On December 13, 1990, 54-year-old Harchand Dhaliwal, a Southwest Asian man working as an attendant at a Portage, Indiana gas station, was shot in the head with a shotgun during a robbery and killed. The assailant left with about $327.55 from the register and fled the scene.

Investigators linked Dhaliwal’s killing to a wave of similar shotgun slayings in the area. Two days later a motel clerk, Marie Meitzler, was found shot to death in Portage with money missing from her register, and police connected those cases to the double homicide of Eli and George Balovski in nearby Lake County.

On January 28, 1991, Christopher D. Peterson (also known as Obadyah Ben-Yisrayl) was arrested; he confessed on January 30 and was charged with multiple counts including the murder of Dhaliwal. In March 1992 a jury convicted him for the deaths of Dhaliwal and Meitzler and the judge imposed the death penalty, a sentence later upheld on appeal.

Did anyone who knew Dhaliwal or worked in Portage at that time see anything unusual around December 13, 1990?