A renowned American steakhouse chain is grappling with its future, now reduced to only four branches nationwide.

Claim Jumper, known for its generous servings, the gigantic chocolate motherlode cake, and decor reminiscent of the gold rush era, has seen its once-extensive chain winnow down to a few restaurants after many years of closures.

The latest setback occurred recently as the chain discreetly closed its San Bernardino, California location, marking it the 41st shutdown since 2010, leaving just four independent Claim Jumper diners operating across the country.

Currently, three of these restaurants are situated in Southern California—specifically in Costa Mesa, Buena Park, and San Diego—accompanied by a single outpost in Tualatin, Oregon.

This significant contraction reflects broader challenges faced by restaurant chains in the U.S., which are contending with escalating labor costs, peak beef prices, persistent inflation, and evolving consumer preferences, leaving many popular casual dining spots fighting to stay afloat.

Founded in 1977 in Los Alamitos, California, Claim Jumper became a household name thanks to its enormous portions, rustic mining-town atmosphere and indulgent comfort food.

At its peak, the chain operated 45 restaurants across eight states, serving everything from prime rib and rotisserie chicken to its legendary Motherlode Cake – a towering chocolate dessert that packed almost 3,500 calories per slice.

In 2005, founder Craig Nickoloff sold the business to a private equity firm in a deal reportedly worth around $250 million.

Just five years later, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy following the financial crisis before being acquired by hospitality giant Landry’s Inc., owner of Morton’s Steakhouse, Mastro’s, Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., Joe’s Crab Shack and Rainforest Cafe.

Despite the rescue, the closures have continued.

The San Bernardino restaurant, which served diners since 1999, closed its doors in June without explanation, following the closure of locations in Henderson, Nevada, earlier this year and La Mesa and Temecula, California, in 2024.

Landry’s still operates three casino-based restaurants branded simply as CJ inside Golden Nugget casinos in Las Vegas and Laughlin, Nevada, but the original Claim Jumper brand has largely disappeared from America’s dining landscape.

The chain’s collapse mirrors wider problems facing the casual dining sector.

According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, average steak prices climbed to $12.73 per pound in March, roughly 16 percent higher than a year earlier, squeezing restaurant margins and forcing many operators to raise menu prices.

At the same time, consumers have become increasingly selective about eating out, with many opting for cheaper fast-food deals, takeout or delivery instead of traditional sit-down restaurants.

Several major steakhouse brands have announced closures in recent months.

Outback Steakhouse owner Bloomin’ Brands has been trimming underperforming restaurants, while McCormick & Schmick’s recently closed its long-running Pittsburgh location. Quaker Steak & Lube is also shutting its final Florida restaurant after more than two decades.

For many diners, however, Claim Jumper’s decline represents more than another restaurant closure – it’s the end of a childhood tradition.

News that the chain is down to just four locations sparked an emotional response on Reddit, where hundreds of former customers shared memories of birthday celebrations, family dinners and famously enormous portions.

‘God I miss Huell,’ one commenter joked while reminiscing about the restaurant’s famous Motherlode Cake after another user recalled a television segment showing that even the display slices weren’t real.

Others said the chain’s sprawling salad bar was reason enough to visit. ‘They had an epic salad bar,’ one former customer wrote, while another remembered diners helping themselves to whole avocados.

Many said the restaurant’s giant chocolate cake remained unforgettable decades later. ‘All I can remember is that cake,’ one user wrote.

Another recalled how a single slice easily fed an entire family. ‘My parents would order one slice and everyone in our family of six would get a full layer.’

After more than forty years, a man has been formally accused of the gruesome murder of a traveling auto parts salesman, whose life ended violently in an Ohio Holiday Inn hotel room. This breakthrough comes following the discovery of the victim’s possessions behind a Cracker Barrel in Georgia, as announced by officials on Monday.

Randy Lane McAllister, a resident of Columbus aged 62, now faces indictment from a Warren County grand jury concerning the murder of John Christopher Warren, which occurred on October 17, 1985.

Authorities charged McAllister with aggravated murder and murder after reviving the cold case thanks to advancements in forensic investigations.

Warren’s lifeless body was discovered a day after he had checked into a now-defunct Holiday Inn in Middletown, Ohio, a town near Cincinnati, where he was scheduled for business meetings. Investigators at the time speculated that the homicide was the result of a violent robbery.

Investigators said a number of Warren’s belongings were missing, including his 1985 Oldsmobile. Days later, those items were discovered behind a Cracker Barrel in Dalton, Georgia, while Warren’s car was found in Redington Beach, Florida.

“Although detectives at the time followed up on a number of leads, there was not sufficient evidence to move forward on the case,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement.

The murder went unsolved for years until investigators reopened the case in 2019. Several of Warren’s belongings recovered from the crime scenes were sent for analysis. That led detectives to McAllister and a now-deceased accomplice, prosecutors said.

“This is a case involving extreme violence,” Assistant Prosecutor Brian Goodyear told a Warren County court judge during McAllister’s first court appearance on Tuesday, Fox 19 Now reported. “The victim was beaten to death and strangled with a ligature. This was a very violent death.”

McAllister, who has three prior violent felony convictions, including felonious assault and aggravated robbery, has been on the run for 40 years, Goodyear said.

The prosecutor’s office has not disclosed how Warren’s items were connected to McAllister.

Authorities are actively hunting for an individual responsible for a knife-point sexual assault on a woman in Greenwich Village during the early morning hours last month.

The incident occurred around 4:40 a.m. on June 27 when a 21-year-old woman was near West 10th Street and 5th Avenue, according to police reports.

The attacker brandished a knife and violently assaulted her, officers reported.

After the suspect fled, the victim was taken to a local hospital, where she was treated and remains in stable condition, officials stated.

Police have released images of the suspect, who is described as having a beard and mustache, wearing a white t-shirt and light blue pants, and seen with a green jacket in the subway.

The intersection where the terrifying attack unfolded is just blocks from Washington Square Park, by a stretch of luxe apartment buildings.

Anyone with information regarding this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Sex Crimes Hotline at 1-212-267-7273 or 646-610-7272, the Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or, for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). 

The ambitious £50 million lawsuit spearheaded by Prince Harry, Doreen Lawrence, and a retinue of other prominent personalities against the Daily Mail’s publishers has been entirely thrown out by the court today.

This sentiment of victory was echoed as the Daily Mail’s Editor-in-Chief heralded what he described as ‘a momentous victory’ after a High Court judge firmly rejected the claims led by Prince Harry and Baroness Doreen Lawrence concerning allegations of phone hacking.

Paul Dacre expressed a sense of ‘overwhelming vindication of our journalism’ after Mr. Justice Nicklin cleared the Mail and its reporters of any wrongdoing, solidifying the trust in their journalistic efforts.

This landmark decision saw the case dismissed entirely, leaving the seven claimants, including renowned figures like Sir Elton John, potentially facing a hefty £50 million in legal costs.

Paul Dacre, the Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers, heartily celebrated the verdict, calling it a triumph not just for the journalists of the Daily Mail but for press freedom as a whole. He remarked, “Today’s verdict is a profound victory for the remarkable journalists at Associated, many of whom have faced great personal challenges during this ordeal, and for a free press. Let’s be clear: this was an attempt, backed by Hacked Off, to take down a newspaper.”

‘The truth is that this trumped-up action – which has cost well over £50million and wasted a huge amount of valuable court time – should never have been brought to trial.’

There was no immediate reaction from the defeated duke or any of his fellow claimants.

In a blaze of publicity, they falsely accused dozens of professional reporters and writers of commissioning crimes including phone hacking, burglaries, car bugging, landline phone tapping and placing ‘sticky window microphones’ on celebrities’ homes. None of it was true.

The extraordinary allegation of burgling people’s homes was struck out before the trial even began. Now, in a decisive judgment following a three-month trial at the beginning of this year, Mr Justice Nicklin has thrown out their case in its entirety.  

He accepted the explanations of the parade of journalists who came to the High Court to explain the legitimate sourcing of all 57 articles or incidents the claimants had said came from unlawful activity.

Mr Justice Nicklin said in his 436-page ruling: ‘Associated called journalist witnesses who gave lawful explanations for the sourcing of the disputed articles and incidents.

‘The court accepted their evidence, including their denials of UIG [unlawful information gathering].’ 

Harry this evening branded the High Court judgment which ruled against him in his privacy case against the Daily Mail a ‘whitewash’.

In a joint statement with Baroness Lawrence reacting to the ruling, the Duke of Sussex said: ‘It is a complete and obvious whitewash, but sadly not altogether unexpected.

‘However, the lengths to which the court has gone to exonerate the Mail is as shocking as it is totally unwarranted…

‘It feels here like one rule for the newspapers and another for the claimants.’

It was Harry who recruited Baroness Lawrence as a ‘trophy’ claimant to the doomed case against the newspaper that had tirelessly championed her and successfully campaigned to jail two of her murdered son Stephen Lawrence’s killers.  

The campaigners alighted on Baroness Lawrence as a ‘national treasure’ after suggesting Gary Lineker was unsuitable because ‘he has no dead children’.

Egged on by Harry and anti-Press campaigners, Baroness Lawrence turned on the Mail, accusing the newspaper and its award-winning crime reporter Stephen Wright of landline tapping, blagging, hacking into voicemails and making corrupt payments to serving police officers. It was all found to be false, and today after four years Mr Wright has been comprehensively exonerated. 

Mr Justice Nicklin declared Mr Wright a ‘truthful’ witness whose explanations were ‘coherent and plausible’, and roundly dismissed the allegation he had corruptly paid police officers.

As editor of the Mail, Mr Dacre wrote the famous front page headline ‘Murderers!’, which could have seen him jailed for contempt but instead eventually led to the jailing of two of Stephen Lawrence’s killers.

Mr Dacre said today: ‘Why Baroness Lawrence – for whom we have always had profound respect and sympathy – chose to turn on both the paper, and the brilliant reporter who campaigned for justice for her son for over two decades, is something I will never be able to comprehend.’

He described Prince Harry as ‘a confused and angry young man’ and said about his memoir Spare: ‘There isn’t a laundry in the cosmos big enough to wash all the dirty linen he has aired about his own family. For him, to complain about HIS privacy being invaded takes, not just the biscuit, but the whole tin.’

The judge hailed the Mail’s Royal Editor Rebecca English as ‘an impressive and honest witness’ and ruled her explanations for where she had sourced stories were ‘entirely plausible’. 

He threw out an allegation she had tried to get the flight details of Prince Harry’s former girlfriend Chelsy Davey.

The judge was also critical of the claimants’ lawyers for advancing allegations against Ms English at the trial in relation to phone hacking which were ‘entirely unsupported by evidence’.

The four-year legal battle involved seven claimants, who are the Duke of Sussex, 41, Baroness Lawrence, 73, Sir Elton, 79, and his husband David Furnish, model and actress Elizabeth Hurley, 61, actress Sadie Frost, 61, and former Lib Dem MP Sir Simon Hughes, 75.  

They are all jointly liable for any legal costs that are awarded against them. A costs hearing is scheduled for July 29, at which who has to pay the estimated total legal costs of £50million will be considered by the judge.

Mr Justice Nicklin said the duke and the other claimants were ‘open to criticism’ for the way they had pursued ‘extremely serious’ allegations that senior Associated staff lied to the Leveson inquiry into Press standards.

He also remarked that Evan Harris, a former Liberal Democrat MP who worked as a researcher for Harry’s lawyers, made an ‘improper and dishonest’ proposal while preparing the claim of Sir Simon Hughes, a former Justice Minister.

Today Associated Newspapers said: ‘We will look to resolve outstanding issues, including the recovery of the costs we have incurred while defending ourselves against this egregious litigation.

‘Mr Justice Nicklin today cleared the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday, and dismissed every single one of the 97 allegations made by the claimants. In every case, the Judge accepted the honesty of our journalists’ evidence on how they sourced their stories.

‘This is a magnificent vindication of the Daily Mail’s journalism.

‘For some of the most outrageous allegations made when the case was launched in a blaze of publicity four years ago – placing bugs in people’s cars and homes, listening to calls as they were made and illicitly accessing bank accounts – no credible evidence was ever presented.

‘As we said at the time, these allegations were ‘lurid’ and ‘preposterous’, and were a fishing expedition by the claimants and their legal teams in a politically motivated campaign to muzzle the free Press.

‘The reputations of our decent and hard-working journalists were terribly impugned, and today they have been exonerated.

‘As the judgment clearly shows, every single article was legitimately sourced.’

The claimants’ doomed case was initially bankrolled by the white supremacist millionaire and late Press campaigner Max Mosley, whose cash donations were subsequently used to ‘pay for testimony’ from potential witnesses and induce them to ‘up their game’. 

Mr Burrows was given £5,000 a month. Also funding the scheme was Geoff Stunt, father of the playboy James Stunt whose godfather is ‘Adams family’ crime boss Terry Adams. 

The plot to ‘bring down the Mail’ – codenamed Operation Bluebird – was more than a decade in the making and formed part of a political strategy designed to pressure the government into a second ‘Leveson’ public inquiry on press reform.

From the moment the case began in 2022, the Daily Mail consistently denied the accusations.

Even the claimants’ own supposed star witness, a private investigator named Gavin Burrows, told them he had never worked for the Mail, yet they ploughed ahead with the case anyway.

Prince Harry, Ms Hurley, Sir Elton, his husband David Furnish and Baroness Lawrence all launched their claims on the basis of alleged ‘admissions’ from Mr Burrows about hacking their voicemails, tapping their landlines, bugging Hugh Grant’s car and, in Ms Hurley’s case, placing a sticky microphone on her dining room window – none of which was true.

Mr Burrows said in his evidence his ‘confession’ statement had been penned by Prince Harry’s legal researchers and was ‘a pack of lies’ complete with a forgery for his signature. The statement was authenticated with a ‘certificate of compliance’ by Baroness Lawrence’s solicitor Anjlee Sangani. She quit the case just before the trial started. 

Mr Burows said Baroness Lawrence had been ‘duped’ into joining the case by the campaigners who boasted suing newspapers was a lucrative ‘gravy train’ and the ‘perfect scam’.

Farcically, when Mr Burrows came to give evidence on oath, the claimants tied themselves in knots and were reduced to calling their star witness a liar and a drunk.

Mr Justice Nicklin said Mr Burrows had been an ‘argumentative, evasive’ witness whose ‘credibility was comprehensively undermined’ and had not provided ‘any coherent or reliable evidential foundation’ for his claims.

Ms Hurley, who repeatedly sobbed into a tissue throughout her own time in the witness box, accused the Mail of ‘monstrous’ conduct. 

But the model and actress’s allegations including that the Mail planted ‘sticky window microphones’ on her windowsill relied heavily on the suggestion that Mr Burrows had ‘confessed’ to targeting her – which he said was lies.

The judge said it was ‘clear that she had been deeply shocked when she learned of Mr Burrows’ allegations concerning her’ but that ‘she has limited evidence to give on the contentious matters in dispute’.

Sir Elton John, giving testimony over a video link wearing bright-blue-framed glasses, snapped at the Mail’s barrister and demanded to know why he wasn’t being questioned about the ‘horrendous things’ the claimants’ legal team alleged Mr Burrows had done, in his claim brought jointly with his husband.

The judge said that Sir Elton had ‘appeared to find the limited extent to which he was questioned to be frustrating’ and, like the other claimants, the singer had ‘limited evidence to give’ on the matters in hand. 

Media lawyer Louis Charalambous called the case ‘a calamity for all seven claimants’ and said: ‘It is rare for a newspaper to win cases like this. The spotlight will now be on the people who encouraged the claimants to bring these cases and the financial position it puts them in. In all likelihood it spells the end of this kind of litigation.’

The campaigners pulling the strings behind the scenes were serial conman and convicted phone hacker Graham Johnson and Evan Harris, the former Lib Dem MP who went on to run pressure group Hacked Off.

Together with a group of lawyers who have grown rich by suing newspapers, the campaigners embarked on a scheme to destroy the Mail. They offered private investigators cash to give evidence ‘whether factual or not’, invented claims of hacking and tried to recruit celebrity ‘victims’. 

Dr Harris spent a decade urging famous names to ‘sue the a*** off the Mail’.

The Mirror group of newspapers was sued in 2023 and The Sun in 2024. The anti-Press campaigners were convinced the Daily Mail ‘had the most money’ and ‘would pay up’ rather than fight, the court heard they had boasted.

Instead, more than 40 Mail journalists past and present helped publisher Associated Newspapers mount a trenchant defence. The journalists had spent years with baseless claims of criminal conduct hanging over them.

In a chilling crime that has left authorities and the local community shocked, an Illinois man has been accused of fatally stabbing his half-brother during a heated argument. He then allegedly collaborated with the victim’s wife to hide their gruesome deed by dismembering the body. The pair reportedly froze the head, neck, and torso, and stealthily disposed of other body parts in a lake.

This heinous act has led to serious charges against James Adams, aged 26, and Robin Turner, 62. According to the Illinois State Police, both face accusations of concealment of a homicide and dismembering a human body, following the demise of Dalewayne Turner, who was 38 at the time of his death.

The gruesome discovery began on June 28 when boaters on Lake Mattoon stumbled across part of a human arm. Their chilling find prompted an investigation, which unearthed additional remains in the vicinity.

For investigative teams, identifying the victim hinged on his unique tattoos, which ultimately confirmed the remains as those of Dalewayne Turner.

Adams and Robin Turner were quickly identified as potential suspects and taken into custody.

According to court documents released on Monday, Adams admitted to fatally stabbing his half-brother, and the victim’s wife failed to contact law enforcement after the killing, Fox 32 reported.

Adams had claimed he killed the victim in an act of self-defense, and Robin Turner said the two men were arguing in the living room when Adams stabbed her husband multiple times, the documents said.

“The one thing I will say is that I did it, but I did it out of self-defense. I will tell you guys that,” James said, according to the documents.

The two suspects are accused of taking several steps to conceal the crime, including using bleach to clean the home and mask odors, repainting parts of the house, removing and burning wood paneling in a fire pit and disposing of rugs, the documents said.

Robin Turner told investigators the repainting and remodeling were part of renovation work completed between June 21 and June 30.

Some parts of Dalewayne Turner’s dismembered body were found in a freezer, investigators said.

On Wednesday, investigators searched the home and found a downstairs freezer with what appeared to be a bloodstain dripping from a drain hole, according to court records, Fox 32 reported. Investigators opened the freezer and discovered a torso, neck and head but no limbs.

Investigators said the remains were placed in trash bags, weighted down, sealed with duct tape and dumped in Lake Mattoon. But prosecutors said one weighted bag tore apart, allowing the victim’s tattooed arm to rise to the water’s surface.

Subsequent searches revealed additional weighted bags containing human remains in the lake, authorities said.

The two suspects are scheduled to appear in court on Thursday for a detention hearing.

A GoFundMe created to cover funeral expenses had raised more than $1,300 as of Tuesday afternoon.

“Our brother Dalewayne E. Turner was tragically taken away from us, leaving our family heartbroken,” the fundraiser reads.