie’s family, it was not the full return of what had been taken. Nothing could be. But it was something they had waited years to hear: her case had answers.
