A Wrong Turn: Ends in Murder and Becomes 50-Year Mystery

Eleven days before Christmas in 1972, a beautiful young mother, accompanied by her four-month-old son, disappeared purportedly en route to pick up a second grader at his school just a 15-minutes away. She was found three days later, brutally murdered, yet the baby survived three nights of subfreezing weather in a vacant migrant labor camp. Who killed her and why remains a mystery a half century later. This is the story of one of North Carolina’s longest unsolved murders and certainly its most intriguing mystery. The FBI reports more than 250,000 murders in the U.S. have gone unsolved since it began keeping records in 1980. We spend nearly $500 billion a year on the American system of justice and public safety. And yet, this appalling high number of “cold cases” reflect a horrendous failure to hold accountable the most despicable offenders. Why we allow this to happen so often is another story begging to be told.