109\. The Lady of The Dunes: The Solved Cold Case
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You're listening to an Ono Media podcast. Hey,

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I'm your host, Peyton Morland, and I'm so happy you are here. If you are watching on YouTube and can subscribe, turn on notifications, give this video a thumbs up, leave a comment. Honestly, just any interaction with the video helps so much. And if you are listening on audio and can leave a review, five stars please. That would be great. If not, I'm happy you're here. Today, we are diving into a true crime case. But before we get into that, we need to do my 10 seconds.

Well, my husband Garrett and I have been going to the Utah hockey games because we are big hockey fans and our boys have been doing so good, except actually last game they did lose. But the game before that they did so good and we've had a couple good fights and it's just been really fun to follow along and I'm really, really rooting for them to get into the playoffs. So I'm crossing my fingers.

You know, I didn't really know much about hockey until I started dating and then married Garrett. But I did read those these hockey romance books, not the ones everyone talks about. I actually read the Briar U series in the off campus series. If you know what those are, those are hockey books that follow a hockey team and each player's like love story. That's like a whole I think there's like eight books or something. But yeah, that was really the only thing I knew about hockey. But yeah.

Now I've been watching the real thing and it's been good. All right. I think that's all we're going to talk about in my 10 seconds. Hockey, hockey, hockey. Let's jump into today's case.

So family can be complicated. Some people don't have good relationships with their relatives, and in some cases, they don't have any kind of relationship at all. Even when everyone gets along, there can be tensions, secrets, and complicated dynamics between parents, siblings, and children. And that's a theme in today's episode. All the difficulty that can come from the way you get along or don't with your family.

So our case begins with a man named Richard Hanchette. He was raised by his adoptive parents, a couple who had been living in Michigan and working in a factory when they had first welcomed him into their family.

And he always had complicated feelings about his birth mother. For the record, Richard didn't know who she was, but he did know around the time that he was a teenager, he did not want to meet her. That just seemed too emotionally painful. So he was content to have nothing to do with his birth mother and to not even know her name.

However, Richard was starting to feel differently as he grew up. Decades had passed. It was actually around the time he reached his 60th birthday.

By then, Richard's adoptive parents had passed away, and their deaths had him thinking differently about family and about his priorities in life. So finally, he felt ready to learn about where he had come from and who had given birth to him. Now, sadly, with his adoptive parents gone, Richard couldn't just...

Ask them about how he had come to join their family. If he wanted to learn who his birth mother was, he would have to start at square one with no information.

Now, luckily, it was 2018 by this time when Richard was in his 60s. This is a time when commercial DNA tests were available to just about everyone. So Richard's girlfriend gave him a gift, a kit from Ancestry.com, and he sent in a DNA sample to try and figure out a little more about his biological family. Well, when he got his results, Richard was shocked.

not only because of his mother's identity, but because of her ties to a decades-old unsolved murder.

I mean, I think we have all heard stories about what the advances in DNA has done for people when they send DNA in and realize that their dad isn't their dad or maybe they aren't even related to their family at all. But this one, to be 60, looking for your birth mother and then find out that she's somehow tied to murder, that's got to be strange.

So the homicide in question was famous in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in part because of how gruesome it was. Okay, so we're going to back up. July 26th, 1974.

A family was visiting the Race Points Beach in Cape Cod. This was in Provincetown. It was also a popular vacation destination known in part for the scenic sandy dunes along the beach. Unsurprisingly, these dunes were called the Race Points Dunes. So the family was visiting friends who were staying in a tiny shack right there on the beach so they could spend every day swimming and playing without having to drive or find parking.

So that meant the parents, the two daughters, Elisa and Leslie, and their two dogs were all together at this shack. Except on this day, one of the dogs seemed especially agitated. It kept barking and whimpering and trying to run off to explore the tree line in the distance.

So eventually, the 12-year-old, Leslie, became curious about what had made one of their dogs so upset. So she followed it over to the trees and stumbled on something truly shocking. A dead body was lying in the sand. It was badly decomposed. In fact, the deceased had been out on the beach undiscovered for weeks at this point.

So this meant that Leslie at 12 wasn't entirely sure what she had found. Her initial thought was maybe it was a dead deer. So she ran to her parents to ask for help. And they could tell just from her tone of voice that she was very shaken. Even if she didn't realize it was a dead person's body, she still understood that this was something serious and upsetting. So Leslie's parents only needed to take one look at the body and

to realize the truth. This was not a dead deer. Someone, a human being, had died on the beach.

but the family had a problem this is the 70s there was no phone at the shack that their friends were renting and they didn't have a car parked nearby so the quickest way they had of getting to the police was to walk toward town along the way they waved at passing cars shouting we found a body finally they got in touch with the locals who passed the word along to detectives

So soon, the investigators had swarmed the beach and they were able to tell a little bit about the person whose remains they'd found. She was a woman, but it was hard to get a sense of her age. Initially, the detectives could only say with certainty that she was between 25 and 45. She had auburn colored hair, which was still in a ponytail when she was found. Her nails were painted pink.

The woman was naked, but the police did find her clothes very quickly. They were actually neatly folded underneath her, as though like she was laying on them as a pillow. So it was clear that she hadn't died in an accident or of natural causes. First, the way she was lying on her stomach looked posed, like someone had left her that way on purpose. And there was also the fact that someone had smashed her head in.

And the attack was vicious enough that this woman, this unknown woman, was almost decapitated.

And the woman's killer had also cut off her hands. So this is very, very gruesome murder in what's supposed to be this beautiful picture perfect place. So the police assumed that the victim had known her murderer and they based this in part on the way the woman was lying when she was found. She was on one side of a beach towel and the other half of the towel was empty.

as though at some point someone had been sitting beside her. There were also no signs of a struggle. This told the police that her murderer had been able to get very close to her without alarming her. So perhaps she had been enjoying a day at the beach with a trusted companion who had suddenly flown into a rage and then killed her.

Since the woman had no hands, there was no way to try to use fingerprints to identify her. It was also impossible to pull her dental records because the killer had knocked out several of her teeth while beating her. So the next step was to question people who lived or worked near the dunes and anyone who had visited recently.

The police also reviewed all of their open missing persons cases to see if any women who matched this Jane's Doe description had disappeared recently. Now, unfortunately, none of these efforts went anywhere. Nobody recognized her and she didn't match any recent missing persons cases. This told the investigators that the dead woman was probably not a local.

which was a good news, bad news situation. The good news was that the people of Provincetown didn't need to feel distrustful of their friends and neighbors. If the victim was a tourist from out of town, that suggested her killer was also not from around there. The community had a reputation for being safe and tight-knit, and people could keep feeling safe. They didn't need to fear that there was a murderer among them. But the bad news was that the culprit

Could have been just about anyone. There were so many tourists stopping through Cape Cod for visits and the possibilities were endless. Still, the police did what they could to investigate the crime. Since they still hadn't identified the victim, they classified her as a Jane Doe, but the locals actually came up with a much more poetic name for her. This mysterious woman who had been murdered, almost decapitated, hands missing,

They called her the Lady of the Dunes. Obviously, they called her that because of where she was found at the Race Points Dunes. Well, sadly, with no ID for the body and no clear suspects, the Lady of the Dunes' case went cold pretty fast. Years went by and the investigators used every trick in the book to try and generate leads.

They regularly put out calls to the public for tips and updates. And while they did get the occasional tip here and there, none of them panned out.

As time went on, forensic technology got better, crime scene investigators were able to create digital models of what the Lady of the Dunes may have looked like, and they actually released the images all across the country. Officials also exhumed the Jane Doe's body on three separate occasions, once in 1980, another time in 2000, and then finally in 2003.

When DNA technology became better, some investigators even sent her skull to a lab to see if they could find a genetic match. But ultimately, none of these efforts went anywhere.

Nobody recognized the lady's digitally reconstructed face. And all of those DNA tests and medical examinations hit dead ends, which is honestly kind of crazy when you consider how much police were doing in this area to try and solve this case years after it had happened. But they finally do have a big break in 2018.

when Richard, in his 60s, looking for his mother, submitted his DNA sample to Ancestry.com because he and the unknown Lady of the Dunes were a match. This homicide victim was Richard's birth mother.

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She had given him up for adoption several years before her murder. And now that investigators had her profile and Richard's, they were also able to identify other relatives. This is huge.

Richard had matched with some cousins and other distant family members. And all these different connections helped the investigators learn exactly who the Lady of the Dunes was. So many people for 44 years had been wondering who this victim was. And Richard was wondering who his mother was. And at the same time, they all figured it out. Interestingly enough,

The Lady of the Dunes was very famous in the Cape Cod area, but Richard had never heard of her until he learned that she was his mother. In fact, when he first got his DNA test back, he was very hopeful that he might have a chance to meet his mom. He assumed she could still be alive. So over the course of several weeks, Richard called those cousins and other distant relatives, hoping one of them could put him in touch with her.

but as hopeful as richard was he was also nervous he was worried about what he might say when he met her and he also wasn't sure if she'd even want to reunite with him at all there had to be a reason she had given him up and maybe she still wanted nothing to do with him every night richard had terrible dreams about all the ways things could go wrong if he tried to meet his mom and then one day the phone rang the caller was an fbi agent

He explained that Richard would never meet his mother because she had been dead for decades. Obviously, this hits Richard hard. For so long, he had such complicated feelings about reconnecting with his birth family. And now that he had the answers he'd been looking for, it was too late.

Still, the FBI agent thanked Richard for helping the police identify the Lady of the Dunes. Now that they knew her identity, they were one step closer to solving the murder. The Lady of the Dunes was actually named Ruth Marie Terry.

She had been born in 1936 in a rundown shack near a remote mining town. And that's where Ruth grew up, too. She was a small-town girl in Tennessee. Ruth had five siblings, all raised by her coal miner father. Sadly, Ruth's mother had passed away of an illness only about a year after Ruth was born. But in her mother's absence, she and her siblings became very, very close to her surviving family members.

Sadly, she didn't have much stability once she became an adult. When she was just 19 years old, Ruth got married and she and her husband decided to leave their small town. She told her family she wanted to see the world and then she moved out of state.

Now that marriage didn't last long, but Ruth was willing to take on the challenge of building a new life for herself from scratch. So instead of going back home after the divorce to be close to her relatives, she decided to see what else life had to offer her.

It also sounds like she took a chance on love again and again, only to keep getting her heart broken. By the time she was in her late 30s, Ruth had already been married and divorced numerous times. It's hard to say exactly how many times Ruth got married because she often used a fake name on her wedding certificate, almost like she was trying to cover her tracks.

And she was also known to move a lot, never staying in one city or state for long. So it was hard to keep track of her comings and goings. But this wasn't too concerning to Ruth's family. She had a reputation for being a free spirit. In their minds, the fact that she was drifting around a lot and moving from husband to husband just seemed like youthful exploration. She was testing boundaries and trying new things. And sometimes all of that exploration had consequences.

For example, in the late 50s, when Ruth was 19 or maybe in her early 20s, she found out she was pregnant. Ruth was not ready to be a mother yet, so she found a solution to her problem. At that time, she worked at an automotive plant in Detroit. She was friends with a young married couple who also worked there. Rather than go through a formal adoption process, Ruth convinced that couple to take her baby and raise him. And that baby was Richard.

Now, it's not clear to me if his adoptive parents knew Ruth's real name or if she used a pseudonym at that job, but either way, they did know her. They might have been able to tell Richard about his mother if he had asked, but he didn't learn any of this information until after he got his DNA test back. So either way, we know that wasn't the end of the story for Ruth. She lived for another 15 years or so, and in February of 1974, she got married again.

As a reminder, we don't know how many husbands she'd had, but this was her final wedding. Her last husband was a man named Guy Moldavin. He and Ruth took their vows in Reno, Nevada, and once again, she gave a fake name.

Six months later, over the summer, the two of them went on their honeymoon. Ruth told her friends that the plan was to go back to Tennessee so her family could meet her new husband. And then afterward, they were either going to buy a new house in California where Guy already lived or somewhere just north of Tennessee. She told conflicting stories to different people, so it is hard to say what the real plans were.

But I do know that in the summer of 1974, Ruth and Guy, her new and final husband, spent some time in Tennessee. And he did get to know Ruth's siblings and parents, and everyone agreed that the newlyweds seemed happy and very much in love. But a few weeks later, when the honeymoon was over, Guy didn't move into a new home with Ruth. He went back home to California all alone. He was driving Ruth's car,

And there was no sign of her. Now, of course, Ruth's friends got a hold of him, asked him where she was and why she hadn't made it back and why she wasn't with him. And all he would say was that Ruth had died during their trip and he wouldn't offer any other explanation to anyone about what had happened to her.

And from the sound of it, nobody really pried. They assumed it was a tragic accident and he was a grieving husband who didn't want to discuss a painful topic. Even Ruth's family didn't know what to make of the news. Guy actually visited them in person to tell them why they hadn't seen Ruth, except this time around, instead of telling them what he told her friends, which was that she had died, he said that she was missing and he didn't know where she was.

And he said this very straightforward, in a matter-of-fact way. He didn't make any effort to soften the blow for Ruth's family, who loved her. Basically, he showed up in Tennessee, dropped a bombshell, and then left. He didn't seem at all interested in helping them find Ruth, or in grieving with them, or trying to remember or honor her. And that's where things stood. People knew that Ruth had either gone missing or passed away on her honeymoon,

And it seemed very suspicious and unusual, but nobody really knew where to even start. Where had she gone missing? Was she missing or was she dead? So of course, now we know that over that same summer, during her honeymoon,

Ruth was killed on a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts. But nobody made the connection until over 40 years later when her son ordered the DNA test. And in fairness to the police, there was no reason that they would have ever linked Ruth's disappearance to the Lady of the Dunes. There was no reason for her or Guy to ever get anywhere near Cape Cod on their trip to and from Tennessee. It was completely out of their way.

The only theory the police could come up with was based on the fact that years before, Guy's parents had owned some property near the Race Point Dunes. So maybe the area had personal significance to him. But it doesn't sound like Guy still had access to that property at the time of their honeymoon. So it wasn't clear why Ruth and Guy went there at all. But the police were still trying to piece this puzzle together.

So on October 31st, 2022, the FBI released a statement. They announced to the public that the Lady of the Dunes had been identified as Ruth. And they also set up a tip line so anyone could share any information they had about how Ruth had even ended up in Cape Cod and who might have killed her.

Now, even without the tips, the police were able to make an educated guess about what happened. You probably can too, especially once they took a closer look at her husband at the time, Guy. See, Guy didn't have the greatest reputation. Apparently, he was known as a chronic liar. He liked to tell people that he had served in the military and was even a war hero, which wasn't true. He also was known for marrying a lot of different women. And none of those marriages lasted for long.

In his lifetime, Guy had five wives and one of those women broke up with him and then they got back together. So it was a total of six marriages. Worst of all, before Guy met Ruth, he'd actually been a suspect in several other murder investigations. See, 24 years earlier on June 18th, 1950, a 28-year-old man named Henry Baird was shot to death.

And his killer posed his body for the investigators to find. Like Ruth, he was found on a beach, but instead of Cape Cod, this was a beach in Table Bluff, California. And here's another similarity to Ruth. Henry was found naked, other than his shoes, and his body was found lying on a pile of clothes. Except unlike Ruth, these weren't his clothes. They belonged to his 17-year-old girlfriend, Barbara Kelley.

The two had been seeing each other for about two months and the police couldn't find Barbara anywhere after they found Henry. But she wasn't a suspect in the case. The investigator's theory was that she'd either been kidnapped or killed by whoever had murdered Henry.

Now, Guy was a major suspect in this crime for a few reasons. First of all, Guy knew Henry and Barbara. They all worked at the same restaurant. Guy was a cook, Barbara was a waitress, and Henry delivered bread all over town, including to that restaurant. Now, incidentally, the restaurant was owned by the woman who Guy was married to at the time.

Now, apparently there was some kind of weird vibe between Guy and 17-year-old Barbara. I'm not sure what was going on exactly because the newspapers at the time are pretty vague. I just know that something about the way Guy acted around her and Henry made the officials take a closer look at him. But there was no hard evidence that he'd hurt either of them, only suspicion. The police were never able to press charges or arrest him. And then 10 years go by.

And Guy, he eventually moved cities, changed names, and married someone new. In 1960, he was living in Seattle with one of his wives, Manzanita Mearns, and her 18-year-old daughter, Dolores Ann. Now, Dolores Ann's father was Manzanita's ex-husband. He lived in Vancouver, Canada at the time, so he didn't get to see his daughter super often. But once a month,

Manzanita and Dolores Ann would drive across the border to see him. Well, sometime in late April or early May of 1960, they missed their scheduled visit with Dolores Ann's father, which wasn't like them. So he actually called the police and the investigators learned that nobody had seen the mother or daughter in public since April of that year. That was weeks ago. Both Manzanita and Dolores Ann were missing.

And as for her husband at the time and Dolores and stepfather, Guy didn't seem particularly concerned about their disappearance. I mean, he hadn't even reported them missing. In fact, just a few months later, he actually got married again. After borrowing $10,000 from his new wife's mother, he also disappeared without a trace.

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash start selling, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash start selling to upgrade your selling today. Shopify.com slash start selling. So the timing was suspicious for sure, but it still took another month for the police to mount a major search or to investigate the home where Guy, Manzanita, and Dolores Ann had lived.

And when they did, they found human remains in the septic tank outside of the house. Now, given the state of forensic technology at the time, there was no way to do DNA tests on those remains. And since the bodies were chopped up,

It was also impossible to know what the deceased had looked like. The police couldn't prove that these corpses were Guy's missing wife and stepdaughter. And since they could never confirm the victim's identities, they also couldn't prove that Guy had anything to do with these murders. The investigators certainly had their suspicions, but once again, the evidence just wasn't solid enough to charge him with anything violent.

They did manage to track Guy down and convict him for grand larceny since he had stolen his wife's mother's money. He had a brief prison sentence, but that was it. He wasn't ever taken to court for anything related to Manzanita and Dolores Ann's disappearances or likely murders. Still, there was a pattern starting to form, especially when you considered Ruth's disappearance in 1974.

People who were close to Guy kept going missing in very suspicious circumstances. There was just never quite enough to implicate him. So he was always a free man. And as if this wasn't all bad enough, in 1976, Guy wrote a book called "Cooking with Rump Oil." It was supposedly a recipe book, except it didn't have any actual recipes in it. Instead, "Cooking with Rump Oil" was full of short poems

that described how to kill, butcher, and eat strange mythical creatures. Many of these animals were very human-like in his book, and the instructions on how to kill them read a lot like a guide on how to murder somebody. According to some experts, this book may have also contained a veiled confession to Ruth's murder. See, one of the recipes in this book was called Cape Cod Shed,

It included a picture of a creature, a shid, that's the name of the creature, what it would be called, with big eyes and long flowing hair that kind of looked like Ruth's hair. And the last line of the so-called recipe or poem read,

the tender look will become one of despair. I mean, the fact that his wife went missing on their honeymoon and then was found murdered on Cape Cod, and then he goes on to write a book about killing a creature with hair that looked like hers called Cape Cod Shed? Okay. So when an FBI profiler read that poem years later, she thought this line was a description of the moment that Ruth realized her husband was going to kill her. Her love turned into despair,

And Guy liked that moment so much, he wrote about the feelings in his book that he could then go back and reread whenever he wanted, enjoying these violent memories. Of course, nobody made the connection between Guy, his book, and all of these missing women and murder victims until after the Lady of the Dunes was identified as Ruth.

Richard, her son, learned that Ruth was his mother in October of 2022, which was also when she was identified as the Lady of the Dunes. And then the Cape Cod and Islands District Attorney's Office made an announcement on August 28th, 2023. They said they had solved the Lady of the Dunes' cold case. In the statement, they specifically said that Guy, quote, was responsible for Miss Terry's death.

They were confident that he had murdered her. In making that ruling, they were able to right a very old wrong. Ruth had once been the oldest unidentified homicide victim in all of Massachusetts history. Now she got her name back, along with an announcement that the case was solved.

So far as motive went, it's hard to say exactly why police believed Guy killed Ruth. One theory was that they had had some kind of argument during their honeymoon and the fight escalated to murderous violence. However, given the long history of unsolved murders and disappearances that seemed to follow Guy everywhere he went, it's possible that Guy was simply a serial killer. Perhaps he liked killing people for the thrill of it or because he enjoyed it, knowing he could get away from it.

His book, Cooking with Rump Oil, seemed to suggest that he was hiding in plain sight. He wanted people to pay attention to him and to know what he was capable of, and it made him feel smart and superior to have all of that while still evading arrest. So perhaps Ruth died for no other reason than because she and Guy were alone on a secluded beach. He knew he could take her life and never get caught. And he was mostly right. He was eventually identified as the murderer, but that wasn't until after his death.

when it was too late for him to pay the price for what he had done. He had passed away in 2002 at the age of 78. Guy had lived a long, full life as a free man. He could never be charged or taken to court for any of the murders or disappearances that he had been suspected in. In fact, after Ruth's murder, Guy remarried yet again and lived out the rest of his days in California.

But even though Guy will never be convicted of any of his alleged crimes, at least Ruth's loved ones can have closure. Still, I think it's worth mentioning that the police only closed Ruth's case.

As of right now, Manzanita, Dolores Ann, and Barbara's disappearances are still considered unsolved. And so is Henry's murder. Interestingly, Henry's homicide and Barbara's disappearance are now the oldest unsolved cold cases in their county in California. And only time will tell if they'll ever get any closure. And speaking of closure...

Every development in Ruth's case was very complicated and emotionally loaded for her family, particularly for the son who never got to know her, Richard, the son who had basically blown this case wide open. He had a lot of regrets about the fact that he had never had a chance to have a relationship with his mom. Richard also hated that his mother's murderer escaped justice for as long as he did. And when he read Guy's book, he was disgusted.

Everything about the case and Ruth's death was just tragic and unjust. Once she was identified, he actually did travel to Tennessee and talk to her family members, and they told him wonderful stories about what a sweet person she was, which also hurt because Richard knew he'd never get to have Ruth in his own life. At least he could take some comfort in knowing that he had helped solve his mother's murder. If he hadn't ordered that DNA test,

Who knows if the authorities would have ever identified the Lady of the Dunes. And without knowing her name and her history, the police also might not have ever connected Ruth's disappearance to her murder.

or found her killer. Of course, answers and solutions can't replace a flesh and blood person. There's no way to fill the absence that comes when you lose a beloved family member or even a casual acquaintance or someone you'd like to love but never had the chance to get to know. Families can be complicated and it's not always possible to be close to your parents or your siblings or anyone else. There's no shame in making the best of the hand you've been dealt, but it is worth remembering that

that you might never know when you might lose someone close to you for good. And that was the unsolved, now solved murder of the Lady of the Dunes, Ruth Marie Terry. You guys, thank you for listening to this episode and I will see you next time as we go further into the dark together. Goodbye.