INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.– Brittany Akers said her sister Gabby led a hard-luck life.
“She didn’t always have a stable job. She didn’t always have a stable place to live. She didn’t always have a car to drive. She did have financial problems,” said Brittany.
Brittany said Gabby seemed fatalistic about her future.
“She told us on a regular basis that one of these days she was gonna end up dead and I didn’t believe her half of the time to be honest because I thought she was making it up. I thought she was just trying to get attention because every now and then she would always say this old boyfriend of hers was trying to kill her.
“We always worried about what she said would be true and to get that call from Owen County that she’s actually gone, that was a wake up call.”
That call came in the spring of 2016 after Akers’ body was found nude and decomposed in Mills Creek in Owen County.
A passing school bus with kids on board spotted the remains, which may have been in the creek for several days.
“She never talked about suicide,” said Brittany. “She never talked about not wanting to be here because she wanted to be better for herself and her kids.”
Owen County investigators said they couldn’t determine if Akers’ death was accidental or homicide.
“They have told us that they have found 22 different drugs in her system,” said Brittany. “We were told with the combination of drugs that were in her system that that would have killed her instantly.”
Brittany said her sister had neither a cell phone nor a car and likely would not know her way around rural Owen County, but a man she lived with, a mushroom hunter, did.
“I asked her, ‘Hey, who is this guy that you’re staying with, Gabby? Can you trust him?’ She says, ‘No, he’s a really great friend.’ She says, ‘He’s an older guy. He just helps me out when I need a place to stay,’ and that’s where she would stay when she wouldn’t have anywhere else to go at that time.”
Gabby’s body was found with no identification and family members were called to identify her by recognizable tattoos.
“All of her possessions were at his house,” said Brittany. “Her purse, clothes, everything. So when they found her in Mills Creek she had absolutely no clothes on, no identification, no nothing.”
Captain Erich Teuton of the Owen County Sheriffs Department said a coroner could not determine Gabby’s time of death and investigators remained mystified as to how she ended up in a creek so far from where she was living on the southwest side of Indianapolis.
Teuton said a search of the home where Gabby stayed turned up no useful information as to her cause of death.
If you have any information, call Crime Stoppers of central Indiana at 317-262-TIPS (8477).
