Welcome to our latest episode of The Path Went Chili. And because we're recording
this right before Christmas, and Ashley is a very busy person around the holidays
with how those kids around in our household, Jules and I will be recording
this one alone. And because she doesn't know all that much about this case,
I'm going to share the details with her and she's going to provide the
reaction. So the case we're going to be covering is the murder of a
woman named Ruth Marie Terry, who up until last year, was known as
an unidentified decendent nicknamed the Lady of the Dunes. And Jules, you said
that you heard some basic details about this case, but don't know a lot
about it. Yeah. I think for me, this case just really stuck
because of the name. There's something like otherworldly about the name, the Lady
of the Dunes. It's like a movie title or something from a comic book,
and so it really stuck with me. It's sort of like the Orange
Socks. Yeah, you know, Jane do that one really stuck with me
because of the name. So I don't really know any details about this case.
This is when where I'm completely in the dark. I just remember the
name because it had this like eerie resonance that I couldn't shake. So I'm
really glad we're going to be talking about it today. Yeah. I always
say that whenever you find a deced in who cannot be identified, it's best
to give them a memorable name, because then people will remember it. Because
this took place all the way back in nineteen seventy four, but people never
stopped talking about it until the identification was made recently. And this is a
little different from the norm because because it is technically a solved case. But
at the time of this recording, I'm working on one of my Trail Went
Cold Update episodes, where I provide updates about cases featured on the Trail Went
Cold that have been solved or in major developments, and there was just so
much to write about with this particular case. I find in a lot of
these stories involving John or Jane does that for years, the Internet comes up
with all these wild theories about who they might have been and what their backstory
was, and more often than not, when they are identified, the explanation
is pretty mundane. But this is one of the rare examples where the real
story actually might be crazier than a lot of the theories that were shared about
her. So this case is solved and that she has her identity back,
or do we know who murdered her? They've done both. They identified her
last year and this year they finally announced that they're pretty sure they're certain who
killed her. Wow, because we see a lot of these Jane and John
Doe cases and it's almost like it's solved in that we've given them their identity
back, but at the end of the day, we still don't know who
murdered them. So this is a pretty unique case to be able to give
to be able to give Ruth Marie Terry her identity back, and also to
know who killed her. So I really can't wait to get into the details
exactly. And when I share the details, you'll probably be saying yourself,
I cannot believe this wasn't solved a long time ago. So fortunately some mistakes
were made. So this case takes place in nineteen seventy four in Barnstable County,
Massachusetts, in the Cape Cod area, and it took place on July
the twenty sixth, when a thirteen year old girl was walking her dog around
the Race Point Dunes, which is a beach located just outside of Provincetown,
and this poor girl wound up stumbling across the decomposing nude body of a woman
who was lying on top of a towel. The police were notified and they
estimated that the victim had been between twenty to forty years old and had been
dead approximately ten days to three weeks at that point, but because of the
decomposition, her face was unrecognizable, though she still had some long auburn reddish
blonde hair at the back of her head, which was used as one of
the big clues. Her head was resting on top of some clothing which likely
belonged to her, and one of these clothing was a blue bandana, and
there was no sign of any struggle, so the evidence showed that she was
probably in the middle of sunbathing before someone came up from behind her and attacked
her. They did find some footprints in the sand which likely belonged to her
killer, as well as some tire tracks, and because this was a pretty
remote area, that probably explains how she was not discovered for a couple weeks.
Well. What was crazy was the level of brutality with her murder because
she had been hit with a blunt instrument been killed with a blow to the
back of the head which crushed the left side of her skull. Her throat
had also been slashed so deeply that it nearly reached her spine and almost completely
severed her head from her body, and there were signs that she may have
been sexually assaulted post mortem with an object, though the actual object was never
found. And not only that, but her hands had been removed, probably
to help prevent identification from her fingerprints, and a number of her teeth were
also removed. They didn't remove all her teeth, but because a lot of
them were missing, they were unable to make a comparison with dental records,
which was frustrating because she looked like she had extensive dental work done with some
gold crowns to her teeth, but because they didn't have her full set of
teeth, it was impossible to make a comparison. Wow, that literally made
me feel sick to my stomach. The idea that somebody would come upon her,
whether they were following her or just by happenstance, and decided to victimize
her cave in her skull, slash her throat so deep that it almost reaches
her spine, and then to okay, well, now we need to do
some friends and countermeasures. We don't want her to be identified. And then
that makes me think, if you're worried about that and you're gonna go so
far as to remove teeth and hands, do you know her? Could you
be tied to her in some capacity? Because this is well before DNA,
So even if there was DNA left behind, if there was no link between
the killer and Ruth Marie Terry, then it makes you wonder, like,
why go to all this trouble when somebody could come upon you while you're taking
her hands off? And what did he use? Did you just have this
with you whatever it would be to remove the hands. Yeah, that's a
good question because we've technically never found out how this was done, like how
they removed the hands and how they removed the teeth. So it just seems
so precalculated that she just happens to be sunbathing in a remote area and whoever
this was just happened to have maybe a hacksaw or a pair of pliers inside
their car while they did this. So needless to say, investigators figure this
was not this person's first homicide. It sounded like this was someone with experience
at killing people and doing whatever they could to prevent identification. That just really
took me kind of for a ride because I was not expecting there to be
Like when you first describe the scene, okay, you were saying that she's
found on a towel, you almost picture this kind of idea of this serene
scene where this woman is found kind of sunbathing and she's just passed away on
a towel. But then when you go further and you describe it and just
the utter brutality of it all. And to think that this poor thirteen year
old girl is the one that happens upon the body, I cannot even imagine
the trauma that that inflicted upon her. Oh exactly, Like you're just out
there with your family, just taking your dog for a walk, and you
not only find a body, but someone who has been brutalized and killed in
the most gruesome fashion possible. And the way that the towel was spread out
made investigators think that it was possible that someone else had been lying next to
her before she was murdered. So just imagine her position. You're just out
there for a relaxing day of sunbathing before your partner just decides to attack you
by bludging you to death and then removes like a lot of your extremities.
Yeah, I can even imagine what that would have been like for all the
first responders and the people who are typically going to investigate a crime, because
in this area, I'm just going to take a wild guest and say,
there probably aren't a lot of murders, would I be correct? Yes,
definitely. They do some weird things I'm going to talk about during the investigation,
which seemed to indicate that they probably did not have a lot of experience
with homicides. Yeah, that was kind of my gut feel. Just when
you said the area and everything, I thought, well, this might not
be something that they run across all too often, So the experience of the
investigators would be called into question, and hence why she remained a Jane Doe
for so many years. Yes, uh, exactly. They did search a
whole bunch of missing persons cases but could not find any matches, so that's
why they gave her the nickname the Lady of the Dunes, which, like
you said, is a very haunting, memorable name and I think has allowed
this case to stand out over the past fifty years or so. So she
was just buried in a cemetery in Province Town under a headstone which simply read
unidentified female body. They didn't even put her nickname on the tombstone, just
like the most generic name there. And here we're going to talk about the
inexperience of the investigators because the police chief did a very bizarre thing. Instead
of burying the victim's skull, he decided to keep it on a desk inside
his office, saying that he was going to use it as a constant motivator
in order to kind of drive him to solve the case and identify her.
And I guess the bright side is that because her face was so heavily decomposed
and they didn't know what she looked like, a couple of year years later,
he finally decided, hey, I still have the skull. Maybe we'll
use this to make a clay bust of like her face to show what she
might have looked like. And then he turned the skull over to the forensic
artists and they did it. But I cannot imagine that a police chief would
get away with that today, taking the skull of a murder victim and keeping
it on his desk, Uh, sir, That is definitely not the right
choice. But I can understand it was a different time and his intentions were
good. Even though I believe a body should be at rest, I think
the feelings that underlied his decision to do that were good ones. He wanted
to solve the case. He wanted to give her her name back and find
out who murdered her. And it did provide some assistance, I guess in
doing those clay busts. Did you see the clay bust of her? I
did, yeah, and it's floated around for many, many years, and
it's always been my visual of what she looked like, so it was very
helpful. But believe it or not, I looked through some old newspaper articles
and the police chief actually photographed himself with the skull on his desk, and
it was printed in the local newspapers. And I can only imagine if this
happened in a cold case today, there would just be so much outrage over
the internet over his decision to do that. Yeah, it's a little bit
tone death. But it was, like I said, it was a different
time. I think our sensitivity towards crime victims and just our emotional intelligence with
regards to murders and those types of things, and like what a victim should
and would require in death is just completely different. So when we look at
it through the lens of now, it's like, what like fifty years later,
it's a long time we're looking to like half a century. So at
least we can say that it provided something good out of it. But yeah,
if it happened today, it would be extremely macabre and weird and people
would be like, what is wrong with this person? It just it would
not happen today. There's no way that you could get away with it in
the age of the internet exactly. And to be fair, the skull was
eventually buried with the rest of her remains, so she did finally get a
proper burial. Well that's good. At least she got to rest in totality
her entire body. So now we're going to talk about some leads that were
used to try to identify the woman. Of course, it turned out that
a lot of these turned out to be false, but many of these leads
are quite interesting. Of course, they went through a number of candidates of
missing women, and sometimes when they launched an investigation, it turned out that
the woman was still alive, so she obviously could not have been the Lady
of the Dunes. But a interesting candidate was a twenty five year old woman
named Rory Gene Kessinger who was actually part of this big criminal organization. I
think it was kind of a radical group and stuff where they would like commit
robberies and stuff in order to finance like a lot of their activities. And
she had a pretty tough life. She had run away from home at the
age of fifteen and became involved in drugs and bank robbery and lived under a
number of different ali and by nineteen seventy three she had become a member of
a gun running drug smuggling syndicate. And in nineteen seventy three she was actually
arrested in Pembroke, Massachusetts by federal agents. So and Kessinger when the police
buss did it and actually picked up a gun and fired at the police officer.
She didn't hit anyone, but it was just added to her charges.
So it seemed likely that she was going to go to prison for a long
time, but she was held in the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, which is
not too far away from Provincetown, and on May the twenty seventh, nineteen
seventy three, a corrupt guard managed to smuggle her a hack saw blade,
which she used to cut through the bars of her cell and escape out a
window by using some sheets to climb out, which is like an old school
thing you'd see in a cartoon, someone tying up some sheets to climb out
a window. Yeah, whenever I think of prison escapes, I always think
of, like, you know, like escape from Alcatraz or something like that,
and like the crazy length that they went to, and this is right
in line with something like that. And it's crazy to think that she was
so adept at being able to commit all of these crimes and move around and
then she goes to prison and manages to break out. I mean it's one
of those like Body and Clyde type stories where you're like, WHOA, that
is pretty incredible that somebody was able to do that and to have the wherewithal,
and the fact that she was a woman is just adds another layer of
interest to it. So I could see why Kessinger would have been a really
good kind of suspect, because if you're running with this criminal syndicator organization,
you're running drugs, guns, whatever, you know. I think that there
could be a motivation to not have your body be identified if they had the
reason to end your life, so to take teeth, to take hands,
that would totally make sense. And to know that she was in the area,
well that's just another check towards yeah, it could possibly be her.
And here's the big twist is that Rory Kessinger's fate is technically still a mystery.
She has not been seen since she escaped from the jail in nineteen seventy
three. There was always speculation that her criminal associates may have killed her and
disposed of her body because they didn't want her to talk and possibly reveal more
information about their organization. And it did make sense, like you said,
that if they didn't want her to be identified, they would cut off her
hands, because obviously, since she was arrested, Cassinger's fingerprints would have been
on file. But in the two thousands, they finally started doing DNA testing
on this case, an option that was not available back in nineteen seventy four,
and they finally tracked down Cassinger's mother got a sampler of her DNA and
it did not match the Lady of the Dunes DNA, so she was ruled
out as being the victim. But to this day, Rory gene Kessinger has
still not been found. And I do think the explanation that she was murdered
by her criminal associates is the most logic, because I can't imagine how a
twenty five year old woman who escaped from jail would manage to stay off the
radar for the next fifty years without being found. But it's still a very
intriguing mystery within a mystery. I mean, it is possible. It sounds
like she had quite a lot of special skills. I don't know I who
want to call them those, but I think that there's a possibility in the
seventies that she may have been able to acquire a new identity, go somewhere,
get married, have a normal life. I think it is equally as
likely, maybe even more likely, that her criminal organization could have killed her.
But I think given the time period, she could have just slipped by
unnoticed, got a driver's license, under this new identity. It was pretty
easy back then to fake identities, So I think we can't discount the possibility
that maybe she just she knew that if she ever came back to where she
was from or got in contact with her family, that she would be found
out. And maybe she had a new family and they didn't know that she
used to be a criminal, so going back to her old life just wasn't
an option. Yeah, that has happened where people who were involved in criminal
activity when they were young women and then managed to escape from jail did wind
up starting a family and living an ordinary life for several years before they were
captured. I don't know if you've heard of a woman named Margo Freshwater,
but she broke out of jail in the nineteen sixties after being arrested for a
murder, and I don't think she was found till like the late nineteen nineties,
early two thousands, and at that point she was living with a husband
and had children of her own and had just lived like she was like a
pta mom, practically just an ordinary looking woman. And then everyone was just
shocked when she was recaptured and it turned out that she had killed someone several
decades earlier. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me because I think back at that
time period, even if you were on the run from the law, if
you had the connections to be able to acquire a new identity, and of
course it was not nearly as difficult as it is now because you're not dealing
with things like you know, watermarks and all those types of things that are
in special holograms that are on identity like IDs. You could just basically find
somebody who was deceased and take their identity. I don't think it took the
special skills that it requiring connections to criminals that it requires today. I think
you just had to have a little bit of knowledge. So I think that
would be probably a good option for a lot of people rather than having law
enforcement be after you. You just change your identity, move somewhere new,
and all of a sudden you're that person, and essentially you're like in witness
protection, but you put yourself there, so you just know that you can't
reach out to your family or people from your old life exactly. So if
Roy gene Kessinger does get arrested sometime in the future, I won't be the
least a bit surprise if she's still alive living a normal life somewhere, But
now we're going to talk about her. Next lead a convicted murderer named hatt
And Clark who has been in prison since nineteen ninety two. He's only been
officially tied to two murderers, but there has been speculation that he's a serial
killer who could have killed at least eleven victims. And he popped up on
the radar in two thousand and four because he sent a letter to a prison
pen pal which showed a hand drawn map of the Cape Cod area, which
featured a home where his grandparents lived, which was not too far from where
the Lady of the Dunes was found, and he wrote on the letter,
the murder is still unsolved, but what the police are looking for is in
my grandmother's garden. And he also included a drawing of a new woman lying
on her stomach with her hands missing and the words summer nineteen seventy four,
which seems oddly specific. And since Clark he would have been in his twenties
at the time he was living in the area, he did look like a
promising suspect. But the problem was that he was a paranoid schizophrenic who had
a history of lying, and he also when he was questioned about this,
he said that, oh, yeah, I did murder her, but I'm
not going to reveal identity because the police were not nice to me and beat
me up during my interrogation, so I'm not going to reveal too many details.
And then people started thinking, maybe this guy is just doing this for
attention. How much of that information was revealed in the media, pretty much
all of it, Like, if you were living in the area, there's
a good chance you would have found out that this woman had been found in
Cape Cod in the summer of nineteen seventy four, and that she was found
with her hands missing. That was all public knowledge, so it's possible that
Clark could have just read about it and then just decided to take credit for
it. And there were a lot of mental health issues with them, like
he once claimed that he was responsible for eleven additional murders, but it turned
out that the reason he did is because he had a bearded cell mat and
he literally thought the guy was Jesus Christ. So that's why he decided to
come clean and reveal all this new information. But because he had grandparents who
were living in the Cape Cod area. They finally said, okay, let's
take him out there and perform a search of his because he said something about
evidence being buried in his grandfather's garden. But because Clark was kind of a
weird guy, he insisted that this bearded innate come along with him on the
search because he still believed he was Jesus and wanted him there when they found
all this evidence. And he also insisted on dressing up in women's clothing wearing
a dress while this was going on. And not surprisingly, during this search,
they didn't find anything at all in his grandfather's garden, and they've pretty
much realized that, yeah, Clark was just taking a credit for a crime
he did not commit, and ruled them out as having any infolvement in the
lady of the dude's case. I feel like the detail about the missing hands
maybe should have been holdback information, because if you say that you murdered somebody,
you know you're going to know specifically that you took the hands. But
when you put that in the paper and you release that on the news,
then it becomes part of the public knowledge and it's sort of like, how
do you then identify who is the actual killer if people come forward and start
trying to confess. But I guess at that point in time it was very
rare that they thought that somebody would confess if they didn't do it. I
mean, given the fact that he had a history of doing this and he
was a paranoid schizophrenic, maybe made them raise a couple of eyebrows. But
I think at that time in the seventies, if you confess to something,
you did it exactly. And like we talked about, the Province down Police
department didn't have a lot of experience with homicide investigations, so back in nineteen
seventy four, they may not have been thinking about stuff like pullback information,
like let's keep the detail about her hands being cut off away from the public
in order to weed out false tips. And of course Clark he was not
arrested until the early nineteen nineties, and the crime took place in nineteen seventy
four, so he would have had ample opportunity to read about this crime in
the newspapers and then remember it when he made a false confession years after the
fact. Do you know if they were ported the detail about the teeth in
the paper, I think, so, yeah, it sounded like they were
just looking for any leads they can find. They probably thought, well,
that's because she also had like an expensive gold crown dental work, so I
can understand why they would want to release that because that's very distinctive. It
sounded like she came from wealth or money, so they were thinking, maybe
someone will read about her dental work and say, oh, I remember giving
a procedure that to a woman matching her description back in the nineteen seventies.
But it didn't really lead to any new tips. So here is a very
interesting new lead which occurred in twenty fifteen. You might be familiar with Joe
Hill. He's the son of the legendary Stephen King, and he's also a
horror novelist. And in twenty fifteen he started getting an interest in cold cases
and he read a book about amateur sluice and how they can help solve crimes.
And he also read about the Lady of the Dunes case because he is
from the New England area, so he took a particularly interest in it.
And then during the summer of twenty fifteen he went to a fortieth anniversary screening
of the all time classic movie Jaws, and about fifty four minutes into it,
they got to a crowd scene which showed this young woman with dark flowing
hair, and he blew bandana, and he became convinced this might be the
Lady of the Dunes because she bore resemblance to the composite sketch of her.
And it turned out that Jaws was filmed in Martha's vineyard during the summer of
nineteen seventy four, the approximate time of the murderer, and I think it
was only about one hundred miles away from Provincetown. So he went back and
watched the movie again on DVD, kept pausing it and looking at her,
and I think it was one of those things where if he had been watching
it on home video the first time around, he never would have noticed her.
But because he was watching it on the big screen for an anniversary showing,
he saw this woman and it just popped into his head, thinking that
might be the Lady of the Dunes. So they looked into it. He
passed on information to investigator, but of course it really wasn't much to work
with because after all this time they're not going to be keeping records of every
single person who was an extra in a crowd scene in a movie that came
out forty years ago. And of course, like she looks like any other
woman from the nineteen seventies, wearing like long hair and a bandana, so
there was nothing really distinct to really show that she would have been the lady
of the Dunes. But on the bright side, even though like investigators thought
it was a major long shot, it helped bring the case back into the
spotlight. And to this day, this is the detail that many people remember
about this case, that there was a murder victim who could potentially been an
extra in Jaws, one of the most famous films of all time. Wow,
that's such an interesting detail. And I can't even imagine being Joe Hell
and watching this, being so familiar with what the bus looks like, and
then seeing this extra, which I imagine would have had that reddish blonde hair,
like you'd said, right, because there was didn't she have like reddish
blonde hair, And that was part of what they used to try to identif
fire her. Yes, though if you look at on screen it looks more
like darker hair. But because she's from a distance away, it could have
been reddish blonde. But I've seen Jaws a bazillion times, so of course,
before I learned about this development, I had never noticed her in the
crowd scene before. But I guess it must have been on Joe Hill's brain
because he's just watching the movie and he's like, Oh my god, I
think that's her. That is so crazy. Have you watched Jaws since you
found out? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely, Like I've seen
that film so many times, and I looked, I paused the frame and
I look at her, and it's like, yeah, she does kind of
look like her, but it's just such a generic look, like she looks
like a million other young women from the nineteen seventies. So there's nothing you
can really point to and say that absolutely had to have been the Lady of
the Dunes. I think it was just kind of confirmation bias on Hill's part,
where he wanted to solve this case so badly that he was really really
hoping it was her. But in retrospect, it turns out that this was
nothing more than a red herring. Well, it didn't end up doing a
disservice to the case, though, because like you said, it brought it
into the forefront again and people can go, WHOA, there's this association with
Jaws. We've got Stephen King's son, and we've got this really eerie name,
the Lady of the Dunes. So I can see how that would peque
everybody's interest. Oh exactly, Like a lot of people who had never heard
of the case before finally did learn about it in twenty fifteen because of the
whole Jaws Joe Hill connection. So I can't really blame him for bringing public
even though it turned out to be a false lead, because it gave a
lot of extra exposure to the case. So I covered this on the trail
went cold in twenty sixteen, and at that time she had still not been
identified, And at the time I thought one of the most intriguing leads to
explain her murder was the notorious gangster James Whitey Bulger. And I'm sure you've
heard of him, right, Oh, yeah, for sure. Isn't he
the one that was like working with the FBI for so many years where they
like left him out there to keep committing his crimes and he was just like
a rat on other people. Exactly, Yeah, he was a major organized
crime boss who headed the Winter Hill Gang in Boston from like the late nineteen
seventies until the mid nineteen nineties. And if you've seen the Martin Scorsese film
That Departedge, you'll know that the Jack Nicholson character the mob Boss is totally
based on Whitey Bulger. And in twenty fifteen they flat out made a movie
based on Balger's life called Black Mass where he was portrayed by Johnny Depp.
And of course, for many years he was one of the FBI's most wanted
fugitives. He went on the run in nineteen ninety four, and even though
he was one of the more recognizable criminals in the United States, he actually
managed to stay off the radar for seventeen years until twenty eleven, where at
the age of eighty one, he was finally tracked down and arrested in Santa
Monica, California. I've seen both those movies. He's an incredibly interesting figure
and was brutal, and it's just it's incredible that he was giving information about
other people an other organizations. But it's like he's the head of the snake.
He's the very worst of the worst, and you guys are in league
with him. Some of these choices are really interesting that law enforcement makes with
regards to who they choose to get into bed with, because he really and
truly was a horrifically scary guy and he did really, really horrible things.
It's not just like he's dealing in guns and drugs and whatever. Like.
There's a lot of murders attached to Whitey Bulger, oh exactly. And one
of the reasons he's been associated with this case is because he was known for
cutting off the hands of his victims to avoid fingerprint identification, and also removing
their teeth to avoid them being identified by their dental records. So since he
was from Massachusetts in the nineteen seventies, I can see why he became a
compelling suspect in this case. But as an aside, I've always found it
amusing that the movie The Departed came out in two thousand and six when Bulger
was still on the run as a wanted fugitive, and apparently there was like
a former Massachusetts police officer who went to a screening of the movie and was
convinced that he saw Whitey Bulger in the audience, but he was never able
to get him tracked down and arrested. But I've always wondered how Bolger thought
watching like Jack Nicholson on screen portraying a character who's loosely based on him,
And I wonder if he was flattered by the betrayal. I can imagine that
maybe in the looks department you might not be all that flattered, but I'm
thinking every other department you're like, Wow, this guy has charisma. Because
Jack Nicholson is undeniably charismatic, and when he's on screen, you want to
watch him not because he's beautiful, but because he's magnetic. And so I'm
sure that Whitey Bulger would have been one of the first butts in the seats
to be able to see who is going to be playing me? What is
this film all about? When you find out that it's Score, Sce and
Nicholson, and then you've also got DiCaprio and Damon attached to it, so
you've got all of these huge names. It was a huge blockbuster film.
So for him, I'm sure he got some kind of smug satisfaction in knowing
that this film is bringing in millions and millions and hundreds of millions of dollars
and he's still on the run. Oh definitely, yeah, I'm sure he
probably had some satisfaction thing I'll never be caught, even though a movie based
on me is being released. And of course, the reason he was allowed
to remain free is because he had made a deal with an FBI agent named
John Connolly who would just provided information about his rivals and in return, Connolly
would ensure that he was never arrested for his own criminal activities and then to
depart. In Matt Damon plays a undercover officer who works for Jack Nicholson's character
who infiltrates the police and feeds some information and this character was loosely based on
John Connolly and the final apologue dwhyite Bulger is that after he went to prison,
he was actually murdered. In twenty eighteen, at the age of eighty
nine, he was transferred to a new prison and shortly after he arrived he
was ambushed and and brutally beaten, which just shows that even if you're eighty
nine years old, if you've done a lot of horrible things and made a
lot of enemies, then people are not going to forget that, and they're
not going to let your age prevent you from being the victim of a horrible
death. So quite a fitting ending to his life. Oh that's rough.
At eighty nine years old, you'd think, oh my gosh, well this
guy's going to die soon, so let's not, you know, inflict any
violence. It seems like a waste. But you've got some people that you've
clearly really pissed off and that are holding major grudges because to kill an eighty
nine year old man in such a violent way so many years after the fact,
says you inflicted a lot of harm on a lot of people. Oh
yes, and he was in a wheelchair at the time when they attacked him.
So karma, God, karma did get this guy back at the end,
because he did some horrible things. And I think that's just the only
appropriate ending to his life considering the circumstances. So here's the reason that Bulger
was looked at as a suspect in the Lay of the Dunes case. I'm
kind of skeptical about this story. But there's this woman named Sandra Lee who
claimed that she found the victim's body before it was discovered by the thirteen year
old girl. She said she had been camping with her family outside of Provincetown
and took her dog for a walk and then she stumbled across the decomposing body
of this nude woman. But at the time, she was just so terrified
that she never bothered to report this discovery and only came out about it many
years after the fact, And that was probably because she grew Sandra grew up
to become a mystery writer and published a fictionalized book based on the case,
which was titled Shantytown Provincetown's Lady in the Dunes. But she was the one
who was certain that Whitey Bulger might have been the victim's killer, because apparently
Sandra's stepfather said that, even though Whitey Bulger was from Boston, that when
her stepfather went to Provincetown, he would often like to drink at a bar
called the Crown an Anchor, And the stepfather said that apparently Whitey Bulger was
there a lot. But the interesting anecdote is that the Crown and Anchor was
a gay bar, and there's been a lot of rumors going around that Whitey
Bulger was bisexual. I don't know if they were ever conclusively confirmed, but
Also, another detail which Sandras spread, which I'm not entirely sure is true,
is that the towel that the Lady of the Dunes was found on may
have belonged to the Crown and Anchor Bar. It might have had its name
on it. So this led to the speculation that there were apparently rumors that
Whitey Balger had been seen with a woman matching the Lady of the Dune's description
sometime in nineteen seventy four, So they wondered it could have been a thing
where maybe he was hanging out at this gay bar and he wanted to keep
this a secret because he's the most powerful mob boss in Boston and he doesn't
want anyone to find out that he takes these secret trips to Provincetown in order
to hook up with men. And her theory, Sandra's theory is that maybe
if this woman found out about it, why decided he had to keep her
quiet, so he lured her to this beach and then decided to kill her
and also went to the trouble of removing her hands and removing her teeth so
she would not be identified. And even though this whole gay bar theory does
seem a bit far fetched. The sheer brutality of the crime does sound like
something that Whitey Bulger would have done, so I can understand why he was
considered to be a possible suspect. Yeah, that's just another interesting layer to
Whitey Bulger for sure, whether or not it's true, I could see why
she would think that that is a viable connection, especially if the towel did
have the crown and anchor embroidered on it or you know, screen printed on
it. That would be an interesting thing when you're going, okay, well,
not only is there a connection with Whitey Bulger to Provincetown, but we
also have a connection to this very specific bar. And then we have a
very similar em o to what we know to other murders that he's committed with
the removed of the teeth in the hands. And then the woman is lying
on a towel which has the bar emblazoned on it so or embroidered on it,
and I can see why she would be convinced that this is a really
good suspect because at the time, we didn't have the Internet at the time,
in the seventies. I mean, I don't know how much law enforcement
talk to each other. So the knowledge that there would be other people out
there removing hands and teeth, I just don't think there would be a lot
of public knowledge of that. You might read about somebody like Whitey Bulger in
the paper, and you might know about that specifically, but you're just not
going to know that there's other killers that have done this, or even think
that it would be something that anybody would do for any other reason than maybe
they were in the mob and they didn't want that person to be identified.
So it was just an interesting time back then. I can imagine exactly.
Yeah, I mean, there really wasn't any conclusive evidence to tie Bulger,
but the detail about the crown and anchor thing on the towel, I never
saw that at any public source. It was only revealed by Sandra Leie.
And I'm still not one hundred percent certain if that detail is true or if
she might have exaggerated things. But there was also rumors that like Whitey Bulger
was like trafficking sex workers at that point, and they figured maybe the lady
of the dunes is from another country, she was trafficked in from Europe or
something, and if she didn't have any family or friends in the United States
that could have played a role in the reason why she was never identified.
Well, that would make total sense too, if it's somebody that you're not
looking for, somebody that hasn't been reported missing. I'm sure her family wants
to know where she is, but she comes to these shores and she's murdered,
and nobody knows to even look for her. So she's not even on
the radar of law enforcement or anybody else because she hasn't made any connections.
It just highlights how easy it would be for criminal figures to get rid of
women that they deemed to be aquote unquote problem who were under their employ with
regards to sex work, because nobody's going to be reporting the missing exactly.
Yeah. So that's why I figured, is it turns out that was completely
wrong, That would turn out that the lady of the dunes was just a
regular person with a family who did miss her, that she was not a
sex worker who didn't have any close family and friends in the area. But
I can understand why people believe that at the time. So when I covered
this on the Trail Went Colled back in twenty sixteen, I did think that
the white Balger theory was the most logical, and he was still alive that
at that point he was in prison, but he hadn't admitted to any more
murders. So I was thinking to myself, even if he did this,
he may never come out and admit it, even though he was going to
remain in prison for the rest of his life. And of course, in
twenty sixteen, we had not started, not yet started using genetic genealogy as
a tool for identifying John and Jane does. I think that was only after
twenty eighteen, after the identification of the Golden State Killer, that they started
using genetic genealogy in a whole bunch of cold cases, and that has led
to the identification of a lot of decendents these past several years, Like it
seems to be like a weekly occurrence now where they announced that a John or
Jane Doe had been identified. So I started thinking to myself, when are
they going to identify the Lady of the Dunes. It almost seems like it's
inevitable. And little did I know that they were secretly working on this case
behind the scenes. And what was crazy is that was last Halloween October thirty
first, twenty twenty two, which I think is one of the biggest days
in the history of true crime because there were just so many developments within the
case of a few hours. I know, in the morning, they held
a press conference that Richard Allen had been charged with the Adelphi murders, which
was a pretty big deal. Later that day they announced that our old friend
Steve Panke had been found guilty of the murder of Janelle Matthews because the jury
had reached a verdict during the early morning hours. So I'm thinking to myself,
Wow, this is quite a day. And then later that afternoon they
announced that the lady of the Dunes had positively been identified as Ruth Marie Terry,
which completely took me by surprise because I had no idea they were even
working on the case. But I'm thinking to myself, wow, this is
three high profile cases that have been solved in one day. It was pretty
incredible. That is a lot of true crime news in one day. And
I do remember that day because it was a lot of excitement on Twitter,
right, like people were so jazzed up to be able to I mean,
Delphi is right up there with one of the cases that I think most people
who love true crime. I mean, you know, are very interested in
true crime. Love true crime might not be the right phrase, but they
would like to have seen Delfi solved because you have, you know, two
young girls, and anytime that there's children involved, I think that it hits
home and it's particularly painful for a lot of people to listen to. So
to know that there is an actual suspect arrested in Delphi, I know that
caused a lot of excitement. And then on the Janelle Matthew's case was Steve
Panky, and then with the lady of the Dunes being identified, it's just
it's a hugely exciting day it was, and I distinctly remember it was a
Monday and I was working my day job from home, but needless to say,
I did not get much work done. I was constantly on social media
and read it following all these developments. So she had finally been identified as
Ruth Marie Terry, and not surprisingly, it was done through genetic genealogy by
the organization AUTHROM Incorporated, who have identified a lot of John and Jane does
these past couple years. They built a DNA profile from the victim's skelter remains,
turn it over to the FBI, who entered the profile into a genealogical
database, and within a few months the DNA wound up matching biological relatives of
the victim and paved the way for the Lady of the Dunes identification. It
would turn out that Ruth Marie Terry had originally been born in the small mining
town of Whitwell, ten and this was a like a mountain town, like
a very like she was from like a country family. She was literally born
inside a mountain side shack and a very large family with a lot of siblings,
and it sounded like she had it quite a tumultuous childhood because her mother
died I think within a few months after Ruth was born, and her mother
I think was only twenty three at that time, so she was pretty young.
And Ruth got married when she was only thirteen years old. Oh my
god, yeah, which is pretty young. She subsequently got divorced from her
husband and remarried him, and got divorced from him a second time before she
reached the age of nineteen. And it was after that when she left Tennessee.
I think she realized, I need to have some more normalcy in my
life, because I think she didn't want to be held down in this constructive,
constrictive town where she gets married at such a young age. She wanted
to see the world, so she subsequently moved to Michigan. Okay, so
one thing doesn't really line up for me. The family life and the background
and the type of husband that I'm sure that she married aren't in alignment with
all of this expensive dental work. That is true. Like I still haven't
been able to find out where she got this dental work. I'm presuming it
happened later in her life after she left Tennessee, because we're going to talk
about she would get remarried several years later, so I guess possibly when she
maybe met her husband later on, he had enough money to give her the
dental work. But I can understand why they wouldn't think it was Ruth because,
for all we know, her family probably never knew that she had ever
gotten dental work later in her life, So if they had heard about the
lady of the Dune's case, they're probably not thinking to herselves that this woman
with special dental work who was found in Massachusetts might be Ruth. Definitely not,
because given the dental work. I thought, Okay, this is somebody
who's been cared for and taken care of, and so I would think that
she would come from a family that was had some love of affluents to be
able to afford all of these you know, gold fillings and whatnot. And
then to find out that she grew up and I guess like relative poverty and
like a mountain town with all of these different siblings, with this tumultuous situation
and her mother dying when she was very young. It's really sad and not
at all the background that I had expected that she would have exactly Like,
it's just kind of crazy that she would be married and divorced at the same
man twice during your teen years from the ages of thirteen to nineteen. So
I think this would be a good place to end Part one. So join
us next week for part two of our coverage about the murder of Ruth Marie
Terry Robin, do you want to tell us a little bit about the Trail
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