Someone They Knew: The Amy Weidner Story
- Gina Westfall
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Someone They Knew: The Amy Weidner Story
On November 13th, 1989, sixteen-year-old Amy Weidner wasn’t feeling well and decided to stay home from school. Amy’s mother offered to take Amy’s two-year-old to daycare so she could rest, but Amy insisted on keeping her toddler at home with her. Gloria, Amy’s mother, left the family’s Indianapolis home for work that morning, not realizing it was the last time she’d see her daughter alive.
Later that morning, Gloria called the house to check on her daughter. No answer. This is long before the days of cell phones and text messages. Gloria tried again. No answer. Maybe Amy was asleep, but surely Emily would be awake by now. She called again. No answer. She asked a neighbor to go knock on the door. No answer.
Gloria returned home to find a scene no mother should ever have to find. Her sixteen-year-old daughter was dead in her bedroom. There was a blood palm print on her bedroom wall. Emily, her two-year-old, was unharmed. Gloria called 911 and took her granddaughter into her arms. From that moment forward, Emily became her daughter. It would be up to her to fight for justice for Amy and ensure Emily knew what an amazing mother she was born to.
Although DNA testing was in its infancy in 1989, detectives had the smarts to collect evidence that could contain DNA. This included Amy’s bedding and semen found inside of her indicating a sexual assault. Amy had been raped, beaten, and strangled to death in her own home while her child was helpless nearby.
Amy was one of four children with two sisters and one older brother. Her daughter Emily, born when she was just fourteen years old, was fathered by a friend of her older brother. He was no longer involved with Amy by the time she was killed. Gloria was a single mother, doing the best she could with the circumstances.
Amy’s brother had stereo equipment and cash stolen on the day his sister was murdered, leading police to believe that the murder was a robbery gone wrong. The bloody handprint, potential DNA evidence, and other items were collected. However, without a suspect, there was nothing to compare them to. Emily’s father was quickly ruled out on a matter of routine investigation. They investigated several of her brother’s friends and followed hundreds of leads, but the case went cold.
Gloria adopted Emily and she was raised as her daughter. She always knew about Amy, of course, but she struggles to remember her. Her family struggled year after year not knowing who took Amy from them. Could this person be next to them at the grocery store? Could it be someone they knew? The uncertainty of not knowing can be torture.
In 2011, a “Remembering Amy Weidner” Facebook page was created by Amy’s friends and family. Cold case detectives wanted to utilize and print pictures from the page, but they weren’t familiar with the application. They asked a nuisance abatement officer for help. Det. Sgt. William Carter helped to print the page and became intrigued about Amy’s case. He became determined to solve it. He wasn’t a detective who solved murders though… he handled things like underaged drinking.
When he started to deep dive into the case, like any good detective, he realized the original detectives made mistakes and overlooked clues. For instance, there were several of Amy’s brother’s friends that were not interviewed and DNA was never collected from. He started reaching out to former neighbors and a name came up that was new: Rodney Denk. In fact, the name was not new. Emily’s father had mentioned the name in an interview in 1989 as a person who hung out at the Weidner house.
Rodney Denk was born in September 1971 and grew up in the Indianapolis area. He was friends with Amy’s older brother, John Paul. The police had never talked to Denk before. Detective Carter was about to change that. After making an appointment with Denk to speak to him, Denk took off. Researching Denk, Carter found prior arrests in 1991 for battery and 1997 for larceny. When he compared the 1997 arrest record prints to the bloody handprint from Amy Weidner’s wall, it was a match!
Confident that Rodney Denk was man that killed Amy Weidner decades earlier, authorities now had to locate him. They tracked his credit card to a rental car equipped with OnStar. Police were able to use the OnStar system to track Rodney Denk and arrest him. Upon approaching him, he attempted to cut his wrist and said, “I didn’t do it”.
Once in the emergency department of a local hospital, Rodney made a confession, saying, “I didn’t know she was in there. I was in John Paul’s room, take the radio and she came around the corner and I hit her in the head.”. He later made more confessions. Detective Carter actively worked on a decades old cold case, solving it in just 12 days!
Rodney Denk admitted to acting alone, pleading guilty. He was sentenced to fifty years for murder and fifteen years for rape. He will not be eligible for parole until 1/1/2043. He will be 72 years old. This is only eligibility, however, not guaranteed.
If you ever wondered if these things were nature vs. nurture- In 2009, seventeen-year-old Dillon Denk, Rodney’s son, beat his mother, Mary McHenry, to death in their Western Kentucky Home. He was sentenced to twenty years in the Kentucky Department of Corrections in 2011. Rodney had been a great source of support to him during his prosecution, only to face his own prosecution for the 1989 murder of Amy Weider shortly after.
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