Latest / Five-Minute Crime / EP 59 - The Lady of the Dunes: A Face in the Sand
Transcript
- HOST: A dog discovered her first—face down in the Cape Cod sand, hands missing, head nearly severed, and for forty-eight years, no one knew her name. [SFX: scary wind] HOST: July 26th, 1974. Provincetown, Massachusetts. A teenage girl walking a dog near Race Point finds a body in the dunes. The victim has auburn hair tied in a ponytail, painted toenails, and a blue bandanna under her head. HOST: No purse. No ID. Her hands are gone, likely to stop fingerprinting. Investigators call her the Lady of the Dunes. HOST: Over the decades, police try everything. Clay reconstructions. Exhumations. Dental charts. Even a theory that she appeared as an extra in the movie Jaws, filmed nearby that same summer. [AD_BREAK:1] HOST: But the case stays frozen until 2022, when forensic genealogy finally gives her back a name: Ruth Marie Terry, born in Tennessee, raised partly in Michigan, about thirty-seven years old when she died. [SFX: surprise sting] HOST: And here’s the darker turn. Ruth had recently married a man named Guy Rockwell Muldavin, an antiques dealer with a violent shadow behind him. HOST: Muldavin’s previous wife and stepdaughter had disappeared years earlier in Seattle. Human remains were later found in their home’s septic tank. He was suspected, but never convicted. HOST: By the time Ruth was identified, Muldavin had been dead for twenty years. [AD_BREAK:2] HOST: Investigators now believe Ruth was likely killed by her husband, though the exact motive remains buried with him. Money? Control? A pattern he thought he could repeat? [SFX: loud thud] HOST: The Lady of the Dunes was not a ghost, not a movie rumor, not a nameless mystery. She was Ruth Marie Terry. And after nearly half a century, the sand finally gave her back.