'It looked like a flying saucer': The story of the last spectator death at the Indy 500

The roar of racecars still stirs her stomach and sends her back. “Change the channel,” she’ll say whenever one flashes across the TV, and you can’t blame her, not for a minute. Karen Kurtenbach hasn’t watched an auto race of any sort in 31 years. She can’t stand the sound.

Indy 500 2023:Loose tire flies over fencing, fans after late race crash

They used to make a family reunion out of it, a big group of them, driving in from Wisconsin and Minnesota and Kansas. They’d grab a few motel rooms on the west side and spend Memorial Day weekend in Indianapolis. They’d let the kids play in the pool on Saturday, then rise early Sunday morning, pack the coolers and head for Speedway. “We used to have a good ole time,” she remembers.

It was a weekend her husband, Lyle, looked forward to every year. He was a cement additives salesman, a veteran of the United States Air Force, a member of the Village Board of Trustees in Rothschild, Wisc., where they lived. He was a proud stepfather who liked to shoot hoops with the neighborhood kids in the driveway, keep his front lawn in immaculate condition and was willing to pull over to the side of the road to help a stranger change a tire. “He loved every bit of life,” his wife says.

The last Indianapolis 500 the group made it to was 1987 – the family’s 10th in a row, a sun-splashed afternoon that went dark in an instant. Al Unser won his fourth that day, but Karen never saw the finish. Neither did Lyle. He left the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in a helicopter, the city in a body bag.

The rest? The rest is a blur. The rest is a nightmare. Karen remembers getting up to go to the bathroom midway through the race. “OK, sweetie,” she said to her husband, “I’ll see you later.” She never thought it’d be the last thing she ever said to him.

The one that shook A.J. Foyt: Scar never healed after seeing friend die in horrific crash at 1958 Indy 500

She was back in her seat, sitting right next to him in the top row of the north vista’s K grandstands, by the time a tire wobbled loose off Tony Bettenhausen’s No. 56 machine on the third turn of the 130th lap of the last race Karen Kurtenbach would ever watch. That tire scooted down the short chute until it smacked into Roberto Guerrero’s No. 4 car and soared skyward, over the catch fence, toward the top row of the K grandstands and straight into her husband.

“It looked like a flying saucer,” said one witness. “There was no time to think.”

“It was like a black meteorite going over the crowd, like a bullet,” said another. “If you didn’t see it coming, you wouldn’t have had a chance.”

Lyle Kurtenbach never did.

Doyel: A 68-year love affair with the Indy 500 started with a boy in an elm tree

“It took one instant,” Karen remembers all these years later, fighting back a flood of emotions. “You look up, it’s coming toward you. We were in the process of ducking, and he didn’t duck enough. It was instantaneous.

“He fell right on my lap ... it hit him, and he fell right on my lap. I was glad he didn’t fall over the balcony.”

Love our motorsports coverage? Get our free INSports app

More:Tragedies at the track, from two defending champs to a trespasser and a teen

The tire that turned Karen Kurtenbach from wife into widow weighed 18.5 pounds and was nearly 26 inches in diameter, smoldering from pounding pavement north of 200 mph for two-plus hours. Blood poured from Lyle’s face as he fell lifelessly into her. She screamed in horror. Everyone around them screamed in horror. “Don’t sit and gawk!” one man shouted, according to a witness. “Get an ambulance! Get an ambulance!”

Their teenage daughter, Dawn, was just a few seats away.

A doctor and nurse, sitting in the stands that day as spectators, checked Lyle’s pulse. It looked bleak. Karen rushed with him first to the speedway’s on-site hospital, where he was briefly revived, then to Methodist, where he was pronounced dead at 1:46 p.m.

He was 41 years old. And he was gone.

At the time, Kurtenbach’s death was the first spectator fatality at the speedway in nearly three decades. Thirty-one years later it remains a largely forgotten chapter in Indianapolis 500 history, one marred by consistent casualties through its bumpy early days. Remember: Newspapers from across the country demanded Carl Fisher’s nascent speedway be shut down only a few years after it opened. At least then it would stop killing drivers, mechanics and spectators at such an alarming rate.

“These races are an amusement congenial only to savages and should be stopped,” wrote The New York Times. “There is abundant legal warrant for doing so.”

Fisher wouldn’t budge. The 500 rolled on, decade after decade, becoming one of the most inimitable of American sporting events, luring in millions of fans from across the world, many of whom turned Memorial Day weekend in Indianapolis into a beloved annual tradition.

Like the Kurtenbachs from Rothschild, Wisc.

While the family raced to the hospital that afternoon, the race went on. It always does.

“Within minutes, people returned to watching the race,” a witness named Barbara Bein would write a few years later in The Pittsburgh Press. “The only difference was a gap in the stands where Kurtenbach had been sitting only an hour before.”

After striking Kurtenbach and flying over the grandstand, the tire came to rest on a sidewalk beneath the bleachers, where a fan named Steve Bealmear found it. “It was hot as hell,” he told a reporter that day. “I wanted to keep it, but the (speedway officials) got it away from me.”

Very few of the reported half-million in attendance were even aware of what had happened. Those watching at home had no idea: The TV broadcast never mentioned it, only referencing the damage to Guerrero’s car. Over the radio, reporter Bob Jenkins told listeners, “A wheel has come off, I believe, Tony Bettenhausen’s car and it was struck by Roberto Guerrero’s machine. It did go flying over the grandstand, I believe.”

Twelve minutes later, more from Jenkins: “It sent the tire high into the air. The tire not only cleared the debris fence, it went over the grandstand. There was some concern as to whether or not it might have struck a spectator in the top row. We simply don’t know at this time.”

Meanwhile, Guerrero’s crew replaced his damaged nose cone. He fought his way back to the front. He was leading late before stalling in the pits. Unser whizzed by. Won his fourth. Karen spent the evening in the hospital, making funeral plans and deciding which of her husband’s organs she would donate.

“There wasn’t a whole lot (left),” she remembers. “His eyes. Some tissue. Not much.”

Guerrero had no clue the toll the tire that had smacked into his car had wrought. “It scared the crap out of me,” he told reporters after the race. “Of course I feel badly about this. I don’t know what else to say.”

The story was covered for a day or two before it faded, buried by Unser’s historic win. Lyle Kurtenbach became a statistic – the first spectator death at the event since 1960, and still, 31 years later, the most recent. He was the third fan in race history to be killed by a tire.

The other two? Both came before World War II.

Karen mourned. “It’s so hard when someone is so healthy and so young and is just gone, instantly,” she says. Eventually she found peace through the pain. She leaned on family. Leaned on faith. Letters poured in from friends of Lyle’s she’d never met – people he’d touched and inspired. Encouraged by her priest, she began giving speeches on the importance of organ and tissue donation. She remarried, changed her name to Karen Bentz, and found in her second husband a widower who knew all about the hole in her heart.

Tom Bentz had lost his first wife five days before the tire struck Lyle in Indianapolis. To this day, the two of them still tell stories about the loved ones they lost.

Karen sued the speedway, the U.S. Auto Club and Bettenhausen’s race team for $9 million, claiming Bettenhausen’s car and wheel were defective, and that USAC – which governed the 500 back then – did not provide adequate inspection of the equipment. The suit also claimed that IMS did not have sufficient safety barriers and that spectators were not told of potential dangers.

Three years after her husband’s death, the suit was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum. Did she get what she felt was fair? “It was OK,” Karen says now.

She’s glad the catch fence, which stood 15 feet on May 24, 1987, has been heightened to 19 feet, 8 inches, and glad there hasn’t been a fan killed at the speedway since.

But she won’t be watching this weekend. “I can’t even listen,” she says.

They had set the VCR to record the Indianapolis 500 that year, and the plan was for her and Lyle to watch it when they returned home. She never has.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.