On Halloween night in 1981, sixteen year old Debra Mae “Debbie” Fulton stood at the front door of her family’s home on Walter Street in Hammond, Indiana. She was upset, but trying to move on with her evening. Her plan was simple: walk the short route she knew by heart to the Roller Dome skating rink, meet up with friends, and be home by curfew.
Her mother, Verna, offered her a ride. Debbie said no. She wanted to walk.
Sometime after she left, Debbie vanished.
By the next day, she had missed her curfew and still had not come home. Verna called police and reported her daughter missing. Debbie had run away before, and that history shaped almost everything that came next. Officials and news coverage quickly framed her as a chronic runaway, an “incorrigible” teen who had cycled in and out of programs for months.
On Sunday afternoon, a local boy playing under the Calumet Avenue bridge saw something in the Grand Calumet River and ran for help. Police pulled the body of a teenage girl from the water. The bridge sat along the exact route Debbie would have walked to get to the Roller Dome. An autopsy confirmed what Verna already feared.
The victim was her daughter, Debra Mae Fulton, sixteen. She had died from a skull fracture caused by a blow from a blunt object.
From there, the public conversation split in two.
On one side was an unsolved homicide. A teenager had been killed and dumped near a bridge in an industrial river. Police appealed for witnesses. Her boyfriend had last seen her in the neighborhood around eight that night. Investigators asked anyone who might have seen Debbie between leaving home and that moment to come forward. No one was ever charged with her murder.
On the other side was a policy fight. Indiana had recently reworked its juvenile code to limit when judges could lock up youth who committed status offenses like running away, skipping school, or defying parents. Debbie’s case became a rallying cry in local newspapers. Her caseworker and a juvenile court judge argued that, if they had been allowed to order secure placement, Debbie might have been alive on November first. Editorials used her death to call for changes that would let the state confine some runaway youth “for their own protection.”
More than forty years later, research on runaway and thrown-away youth paints a complicated picture. Young people who leave or are pushed out of home are often coping with trauma, abuse, or intense family conflict. They are at very high risk of violence and exploitation while on the streets. At the same time, locking them in detention tends to deepen that trauma rather than resolve it. The interventions that work best are safe housing, counseling, and family supports that help stabilize the situation without criminalizing the child.
Debbie’s story sits in the middle of that tension. She was not just a category in the juvenile code. She was a daughter who wrote “I love you” on the back of her school photo to her mom. A girl who liked to skate. A teenager who left home one October night and never came back.
In this episode of A Heavy Weight, we return to Hammond and try to walk that last route with her. We reconstruct the investigation from contemporary news reports and cold case summaries. We look at another woman killed by a blow to the head and found in Lake County just weeks later, and at why police publicly dismissed any connection. And we place Debbie’s life and death alongside what we now know about missing youth, runaway cases, and the dangers they face.
We also sit with the question that still haunts this case.
If the systems around her had been built differently, would Debbie have come home from the rink? If there had been safe, voluntary places for her to go, would she have needed to run in the first place?
Debra Mae Fulton’s homicide remains unsolved. The Indiana State Police and Hammond Police Department still list her case as open and are asking for tips. If you skated at the Roller Dome in 1981, lived in Hammond, or crossed the Calumet Avenue bridge that Halloween night and remember something that did not feel right, even if it seems small now, you may carry a piece of what happened.
You can contact the Indiana State Police cold case team or Hammond Police Department with any information.
Debbie was more than a runaway. She deserved to grow up, change her mind, and come home.
