In 1974, hikers discovered the decapitated body of a woman murdered in the sand dunes near Provincetown, Massachusetts. For years, both police and amateur sleuths have struggled to figure out who this woman was and who killed her.
This week, police revealed the answer to the first question, putting them one step closer to solving the second:
For the nearly 50 years since hikers found the body of a deceased woman in the dunes of Provincetown, the mystery of the "Lady of the Dunes" has been foiling investigators.
Now the mystery is beginning to unravel.
The "Lady of the Dunes" has been identified as Ruth Marie Terry from Tennessee, 37 at the time of her death, according to a Monday announcement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Boston Division.
Police made the discovery by using "genetic genealogy," an increasingly popular method of identifying unknown homicide victims by using DNA to trace family trees.
Terry was born in Tennessee in 1936, [Boston bureau agent Joseph] Bonavolonta said, and "was a daughter, sister, aunt, wife and mother." She had connections to California, Massachusetts and Michigan.
The family was notified about the identification of the body just a few hours before Monday's press conference, said [Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael] O'Keefe, who along with other investigators would not give further information about the family and where they live. Bonavolonta asked that their privacy be respected.
...
"Today's identification is not the end of the case, or even the beginning of the end, but it does mark an important milestone," [Massachusetts State Police Col. Christopher] Mason said. "What we need to do now is to learn everything about Ruth Terry's life; what she did, where she went, who she associated with, all in hopes that those details and that timeline will lead us to her killer."
This has been a cold case since O'Keefe joined the Cape and Islands District Attorney's office. Now that he is leaving the job, he said "it was a satisfying day, it was Friday, when we got the word," but added, "We haven't solved anything yet."
O'Keefe said one of Ruth's aunts was searching for her back in the 1970s. She has since died but investigators will be talking with her friends and family to see if she left any written documents of hers reach or spoke about her search with them
It is hard to overstate the fixation that many true-crime aficionados have had on this case. Stephen King's son Joe Hill, for instance, was known for publicizing a theory that the lady was an extra from the film Jaws:
Specifically, Hill highlighted a moment about 54 minutes and 2 seconds into the film during a crowd sequence set on the Fourth of July, when he spotted an extra — a fit, young-looking woman with brunette hair wearing a blue bandana — who bore a "startling resemblance" to a composite sketch of the lady herself.
He wondered, "What if the young murder victim no one has ever been able to identify has been seen by hundreds of millions of people in a beloved summer classic and they didn't even know they were looking at her?"
"What if," he wrote in 2015, "the ghost of the Lady of the Dunes haunts JAWS?"
The theory wasn't crazy; the resemblance between the extra and the composite sketch was rather striking, and the extra's bandana appeared to be similar to one found with the body itself:
