MASSACHUSETTS 1974 Cold Case Solved After 48 Years — Justice for Ruth Marie Terry

On July 26, 1974, a 9-year-old girl camping with her family in Provincetown, Massachusetts, was running away from domestic violence. She followed the dog deeper into the Race Point dunes. The dog barked. The girl followed. And she found the body of a woman lying on a blue beach towel, her head resting on neatly folded jeans, as if she had been sunbathing and then drifted off to sleep. But both hands had been cut off. Her head was nearly severed from her body. The left side of her skull had been smashed. The killer had pulled out her teeth, cut off her hands at the wrist and the elbow, then placed small piles of pine needles on the sand where her two hands had been. He did not want anyone to know who she was. And for 48 years, he succeeded. No one came to claim the body. No one reported her missing. She was buried in October 1974 at Saint Peter’s Cemetery with a marker that read: “Unidentified female body, found at Race Point dunes, July 26, 1974.” She became the Lady of the Dunes, the oldest unidentified murder victim in Massachusetts history. Police tried everything. Ground-penetrating radar, psychics, two exhumations, DNA comparisons with dozens of missing women. They floated dozens of theories, from Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger to serial killer Hadden Clark, even the possibility that she had appeared in the movie Jaws. None of the theories led anywhere.

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