Because the suspect was a juvenile, early media reports did not name him. After the state determined the suspect would be tried as an adult, however, he was revealed to be Aiden Fucci, an eighth grader who lived less than a mile from Bailey in their “close-knit” neighborhood of Durbin Crossing, a few miles outside of St. Johns.

Bailey had been last seen by her family around midnight on Saturday, May 8. Around 1:15 a.m., Bailey and the suspect were seen on surveillance footage near Durbin Crossing North Amenities Center in Durbin Crossing. Around 1:45 a.m., the two classmates were captured on a home surveillance video walking together along Saddlebrook Drive. The same home captured video at 3:27 a.m. of Fucci walking by himself, shoes in hand.

On Sunday morning, Bailey’s family could not locate her, so they called 911 and reported Bailey missing around 10 a.m. St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office swiftly issued a “Florida Missing Child Alert,” and many families in the Durbin Crossing community went around the neighborhood to look for Bailey. An aviation unit from the sheriff’s office flew overhead to locate the missing girl.

“We saw moms and families out walking the woodline in clothes like church clothes yesterday,” said St. Johns County Sheriff Robert Hardwick, on Monday.

The initial search for Bailey during the afternoon of Sunday, May 9, was unsuccessful. But around 6 p.m. that evening, a resident jogging through a remote, wooded area of the community came across a young person’s body near a retention pond. The sheriff’s office was notified and the victim was soon confirmed to be Bailey.

Bailey was found clothed, wearing black sweatpants and a black t-shirt, but the sheriff’s office revealed no initial information about her cause of death or details of the crime scene. Within hours, several crime scenes had been cordoned off, including two homes and the retention pond near where Bailey was found.

Overnight, the suspect was taken into custody and held on a second-degree murder charge. He was detained and moved to a juvenile facility in Volusia County, north of Orlando.

On Monday, May 10, Patriot Oaks Academy—a school with about 1,500 students—reported some 200 absences, many from students who were unable to process what seemed like an unthinkable tragedy in their community.

“We now have two families that are devastated and heartbroken,” wrote Allison Olson, the principal of Patriot Oaks Academy, in an email.

Patriot Oaks Academy offered on-site grief counseling to students who did attend school that day, and throughout the rest of the week. Many students wore white, or aqua—Bailey’s favorite color—to commemorate her life.

On Monday night, a candlelight vigil was held at a park near where Bailey was found, as classmates, family members, and friends gathered to remember her life. Students in aqua t-shirts, some with the hashtag #LLTB—Long Live Tristyn Bailey—circled a growing collection of candles, photos, keepsakes.

As the community found itself reeling from a senseless crime, sheriff Hardwick began the search for answers.

“I don’t think the totality of the circumstances in this case can be easily explained,” he said in an interview several days after Bailey’s murder.

Who was Tristyn Bailey?

Tristyn Bailey was a 13-year-old seventh grader at Patriot Oaks Academy, in St. Johns, Florida. She was the youngest of five children—four sisters and one brother—to Forrest and Stacy Bailey. Together the family referred to themselves as “The Bailey 7.” As the youngest of the group, Tristyn was known as “Baby Bailey.”

Bailey, considered by many a “natural performer,” was a cheerleader for three cheer squads in her community, including a team called Infinity Allstars, which had recently won first-place in an ESPN cheer competition in Orlando. She was also part of the school’s Patriot Oaks Chargers cheerleaders. During a community memorial held after her family’s private funeral, the jacket she wore from the Orlando competition was displayed on stage.

By all accounts, Bailey was known as a charming, extroverted girl. “She was just this amazing person with a love for everyone,” said eighth grader Addison Strumlauf.

“She always was the first to hug me,” said Tanya White, one of Bailey’s cheer coaches. “She was officially my favorite.” Another coach, Jessica Moltisanti, had worked with Bailey since she was seven. “She brought such a bright energy to everything she did,” Moltisanti said, “and she touched so many people around her.”

During her memorial, friends and family shared stories and memories that recalled Bailey’s exuberance and energy. Her sister Brittney remarked on her youngest sister’s “contagious laugh,” and her mother recalled how vocal Bailey had been, starting from day one.

“She was the loudest one in the nursery,” Stacy said.

Forrest shared similar sentiments at Tristyn’s memorial, and attempted to put a positive mindset on the tragedy. “Our love is greater than the evil that can exist in the world,” he said, reminding those in attendance that “when things get difficult and challenging, I want you to hear one more voice in your head. And hear her cheering you on.”

Who is Aiden Fucci?

At the time of the murder, Aiden Fucci was a 14-year-old eighth grader at Patriot Oaks Academy. He was described as being 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighing 179 pounds. He lived several blocks from Bailey, and knew of the girl, but it wasn’t clear how well they were acquainted. It was not believed that the two had a romantic relationship, and it was never fully clear why Fucci chose Bailey as his victim.

Fucci’s mother was Crystal Lane Smith, 35 at the time of the incident. Within a month of the murder, Smith was charged with tampering with evidence—a third-degree felony in Florida—after investigators discovered video footage from inside the Fucci home of Smith scrubbing blue jeans that were thought to be the pants Fucci wore the night of Bailey’s murder. In July, she pleaded not guilty.

Fucci’s father was Jason Michael Fucci, 36 at the time of the murder. He owned a landscaping business in Jacksonville, and had several convictions on his record. In 2016, he was charged with battery after assaulting a man at a gas station who had allegedly come close to bumping Jason’s son.

Jason was sentenced to anger management classes and six months of probation. As a 19-year-old in 2003, Jason had also been charged with child abuse and related charges when he had consensual relations with a minor.

Timeline of the Crime

On Saturday, May 8, 2021, the Bailey family returned to their home in Durbin Crossing around 11:45 p.m. after going out for dinner and visiting one of the Baileys’ adult siblings. Tristyn Bailey was last seen around midnight by one of her siblings, who assumed she was going to bed.

According to St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office reports, Bailey instead left the house and walked to a friend’s home in the neighborhood around 12:30 a.m. This friend was also a friend of Fucci, and had provided Fucci with Bailey’s phone number that night. It was later revealed that Fucci had contacted Bailey and convinced her to leave home just after midnight.

Fucci and Bailey were seen on video footage around 1:15 a.m. near the community’s amenity center, and at 1:45 a.m., they were seen on video walking east Saddlestone Drive—toward the area where Bailey’s body would eventually be found. Just before 3:30 a.m., Fucci was seen on video walking, alone, west on Saddlestone Drive. He had a white pair of shoes in his hands.

When a sibling went to wake up Bailey for Mother’s Day breakfast around 9:40 a.m., the family discovered she was not in bed. They searched the home and nearby area for her, but after no success, called the sheriff’s office around 10 a.m. to report her missing. They posted on social media to spread the word, and went out into the neighborhood to search for Bailey.

Sheriff’s deputies immediately canvassed the private neighborhood and pulled video surveillance footage from several residences. With this footage, officers were able to piece together a rough timeline of her whereabouts in relatively short order. By Sunday afternoon, however, they still had not located Bailey.

The sheriff’s office requested a ping order to locate Bailey’s cell phone, which had been going right to voicemail, but there was no way to locate its precise location. The family used the Life 360 app, but its location-sharing features had been turned off and didn’t provide any useful information.

With video evidence of Fucci and Bailey being seen together, deputies questioned Fucci about what had happened in the early hours of Sunday. When he was first questioned around 4:30 p.m., Fucci’s initial story was that the two had left a mutual friend’s house around 1 a.m., and then parted ways—she walking home and he walking around the neighborhood alone until about 3:00 to 3:30 a.m.

His story soon changed, however. In his second retelling of the events, Fucci said that the two had gotten in an altercation that night, and that Fucci pushed Bailey to the ground after she attempted to grab him. She hit her head, Fucci claimed, and because he was high from smoking marijuana, he walked away and didn’t see if she got up or not.

Fucci also claimed that Bailey may have been in contact with a known drug dealer who operated near the amenity center, apparently a known place for afterhours teenage drug use. When deputies followed up on the lead, however, they found no connection between the supposed drug dealer and what happened in the early hours of May 9.

Throughout the early investigation, Fucci’s behavior was defiant. While he was being held in a police car, on Sunday, for example, he posted on Snapchat: “Hey guys, has inbody [sic] seen Tristyn lately.” A message later retrieved from his phone read: “You were with her Aiden u know what happened to her.”

Just after 6 p.m., a resident jogging through a wooded area near Saddlestone Drive spotted what appeared to be a body. He called the sheriff’s office, and they quickly confirmed the remains to be Bailey. Her body was found about 140 feet from a small retention pond.

With video evidence suggesting the timeline of events, and now with Bailey’s body recovered, the sheriff’s office was ready to move quickly in their investigation.

Evidence and Investigation

Just before 9 p.m. Sunday night, Fucci and his parents, Crystal Smith and Jason Fucci, were placed in an interview room at the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. According to their reports, Smith advised Fucci that the room was being recorded, and both parents “advised Aiden to find his story and stick to it.”

Smith revealed to her son that they had found Bailey’s body. “How is it my problem?” Aiden asked. His parents told him that according to what they knew, he was the last person to be seen with the teenager. They asked if there was anything on the clothes that he wore that night that might be evidence of a crime, and he said there was not.

Perhaps already aware that her son may have been in legal trouble, Smith had gone into Fucci’s room that afternoon, and around 1 p.m., had taken his jeans and scrubbed them in the bathroom for some time. A search of the home would later reveal dirt and blood traces in the bathroom where she’d attempted to clean the pants.

While in the interview room waiting for detectives, Jason Fucci typed something on this phone and handed it to Fucci. They did this several times as a way to “subvert investigative efforts” read a later sheriff’s report.

Around 12:45 a.m., investigators began searching the Fucci home, where they found Fucci’s clothing from Saturday night, including a wet t-shirt, wet blue jeans, and a pair of white Nike shoes. There appeared to be traces of blood on the clothing, though it would take time to determine where it had come from.

Deputies also recovered eight pocket knives, several homemade “shanks,” and a number of graphic drawings that Fucci was well-known for creating. Some of them depicted violent scenes and “depicted a Satanic element.” The search also revealed marijuana paraphernalia, and a towel with possible traces of blood.

With this evidence, Fucci was arrested at 3:30 a.m. and charged with second-degree murder.

Few initial details were revealed about the murder, but within days, the St. Johns County Medical Examiner’s Office reported that Bailey’s official cause of death was due to “sharp force trauma by stabbing.” Bailey had suffered from 114 stab wounds to her body—most of which were defensive, on her hands, arms, and head.

The tip of the knife used to attack Bailey was found in her body during an autopsy.

“Based on the nature of the injuries,” read the sheriff’s office report, “it appeared the suspect was standing behind Tristyn and came at a downward angle.” Her time of death was narrowed down to between 1:45 a.m. and 3:30 a.m.

The medical examiner also found, on the inside of Bailey’s left ankle, the word “karma,” written in blue ink. On her right ankle was a small smiley face. It wasn’t known who drew the two markings, and if they had occurred at school or on the night of the murder.

A judge ordered Fucci to be held without bond for 21 days, giving the state time to decide if he would be tried as an adult or a juvenile. After the medical report, however, the state’s attorneys revealed that the graphic severity of the attack would mean that Fucci would now face an adult charge, and it would be escalated to first-degree murder.

“The bottom line is that premeditation could be inferred certainly from just the sheer number of stab wounds that TB had to suffer,” said R.J. Larizza, state attorney for the 7th Judicial Circuit. “Every time that arm went back, and every time that arm went down, that was premeditation.”

This is what many in the community—and state—expected. By late May, just weeks after the murder, a petition on change.org had more than 700,000 signatures all requesting Fucci be tried as an adult.

Fucci had been detained at Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Volusia County, but after the state announced that he would be tried as an adult, he was moved to a juvenile wing of an adult facility in St. Johns County.

“The adult system is where this case belongs,” Larizza said.

During the investigation, authorities soon pieced together more of the scene that took place near Saddlestone Drive. A knife was found in the retention pond near Bailey’s body, and was matched to a sheath found in Fucci’s home.

According to one witness, a friend of Fucci’s, he routinely brought two knives to school and nicknamed them “Picker” and “Poker.” The knife in the pond, according to the witness, was the one Fucci called “Poker.”

Other witnesses, including Fucci’s girlfriend, reported that he often talked about death and killing. On more than one occasion in the weeks and months leading up to Bailey’s murder, Fucci mentioned to friends that he “intended to kill someone by taking them in the woods and stabbing them,” reported one witness.

His girlfriend claimed that Fucci said he heard voices when he was angry, and they told him to commit violent acts. He had never acted upon these, reports claimed, but his girlfriend said that he would “mock” stab her as a joke. Multiple friends of Fucci heard and saw his behaviors, but none believed they were legitimate threats.

While in custody, Fucci didn’t present any signs of mental illness, though he did get into multiple altercations with other inmates while he awaited trial. On more than one occasion, he had to be pepper sprayed or detained for various infractions, including threatening guards and inmates, bullying others into giving up their commissary items, and possessing contraband.

In June 2021, Crystal Smith was charged with tampering with evidence for washing Fucci’s jeans on Sunday afternoon. She pleaded not guilty to the felony charge, which carried a potential for five years in prison and up to a $50,000 fine. She was released on bail shortly after surrendering to the sheriff’s office. She would eventually plead no contest to tampering with evidence and was sentenced to 30 days in jail with five years of probation.

As the investigation continued, the blood found on Fucci’s clothing and shoes matched Bailey’s DNA. The knife found in the retention pond was also confirmed to be the same blade that was used to attack Bailey. Within months, the state attorney’s office and St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office investigators had enough evidence to move forward.

The Court Case

In June 2021, Fucci had pleaded not guilty to his murder charge. Because of the unusual aspects of the case, and with more than 200 witnesses to process, his trial wasn’t scheduled to begin until the following year. In August 2022, his defense requested the judge limit media access to the proceedings, and wanted the autopsy photos to be unavailable to the jury.

Both these motions were denied, and Judge R. Lee Smith also denied a later motion to move the trial’s venue. The judge did grant the prosecution’s request to a six-person jury, however, as the state argued that Fucci’s was not a capital case, because of his age, and didn’t require 12 jurors. The trial was eventually scheduled for February 2023.

On Monday, February 6, 2023—the same morning jury selection for his trial was scheduled to begin—Fucci pleaded guilty to the murder of Tristyn Bailey. “I just want to say I plead guilty and I’m sorry for the Bailey family and my family,” he said to the judge.

The plea was positively received by St. Johns County Sheriff Hardwick, as well as the Bailey family. “This was an all out agency effort,” Hardwick said. “The trial preparation process is just as tedious as the investigation itself. The detectives have not stopped working this case since the initial call we received.”

Stacy Bailey, Tristyn’s mother, praised the prosecutor’s office for their commitment to justice. “Just as Tristyn fought for her life,” read the family’s statement, “we equally fought for her and would not agree to any plea deal. We were fully aligned with the prosecutor in rejecting the proposed plea deals mentioned by the public defender during the plea hearing.”

In March, Fucci and his parents submitted letters to the judge, and a sentencing hearing lasting two days took into account statements from each family. “Most of all, I grieve for Stacy Bailey as a mother,” wrote Crystal Smith in her letter to the court. During the sentencing hearing, one of Tristyn’s sisters, Alexis, dropped 114 aqua-colored stone hearts into a jar, mirroring the number of times her sister had been stabbed.

On Friday, March 24, 2023, Fucci was sentenced to life in prison. Under Florida law, the sentence could be reviewed by a judge in 25 years (Fucci’s defense was seeking a 40-year sentence). In explaining his reasoning, Judge R. Lee Smith called the crime one of the most heinous he had seen in his career.

“This case is probably the most difficult and shocking case that this county, St. Johns County, has dealt with,” Smith said. “It was done for no other reason than to satisfy this defendant’s internal desire to feel what it was like to kill someone.”

Nearly two years had passed since Bailey’s death, and with a conviction and life sentence in place, her family was ready to move to their next stage of healing.

“In the days ahead, we’re going to talk more about Tristyn and plans to continue her legacy,” said her father. “We will always be the Bailey 7.”

Today, the Tristyn Bailey Foundation offers assistance to families and young people through a focus on character development, self-defense, victim advocacy, and awareness of the dangers of social media.

FAQs

What was the motive behind Tristyn Bailey’s murder?

No definitive motive was ever established for Tristyn Bailey’s murder. During the investigation and court proceedings, Fucci didn’t provide a clear explanation for why he killed the teenager.

Testimony from multiple witnesses, including Fucci’s friends, indicated that he had previously spoken about wanting to kill someone in the woods, but did not articulate a specific reason why. At sentencing, Judge R. Lee Smith stated that the evidence suggested the crime was driven by Fucci’s desire to commit an act of violence rather than by any specific motive.

How did the community respond to Tristyn Bailey’s death?

The community of Durbin Crossing, and St. Johns, showed immense support for the Bailey family after the murder. Aqua bows, ribbons, and signs were common in their neighborhood, and numerous families offered the Baileys help with meals and other needs during the two-year investigation and criminal proceedings.

Forrest and Stacy Bailey offered continual gratitude and praise to their community for helping them get through their ordeal.

Where is Aiden Fucci now?

Today, Fucci is serving his life sentence at Cross City Correctional Institution in Cross City, Florida. In July 2025, Fucci lost an appeal filed by his defense team in 2023.

Watch & Listen: Additional Reporting

This list includes additional reporting and documentaries from established media outlets. Inclusion does not imply endorsement of any specific narrative or production approach.

• First Coast News - Remembering Tristyn Bailey
  A memorable interview with Forrest Bailey, Tristyn’s father, who continues remembering her legacy.

• Murder Under the Friday Night Lights - Monster Among Trolls
  Investigation Discovery show that focuses on social media’s role in Bailey’s murder investigation.

• Anatomy of a Murder - Walking in the Night - Part 1 (Tristyn Bailey)
  Two-part podcast on Bailey’s murder and the investigation that followed.

Sources & Documentation

• The Florida Times-Union, May 11, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, May 12, 2021

• Orlando Sentinel, May 12, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, May 17, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, May 20, 2021

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, May 21, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, May 25, 2021

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, May 28, 2021

• The Palm Beach Post, June 5, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, June 6, 2021

• Northwest Florida Daily News, June 7, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, July 15, 2021

• Florida Today, July 18, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, July 27, 2021

• The Florida Times-Union, October 29, 2021

• Orlando Sentinel, October 31, 2021

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, May 9, 2022

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, August 18, 2022

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, February 6, 2023

• Orlando Sentinel, February 7, 2023

• Tallahassee Democrat, February 8, 2023

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, February 8, 2023

• The Daytona Beach News-Journal, March 26, 2023

• South Florida Sun Sentinel, March 26, 2023

• Tristyn Bailey Foundation, Inc. (n.d.). Our community, our mission. Tristyn Bailey Foundation. https://tbstrong.org

• St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office. Incident report narrative by Officer Kurt Hannon, May 9, 2021. Obtained via DocumentCloud. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20996650-incident-report-from-ofc-kurt-hannon/

• Florida Department of Corrections. Inmate search records for Aiden Fucci. Accessed Dec. 16, 2025.

• First Coast News, “Aiden Fucci’s life sentence stands for murder in St. Johns County, even after appeal,” July 19, 2025, https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/crime/aiden-fucci-life-sentence-murder-in-st-johns-county-appeal/77-29e48170-50d9-4131-aaf8-9f38511506b

For Alisha Jackson, the first weekend of September 1998 was bound to be a special one. She and her three sisters would celebrate their mother’s birthday, and the 27-year-old planned a surprise announcement of her own: she was engaged to be married.

On Saturday, September 5, Alisha and her fiancé, Tyrone Davis, drove from Jackson, Mississippi, to Fernwood—about 85 miles south—to visit her mother, Thadoria Jackson.

The sprawling suburbs gradually gave way to small towns, roadside churches, and tranquil farmland. The couple headed toward Fernwood, a quiet hamlet in Pike County’s woods, built by one of southern Mississippi’s largest lumber companies in the 19th century.

That weekend, Alisha introduced Tyrone to her family, including her two older sisters, Sabrina and Sonjia, and her younger sister, Stacey. Alisha and Stacey shared a particularly close bond. Stacey, the youngest Jackson sister, attended Hinds Community College and often visited Alisha’s North Jackson apartment after class.

The weekend unfolded wonderfully. Three generations of Jackson women celebrated Thadoria’s birthday, and everyone congratulated Alisha and Tyrone on their engagement.

During the party, Alisha recounted a recent dream she’d had about her father, Larry Jackson, who had died five years earlier, on Valentine’s Day.

“Alisha said tears rolled down his face, but he smiled at her,” recalled her sister Sabrina, years later. “She said, ‘I was going somewhere with my daddy.’ Our grandmother got real quiet. She said to Alisha, ‘Baby, if you have that dream again, don’t you go with him. Don’t ever go.’”

Over the weekend, Alisha and Tyrone sat with Thadoria on her living room couch to discuss their wedding, planned for Saturday, March 6, 1999. That gave the couple exactly six months to plan, and they got to work right away on Thadoria’s living room couch. When they set out for Jackson that Sunday, Alisha and Tyrone looked forward to building their life together.

Two days later, on the night of Monday, September 7, 19-year-old Stacey drove to Alisha’s apartment after class. Her college campus was just outside Jackson, and it was less than a 30-minute drive to Alisha’s apartment, 25B, at Pepper Mill Apartments. Stacey took out her key and entered the residence. She turned on the lights and immediately saw the body of her sister, Alisha, sitting against the wall in a horrifying manner.

Alisha’s eyes were open, but she was clearly no longer alive. Stacey’s haunting screams got the attention of an off-duty Jackson police officer who happened to live at the complex.

He rushed over to see what had happened. Inside, he found Stacey holding Alisha, who had been stabbed repeatedly in the head, neck, and chest.

Stacey was understandably shocked by her sister’s death. Less than 48 hours earlier, the Jackson family had been celebrating a birthday and planning a wedding.

Five years later, with Alisha’s murder still unsolved, Thadoria confessed that Stacey—who had dropped out of medical school after discovering her sister’s body—had never been the same.

“When she found that,” Thadoria said, “it did something to that child.”

When police arrived at Alisha’s apartment that evening, they found no signs of forced entry. A medical examination revealed she had been stabbed 52 times with a knife from her own kitchen. The brutality of the attack suggested it was personal.

“This is a vengeful type killing,” said Jackson Police Detective Brent Winstead.

But the Jackson family couldn’t imagine who would harbor such hatred for Alisha. Born in Independence, Louisiana, in 1971, she was deeply rooted in her faith and community. She led the usher board at North End Church of God in Christ in Jackson and belonged to the Order of the Eastern Star. When she wasn’t working or at church, she stayed close to home in North Jackson with her sprawling family of sisters, nine uncles, six aunts, and a niece.

In high school, Alisha had been a cheerleader and basketball player before attending Southwest Mississippi Community College. At the time of her death, she worked as a Medicaid billing specialist for Uni-Care—a job centered on helping others, just like everything else in her life.

When she was discovered stabbed to death in her own apartment, then, the Jackson family had little to offer investigators. Sonjia recalled that in the weeks before Alisha’s death, a Pepper Mill manager mentioned that a woman had been seen “beating” on Alisha’s door. According to Sonjia, Alisha had also received threatening notes on her car at her workplace in Ridgeland, north of Jackson.

Police interviewed neighbors based on Sonjia’s tips, but the leads went nowhere. Her fiancé, Tyrone, provided a verified alibi when he proved that he was at work that day. During the investigation, police learned that Sonjia had stayed with Alisha for about a week before the murder.

During that time, she’d met several neighbors, including Jerry Livingston, who visited so frequently that Sonjia assumed he worked maintenance for the complex. He was just a resident, Alisha had assured her.

Jackson Police Detective Willie Mack interviewed Livingston and others, but nothing substantial emerged. Mack found it odd that Livingston had visited Alisha so often, especially given her engagement to Tyrone, but there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder.

The scene of the homicide was cleaned quickly. Thadoria later complained that the apartment complex sent repairmen the very next day to tear out carpet, replace drywall, and scrub the unit top to bottom for the next tenants. It was one of the first signs, according to Thadoria, that others viewed Alisha’s death as simply a statistic to be noted, archived, and forgotten.

While Mack investigated the case, Thadoria took her own approach to solving her daughter’s murder. Alisha’s mother was no stranger to the criminal justice system: she was a booking deputy at Pike County Sheriff’s Department, and witnessed firsthand suspected criminals come in and out of the jail system for years.

Two days after Alisha’s death, she contacted Jackson Detective Winstead for an update. He had no progress to report, he said, as there were no witnesses or obvious physical evidence that could be traced back to an immediate suspect. Investigators did retrieve fingerprints from the scene, and a visible footprint, but it would take time to process the evidence.

Mack believed robbery wasn’t a motive in Alisha’s death, as nothing appeared to be missing. And with no sign of forced entry, it seemed that Alisha may have known her attacker. But that didn’t narrow the field enough, and as 1998 closed, Alisha’s death became one of 64 homicides in Jackson that year.

Some were solved. Others, like Alisha’s, remained open.

Every year, on Alisha’s August 1 birthday, Thadoria and her daughters placed a memorial in local newspapers. Some years, a small poem ran alongside Alisha’s photo. In others, her tribute appeared near one for Larry Jackson, her father, who died in 1993.

Thadoria had stayed strong for her daughters after her husband’s sudden death on Valentine’s Day 1993. But when Alisha died, that resolve shattered. Four years later, in 2002, Thadoria admitted she could barely function. She dragged herself through work most days and couldn’t sleep without medication.

“I have been in counseling, everywhere,” Thadoria told newspapers. “I don’t have the strength to go to work, but I have to work. It’s hard on me losing that child, and the way she was done. My daughter was only 27 years old, and she had her whole life jerked from her.”

That year, the Jackson family offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to arrests. Detective Mack still led the investigation, but remained stymied by a lack of evidence and leads. Thadoria maintained constant contact with Jackson police, believing her persistence would push them to work harder. Instead, she was reprimanded. A high-ranking Jackson Police official called Thadoria’s supervisor in Pike County and asked her to stop calling—she was interfering with their case.

“I don’t think it’s open at all,” Thadoria said of Jackson Police’s case in June 2003. “I think they closed it.”

In her view, her daughter’s case had gone under the radar—both with Mississippi officials and the media at large. When Alisha was killed, she attempted to contact everyone she could think of that might be able to help, from state Attorney General Mike Moore to mayor Harvey Johnson, the first black mayor in Jackson’s history. She even reached out to then-President Bill Clinton, hoping to generate nationwide attention.

Nothing worked.

Back in Mississippi, Thadoria tried partnering with attorneys to bring attention to the case. None accepted her as a client. When she reached out to 20/20 and America’s Most Wanted, neither helped. (Thadoria claimed Jackson Police didn’t share information with America’s Most Wanted, preventing them from featuring Alisha’s case.) The first investigator on the case proved particularly discouraging.

“You better depend on God,” the detective allegedly told her, “because we’ll probably never find out who did it.”

Meanwhile, Thadoria found that cases with similar characteristics, though “higher-profile” victims, were gaining nationwide attention. In the years following Alisha’s murder, the nation became captivated by Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, and Elizabeth Smart—cases that consumed the media’s relentless attention and drew rewards of $250,000 to $500,000 or more, dwarfing the $10,000 the Jacksons offered.

Thadoria felt her daughter’s case was being swept aside, perhaps due to the racial inequities that often plagued criminal justice systems and viewership-focused media cycles. But that didn’t stop Thadoria and her daughters from pursuing Alisha’s case. When Thadoria was told to stop calling Jackson Police, one of her daughters took over, calling weekly to monitor the case’s progress.

Over time, Alisha’s sisters regained some normalcy in their lives. Stacey, forever changed by the discovery of her sister’s lifeless body, re-enrolled in school, made the dean’s list, and expected to graduate in August 2003.

For years, Thadoria went about her own new routine: visiting Alisha’s grave at the Burton Temple Church of God in Christ cemetery.

“For the past four years,” she said, “I have not missed a week.”

On March 15, 2006, more than seven years after Alisha was murdered, Thadoria received a phone call from the Jackson Police Department. A suspect in Alisha’s case was under arrest.

The next day, Assistant Police Chief Roy Sandefer confirmed that the suspect was 30-year-old Jerry Livingston, Alisha’s former neighbor at Pepper Mill Apartments in 1998. Police couldn’t reveal much about the now-active investigation, but Detective Willie Mack, retired by then, admitted he’d interviewed Livingston multiple times during the initial investigation.

Livingston had always been one of his most obvious suspects, Mack said, but he could never gather enough evidence to warrant an arrest. Livingston had even admitted to being in Alisha’s apartment sometime before she was murdered—but that wasn’t enough to build a case.

“I didn’t want to make an arrest of that type and end up letting him go because there was not enough evidence there,” Mack said after Livingston was arrested. “If I was going to make an arrest on that case, I wanted it to stick.”

Authorities didn’t reveal what led to the 2006 arrest, but the Jacksons were eventually told that Livingston himself called 911 and confessed to the murder. The weight of what he had done so many years ago had led him to contact authorities.

Livingston was detained at the State Hospital in Whitfield for two years. Then, in October 2008, Livingston’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Alice Stamps, announced that her client was mentally incompetent to stand trial.

“I don’t expect it to come to trial anytime soon,” Stamps said.

The legal standard for mental competency is straightforward: defendants must understand the charges against them and be able to participate in their own defense. They must recall details of the incident and grasp how legal proceedings work. Being declared incompetent is less about mental illness, specifically, and more about one’s capacity to navigate the legal system.

According to Stamps, Livingston had undergone two separate mental evaluations, and in each, was found to be incompetent to face murder charges. This was a stunning turn of events for the Jackson family, who had, for two years, believed that the person responsible for Alisha’s murder would finally face justice.

“I’m very upset,” Thadoria told reporters. “This is tearing my heart out. It makes me angry.”

Despite their objections, there was little the family could do. If multiple doctors found Livingston mentally incapable of facing charges, there would be no trial.

In November 2009, Hinds County Circuit Judge Winston Kidd officially declared Livingston mentally incompetent. He would remain at the State Hospital at Whitfield and would not face charges for Alisha Jackson’s murder. Judge Kidd did stipulate that if Livingston was found competent in the future, he could still stand trial.

Eleven years had passed since Alisha was murdered. For eight years, hers was a cold case with no leads or arrests. For three years, the Jackson family had known exactly who killed Alisha, and for the past year, they had waited to see if he would stand trial. They had done everything they could, and they had never stopped fighting.

“The system has failed us,” Thadoria said after the judge’s ruling. “I don’t feel good about it. He wasn’t crazy before he did it.”

In August 2009, two months before Livingston was officially ruled incompetent to stand trial, Thadoria published a memorial for Alisha in McComb’s Enterprise-Journal:

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, love leaves a memory no one can steal. It’s hard to believe that 11 years has gone by since we suffered such devastating loss. We will forever love and cherish your memories in our hearts. Happy Birthday my Darling Daughter.

Inside Thadoria’s home, signs of Alisha remained everywhere. She kept her daughter’s brown Coach purse, still full of makeup, checkbook, random scraps of paper. Alisha’s clothes hung beside Larry’s saved wardrobe.

When Thadoria went for walks, she wore Alisha’s white tennis shoes—the last ones she saw her daughter ever wear. Photos throughout the house reminded the Jacksons of the light Alisha had brought to their lives for 27 years.

“If you had a bad day,” said Thadoria in 2003, five years after Alisha’s murder, “when you got around her you would be all right.”

After September 7, 1998, when the bad days seemed to stretch endlessly into the future, Thadoria sought that comfort at her daughter’s grave, hoping the girl who could lift anyone’s spirits might lift hers one more time.

On Christmas Eve 2002, New Mexico state police warned holiday drivers to avoid the southeastern region of the state if possible. Severe winter conditions and icy roads had made it unsafe to travel through Chaves County, including Roswell, and Eddy County, home to Carlsbad.

Recently, Carlsbad’s daytime temperatures had been pleasant, climbing into the 40s, but nighttime lows often dropped into the 20s, and whatever moisture was in the air froze and clung to the roads by morning.

Around 7:45 a.m. on Christmas Day, under a gray winter sky, a driver heading east out of town and passing an alfalfa field noticed something out of place—something that clearly didn’t belong in such an otherwise vast, ordinary expanse.

Near the intersection of Thomason Road and Fiesta Drive, the driver saw what appeared to be a person, but why they would be in such a field, at this time and on Christmas Day, was unknown. The driver pulled over and dialed 911.

When Carlsbad Fire Department arrived on the scene, first responders found a young woman barely clinging to life. She shivered violently and appeared to be suffering from massive head wounds.

Potential hypothermia and physical trauma had pushed the woman to the brink of unconsciousness. She was rushed to Carlsbad Medical Center, but when the extent of her injuries became clearer, the woman was airlifted to Covenant Medical Center in Lubbock, Texas, 180 miles to the northeast.

There, doctors waited for her body temperature to regulate so she could undergo surgery. During the operation, they removed several fragments of bullets from her skull. By the following day, the woman was in a coma and considered to be in extremely critical condition.

Back in Carlsbad, Eddy County Sheriff’s Department investigators canvassed the alfalfa field and surrounding area for clues as to what may have happened to the woman. Based on her condition—the hypothermia, the rigor in her limbs—authorities believed she’d been lying there for hours, possibly since the night before.

After questioning residents and businesses in the vicinity, investigators learned that the woman had last been seen around 10 p.m. at Allsup’s, a convenience store not far from where she was found.

There, authorities located her car, with the driver’s side door open and her keys still inside. It wasn’t immediately clear if the woman had been taken against her will or freely, but in either case, she had left the vehicle in a hurry.

Throughout Christmas Day, Eddy County Sheriff Kent Waller and Lt. Jim Ballard collected and processed what little evidence they could find. Most of it, however, came from the woman’s surgery: they hoped that the bullet fragments might indicate what firearm had been used in the crime.

On the morning of December 29, four days after she was discovered in the field, the young woman died from her irreparable wounds. Despite surgery and around-the-clock medical care, she could not be saved.

The woman was 21 years old, and her name was Sasha Hedgecock.

Carol Price described her blond-haired, green-eyed daughter as an “angel of God,” a bright, kind churchgoing young woman who was just beginning to put her adult life in order.

Just a few months before she died, Sasha Hedgecock had been baptized in the Pecos River in front of 30 friends and family. She’d been a member of two churches in town, including Oasis Christian Fellowship, where hundreds of friends, family, and sympathetic strangers attended the young woman’s funeral in early January 2003. With her churches, Sasha had participated in several mission trips, volunteering with youth groups in Mexico and Texas.

Her sisters—Desirae, Kayla, and Sierra—did what they could to process the incomprehensible loss of the family’s eldest sister, but the shock was nearly unbearable.

“They’re not handling it real well,” Carol said in the days after her daughter’s death. “She loved them so much.” Sierra, the youngest sister, had been so close to Sasha that her death resembled the loss of a parent.

Just as distraught was Zack Downen, Sasha’s boyfriend of several years, and recent fiancé. Zack had met Sasha while visiting from Dallas. They began dating, and soon after, he moved to Carlsbad to be with Sasha.

According to Zack, the couple planned to marry in Carlsbad and eventually move to Portales, where Sasha wanted to transfer to Eastern New Mexico University. She’d been attending New Mexico State University-Carlsbad but wanted to change schools to pursue her interest in forensic science.

Despite Carlsbad’s rough edges—the city was more utilitarian than artistic and quirky, like other New Mexico towns—Sasha and Zack had worked to build an adventurous life together.

They’d become certified scuba divers at Balmorhea State Park, where instructors teach in a dreamy, one-acre pool fed by San Solomon Springs waters that never dip below 72 degrees. In Portales, they’d planned a life centered around the university and the slower-paced lands north of Carlsbad.

Instead, Zack, Carol, and her daughters were now consumed with figuring out who killed the young woman who was their partner, daughter, sister. Bill Runkle, Carol’s long-time partner and Sasha’s stepfather, was also devastated by the loss of the woman he viewed as his own child. So too was John Hedgecock, Sasha’s father, though he was in prison at the time of her death. It wouldn’t be until his release several years later that he admitted, “it really hit me.”

Together, the family sought answers to Sasha’s death, but this proved complicated. Despite her deeply religious upbringing, Sasha’s life had shadows of its own.

She had plans for a bright future, but just a few months before she was killed, Sasha was arrested for “battery upon a household member,” a charge to which she pleaded no contest. Instead of jail time, she was placed on unsupervised probation.

In the days following Sasha’s death, rumors circulated through the small town that it was drug-related—perhaps a deal gone wrong. Carol vehemently denied the rumors, but they spread quickly all the same.

In early January, Sheriff Waller and Lt. Ballard asked the public for help identifying two pickup trucks seen at Allsup’s around the time Sasha was there on Christmas Eve. They believed one was a dark maroon, four-wheel drive pickup with heavily tinted windows. The other was black or dark blue.

The descriptions were hardly unique in a place like Carlsbad, where industrial work was common and many locals drove big, desert-hardened vehicles. Still, it was the best authorities had to work with. They eventually released a composite photo of the maroon truck they were most interested in, and slowly worked their way through a list of registered trucks in the area.

“If you own a truck and you are contacted by police,” said Lt. Ballard, “please be patient and understanding.”

When the early days of the investigation yielded few substantial leads, the sheriff’s department openly acknowledged that residents had information about the case, but weren’t coming forward. In the Carlsbad Current-Argus, a religious group ran ads to encourage spiritual answers. “Calling the Christian community for prayer and fasting for Sasha Hedgecock’s murder to be solved,” read one bulletin.

Law-abiding residents were also rattled by Sasha’s death and other recent crimes in town. Carlsbad had experienced seven armed robberies in less than one month before Sasha’s murder, which prompted the formation of Concerned Citizens of Carlsbad, run by a local named Clifford Stroud.

To support law enforcement, the group organized more than $15,000 in pledges toward a reward leading to an arrest and charges in Sasha’s case—or in any of the armed robberies that preceded it.

The group partnered with Eddy County Crime Stoppers, and together they ran newspaper notices whenever another significant crime occurred in town. For years, each time the Concerned Citizens of Carlsbad announced a crime, they included Sasha Hedgecock’s story—it was their origin as a coalition, but it was also a way to ensure that Sasha’s name didn’t leave the local media spotlight.

In February 2003, the Lubbock County Medical Examiner’s Office revealed the full extent of Sasha’s injuries. According to her autopsy report, Sasha had seven gunshot entrance wounds, and more than one was on her head. Additional bullet fragments removed from her body during the autopsy were placed into evidence alongside those collected during surgery the day she was found.

According to the medical examiner, Sasha also had cuts and bruises on her face, right arm, left leg, and feet. A toxicology report revealed traces of benzodiazepines in her system. A vaginal swab contained male DNA, suggesting she had been sexually assaulted.

Eddy County authorities were still waiting on results from the state crime lab, which was experiencing lengthy delays. By early April, investigators revealed they’d narrowed the scope of their case from four or five areas of interest into one key direction. That didn’t mean a suspect quite yet, they noted, but progress was mounting behind the scenes.

By the summer 2003, two investigators were working the now six-month-old case. They’d acquired several firearms suspected of being involved in Sasha’s death, but ballistics reports would take months to provide any insights into who killed the young Carlsbad woman.

On the night of December 29, 2003, a group of Sasha’s friends and family gathered on the lawn of Eddy County’s courthouse, wrapped in blankets and winter jackets. The cold, quiet vigil marked the first anniversary of her death. In the year since, investigators were no closer to discovering who had killed Sasha, or why.

The vigil also paid tribute to other Carlsbad homicide victims that year, including 22-year-old Katie Sepich, and 37-year-old Elisa Galindo. Katie had been assaulted, strangled, and found in a landfill that summer. Elisa was killed in what was thought to be a gang-related shooting.

For Carol and her daughters, December vigils became routine. For years, they gathered in small groups to remember Sasha and pray for answers. With every vigil, other homicide victims were included in their thoughts. By December 2004, Carol’s strength was wearing thin.

“I do have faith in the Lord that next year we won’t have to be here like this,” she said. “I am hopeful that the person who did this will be brought to justice.”

Four years after Sasha’s death, her family struggled to understand why there hadn’t been more progress in the case. “This is a small town and it’s been four years,” Carol told the Carlsbad Current-Argus. “They should have found something out by now.”

Still on the case was Jim Ballard. He’d been promoted to Captain within Eddy County Sheriff’s Department and sympathized with the Hedgecock family. But he also noted that they had worked diligently to find Sasha’s killer.

The department had collected DNA samples from at least 30 persons of interest in the case, and was continually awaiting delayed crime lab results on various pieces of evidence gathered over the years.

Ballard and his team also received assistance from Rocky Mountain Information Network, or RMIN, a group that offered advanced crime analysis support for agencies that couldn’t solve cases through traditional means.

According to Ballard, investigators believed Sasha knew her assailants—who may have been involved in Carlsbad’s drug scene—but wasn’t herself involved in a drug deal. Their working theory was that Sasha had a “conflict” with this person that ultimately led to her being found in the alfalfa field on Christmas Day.

Ballard and Lt. Jeff Zuniga believed the key to the case was still, as it had been in 2002, someone coming forward with information. “I just wonder what they would want someone to do if this was their child,” Zuniga said in December 2006.

For years, every time the Carlsbad Current-Argus ran a Crime Stopper Crime of the Week, Sasha Hedgecock’s story served as its tragic boilerplate. For a time, her unsolved murder became part of the town’s criminal identity.

On the morning of August 31, 2003, six months after Sasha’s death, a couple practicing target shooting at an old dump site east of Las Cruces discovered the lifeless body of 22-year-old Katie Sepich. She had been assaulted, strangled, and burned in what investigators believed was an attempt to cover the crime.

Katie had grown up in Carlsbad, about 160 miles east of Las Cruces, and had recently graduated from New Mexico State University. In late August, she was celebrating the end of summer with her boyfriend and friends, and preparing to start her MBA program at NMSU.

The night before she was found dead, Katie had gone to a party with friends about two miles from where her body was later discovered. After a fight with her boyfriend, Katie left the party in a hurry, without her keys, purse, or cell phone. She made the five-block walk home, but as she was getting inside, Katie was brutally attacked by an unknown assailant.

DNA evidence was recovered from Katie’s body—skin beneath her fingernails—just as it had been from Sasha’s body six months earlier. The DNA sample was processed and uploaded to CODIS, the FBI’s nationwide forensic database. But the DNA didn’t match anyone in the system, and it would take nearly four years for Katie’s assailant to be discovered and charged.

In November 2003, less than three months after Katie’s death, a man named Gabriel Avila was arrested for breaking into the apartment of two young women in Las Cruces. The roommates barricaded themselves in a bedroom to avoid Avila, who was eventually caught, arrested, and in March 2004, convicted of aggravated burglary.

After being released on bond, Avila fled to avoid his nine-year sentence, and remained at large until November 2004. Upon entering the prison system as a convicted felon, Avila gave a DNA sample, a routine procedure under New Mexico state law. It sat untested for two years. When it was finally analyzed, it matched the DNA recovered from beneath Katie Sepich’s fingernails in 2003.

In 2006, with evidence stacked against him, Avila confessed to Katie’s murder. To avoid the death sentence, he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, rape, kidnapping, and tampering with evidence. Avila received a 69-year prison sentence.

Katie’s case was solved in less than four years, but her parents, Dave and Jayann, believed it could have concluded much sooner if New Mexico had made one significant change to its DNA policies. Instead of collecting DNA samples only after felony convictions, what if the state mandated that samples be taken for any felony arrest?

In their minds, Avila could have submitted his DNA just months after Katie’s death—following his November 2003 arrest—instead of years later. By focusing on DNA collection at arrest rather than conviction, Dave and Jayann argued, the state could prevent countless crimes committed by repeat offenders.

The state of New Mexico agreed. On January 1, 2007, Katie’s Law, which mandated DNA collection upon any felony arrest, went into effect. The Sepich family then took their campaign nationwide.

When the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act of 2010 passed, it provided financial incentives for states to collect DNA samples at the arrest stage for “crimes involving murder, manslaughter, sexual assaults, and kidnapping or abduction.”

The Sepich family’s steadfast efforts to change New Mexico’s DNA policies would, in the coming years, help solve countless cases by matching DNA samples to evidence collected at crime scenes around the state.

One of those cases would be Sasha Hedgecock’s.

In 2009, a man named Jeremy J. Melendrez was arrested for a series of violent crimes in New Mexico. He was charged with, among other things, aggravated burglary with a deadly weapon, aggravated battery, and conspiracy to commit aggravated burglary.

By then, Katie’s Law had been in place for several years, so when Melendrez was arrested, the state collected and uploaded his DNA to CODIS. In 2010, he was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison.

Seven years after his arrest, in April 2016, Undersheriff Chief Mark Cage announced that Eddy County finally had a suspect in the murder of Sasha Hedgecock. It had taken more than a decade, but the connection between Melendrez and Sasha was finally and firmly established.

Sadly, Carol Price had passed away in 2013 and never saw her daughter’s case resolved. For Sasha’s sisters and the Sepich family, the arrest was a step toward resolution and proof that Katie’s Law was helping authorities solve longstanding cases.

“We are very, very happy that Katie’s Law could play a role in this,” Jayann Sepich said, “but that just provided a lead that they had to take, and they had to investigate, and had to go out and make a case. And the District Attorney had to say ‘Yes, we’re going to prosecute this case.’”

Melendrez, who was not cooperative with Eddy County’s investigation, was charged with an “open count” of murder, which allowed a preliminary hearing to later determine the specific degree of the charge. Melendrez had been scheduled for release from prison in 2016, but the new charge meant he would continue to be held at GEO Prison in Hobbs, near the Texas border.

For investigators, it took seven years to build a strong case against Melendrez. Even with the suspect’s DNA evidence collected in 2010, Eddy County Sheriff’s Office detectives had to review old interviews, evidence, and original files to ensure they had a case that would stand up in court.

In the early days of their focus on Melendrez, he denied knowing Sasha at all. Later, Sgt. Jeff Zuniga and his partners uncovered a “tepid” relationship between the two. Finally, when faced with the DNA evidence found on Sasha’s body, Melendrez concocted a story about the night of December 24, 2002, that didn’t fit anything else in her case file.

In his version of events, Melendrez met Sasha at a known “drug house” in town, then proceeded to have consensual sex with the young woman, who he believed was working as a prostitute.

Afterward, he claimed he was threatened by two men he thought worked with Sasha. Melendrez didn’t know how she ended up in the alfalfa field, suffering from hypothermia and multiple gunshot wounds, he claimed. No other testimonies in the investigation supported anything Melendrez told detectives.

“Mr. Melendrez provides us a story,” said Sgt. Matt Hutchinson, “and then that’s where we begin to start to poke holes in that story. Just that process it takes a matter of time to be able to get all the pieces in place to write a complaint.”

When shown a missing-persons flyer with Sasha’s photo during one interview, Melendrez became “visibly upset,” investigators noted. “He continually stared at the flyer, chewed his lip, and stopped making eye contact with the investigators,” read the interview transcript.

The effort to wade through Melendrez’s stories, however frustrating, paid off in an unexpected way. He hadn’t been among the 30 or so suspects who gave DNA samples back in 2003. Without his unrelated arrest and the genetic database hit years later, thanks to Katie’s Law, Melendrez might never have surfaced as a suspect.

In March 2017, after discussing their options with Sasha’s family, prosecutors announced they would not seek the death penalty for Melendrez. The open count of murder was upgraded to first-degree murder. If convicted, the defendant could face life in prison.

In February 2018, Melendrez announced to Carlsbad’s Fifth Judicial Circuit Court that he would be entering an Alford plea to voluntary manslaughter. This type of plea deal allows a defendant to maintain their innocence while acknowledging that the case against them is likely strong enough to establish guilt in a jury trial.

“After an overall assessment, meeting with the Hedgecock family, and based on the strength of the case,” said District Attorney Dianna Luce, “we made a decision to make an offer.”

By February 2018, Melendrez had already served nearly two years on the charge, with an estimated three more years remaining under his plea agreement, which carried a maximum of six years in prison.

For the Hedgecock family, the plea agreement marked the legal resolution of Sasha’s case. But justice on paper hardly brought closure to Desirae, Kayla, Sierra, or Sasha’s friends and community.

Melendrez’s story didn’t end with his plea in Sasha’s murder. By May 2021, out on parole, he faced new charges for criminal property damage and probation violations. Those charges were eventually dismissed, but by June 2023, he was wanted again, this time for two separate violent incidents in Carlsbad.

In one, a woman at Friendship Park was found shot in the head. She survived, and recounted to police that two men had appeared to be arguing at the park. She’d heard two shots fired and remembered little afterward. She didn’t identify Melendrez specifically, but authorities believed he may have been involved in the shooting.

In another incident, on the same day, a man was stabbed several times in the head before neighbors forced the attacker to flee. One witness later identified the assailant as Melendrez, and claimed he was armed when he left.

Throughout the summer of 2023, Melendrez allegedly committed a series of crimes—including the robbery of an Albuquerque Pizza Hut—and in September 2023, he was arrested after an hours-long standoff with Carlsbad’s SWAT team.

“It’s not like he was having a bad day,” said Captain Jessie Rodriguez of the Carlsbad Police Department. “This individual has been involved in multiple incidents throughout the course of his life where he’s put people in danger or caused injury.”

Today, at least 25 states have passed some variation of Katie’s Law, requiring or incentivizing expanded DNA collection for arrests in violent crimes. Since 2007, New Mexico alone has matched DNA from more than 1,500 felony arrestees to hundreds of cold cases, including Sasha Hedgecock’s.

Sasha never reached Eastern New Mexico University to study forensic science, or to live with her fiancé Zack. Instead, her story became a tragic part of the field she’d hoped to one day enter, an enduring link to the advocacy that began in New Mexico and transformed DNA collection nationwide.

On Friday, April 29, 2005, Wesley Triplett and Jan Stackhouse left New York City for a weekend in the Berkshires, where Wesley owned a second home in the quiet town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

The trip was one of grief and healing: in early April, Wesley had lost his longtime partner to lymphoma, and Jan, one of Wesley’s closest friends, accompanied him to a familiar place offering solace and escape from the city’s relentless hum. 

Jan and Wesley spent the weekend enjoying the crisp April air and colorful blooms of early spring in Western Massachusetts. The landscape blossomed against the backdrop of large oak trees while thin, meandering creeks fed into the peaceful Housatonic River.

Just down the street from Wesley’s home stood the Norman Rockwell Museum, the artist’s former studio that now displayed his signature, idealized visions of small-town America. Wesley’s home in the Berkshires, by all accounts, embodied the same tranquility. 

On Sunday afternoon, 52-year-old Jan told Wesley she was heading out for a walk before they returned to the city. She pulled on a sweatshirt, laced her running shoes, and left Wesley’s home on Christian Hill Road around 1 p.m.

Thirty minutes later, a motorist driving along Dugway Road, less than a mile west of Wesley’s home, noticed something strange and out of place on the country lane’s narrow shoulder. A body lay motionless in the gravel, blood darkening the ground beneath it.

The driver quickly dialed 911, but poor cell service forced him to one of the nearest homes, where he called for help. When Stockbridge police arrived at the scene near the intersection of Dugway Road and Route 183, they confirmed what seemed unthinkable. In the brief window of time between leaving Wesley’s house and being spotted by the passing motorist, Jan Stackhouse had been killed and left on the roadside.

Just east of where Jan lay, Mohawk Brook wound through the trees before emptying into the Housatonic River south of 183. It was an idyllic setting most days, but on this Sunday, the first day of May, it became a wholly unexpected crime scene.

Stockbridge hadn’t seen a homicide in 35 years—not since 1969, when local John Winn beat a man to death after the man had allegedly assaulted Winn’s daughter.

Stockbridge Police Chief Richard Wilcox and his officers secured the scene and canvassed the quiet neighborhood. The initial investigation revealed that Jan had died from a single wound to the neck, but Wilcox refused to say whether a weapon had been recovered or how exactly Jan had been injured. If police knew the mechanism of her death, they kept it well-hidden from the public.

That Sunday, local and state police swept through the area with search dogs and metal detectors, working the banks of Mohawk Brook and the graveled shoulders of Dugway Road. Investigators kept returning to the same perplexing question: how could someone kill Jan Stackhouse in broad daylight on a small country road in less than 30 minutes, right down the street from a friend’s house?

The answers wouldn’t come quickly. As days turned to weeks, rumors began threading through hushed conversations: theories whispered over coffee, speculation that grew more alarming the longer police remained silent.

Jan Stackhouse was born on July 10, 1952, in Montevideo, Uruguay, the daughter of American diplomats with the U.S. Foreign Service. Their work carried the family across the world, allowing Jan to live in places like Lebanon and Libya as a child. She spent time in Washington, D.C. and Israel, where she attended high school.

As an adult, Jan had built a life in Brooklyn Heights, where she lived in a five-story brownstone on Brooklyn’s Remsen Street. Neighbors described her as smart, “culturally and politically intense,” and “very much into women’s rights, workers’ rights,” said one neighbor, 71-year-old Richard Bellak. She often filled her apartment with the sounds of Thelonious Monk and Charlie Mingus.

She lived alone—divorced once, with no children—but her life was far from solitary. Jan managed the business operations for Service Employees International Union Local 1199, a union representing hospital and health care workers. She had spent most of her adult life working toward justice for women and workers, starting when she helped unionize the Yale bookstore in 1975.

From then on, Jan dedicated her life to helping others protect and retain their rights. She co-authored Brass Valley: The Story of Working People’s Lives and Struggles in an American Industrial Region, an in-depth, academic review of the history of laborers in Western Connecticut’s Naugatuck River Valley.

Jan made it her mission, as her biographical website put it, to “bring economic, political and social justice to the lives of workers and women.” She had dedicated her life to the freedoms of others, and in just one short window while on a quiet country walk, Jan was gone.

Right away, state and local authorities questioned residents on Dugway Road, speaking with anyone who might have seen or heard something around the time Jan was found. No one had.

The stretch of road where Jan died was visible from only a handful of homes, and none of those residents had been looking out their windows, or home, at the right moment. The closest house belonged to Alexandria Swann, 51, who said she wasn’t home when Jan’s death occurred.

Her boyfriend, Lance Williams, had been there working on household projects, though. In the days leading up to Sunday, Williams said, he’d noticed something odd: unfamiliar vehicles—a white truck, a dark green SUV—cruising past the house more frequently than usual traffic did. He thought it odd enough to mention to a friend at the time, and reported these vehicles to police when interviewed.

Details about what exactly happened to Jan were sparse. A source close to the investigation said of the roadside scene, “there was blood everywhere.” Days after the initial cleanup, blood still marked a number of leaves near a fallen log.

When she was found, Jan was fully clothed in the sweatshirt, blue jeans, and running shoes she had worn on her walk. It was believed that she hadn’t been killed during an attempted sexual assault.

As police spoke with neighbors, they learned that traffic in the area had increased in recent weeks, but aside from Williams’ observation, there wasn’t much out of the ordinary in the time leading up to Jan’s death.

Within days, New York City detectives joined the investigation. Their involvement was obvious: had someone followed Jan from Brooklyn? Was her death connected to her decades of labor organization efforts? Union work often made enemies, as management didn’t appreciate workers who knew how to preserve, or expand, their rights.

But despite Jan’s many years of work and reputation for persistence, authorities believed she had few, if any, enemies. She did have plenty of supporters, however. Jan’s union soon put out a reward of up to $10,000 for information leading to an arrest in her case.

Those familiar with Jan’s line of work in New York City noted an interesting detail. Her death on May 1 coincided with International Workers Day, a designation honoring laborers worldwide since 1889.

Back in Stockbridge, the theory that Jan’s murder was the result of a disgruntled labor dispute gained traction—if only as a way for locals to believe that crimes like that didn’t happen in their community. For some residents, it was reassuring to think that violence followed Jan from the city than to accept that it had been waiting in Stockbridge all along.

But after searching Jan’s home and questioning her neighbors and colleagues, police found no reason to believe her death was related to her work. Authorities in both states still had no definitive answers the week of her death, but the hired-hit scenario didn’t hold up under scrutiny.

By the following weekend, Stockbridge police ramped up their activity in the area, setting up checkpoints along Route 183 and Dugway Road. They asked passersby how often they came through the area and if they had noticed anything unusual in prior weeks. The additional police force may have helped Stockbridge residents feel safer, but it didn’t generate any leads in Jan’s case.

Stockbridge was noticeably on edge by mid-May. Some locals believed a killer walked among them, while others were simply disquieted by the fact that police had so few leads. With residents questioning the police’s progress and feeling unsafe in their own homes, authorities called for a community meeting to be held at the Austen Riggs Center, where residents could ask questions and police could address their concerns in a communal setting. 

A town meeting would be ideal, noted one psychiatrist on Main Street, as “a careful, thorough and confidential police investigation has left townspeople with little information and no way to calm their anxieties over the recent death of Jan Stackhouse.” 

More than 60 residents attended the meeting, which seemed to alleviate the town’s shared anxieties. It was an opportunity for locals to voice fears, hear directly from town officials, and to feel less alone in their collective uncertainty. 

During the meeting, it was agreed that the town of Stockbridge would write condolence letters to the family of Jan Stackhouse and to Wesley Triplett, who had now lost, in the span of one month, a longtime partner and a close friend. More than 140 residents signed Jan’s letter in the days that followed. Despite the meeting’s positive outlook, Police Chief Wilcox was unable to provide progress on the case.

“I wish I could stand up there and say that we have something,” Wilcox said. “But I can’t.” 

After the meeting, police again increased their presence around town, and in June, another meeting was held to approve overtime pay for the strained police force.

The investigation into Jan’s death had been a procedural challenge, to be sure, but it was also an expensive one. The town meeting ensured that funds from Stockbridge’s accounts would cover whatever police needed to keep the town safe—and to solve Jan’s case.

Throughout the investigation, Police Chief Wilcox emphasized that Jan’s death was still considered a homicide, and not yet a murder. Homicide, Wilcox reminded residents, could be accidental, while murder required premeditation and intent. He cautioned the community against assuming Jan was murdered, and acknowledged that police needed more information before they could make a final determination.

As the summer of 2005 wore on, Jan’s death remained a mystery. Wesley Triplett had been ruled out as a suspect, and police believed Jan’s death wasn’t the result of a serial killer in the area. Back in New York, Jan’s friends and colleagues held a gathering in July to celebrate what would have been her birthday, and to honor a life cut far too short.

State and local police continued to explore leads and revisit the crime scene on Dugway Road. With no clear answers, residents formed their own stories about what happened on Sunday, May 1, 2005.

“The problem with this process is that with very little information, people do all kinds of speculation and gossip,” said Police Chief Wilcox.

Whatever rose-colored image Stockbridge had constructed of itself as the tranquil home of Norman Rockwell and all-American pastimes was, for the time, shattered.

Through the fall and winter of 2005, the town lived in unease, with residents questioning those who would normally be above suspicion. One unsubstantiated rumor considered Alexandria Swann’s boyfriend, Lance Williams, a suspect because he had been working on the house nearest to where Jan’s body had been found.

In early 2006, a more unsettling rumor began to circulate. That February, 22-year-old William Demagall—described as a “transient” and survivalist in the Berkshires region—escaped from a psychiatric unit at Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, 30 minutes north of Stockbridge. Within two days, he’d traveled to Hillsdale, New York, where he murdered George Mancini, a 56-year-old retired schoolteacher. Demagall stabbed and bludgeoned Mancini, then set his house on fire in an attempt to destroy the evidence.

When he was caught, Demagall confessed that he had been living outside, in caves scattered throughout the Berkshires. One of Demagall’s supposed shelters was located one mile from where Jan’s body was found.

There had also been an another murder in the region just two months after Jan was found dead. On July 4, 2005, Anthony Colucci went missing in Pittsfield. His body turned up days later, stabbed multiple times.

Investigators questioned Demagall about Jan and Anthony, and his whereabouts throughout 2005, before being held at Pittsfield’s hospital. Demagall’s father, Steven, insisted his son couldn’t have been responsible for the murders because William had been living at home then. 

“He wasn’t manic then and he wasn’t psychotic,” Steven told reporters, “and when he did become manic, he wasn’t as psychotic as he is now.”

Despite the geographic proximity and the fact that both unsolved Berkshires murders involved stabbings, investigators never conclusively linked Demagall to the deaths of Jan or Anthony.

He was eventually convicted of second-degree murder for killing George Mancini and sentenced to twenty-five years to life. It took four separate trials to establish that he was mentally competent and understood his actions during the crime.

With Demagall ruled out, Jan’s case went cold once again.

By May 2007, the case remained unsolved. When The Berkshire Eagle surveyed Stockbridge residents that month, 46% believed the mystery of Jan’s death would continue, while 43% thought no one would ever be charged in her death. Only 11% felt the perpetrator would eventually be caught.

In May 2020, 15 years after Jan’s death, journalist Carole Owens presented an intriguing theory about what could have happened on Dugway Road—one that had quietly circulated for years.

Owens suggested, in The Berkshire Edge, that a truck speeding down the road—its driver distracted or inattentive—could have clipped Jan as she enjoyed her Sunday afternoon walk before returning to Brooklyn. The theory could account for the vague details about Jan’s neck wound, and the narrow time frame in which she died.

“If Stackhouse were walking facing traffic as recommended along country roads, she would be on the passenger side of the vehicle,” Owens wrote. “What if an extended truck mirror gashed her neck and the driver never realized it? Is that what happened? No way to prove it.”

Others, like cold case expert Sarah Stein, believed Jan’s death was “a crime of opportunity,” a matter of Jan being in the wrong place at the wrong moment, visible and vulnerable to someone who happened to pass by.

“I don’t think there’s any personal connection between the killer and the victim,” Stein said. “There’s no evidence of overkill, or passion, or anything of that nature. I think it was just a case of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

In 2014, Police Chief Richard Wilcox retired after nearly a decade of living with Jan’s unsolved case. He called her death “a very big frustration ... in terms of my ability to give the community peace of mind.” His replacement, Robert Eaton Jr., arrived hoping to bring fresh eyes and new answers. But Eaton’s tenure came and went, and Jan’s case remained unsolved.

Current Police Chief Darrell Fennelly replaced Eaton in May 2016. Today, local and state investigators remain committed to Jan’s case, hoping that new leads, witnesses, or evidence emerge from the pastoral landscapes and streets of Stockbridge.

Thanks for reading Buried Cases. If you found this story interesting, send it to a friend to help this project grow. You can also explore past reads, like:

• The Abduction and Murder of Tara Sidarovich

• The Cold Case of Maylon Johnson

• The Murder of Rose Twells

Have a case you’d like to see covered? Let us know here.

In the summer of 2001, Sharon and Keith McPhillips moved from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to southwest Florida with Sharon’s three children: 19-year-old Tara, 13-year-old Veronica, and their younger brother, Paul.

The family chose sunny Punta Gorda for its low crime rate and ideal weather. They rented a quaint home in the Tee Green neighborhood east of town, and didn’t take long to settle into a new routine punctuated by “family day” Sundays.

Each week ended the same way: the family of five spent the entire day together, running errands, shopping, and exploring what their new town had to offer.

On Sunday, September 30, 2001, their itinerary included breakfast at Cracker Barrel, a trip to a Fort Myers flea market, and a casual stroll around Port Charlotte Town Center mall after catching Keanu Reeves’ Hardball. The mall was a familiar hangout for Tara, who had recently begun working at a jewelry kiosk there.

Florida was growing on Tara, but that hadn’t always been the case. She had resisted the move at first, refusing to leave her friends and the Northeast community she’d grown up in.

But just three weeks after the rest of the family headed south, Tara followed suit. She made plans to attend Fort Myers’ Edison Community College, where she wanted to learn to become a crime scene investigator.

After another family day together, Sharon’s household began Monday, October 1, like any other weekday morning. Veronica and Paul went to school. Sharon and Keith each drove to work.

Tara had plans to pick up her paycheck from Golden Isle Jewelers, but first had to wait for a septic company to stop by and inspect their septic system. Heavy rains over the past few days had caused septic problems throughout the neighborhood, and several homes had reported backed up tanks.

Just before noon, Tara called a coworker to confirm she’d stop by the mall later to grab her check. Sometime after noon, two men from ABC Septic arrived: Phillip Barr, the company’s owner, and David McMannis, a part-time employee.

The men entered the home, inspected a toilet, and assessed the home’s septic system. Toward the end of the appointment, the men backed their truck up to the house.

After some time, they left.

When Veronica stepped off the school bus just before 4 p.m. that Monday, she felt a sense of relief. She had left her keys at home that morning, but now, seeing Tara’s car still in their driveway, Veronica knew that she and Paul could get into the house without issue. 

But when Veronica and Paul reached the front door, something felt off. The door wasn’t closed all the way, and when she stepped inside, Veronica noticed some items had been moved—subtly, perhaps, but moved nonetheless.

When Veronica called for Tara, she received no reply. Veronica walked through the home, continuing to call for her older sister, but soon realized Tara was not at home. Despite her car being in the driveway—and her purse and keys still in the sisters’ shared bedroom—Tara was gone. 

Veronica knew immediately that something had happened. Her sister wouldn’t leave without telling anyone, and she certainly wouldn’t leave without her purse and personal items.

Tara, who was once named to the “Who’s Who Among American High School Students” list, was responsible and communicative. Her absence struck a note of distress that Veronica couldn’t shake. 

When Keith arrived home shortly after Veronica, he shared her unease about Tara’s absence. Keith and Tara were close, and like Veronica, he knew Tara wouldn’t leave without mentioning it to someone in the family. Tara, who paid room and board at their new home, was like another dependable parental figure in the house, especially to Veronica. 

Keith quickly called Sharon, who tore through her 40-minute commute home. He next called the Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office, and when Sharon arrived at the house, an officer was already on the scene.

Sharon, Keith, and Veronica voiced their concerns to the officer, who was focused on cataloging what appeared to be a burglary. Jewelry and cash were missing, and the officer seemed more concerned with this information than with Tara’s whereabouts.

The scene did appear to be a burglary. When Keith had arrived home, he noticed that a television set on top of his bedroom dresser was facing forward, not the direction it usually faced for someone lying on the bed nearby, watching TV. Jewelry and cash in the vicinity were gone. There also appeared to be scuff marks on the dresser, as if someone had kicked it with the bottom of their shoe.

Throughout their home, Keith and Sharon found small, subtle signs that something had occurred in the house that afternoon. When friends came over to help look for Tara, someone noticed an earring embedded deep in the home’s carpet. Then another. And another. Tara had been wearing all three that morning. Dirty boot prints marked various parts of the carpet.

Outside, the family noticed other odd details. A small palm tree had been knocked over, its decorative border smashed into the lawn. Hair ribbons that Tara had been wearing lay in the yard. Tire tracks ran the width of the front yard and appeared to go directly up to the front door. For what reason, Sharon and Keith didn’t know.

As more of the scene’s details unfolded before the family, the more they feared the worse: that Tara had been abducted.

The officer on the scene suggested Tara had perhaps gone to a friend’s house or a football game taking place nearby. It was also suggested, at various points, that she may have been a runaway. Because Tara was 19 and technically an adult, the officer could put out a BOLO—a be-on-the-lookout notice—but 24 hours would have to pass before she could be declared officially missing.

“I get very angry with the way it went in the beginning,” Keith would say years later.

Sharon and Keith knew Tara better, and they didn’t wait: the couple began their search for Tara immediately. They didn’t care about the cash or the jewelry missing, though Keith would later admit that one of the pieces taken was a “dad” ring Tara had given him—something he cherished as a father figure in the young woman’s life.

She had gone by Tara Ord in high school, but afterward took the last name of her biological father, John Sidarovich (in some accounts, she appears as Tara Ord-Sidarovich). After years in the same household, Keith and Tara had grown close, and he viewed her as a “buddy,” he would say later, tearfully.

When Sharon and Keith learned that Tara never showed up to collect her paycheck at the mall that day, they knew with absolute certainty. She had been taken.

On Tuesday, October 2, Tara was officially declared a missing person. By then, however, the crime scene—what appeared to be the entire McPhillips residence—was no longer pristine.

Dozens of people had been in and out of the house since Monday afternoon, helping with the unofficial search for Tara. When crime scene investigators arrived at the house on Tuesday, they faced a scene that had not been well-preserved. Still, they went to work.

The crime scene revealed no immediate forensic evidence of what may have occurred at the home. Investigators began piecing together Tara’s last confirmed sightings and contacts.

Sharon had last seen Tara on Monday morning, before she left for work. Tara’s coworker had last spoken with her around noon, when she said she’d stop by the mall. That was the last time anyone had heard from Tara.

When Tara’s family informed investigators that a septic company had visited on Monday afternoon, they immediately pulled information on ABC Septic and its owner, Phillip Barr. He and David McMannis both gave statements to police.

Barr stated that Tara was fine when he and McMannis left the home on Monday afternoon after the appointment. He said the two men inspected the home, entered the residence one time, and had little contact with Tara. Barr also mentioned that while in the home, the repairmen noticed a young, dark haired man in Tara’s bedroom.

Barr claimed that after he and McMannis left the McPhillips house, he stopped by Bread of Life Mission in Punta Gorda, run by a woman named Judy Jones. As far as Barr was concerned, it was a typical workday.

In the days to follow, however, investigators noticed Barr and McMannis both behaving curiously. McMannis moved out of state within a week of the incident, and the day after Tara’s disappearance, Barr was spotted, by an undercover officer, cleaning out the bed of his septic truck.

When Tara’s 20th birthday arrived on October 30, just weeks after she disappeared, there was still no sign of the young woman. Her family left birthday presents on her bed, fully expecting Tara to come home any day—to walk through the front door like nothing had changed.

By November, authorities had searched more than 500 acres of land in the Punta Gorda area, relying on helicopters, cadaver dogs, and officers on horseback to comb through remote, heavily treed areas. Knowing the family was originally from Pennsylvania, investigators followed up on leads from their previous life in the Northeast.

In November, investigators collected DNA evidence from Barr and McMannis, including hair, saliva, and blood samples. They interviewed neighbors, asking about the septic truck that had been parked at Tara’s home on October 1. One neighbor mentioned that she saw the truck, but claimed a fence between their properties made it difficult to tell who was there or what took place.

Sharon and Keith plastered the Punta Gorda area with missing person posters, from the mall where Tara worked down to Fort Myers and beyond. The flyers featured Tara’s senior picture, complete with “a smile that will knock your socks off,” in her grandmother’s words.

The posters described Tara as 5’5”, recently blonde instead of brunette. The young woman who had grown up cheerleading and playing softball, and who aspired to be a crime scene investigator, was now at the center of a missing persons case.

“Now someone is investigating her,” Sharon told The Scranton Times.

In March 2002, five months after Tara’s disappearance, authorities obtained a warrant to examine Barr’s truck tires, believing they matched the tracks in the McPhillips’ front yard.

Then, in April, a man named Glen St. John made an interesting admission in an interview with Florida’s Charlotte Sun. He said that a day or two after Tara disappeared in 2001, he was given stolen jewelry from Barr, who St. John had worked with on occasion. St. John claimed that he was not at Tara’s home the day she disappeared.

“Phil begged me, ‘please, please please, don’t turn the jewelry in because it came from the girl’s house,’” St. John told the newspaper. When authorities followed up on the accusation, Barr claimed the jewelry he gave St. John was unrelated and “maybe worth 10 bucks.”

St. John was on probation at the time and had turned the jewelry in to his probation officer, Scott White. In court, years later, White testified that St. John brought McMannis to the probation appointment, and that St. John’s story, White claimed, was “not consistent” over time.

The connections between Tara, Barr, and McMannis—and now, St. John—were growing, but investigators still had no physical evidence to suggest the septic repairmen were responsible for her disappearance.

Barr, in fact, began to publicly complain that the investigation was hurting his business. In a 2002 NBC segment, Barr said that he had been harassed since October 2001, and looked forward to investigators solving the case.

In June 2002, Circuit Judge William Blackwell approved a search warrant granting officers access to Barr’s home. In it, they found what appeared to be “a several-page, hand-written note” about Barr’s activities, particularly as they related to the McPhillips appointment, on October 1, 2001.

The content wasn’t publicly revealed, but prosecutors would later argue that the note was fabricated—an alibi created after Barr realized he was the prime suspect in Tara’s disappearance.

On July 12, 2002, a construction worker near Burnt Store Road, just south of Punta Gorda, wandered into the coastal brush to relieve himself. Under the humid Florida sun, the worker stumbled across what appeared to be a human skull and bones.

The remains had been scattered, likely by animals and the harsh, unforgiving climate of southwestern Florida. From where the worker stood, on a 60-acre swath of land for sale, he was more than one mile from the nearest home. He stood ten miles from Tara’s house.

When detectives arrived on the scene, they confirmed the remains were human. Sharon and Keith rushed to the area. Over the past nine months, they’d visited nearly ten potential crime scenes. But something told them this would be the last.

Eventually, dental records and a belly button worn by Tara Sidarovich confirmed that it was the missing 19-year-old. Authorities canvassed the area, but recovered fewer than half her bones. They couldn’t determine her cause of death, but did identify markings consistent with trauma to her ribs, suggesting that she had struggled mightily during the attack that ended her life.

For Tara’s family, the discovery brought devastating and mixed emotions. They had an answer to Tara’s disappearance after almost one year of uncertainty, but their loss was now permanent.

In July 2002, more than 100 friends and family gathered at Abundant Life Assembly of God in Punta Gorda to pay their respects to the bright, shining life of Tara Sidarovich. Ribbons of pink and black—Tara’s favorite colors—adorned those in attendance.

A photo slideshow captured glimpses of a painfully brief life: a young woman who loved dancing, softball, cheerleading, and Tigger, and whose charismatic presence could still be felt. A softball and glove sat beside her blue-and-gold urn. Mourners recalled the time Tara accidentally dyed her hair pink, and how she could laugh at just about anything.

“I remember one time I was walking with Tara in the hall at school,” recalled one former classmate, “and she was wearing these big platform shoes. People could see her from the classrooms, and she just fell right on her face. Then she got up and did the same thing about three minutes later. All she did was laugh, laugh, laugh.”

Tara’s family installed a cross near the area where her remains were found. Over the years, it would be decorated with sympathy cards, stuffed animals, fresh flowers. Detectives who worked Tara’s case left a handwritten note: We won’t forget.

And they didn’t. The month after Tara’s remains were found, detectives from Florida, Maryland, and Pennsylvania tracked down McMannis, who’d moved out of state within days of Tara’s disappearance. They reinterviewed him and several of his family members, hoping for a breakthrough.

Despite their suspicions, investigators still couldn’t piece together an ironclad case against Barr and McMannis. Tara’s home, and her remains, contained no traces of forensic evidence from either suspect. There were no eyewitnesses and no confessions, just a string of connections that were easy to follow but difficult to prove.

The repairmen’s actions following Tara’s disappearance had investigators’ full attention, but prosecutors needed stronger evidence to secure convictions.

By July 2004, Tara’s case had once again hit a wall. Barr and McMannis were still on authorities’ radar, but there had been little progress in the case for two years.

Desperate to keep momentum, Tara’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Barr and their landlord, Dennis Postell Jr. The civil suit, which wouldn’t impact criminal charges, claimed that Barr “abducted, kidnapped and murdered Tara Sidarovich.”

Attorney Amanda Wiggins filed the suit with Florida’s 20th Judicial Circuit, hoping the move might spur progress on Tara’s criminal case. Postell requested that he be removed from the suit, claiming that he had never permitted Barr to enter Tara’s home in October 2001. A judge denied the motion.

In July 2005, during an 11-minute deposition related to the suit, Barr invoked the Fifth Amendment ten times. He provided little information that authorities didn’t already have. 

That same year, Charlotte County Sheriff John Davenport created the department’s first cold case unit. Three retired detectives—Mike Gandy, Kurt Mehl, and Mike Vogel—volunteered to work the county’s unsolved cases, including Tara’s. Gandy had been involved in Tara’s original investigation. Combined, they had more than 80 years of law enforcement experience.

The detectives hung a large print of Tara’s senior photo in the unit’s office as a reminder of what they were working toward. “When you sink your teeth into something like this,” said Detective Gandy, “you’re fighting for a helpless victim and you’re fighting for their family and friends.”

For seven more years, the cold case unit built their case piece by piece, witness by witness. They worked through at least 12 boxes of old case files and documents. In those, they began to uncover discrepancies in the initial interviews with Barr, McMannis, and Dille.

They also flagged a potential eye-witness who had not been interviewed at the time—someone who would later testify that she saw Barr and McMannis come and go to the house at least twice, including a final trip, when they backed up to the front door and unloaded the tailgate.

In 2012, the cold case detectives had finally amassed enough evidence to move forward with arrests.

On October 26, 2012, McMannis was arrested in Cumberland, Maryland, and charged with first-degree murder. An arrest warrant was also issued for Barr, but investigators couldn’t locate him. He had last been seen in upstate New York, and agencies around the Northeast began a manhunt for the murder suspect.

McMannis was soon extradited to Florida. There, he was held in the county jail without bond. The announcement of his arrest came on October 30—what would’ve been Tara’s 31st birthday.

Since Tara had disappeared in 2001, her family had begun measuring their lives in Octobers. That was the month Tara was born, when her favorite holiday arrived, and when she disappeared. Now, it was the month that investigators were finally able to make an arrest in her case.

In November, authorities announced a second arrest. Linda Fay Dille, Barr’s girlfriend at the time of Tara’s disappearance, was arrested and charged with two counts of felony perjury.

The charges stemmed from a 2001 interview, when Dille had told authorities she and Barr talked on their cell phones during the day of Tara’s disappearance. Detectives later discovered that the couple’s cell phone service had been disconnected for lack of payment at the time, making it impossible for them to have talked over those lines.

Authorities also accused Dille of lying about the location of a vehicle she owned that Barr used on October 1, 2001. During a recorded 2002 call from Barr in jail to Dille, she acknowledged withholding information about the case in 2001. “They just know I know more than what I’m saying,” she said.

On November 14, less than three weeks after McMannis was arrested, Barr was located and detained near Hardwick, Vermont. He’d been living under the pseudonym “Frank Perelli,” first at a hotel, then with a woman named Jene Mansur.

When Barr attempted to flee from the woman’s mobile home, U.S. Marshals apprehended him on the spot. According to the FBI, Barr had been supporting himself through various “fraudulent schemes” in Florida and eventually planned to head north into Canada.

Instead, Barr was finally arrested for the crime he had long been suspected of committing.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Cameron. “We promised Sharon we would never take our eyes off of this case.”

By December 2012, prosecutors had three suspects in custody and dozens of witnesses ready to testify. Barr and McMannis both pleaded not guilty to murder charges and were scheduled to face separate trials.

That month, Dille accepted a plea deal that would allow her to avoid prison time if she agreed to testify truthfully against Barr. If she didn’t, prosecutors said, she could face up to five years in prison.

After a number of delays and legal motions, Barr finally went to trial in October 2015—14 years after Tara’s disappearance. It was the first murder trial in Charlotte County in two years, and the first trial brought by the county’s cold case unit created ten years earlier. 

About 20 of Tara’s friends and family filled the courtroom on the trial’s first day, each wearing the black-and-pink ribbons that had become a symbol of Tara’s memory since 2001.

The state laid out its theory. On the morning of October 1, prosecutors claimed, Barr and McMannis had smoked drugs before arriving at Tara’s home. While Barr inspected the septic system, McMannis roamed from room to room, stealing jewelry and cash to fuel their ongoing drug habits. When Tara discovered McMannis robbing her home, the theory went, she confronted him and Barr.

The two men overpowered Tara, killed her, backed the truck up to the house, loaded her body, and later dumped her in the woods off Burnt Store Road. To support their case, the state planned to call 60 witnesses over a two-week period.

Defense attorney Mark De Sisto argued that Barr was guilty of one thing only: being associated with drug-addicted criminals like McMannis and Glen St. John, who had received immunity in the case thanks to information he disclosed to investigators. 

De Sisto emphasized that no DNA evidence had ever linked Barr to the crime, and suggested instead that the emotional pull of the cold case led investigators to develop “tunnel vision” on his client.

De Sisto pointed out that McMannis had left the state shortly after Tara disappeared, and said that her remains were found not far from one of St. John’s favorite fishing holes. Barr’s judgment of character was poor, he admitted, but he was not responsible for Tara’s murder.

Weeks of testimony and circumstantial evidence outlined what investigators knew of the case. Dr. R.H. Imami confirmed that Tara’s rib bones had shown signs of trauma, but noted that because so little of her skeletal remains were recovered, her exact cause of death still couldn’t be determined. 

Damning evidence came from witnesses who testified that Barr made incriminating statements in the days, months, and years following Tara’s disappearance. “By the time they find her body, it’ll be totally decomposed,” Barr allegedly told one Charlotte County Jail inmate, according to the inmate’s testimony.

Another inmate, who testified that Barr appeared worried about Tara’s case in 2002, said Barr told him the young woman “won’t be talking.” A woman who saw Barr at Harpoon Harry’s on the night of October 1, 2001, said he appeared “dirty, like he had been working all day,” with visible marks on his upper left arm.

But the most damaging testimony came from Barr’s ex-girlfriend.

Dille, who had chastised the media for harassing Barr during the investigation’s early days, testified that his behavior on the day of Tara’s disappearance was out of the ordinary.

She claimed that on October 1, 2001, Barr asked Dille to borrow her Toyota Corolla so he could remove a “hog carcass” near their home. 

When Dille saw something under a sheet in the car, she didn’t question it at the time. Later, Dille said, she realized it might not have been a hog at all. After Barr borrowed the Corolla that day, she never saw the vehicle again—something she’d failed to mention to investigators during her earliest interviews.

“I just forgot about it,” Dille said during the trial. “I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone.”

Barr also asked her strange questions on October 1: How do you clean up DNA evidence? Where’s a good place to dispose of a body?

He also loaded bedsheets into the washer that day—something Dille said he would never do on his own. To prosecutors, and the jury, these erratic and out-of-character behaviors presented a clear pattern.

On October 28, 2015, a jury of seven men and five women deliberated for less than 90 minutes before finding Barr guilty of first-degree murder. He was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Charlotte County’s first cold case conviction was complete.

In February 2017, following a six-week trial, McMannis was also found guilty of first-degree murder. His jury took less than one hour to reach their verdict, and McMannis, too, was immediately sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Sixteen years after Barr and McMannis backed their septic truck up to the McPhillips’ front door, both men had finally answered for what they’d done.

Detectives Mike Gandy, Kurt Mehl, and Mike Vogel did what their note on Tara’s memorial promised. It took years of persistence, but they kept their word.

On September 1, 1998, Newark Police Director Joseph Santiago formalized the city’s first Cold Case Squad, a unit dedicated to working older unsolved cases, some of which dated back decades.

Detectives Keith Sheppard and Rashid Sabur were assigned to review dust-covered, well-worn case files and field phone calls from families who had never stopped searching for answers. 

Within a month, they’d already solved and closed their first case: the 25-year-old murder of Theodore Mitchell, a dry cleaning business owner who’d been stabbed to death in his storefront in March 1973.

The detectives tracked down a witness who had been only nine at the time of the crime, but was now 34 and able to identify the murderer as Charles Davis Jr. 

The unit’s early success made headlines in Newark. In October, two brothers contacted the squad with a 27-year-old cold case of their own.

In the early morning hours of October 3, 1971, 10-year-old George Johnson woke to the sound of screaming.

His older sister, 14-year-old Susan Marie Johnson, was shrieking in distress from their mother’s bedroom. George and his brother, 8-year-old David Johnson, ran down the hallway to her room in their first-floor apartment on South 20th Street in Newark, New Jersey. 

Their mother, 30-year-old Maylon Johnson, lay in her bed with a single bullet hole in her chest and nightclothes. Susan was in the room, crying and yelling. 

When police arrived, Susan told them she’d woken to a loud noise. When she went to check on her mother, she found Maylon shot and already deceased. Susan went to the window, she reported, and saw her mother’s boyfriend’s car speeding away from the scene. Maylon was separated from Susan’s father at the time, and had a steady boyfriend—someone Susan did not like or trust. 

Authorities questioned Maylon’s boyfriend, but he was quickly cleared and never considered a suspect in the murder. Investigators interviewed neighbors and those who knew the single mother, but were unable to uncover any leads in her case, which soon went cold.

It remained that way for 27 years. But when George and David overheard that Newark’s newly formed cold case unit was fielding calls, they got in touch with detectives Sheppard and Sabur. 

The brothers had a working theory: their mother was seeing a second boyfriend in October 1971, they believed, and this unknown man may have shot and killed her out of jealousy.

As they did with the Mitchell case, Sheppard and Sabur began reviewing the investigation’s original findings. They pored over every document, interview statement, and every scrap of evidence that had been preserved from 1971. 

It was then that Detective Sabur found something that the first investigation had overlooked. It was a minor detail, easily missed, but one that pointed in the direction of who might’ve been responsible for Maylon Johnson’s murder.

In October 1998, Sheppard and Sabur began reinterviewing witnesses and persons of interest from 1971, including the Johnsons’ former neighbors on 20th South Street, as well as previous addresses. They also tracked down Maylon’s daughter, Susan Marie Watson, in Schenectady, New York—about three hours north of Newark. 

Susan was now 41, married to a counselor named Michael Amos, and working as a keyboard operator for The State University of New York. She and Michael had three daughters, and Susan spent her free time volunteering at a group home for troubled girls. She was generally known as a reserved person who went out of her way to help others when she could. 

In late October, Susan agreed to come to Newark to talk to detectives about her mother’s murder. On October 28, she arrived at the Newark police department and was led into an interview room.

For hours, detectives Sheppard and Sabur asked Susan about what she could recall from that morning 27 years ago. But they had another motive: they wanted to build rapport with Susan. They asked her about her childhood, her relationship with her mother. The boyfriend.

Susan revealed that she had often been abused by her mother—verbally and physically. Maylon frequently berated and beat her three children, Susan said, and her boyfriend had also sexually abused Susan.

Life in their apartment, in Susan’s view, had been violent and traumatic. Susan felt like her mother not only abused her and her brothers, but did nothing to prevent others from doing the same.

The detectives listened intently, watching Susan’s body language and tone change over the course of several hours. Finally, Susan broke down. 

In tears, she confessed to murdering her mother in October 1971. Now an experienced mother herself, Susan finally admitted to what had happened nearly three decades prior.

When her husband later asked why she’d confessed then and there, to complete strangers, Susan had a simple answer.

“I trusted them,” she said.

Susan’s confession hardly surprised Detective Sabur.

“I said, ‘She’s gonna lie, she’s gonna lie,’” he said after the interview. “But then she’s gonna tell the truth.”

Sabur had discovered early in their cold case investigation that Susan’s original police interviews included, in his words, “a lot of dancing around.” 

The small detail that seemed to be overlooked the first time around? The medical examiner determined that when police arrived on the scene, Maylon had been deceased for about two hours. For three young children who’d suddenly and shockingly lost their mother, Sabur thought, that two-hour gap didn’t make sense. 

“My thing is, being the suspicious person that I am,” said Detective Sabur, “that this girl waited two hours to get her story together because she killed her mom.” 

Sabur’s theory was that Susan fired the shot, then staged her shock and distress when George and David rushed in. The boyfriend’s car fleeing the scene was fiction—a misdirection she invented during those two hours of waiting. 

The truth was that Susan believed the household’s abuse would never stop unless she stopped it herself.

Susan admitted that in the early hours of October 3, 1971, she crept into her mother’s room and opened a nightstand drawer, where Maylon’s handgun lay wrapped in a handkerchief.

Susan unwrapped it, aimed it at her mother, still sleeping in bed, and fired a single bullet into her chest. She quickly wiped her fingerprints with the handkerchief and placed it back in the drawer.

Then she hid behind the window curtains. Maylon, in shock, sat up in bed—now bloodied and panicked—and called her daughter’s name. Just as suddenly, she fell back and died.

Susan waited, and worked through what would become her alibi. She waited for her brothers to come in and considered what she’d tell them. What she’d say to the police. Although she was questioned and interviewed at the time, investigators never seriously considered Susan a viable suspect.

Upon her confession, Susan was arrested and charged with murder. But the case immediately presented a legal paradox for authorities. Because she was only 14 at the time of the crime, Susan was booked as a juvenile offender and held at Essex County Juvenile Detention Center. 

Ray Weiss, spokesperson for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, said that the unusual case could result in Susan being tried as an adult, but that the county would make that determination in the near future.

In the meantime, the 41-year-old was placed in a separate wing of the juvenile facility, beginning a process that would become years of legal uncertainty in uncharted territory for the county’s court system.

Before South 20th Street, the Johnsons had lived on South 15th Street, in an apartment below Barbara Evans and her sister, Carol. When the sisters were interviewed in 1998, neither was surprised by Susan’s confession.

“She used to beat them for hours at a time,” Barbara said. “She would turn on the radio real loud, but I would hear them crying all three of them.”

Carol confirmed that the Evans family could hear, on a near-daily basis, the verbal and physical abuse that took place in the Johnson household. “When I first read about Susan, a friend of mine was sitting here with me, and I said, ‘I’ll be damned. I knew this kid. I can imagine how she felt all these years.’”

Curiously, the Johnsons’ previous neighbors on South 15th Street were never interviewed by police in 1971. If they had been, investigators might have looked closer at what went on inside the home rather than who may have been fleeing from it.

Susan’s neighbors may have understood her predicament, but Detective Sabur had little sympathy. Even if Maylon had abused her children, Sabur said, she didn’t deserve to die like that. Susan, however much a victim herself, would still have to face her legal consequences.

Those consequences, however, were difficult to determine. Within days of Susan’s arrest, Family Court Judge Michael Degnan instructed that she be moved to an adult facility, but it still wasn’t clear if she would face murder charges as a juvenile or an adult.

According to the laws that were in place when the murder was committed in 1971, a 14-year-old in New Jersey could not be tried as an adult. The maximum penalty a juvenile could receive back then—even for murder—was being detained until they were 21. The focus of juvenile penalties at the time was rehabilitation rather than extended incarceration.

By 1998, the penalties for juveniles had changed. Now, a 14-year-old convicted of murder could be held for up to 20 years. This presented the court with a unique challenge: based on 1971 laws, Susan couldn’t be charged as an adult, but by the time she was arrested in 1998, she was well past the age of a typical juvenile defendant in need of rehabilitation.

“In my 18 years in Superior Court,” said Family Court Judge Michael O’Brien, “I haven’t seen it. It’s very, very unusual.”

In early November, Susan’s defense attorney, Walter Florczak, argued for her to be released on bail, claiming that since the shooting in 1971, Susan had led a normal, law-abiding life that was stable and uneventful. While the judge deliberated, Susan remained at Essex County Jail Annex in North Caldwell, housed among adult inmates.

The prosecutor’s office requested that Susan be held on $150,000 bail, but Judge Degnan soon decided her bail would be set at $10,000. She was released in early November, as the Superior Court’s adult and juvenile divisions worked to decide where she would be prosecuted.

During initial hearings, Florczak attempted to have the media barred from the proceedings, but Judge Degnan denied the motion and allowed media, including reporters from The Star-Ledger, into the courtroom.

By early 1999, after months of legal wrangling, it still wasn’t clear whether Susan would be tried as a juvenile or an adult.

Frustrated with the lack of progress and aware that his client faced a sort of legal purgatory, Florczak filed a motion to dismiss the charges against Susan in February 1999, claiming that no court had proper oversight over her case.

“No one has jurisdiction because the law simply doesn’t provide for dealing with 41-year-old juveniles,” Florczak said.

He argued that Susan had already done what juvenile detention was supposed to accomplish: she’d rehabilitated herself. She had raised a family, held steady work, and became a productive member of society. Time, Florczak argued, had been her sentence, and she’d served it in the community instead of behind bars.

In April 1999, six months after Susan confessed to murdering her mother, Judge Degnan ruled that she could go free.

Because 1971 statutes didn’t allow 14-year-olds to be tried as adults, the judge declared, she couldn’t be moved to an adult court. And because juvenile law at the time focused on rehabilitation—something Susan had clearly achieved—there was no point in further pursuing the case.

“There is absolutely no purpose in prosecuting Miss Watson,” the judge said in his ruling, “and clearly no need to rehabilitate.”

When the judge announced his decision, Susan broke down into tears, embraced her husband, and hugged her brothers, who sat behind her. David celebrated his sister’s legal freedom, but George did not.

“She should have been punished,” he said afterward. “She killed my mother. I suffered for 27 years.”

Despite numerous testimonies stating that the Johnson children were routinely abused, George, who was only ten at the time of Maylon’s murder, remembered something different. He recalled a single mother who worked hard to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

“My mama worked two jobs to get us everything we wanted,” he said in 1999. “She wanted better for us.”

To George, Judge Degnan’s ruling meant that Susan had gotten away with murder. 

The prosecution agreed: though Susan did appear to be rehabilitated, and though she murdered Maylon under abusive conditions, it was a crime nonetheless—one Assistant Prosecutor Keith Harvest believed should have consequences in some form, even if those were unclear.

“The mere fact that she was undetected should not benefit her,” Harvest said to the judge after the decision was announced.

A hearing following the judge’s ruling would determine whether Susan was indeed rehabilitated, but attorneys from the prosecution and defense agreed that this was a mere formality.

The judge had made it clear: this case appeared to be over.

In February 2000, nearly a year after Judge Degnan dismissed Susan’s charges, a Superior Court panel reversed the decision. It ruled that Susan would be required to face her original charges in juvenile court.

A two-judge panel determined that, despite her age and the time that had elapsed, the juvenile court was the proper jurisdiction because of Susan’s age at the time of the murder. 

The panel also determined that Judge Degnan should have established guilt or innocence before separately addressing Susan’s rehabilitation. It was a technicality, to be sure, but one that meant Susan would have to return to court and face murder charges after all.

With her charges reinstated, Susan was scheduled to face trial in June 2001. But just days before the trial was to begin, Susan and her defense attorney negotiated a plea deal: she would plead guilty to manslaughter—a reduced charge with an expired statute of limitations—in juvenile court.

Susan offered a tearful apology, repeating that her actions in October 1971 were a result of her mother’s repeated abuses and her inability to stop others from doing the same. After Susan entered her plea, Judge Degnan held a hearing, another formality, to officially declare Susan rehabilitated.

To some degree, the plea deal allowed all parties to save face. Susan admitted to the crime. Assistant Prosecutor Harvest appreciated the admission, and defense attorney Florczak believed it to be a fair conclusion. 

Through her lawyer, Susan—who didn’t give media interviews during the case—made it clear that she wanted to keep the past in the past.

“She wanted to plead because she didn’t want to put her mother on trial,” Florczak said after the judge’s final ruling.

George Johnson finally had the answer he and David sought when they contacted the newly formed Newark Cold Case Squad in October 1998.

But there was no jealous second boyfriend, no person who slipped away in the quiet, early hours of October 3, 1971. There was only a daughter, an older sister, who screamed for help, yet again, in her South 20th Street apartment.

Thanks for reading Buried Cases. If you found this story interesting, send it to a friend to help this project grow. You can also explore past reads, like:

• The Murder of Rose Twells

• The Unsolved Murders of Milwaukee’s South Side

• The Baffling Disappearance of Marjorie West

Have a case you’d like to see covered? Let us know here.

On Thursday, May 29, 1975, a young farmer named Gerald Drought tended a field outside Raymond, Wisconsin, a small town in northern Racine County about 20 miles south of Milwaukee. As he made his rounds on a tractor, Drought noticed something peculiar in a ditch off County Line Road: a human foot.

Drought called on a neighbor, who reported the finding to police in nearby Franklin. When they arrived on the scene east of Highway 45, police found the lifeless body of a young woman lying face down in the weeds. She had no visible wounds, though her head was bruised, and it appeared as if she had been beaten.

The next day, the woman was identified by her parents as 19-year-old Sherry Lynn Moriarity, a resident of a small town outside Milwaukee. Sherry was married but reportedly separated from her husband. Investigators believed her body had been in the field for a day or two before it was discovered.

There was little to suggest what happened to the battered teen. Autopsy results weren’t immediately conclusive, though blood found underneath the woman’s nails suggested she had fought back against her assailant.

Several of Sherry’s belongings were missing, including a gold earring, the butterfly pendant necklace she wore regularly, and personal items from her purse, such as glasses and a hairbrush. Later court documents revealed that one of Sherry’s wrists “bore a mark three-eighths of an inch in width,” leading investigators to believe someone had handcuffed or bound her before she died.

As the investigation unfolded, police learned that Sherry had been last seen on May 24, five days earlier, when she had walked home following an argument with an unknown man.

Sherry’s murder was disturbing, but it wasn’t a lone incident. From December 1973 to May 1975, when Sherry was found, six young women from around Milwaukee had been found murdered, all under mysterious and similar circumstances.

On December 13, 1973, 27-year-old Stena Weber left home to pick up a pay stub from the Milwaukee restaurant where she worked, but she never arrived. The following day, her niece discovered her body in a garage behind Stena’s South Side home.

Two days later, on December 15, the body of 19-year-old Linda Frank was found in a parking garage three miles away from where Stena was killed. Linda had left her boyfriend’s house in the early morning hours of Saturday and was found later in the day by a concerned cousin.

Both women had been strangled, and police admitted the cases that had occurred so close together in time and proximity were “very similar.” There were no obvious suspects, and a lack of progress on both cases “planted a note of fear” in the South Side community, reported one newspaper.

That fear worsened when another woman, 21-year-old Cynthia Marie Franckowiak, was found strangled on January 19, 1974, just one month after Stena and Linda had been murdered. Cynthia’s body lay in a pool of blood in a Milwaukee parking lot just a few blocks from where she lived.

Cynthia had visible bruises and marks on her neck, leading police to believe she had been strangled with a rope or cord. Investigators found cash and a paycheck on her person, suggesting the crime wasn’t a botched robbery. Despite the harsh winter conditions, the driver’s side window of her nearby car was down. The car’s ignition still held her keys.

Months passed before the next victim surfaced: in August 1974, the body of 21-year-old Susan Wicinski was discovered by crab fishermen on the Root River about six miles northwest of Racine. Susan was last seen in an alley near her home on Wednesday and reported missing the same day. Her body had been in the river for less than 24 hours, said Racine Chief Deputy Donald Nelson.

A medical exam revealed that the Milwaukee woman had water in her lungs, but confirmed that she had been strangled to death before being dumped in the current—likely from the Highway 31 bridge just below 4 Mile Road. Susan was missing a pin and a pendant necklace.

Less than two months later, on October 1, the body of 15-year-old Wendy G. Brown was found in a Racine cornfield west of I-94. Wendy, who had been reported missing on August 21, was clothed, though her Mickey Mouse watch and macramé bracelet were missing.

Her body was decomposed to the point that it obscured her cause of death, but the coroner didn’t rule out strangulation. The teen had planned to meet a friend at a drive-in restaurant in Milwaukee’s South Side, but never showed up.

Sherry Moriarty’s murder in May 1975 brought the tragic toll to six young women dead in 18 months. A lack of evidence had stymied investigators—until an unusual event in June 1975 pointed detectives toward a key suspect.

On June 23, 1975, a 20-year-old woman was driving on the North-South Freeway near the Milwaukee-Racine county line when she heard a bullhorn behind her: a police car ordering her to pull over.

When she did, a man claiming—unconvincingly—to be a state police officer handcuffed her at gunpoint and forced her toward his vehicle. Thinking quickly, she asked him to turn off her headlights before they left. When he walked back to her car, she jumped into the driver’s seat of his vehicle and sped away, narrowly escaping her would-be abductor.

The attempted kidnapper was later identified as James Multaler, a Wisconsin man in his early thirties with a curious criminal background. Multaler, born in 1944, had bounced around various small towns in Wisconsin, committing a number of petty crimes and minor traffic violations in his twenties.

In 1968, 24-year-old Multaler had been charged with carrying a concealed weapon in Little Suamico, Wisconsin. He was previously on probation for failing to make a mortgage payment, so the gun charge led to a two-year prison sentence in Green Bay.

Upon Multaler’s release from prison, his crimes escalated. In April 1970, he picked up two female hitchhikers, Mary Mayo and Shirley Wolfinger, in Fond du Lac and drove them southwest to a property in Waupun, where he attempted to rob them at gunpoint. Somehow, the women managed to disarm him during the incident, and as he fled, they recorded his license plate number.

After fleeing the Midwest, Multaler was arrested in Florida and taken back to Wisconsin to face attempted robbery charges. One day, while in the Fond du Lac County jail, Multaler complained of stomach pains and was sent to St. Agnes Hospital, where he escaped from a third-floor window.

A police report claimed he “was able to get the window and outside screen open, climb to a lower roof and jump to the ground or parking lot at the rear of the hospital.”

Two weeks later, Multaler was picked up by FBI agents in Mississippi and returned to Wisconsin. By 1973, Multaler was back on the streets, again tallying traffic violations, like speeding and driving with a revoked license.

In July 1973, Multaler and six others were arrested in a counterfeit money ring operating out of Fond du Lac. Fake bills had been circulating in the area that summer, and federal agents silently traced them back to their source.

When Secret Service agents raided Multaler’s Waupun apartment, they found a small press, printing supplies, and about $200,000 in counterfeit bills—many of which had been soaked in coffee to lend them a weathered appearance. Agents located Multaler at work, where he painted cars, and took him to Waukesha County Jail, where he was held on a $5,000 bond. When Multaler was arrested, he had approximately $2,500 in fake bills on his person.

While in custody, Multaler told investigators he had learned the art of printing while in prison at Green Bay, where he had served time for his gun charge in 1968. Multaler initially pleaded not guilty to manufacturing counterfeit currency, but in early 1974, he changed his plea to guilty and was given five years of probation.

Multaler was still on probation when he was arrested for the attempted highway kidnapping of the young woman in June 1975. After his arrest, it didn’t take long for investigators looking into Multaler’s background to count him as a possible suspect in the still-unsolved murders of Sherry Moriarity, Wendy Brown, Cynthia Franckowiak, and Susan Wicinski (these four cases had garnered the most media attention, but the murders of Linda Frank and Stena Weber also appeared to be unsolved).

Multaler was a plausible person of interest. He had a rap sheet dating back to 1968—including the attempted robbery of the two hitchhikers—and most of the murdered women were thought to have been killed in or near their vehicles. Then there was a peculiar incident: Milwaukee County District Attorney Edward Michael McCann received an anonymous newspaper clipping about the 1975 abduction attempt with a handwritten note reading, “This man is the South Side Killer (7 Mile Rd.)[.] He has raped 36 girls.”

A handwriting analysis of the note pointed to Multaler, prompting investigators to dig even deeper into the man’s background. Detectives interviewed Multaler’s ex-girlfriend, who reported that while making love, he sometimes “placed both his hands around her throat and choked her,” occasionally to the point that it was difficult for her to recover. Much of the information gleaned from this woman would make its way into the affidavit used to search Multaler’s home decades later.

She also revealed that Multaler kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings centered on the murdered Milwaukee women. One scrapbook, she said, even included clippings from another murder case, though she didn’t specify the victim. The scrapbooks and clippings would later prompt Multaler’s own defense attorney to conclude that his client had a “fairly unusual interest in these cases.”

In January 1976, Multaler pleaded guilty to four counts related to the attempted kidnapping of the woman in June 1975. In admitting his guilt, Multaler came under more intense scrutiny for the open Milwaukee murders. When detectives interviewed Multaler in March 1976, he denied any involvement in the killings, saying he would take a sodium pentothal test—a truth serum—to confirm his innocence.

“You may use any and all evidence as you see fit or as needed in reference to these four murders,” Multaler wrote in a letter, against the wishes of his defense attorney.

Authorities didn’t take Multaler up on the offer. After his kidnapping conviction, in May 1976, Multaler was incarcerated in Central State Hospital by Judge Christ T. Seraphim, who called the convict “the most dangerous man that has ever been before me in my 16 years on the bench.”

Multaler agreed, acknowledging that he himself didn’t think it was a good idea for him to “be out” thanks to his violent tendencies. Multaler confessed that he had attacked other women as he did the driver in June 1975, and had planned to sexually assault her if the abduction had gone according to plan.

“I have done it several times, your honor, over the period of years that I have been free outside,” Multaler said. “I have a long prison history and the sex life that I do have is inadequate. I have gone out and done it since I have been approximately 13.”

Despite his rambling confessions and apparent mental illness, investigators couldn’t definitively tie Multaler to the unsolved murders. He admitted to being a violent predator, but never provided the specifics that would connect him to the killings.

While at Central State Hospital in Waupun, Multaler began his next printing project: an unusual 22-page booklet called “Mad Man Book of Formulas.”

Inside, readers found recipes and step-by-step instructions on how to make “little goodies like poisons,” napalm, laughing gas, and “knockout drops” made from toilet cleaning chemicals. The self-published booklet was a survival guide for suspicious DIY activities. It was advertised for $9.95 in the classified sections of magazines like “Soldier of Fortune.”

Multaler began publishing it shortly after entering Central State Hospital, and by 1982, he had supposedly sold more than 3,000 copies. The operation was shut down when a hospital employee came across one of Multaler’s magazine ads. That same year, Multaler requested a release from the state hospital, claiming he was no longer mentally ill. His appeal was swiftly denied.

In the meantime, investigators continued looking into Multaler’s connections to the women murdered outside Milwaukee, but couldn’t organize enough evidence to bring charges against him. For years, the cases stalled, and Multaler served out his sentence at the state’s criminal hospital.

By the fall of 1988, Multaler was back in the general public, but he was once again arrested—this time charged with second-degree sexual assault. Investigators, including Lt. James Ivanoski of Racine County Sheriff’s Department, began to revisit Multaler as a suspect in the 1970s murders—what were now cold cases.

As Ivanoski reviewed old case files, he focused on a handful of overlooked details that seemed to conclusively link Multaler to at least one of the victims: 15-year-old Wendy Brown. According to police reports from 1976, Multaler admitted that on the night Wendy disappeared, he picked up the young hitchhiker and brought her to a drive-in restaurant—the same one where she was supposed to meet a friend.

At one point, when pressed for details about that day, Multaler claimed to have “had a drug-induced flashback and so couldn’t remember anything other than stopping there.” It was a perplexing alibi, but since he confessed to being one of the last people to see Wendy alive, Multaler had definitively tied himself to at least one of the Milwaukee victims. Why these threads hadn’t been pursued more in the 1970s was unknown.

In November 1988, Ivanoski pushed for Multaler to take a polygraph or “truth serum” test, but Racine County District Attorney Lennie Weber acknowledged that the results of either test would be inadmissible in court. Despite his tentative connection to one of the victims, Multaler wasn’t arrested or charged for the murder of Wendy or the other women. Their cases remained unsolved through the 1980s and ‘90s.

Then, in May 1998—a decade after he was last arrested for sexual assault—Multaler became a suspect in the February 1997 murder of a woman in a Racine nature preserve. Multaler would eventually be cleared of the crime—he was in poor physical health by this time— but detectives, including Racine County Investigator John C. Hanrahan, decided to once again look into Multaler’s links to the ‘70s cold case murders.

Like Ivanoski, Hanrahan found more connections that firmly pointed to Multaler as the common denominator in at least two of the murders. Not only did the initial investigation reveal that Multaler had seen Wendy the night she disappeared, but when Multaler admitted to picking her up, he also “corrected” information about the teenager that was inaccurate in her missing person’s report.

Although he initially claimed to not know what happened that night, when asked during a separate interview if he was involved in her disappearance, Multaler had admitted that he may have been.

“If she is dead I must have killed her,” Multaler reportedly said, according to court documents. “I had to kill her, I don’t recall.”

He didn’t get all the facts straight, though. When asked to describe Wendy’s clothing, Multaler detailed a specific outfit, but it wasn’t Wendy’s. Instead, it was exactly what Susan Wicinski wore when her body was found in August 1974.

When Multaler had been taken to the state hospital in 1976, reports claimed, he also admitted that he “always liked strangling—playacting—with every girl [he had] known,” a habit confirmed by his ex-girlfriend. It was at this time that doctors at the institution diagnosed him as having antisocial personality disorder, “moderate unspecified sexual deviation,” and other mental health conditions.

His case file also revealed that in 1978, Multaler contacted a Milwaukee television station to request copies of any stories related to the murders of the women in 1974 and 1975—presumably for the scrapbook his ex-girlfriend reported finding in his home.

Multaler had a more tentative connection to Cynthia Franckowiak, who was found with a note in her pocket that read “James McDonald.” The name may have been an alias for Multaler, whose ex-girlfriend reported seeing the same moniker written down somewhere in his home during her stay there in 1975.

In 1988, when Multaler was arrested for sexual assault, the investigation also revealed that his 13-year-old daughter admitted to police that her father had sexually abused her over the course of many years.

Looking back, Hanrahan also noted a striking pattern: the murders stopped abruptly in 1976—the year Multaler was imprisoned.

Years worth of case files and circumstantial evidence pointed to Multaler as the serial murderer of the young Milwaukee women, yet multiple detectives—across decades—couldn’t build a strong enough case to charge him.

To Hanrahan, the connections were more than enough to pin the murders on Multaler. Now, he just needed physical evidence. In May 1998, Hanrahan filed an affidavit requesting a search warrant of Multaler’s Milwaukee home, where he lived with his wife and daughter.

Hanrahan knew that Multaler had owned the house for twenty-odd years, and he believed that if Multaler was the killer, he likely kept possession of some of the murdered women’s things as mementos. He hoped to find Wendy’s Mickey Mouse watch and bracelet, Sherry’s gold earring and pendant necklace, and Susan’s pin.

In the affidavit, Hanrahan attempted to prove “the reasonable inference that he [Multaler] would be likely to retain the mementos more than 20 years after the murders,” the way many serial killers often do. The affidavit was convincing, and in May 1998, authorities received permission to search Multaler’s home.

The search was productive, but not for reasons investigators predicted. When they combed through Multaler’s residence, police retrieved some evidence potentially related to the serial murders, but they also found something else: illegal images of children. When investigators searched the contents of two computer disks, they found 79 explicit photographs of minors—material Multaler said he possessed for “possible resale” or to create similar content himself.

Multaler faced 79 charges, each carrying a potential two-year sentence. Held at Milwaukee County Jail pending a preliminary hearing, Multaler argued that the charges were duplicative and should be reduced to two counts—one for each disk. The court rejected his argument, and Multaler ultimately accepted a plea deal that resulted in a 56-year prison sentence.

Investigators later revealed that the search of Multaler’s home didn’t uncover any direct links to the murders of the Milwaukee women, but they did seize several circumstantial items, including scrapbooks, newspaper clippings, videotapes, and a pair of handcuffs.

They also took a DNA sample from Multaler to see if it matched evidence found under Sherry Moriarity’s fingernails, but the blood sample was determined to be her own. By the summer of 1999, investigators were no closer to connecting Multaler—then 62 and serving his lengthy prison sentence—to the Milwaukee murders.

For years, Multaler appealed his convictions, arguing that the search warrant and sentencing were unjustified. In 2002, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court ruled that the search warrant was legal and that Multaler’s sentence would be upheld. With his legal maneuvering exhausted, Multaler accepted his fate as an inmate of Dodge Correctional Institution in Waupun.

In February 2004, Multaler died while in prison. Despite years of separate investigations, authorities in Racine and Milwaukee Counties were never able to bring charges against him for the murders of Sherry Moriarity, Cynthia Franckowiak, Susan Wicinski, Wendy Brown, Linda Frank, or Stena Weber. Their murders remain officially unsolved to this day.

On December 20, 1979, Charles Edgecumbe pulled on his coat and trudged across the snow-swept street toward the home of Rose Twells in Woodbury, New Jersey. Charles was married to Celeste, Rose’s niece, and was coming to bring the 86-year-old woman over for dinner at the Edgecumbe residence.

Most Thursdays, Rose and Celeste went shopping in town. Rose, a widow who lived alone in a 140-year-old mansion, was fiercely independent, but allowed Celeste to take her shopping for groceries each week.

On Tuesday, December 18, Rose had cancelled their usual Thursday trip, but accepted a dinner invitation in its place. When Charles arrived at Rose’s door just after 5 p.m. on Thursday, he knocked and received no answer. He continued knocking, and waiting, and when there was still no sign of movement inside, Charles headed home to retrieve a key to Rose’s front door.

When he entered the white, three-story stucco house, he found the home in disarray. Rose had always kept antiques and collectibles organized around the house, but on this late afternoon, rooms were disheveled, and items were scattered haphazardly. When he entered the living room, Charles saw something that would haunt the city of Woodbury for decades to come.

The living room was ransacked. Furniture lay overturned and antiques were strewn about. At the bottom of the staircase, Rose Twells lay motionless, ankles bound by a lamp’s electrical cord. The cord was tied to a stairwell banister, and a pool of blood appeared beneath her head.

Charles ran home across Delaware Street and called the police. In shock, he told them that Rose Twells, the retired teacher who had always been active in their tight-knit community, was dead. The murder made no sense to Charles or Celeste, and for decades, it would remain Woodbury’s most elusive cold case.

At the time of her death, Rose Twells was something of a reclusive woman, but that had not always been the case. Rose had been married to John Stokes Twells, who had served as Woodbury’s mayor in the 1930s. Rose had been a strong presence beside her husband, who was hard of hearing.

She took care of John in countless ways, and would often “yell at the top of her lungs” to make sure he could hear, said one neighbor. John, in turn, appreciated Rose: every May Day, he never failed to send a bouquet of spring flowers, said the local florist.

For 15 years, Rose taught at Mantua Grove School in West Deptford Township. She and John had no children, but she enjoyed the company of young people and many considered her an excellent teacher. Her family had deep roots in the area, dating back to before the Revolutionary War. Rose was a descendant of Caesar Rodney, a founding father who had signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776.

For years, the Twells were a well-known couple in the community. Rose was a member of the Presbyterian Church and volunteered with the local Red Cross and Woodbury Women’s Club. John was a staple of town politics, and when he died in 1970, Rose became a widow who didn’t want to leave behind her opulent house on Delaware Street.

Despite friends and family—including Celeste Edgecumbe—insisting that she not live by herself, Rose had remained stubbornly independent throughout her 80s. After John died, she kept her home clean, though full of antiques and mementos. “The whole house was like stepping back into the 1930s,” said a retired detective in 2005.

In 1976, Rose donated three acres of land across the street to the city of Woodbury, which in turn converted the acreage into a bird and wildlife sanctuary in memory of her husband, who was one of the town’s earliest council members.

When summer would arrive in Woodbury, Rose tended to her garden in the morning and evening, working among her favorite flowers and plants. And when winter hit, Rose—afraid that the old oil system in her home would malfunction—kept her house barely warmed.

When police arrived to investigate Rose’s death on December 20, the thermostat in her home was set in the 40s. She was dressed in enough layers to suggest that this was her regular winter routine.

Rose would go on frequent walks into downtown Woodbury and was often spotted around town as she went about her business. On Tuesday, when Celeste last talked to her aunt, Rose was seen walking in Woodbury’s shopping district. City Clerk David Phillips saw Rose when she came in to pay her property tax bill that day.

The frail widow, described as an “elegant lady,” stood less than five feet tall and weighed no more than 90 pounds, yet still walked in every season to complete her errands as needed. To those who knew her, Rose was small but mighty.

One person was particularly shocked by Rose’s murder: current Woodbury mayor Frederick Bayer. As two political-minded families in town, the Bayers and Twells knew each other well. Fred phoned and visited Rose often, checking up on the woman he and his 17-year-old son, Jeffrey, had come to know, affectionately, as “Aunt Rose.” Fred’s mother had met Rose when the two women attended Trenton State Teachers College in the 1920s. There, they began a friendship that connected the two families more than 50 years later.

“She was a very friendly woman, extremely interested in the city,” said Fred, after Rose’s death. “She always looked at you as the boy next door, you never grew up in her eyes. But it’s nice to know that some people think that way.”

In the months before Rose’s death, several thefts and other petty crimes began to crop up in Woodbury—particularly on Delaware Street, which ran east-to-west through the heart of town. In Rose’s area, some elderly residents had begun to fear for their safety while walking around town.

An elderly woman who lived near Rose was mugged while walking back from downtown in recent weeks, and according to Woodbury Police Chief F. Dean Kimmel, there had been three purse snatchings, an assault, a case of breaking and entering, and an armed robbery in the weeks leading up to Rose’s death. About a block away from Rose’s home, a juvenile had recently been arrested for attempted burglary. There had been two robbery attempts of a local flower shop in November.

The crime wave was out of the ordinary for a city like Woodbury, and it was enough to spur police to set up stakeouts on Delaware Street in early December. By December 7, however, police hadn’t witnessed any additional crime in the area, so they concluded the four-day operation.

Despite the uptick in recent crimes, Woodbury—and Rose, herself—had seen similar cases come and go. Two years before her death, Rose was visiting family in California when someone broke into her home through the cellar door. It didn’t appear as if anything had been stolen, police concluded, but the nature of Rose’s antique collection made it difficult to be sure.

When Woodbury police arrived at Rose’s home on December 20, they found no signs of forced entry. The back door was unlocked, which Celeste and Charles noted was unusual. It had been snowing on the day Rose was found, so any tracks coming in or out of the home had been covered. The temperature of the house had preserved the crime scene well, examiners noticed, and investigators located several blood-covered items in the living room.

It wasn’t clear what had been used to kill Rose. An examination of her body revealed that her only injuries were to her head, likely done with a blunt, heavy object. Deputy county medical examiner Dr. John W. Holdcraft estimated that Rose had been killed Tuesday night, though it would take an autopsy to uncover specific and accurate details about her death.

As it stood, police knew they had a homicide on their hands, but it wasn’t clear what the motive of the crime was. Because Rose’s home was so packed with items, it also wasn’t initially clear if anything was missing from the home. It would take investigators days to canvas the house completely, and even then, police were never able to catalog all the items in the house before and after Rose’s death.

“One of the problems we have to overcome is that she was a ‘saver,’” said Woodbury Detective Lt. Robert Malin. “It looks like she saved everything. It’s going to be a long time before we’re able to find out if anything is really missing.”

Because of the ransacked nature of the house, Captain Donald Layton of the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office believed it was a burglary gone wrong. The intruders may have been looking for cash or items to sell, he guessed.

Whatever theories the police had about Rose’s killer, they could not be confirmed by witnesses. That week, a cold spell meant that most families were safely and warmly in their homes before dark each afternoon. And that week’s snowfall meant that there were no footprints preserved in or around the home. What made Rose’s death so difficult to solve was that it occurred in the cold, solitary vacuum of a New Jersey winter.

With results from the autopsy days later—one that showed “nothing too unexpected”—Woodbury investigators believed Rose had died 15 to 20 hours before Charles found her. The examination also revealed that she had confronted her assailant, fighting back as much as her 85-pound frame could manage. City police and the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office had no suspects, clues, or motives after five full days of investigating the Twells’ home.

Police hoped that a reward of up to $7,500 for information related to the crime would spur leads, but it resulted in sparse calls and no substantial insights.

Six days after Rose’s body was found—one day after Christmas—60 friends and family arrived at Woodbury’s Presbyterian Church to remember the life of Rose Twells, whom her reverend called the “first lady of the community.” Police attended the funeral and took photos of those in attendance, hoping the killer would show up in a strange sort of reverie.

Rose was buried at Eglington Cemetery alongside her husband. The official date of death on her gravestone read December 19, 1979.

Six months after Rose’s death, Woodbury police had yet to make an arrest in her case. That wasn’t for a lack of trying: Detective Ralph Quidone said the department “put in more hours in a shorter period of time than any other murder case.” By Quidone’s estimate, investigators had poured 200 hours into Rose’s case and were still no closer to any answers by June 1980.

Some of the challenges remained the same: after interviewing Rose’s neighbors, it was clear that the snow and weather that week prevented there from being any eyewitnesses. Inside the house, the condition of Rose’s home—full of old antiques and curiosities—made it difficult to obtain fingerprints thanks to the amount of dust on nearly every surface.

Still, Woodbury police had conducted plenty of interviews and had even given polygraph tests to 12 to 15 people, though none led to arrests. After half a year of no answers, investigators were open to anything, including working with a psychic or hypnotist to help retrieve information through unconventional means.

More traditionally, they enlisted the help of the FBI’s Criminal Personality Profiling program, based in Quantico, Virginia. Woodbury investigators hoped that the FBI’s expansive knowledge of criminal profiles might help them find evidence or characteristics of the homicide that they had perhaps overlooked.

By the summer of 1980, detectives had ruled out 40 suspects. Rose’s case file was more than a foot thick, but they were no closer to a legitimate perpetrator or motive. They also weren’t entirely sure of what was taken from the home when Rose was killed, if anything, but believed the murder weapon may have been removed as the assailant, or assailants, escaped.

Two years after Rose’s murder, the Woodbury Old-City Restoration Committee wanted to pay tribute to the Twells by hosting their second annual designer’s showplace in the couple’s empty home. It was perhaps a macabre suggestion, and one that eventually fell through after a pipe burst and became irreparable before the event. At the time, in January 1981, Woodbury Police Chief Kimmel stated that there had been no new leads in Rose’s case, although investigators held weekly meetings to review their progress.

Years passed with no public updates on Rose’s murder. By the mid-1980s, the Twells’ home was rezoned as a professional office building, and whispers of her unsolved murder became fewer and farther between. Police continued to follow up on new leads, but those, too, had dwindled in recent years.

In December 1986, the Gloucester County Times ran a profile on the seventh anniversary of Rose’s death. It recounted the circumstances—that Rose had been killed just days before Christmas, when she planned to join her nephew, Thomas Twells, for a family holiday near Baltimore. Thomas had been responsible for the reward offered for leads on Rose’s case, though the offer came and went without success.

Despite the passage of time, the paper reported, detectives were still committed to solving Rose’s murder. Detective Quidone, who was on the original case in 1979, was still protective of the information police had on hand, and prevented reporters from reviewing their files. Police still wouldn’t publicly reveal what the murder weapon had been, though at least four years had passed since they had received a legitimate lead. With each passing year, Rose’s case grew colder, but Woodbury police were determined not to give up.

Quidone said that from time to time, the department—and even the medical examiner—would review Rose’s case file to see if there was anything they had overlooked the first time around. “Maybe there’s something in there we missed because it’s so obvious you go right over it,” Quidone said. “But I don’t think that’s the case.”

For Celeste Edgecumbe, the answer was in plain sight. “I think it was a local person,” she said in December 1986. “She always kept the doors bolted so tightly shut.” Because there was no sign of forced entry, and Rose was so particular about who she let into her home, Celeste believed that whoever killed her aunt was intimately familiar with Rose and her routines.

In 1986, investigators noted that one item in Rose’s home had never been found: a two- to three-carat diamond pendant. The diamond, valued at $10,000, had originally come from a ring, but had been reset into a white-gold Tiffany setting. The missing jewelry and disheveled condition of the home led police to further conclude that Rose’s murder was the unfortunate result of a burglary.

With leads exhausted, Quidone’s optimism centered on one hope: that the passage of time would work to investigators’ favor. “We’re hoping that sooner or later the killer will mention it to someone,” he said. “We’re always hopeful.”

In 1990, Celeste’s hunch that a local man murdered Rose Twells gained steam. It had been 11 years, but the Twells family—and others in Woodbury—were sure that those responsible for Rose’s death were heading, however slowly, toward justice.

“There’s a lot of evidence,” Thomas Twells told reporters. “I can’t believe that anybody in a relatively obscure town in South Jersey can squash a murder investigation or keep evidence from coming to light.”

The Twells wouldn’t publicly name the suspect they had in mind, but newspaper reports called him “a young man who is the son of a Woodbury family.” As police worked their investigation, Thomas began looking for a private investigator—ideally, a retired FBI agent, he said—who could help the family piece together what had eluded authorities for more than a decade.

The Twells family believed that this young man had a key to Rose’s home and knew she would have jewelry and cash in her possession. They claimed to have found a bloodied jewelry box in an upstairs room after the police’s initial investigation, suggesting that detectives weren’t as meticulous as they appeared to be. The family also suggested a brooch had been stolen from Rose’s home, retrieved, and given back to police, though Detective Quidone said this was inaccurate.

The rumored suspect was no stranger to Woodbury police. “Yeah, it’s the hot rumor all over town,” said Norman Reeves, deputy chief of the Gloucester County Prosecutor’s Office. But without hard evidence, Reeves confirmed, the county couldn’t make a good arrest—or a case for murder.

On June 21, 2003, the Gloucester County Times ran a front-page story with the headline: “Three charged in 23-year-old murder.” The story featured photos of Rose Twells, the crime scene, and the fresh mugshots of two individuals: Clifford Jeffrey and Jeffrey Bayer.

It had been 13 years since the Twells suggested they knew who was responsible for Rose’s death, and now, police finally had enough evidence to make their arrests—three in total, and all already in jail or prison.

Jeffrey, 41, was serving time at South Woods State Prison for various drug convictions. Bayer, 39, was scheduled to be released from South Woods after serving five years for burglary and theft convictions. Mark English, 41, was being held on grand theft charges at Florida’s Madison Correctional Institute. In Rose’s case, all three men faced charges of first-degree murder, first-degree felony murder, and first-degree conspiracy to commit murder.

The “young man” from a Woodbury family that the Twells had long suspected was Jeffrey Bayer—the son of former Woodbury mayor Fred Bayer, who was in office in 1979 when Rose was killed. Fred may have been a close friend of the Twells, but Jeffrey, 17 at the time of Rose’s murder, was a known delinquent in town.

In the spring of 1979, Janet Bayer, Jeffrey’s mother, had thrown him out of the house after he stole dinner silverware to pawn for drug money. He also burglarized another home in the community, but Janet was able to trace the jewelry back to a pawn shop and retrieve it. Considering the condition of Rose’s home—and now, with Bayer’s criminal history coming to light—investigators were confident that Bayer and his accomplices meant to rob Rose the week before Christmas.

The 2003 arrests of Bayer, English, and Jeffrey were the result of information Woodbury police received back in 1991, when an anonymous source came forward with details of the crime. The informant was given immunity in exchange for a full testimony of what happened to Rose Twells.

The informant revealed that she had been part of a group of teenagers who were, in December 1979, plotting to rob Rose, focusing on cash and jewelry that they could later pawn. The informant claimed that the group of teens included Bayer, English, and Jeffrey, who were all known to be in the same social circles.

By 2002, authorities had corroborated insights from the informant and other sources, motivating Woodbury detectives, including Robert Atkisson Jr., to bring the case to a close. Atkisson was a rookie in 1979 and now had 23 years on the job—23 years spent investigating Rose’s case.

“Within the last year, it really got hot,” said Woodbury Police Chief Reed Merinuk, who was just 11 years old when Rose was murdered. “We were getting good information and corroboration. They were relentless. Every time they got a little more information, they jumped right on it.”

After years of roadblocks, Woodbury’s only unsolved murder case appeared close to being solved.

Prosecutors soon discovered that the charges against Bayer would be problematic. To start, he had been a juvenile at the time the crime was committed. His public defender, Jeffrey Winter, citing the laws in place in 1979, argued for Bayer to be tried as a juvenile. English, who was scheduled to face a separate trial, was also a juvenile at the time.

The prosecution argued that Bayer’s lengthy criminal history, dating back to the 1970s, was sufficient to have him tried as an adult. In February 2004, Bayer and Jeffrey were indicted for murder charges; a judge ruled that both would indeed be tried as adults.

As Bayer’s trial loomed, the informant who broke open the case was revealed to be Luanne Waller, Bayer’s girlfriend at the time of the murder. Waller offered firsthand accounts of her conversations with Bayer about Rose back in 1979, and she had even been at the scene on the night Rose was killed. According to Waller’s account of the botched robbery, she acted as a lookout as Bayer and his accomplices entered Rose’s home. “I can’t forget about what happened,” she said in a taped interview with police.

After the murder, Waller stayed quiet out of fear of Bayer’s retaliation, she claimed. She moved away, but when she came back to Woodbury in the early 1990s, Waller began dating a police cadet. When he revealed that Rose’s murder was still unsolved all these years later, Waller finally revealed what she had known all along. Waller claimed that she was surprised the murder case hadn’t been resolved by then, so she went to the police, hoping for the immunity she was eventually granted.

In October 2004, Mark English was also indicted on murder charges. All three defendants were scheduled to face trial in 2005, with Bayer going to court first. In April, Bayer refused any last-minute plea bargains, confirming that his case would go to trial.

There, his defense focused on a lack of tangible evidence. But while there was no physical connection to tie Bayer to the scene—police had never recovered DNA traces belonging to him—several witnesses claimed Bayer had told them about the murder in the weeks and months to follow.

Waller was the prosecution’s key witness, but another friend, Steve Forbes, testified that he had given Bayer and English a ride into Philadelphia after the murder so that they could pawn stolen jewelry. Justine Shenkus, who was 13 at the time of the crime, reported that Bayer said he killed Rose after she caught him trying to steal things from her home.

A woman named Shirley Logan also testified that she had overheard Bayer confess to the murder. Several days after the crime, Logan said, she had received an anonymous phone call from someone who said Shirley would be killed if she talked to the police.

In each case, the witnesses had stayed silent for so long because they feared Bayer’s retribution. Bayer’s defense, on the other hand, presented these witnesses as unreliable—biased by the passage of time and drug-riddled memories. In the defense’s view, these witnesses were problematic because they couldn’t accurately recall what they did as teenagers decades ago.

When jurors were asked at the beginning of the trial if they were capable of convicting someone of first-degree murder with no physical evidence, all 15 jurors said, unequivocally, that they could not. This seemed like a win for Bayer’s defense, but as the trial unfolded, he did himself no favors. When he was called to testify, Bayer admitted to using drugs as a teenager, and made derogatory statements about others, including Waller, his former girlfriend.

Curiously, he also said that he didn’t know Rose Twells, Mark English, or Clifford Jeffrey at the time of the murder—despite years of relationships between the Twells and Bayer households. He claimed not to have met Waller until 1981 or 1982, despite her own testimony. Bayer’s time on the stand proved that he was interested in distancing himself from the crime and those involved, regardless of other witness testimonies.

During the trial, Logan, who was Clifford Jeffrey’s 16-year-old girlfriend at the time of the murder, claimed that Bayer was focused on finding Rose’s large diamond. Shirley said Bayer believed it to be a “10-carat diamond ring,” though the pendant that went missing was two to three carats in size.

Perhaps most convincing was Waller’s account of the murder. She testified that on December 20, she finished her homework, left her parents’ house, and joined Bayer and his friends. They went to Rose’s home, and the men went inside, Waller said.

When one came out 25 minutes later, he “looked scared.” Rose left shortly after, and Bayer called her that night to recount what happened. What was supposed to be a quick, easy robbery for drug money turned violent almost immediately.

Bayer said that Rose “must have heard somebody in the house,” Luanne testified. “She had recognized Jeff and was going to call his dad. Jeff grabbed her and she fell down the steps and he hit her in the head.”

On May 27, 2005, after five days of witness testimony, it took less than three hours for a jury of nine women and three men to find Bayer guilty of felony murder. He was acquitted of the first-degree murder charge, as the jury could not tell without a reasonable doubt that he was the one who actually killed Rose. They all agreed, however, that he had participated in the burglary-turned-murder.

Thomas Twells, Rose’s nephew who had set up the reward for her case in 1979, was present during the announcement of the verdict. “I’d hate to have anybody take my blood pressure right now,” Tom, 70, said. “It’s through the roof, but it’s coming back down.”

Because of the amount of time that had passed since Rose’s murder, Bayer was sentenced under New Jersey’s 1979 murder statutes. The judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison, with parole eligibility after 15 years. Had he committed the crime after New Jersey updated its laws in the 1980s, Bayer could have faced a more extended prison sentence because of his prior convictions for burglary and theft.

In August 2005, Clifford Jeffrey pleaded guilty to felony murder, but attempted to recant after English’s case resulted in a mistrial in October 2005. A judge affirmed the plea deal in November 2005, however, and Jeffrey’s conviction was upheld. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

In February 2006, a jury in English’s second trial acquitted him of murder charges. He did plead guilty to another crime, however, stemming from an assault on a sheriff’s officer in January 2005.

For his time in custody, Bayer was credited with 756 days of time served and more than 4,000 days of “gap time” credit. In June 2008, a three-judge panel upheld Bayer’s conviction after his defense team appealed, claiming that the jury in his trial overheard “damaging and prejudicial information about the defendant.”

In June 2018, 13 years after he was convicted of Rose Twells’ murder, Bayer was released from New Jersey State Prison.

On May 8, 1938, in celebration of Mother’s Day, little Marjorie West, only four years old, went on a picnic with her family in the Allegheny Forest near Bradford, Pennsylvania. 

After church, Marjorie and her family—her father Shirley West, who was an assistant engineer at Kendall Refining, her mother Cecelia, her older sister Dorothea, 11, and her brother Allan, 7—went along with family friends Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd Akerlind.

To get to their picnic spot, the Wests drove along Highway 219 to nearby Marshburg, a popular clearing in the Allegheny Forest. By 3 p.m., an exhausted Cecelia returned to the family car to rest. Shirley and the Akerlinds headed further into the woods to fish for trout in a nearby stream.

Soon, Marjorie and Dorothea decided to pick a bouquet of wildflowers for Mother’s Day. Their father cautioned the girls to watch for rattlesnakes, then left them in the clearing.

For a time, the West sisters gathered violets. Then Dorothea left Marjorie alone for a moment while she ran back to the car to give Cecelia a bouquet of flowers.

When she returned, Marjorie was gone. 

The Wests and their friends combed the clearing and woods where the girls had been picking flowers, but to no avail. Most groups stayed to search for the lost child, while others drove to the nearest phone, which was seven miles away in the small town of Kane. Only then were the police alerted. 

Initially, the police assumed little Marjorie was purposely hiding from her sister. After all, one of her favorite games was hide-and-seek. But the little girl with curly red hair never came out of hiding. The police then theorized that Marjorie wandered off and was lost in the woods. 

Allegheny Woods was a dangerous place. There were bears and rattlesnakes. The ground was dotted with hundreds of abandoned oil wells, remnants of the 1870s petroleum industry that boomed in the area. And there was the fast-moving stream. 

The police searched the area but could find no trace of the missing girl. They quickly realized they would need more boots on the ground. Eventually, some 200 volunteers from the local Moose and Elk lodges joined a group of people from the Citizen Conservation Corps to look for Marjorie. 

Even though, as the local newspaper reported, “all available flashlights in the city were pressed into service,” the initial search was called off when it got too dark to see. The next morning, Monday, 500 volunteers arrived to continue searching the forest for the missing child. Many of them called into work so they could help locate Marjorie. 

With each passing day, more volunteers assisted in the search. On Wednesday, Hugh Ryan, the mayor of Bradford, issued a plea for a thousand volunteers. More than 2,500 showed up.

On Thursday, the owners and managers of several of western Pennsylvania’s oil fields did something unprecedented: they gave their workers the day off to help in Marjorie’s search. 

Hundreds of volunteers walked every square inch of the Allegheny Forest, an arm’s length apart from each other. They scoured the tangled underbrush, killed rattlesnakes, shined their lights into abandoned wells and mine shafts, and searched in and along the stream. 

On May 10, two days after Marjorie West disappeared, police bloodhounds from New York were brought in. Two local newspapers reported that the bloodhounds located Marjorie’s scent and followed it “half a mile up a mountain to a cabin with its door nailed shut.” The cabin was thoroughly searched, but yielded no clues as to the child’s whereabouts. 

Years later, however, descendants of the West family presented a different account of the bloodhounds’ activities. They claimed the dogs followed Marjorie’s scent until it suddenly stopped at the road next to the clearing. 

In 2006, a woman named Catherine, the daughter of Marjorie’s cousin, Joyce, wrote in her blog, “The searchers found the crushed bouquet of violets, picked for her mother for Mother’s Day, lying on the ground not far from the rock.” The rock was in the same area where Marjorie and her sister, Dorothea, had collected the violets. 

If this account is true, it lends credence to the new theory that police were still developing. Since the little girl was not found wandering in the woods as expected, and her body was not discovered in an old mine shaft or on the banks of the creek, authorities investigating Marjorie’s disappearance began to think that she had been taken from the forest—snatched by a stranger. 

Police questioned witnesses and nearby residents about vehicle traffic on the road around 3 p.m. on Mother’s Day. They learned that three cars were seen driving past the area at that time. Less than 48 hours later, the police knew the identities of two of the drivers. 

But they couldn’t track down the third driver, a man witnesses said was speeding away from the clearing so fast that another motorist in the oncoming lane had to swerve into a ditch to avoid a collision. They could only learn that the unidentified man was driving a Plymouth sedan. 

Marjorie West’s disappearance occurred just six years after the highly publicized kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. The infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh had been kidnapped from his crib by someone demanding a ransom for the child’s return.

At the time, the Lindbergh kidnapping was the biggest news story, and the latest developments were splashed on the front pages of newspapers every day. 

While there were twists and turns in the case of the Lindbergh kidnapping, there was one undeniable outcome of this incident.: people across America became aware that strangers could abduct children with nefarious intent. 

The outcomes of the Lindberg kidnapping and the disappearance of Marjorie West differ greatly, but these two events rank as two of the most highly publicized missing children’s cases—with the biggest manhunts in the first half of the 20th century. Both events helped to raise awareness about child abduction and set the stage for the “stranger danger” era to come. 

So, what happened to Marjorie West? The answer is: we don’t know. 

No evidence has been found and the case has never been solved. As one unnamed volunteer later said, “There was no way the little girl could have been in the woods.”

Most people living in Bradford, including the police and volunteers who helped search for the child, believe that she was taken from the clearing by a passing motorist. What happened after that, however, is the subject of much speculation. 

No ransom note was ever sent to the West family or the police, so it was deemed unlikely that Marjorie was kidnapped for ransom. It was equally implausible that her parents were responsible for the little girl’s disappearance. It was widely reported that Marjorie’s father, Shirley West, refused to leave the Allegheny Forest for over a week.

He spent his time frantically searching for his lost child, barely sleeping or eating. According to one article, approaching complete exhaustion, Shirley had finally “consented to come to Bradford. He ate his evening meal at home and then returned to the forest.”

Marjorie’s mother, Cecelia, refused to leave her home. She sat by the telephone, afraid of missing a call. 

The fact that Marjorie’s body was never found gives hope to residents of Bradford and members of the West family. Marjorie’s cousin, Jack Covert, gave an interview shortly before his recent death.

“She could still be living,” he said. “But she’s probably not around here.” Many people echo his sentiments. 

The police investigated the child’s disappearance for about six years. Local police, FBI, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children continue to collect tips regarding the Marjorie West case to this day. 

Two of Marjorie’s cousins consented to have DNA cheek swabs collected from them and sent to the crime lab at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2012. So far, there have been no hits connected to them. 

Marjorie’s relatives continue to publicize her story, hoping someone will come forward with the information they need. 

“I remember listening to my grandmother tell me stories about Marjorie and the sadness she felt for leaving her sister alone for those few moments,” wrote Angel, the granddaughter of Marjorie’s sister, Dorothea West. “My grandmother held on to her feeling of responsibility until her passing two years ago.”

Marjorie’s cousin, Joyce’s daughter, Catherine, maintains the family’s blog. “My grandfather searched for weeks,” she wrote, “long after the manhunt was called off, returning home late into the night. Three small children sat on the porch steps waiting for him, but they knew each night from the slope of his shoulders, he didn’t find the little girl with the bouncing red curls.”

In a 2010 book, Finding Marjorie West, author and college professor Harold Thomas Beck laid out his own personal investigation into the baffling disappearance and presented his incredible, yet unproven, theory. 

Beck claimed that in the late 1990s, during the early years of the internet, he posted information about the Marjorie West case online and offered a $10,000 reward for information regarding her whereabouts.

In the post, he included a few current photos of Dorothea. Marjorie closely resembled her older sister as a four-year-old child, so Beck assumed they would look alike as adults, too. 

He received several responses to his post and planned a trip to talk to some of these people. One tip came from a woman who stated that a coworker, a nurse, looked quite similar to the photographs of Dorothea.

On his travels, Beck stopped in Florida to meet this woman. He agreed that the nurse looked a lot like Dorothea, but the woman—later identified as Sylvia Waldrop London—was adamant that she was not the missing Marjorie. 

Several years later, in 2005, Beck recounted that Sylvia London reached out to him again. By this time, she had returned to her childhood home, a family farm in North Carolina, to tend to her ailing mother. She invited Beck to meet her there. 

Sylvia shared with Beck that her mother had made a deathbed confession. According to the mother’s story, her husband—Sylvia’s father—spent the winter of 1938 working in a refinery in Bradford. He planned to return to the farm in the spring to plant his crops.

As the story went, Beck learned that on Mother’s Day, the man drove past the Allegheny Forest on his way to North Carolina when a little girl darted into the road. He was unable to stop and struck the child with his car. 

The little girl was unconscious, and the man noted that no one was around. Quickly, he put the child in the backseat of his car, intent on taking her to the closest hospital. A short time later, the child regained consciousness and seemed fine. Then, the man had an idea. 

According to his wife’s deathbed confession, the man knew that Mother’s Day was particularly rough on his wife. The couple’s only child, a daughter, died during delivery just months ago.

The birth was a difficult one and the couple had been told that they may not be able to have more children. So, the man brought little Marjorie home with him and presented her to his wife. They raised the child as their own. 

As the story went, a few years after this incident, the man was drafted into the military and sent to fight in World War II. He lost an arm in battle and later told his wife it was certain it was “God’s way of punishing him for what he’s done.”

Sylvia told Beck that, as a child, she told her parents about the “other family” and spoke of living in a place where the “snow was way over her head.” Sylvia’s parents told their friends that their daughter had an active imagination. Sylvia even remembers the names “Dorothea” and “Allen” as being important to her. 

Beck explains in his book that Sylvia agreed to tell him this information on two conditions: that he not disclose her identity until after her death, and that he arrange for her to meet Dorothea. Sadly, by this time, Dorothea was in her late 70s and in failing health. Dorothea died in 2007, and two years later, Sylvia succumbed to cancer. Beck self-published his book in 2010. 

Did Harold Thomas Beck solve the mystery of Marjorie West’s disappearance? The Bradford police don’t believe his incredible tale. Nor does the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

Bob Lowery, a former leader at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, admitted that he hasn’t read Beck’s book, but stated, “I would think that anyone alive today who was living at that time would have vivid memories of this. When something happens to a child of four, there’s a need to have the truth shared so that everyone knows.”

As for Beck, he is sticking by his story. “There’s no question, it’s her,” he added. Naturally, many people have questioned why Beck hasn’t taken his information to the authorities.

To this, Beck asks, “What is it going to accomplish? One family is dead, and the other has been living under a set of circumstances they believe to be true. The mother and father were considered good people in the community.”

Even though Sylvia Waldrop London is gone, she has a daughter. Her DNA could be compared to the DNA cheek swabs from Marjorie West’s relatives that are on file at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. 

That would conclusively answer the question. Either this DNA analysis hasn’t yet been done—for whatever reason—or it has, and one or both families have chosen not to make the results public.

A group of twenty people gathered outside Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin, on the night of Monday, October 5, 1998. Wearing red ponchos and drenched in steady rain, the friends and family handed out fliers to thousands of fans arriving to watch the Green Bay Packers take on the Minnesota Vikings.

Taped to the fronts and backs of their ponchos were photos of 19-year-old Amber Lynn Wilde, a University of Wisconsin–Green Bay student who had been missing since September 23.

The group included Steve Wilde, Amber’s father, and her mother, Julie Ketter. Together, they directed the hooded volunteers around the perimeter of Lambeau Field, distributing 10,000 fliers to nearly 60,000 fans that night.

Since Amber’s disappearance in late September following a minor car accident, her family had done everything possible to raise awareness.

Lambeau Field was their latest effort after Amber’s car—a dark gray 1988 Subaru GL, its rear window lined with stuffed animals—was found abandoned at the Fifty-Yard Line Sports Bar across the street from the stadium on October 1. The family saw the next Packers game as a way to reach as many locals as possible.

“I know that after we’re through, we’ll have at least 10,000 more people who at least know that this is happening,” Steve said afterward.

On Wednesday, September 23, the day Amber disappeared, she called her father about a minor car accident that morning. She had hit her head on the windshield, cracking the glass and leaving a noticeable knot on her forehead. Amber told Steve she’d checked in with a nurse at UWGB’s clinic and complained of a headache, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.

The next day, Steve hadn’t heard from Amber, and she wasn’t answering her phone. She also didn’t attend class that day or on Friday.

By Thursday night, growing more concerned—and suspecting she might have suffered a head injury—Steve left his home in Mayville and drove 90 minutes north to Green Bay, where Amber lived in an off-campus apartment on August Street. The apartment was locked, and her Subaru was gone. Still unable to reach her, Steve began looking for other clues.

“I got a copy of her bank statement and credit card, and nothing has been used,” Steve told The Reporter, a week later. “That’s why I’m kind of figuring it wasn’t something that was planned. I was kind of hoping something was used.”

Amber’s disappearance was unusual for many reasons. She was a diligent student who had just completed her associate’s degree at the University of Wisconsin–Washington County. Her father called her “an endless planner” who would schedule her “Friday and Saturday on Monday.”

She had transferred to UWGB to begin a pre-med program with hopes of becoming a pediatrician. Two days before she vanished, Amber had been elected to the university’s Student Senate. She’d been on campus for only three weeks when she crashed her car.

Amber was also pregnant when she disappeared. Early newspaper reports said she was four and a half months along; others claimed six. In any case, she was well into her pregnancy, though her family didn’t believe it was connected to her disappearance. She had become pregnant by a man in West Bend, but the relationship hadn’t lasted. Amber planned to raise the baby on her own.

“I think she was disappointed in herself, but six weeks ago, she was already dealing with it,” Steve told newspapers. “She had all of us helping her and supporting her. She looked at it as another new challenge—to go to school and be a mother, too.”

When Steve couldn’t find his daughter at her apartment, he contacted Green Bay police. According to a 2023 news report, officers mistakenly told him he had to wait 48 hours before filing a missing person report. On Saturday, he did—and the investigation into Amber Wilde’s disappearance officially began.

In the first week of the search, police uncovered no clues as to what might have happened to Amber. With no leads, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that she had run away or taken her own life.

Instinctively, Steve believed his daughter was alive, and perhaps in trouble. This was something he was more than willing to face.

“I don’t care what you’ve done—what you’re afraid of,” he pleaded to the public on October 1. “Just let us know where you are.”

Within days, Green Bay police received reports of possible sightings, but none could be confirmed. Amber was described as 5’5”, with reddish-brown hair and eight small hoop earrings in each ear. Her family printed thousands of fliers to distribute at toll booths and rest stops all the way down to Chicago, in case she had been traveling—by choice or not—along the busy Midwestern freeways.

Together, Steve and investigators began piecing together Amber’s last known movements. Immediately after her car accident on the morning of September 23, she was checked by a school nurse and called her father that afternoon.

The nurse advised her to rest and let her family know about the incident, but saw no need for hospital care. At some point that day, Amber picked up her weekly paycheck from work, estimated to be $50 to $60. Amber last spoke to Steve around 4 p.m., and it was believed that she called one other person from her apartment just after 7 p.m. that night.

On Thursday and Friday, she missed her classes, and friends reported no contact with her for the rest of the week. By the time Steve filed a missing person report on Saturday, more than sixty hours had passed since their last conversation.

One reported sighting claimed Amber was seen in the Shawano area—about forty miles northwest of Green Bay—on Monday, September 28. Police couldn’t confirm it, but they knew the man who’d fathered Amber’s child worked in that area.

He wasn’t considered a suspect, as investigators still weren’t sure whether Amber had vanished voluntarily or met with foul play. The baby’s father, who remained unnamed in newspapers, was a construction worker with whom Amber had become “obsessive” before starting classes at UWGB.

At some point during their relationship, Amber had learned that the man was in a serious relationship with another woman; reports claimed this was his fiancée.

When Amber told the woman about her own pregnancy, the man promptly broke off his relationship with Amber and expressed that he didn’t have any desire to be in the baby’s life. Despite the tumultuous summer, Amber decided to move forward with the pregnancy. From West Bend, she relocated to Green Bay to begin the next phase of her education.

The first break in Amber’s case came on October 1, when her unlocked Subaru was found abandoned in a parking lot of a sports bar near the Packers’ stadium around 6 p.m.

Steve had just finished paying Amber’s rent for the month when he received word from Green Bay police that her car had finally been located. When he joined police at the vehicle, Steve could see that the keys were still in the ignition.

The driver’s seat was pushed farther back than Amber’s small frame likely required, and the odometer showed 600 to 900 “unaccounted-for” miles. Amber’s purse was in the trunk; her cell phone lay on the passenger seat.

The tavern’s owner, Kris Olson, told police he first noticed the car on Tuesday but hadn’t realized it was connected to the missing woman. He said it stood out because it was parked oddly, though Steve later questioned Olson’s recollection.

A puddle of antifreeze had formed beneath the vehicle, and Steve doubted it could have remained there through a heavy rainstorm on Wednesday if the car had been parked since Tuesday.

Although there was still no official theory as to why or how Amber disappeared, signs that foul play was a factor became difficult to ignore. Amber, who was well into her second trimester, now had no vehicle, keys, purse, or cell phone, and had not made any financial transactions since her last sighting.

If she were alive, she was completely untethered from her everyday life as a student at UWGB.

A forensic sweep of the Subaru produced no usable fingerprints or additional leads. On October 6, the day after the Packers game, Steve told a reporter he didn’t believe the baby’s father was involved.

“I don’t think so, at this point,” he said. “The detective has talked to him a couple of times and doesn’t see anything there.”

In mid-October, Green Bay police revealed that the case had slowed because “a particular individual isn’t talking to us,” said police Lt. Craig Van Schyndle.

The person wasn’t identified—other than being one of Amber’s friends—though Van Schyndle said that detectives had “talked to individuals who had been her boyfriend in the past, but I don’t know if any of them are her current boyfriend.”

The Wilde family began running frequent missing-person ads in local newspapers and established the Find Amber Lynn Wilde Fund to raise additional resources for her ongoing search.

They grew impatient with Green Bay police, though the department insisted at least four or five detectives were working her case every day. When one month passed, Amber’s family hired a private investigator to aid police.

Penny Bell, a Milwaukee detective, brought her trail-seeking bloodhound, Hoover, to Green Bay to look for clues near Amber’s apartment and the tavern where her car was located.

In both areas, Hoover found no scent or trail leading to evidence. Steve Wilde and Julie Ketter kept the search alive, but by year’s end, police were no closer to answers. Steve’s first Christmas without Amber came and went—this one without a tree.

Despite the department’s continued efforts, months passed without new leads. By the end of 1998, police believed Amber had likely been the victim of homicide. Still, as Lt. Greg Urban noted, it wasn’t technically a murder case.

“It changes to a homicide if we locate a body identified as Amber Wilde,” he said. “This is still a missing persons case.”

In January 1999, the search for Amber moved to West Bend, where she had been a student the year before transferring to Green Bay. Investigators said there were “specific people” they wanted to talk to, but kept most details private.

By April, nearly seven months later, Amber’s family still had no answers. It remained unclear whether she had disappeared voluntarily or was suffering lingering effects from her head injury.

“I don’t know if I should be grieving because my daughter is dead,” Amber’s mother wrote to The Reporter on April 16, “or angry because she has walked away from her life and her responsibilities, or scared to death that she may be wandering, not knowing who or where she is.”

A year later, in September 1999, those questions remained, haunting Amber’s friends, family, and community. A candlelight vigil gathered some 85 people at Fireman’s Park in Campbellsport, where Amber graduated high school in 1997, in memory of the still-missing woman.

One of Amber’s aunts, Laurie Ehnert, read a poem Amber had written. Another aunt, Jenna Wood, led the crowd in prayer. After a year filled with uncertainty and silence, the vigil marked perhaps the first public acknowledgment that Amber’s absence might be permanent.

In April 2001, investigators began an intense four-day search of a construction site west of Shawano, where Amber had once been allegedly sighted after she was reported missing. Acting on recent interviews and information, police secured a search warrant and began excavating, digging through hundreds of yards of soil in hopes of finding human remains or any trace of evidence.

After four days of hauling hundreds of yards of soil, police found no remains or relevant evidence. Green Bay Police Lt. Bill Galvin reiterated to the public that this was part of the investigation process, however frustrating, and that detectives were still actively working on Amber’s case as it moved into its third year.

By September 2013, fifteen years had passed since Amber Wilde disappeared. What began as a missing-person case had long since gone cold, leaving Wisconsin authorities without answers.

Police held a news conference to bring the case back into public view, hoping someone—somewhere—would finally come forward. They had no resolution, they said, but they hadn’t forgotten what justice for Amber meant to her family and community.

“Like she has never been forgotten by her family, she has also never been forgotten by the officers and detectives involved in trying to solve her case,” said Detective Lee Kingston. “We have a lot of information … we have a lot of theories. We just need a little help.”

The following November, investigators obtained a search warrant for 30 acres of land in Portage County, west of Green Bay, but the search again turned up no evidence. Police confirmed they had a “person of interest” in the case but did not name the individual publicly.

By May 2016—nearly twenty years after Amber’s disappearance—police were confident she had been killed and were treating her case as a “first-degree intentional homicide.”

Court documents revealed that investigators had uncovered a diary and other evidence shedding new light on the final months of Amber’s life.

According to the diary, Amber met the father of her baby after a party in May 1998. When she discovered she was pregnant, he and his parents pressured her to have an abortion—something she refused to do.

When Amber later learned that the man was engaged, she informed his fiancée about the pregnancy. When police questioned the father, he denied that he and Amber had a sexual relationship, and detectives noted that he “showed no concern for Amber being missing.”

A friend of the father’s later told police that the man felt guilty for having sex with Amber, leading police to believe that he wasn’t telling the entire truth about their relationship.

In May 2015, police requested phone records from the father, and after compiling evidence dating back to 1998, believed they had a strong case for Amber’s disappearance being one of intentional homicide.

When news broke that the father of Amber’s baby was considered a suspect, it came as little surprise to her family. “I believed it from things Amber had told me,” said her aunt, Laurie Ehnert. “I had my suspicions about this from day one after she went missing.”

Despite having a clear suspect and motive, prosecutors have yet to bring charges against the person of interest. In 2023, a news article confirmed that the father had been the uncooperative person in the early days of the investigation.

“We have a lot of questions that are still unanswered,” said Green Bay Detective David Graf. “Could he be able to answer them today? I hope so. That’s up to him.”

Today, Amber Wilde’s disappearance remains unsolved, and the investigation is still active. Her remains have never been found, but her family continues to search for closure.

“She’s still missed as much as she was from day one,” said her aunt, Laurie Ehnert. “We’re just hoping that someday we’ll get answers.”

The Heartbreaking End of the Lindbergh Kidnapping

Delivery driver Orville Wilson pulled his truck off the side of the road in a wooded area near the small New Jersey hamlet of Mount Rose on the afternoon of May 12, 1932.

When Wilson stopped, his assistant, William Allen, stepped out of the vehicle and urinated about 45 feet into the woods. There, he spotted what looked like the foot of a small child partially buried under dirt and leaves.

Police were immediately summoned to the site. The secluded spot was only four and a half miles from the home of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh and his socialite wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh—the home from which the Lindberghs's 20-month-old son had been kidnapped two and a half months earlier.

The child's body was badly decomposed and bore signs that it had been ravaged by scavenging animals. Dr. Charles A. Mitchell, the county medical examiner of Mercer County, New Jersey, determined, "The cause of death is a fractured skull due to external violence." 

From the state of decomposition, it was determined that the baby likely died the night of the kidnapping or shortly thereafter. Betty Gow, the baby's nurse, positively identified the remains based on two factors—the body had overlapping toes on his right foot, just like the Lindbergh baby, and the child wore a handmade shirt that Gow had sewn herself for her ward. 

The discovery of the body of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was not the outcome the police, the Lindbergh family, and the anxious American public had hoped for.

Allen was understandably shaken after finding the beaten and decomposing body of the Lindbergh baby. "I just hope they get the man that did it," he said. "Nothing would be too bad to do to him." 

His sentiment was echoed by people around the globe who grieved for the murdered baby, along with Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Charles Curtis, the Vice President of the United States under President Herbert Hoover, said of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, "They have my deepest sympathy, and my most heartfelt condolences go out to the bereaved mother and Colonel Lindbergh and to their families in their sorrow. It is a most shocking thing."

Betty Gow was the first to discover that little Charles Lindbergh, Jr. was missing from his crib. At around 9 p.m. on March 1, 1932, she entered the second-floor nursery in the Lindbergh home—a 390-acre rural estate on the outskirts of the New Jersey city of Hopewell—to tend the infant. 

The boy was not in his crib. 

Gow assumed he was with his mother, Anne, but she began to worry when she emerged from her bath without the child. Gow alerted her employer, Charles Lindbergh, a pilot who had become a national celebrity after his historic trans-Atlantic flight in 1927.

The concerned father ran to the nursery to search for his son. Instead of finding his child safe in his bed, Lindbergh found an envelope on the windowsill. A handwritten ransom note, filled with misspellings and grammatical errors, demanded $50,000 for the baby's safe return.

The 1930s saw an uptick in child kidnapping for ransom cases, but the abduction of the Lindbergh baby was the most famous one of all. Driven by desperation in the face of the Great Depression's economic hardships, some ruthless individuals sought to extract money from wealthy families by stealing their most precious possessions: their children. 

Newspaper and radio reports sensationalized celebrity kidnappings, and the public was fascinated by these stories. In a time when "stranger danger" hadn't yet been drilled into youngsters' heads and children were expected to obey all adults, even ones they didn't know, it wasn't too difficult to nab a child.

The Lindbergh baby, however, was stolen from his crib on the second story of his family's secluded home. After he read the ransom note, Charles grabbed his gun and ran outside to search around the house, taking the family butler, Olly Whateley, the only other male in the home at the time, with him. 

On the ground, beneath the nursery window, they discovered the baby's blanket, broken pieces of a wooden ladder, and impressions in the dirt where a ladder had been placed. Lindbergh instructed Whateley to telephone the local police department in Hopewell. Lindbergh called the New Jersey State Police and Henry Breckenridge, his friend and long-time attorney.

Word of the Lindbergh baby's kidnapping caused a media frenzy. The New Jersey State Police, the organization overseeing the investigation, scoured the area for clues. Soon, another ransom note was sent. And another. In all, a dozen notes were sent either to Lindbergh or to a go-between, Dr. John Condon.

On April 2, 1932, ransom money was delivered as the most recent ransom note instructed. Included with the money were several gold certificates, a form of paper currency that was on the cusp of being discontinued. 

The police hoped that the kidnapper's attempts to spend the gold certificates would draw attention to him. The gold certificates and other bills were not marked, but clever investigators copied down all the serial numbers. Lastly, the ransom money was placed in a homemade wooden box that could be easily identified later.

When the body of the Lindbergh baby was discovered roughly two and a half months after the kidnapping, the investigation shifted. Col. Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police and the father of General Norman Schwarzkopf—the Coalition forces commander during Operation Desert Storm—issued a statement saying:

Now that the body of the baby has been found, every possible effort will be used, and all men necessary will immediately exercise every possible effort to accomplish the arrest of the kidnappers and murderers.

"No footprints were found in the vicinity of where the baby's body was located," Schwarzkopf stated. "This whole territory was thoroughly scoured by investigators from this office, even to the extent of scraping the ground around where the body was found and putting it all in containers and bringing it to these headquarters for the purpose of test and analysis."

While they waited for the ransom money to be used, authorities focused their attention on the two most important pieces of evidence left at the crime scene—the first ransom note and the wooden ladder.

The ladder was a hastily built homemade device crafted from wood. Although it was not professionally built, the police theorized it was constructed by someone with woodworking skills. 

The New Jersey State Police contacted Arthur Koehler, a wood expert with the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service. Koehler meticulously examined the wood to determine its age and type. He noted that the wood appeared to have been repurposed from prior use in indoor construction. His analysis would play a vital role in convicting the kidnapper.

Between August 20 and the end of September 1934, the gold certificates from the ransom drop began popping up. A total of 16 gold certificates were used at various places around Harlem and Yorkville. 

Just like in old police dramas on TV, investigators—now a team comprised of members of the New Jersey State Police, the New York City Police, and special agents from the FBI—hung a large map of the New York metropolitan area on the wall of their headquarters and pushed a colored pin in it to mark the location where each of the gold certificates was used. Doing so allowed them to track the kidnapper's movement.

Next, detectives visited every bank in New York City and the surrounding area, and shared the serial numbers of the ransom bills with them. Bank tellers were instructed to scrutinize every bill coming through their drawers and take note of customers at their windows. This tactic worked.

On September 18, 1934, at 1:20 p.m., a call came to investigators from the assistant manager at a bank located at the corner of 125th Street and Park Avenue in New York City. 

As the manager explained, one of the tellers had just received a $10 gold certificate. The banker learned that this bill had been spent at a gas station at 127th Street and Lexington Avenue. 

When the detective visited the gas station, they got their first big break in the case. The astute gas station attendant—suspicious of a man who had visited the business several times over the past week and paid for his minor purchases using $10 gold certificates—had jotted down the man's license plate number. 

When the police ran the plate, it came back registered to Bruno Richard Hauptmann of the Bronx. Hauptmann was taken into custody that evening. At the time of his arrest, he had one of the gold certificates on him.

A German immigrant living in the United States for 11 years, 35-year-old Hauptmann worked as a carpenter in New York. He had served time in prison in his native Germany before illegally entering the U.S. as a stowaway. 

He was married to Anna Schoeffler, a waitress, and they had an infant son, Manfried, who was born in 1933, just months after the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. For more than a decade, Hauptmann was a hard worker who never missed a day of work; however, in early March 1932, within days of the kidnapping, he suddenly began trading in stocks and quit his job.

A thorough search of his home yielded some startling finds. Hidden in a gas can in his garage were gold certificates and bills from the ransom money totaling $13,000. A phone number and address belonging to John Condon, the ransom go-between guy, were written down. 

Police also found a section of wood in Hauptmann's attic that Koehler determined to be an exact match of the wood used to make the ladder found at the Lindberghs' home the night of the kidnapping.

Authorities obtained samples of Hauptmann's handwriting from his home and sent them to be analyzed by FBI handwriting experts. The report stated that there were remarkable similarities between his writing and the writing of the ransom notes.

Bruno Hauptmann's trial began on January 3, 1935. For the next five weeks, jurors heard the evidence, which was, in hindsight, largely circumstantial. In the court of public opinion, Hauptmann was guilty even before the trial started. 

America in the 1930s was anti-immigrant and anti-German; Hauptmann was therefore vilified in the press. He staunchly maintained his innocence, claiming that a friend and fellow German immigrant had left him the box of money as repayment for an old business debt. The other man died shortly afterward.

The jury wasn't buying Hauptmann's excuse. They found him guilty of first-degree murder on February 13, 1935, and he was later sentenced to death. That sentence was carried out on April 3, 1936, when Hauptmann was sent to the electric chair.

In the decades since the Lindbergh kidnapping, numerous theories have surfaced claiming that Bruno Hauptmann was wrongly convicted and executed. Other theories claim Hauptmann was guilty, but that he was not the only one involved in the crime. 

A recent theory even suggests that Charles Lindbergh himself—an advocate for eugenics—orchestrated the murder of his son because the child had several congenital disabilities. 

The majority of people, however, believe that the police got the right man and that Bruno Hauptmann had single-handedly committed the horrific crime of kidnapping and murdering the infant son of the most famous aviator of the 1930s.

Explore More

• Read: The Case That Never Dies: The Lindbergh Kidnapping, Lloyd C. Gardner

• Listen: A Shocking New Look at the Lindbergh Kidnapping & Murder w/ Lise Pearlman, Most Notorious! A True Crime History Podcast

• Watch: The Circumstances Surrounding the Kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby, Weird History

1971: Serial killer commits his first murder (of an adult)

Iowa-born serial killer Carroll Cole had a classically horrible relationship with his mother. She forced him into dresses and brought him along while she cheated on his father; Cole was so infuriated by her that when he committed his first murder at age eight, he said he was doing it to “get even with my mother.” 

After numerous acts of violence—and though numerous authorities at mental institutions realized that Cole had significant issues with women and seemed to want to kill them all—he was released back into society. 

There, he continued to kill.

On May 7, 1971, he picked up a woman named Essie Louise Buck at a bar in Dallas. They both drank heavily. She reminded him of his mother—a cheater, he said later. And so he strangled her and dumped her nude body in a field. 

He was arrested at the scene of another murder, and at first, he was sentenced to life in prison. But when his mother died while he was locked up, Cole decided he was okay with being extradited to Nevada—the site of two of his murders—where he would probably get the death sentence. 

He was happy to be given the sentence, and was executed by lethal injection in 1985. “I’m the person who slid through the cracks in the medical and psychiatric system,” he said.

Dive Deeper

• Read: Caroll Cole: The serial killer you didn’t know was born in Sioux City, SiouxlandProud

• Listen: Carroll Edward Cole, True Crime All The Time

• Watch: Serial Killer Documentary: Carroll Cole (The Alcoholic Cannibal), Serial Killers Documentaries

1972: Arthur Shawcross claims first victim

Before killing his first victim, Arthur Shawcross had been abused by his mother, married three times, and lied about fighting in the Vietnam War.

He was already an extremely troubled person, spotted with red flags, when he convinced two young boys to go fishing with him in Watertown, New York.

Their names were Jack and Allen Blake, and their mother was disturbed when he brought them back home. She told her sons never to go off with a stranger again.

Tragically, Jack ignored her. He went off with Shawcross a week later, perhaps lured along by promises of more fishing. Instead, Shawcross raped and killed him. 

A few months later, Shawcross did the same to an eight-year-old girl. 

Shawcross was given a maximum of 25 years in prison for the murders, but was released after serving 14. Unbelievably, he was declared “no longer dangerous.” He went on to kill 12 more people.

When he was arrested for that second string of killings, Jack’s mom told the press, “I’m not shedding tears because I’ve got nothing left.”

Dive Deeper

• Read: Family relives pain, anger of child's slaying in 1972, Democrat and Chronicle

• Listen: Arthur Shawcross - The Genesee River Monster, Murder, Mystery & Makeup

• Watch: Interview With A Serial Killer: Arthur Shawcross Tells All On 17-Year Killing Spree, Absolute Crime

1985: A victim of the I-70 Strangler disappears

Eric Allen Roettger was trying to get a summer job. He was troubled, according to his sister. He was artsy, he liked Led Zeppelin, he hung out with drug addicts. But he was trying.

The 17-year-old had a day of interviews lined up, but instead of making it to any of them, Roettger disappeared. He was last seen climbing into a car near a bus stop, apparently taking the driver up on his offer for a ride instead of taking the bus.

His body was found two days later in a rural part of Ohio. He was missing a shirt and had been strangled by a rope. 

Technically, Roettger’s murder has never been solved. You can find his name in a list of victims of the I-70 Strangler, an unknown serial killer who murdered young men and boys around Indiana and Ohio’s Interstate 70.

But the suspect behind those murders, and thus the most likely person to have killed Roettger, was a bizarre, thrift-store-chain-owning man named Herbert Richard Baumeister.

Baumeister shot himself before he could be convicted of any crimes, but he owned a creepy place called Fox Hollow Farms that was absolutely stuffed to the gills with buried bodies and bone fragments.

If he killed the bodies on his farm—as well as the I-70 victims—that puts Baumeister’s victim count at close to 20, and perhaps even more.

Dive Deeper

• Read: Unidentified man's death a homicide, coroner rules, Dayton Daily News

• Listen: Death and Chaos - The I-70 Strangler, True Crimecast

• Watch: Herb Baumeister: The I-70 Strangler, this is MONSTERS

2000: Alicia Versluis goes missing

According to Alicia Versluis’ mom, Simona, their family was having a lovely day at the park near their home in Pomona, California, when three-year-old Alicia went missing.

Simona claims she was reading for a minute or two—and looked up to find her daughter gone. 

But Alicia’s twin sister had a more chilling description of what happened. She told police that Simona “took Sissy and wrapped Sissy in a jacket and put her in the drain.”

When investigators looked into the family, they found that little Alicia and her twin sister had been raised in a nightmarish home: dirty, dangerous, exposed electrical wires, no running water, and exposure to marijuana.

Simona—who was only 19—and her live-in boyfriend, Jeff Jones, were charged with endangering the twins, and while Simona was held on that charge, she gave birth to another child, who was immediately taken from her.

Simona and her boyfriend were eventually charged with second-degree murder, corporal injury to a child, and felony child abuse. They each received sentences of 33 years to life in prison.

To this day, Alicia’s body has never been found.

Dive Deeper

• Read: Mother of missing girl charged with endangerment, Los Angeles Times

The Seafood Market Murder

At 46 years old, Carol Dowd was battling many challenges in life. She lived in a halfway house in the Frankford neighborhood of Philadelphia and frequented local bars.

She was outgoing and quick to strike up a conversation with anyone: the cashier at the Little Spot, who sold her a six-pack of beer on the evening of April 28, 1990; the bartender at the Happy Tap, who poured her drinks that night; and a stranger she had just met that evening at the bar—an older, white man with gray hair.

At 2:00 a.m. on April 29, 1990, a patrolman, Officer Dean Johnson, making his rounds in Frankford stepped behind Newman’s Sea Food at 4511 Frankford Avenue. There had been reports of break-ins at area businesses, and he wanted to ensure everything was secure. 

In the alley, behind the seafood shop, however, he came upon the nude body of Carol Dowd. She had been sexually assaulted, then viciously beaten about the head and face.

She had been stabbed in the face, back, neck, and chest. Her abdomen had been slit open, and her intestines spilled out. She had defensive wounds on her hands, and it was later determined that one of her nipples had been sliced off. The scene was bathed in blood.

Dowd had not been dead long. It was estimated that she was murdered sometime between midnight and 1:40 a.m., twenty minutes before her body was found. The clothes she had been wearing were found in the alley, not far from her body.

So was her purse. It had been opened, and some of the items inside had fallen out, but nothing was missing. From all appearances, robbery was not the motive for the murder. Rape was a more likely motive.

Carol Dowd’s home was not far from the alley, and she was well-known in the neighborhood. Early in the investigation of her murder, a witness reported seeing Dowd walking along the streets in the company of an older Caucasian man mere hours before she was killed. Other possible witnesses, however, pointed their fingers in another direction.

According to her brother, James Dowd, Carol Dowd’s childhood was relatively uneventful. Their older brother, Thomas, was killed in Vietnam in the late 1960s. That tragedy greatly impacted Carol. “She started to hear voices,” James explained. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and admitted to the Philadelphia State Hospital.

Carol Dowd spent most of the 1970s in and out of various mental institutions getting treatment for her mental illness. She was starting to rebuild her life after being released from the hospital and enrolling in a community-based treatment program. As part of this program, she moved into her own apartment.

In this apartment, however, Dowd was raped—an event that retriggered her mental health decline.

At the time of her murder, James later explained, Carol was living in a halfway house in Frankford. He described his sister as “a very outgoing person. She would talk to anybody. Very friendly, very generous … a good personality”. She was finally moving beyond the trauma of her past when tragedy found her once again.

Leonard Christopher was a 38-year-old African American man who worked at Newman’s Sea Food as a fish cutter. Like Dowd, Christopher had a rough past.

Acquaintances stated that Christopher was once a “disheveled, down-on-his-luck bum whose belly protruded over his belt.” They added that he was a “moocher” who pestered them for beer and cigarettes. For a time, he was homeless and slept in an abandoned house.

Christopher’s luck took a turn for the better about nine months before Dowd’s murder. He was hired as a fish cutter at Newman’s Sea Food and was finally earning a stable income.

It was enough for him to afford his own apartment. He started working out, got fit, bathed regularly, and laundered his clothes. He even got a haircut and started shaving. He still bummed cigarettes off his friends at the bar, but everyone could see that he enjoyed his new job and was thriving.

When the police started questioning people in the area about Carol Dowd’s murder, they learned that she was seen that night in the company of an older white man. But then Leonard Christopher started throwing up some red flags.

To start, Christopher stopped into the nearby Rite-Aid pharmacy first thing in the morning on April 29. According to one of the cashiers—a woman named Colleen—it seemed like the only reason he came into the drugstore that morning was to tell everyone about the murder.

“The day it happened, he was in here telling everybody about it. How they found her. Like he was bragging. Everybody was asking him questions,” Colleen said.

Another witness claimed to have seen Christopher behind the seafood store holding a knife. Since he worked at the seafood store as a fish cutter, she didn’t think anything of it until she heard about Dowd’s murder.

Philadelphia police questioned Christopher. When they asked where he was at the time of the murder, he told them he was with his girlfriend.

The girlfriend, however, said she was alone that night. The officers who initially spoke to Christopher noted that he had no cuts or injuries. They did, however, spot a few drops of blood on his pants that raised suspicions.

Christopher’s employer, who was unnamed in news articles, was able to explain the blood. She claimed that Christopher was tasked with cleaning up the crime scene after the police left. “The mess was still there so my husband told him to clean up the blood. He brushed it clean,” she said. She surmised that a few drops of Dowd’s blood splattered on Christopher’s pants when he swept the alley.

The fish shop owner also said of Christopher, “He was a talker, talks a lot with the customers.” His talkativeness when police interrogated him also gave them a reason to suspect him.

He chatted with the Philadelphia police officers about the robberies in the area and the prostitution problem. When the conversation turned to murder, Christopher mentioned that he knew Margaret Vaughan, another recent murder victim from the Frankford neighborhood. That was the clincher.

On May 5, Leonard Christopher was arrested and arraigned on charges of murder, abuse of a corpse, possession of an instrument of a crime, and robbery. The judge ordered him to be held without bail.

With Christopher in jail, the police widened their investigation to see if evidence pointed to him as Margaret Vaughan’s killer. Or if he was linked to any other recent murders in the Frankford neighborhood.

There had been seven previous unsolved murders, and when Carol Dowd’s body was found, police immediately assumed the same killer had murdered all the women—that they had a serial killer in their midst.

Between 1985 and 1990, nine people were murdered in Philadelphia’s Frankford neighborhood. The similarities between all the crimes were notable. All the victims were women. All had been raped. And all had been stabbed multiple times.

Interestingly, witnesses in several of these cases reported seeing the victim with an older white man just before they were killed.

Despite the patterns, Philadelphia Police Commissioner Willie Williams told reporters at a press conference regarding Carol Dowd’s murder, “We’re not looking at it as a serial killer.”

Investigators failed to find a connection between Christopher and the other murder victims of the so-called Frankford Slasher. Interestingly, the last murder attributed to the Frankford Slasher—the killing of 30-year-old Michelle Dehner in September 1990—occurred while Christopher was in jail awaiting trial for Dowd’s murder.

The evidence against Leonard Christopher was circumstantial at best—there was no physical evidence tying him to the crime, nor a murder weapon—yet the prosecutors went forward with his trial. Christopher’s court-appointed lawyer, Jack McMahon, Jr., tried to have his bail reinstated, saying:

One of the reasons, obviously, that he’s been held without bail is that he’s suspected in these other killings. Unless he dug his way out of prison, and went down to Frankford, and dug his way back in, he’s not the person that police have tried to intimate he is.

At the trial, several witnesses spoke about Christopher’s character, stating that he had never been in trouble with the law before, that he was a hard worker, and that he was a kind person. The prosecution countered with crucial testimony from two women who claimed to have seen Christopher with Dowd before she was murdered.

On December 12, 1990, the jury found Leonard Christopher guilty of one count of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.

A number of people in the Frankford neighborhood, residents of Philadelphia, and Christopher’s attorney were outraged when the verdict was read.

“This case stinks. It’s garbage,” McMahon told reporters. “The police made a mistake. Leonard Christopher has never been arrested in his life and was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy.”

He was incensed that the jury believed the testimonies of two prostitutes he described as “junkies who have been arrested 35 times between them” over his client’s testimony.

However, Assistant District Attorney Judith Frankel Rubino stood by the conviction. “This was an intelligent jury, and they were able to determine that circumstantial evidence is good evidence,” she stated.

Even Carol Dowd’s brother, James Dowd, was of mixed emotions when he heard the verdict. “I thought I would feel better after the verdict was read,” he said. “But I don’t feel any better now.”

As Leonard Christopher was led from the courtroom, he shouted, “I’m being railroaded! The Northeast stalker is still out there killing people! I didn’t commit no crimes.”

Today, the eight other murders in the Frankford neighborhood remain unsolved and are lumped together as being attributed to the Frankford Slasher, a mysterious, unknown serial killer who was, perhaps, an older white man.

Throughout his incarceration, Leonard Christopher maintained his innocence and consistently proclaimed that he had nothing to do with the rape and stabbing death of Carol Dowd. He died in prison from cancer.

Explore More

• Read: ‘Frankford Slasher' Case Still Haunts Philadelphia, Remains Unsolved, NBC10 Philadelphia

• Listen: The Frankford Slasher prt. 1, The Shocking Details

• Watch: The Frankford Slasher | Unsolved Serial Killer Crime Scenes Documentary, Ruin Road

It’s been called “Germany’s coldest case.”

On a lonely farm an hour from Munich, six battered bodies were discovered on this day in 1922. All had been smashed to death by a mattock, a farm tool similar to a pickaxe.

In the barn: 35-year-old Viktoria Gabriel, her 7-year-old daughter Cäzilia, and her parents Andreas and Cäzilia Gruber. In the house: Viktoria’s 2-year-old son Josef, and the family’s maid, Maria Baumgartner.

Not only was the crime scene gruesome, but more chilling details emerged over the following days. There were signs that the murderer had lived in the farmhouse for several days after killing the family.

All the animals were well fed; a neighbor spotted smoke from the chimney, and someone had eaten their way through the family’s bread supplies. Plus, a house key was missing.

Had the killer also been hanging around the farm before the murders? Neighbors remembered that Andreas Gruber had noticed a few weird things around his farm before he was murdered. At one point, he found a newspaper lying around, one that he didn’t subscribe to and didn’t remember buying.

Another time, he found footprints heading out of the nearby forest and toward his machine room—which now had a broken lock. Even more creepily, the family recently had a maid quit on them because she claimed strange noises were coming from the attic.

Later, she said she felt like she was constantly being watched. Did the Grubers have someone living in their attic? Did that someone kill them?

No one knows. Suspicion fell on several men with connections to Viktoria—her boyfriend, her ex-husband—but no one was ever charged with the murders.

The viciousness of the attack seemed to imply that it was done by someone who hated the family, someone with an ax to grind. But over a hundred years later, the case remains as cold as the snow that held those mysterious footprints.

Dive Deeper

• Read: ​The Chilling Story of the Hinterkaifeck Killings, Germany’s Most Famous Unsolved Crime​ (Mental Floss)

• Listen: ​The Hinterkaifeck Murder​ (Gruesome: Horrific True Crime)

• Watch: ​The Hinterkaifeck Murders​ (The Casual Criminalist)

1974: The BTK Killer’s only known survivor fights back

He’s perhaps the neediest serial killer of all time—Denis Rader, who once left a box of cereal at a crime scene so everyone would know he was a serial killer.

He gave himself his own nickname—BTK, for Bind, Torture, Kill—and wrote poetry worthy of an 8th grader’s Myspace page. And he loved to tie people up.

On April 4, 1974, Rader hid inside the Wichita home of 21-year-old Kathryn Bright, and when she walked through the door with her 19-year-old brother Kevin, Rader pointed a gun at them and said, “Hold it right there.”

Kevin’s presence was unexpected. Rader had been watching Kathryn for a while and expected her to return home alone. He had to pivot, tying up both siblings in different bedrooms, and telling them he was just looking for money and a car, and wasn’t going to hurt them.

Kathryn fought him so hard that he wasn’t able to strangle her to death, as he’d planned, so he ended up stabbing her in the stomach. He tried to strangle Kevin, but Kevin fought too, jumping up and even managing to get Rader's gun away from him at one point.

Somehow, though, the gun didn’t fire when Kevin pulled the trigger, and Rader wrestled it back, shot Kevin once, left the room—and then came back to shoot him a second time. Kevin survived by playing dead.

When he heard Rader leave, Kevin sprinted out of the house to get help. Kathryn was still alive, too, and she was taken to the hospital—but despite emergency surgeries and blood transfusions, she didn’t make it.

Rader wasn’t captured until 2004, when he wrote to police and asked if he could anonymously send them a floppy disk. The police replied, Sure! Floppy disks are totally untraceable!

This was a lie, of course, and the infamous disk led them quickly to Rader himself.

In 2023, Rader’s daughter tweeted, “The only known survivor of BTK is Kevin Bright, who at the age of 19 nearly handed my dad his rear.”

Dive Deeper

• Short read: ​Victim's brother describes killing linked to BTK​ (CNN)

• Long read: ​Bind, Torture, Kill: The Inside Story of BTK, the Serial Killer Next Door​, Roy Wenzl, Tim Potter, L. Kelly, Hurst Lavania

• Listen: ​REOPENED: Finding BTK​ (Cold Case Files)

• Watch: ​Woman discovers her father is notorious BTK serial killer​ (Nightline)

1988: April Tinsley’s body is found in a ditch

Little 8-year-old April Tinsley was playing with her friends in Fort Wayne, Indiana when she ran home to get an umbrella—and met a horrifying man named John Miller instead. He kidnapped, raped, and strangled her.

Three days later, on April 4, a jogger found her body in a ditch.

Her case remained unsolved for the next thirty years, though the killer made his presence known again and again. He left notes—some written in crayon—on the sides of a barn and little girls’ bicycles, saying that he had murdered April Tinsley and that he was watching other little girls and planning to kill again.

The notes on the bikes were accompanied by photos of his naked body and used condoms (whose DNA matched the DNA found on April). Detectives had all the evidence they needed—they just didn’t have the technology to utilize all that DNA.

It wasn’t until 2018 that they were able to run the samples and find 59-year-old John Miller, a loner who worked the midnight shift and lived in a trailer.

They took him in for questioning, and he brought up Tinsley’s name before they did, as though he were looking for a chance to confess. Miller told them that he had been wandering her neighborhood, specifically looking for a child to kill.

Today, he’s in jail for life, though April’s parents pushed for the death penalty. “We have one less monster on the street,” said a detective who worked on the case.

Dive Deeper

• Read: ​Tinsley detectives reveal new details about case, suspect​ (WANE 15)

• Listen: ​April Tinsley & The Monster in Fort Wayne​ (Crime Junkie)

• Watch: ​Predator at Large​, Season 1, Episode 6

1991: Law professor Mary Joe Frug is stabbed to death

Was Mary Joe Frug killed because she was…too feminist?

That's the theory that cops were working with for some time. The 49-year-old professor at the New England School of Law was known for her (somewhat) controversial scholarship, and her murder seemed targeted and full of rage.

She was stabbed to death on the street in Cambridge, not far from her home, and her murderer didn't take her purse. This wasn't a robbery—there was something personal about the attack.

Who wielded the 11-inch military knife that killed her? An angry colleague? A disgruntled student? Cops even pursued the theory that a student who was in love with her had murdered her. But none of their leads panned out.

Her case is still technically open and unsolved. A cold case unit took it up in 2019, releasing a rather depressing statement: "Although to date we have been unable to identify who killed Frug or what the motive may have been, we continue to try to answer those questions."

Witnesses saw a man running from the scene—a young man, 20ish, 5'10" to 6' 0" tall, with white skin and brown hair. Cops recovered his shoe prints, but that's as far as it goes.

Frug was killed outside a church while the choir was singing inside. She was nicely dressed. "Some members of the choir thought she could have been coming to sing with them," wrote The Boston Globe at the time of her death.

Dive Deeper

• Short read: ​True Crime: Killed off campus​ (The Boston Globe)

• Long read: ​The Tragedy of a Cambridge Feminist​, Ellen Lapointe St. John Fisher University

• Listen: ​Mary Joe Frug​ (A Little Wicked)

The idea of the creepy male photographer is a common cliche, but sometimes it's more than accurate.

When the young, gorgeous Terry Diane Walden—a 23-year-old wife, mother, and nursing student at Texas's Lamar University—was approached by a "photographer" who asked her to model for him, she turned him down, sensing correctly that he was not to be trusted.

She turned him down twice, in fact, because he kept pressing, asking her to come to his car and look at his work samples. She even went home and told her husband about the disturbing older guy with the beard who'd been so insistent. Perhaps she was still troubled by the encounter.

Two days later, she vanished.

Her body was found on March 26, three days after she disappeared. She was floating in a canal, face down, wearing all her clothes. An autopsy would later reveal that she had been gagged, tied up, and stabbed to death.

Her murderer was Australian-born Christopher Wilder, a serial killer in the middle of a spree. Journalists described him as a "wealthy playboy" who would frequently pose as a photographer in order to kidnap, rape, and kill women, many of them aspiring models or beauty queens.

By the time his spree was done, he'd kidnapped and tortured at least 12 victims, killing eight of them, before shooting and killing himself during a tussle with police in April 1984.

Wilder died at the height of his terror. "An FBI spokesman in Buffalo said Wilder's attacks were becoming more frequent, and he was becoming more dangerous," one newspaper reported after his death.

Dive Deeper

• Short read: ​Victims' Relatives Feel Anger, Relief​ (The Oklahoman)

• Long read: ​A Killer's Rampage​ (Crime Library)

• Listen: ​Christopher Wilder - The Beauty Queen Killer​ (True Crime All The Time)

• Watch: ​A Model Killer​ (The FBI Files)

1985: A young serial killer claims his first victim

Tommie Lou Whiddon loved clothes. The 19-year-old loved using the money from her job at Valparaiso Baptist church to buy new shirts and shoes; she planned out each day's outfit the night before.

Whiddon wrote down everything she wore on her calendar to avoid wearing the same outfits too many times. She was equally obsessed with buying little clothes for her toddler nephew, Eli.

When Whiddon wasn’t dreaming of fashion, she was studying to become a physical therapist, keeping up with her social life (she’d been a popular student in high school), or relaxing on the beach with friends.

That’s where she was the day she went missing.

She’d planned to meet a friend on Okaloosa Island off Florida’s panhandle, but the friend didn’t show up, so Whiddon was lazing in the sun by herself when a 17-year-old boy came upon her.

The boy, Frank Walls, was supposed to be doing community service on the beach for his previous crimes of voyeurism and animal cruelty. Instead, he slit Whiddon’s throat, then stole her car.

Despite his young age, Frank Walls would go on to become a bona fide serial killer. Whiddon was his first victim. Over the next two years, he’d kill four more people, earning himself a spot on Florida’s death row, where he sits to this day.

His former roommate was the one who told police about him. Walls was a scary guy, said the roommate, “always talking about rape and killing people.”

Dive Deeper

• Read: ​Remembering Tommie Lou: Thirty year anniversary of death approaching​ (Northwest Florida Daily News)

• Listen: ​Frank Walls: A Personal Connection​ (Murder Moms)

1988: Lisa Marie Kimmell’s boyfriend reports her missing

Lisa Marie Kimmell had finished high school and was ready to be a working woman.

On the night that she disappeared, the 18-year-old girl was driving from Denver, where she managed an Arby’s, to Billings, Montana, where she’d grown up and where her two younger sisters still lived.

On her way home, she planned to pick up her boyfriend, but she never arrived. He called her parents the next day, March 26, to let them know she hadn’t shown up the night before.

Instead, Kimmell had crossed paths with a man named Dale Wayne Eaton, 24 years her senior, who later told a cellmate that she’d agreed to give him a ride (Kimmell’s family says she would never have offered something like that).

Eaton claims that they were having a wonderful time in her car until he asked if they were going to have dinner, upon which she grew nervous and began acting “high and mighty.”

This angered him—and so he abducted her.

He kept her hostage for the next six days, raping her repeatedly. Finally, he bludgeoned and stabbed her to death, then threw her off the Old Government Bridge near Casper, Wyoming.

He told his cellmate that “nobody would miss her."

Eaton wasn’t caught until 2002, when investigators developed a DNA profile from evidence found on Kimmell’s body. The DNA matched Eaton’s, who was already in prison for kidnapping an entire family at gunpoint.

Kimmell's car was later found buried deep on Eaton's property, in a large hole his neighbors recalled him once digging.

Dive Deeper

• Short read: ​Kimmell family shares anger over change in killer’s sentence​ (Wyoming Tribune Eagle)

• Long read: ​Rivers of Blood​, Robert Scott

• Listen: ​Lisa Marie Kimmell | The Lil Miss Murder​ (Crimelines True Crime)

• Watch: ​Hiding A Dead Woman's Car Helps Murderer Avoid Capture​ (Cold Case Files)

2018: The Hart parents kill all six of their children

Jennifer and Sarah Hart, a white lesbian couple living in Woodland, Washington, loved posting about their big, diverse, happy, loving family on Facebook.

They had adopted six Black children—two sets of three biological siblings—and if anyone dared to criticize their parenting methods, they would claim racism or homophobia and go back to posting happy photos online.

But a closer look at the photos revealed their children were awfully thin. And rumors of abuse dogged them. In fact, their next-door neighbor had several disturbing interactions with the children.

In the middle of one night, 16-year-old Hannah banged on their door, saying, "Don't make me go back! They're racists and they abuse us!" And 15-year-old Devonte would plead for food whenever he saw them, begging them not to tell his parents.

Finally, the neighbor called the police and the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services.

When the latter began trying to get in touch with the Harts, Jennifer, and Sarah must have decided that the only way out of this mess—the only way to hide the awful, abusive nightmare they'd been forcing these children to live in—would be to kill everyone.

On March 26, Jennifer (drunk) and Sarah (sedated with Benadryl) doped up their children up with the remaining Benadryl and went for a drive. Jennifer was driving and was the only one wearing a seatbelt.

In the passenger seat, Sarah Googled things like "is death by drowning relatively painless?" Jennifer stopped at a 100-foot cliff in Mendocino County, California. She then accelerated, and the car plunged through the air and landed upside down in the ocean.

Everyone in the car was killed, most of them with broken necks. Devonte's body has never been found, but authorities ruled that he was in the vehicle and is indeed dead.

The prevailing theory about why the Harts did it is that their con was about to collapse—they were going to lose the children, and perhaps more importantly, they were going to lose the hefty government check that they got for their children, plus their image of being the perfect multiracial two-mom family.

So, like many family annihilators before them, they decided their best bet was to end it all.

Dive Deeper

• Short read: ​5 Years After Wash. Mom Drove Wife and Kids Off Cliff, the 'Hart Family Murders' Remain Chilling​ (People)

• Long read: ​We Were Once a Family: A Story of Love, Death, and Child Removal in America​, Roxanna Asgarian

• Listen: ​Broken Harts​ (iHeart True Crime)

• Watch: ​A Thread of Deceit: The Hart Family Tragedy​

Margaret McNulty prepared for work on a typical Friday morning on October 27, 1989, when her ten-year-old daughter told her she would stay late at school that day for choir auditions.

Shortly after being dismissed from school that day, Amy Mihaljevic would be taken from the Bay Square Shopping Center in Bay Village, Ohio, by a man that remains unknown to this day.

Months later, on February 8, 1990, a jogger discovered Amy’s body in a field 50 miles away from her home.

A Quiet Life in Bay Village, Ohio

The city of Bay Village, Ohio, was a small, quiet community of around 17,000—the type of place where people didn’t feel the need to lock their doors. In 1989, Amy Mihaljevic was ten years old. She lived with her mother, Margaret, her father, Mark, and her older brother, 13-year-old Jason.

Amy was enrolled at Bay Village Middle School, where she was a star student in the fifth grade. Amy was known by friends and family to be highly intelligent, and she was part of the school’s gifted and talented program.

Amy also loved horses and enjoyed riding horses in her spare time. She and her brother were “latchkey kids,” regularly coming home from school to be alone for some time before their parents arrived home from work. Bay Village was considered safe, however, and her parents never had a reason to worry about the children spending time alone.

On the morning of October 27, 1989, Amy told her mother that she would be staying late at school for choir auditions. Margaret thought nothing of this, knowing her daughter was an exemplary student, and so she went off to work.

Amy and her brother, Jason, took their bikes to school as usual. At school, Amy revealed a secret plan to her friends. Some time prior to this day, Amy had received a phone call on her home phone from a man who claimed to work with her mother at Trading Times Magazine.

The man had told Amy her mother was receiving a promotion, and he needed Amy’s help to select the perfect gift. Amy was excited about the opportunity to surprise her mother; she invited her friends to accompany her to the Bay Village Shopping Center after school.

When class was dismissed around 2:00 p.m., Amy and her friends made the short walk to the nearby shopping center.

Amy’s Abduction

Upon arrival at the Bay Village Shopping Center, reports say the young girls treated themselves to ice cream. Two classmates saw Amy around 2:15 p.m., walking through the shopping center with an unidentified adult male. Nobody knew at that time that Amy would never be seen alive again.

Amy was walking with the man, as later reported, before both individuals vanished. Later, there would be no suspicious vehicles reported and no reports of a struggle or altercation between the two. The man was described as a white male, aged 30 to 35, with a medium build. Eyewitness accounts also recalled the man possibly having round glasses and traces of a beard.

At 3:10 p.m., Amy’s brother Jason became concerned when his sister had not yet arrived home. He called his mother from the house phone, letting her know Amy wasn’t home yet. Margaret wasn’t overly concerned, as she recalled Amy mentioning the choir audition after school. She told Jason about the arrangement, and that he needn’t worry about his sister.

Despite her daughter’s activities that day, Margaret felt that something was off. But just twenty minutes after her phone call with Jason, Amy called her mother at work. She assured her mother that everything was fine, and there was no panic in her voice to indicate otherwise.

Margaret assumed Amy was calling from home—there was no caller ID at the time—and her worries subsided. But when Margaret arrived home at 5:30 p.m., the concern she felt earlier turned to panic. Amy was nowhere to be found. Jason informed his mother that his sister had still not come home.

Now panicked, Margaret jumped into action.

She first called neighbors and relatives to ask if they’d seen Amy. When nobody had seen the young girl, Margaret rushed to Bay Village Middle School, where she found the school empty, though Amy’s bike was still locked up on the bike rack.

Amy next drove to the Bay Village Police Station and reported her daughter missing, just before 6 p.m. Mark Mihaljevic, Amy’s father, returned home around the same time and began assisting in the search efforts.

The Search for Amy Mihaljevic

Almost immediately after Margaret reported her daughter missing, Bay Village Police began searching for the missing girl. Because of the circumstances surrounding her disappearance, BVPD requested assistance from the FBI.

Agents from the FBI office in Cleveland, Ohio, swiftly responded to assist with the search. As the earliest days went by, neither agency came any closer to finding Amy, despite the investigation generating thousands of leads.

Since Amy’s disappearance in 1989, more than 20,000 interviews have been conducted relating to the case; several suspects in 1989 were asked to take polygraph tests, which ultimately led investigators nowhere.

Months passed, and nobody had seen or heard from Amy. Early on, the family was cleared of suspicion, and they refused to give up hope. The search for Amy Mihaljevic ended on February 8, 1990.

A jogger in Ashland, Ohio, some 50 miles from Bay Village, made a horrifying discovery while running through a field just off County Road 1181. Police moved quickly to identify the body, and everyone’s worst fears were confirmed.

An autopsy revealed that Amy had been dumped shortly after her abduction. Her cause of death was determined to be multiple stab wounds to the neck and blunt force trauma to the head, along with other bodily injuries.

Amy was dumped wearing the same clothes she had worn to school that day. There was blood in her underwear, indicating that Amy likely suffered some form of sexual abuse prior to her death. A few items were missing from Amy’s person, and a curtain and blanket, believed to be handmade, were also found in the field near her body.

The search for Amy was complete, but the search for her killer had just begun.

Amy’s Strange Circumstances

When investigators first discovered Amy’s body, they immediately noted a few odd items missing from her person. Amy’s horse-riding boots were gone, along with her denim backpack, her school binder, and her turquoise horse’s head earrings.

These items are believed to have been taken by her killer, likely as a sort of trophy. The blanket and curtain found near Amy’s body appeared to be handmade, but despite circulating photos of the items, nobody came forward to identify them.

There were also peculiar details surrounding Amy’s kidnapping and murder. Foremost, the killer somehow knew Amy’s home phone number. He also knew, to some extent, the family’s schedule, as he was able to call when Amy would be the one to answer the phone.

The apparent “plain sight” abduction of the young girl also perplexed investigators. The Bay Village Shopping Center was nestled in a busy part of town, and between two and three in the afternoon, it would not have been empty. This kidnapping occurred in a public place in broad daylight: Amy was taken between 2:15 and 3:00 p.m., and there would have been plenty of opportunities for someone to witness the crime.

And after Amy had been taken, when she made a call to her mother, the young girl did not sound distressed. The killer must have given Amy access to a phone, and somehow kept her calm enough to not alert her mother that there was any sort of danger at hand.

Perhaps the strangest detail of the abduction is that the Bay Village Shopping Center sits directly across the street from the Bay Village Police Department. Whoever kidnapped and murdered Amy Mihaljevic was bold: his brazen abduction in broad daylight right across from the police station has stumped investigators for years.

The Leading Suspects

The Bay Village Police Department, along with the FBI, have kept the suspect list fairly private over time. Thousands of people were either interviewed, questioned, or polygraphed during the initial investigation.

Today, most sources agree that there are three primary suspects in the Amy Mihaljevic murder case: Dean Runkle, Richard Holbert, and Joseph Newton Chandler III.

Of these three suspects, many who have studied Amy’s case believe Dean Runkle to be the most likely culprit. Not only does Runkle match the description and the artist sketch, but he was also a teacher in Ohio.

Runkle denied any involvement with the crime, but when the Bay Village Police began collecting DNA samples from potential suspects, he sought legal counsel. It should be noted that Runkle was also accused of inappropriate conduct by a former student, and he allegedly set aside a few thousand dollars for his favorite student, though nothing ever came of the relationship.

Richard Holbert, who was not one of the original primary suspects, came under suspicion after confessing to the crime. While attending a Sunday mass service, Holbert confessed to killing Amy Mihaljevic.

However, he was not the only person to confess that they killed Amy, and Holbert’s medical records later proved his confession to be false. On the very day Amy was kidnapped, Holbert had been institutionalized, so it wasn’t possible for him to have kidnapped and killed Amy.

The last of these three suspects is Joseph Newton Chandler III, of whom few public details have been released. In 2018, investigators announced that they were pursuing a possible connection between Chandler III and Amy’s murder.

Unfortunately, Chandler III died in 2002, after taking his own life. After his death, investigators learned that his real name was Robert Ivan Nichols, and he stole his previous moniker from a child that died in a car accident.

Investigators were immediately intrigued by this man, believing him to be a potentially dangerous fugitive. The reasoning for his name change, move, and period of disappearance is currently still a mystery, but investigators have been pursuing possible connections to Amy’s case for several years.

Amy Mihaljevic Case Updates

Although Amy was abducted in 1989, her case is still open and being actively investigated. Since her murder, there have been several major updates to the case, including ones in recent years. In 2006, investigators revealed that Amy was not the only young girl in the Bay Village area to receive a suspicious phone call.

Multiple girls, all residents of North Olmstead, had received calls from a man who told them he needed their assistance in purchasing a present for their mother. Based on this information, it is presumed that the same man who called these girls kidnapped and murdered Amy.

Some of these girls had unlisted phone numbers, and the suspect would not have been able to find them in a phone book. However, Amy and each of the girls that was contacted had signed the guest book at the Lake Eerie Nature and Science Center at some point in their young lives.

Presumably, the killer could have taken the girls’ information from the guest book, and later used it to contact them. The police obtained a copy of the book, and have extensively investigated the center employees, but no leads have been made public.

Perhaps the biggest break in Amy Mihaljevic’s case came in 2021, when police announced that a former girlfriend of a man on the suspect list had come forward and implicated her ex-boyfriend in the crime.

Although the man’s name has not been publicly released, sources say he gave suspicious answers to interview questions, and had possibly met Margaret McNulty prior to Amy’s death.

This man willingly provided a DNA sample, but failed a polygraph test administered by investigators. The potentially most condemning circumstance for this suspect is that when questioned, two eyewitnesses picked him out of a lineup, and he was identified by both of them as the man seen with Amy before her disappearance.

Police are keeping a tight seal on the information, but it can only be assumed they are pursuing every possible connection between this man and the murder of Amy Mihaljevic.

In October 2025, investigators revealed they sent three unidentified hairs found on Amy Mihaljevic’s clothing for new DNA testing, hoping to finally identify the man who abducted and killed the 10-year-old in 1989.

After thousands of tips and decades without answers, the FBI is banking on modern forensic technology to break one of Ohio’s most haunting cold cases. A reward of up to $25,000 is still being offered to anyone who submits information leading to an arrest and conviction in Amy’s case.

Where to Watch

• What Happened to Amy?, Dateline NBC (aired September 17, 2021)

• Who Killed Amy Mihaljevic?, The Lake Erie Murders (aired December 30, 2018)

Sources

• The Amy Mihaljevic Case. Bay Village, OH. (n.d.). https://www.cityofbayvillage.com/425/Amy-Mihaljevic-Case

• Amy Mihaljevic. Cuyahoga County Prosecutor. (n.d.). http://prosecutor.cuyahogacounty.us/pdf_prosecutor/en-US/2016-06-Amy-Mihaljevic-Press-Conference.pdf

• Amy Renee Mihaljevic Unsolved Homicide. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. (n.d.). https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Files/Law-Enforcement/Investigator/Cold-Case/Homicides/Mihaljevic

• FBI. (2014, January 22). Amy Renee Mihaljevic. FBI. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/seeking-info/amy-renee-mihaljevic

• NBCUniversal News Group. (2023, January 22). Dateline Friday sneak peek: What happened to Amy?. NBCNews.com. https://www.nbcnews.com/dateline/video/dateline-friday-sneak-peek-what-happened-to-amy-120947269618

• Renner, J. (2013). Amy: My Search for Her Killer: Secrets and Suspects in the Unsolved Murder of Amy Mihaljevic. Gray & Company.

• Thompson, E. G. (2018). Unsolved Child Murders: Eighteen American Cases, 1956-1998. Exposit.

• Vrsansky, N. (2020, October 27). The Amy Mihaljevic Case: Investigators hold out hope that DNA advancements could soon help solve 1989 cold case. https://www.cleveland19.com. https://www.cleveland19.com/2020/10/27/amy-mihaljevic-case-investigators-hold-out-hope-that-dna-advancements-could-soon-help-solve-cold-case/

• Walk for Amy. (n.d.). https://www.walkforamy.org/