Cold Case Itch: Jeremy Rolfs and Heather Uffelman
An intriguing connection between a crime victim and the serial killer suspected of committing the crime.
“The answer to all the unanswered questions always [lay] with Jeremy Rolfs. He, and his unwillingness to cooperate, has always been suspect. He knew something and wasn't telling (unsure about the past tense). See if you can find out about his Mother's side of the family. [Jeremy] once told me his uncle was mob-connected. Who knows if he was telling the truth.”
Unsolved Mysteries. The show has terrified and intrigued many since its premiere in the 1980s. I’ve always been devoted to it, and certain cases covered by the long-running series have informed my crime writing in the past. One was the robbery-murder that ended with the death of Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) student Heather Uffelman in 1992.
In 2007, I wrote an in-depth article about the case, digging into the theory that a dead killer who committed a remarkably similar crime in Nashville a couple of years later might have attacked the couple, injuring Jeremy Rolfs, killing Heather, and absconding with the high-end Mac Quadras he was supposed to buy from Rolfs.
In response, I received the message quoted at the beginning of this newsletter.
It was from someone claiming to be an Uffelman family member. This person—my vagueness about them is intentional—initially seemed somewhat outraged that I’d written about the case. I understood that reaction. I’d encountered it before. Even if a popular show like Unsolved Mysteries has publicized a crime, it always remains personal and intimate to family, and outsiders who discuss it independently of a prominent publication like a paper, magazine, or broadcast outlet can seem like leering busybodies. (True crime podcasting faces the same problem to this day, and many podcasters fail brutally at trying to approach what they discuss as something real and tragic that happened to other human beings.)
From my perspective, my interest was simple—sometimes, these unsolved cases cause a mental itch that’s hard to ignore. Several more tangible threads might also tie my interests to a true story like this. The crime occurred in Marietta, Georgia, near where I lived when I first wrote about it. It also involved people from familiar places in Tennessee, like MTSU in Murfreesboro, Nashville, and Clarksville. And—perhaps I’m burying the lede—this was also a factor: The man I thought was an obvious suspect, accused rapist and murderer, Thomas Steeples, had once been friends with my brother-in-law.
I never met Tom Steeples. I knew he’d triggered my late sister Sherry’s creep meter and that he was the kind of friend her easygoing husband Richard likely kept at arm’s length. My brother-in-law confirmed this later, but he never would’ve predicted Tom Steeples was a murderous creep. Who can expect such a thing? We’ve all had sketchy friends, but the sketchiness rarely rises to murder.
In August 1994, Steeples died in jail after nose-diving into a pile of cocaine smuggled in by his generous wife, Tillie Ruth. At the time, he was awaiting trial for murdering Rob and Kelli Phillips. The California couple was new to Nashville, Rob seeking country music stardom, Kelli seeking work in catering, and Steeples fooled them into thinking he had inroads into the country music business. He went to their hotel room, intent on raping Kelli. Investigators said he did, and then he bludgeoned the couple to death. Police described a horrific, bloody scene.
Steeples was also the prime suspect in the 1993 murder of Ronald Bingham, to whom he owed money for gambling debts. He was out on bail in the Bingham case when he killed the Phillipses.
My understanding of Steeples’s status as a suspect was that police in Marietta, Georgia, thought he was too young to be the “Tom Johnson” who attacked Rolfs and Heather Uffelman. Steeples owned a computer shop in Nashville and lived in Mt. Juliet, just outside the city, fit the physical description somewhat, and Tom Johnson was driving a car with a Tennessee license plate—but Steeples was nearing 50, and his cocaine habit likely made him look his age, if not older.
I left the case alone for years, but the message from Heather’s relative was another element of that itch I felt to take a new look whenever I could.
After all, this person had revealed that Jeremy Rolfs was uncooperative in the investigation, something I’d never heard before, and implied that Heather’s family long suspected that Jeremy, whose injuries were comparatively minor, somehow knew more about what was happening than he ever revealed. And Jeremy’s behavior after Heather was killed might have seemed strange to some.
Jeremy Rolfs died in 1997 in Winburg, Lejweleputswa District Municipality, Free State, South Africa. He’d joined the Peace Corps and was doing TV technical consulting there. He perished in a head-on crash with a drunk driver. With Steeples and Rolfs dead, what more is there to learn?
This is where it gets tricky. Years ago, I spotted a tangential connection between Steeples and Rolfs that puzzled me.
They were both from Chicago.
I realized I’d never seen anyone else draw this connection. But even though it’s the kind of detail that might make one sit up and pay attention to this long-unsolved murder, it doesn’t prove anything—save that if the Uffelman family does indeed believe Jeremy Rolfs held the key to the mystery all along, their suspicions make sense.
At various times, publicly available records listed a Jeremy A. Rolfs with the same birth date at addresses in both Oak Park, Illinois, and Chicago proper. One address was an eight-mile drive from a residence listed in the same public directories for Thomas Steeples, who originally hailed from Oak Park. Steeples’s father had been a police chief in a community near Chicago in the 60s and 70s. Another, later address for Jeremy was just four miles from the former Steeples address.
My brother-in-law Richard had known Tom Steeples from working together in Memphis and renewed their acquaintance once they were both in the Nashville area. So Tom Steeples had lived in Tennessee for quite some time. That Steeples should so accurately match many things about the description of the man who killed Heather Uffelman—lived in Tennessee, ran a computer store, fit the physical description in several ways—was coincidence enough.
To learn that Heather’s family felt Jeremy was withholding information when he died, that he knew more than he ever admitted to investigators, and then note that both Steeples and Rolfs came from the same part of Chicago was impossible to ignore. Yet what could it mean?
The simplest explanation is coincidence. Screenwriters love to have cops say (and I’ve heard some actual detectives say this) that they don’t believe in coincidences, but the fact is, those do happen. Sometimes to an uncanny degree.
Another scenario is Jeremy Rolfs and Tom Steeples had some connection and perhaps even cooked up a scheme to profit off the computers together. Jeremy was technically proficient, working with advanced computer equipment on early digital editing and broadcasting. After Heather was murdered, Jeremy essentially hid out for a time, saying he was under police protection because the killer was out there. He wrote an editorial about launching a scholarship in Heather’s name, and also, once Tom Steeples came up as a possible suspect, said police in Marietta would not let him see a photo of Steeples—this even as the murderer’s photo was published several times in Tennessee newspapers for all to see. The image of Steeples above was published in May 1994 in the Tennessean. Just a month later, Murfreesboro’s newspaper published an article about how police in Marietta wouldn’t show Jeremy Rolfs a photo of the suspected killer.
The investigators’ consensus seems to have been that Steeples was too old, didn’t fit the physical description (he did, to a degree), and was simply not a viable suspect. He was likely a coke-crazed serial killer bent on sexual assault as much as anything.
Still, as Redditors discussing the case pointed out, several aspects never made sense. For example, Jeremy Rolfs was just a part-time company employee selling the Mac Quadras for $30,000 (or $31,000; different sources have reported both numbers), yet he was willing to make the roughly 230-mile drive from Nashville to Atlanta.
Additionally, two Mac Quadras in 1992 would have been maybe $12-15,000, and used ones less. If the sellers were charging $30k or more, they were drastically overcharging—and if the killer knew computers, he understood that.
Then there are the other stray details that make it more plausible that “Tom Johnson” was Tom Steeples but could also point to something entirely different. Like this: A mysterious woman complained about noise from a hotel room used by Johnson at the Knight’s Inn where the murder occurred—as I’ve seen noted in online discussions more than once, a female accomplice helping “Tom Johnson” would jibe with an apparently toxic but codependent dynamic between Steeples and his wife Tillie, who was, after all, the person who ultimately provided her husband with enough cocaine for him to kill himself.
The murder of Heather Uffelman may remain a cold case. I hope it doesn’t, but someone with concrete evidence about what happened in that Marietta motel room would have to come forward. The famous Unsolved Mysteries segment apparently didn’t provide much help, save for giving the story a longer tail. Whatever Jeremy Rolfs knew went with him to the grave. And what Tom Steeples knew about anything vanished in his final big snort of blow.