Original subtitles

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

The Lady of the Dunes case

was one of the most notorious unresolved homicides.

Chief Meads believed if we could identify her,

it would immediately take us to her killer.

They had thrown away the evidence.

I remember thinking to myself, I'm back at square one.

I worked on this case for 20 years.

When I retired, it was difficult giving up the case.

There would be nights I'd put my head on the pillow

and be thinking about it.

And thinking about how to solve it.

I couldn't just let it go.

And as the years went by, the mystique grew.

The Lady of the Dunes, the, I'll even say the legend of it.

I didn't think it would 100% be solved,

but I never gave up hope.

To solve this case was going to take someone

with as much determination

as Chief Meads and myself to take over.

We did not make any headway.

Until Meredith came along.

I spent well over a decade working

as a criminal defense attorney.

I was a public defender in primarily Boston.

And keep in mind, this was Boston in the '80s and '90s.

And a lot of things were suspect.

There were instances of investigators looking

to close cases and not look for the actual perpetrator.

The victims are really not the primary focus of the system,

and I thought maybe I could make some sort of difference.

So I became a detective.

Came down to Provincetown and was hired in January of 2011.

I took over the Lady of the Dunes investigation.

The first thing I did was scan the case file,

every bit of paper, every little pink message

that came in for Chief Tobias or Chief Meads.

It was daunting.

I have this 38-year-old case, and now she's my responsibility.

I began working

with the National Association of the Missing and Unidentified.

It's basically a repository of all the missing persons

that have been reported and the unidentified bodies

that have been found, so that when anyone

is looking for a loved one, they can submit DNA samples.

And the ultimate hope is that there would be a familial match.

In 2012,

I received a call from a police department in California.

They were going through their cold cases

and came across the case of missing persons

Stephen Packard and Linda Lovell.

They came to Provincetown during the summer of 1974

at the beginning of July.

They were last seen hitchhiking out of Provincetown.

They were never seen again.

This is the most promising lead we've had probably ever.

We made arrangements to have Linda Lovell's

mother's DNA taken and examined.

Hopefully there would be a match from the Lady of the Dunes.

Chief Tobias had brought DNA into this.

Being able to pick it up at that point was a huge advantage.

Fortunately, DNA was making progressions at that time.

An exhumation had been done around 2000 by Chief Tobias.

I knew that a sample from that exhumation

had been sent to Dr. Bruce Jackson,

the foremost geneticist probably in the world.

And I knew a DNA profile of the Lady of the Dunes

had gone to the medical examiner's office,

and the medical examiner's office had sent DNA

to the lab of Dr. Bruce Budowle.

He founded the FBI's DNA lab.

My contact at NamUs, Lori Bruski,

took a look at the profile

Dr. Jackson had for the Lady of the Dunes.

Because she is very thorough,

she also went and pulled the profile

Dr. Budowle had for the Lady of the Dunes.

I'll never forget that afternoon when I received the call.

I was in my office. I answered the phone.

She said, "Meredith,

these two DNA profiles from the Lady of the Dunes don't match."

And I said to her, "What do you mean they don't match?"

Meredith, these are from two different people.

We didn't know how that had happened.

We still don't know how that happened.

We didn't know if the correct DNA profile

for the lady in the dunes was the profile

that Dr. Budowle obtained or the profile

that Dr. Jackson had obtained.

We thought we had an accurate DNA profile,

and it ends up we don't.

This was now in addition to Warren having learned

that all the physical evidence in the case,

meaning the jeans, the bandana,

the towel her head had been resting on, her hair,

the state police had thrown it all away in 1989.

It was just, are you kidding me?

What else can go wrong in this case?

When we realized that the DNA had been contaminated,

I knew that the only resolution was to do another exhumation.

I went to my chief, and it was decided that's what we would do.

The medical examiner's office had done the prior exhumation.

Guys, stay back, okay? Stay back.

To circumvent any more contamination that had occurred,

our 2013 exhumation, it was different.

It was supervised by a geneticist, Dr. Jackson.

But I had no doubt that this exhumation was done by the book.

So now that we knew that we had the accurate profile

for the Lady of the Dunes,

we ran Dr. Jackson's DNA against Linda Lovell,

the missing person from California.

Unfortunately, the DNA did not match the DNA

from the Lady of the Dunes.

But it wasn't a dead end.

We know we have an accurate profile,

and now we can move forward.

In 2014, the former chief left

and was replaced by acting Chief James Golden.

There was definitely a shift in the tenor and tone

of supervision of this case.

I had an active, full caseload as a detective.

I would work on this case after work hours, on my days off.

And that's when Chief Golden told me

that I'd no longer be able to get any overtime

for working on this case.

A lot of cops would be like,

"Well, if I'm not getting paid, forget it."

But, you know, it certainly wasn't going to dissuade me

from continuing to work on the case.

In Massachusetts, when there's a homicide,

that homicide falls under the jurisdiction

of the district attorney's office and state police.

But local police are still very much involved

in the investigation.

I had talked to a facial reconstructionist

from Boston Police, who had cutting edge technology

that had not been used before, to enlist his help

to do reconstructions of the Lady of the Dunes.

We were ready to hit the presses with the new composite.

We believe this to be a true

and accurate representation of the Lady of the Dunes.

But the head of the State Police Detective Unit

said, "Stop this now."

There was no reason given for stopping it.

Unfortunately, and I'd say tragically,

it was never released.

I think her administration did not want

the Provincetown Police Department associated

with this case as much as I did or Chief Meads did.

I can't say with any certainty why.

Maybe so that none of the evidence being lost,

none of the contamination will come out in public.

When I had this case, I had a free hand.

I don't think Meredith had the same free hand.

She ran into roadblocks.

It sent a clear message that anything

that could lead to the identification of

the Lady of the Dunes was going to be met

with resistance from the top.

We're getting into 40 plus years into this case.

You have this almost panic in your head

that time is running out here.

Given the fact that she was found deceased in 1974,

it seems like time is ticking.

I had my doubts that the case was ever going to be solved,

that we would ever identify her.

A new kind of DNA evidence called genetic genealogy.

Genetic genealogy uses databases

like Ancestry, 23 and Me.

But the DA's office, for whatever reason,

was completely opposed to trying to get DNA done,

trying to get forensics done,

any kind of scientific work being done.

Ultimately, in 2018, I was told not

to work on the case by my chief.

Chief James Golden had been brought to heel

by the District Attorney's office.

He said, "If she has a family,

watch, they'll turn around and sue us

because it took so long to identify her."

His attitude was that, you know, they're in charge of the case.

Just leave it alone.

I was just disgusted.

You have a body on your department.

And you just say,

"Leave it alone and let that woman rot in that cemetery."

None of it makes sense.

But politics unfortunately played a role in this case.

You were dealing with fragile male egos.

You're dealing with jurisdictional issues.

And they don't like it, especially from a woman,

especially from someone from out of town.

Especially from, you know, someone who's gay.

It's not appreciated.

The district attorney's office,

I don't believe wanted this case solved.

And I think the answer is very simple,

because of the evidence issue.

They had thrown away the evidence.

They were going to look bad.

I'm in this alone, one hand behind my back,

but basically, [bleep] you.

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

At that point,

my chief was actively attempting to shut down my investigation.

I was sitting at my desk, and all of a sudden, sitting there,

I realized, wait a minute,

this happened on national park property.

Any homicide that happens on park property

is the jurisdiction of the FBI.

The FBI needs to get involved here.

This should be their case.

And then the Golden State killer was identified.

Alleged Golden State killer Joseph DeAngelo was arrested

in April 2018 thanks to genetic genealogy.

The case had remained unresolved for decades.

Using genetic genealogy,

they were able to identify the perpetrator in that case.

That made a huge difference.

The FBI was a little reluctant to get involved.

You know, I made it clear to them, "Look, guys,

you're not doing me a favor.

This is your case. This is your jurisdiction."

I said, "It's been almost 48 years.

This is a chance for you to solve this."

You get to stand up at that microphone and say,

"Look at what the FBI did to solve

the Lady of the Dunes case."

And you take all the credit for this.

Let's do it.

I'm excited but holding my breath.

The analyst from the FBI did the genetic genealogy.

I was in Superior Court on another case,

and I found out

that there was going to be this meeting scheduled between FBI,

Provincetown, State Police, DA's office, for the next day.

The level of hope

and then disappointment had happened so many times.

This felt different.

I heard the FBI had a name for the Lady of the Dunes.

It was surreal.

It was personal for everyone.

You know, wishing Chief Meads could have known,

wishing I were allowed to tell Warren what was happening.

Kind of feeling like after,

you know, 11 years of bashing your head against a wall,

it was going to be worth it.

I went home and just said,

"I just want to stay alive till 11:00 tomorrow morning.

I hope I don't die in my sleep

because that would really be lousy not knowing."

In the end, the FBI,

using a lab that worked on genetic genealogy,

came back with the DNA that led them to her identity.

It took nearly 50 years,

but investigators in Massachusetts

have caught their break.

We are standing here today to announce

that after nearly a half-century of investigative efforts,

we have identified the oldest unidentified homicide victim

in Massachusetts, known as the Lady of the Dunes.

She is...

I was upstairs in the office where I spend a lot of my time.

The phone rings, and I noticed

right on there that it said FBI.

And I got nervous. I got really nervous.

They wouldn't tell me anything on the phone,

you know, just that, "We're the FBI,

and we need to talk to you."

They pulled up in a black Suburban,

all the windows were darkened out, windshield and everything.

Just like on TV, man, the doors opened up,

four guys got out in suits, and I started praying.

You know, 'cause I thought,

you know, apparently I've done something wrong.

We drove to the Detroit office, and when we got there,

they proceeded to tell me that they had located my mom.

I got really excited

'cause I thought I was going to meet my mom.

I said, "Well, where is she?"

He goes, "Oh, no, no, no, no. Your mom's gone.

And she's been gone for a long time."

And then that's when he said,

"Well, we all knew her as the Lady of the Dunes."

We're in Livonia, Michigan, an older part of Livonia.

My mom and dad used to live here and work at the plant.

This used to be Fisher Body Livonia.

It opened up in '57 or '58.

My dad came down from Lansing

to be superintendent here at this plant.

My mom worked here, my older sister worked here,

my aunt worked here, they all worked here at this plant.

The auto plants were all running big, and they needed people.

And they hired a lot of people from the south.

There was a woman that worked there.

She said her name was Ruth Smith.

Pat, my older sister,

and Ruth hung out quite a bit and became really good friends.

And Ruth got pregnant.

Wasn't married, it was the '50s, and, you know,

she didn't know what to do.

My mom and dad were looking to adopt a baby.

But they were older, and the government wouldn't let them.

So Ruth approached Dick and Thelma and said,

"Hey, you know, I know you, you're great people,

and I want you to take care of my baby."

And my mom and dad were just so excited.

That's gonna be this house right there.

That's the house that I was born in.

After Ruth came to my parents, my parents,

they rented a house to take care of Ruth.

And my mom and my dad and Ruth

all agreed that when it come time for me to be born,

that my mom would give her driver's license to Ruth

and that my dad would take Ruth down

to the Garden City Hospital.

And that's exactly what happened.

My birth certificate, it said Thelma Hanchett,

but it had Ruth's birth date and the birth place for Ruth,

with Chattanooga, Tennessee.

My mom said right after I was born, they came back here

and Ruth come over and said her goodbyes

and my mom never ever seen her again.

Growing up as a child,

I was mad at Ruth because if I had a child,

I would never give it away.

I felt abandoned.

And got in a lot of trouble.

Breaking [bleep], stealing

I was rebelling, I was trying to tell people

I was mad, and the older I got, the worse I got.

And then, in 1972, Ruth reached out to my sister Patricia.

Richard has always wanted to see his mother and meet her,

but when Ruth came in, talked to Pat,

and she wanted to meet Richard,

Richard was going through a very bad point in time in his life.

I was 13 years old, I OD'd on PCP.

I woke up in a hospital two and a half weeks later.

My older sister Pat came to see me to let me know

that Ruth was trying to get a hold of me.

I just blew it off,

I didn't want anything to do with anybody.

Unfortunately, I think Pat had to tell her what happened,

that this is why he doesn't want to see you.

I'm kind of mad at myself

because I had no idea that was my only chance.

My older sister, Patricia, was a second mom to me.

I idolized her.

I don't know what the deal is,

but there's been death around me all my life.

This is a newspaper article the day

that her ex-husband murdered her.

He barged into her home and shot her.

And then was killed by the police.

When my older sister was murdered,

I thought Ruth perhaps would have been at the funeral.

They were friends.

I looked at all the books,

and I looked for Ruth Smith to see

if her signature was in there.

But it wasn't there.

Deep down, I needed to know, where is she?

My mom died in 2013.

And then younger sister Lisa died in '17.

And I found myself all alone.

That's when I was like,

"You know, where'd everybody go?"

Come on.

He was lost.

And I said, "Well, what if you tried to find your mom and dad,

you know, your birth parents?"

So in December of '17, I got him a DNA kit for Christmas.

I said, "I bought you this

because you've been questioning a lot of things.

But you have to look at, it might be a downside, too."

Maybe the family is-- don't want you around.

It could be a Pandora's box.

I took the DNA test, sent it in, had to wait a couple weeks.

And then I got the e-mail that my results were in.

And I'm getting excited.

It gave me access to the Ancestry database.

My hair is standing on my arms.

Wendy's behind me. She's shaking.

It immediately came back with a match.

I was shocked.

I match a woman from Tennessee.

This woman was my mom's brother or sister's child.

I sent her a message.

It was really simple-- "The system says you're my cousin.

I was adopted. I don't know who I am.

And I'm looking for help."

And within seconds, she responded, "Oh, my God.

I've been looking for you my whole life."

She just started telling me things about my mom,

my family, and who I am.

It says, "She is our beloved Ruth Marie Terry."

And she sent me a picture.

I was like, "Holy crap!

That's my mom, there's no ands ifs or buts about that!"

It was just unbelievable.

Then, three quarters of the way down was the,

"She's been missing since the '70s."

I was just crushed. I'm like, "What?"

You're at the top of the mountain,

and you've just slipped off.

I wanted to know who she was, what she was like.

Everything about her and her family.

My father and my Aunt Ruth were brother and sister.

She looked like the lady from "Gone with the Wind."

She was just this beautiful woman.

Super bubbly. Larger than life.

Aunt Ruth had fiery red hair,

piercing blue eyes, and an awesome smile.

Aunt Ruth grew up in a beautiful town,

about 20 miles north of Chattanooga.

Got up this morning to drive down to Tennessee.

Boy I tell ya, these Black Mountains down here.

The scenery is just beautiful.

I've talked to my Uncle Ken and John and Jim

on the phone a couple of times,

but it's just not the same as when you see 'em live.

And they invited me down to Tennessee.

The Terry's wanted to put on a reunion.

- Ric-ard! - Hey!

- What's up, dude? - Hey, man.

- Alright, man. How you been? - Good. How you been?

Not too bad.

- How you doing, honey? - I'm good. How are you?

- I'm good. - Great to see ya.

Thank you so much. - You're welcome.

Everybody there had nothin' but kind words to say about my mom.

I wanted to know who she was, what she was like,

the type of person she was, all of those things.

But there were things that I needed to know, you know?

What happened?

My dad has told me stories.

My cousins told me about Ruth.

In a short period of time, I learned who my mom was.

She was a little country girl for 14 or 15 years of her life.

When my Aunt Ruth was probably

1 or 2 years old, her mother died.

My Aunt Ruth was taken in by my mother-in-law's family.

I think she was 13 years old, and she married Billy Ray Smith.

They got married really young.

And it just didn't work out.

Their house is still there.

So this is where Aunt Ruth lived

when she married Billy Ray Smith.

This is the last place that Ruth lived before she left, isn't it?

Uh, as far as I know.

Uncle Ken might be able to clarify that, but, yeah, likely.

He was 19, and she was 13.

So her life probably changed right then, huh?

Yeah. I knew Billy Ray well.

I worked with him on the railroad.

He was a nice guy.

It wasn't too much longer after that

when she split for Michigan.

Yeah.

Their marriage dissolved.

She wanted to get out of Whitwell,

and she wanted to make her own life and strike out on her own.

She wanted something better than just a coal mining town.

To the best of my knowledge, she lived in Michigan for about

two, two and a half years.

Got a job, got pregnant.

Ruth left right after I was born.

And I think that might have been the deciding factor of

why she left Michigan.

She decided to go to California.

From what I've heard from others,

she may have wanted to move to California and be an actress.

She was doing odd type jobs, you know,

house cleaning, that type of stuff.

She met this guy, you know, he was wealthy.

You know, he was an "antiquity dealer."

He appeared to be all the things that she was dreaming for.

I don't know how long the relationship was.

I just know that they met, you know,

and then shortly after that, they got married.

Nobody in the family knew anything about the guy, really.

In the spring of 1974, I was 8 years old,

and my Aunt Ruth came.

The overall mood that I remember,

it was just excitement.

Dad was excited his little sister was in town,

and she did introduce her new husband to my dad.

But I have no idea what happened to Aunt Ruth after that week.

A major break in the state's oldest unsolved murder.

A Jane Doe mystery stretching back to 1974.

After nearly a half-century of investigative efforts,

we have identified the Lady of the Dunes.

She is...

Ruth Marie Terry.

I just said, "There you are."

During my years investigating it,

I never once thought what it was gonna be like solving the case.

That case had been part of my life for 35 years.

Even after I retired.

I didn't realize how omnipresent she was in my life.

I'd go periodically.

Either just sit there by the grave or sit in my car.

I didn't realize that I wasn't the only one that did that.

This is gonna sound kind of crazy.

It was almost kind of like part of my identity

that I was associated with the Lady in the Dunes.

And now she had been identified.

Like there's a "before Ruth"

when we had the Lady of the Dunes

and then there's like an "after Ruth."

So for 48 years, my Aunt Ruth was the Lady of the Dunes.

Until they had identified her remains.

That's hard.

I never would have thought

that our family would have been part of a mystery like this.

The detective started speaking to me.

They said that they had identified her

and that she'd been murdered in Provincetown.

I have a hard time with this part.

Before the FBI contacted me,

I was having nightmares for a few weeks.

And the person in my nightmare was violently hitting someone.

And it just hurt. It hurt down in my stomach.

And uh, yeah.

That's gonna bother me till the day I die.

The moment we learned her name, Ruth Marie Terry,

we just started digging.

And now authorities are asking for the public's help.

The hunt for her killer.

We find out who the victim is.

And then it's like, "Okay, now who killed her?

Ruth had a great life in California.

Ruth and her new husband came back to Tennessee

in the early '70s.

This guy was big, burly, curly hair.

He seemed more like a beach bum to me.

Dad didn't approve of him.

Wasn't clean-shaven, that turned my dad off.

They called us and said she was in

with a new guy she had married.

He was an antique dealer.

They was traveling cross country looking for antiques.

He was sort of a heavy set guy with gray hair.

He looked kind of older, then?

Yeah, he was older, yeah.

But my wife, she just sort of read people, you know?

And she said he was bad news for her.

No, she didn't care for him, his demeanor or what, I don't know.

And after that, she left.

That was the last time we saw her.

Her husband's name was Guy Muldavin.

Ruth showed up with him. They met him briefly.

Then she vanishes.

I always wondered what happened.

My dad told her whenever she got to

where she was going to call, make sure she got there safe.

And apparently, he never got the call.

According to this marriage certificate,

six months before her body was discovered on the Cape,

she exchanged vows in Reno, Nevada.

Looking at the marriage records for Guy Muldavin

with Ruth Marie Terry, we saw she used an alias.

Teri Vizina.

When I found out that my mom was changing her name,

my first impression was that she was doing something wrong.

She was involved in something illegal.

Why would she do that? Is she on the run?

Is she hiding from somebody?

Did he set this up so he couldn't be found?

My dad, James, was her older brother.

Dad called Aunt Ruth's husband.

Guy said he'd come home from work

and all of her stuff was gone.

Guy told him that she had joined a cult.

Dad really didn't think that she would just run

off without letting him know where she is.

That wasn't like Aunt Ruth.

Dad went on his search.

From what this guy she had married had said,

she went back west.

My father hired a private detective

to go find her in California.

As far as I know,

my father never looked east at all for my aunt.

Dad never gave up looking for her.

We only know what Guy Muldavin had told dad.

No one knew who Guy Muldavin was.

I just began working my sources.

They are looking for information about a man

the victim married a few months before she was killed.

We found out he had a very dark past

that was hidden for decades.

Who was Guy Muldavin? Depends on who you ask.

The story of Manzanita Rockwell and Dolores Mearns

unfolded in a strange manner.

Just a charade of lies, mistruths.

His eyes got dark, and his look changed.

Then they stumbled upon what clearly was

a gruesome crime scene.

This guy's a fugitive from the law.

We need to find him now.

And that was about 14 or 15 years before he had met my mom.

It was this difficult to bring it to a resolution.

I had always said there would be retribution.