Original subtitles

I became a detective because

I thought maybe I could make some sort of difference.

Cold cases, the missing, the unidentified,

they tend to fall through the cracks.

The Lady of the Dunes case was one of the reasons

I wanted to come down here.

When I got the case, I went to the grave

and I promised her that I'd get her name back

and get her back to her family.

It was the most high-profile case

I had ever had the opportunity to investigate.

And I ended up losing my career as a result of this.

This is the first time that I've spoken completely on camera

about my role in the investigation.

The fact that someone had remained unidentified

all that time is so tragic.

It was a daunting task.

I would work on this case on my days off.

Ultimately I was told, "Just leave it alone."

I knew all along that

there could be some serious repercussions.

But I just kept going.

You're trying to tie one hand behind my back

but, basically, [bleep] you.

I'm not stopping. I owe it to her.

This is a legendary case.

It really was mythical, urban-legend-like.

It's an enduring mystery that has frustrated...

The oldest unidentified homicide victim

in Massachusetts.

It was a brutal crime

in the dunes of Provincetown in 1974.

She was known as the Lady of the Dunes.

Her name, a mystery.

It became more than just a story.

It became kind of like folklore.

Her head was crushed and nearly decapitated.

Her hands cut off. - Who was this woman?

Who was the killer? What happened?

And why?

Their take was that this person was taunting the police.

No small community anywhere is prepared for that kind of thing.

Somewhere out there, there's a family

who's got to be missing this young lady.

Over the decades, there have been many theories

about what could have happened to her.

A bank robber who'd escaped from a regional jail.

Could she have known too much?

Could this have been a mob hit?

The theories just went on and on and on.

This is beyond grisly and beyond disturbing.

It really, really rattled the community.

Days turned to weeks, weeks to months, months to years.

Former detectives say evidence was thrown away

and contaminated.

I just always thought of it as an unbelievable ghost story

that probably would never be solved.

You can't help but bond with this person

and feel like their soul is in your hands.

I got a call about a woman who went missing in 1973.

Young girl, running guns, drugs, crisscrossing the country,

trying to shoot police officers.

Honest to God, you can't make this up.

It's like out of a movie.

I remember this area.

This is very familiar.

All of us kids would just come out here and run around

and look for driftwood and animal tracks

and just hang out and explore.

We came to Provincetown in the summers.

Our family friends used to rent this dune shack every summer.

And all of the families would converge here during that week

and swim and party.

I remember it was a beautiful day.

It was sunny. My parents and my sister

spent the day swimming, and then they were walking back.

The people that had rented the dune shack,

they had a couple of dogs.

And the dog veered off and started barking at something.

So my sister followed the dog.

The dog turned around here to this clump of scrub pines

and that's when she saw the body.

When my parents tell the story,

my mother used to say that she heard my sister go,

"Mom, Dad" and that there was something in the tone

of her voice that really frightened my mother.

And she said she grabbed my father's arm and she said,

"I'm not going. Lenny, you go look."

It was a woman and she was laying on her folded clothes.

Like she could've been sunbathing.

They took the jeep and went to the ranger station

and reported it to the rangers.

She was laying down, facedown, on half of a beach towel.

Had dungarees and a kerchief she used as a pillow, sort of.

Reddish brown, auburn hair, 5'6".

The body was nude when she was found.

They weren't sure how long she had been there, up to two weeks.

It was July. It was hot.

They didn't even want to get close to the body.

It was that bad.

Her skull was crushed.

Her head was nearly decapitated.

Her hands were cut off.

Someone clearly wanted to hide her identity.

This looked like someone who had perhaps done this before.

This was one of the most publicized

and notorious unresolved homicides in New England.

It's a beautiful location contrasted

with the brutal murder of an unknown young woman.

Here's a grave, an unidentified female.

Police weren't just searching for a killer.

They were trying to find out who this woman was.

We've been spending summers on the dunes

since 1956 as a family.

We had gone to town to pick up some groceries.

And they waved us down. They seemed very agitated.

Everybody was shouting at one time.

And they said, "We found a body, we found a body."

After the body was found,

I think the whole town became a little more spooked.

Who knows who's lurking in the dunes?

It really, really rattled the community.

They would lock the windows, lock the doors,

be a little suspect of strangers.

It was sort of like a town-wide game of Clue.

I spent a great deal of time in Provincetown

when I was an adolescent.

It was just a wonderful, exotic place.

This is not a pejorative word here,

but you just have a lot of weirdos.

And the town encourages that. It welcomes it in.

You have the artists, you have the gay and lesbian community.

The town would have been crawling with hippies.

Back in the '70s,

our year-round population was probably about 2,500.

In the summertime,

that number would swell to 100,000 no problem.

I worked for the Provincetown police department for 35 years.

In 1974, started when I was 17.

Working summers as a summer patrolman.

It was known as Helltown.

The bikers would take over one bar.

Across Commercial Street,

the fishermen would be in another bar,

and they would be bumping heads.

All the time.

We would go all night long from fight to fight to fight.

I would go home every night, bloodied, torn uniform.

Anything goes. Drugs, alcohol, you name it.

It was allowed.

I shouldn't say it was allowed. It went on.

But something like this was just huge news.

That something of that magnitude could happen in our town.

The first step was to identify her.

And we reached out to the community.

Because the community is so small.

Everybody knows everybody. Word was out.

Nobody was missing anybody from their family.

We knew immediately it was nobody local.

As the days and weeks and months went by,

we could find no more information about this woman.

So the community gave her a name.

The Lady of the Dunes was a term that the locals used.

I'm not sure that my father was the one

that came up with it. In fact, I'm pretty sure he wasn't.

Based on the proximity to the dune shacks,

the location of that area of where her body was positioned,

the perpetrator most likely was very familiar

with that area in the dunes.

At the time, in order to get out to the dune trails,

there was a shack

that was manned by the National Park Rangers.

And when you would pull up to the booth,

they would write down every plate number

and the name of the operator who was going out onto the dunes.

The shack isn't manned 24 hours a day.

Anybody who's familiar with driving

out there would know that.

It would appear that this type of murder,

he probably murdered prior or has murdered since.

This was not a crime of passion. This was premeditated.

There was definitely a sense of unease around town.

We were wondering if somebody in the community was a murderer.

That had happened before.

Five years before the Lady of the Dunes was discovered,

there was a serial killer in Provincetown named Tony Costa.

This was the first grave that was found.

And after probing, we found the remains of an unidentified girl.

There are indications that there are teeth marks

on some of these parts of these dismembered bodies.

Tony Costa was known as "Tony Chop Chop" due to his crimes.

That particular case occurred actually in Truro,

the next town over.

There were similarities with Tony Costa,

and now we have another murdered young woman.

These women who were murdered were all visitors.

Nobody in town suddenly was like,

"Hey, where did so and so go?"

The age of the decomposed bodies

may go back beyond six months, eight months, nine months.

We don't know what took place during that time,

and at least 2,000 or 3,000 missing females

in the United States

and we don't know how many may be buried in the Truro woods.

It was incredibly disturbing to the town and upsetting,

and when something that dark happens again,

you start to wonder if this isn't becoming a new normal.

The Tony Costa thing was fresh in everybody's mind.

Everybody in town was concerned and afraid

that there was a serial killer around.

Tony Costa had been charged with

killing several women in Truro.

But Tony Costa had died by what was determined to be suicide

in prison...

...prior to the Lady of the Dunes being found.

I was 12 years old at the time

that the woman in the dunes was found.

It's something that I'll never forget.

One thing that sticks out in my mind

was me going to the police station to visit my dad.

The police station was underneath Town Hall.

You walked down a set of stairs. When you walked in,

there was a small room. To the left was his office.

As you walked into his office,

his desk was right in front of me.

There was paneled walls on either side and photographs.

A gruesome display of her hands chopped off, her skull caved in.

I remember the skull laying on his desk.

The whole thing was pretty disturbing.

Chief Meads worked tirelessly on this case.

In the very beginning,

Chief Meads ran down every possible lead, hoping

something would jump out.

He believed if we could identify her,

it would immediately take us to her killer.

Canvassed the entire area.

We used metal detectors, brought in the park police bloodhounds,

canvassed the area for the hands and made a complete search.

He always had something that he was looking at.

Our own men went through every motel,

hotel, campground looking for some articles of clothing

perhaps that some young lady had left behind.

In the '70s there was no DNA.

The most advanced forensic tools available

would have been blood typing, fingerprints, photographs.

When those leads didn't pan out,

he tried to identify her through dental records.

Chief Meads turned to the dental records

because the teeth that were in her skull

contained a large sum of money invested in gold fillings.

And it was done in what's called the New York style of dentistry.

You know, you can draw a lot of conclusions

about the dental work.

The gold in this young lady's head

is valued today at $7,000 to $10,000.

So Chief Meads contacted the American Dental Association

to see if any dentists out there recognize these charts.

He contacted every state in the country.

As many dentists as he could.

You would think or hope

that someone would have looked at that

and said, "Yes, I know who that is.

I worked on her."

I believe it haunted my dad because he really felt

like he wanted to give this woman a name

and give her family some closure.

He was personally responsible for having her buried

in the Catholic cemetery.

The Catholic church,

they were a little hesitant to let him do that

because they didn't know if she was a Catholic or not

but he had some connections

and he was able to get them to allow her

to be buried in the cemetery. The good part about that

was they were able to have her right there

if they ever had to exhume her.

Every cop wants to solve every crime,

but this really struck a note with Chief Meads.

He worked on the case all the time.

He was determined about it.

This was always a Provincetown case from its inception.

In the beginning,

the state police worked the case with Chief Meads.

As the years went on, the state police input dissipated.

When Chief Meads was interviewed, you know,

"Why are you putting so much time and effort into this case?"

And he said, "You have no business being a police officer

if you can't demonstrate the duty of care,

you owe to your victim and to their family."

As a police chief,

my father was haunted by the fact

that the woman didn't have an identity.

And I think the biggest thing with the case

was he wanted to put a name to her and then in turn

that would help him solve the case.

As a teenager,

I was given this bag as a Christmas gift

or a birthday gift, and then all of a sudden, one day,

my father asked me if he could use the bag.

He would put the skull in it,

kept it in his possession all the time,

and took it from one place to the other.

Chief Meads' next step was

to get a clay reconstruction done of her skull.

He had the skull brought to have clay restructure the face,

the bones, to come up with a picture.

She's described as 5'6" to 5'8",

about 140 pounds, athletic build, long, reddish brown hair.

They sought information from the public

based on those composites,

if anyone could make an identification.

Chief Meads went to the media with it everywhere

and every possible way he could.

The hope was that somebody would recognize her.

The chief has had hundreds of leads,

hundreds of letters and hundreds of disappointments.

I often thought

somebody out there is missing a family member.

Why are we not hearing about it?

Through the course of the investigation,

they found a good five or six women who were still alive

and did not want to be found.

Like, "Yeah, I hate my family.

I disappeared. Like, leave me alone."

Provincetown at that time was full of people

who were escaping things.

I think there was always kind of a thought like,

could she have been a criminal?

Was she on the run?

When the body was first found, the hands were missing.

The only logical reason

to cut off the Lady in the Dunes' hands

is to prevent her identification.

Back in the '70s, you have to ask yourself,

who got fingerprinted?

Military, federal employees, criminals.

We arrested many fugitives of justice

because they could get lost in the crowds.

They could come here and disappear.

He was just trying everything he could

in his power to come up with a solution.

The body of work

that Chief Meads left behind was voluminous,

it was detailed, and it was ruthless in the way

he hunted down every lead.

His only wish was to find out who she was.

And he took offense to the fact

that somebody did something in his town.

The lawman obsessed by his search.

Police Chief Jim Meads'

investigation has become his obsession.

As time progressed,

we didn't see Dad as much as we had in the past

because he was buried in his work.

As time goes on, my hopes diminish.

This was the biggest case

that he had in his tenure as police chief.

Chief Meads had it right when he said

our goal here is to identify her and get her her name back.

That was adopted by Chief Tobias.

I became detective and I asked him

if I could take over the case.

He had to kind of ease my way in there.

I mean, that was really his personal property.

This was his baby, and he was reluctant to let it go.

I would go through that case file time and time again.

This was not just a random act of violence

that the person would have just been left there

if she'd been killed on the spot just randomly.

This person set this body up to taunt the police, if you will.

When I took over the case from Chief Meads,

I was starting from scratch.

That case folder was at least three feet thick.

At least a thousand pages of documents, reports,

magazines, news articles, notes from Chief Meads.

I read that case folder so many times,

hoping something would jump out.

But, at that point in time,

I had a new investigative tool that Chief Meads did not have.

That was a whole different ballgame.

Controversial technique known as DNA fingerprinting.

Putting more and more criminals behind bars.

It's the latest in high-tech crime solving.

Virtually any trace of human contact left

at the scene of a crime can now be analyzed,

tested, and retested to reveal a person's

smallest genetic makeup.

DNA was just beginning to be used in cases.

According to Provincetown Police,

they went to go get the physical evidence from the crime scene

because they wanted to test it.

I knew the State Police

and the district attorney's office held the evidence.

They had the towel, the jeans, her hair.

That physical evidence could very well have DNA on it,

not only the DNA of the perpetrator,

but the DNA of the victim.

I made arrangements to go get the evidence.

When I got to the state police barracks,

they gave me a sheet of paper.

It was a report saying that they had thrown away the evidence.

I was shocked.

Why in the world would you throw away the evidence

to an unsolved murder?

The case was only 15 years old.

The reason they had gotten rid of it

was they had a storage locker and they needed more room.

So there goes my source of DNA for the Lady in the Dunes.

This was devastating to the investigation.

I kept my mouth shut about this for 30 years.

I didn't want to publicly

damage the reputation

of law enforcement.

And then I had gotten a lead about a fugitive

who had escaped and had disappeared.

I got a call from the Pembroke Police Department.

One of their investigators

had seen a story on the Lady of the Dunes,

and he had a theory about a woman who went missing in 1973.

Rory Gene Kesinger.

Her story really is a crazy story unto itself.

Young girl, running guns, drugs, crisscrossing the country,

trying to shoot police officers.

It's almost like Bonnie and Clyde without Clyde.

Rory was living just off-Cape.

The police department there did a raid one night

on her apartment.

When they raided it, she tried to shoot one of the officers.

She came in from the front bedroom with a gun in her hand

and very politely said,

"I'm sorry, Officer, but I have to kill you."

Pushed the weapon that she had to the side, handcuffed her.

We found a number of guns. We found a lot of money.

It was probably the biggest drug raid in Plymouth County.

She ended up in the Plymouth House of Correction.

Honest to God, you can't make this up,

It's like out of a movie.

Kesinger hacksawed her way through these bars,

slipped out this window, and was never heard from again.

The timing was perfect for her to be the Lady in the Dunes

'cause it happened before the Lady in the Dunes was found.

She fit the description physically.

She was a criminal,

which fit one of the three possibilities of

why you would remove the hands.

But the only way to confirm that she was a match

for the Lady of the Dunes was through DNA.

Rory Gene Kesinger absolutely changed the course

of my investigation

because now I was focused on this one individual.

But unfortunately the evidence that had been

found at the scene, that had been thrown away.

Chief Tobias sent the skull of the Lady of the Dunes

to attempt to extract DNA for a profile.

At that point in time, Cellmark

was like the premier DNA company.

So we sent the samples there.

DNA fingerprinting by Cellmark Diagnostics.

With virtually 100% accuracy, researchers can now link

a drop of blood found at a crime scene.

DNA was new, and it wasn't 100% guaranteed.

But I was hopeful.

If I can get DNA from the body

and then find a family member from Rory Gene Kesinger,

this could solve the case.

But, unfortunately, Cellmark was ultimately unable to extract

enough DNA to get a profile.

It was a dead end.

That was so depressing.

At this point, the case is about 25 years old.

And Dr. Bruce Jackson had come into the picture.

Dr. Bruce Jackson worked

with the federal government identifying soldiers' remains

brought back from Vietnam.

I mean, this guy knew his stuff.

Dr. Jackson volunteered his time, his lab, his money.

So, what is my next avenue for DNA?

I needed to exhume the body.

The samples were sent to Dr. Jackson.

And he was able to get a good sample.

It was a godsend.

Now that we have a sample, we can see

if Rory Gene Kesinger was the Lady of the Dunes.

Tracking down her family was very difficult

because of the amount of time that had passed.

But I did eventually find the mother.

I'd had a gut feeling this was gonna be it from the first time

I heard about Rory Gene Kesinger.

So now I could test her DNA against the DNA

from the Lady of the Dunes.

This was huge. This could solve the case.

But it was not Rory Gene Kesinger.

I was devastated.

I had 10 years' worth of work on Rory Kesinger.

I remember looking at that huge file and thinking to myself,

"I'm back at square one."

You know, it's a haunting ghost story.

Over the decades, there have been many theories

about who she was, what could have happened to her.

It very quickly goes in these wild directions

of satanic cults and biker gangs, UFOs,

actual ghosts in the dunes.

Infamous mob boss Whitey Bulger spent lots of time

in Provincetown, and this looked like a mob hit.

Could she have known too much?

But then I got a phone call from

Montgomery County, Maryland.

A serial killer confessed to killing the Lady in the Dunes.

Marking soft sticks.

My name is Alec Wilkinson,

and I'm a longtime writer at "The New Yorker."

I was up on the Cape and I was talking to a police chief

and I said, "Anything interesting going on?"

And he said, "I think I have a serial killer."

The murderer's name was Hadden Clark.

I spent my childhood on Cape Cod.

My mother made me aware

that I had been in a swimming class with Hadden Clark.

I really only had a sort of incomplete memory

of a kind of shivering little boy.

I got in touch with Hadden probably 1999, 2000,

because I was so intrigued by the story

that the Wellfleet police chief had told me.

Hadden Clark wasn't the normal sort of killer

you meet in prison.

He was not an imposing or threatening sort of person.

He had a kind of hidden sullen side

that was capable of a real menace.

His family was from this area.

He had worked in Provincetown.

His diagnosis is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Clark exhibited narcissistic as well as sociopathic tendencies.

There was certainly something wrong with him.

Hadden Clark first came to the attention of our agency,

Montgomery County, Maryland,

in the middle '80s

when the disappearance of Michele Dorr occurred.

Six-year-old Michele Dorr mysteriously disappeared

while outside her Silver Spring home.

Clark at the time was a neighbor,

lived just a few doors away.

The police questioned a man known

as the neighborhood oddball.

Then Hadden Clark's name came up in another investigation.

The friends, family,

and co-workers of Laura Houghteling

have a mystery on their hands tonight,

trying to figure out what happened

to the young Bethesda woman

who appears to have vanished without a trace.

Police have found traces of blood in her bedroom

and bloody bedclothes in a nearby wooded area.

In that blood was Hadden Clark's fingerprint.

Her mother had hired Hadden Clark as a handyman.

Clark finally confessed to the killing

and led police to the young woman's body in Bethesda.

In the late '90s,

information came from another inmate

in the State Correctional Facility

who had befriended Clark.

This man had long hair and a beard, and Hadden said,

"I know who you are. You're the second coming of Christ.

You're Jesus."

And Hadden would tell Jesus things about what he had done.

And he said that he'd been responsible for the death

of the Lady of the Dunes.

Hadden Clark confessed to killing Lady in the Dunes over

and over and over again.

He eventually would tell us that he became angry,

attacked the woman, bludgeoned her,

and removed all her clothing.

He then removed her hands.

Clark's description of what he did to the Lady of the Dunes,

was consistent with the crime scene.

Hadden Clark made several drawings when he was in prison,

one of which depicted the victim in the position she was found,

where her body was found.

And they found, in his possessions,

tokens from his other crimes.

One of the things that they found

was a jewelry box filled with beach sand.

Beach sand, the Lady of the Dunes was found in the dunes.

Acting on this information that Clark had provided,

we contact the Massachusetts State Police.

It was determined it would be beneficial

to bring Clark out to Cape Cod.

We made arrangements to see if he could show me

where the body was, and where her hands were.

Anytime you're dealing with someone with a diagnosis

of paranoid schizophrenia,

it's certainly worth looking at.

They drive him up from Maryland.

They had brought Jesus along too

because Jesus is the Hadden whisperer.

The two of them were transported

by Montgomery County detectives as well as FBI personnel.

My supervisor felt that I had an ability to keep Clark talking.

Hadden had two personalities.

And the second was a woman named Kristen who was mean and evil.

And remorseless.

On this particular morning, he was Kristen.

And Kristen wasn't gonna cooperate

unless she was allowed to obtain some women's clothing.

And about 10 miles from Wellfleet,

they go to a department store.

This is 20 years ago.

You know, it was a bold thing on Hadden's part to ask for it.

We were going the extra mile on this.

Clark went in. He picked out various items.

I remember a couple black SUVs pulling up

in front of the station over here.

And they were late.

And they told me they were late

because Hadden Clark kept attacking the deputies

that were transporting him

'cause he wanted to drink their blood.

We drive out into the dunes,

accompanied by Massachusetts State Police.

I rode in the back seat with Hadden Clark,

and it was the creepiest day of my life

sitting next to this known serial killer.

He provided detail about how the area had changed.

I found Clark's information to be very compelling.

In working with Clark,

you had to demonstrate a great deal of patience.

It might take you an hour or more to get a yes or a no.

He took us almost to what I would learn to be the location

she was recovered.

But he ultimately was unable to provide any evidence

or any significant detail at all.

I think he could manipulate us.

He was out of jail for the day,

got to see Provincetown and the dunes.

As we worked through the details provided by Clark,

we know some of that information

was out there in the public venue.

But I believe there's still a possibility Clark

may have been responsible for it.

It was disappointing.

Back to square one again.

At some point, it begins to wear you down,

and you learn to be less hopeful after dead end after dead end.

You're looking for the next lead.

All my life I've always wondered who my mom was.

When I was old enough to understand,

my parents sat me down and explained I was adopted.

Oh, thank you.

He was always in search of his mom.

This was so hard on his heart and his mind.

I started thinking.

You know, maybe I should figure out who she is.

I said, "But it could be a Pandora's box.

It could open up so many things that you're not ready for.

With every positive, there's also negatives.

So you just got to be ready for all that

when that box gets opened."