On December 31, 2014, 18-year-old Marina Boelter clocked out of her shift at the IGA grocery store in Bloomfield, Indiana, at six o’clock in the evening. She had a son in foster care she was fighting to get back, a new apartment she was proud of, and plans to spend the night celebrating. Within minutes of leaving work, she got into a stranger’s car. More than a decade later, Greene County’s prosecutor would describe her case in blunt terms: not a missing persons case anymore, but a death investigation.
A Fresh Start
Marina Pearl Boelter was born on July 15, 1996, to John Boelter and Tressie “Cricket” Palmer. She grew up in Hamilton, Ohio, with her father and brothers, then moved to Bloomfield, Indiana, in eighth grade to be closer to her mother and grandfather.
At 17, she became pregnant by her on-and-off boyfriend, 22-year-old Douglas “D.J.” Lockhart. She dropped out of high school, but earned her GED anyway. Their son, Landon, was born in April 2014. Four months later, in August 2014, the baby suffered a head injury during a physical altercation between Marina’s sister, Faith, and Faith’s boyfriend, inside the home where Marina and the infant were living.
Several unofficial accounts of the case describe the incident this way, though Indiana authorities have never confirmed those details publicly. What is documented is the outcome: the state removed the baby from the home, neither parent was in a position to take him, and Landon was placed in foster care.
Marina was devastated. She moved into her own apartment, took a job at the deli counter of the IGA grocery store off Highway 231 South, and began working toward custody of her son. She had recently been accepted into college with plans to train as a pastry chef. According to her sister-in-law, Ashley Boelter, getting Landon back was the goal behind everything else she was doing that year.
The Last Shift
Marina worked a normal shift on New Year’s Eve, finishing at the IGA at around 6 p.m. Lockhart was waiting for her in the parking lot, reportedly after calling her earlier that day. He wanted her to spend the night with him and a few friends instead of going to the party she had planned to attend, hosted by an older, married man she had reportedly been seeing. She turned Lockhart down.
Witnesses told police that Marina instead crossed the lot toward a different car: a 2009 to 2011 Mercury Milan in a metallic silver, gold, or beige finish, fitted with multi-spoke rims, a spoiler, and a shark-fin antenna on the roof. Behind the wheel was a heavyset white man in his 40s or 50s, wearing glasses. Investigators later learned Marina knew him from the grocery store. She got in. He drove off in the direction of her apartment, while Lockhart and his friends drove the opposite way.
On January 9, Lockhart appeared at a candlelight vigil for Marina at Bloomfield Town Park, where he was photographed sharing his thoughts on her disappearance with the crowd. He would be dead within five weeks.
The Final Ride
Marina reportedly didn’t want the man to know exactly where she lived, so she asked him to drop her at a closed-down pizza restaurant near her building instead. Cell phone records later confirmed a signal near her apartment around the time she would have been dropped off, the last trace of her phone that investigators have ever been able to produce. The man told police he left her there and drove home alone.
Separately, the married man she’d planned to spend the evening with said the two had spoken by phone shortly after she clocked out, and that she’d confirmed she was still coming to his party. She never arrived, and he could not reach her the next day. Marina also missed a scheduled visitation with Landon that week, something everyone close to her said she would never do given how hard she had fought to get him back. When she also failed to show up for her next shift, her coworkers at the IGA reported her missing to the Bloomfield Police Department on January 2, 2015.
Some accounts of the case state that Marina had deactivated her main Facebook account in the weeks before she vanished, but kept a separate profile on a modeling website, a detail that has fueled unconfirmed online speculation about a second, secret life apart from her family. Police have never addressed that claim publicly.
What is documented is that neither the IGA parking lot nor the strip mall around it had security cameras, and police have spent years asking the public for any New Year’s Eve footage from Highway 231, Judson Street, or Seminary Street. By February 2015, six weeks in, Indiana State Police said they had exhausted every lead on the car and the man Lockhart had described. Years later, the family said investigators had located and questioned a man matching that description, though he was never publicly named, and no one has ever been arrested.
A Sudden, Unrelated Death
Lockhart had cooperated with investigators from the start, and police came to consider him cleared as a suspect in Marina’s disappearance. Just before 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 12, 2015, Indiana State Police were called to a home in the 300 block of South Lewis Street in Bloomfield, where Lockhart had gone to confront a man named Michael A. Rogers over a past relationship with Marina and another woman. A struggle broke out inside the house, and Rogers stabbed Lockhart once.
An autopsy found the wound had reached his heart. According to the Greene County Daily World, Rogers tried to stop the bleeding and called 911 himself, but Lockhart died anyway. Indiana State Police Sgt. Curt Durnil confirmed the death to reporters that week and said investigators were not yet sure whether the stabbing and Marina’s disappearance were connected. Police later ruled the stabbing self-defense. No charges were filed.
Investigators said they found no evidence connecting Lockhart’s death to Marina’s disappearance. Her family was not so sure. Ashley Boelter later told the Greene County Daily World that she and her husband, Marina’s brother David, never stopped wondering whether Lockhart, who she said had once broken Marina’s collarbone, knew more than he ever told anyone. “It seems too weird that we didn’t have answers,” she said, “then he died and we still don’t.”
A Family’s Search
Marina’s mother, Tressie Palmer, spent the rest of her life trying to bring her daughter home. She organized search teams, held a 15-mile walk to fund a billboard with Marina’s photograph, and dyed her own hair purple, Marina’s favorite color, in tribute. Ashley Boelter, who moved to Nevada but kept running the “Find Marina Boelter” Facebook page, said the family chased down tips for years that never panned out, including an unconfirmed rumor that Marina’s belongings had turned up in a dumpster behind a local business. At one point, someone messaged the page claiming to know where Marina was and demanding money. Ashley contacted the FBI, who tried to set up a sting using her account. The person turned out to be a scammer in Iowa.
Tressie Palmer died in 2021, without ever learning what happened to her daughter.
The case has not gone away. Marina is listed with NamUs and with the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and in December 2024, ahead of the 10-year mark, Indiana State Police and the Greene County prosecutor’s office gave new interviews to WTWO on the case.
Prosecutor Jarrod Holtsclaw said the passage of time, combined with the total absence of any contact from Marina to friends or family, meant the case was now being treated as a death investigation. “It has been extremely frustrating in that despite countless hours of work by numerous local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies we have not even been able to locate Marina, let alone determine what has happened to her,” Holtsclaw said. “She was a young woman with a difficult set of life circumstances, with a young child of her own, living by herself and trying to make a better life. And she vanished.”
Marina’s sister, Faith Boelter, told WTWO that the years had not brought the family any closer to an answer. “Each year doesn’t get any easier,” she said, “it just becomes more manageable with coping skills. At the end of the day we still have no answers.” Ashley put it more simply: “You see it on TV or in a movie and you think that will never happen to me. It happened to us.”
Marina Boelter is 5 feet 3 inches tall and weighs around 120 pounds, with blue eyes and strawberry blonde hair she sometimes dyed reddish brown. She has pierced ears, a small scar from an old lip piercing, and a tattoo of a star with butterfly wings on her foot. She was last seen wearing a black and purple plaid pea coat, jeans with rhinestones on the back pockets, pink and white Nike sneakers, and a cross necklace she wore every day. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Indiana State Police at 812-332-4411 or Crime Stoppers of Central Indiana at 317-262-8477.
Landon, the son she fought to get back, has since been adopted by another family. He has likely never been told what his mother looked like the last time anyone saw her: walking across a gravel parking lot, getting into a stranger’s car, and driving toward home.
