30 years later, questions remain, women still missing

By Ed Breen

Thirty years now. Thirty years, one piled upon another over those 10,950 days and nights, since that spring evening in 1993 when Tricia Reitler left her dorm on the Indiana Wesleyan University campus in south Marion, strolled over to the Marsh Supermarket on Adams street, bought a magazine and a root beer, left the store and was never seen or heard from again.

Her parents now understand that she is most likely dead, but closure eludes them. Police officers consider it an open case and a couple of them are still trying to find a way to get to the person they believe abducted and killed the 19-year-old all those years ago.

And in an awful irony, another Grant County girl who vanished in those same years also remains absent without explanation. She is Wendy Felton, a Gas city resident who disappeared six year earlier, on June 4, 1987, from her Gas City home. She was 16 at the time. Her sister had taken her parents, Russell and June Felton, to the Indianapolis airport. When the

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teenager left her home she took nothing – not even her purse – with her.

Both girls –Tricia Reitler and Wendy Felton –remain unaccounted for and in the cold analytics of the modern world are reduced to National Crime Information Center — NCIC — file numbers at the FBI.

Tricia Lynn Reiter is NCIC case M633946073.

Wendy Louise Felton is NCIC case M250436110.

Both, however, remain very much a part of the lives of their families –the Feltons in Gas City and Garry and Donna Reitler, who still live in the suburban Cleveland, Ohio, home in Olmstead Township from which their daughter moved to come to Marion to study psychology at IWU.

And both remain in the minds and workflow of police officers, active and retired, in Marion and Grant County.

Tricia Reitler’s file is now in the custody of the third generation of investigators since that 1993 morning when she was reported missing.

At least a dozen officers, city and county, have sought answers to the questions: Where did Tricia Retiler go? And where did Wendy Felton go? And who took them? And were they killed? And Cont. on Pg. 3.

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