Dec. 10, 2025
368: Return to the Lady of the Dunes
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A 50 year old Massachusetts murder mystery is finally solved.
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WEBVTT
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[SPEAKER_00]: A Jane Doe revealed.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Leib.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And this is Ghost Town.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On the summer of 1974 during Cape Cod's peak season, 12-year-old Leslie Metcalf was walking with her family in race-point dunes, just two miles east of Providence Town, Massachusetts.
00:32.166 --> 00:39.100
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the middle schooler made a grizzly discovery in the sands, one that would take nearly 50 years to solve.
00:39.080 --> 00:52.435
[SPEAKER_00]: After almost half a century, and countless hours of investigation, the case became the oldest unidentified dead person in Massachusetts, which was eventually, and bizarrely, and thankfully, solved.
00:53.256 --> 01:03.248
[SPEAKER_00]: We covered it as a mini-back on October 9, 2020 when it was still unsolved, and the niche and remote theory about it being our point of reference.
01:03.228 --> 01:04.731
[SPEAKER_00]: But I have news for you.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 2023, the case was actually solved and finally closed.
01:10.943 --> 01:14.429
[SPEAKER_00]: So, today on Ghost Town, we tackle the case in its entirety.
01:14.870 --> 01:18.537
[SPEAKER_00]: I case that came to be known as the Lady of the Dunes.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On July 26, 1974, the Metcalf family was visiting province town, the lively beach town on the northern tip of Cape Cod.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Leslie Metcalf then 12 and her parents and their friends had been hiking back to the province lands visitor center.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Leslie's younger sister Alyssa stayed behind.
01:37.656 --> 01:42.482
[SPEAKER_00]: A couple of the Metcalf friends' dogs were also on the hike, following the group from behind.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, one of them caught a scent.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, the dog kind of started barking at something as they were hiking across, so my sister went to follow and see what the dog was barking at, a listen-met-cafrac counted.
01:53.787 --> 01:55.931
[SPEAKER_00]: That's when she found the body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Alyssa speaks for her sister Leslie, who died in 1996.
02:00.822 --> 02:08.634
[SPEAKER_00]: Alyssa set her sister at first perceived what appeared to be a dead deer through the dense scrub pines and that the form had no hands.
02:09.595 --> 02:17.127
[SPEAKER_00]: After showing the body to her parents, the group quickly went back to the park-ranger station and the rangers went out to take a closer look.
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[SPEAKER_00]: what they saw was shocking in its brutality and mystery.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A woman's head nearly severed from her body, the head itself resting on a pair of neatly folded wrangler jeans and a blue bandana.
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[SPEAKER_00]: There were no murder weapons at the crime scene and the body had been there at least a week, lying on one half of a beach towel, quote, as if authorities would later say, she'd been sharing it with a companion.
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[SPEAKER_00]: quote, it's kind of always stayed with the family, Alyssa Metcalf said, there's this, I don't know, do you call it a kinship with the case?
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[SPEAKER_00]: But the Metcalf's aren't alone.
02:51.665 --> 02:57.019
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the public would also form a connection with the case over the decades it remained unsolved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The identity of who the media would call, the Lady of the Dunes, would fester in Provincetown, haunting the area community and law enforcement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, it was a horrific brutal crime Provincetown police chief Jeff Geran told the Cape Cod Times, picking up the mantle of a string of detectives who had tried to solve the case.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A press release from the FBI would later read, quote, For nearly five decades, investigators have worked tirelessly to identify this victim through various means, including neighborhood canvases, reviews of thousands of missing person cases, clay model, facial reconstruction, and age regression drawings.
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[SPEAKER_00]: but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the summer of 1974, police had little to go on, though they did discover from the scene that the victim had Auburn colored hair tied in a ponytail, pink painted toenails, and was believed to be between the ages of 25 and 45.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though her cause of death was blows to her head, there was no sign of a struggle.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Police theorized she either knew her killer or had been asleep when she died, and that she'd been sexually assaulted after her murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like Leslie Metcalf had witnessed, the victims' hands were missing, as was her form, the the teeth that remained showed signs of expensive dental work, cavities, implants, and care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Police first turned to the thousands of area missing persons cases, and a list of vehicles that had been driven through the area, but no connections or matches were found.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At the scene, the patterns around the sand and beach blanket were not disturbed, suggesting that the body was possibly moved to the spot where it was found.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Despite extensive search of the area, no other pieces of evidence or clues were uncovered.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One of the more promising leads at the time was that the victim could have been a missing woman named Rory Jean Cessinger.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The 25-year-old bore a slight resemblance to the victim, or at least what they thought the victim might look like.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Plus, Cessinger led a high-risk life, allegedly as a gunrunner and drug smuggler, arrested on assault charges after allegedly shooting an officer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Less than two months before the discovery of the lady of the dunes, Kessinger escaped the Plymouth County jail, and her whereabouts were and remain unknown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Still, there was nothing more concrete time Kessinger to the victim.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As for the perpetrator, authorities looked into whether the unidentified victim fell prey to Massachusetts babysitter turned serial killer Tony Costa.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That's a story for another day, I promise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: However, the timelines don't add up, cost a died in May before the murder occurred.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Convicted killer had in Clark also eventually confessed to the murder, but his confessions were widely believed to be delusions rooted in paranoid schizophrenia.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Removal of the victim's hands also led to speculation that the homicide was connected to the mob, more specifically, infamous Boston gangster James Weidey Bulger.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After the months went by and summer turned to fall, the case slowed, but didn't entirely grow cold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In October of 1974, the body of the lady in the dunes was given a proper funeral.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sadly, her stone marker in Provincetown's St. Peter's Cemetery, named her only as, unidentified female body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Other avenues were pursued in the years to come.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1979, the first facial reconstruction of the Lady of the Dunes was created with clay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1980, the Lady of the Dunes remains were exhumed to know a veil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No new clues were uncovered from this effort, though her skull was kept just in case an advancement in forensic technology might be made.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, that's exactly what happened, nearly 40 years later, when the real story of the lady of the dunes, along with the mysterious theory involving the movie Jaws, would be brought to light.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The reality of the case, however, you served any conspiracy, and became a story more surprising and sinister than anyone ever thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: more after this break.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The case of the Lady of the Dunes went cold for 30 years.
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[SPEAKER_00]: At this point the victim's body was exhumed again in light of advancements in DNA testing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This effort didn't yield any results aside from proving that via DNA comparison that the Lady of the Dunes was not in fact Roy Kessinger.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In May of 2010, another technological tool was used in hopes of cracking the case by the National Center for Missing and Exploded Children, the computed tomography scan or CT scan.
07:31.524 --> 07:37.651
[SPEAKER_00]: The scan was used to see its inner topography more clearly, and hopes for more accurate, cranial reconstruction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That also yielded no new leads or information.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 2018, horror writer Joe Hill, the son of famed author Stephen King, brought up his theory that the Lady of the Dunes was an extra in the 1975 film Jaws.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Hill theorized that before the Lady of the Dunes was killed, she may have been an extra in the film, shot about a hundred miles from where her body was found.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the film itself, Hill pointed to a moment 54 minutes and two seconds in, when a crowd gathers for the Fourth of July on the beach.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A fit, young-looking woman with brunette hair wearing a blue bandana, who bore a quote, who bore a startling resemblance to a composite sketch of the lady herself, people reported.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'll also speculate about the timing of the murder and the filming of Jaws in a now-deleted blog post.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's said, quote, it is impossible to say with complete precision whether they film the July 4th crowd-erived sequence, which is where the shot appears he wrote.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we know it was almost certainly shot in June, because they filmed all of the island scenes that they could very early.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The water was too cold for swimming, and the malfunctioning shark wasn't ready for the at sea material until late July.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it's an interesting theory, but not one that anyone can completely prove.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A young woman in a bandana.
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[SPEAKER_00]: with Auburn hair, it could be many, many people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So of course the case went cold again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Then on October 31st, 2022, a huge development was made.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, by way of investigators, interested in solving this decades-old case.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Again, by way of a technology,
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[SPEAKER_00]: A forensic genealogy lab called authorim labs took interest in the case, and an identified Jane Doe as a missing Tennessee 37-year-old nearly 50 years after her murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On October 31, 2022, the FBI field office in Boston publicly announced the victim's name, Ruth Marie Terry, an identifying Terry would very quickly lead to solving the lady of the
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin with the identification of the victim.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though Terry died at 37, the information that would lead to solving her murder would begin when she was just 21.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1958, Terry, barely an adult at 21 years old, had lived all over the country, and was working at an assembly plant in Livonia, Michigan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After getting pregnant and having a son, she essentially adopted out her baby to a couple who also worked at the plant.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Terry's son, Richard Hanschett, grew up in Michigan, but always wanted to know who his biological mother was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, as one does, he took a DNA test via ancestry.com.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The test led him to biological family members in Tennessee, where he learned that his mother, Ruth Terry, had completely vanished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, we just never heard from her again, Terry's nephew Jim Terry told The New York Times, I was a kid.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just remember a big smile and her Auburn hair.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Handship learned from meeting Terry's relatives that in the 1970s, Terry planned to return to California or go north, that she was a sweet and adventurous soul.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Terry family had searched for Terry for decades according to The New York Times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone that I talked to who knew her a daughter, handshit said, I wish I could have just talked to her, touched her once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Via Ancestry.com data, authoram labs linked the lady of the Dunes DNA to handshits, and by way of handshit, Terry's extended family, giving them the identity of the victim.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This would open up the search for Terry's killer exponentially, the investigation now renewed, obtained court records, and within days of the lady of the Dunes identity being revealed, investigators immediately found their prime suspect, a man named Guy Rockwell Moldavin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As police dug into Moldavin's identity, they learned the man lived many lives, all of which were tinge with violence and ill-reputed to say the least.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Born on October 26, 1923, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in his early years while David lived in New York and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Once described as a quote, Bunko artist and great lover, according to SF Gate.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The New York Daily News cited Maldavin as having a heavy presence in New York City's Greenwich Village, with quote, "...beatenics, art lovers, celebrities, and celebrity hunters."
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[SPEAKER_00]: Maldavin enlisted in the military, where he was disqualified from active service to to a mastoid infection.
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[SPEAKER_00]: On May 11, 1946, while working as a professor, he married, divorced, worked as a
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[SPEAKER_00]: While David's second wife was a woman named Manzanita Eileen Ryan, Ryan had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage named Dolores and Mirrors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shocking investigators looking into Moldaven.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both Ryan and Mirrors disappeared in Seattle on April 1, 1960, with Moldaven becoming the prime suspect.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After getting a rhinoplasty, Moldaven fled Seattle but was arrested by the FBI and charged with unlawful flight to avoid giving testimony into his deceased wife and stepdaughter's deaths.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, Moldaven went on to marry another woman, swindling her family out of $10,000 around the time his second wife went missing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1961, he was convicted of those charges and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A judge suspended the sentence in March 1962, provided that Maldavin repay the money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Investigators have always circled Maldavin in the case of Ryan and Mirrens, but could never pin it on him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They even found dismembered human body parts in Maldavin's septic tank, but were unable to prove they were from either of the missing women.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to iconic true crime writer and rule, who devoted some writing and research to Moldaven, he was never charged in the connection of the double murder, as the King County Prosecutor was reluctant to do so without any bodies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before moving to California in the 70s, Moldaven was also the prime suspect in the murder of Henry Lawrence Bayard, a 28-year-old bread truck driver, and the disappearance of Barbara Joe Kelly, a 17-year-old waitress in Los Angeles.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Moldaven was the executive vice president of a silver store on Rodeo Drive at the time, and after his retirement he worked at a tobacco shop and became a volunteer radio host
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was around this time that he met Terry, who was also living in California, and according to public records the two married and renal in February 1974, just five months before Terry's death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Crazyly enough, rule also mentions in her writing that Maldavin married a woman named Terry in February of 1974 in Reno, Nevada.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Not only that, Massachusetts State Police learned that Terry and Maldavin traveled during the summer of 1974 as a kind of honeymoon, and when Maldavin returned to California, he was alone, driving his wife's car.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Upon returning, he indicated to a friend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that his wife had mysteriously passed away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Additionally, Terry's brother reportedly questioned Maldavin about his sister, but Maldavin claimed he and Terry fought on their honeymoon, quote, and he had not heard from his wife again.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The annual writing, the traveling, the friend and family testimony, it's almost as if the decades-old answer to the lady of the Dunes case was hiding in plain sight.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And there's even more pointing Maldave into Terry's murder if you can believe it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After marrying and murdering Terry, Maldave and married again, somewhere between Terry's murder and his fourth marriage.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1976 Maldave and published a bizarre comic book called Cooking With Rump Oil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a recipe book, really.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's part comic, part avant-garde poetry book.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It talks about cooking people about violence, especially against women and self-destruction, masked in a darkly humorous tone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One page shows a woman being cooked, her long hair cascading down the page.
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[SPEAKER_00]: her eyes panicked, looking from above.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A quote from the text references the picture saying, quote, the tender look will become one of despair.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Julia Crowley, a retired FBI agent and pro-filer who worked on the Golden State Killer case says of the book, quote, writing this book sort of indicates to me that dismembering was an important aspect to him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little bit creepy and morbid when you go through the book and you see what's happening, what they're being boiled and full-aid and grinded up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think this was possibly his way of reliving what he had done.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In March 14th, 2002, according to his obituary, while David died of a lengthy illness in Salinas, California.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, when we recorded our original episode about this case, it was still cold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But with all of this information coming to light in 2022 and 2023, on August 28th, 2023, the perpetrator, avoiding the law for decades, allowed to continue his dangerous existence, was finally and officially named.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Guy Rockwell, Maldavin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though Maldavin had been long deceased, Terry's family is still grappling with the reality of the case's long cold status, and the justice that was never served.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, the fact that he touched my mother kills me, but the fact that he got away with it pisses me off more than anything, said Richard Hatchett.
17:23.716 --> 17:32.695
[SPEAKER_00]: Said Ruth Terry's grandnies, Brittany Novanglowski, quote, It was just earth shattering to know that somebody so loved and so beautiful and so bright.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was just taken like that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was just brutalized and left that way with no dignity.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, the technology and information used in solving the case of the lady of the dunes would bring new life to other cases, expanding and legitimizing the newly forming study of forensic genealogy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As of December 2023, nearly two years ago, from right now, when I'm recording this, the use of this technology has solved 651 criminal cases, found hundreds of unnamed victims,
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[SPEAKER_00]: and has renewed hope in many that justice will finally be served.
00:00.031 --> 00:01.498
[SPEAKER_00]: A Jane Doe revealed.
00:02.121 --> 00:02.865
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jason Horton.
00:03.166 --> 00:03.930
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Rebecca Leib.
00:04.352 --> 00:05.839
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is Ghost Town.
00:20.163 --> 00:31.185
[SPEAKER_00]: On the summer of 1974 during Cape Cod's peak season, 12-year-old Leslie Metcalf was walking with her family in race-point dunes, just two miles east of Providence Town, Massachusetts.
00:32.166 --> 00:39.100
[SPEAKER_00]: They are the middle schooler made a grizzly discovery in the sands, one that would take nearly 50 years to solve.
00:39.080 --> 00:52.435
[SPEAKER_00]: After almost half a century, and countless hours of investigation, the case became the oldest unidentified dead person in Massachusetts, which was eventually, and bizarrely, and thankfully, solved.
00:53.256 --> 01:03.248
[SPEAKER_00]: We covered it as a mini-back on October 9, 2020 when it was still unsolved, and the niche and remote theory about it being our point of reference.
01:03.228 --> 01:04.731
[SPEAKER_00]: But I have news for you.
01:04.771 --> 01:10.001
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2023, the case was actually solved and finally closed.
01:10.943 --> 01:14.429
[SPEAKER_00]: So, today on Ghost Town, we tackle the case in its entirety.
01:14.870 --> 01:18.537
[SPEAKER_00]: I case that came to be known as the Lady of the Dunes.
01:19.073 --> 01:27.143
[SPEAKER_00]: On July 26, 1974, the Metcalf family was visiting province town, the lively beach town on the northern tip of Cape Cod.
01:27.724 --> 01:33.771
[SPEAKER_00]: Leslie Metcalf then 12 and her parents and their friends had been hiking back to the province lands visitor center.
01:34.412 --> 01:36.755
[SPEAKER_00]: Leslie's younger sister Alyssa stayed behind.
01:37.656 --> 01:42.482
[SPEAKER_00]: A couple of the Metcalf friends' dogs were also on the hike, following the group from behind.
01:42.462 --> 01:44.747
[SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, one of them caught a scent.
01:45.348 --> 01:53.747
[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, the dog kind of started barking at something as they were hiking across, so my sister went to follow and see what the dog was barking at, a listen-met-cafrac counted.
01:53.787 --> 01:55.931
[SPEAKER_00]: That's when she found the body.
01:55.951 --> 02:00.842
[SPEAKER_00]: Alyssa speaks for her sister Leslie, who died in 1996.
02:00.822 --> 02:08.634
[SPEAKER_00]: Alyssa set her sister at first perceived what appeared to be a dead deer through the dense scrub pines and that the form had no hands.
02:09.595 --> 02:17.127
[SPEAKER_00]: After showing the body to her parents, the group quickly went back to the park-ranger station and the rangers went out to take a closer look.
02:17.107 --> 02:20.031
[SPEAKER_00]: what they saw was shocking in its brutality and mystery.
02:20.592 --> 02:28.263
[SPEAKER_00]: A woman's head nearly severed from her body, the head itself resting on a pair of neatly folded wrangler jeans and a blue bandana.
02:28.303 --> 02:40.380
[SPEAKER_00]: There were no murder weapons at the crime scene and the body had been there at least a week, lying on one half of a beach towel, quote, as if authorities would later say, she'd been sharing it with a companion.
02:41.137 --> 02:48.557
[SPEAKER_00]: quote, it's kind of always stayed with the family, Alyssa Metcalf said, there's this, I don't know, do you call it a kinship with the case?
02:49.619 --> 02:51.244
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Metcalf's aren't alone.
02:51.665 --> 02:57.019
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the public would also form a connection with the case over the decades it remained unsolved.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The identity of who the media would call, the Lady of the Dunes, would fester in Provincetown, haunting the area community and law enforcement.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, it was a horrific brutal crime Provincetown police chief Jeff Geran told the Cape Cod Times, picking up the mantle of a string of detectives who had tried to solve the case.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A press release from the FBI would later read, quote, For nearly five decades, investigators have worked tirelessly to identify this victim through various means, including neighborhood canvases, reviews of thousands of missing person cases, clay model, facial reconstruction, and age regression drawings.
03:37.111 --> 03:38.895
[SPEAKER_00]: but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Back in the summer of 1974, police had little to go on, though they did discover from the scene that the victim had Auburn colored hair tied in a ponytail, pink painted toenails, and was believed to be between the ages of 25 and 45.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though her cause of death was blows to her head, there was no sign of a struggle.
03:58.195 --> 04:04.967
[SPEAKER_00]: Police theorized she either knew her killer or had been asleep when she died, and that she'd been sexually assaulted after her murder.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Like Leslie Metcalf had witnessed, the victims' hands were missing, as was her form, the the teeth that remained showed signs of expensive dental work, cavities, implants, and care.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Police first turned to the thousands of area missing persons cases, and a list of vehicles that had been driven through the area, but no connections or matches were found.
04:26.525 --> 04:33.738
[SPEAKER_00]: At the scene, the patterns around the sand and beach blanket were not disturbed, suggesting that the body was possibly moved to the spot where it was found.
04:34.759 --> 04:40.429
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite extensive search of the area, no other pieces of evidence or clues were uncovered.
04:40.409 --> 04:46.038
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the more promising leads at the time was that the victim could have been a missing woman named Rory Jean Cessinger.
04:46.078 --> 04:52.509
[SPEAKER_00]: The 25-year-old bore a slight resemblance to the victim, or at least what they thought the victim might look like.
04:53.330 --> 05:02.485
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus, Cessinger led a high-risk life, allegedly as a gunrunner and drug smuggler, arrested on assault charges after allegedly shooting an officer.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Less than two months before the discovery of the lady of the dunes, Kessinger escaped the Plymouth County jail, and her whereabouts were and remain unknown.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Still, there was nothing more concrete time Kessinger to the victim.
05:16.260 --> 05:24.389
[SPEAKER_00]: As for the perpetrator, authorities looked into whether the unidentified victim fell prey to Massachusetts babysitter turned serial killer Tony Costa.
05:24.849 --> 05:27.392
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a story for another day, I promise.
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[SPEAKER_00]: However, the timelines don't add up, cost a died in May before the murder occurred.
05:32.959 --> 05:41.291
[SPEAKER_00]: Convicted killer had in Clark also eventually confessed to the murder, but his confessions were widely believed to be delusions rooted in paranoid schizophrenia.
05:42.172 --> 05:52.165
[SPEAKER_00]: Removal of the victim's hands also led to speculation that the homicide was connected to the mob, more specifically, infamous Boston gangster James Weidey Bulger.
05:52.145 --> 05:58.178
[SPEAKER_00]: After the months went by and summer turned to fall, the case slowed, but didn't entirely grow cold.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In October of 1974, the body of the lady in the dunes was given a proper funeral.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Sadly, her stone marker in Provincetown's St. Peter's Cemetery, named her only as, unidentified female body.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Other avenues were pursued in the years to come.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1979, the first facial reconstruction of the Lady of the Dunes was created with clay.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1980, the Lady of the Dunes remains were exhumed to know a veil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: No new clues were uncovered from this effort, though her skull was kept just in case an advancement in forensic technology might be made.
06:34.518 --> 06:46.616
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, that's exactly what happened, nearly 40 years later, when the real story of the lady of the dunes, along with the mysterious theory involving the movie Jaws, would be brought to light.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The reality of the case, however, you served any conspiracy, and became a story more surprising and sinister than anyone ever thought.
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[SPEAKER_00]: more after this break.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The case of the Lady of the Dunes went cold for 30 years.
07:04.400 --> 07:09.210
[SPEAKER_00]: At this point the victim's body was exhumed again in light of advancements in DNA testing.
07:09.951 --> 07:18.649
[SPEAKER_00]: This effort didn't yield any results aside from proving that via DNA comparison that the Lady of the Dunes was not in fact Roy Kessinger.
07:19.709 --> 07:30.883
[SPEAKER_00]: In May of 2010, another technological tool was used in hopes of cracking the case by the National Center for Missing and Exploded Children, the computed tomography scan or CT scan.
07:31.524 --> 07:37.651
[SPEAKER_00]: The scan was used to see its inner topography more clearly, and hopes for more accurate, cranial reconstruction.
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[SPEAKER_00]: That also yielded no new leads or information.
07:42.878 --> 07:53.749
[SPEAKER_00]: In 2018, horror writer Joe Hill, the son of famed author Stephen King, brought up his theory that the Lady of the Dunes was an extra in the 1975 film Jaws.
07:54.550 --> 08:01.858
[SPEAKER_00]: Hill theorized that before the Lady of the Dunes was killed, she may have been an extra in the film, shot about a hundred miles from where her body was found.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In the film itself, Hill pointed to a moment 54 minutes and two seconds in, when a crowd gathers for the Fourth of July on the beach.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A fit, young-looking woman with brunette hair wearing a blue bandana, who bore a quote, who bore a startling resemblance to a composite sketch of the lady herself, people reported.
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[SPEAKER_00]: He'll also speculate about the timing of the murder and the filming of Jaws in a now-deleted blog post.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's said, quote, it is impossible to say with complete precision whether they film the July 4th crowd-erived sequence, which is where the shot appears he wrote.
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[SPEAKER_00]: But we know it was almost certainly shot in June, because they filmed all of the island scenes that they could very early.
08:45.760 --> 08:52.470
[SPEAKER_00]: The water was too cold for swimming, and the malfunctioning shark wasn't ready for the at sea material until late July.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it's an interesting theory, but not one that anyone can completely prove.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A young woman in a bandana.
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[SPEAKER_00]: with Auburn hair, it could be many, many people.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So of course the case went cold again.
09:08.532 --> 09:14.019
[SPEAKER_00]: Then on October 31st, 2022, a huge development was made.
09:14.560 --> 09:18.785
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, by way of investigators, interested in solving this decades-old case.
09:19.826 --> 09:25.954
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, by way of a technology,
09:25.934 --> 09:36.924
[SPEAKER_00]: A forensic genealogy lab called authorim labs took interest in the case, and an identified Jane Doe as a missing Tennessee 37-year-old nearly 50 years after her murder.
09:37.705 --> 09:53.460
[SPEAKER_00]: On October 31, 2022, the FBI field office in Boston publicly announced the victim's name, Ruth Marie Terry, an identifying Terry would very quickly lead to solving the lady of the
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[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin with the identification of the victim.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though Terry died at 37, the information that would lead to solving her murder would begin when she was just 21.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1958, Terry, barely an adult at 21 years old, had lived all over the country, and was working at an assembly plant in Livonia, Michigan.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After getting pregnant and having a son, she essentially adopted out her baby to a couple who also worked at the plant.
10:19.236 --> 10:24.865
[SPEAKER_00]: Terry's son, Richard Hanschett, grew up in Michigan, but always wanted to know who his biological mother was.
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[SPEAKER_00]: So, as one does, he took a DNA test via ancestry.com.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The test led him to biological family members in Tennessee, where he learned that his mother, Ruth Terry, had completely vanished.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, we just never heard from her again, Terry's nephew Jim Terry told The New York Times, I was a kid.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I just remember a big smile and her Auburn hair.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Handship learned from meeting Terry's relatives that in the 1970s, Terry planned to return to California or go north, that she was a sweet and adventurous soul.
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[SPEAKER_00]: The Terry family had searched for Terry for decades according to The New York Times.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone that I talked to who knew her a daughter, handshit said, I wish I could have just talked to her, touched her once.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Via Ancestry.com data, authoram labs linked the lady of the Dunes DNA to handshits, and by way of handshit, Terry's extended family, giving them the identity of the victim.
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[SPEAKER_00]: This would open up the search for Terry's killer exponentially, the investigation now renewed, obtained court records, and within days of the lady of the Dunes identity being revealed, investigators immediately found their prime suspect, a man named Guy Rockwell Moldavin.
11:40.070 --> 11:48.261
[SPEAKER_00]: As police dug into Moldavin's identity, they learned the man lived many lives, all of which were tinge with violence and ill-reputed to say the least.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Born on October 26, 1923, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in his early years while David lived in New York and attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Once described as a quote, Bunko artist and great lover, according to SF Gate.
12:04.897 --> 12:15.330
[SPEAKER_00]: The New York Daily News cited Maldavin as having a heavy presence in New York City's Greenwich Village, with quote, "...beatenics, art lovers, celebrities, and celebrity hunters."
12:15.951 --> 12:21.738
[SPEAKER_00]: Maldavin enlisted in the military, where he was disqualified from active service to to a mastoid infection.
12:21.798 --> 12:32.592
[SPEAKER_00]: On May 11, 1946, while working as a professor, he married, divorced, worked as a
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[SPEAKER_00]: While David's second wife was a woman named Manzanita Eileen Ryan, Ryan had a teenage daughter from a previous marriage named Dolores and Mirrors.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Shocking investigators looking into Moldaven.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Both Ryan and Mirrors disappeared in Seattle on April 1, 1960, with Moldaven becoming the prime suspect.
12:53.986 --> 13:04.425
[SPEAKER_00]: After getting a rhinoplasty, Moldaven fled Seattle but was arrested by the FBI and charged with unlawful flight to avoid giving testimony into his deceased wife and stepdaughter's deaths.
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[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, Moldaven went on to marry another woman, swindling her family out of $10,000 around the time his second wife went missing.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In 1961, he was convicted of those charges and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
13:18.727 --> 13:24.954
[SPEAKER_00]: A judge suspended the sentence in March 1962, provided that Maldavin repay the money.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Investigators have always circled Maldavin in the case of Ryan and Mirrens, but could never pin it on him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: They even found dismembered human body parts in Maldavin's septic tank, but were unable to prove they were from either of the missing women.
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[SPEAKER_00]: According to iconic true crime writer and rule, who devoted some writing and research to Moldaven, he was never charged in the connection of the double murder, as the King County Prosecutor was reluctant to do so without any bodies.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Before moving to California in the 70s, Moldaven was also the prime suspect in the murder of Henry Lawrence Bayard, a 28-year-old bread truck driver, and the disappearance of Barbara Joe Kelly, a 17-year-old waitress in Los Angeles.
14:07.711 --> 14:22.785
[SPEAKER_00]: Moldaven was the executive vice president of a silver store on Rodeo Drive at the time, and after his retirement he worked at a tobacco shop and became a volunteer radio host
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was around this time that he met Terry, who was also living in California, and according to public records the two married and renal in February 1974, just five months before Terry's death.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Crazyly enough, rule also mentions in her writing that Maldavin married a woman named Terry in February of 1974 in Reno, Nevada.
14:45.568 --> 14:57.264
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only that, Massachusetts State Police learned that Terry and Maldavin traveled during the summer of 1974 as a kind of honeymoon, and when Maldavin returned to California, he was alone, driving his wife's car.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Upon returning, he indicated to a friend.
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[SPEAKER_00]: that his wife had mysteriously passed away.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Additionally, Terry's brother reportedly questioned Maldavin about his sister, but Maldavin claimed he and Terry fought on their honeymoon, quote, and he had not heard from his wife again.
15:13.609 --> 15:24.345
[SPEAKER_00]: The annual writing, the traveling, the friend and family testimony, it's almost as if the decades-old answer to the lady of the Dunes case was hiding in plain sight.
15:24.325 --> 15:28.412
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's even more pointing Maldave into Terry's murder if you can believe it.
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[SPEAKER_00]: After marrying and murdering Terry, Maldave and married again, somewhere between Terry's murder and his fourth marriage.
15:36.266 --> 15:42.216
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1976 Maldave and published a bizarre comic book called Cooking With Rump Oil.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a recipe book, really.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's part comic, part avant-garde poetry book.
15:48.065 --> 15:56.979
[SPEAKER_00]: It talks about cooking people about violence, especially against women and self-destruction, masked in a darkly humorous tone.
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[SPEAKER_00]: One page shows a woman being cooked, her long hair cascading down the page.
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[SPEAKER_00]: her eyes panicked, looking from above.
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[SPEAKER_00]: A quote from the text references the picture saying, quote, the tender look will become one of despair.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Julia Crowley, a retired FBI agent and pro-filer who worked on the Golden State Killer case says of the book, quote, writing this book sort of indicates to me that dismembering was an important aspect to him.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It's a little bit creepy and morbid when you go through the book and you see what's happening, what they're being boiled and full-aid and grinded up.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I think this was possibly his way of reliving what he had done.
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[SPEAKER_00]: In March 14th, 2002, according to his obituary, while David died of a lengthy illness in Salinas, California.
16:42.406 --> 16:46.973
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, when we recorded our original episode about this case, it was still cold.
16:47.834 --> 17:04.299
[SPEAKER_00]: But with all of this information coming to light in 2022 and 2023, on August 28th, 2023, the perpetrator, avoiding the law for decades, allowed to continue his dangerous existence, was finally and officially named.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Guy Rockwell, Maldavin.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Though Maldavin had been long deceased, Terry's family is still grappling with the reality of the case's long cold status, and the justice that was never served.
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[SPEAKER_00]: Quote, the fact that he touched my mother kills me, but the fact that he got away with it pisses me off more than anything, said Richard Hatchett.
17:23.716 --> 17:32.695
[SPEAKER_00]: Said Ruth Terry's grandnies, Brittany Novanglowski, quote, It was just earth shattering to know that somebody so loved and so beautiful and so bright.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was just taken like that.
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[SPEAKER_00]: It was just brutalized and left that way with no dignity.
17:39.089 --> 17:50.728
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, the technology and information used in solving the case of the lady of the dunes would bring new life to other cases, expanding and legitimizing the newly forming study of forensic genealogy.
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[SPEAKER_00]: As of December 2023, nearly two years ago, from right now, when I'm recording this, the use of this technology has solved 651 criminal cases, found hundreds of unnamed victims,
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[SPEAKER_00]: and has renewed hope in many that justice will finally be served.
