It was the height of the tourist season, July 26, 1974, when a killer stunned a summer sanctuary and the dunes of this small seaside town at the tip of Cape Cod became a crime scene.
The victim was unknown for years, buried in the back corner of St. Peter's Cemetery in Provincetown and known only as the "Lady of the Dunes."
The Lady of the Dunes was the longest unidentified murder victim in the state of Massachusetts. The case was unresolved for 48 years. Physical evidence from the scene like the victim’s clothing and a blanket were thrown away by state police. But as time passed and hope faded, science and DNA analysis evolved- finally giving investigators the break they needed.
A piece of the victim’s skull finally helped put a name - Ruth Marie Terry - on that gravestone and gave a family the answers they had been searching for for decades.
The crime collided with a son’s lifelong search for his biological mom. Richard Hanchett, who learned his mother's identity at the same time he learned she was a noted murder victim.
But what of the murderer? The hunt for Terry's killer led investigators to her now-deceased husband, Guy Muldavin, whose family owned property and vacationed in Provincetown. He made headlines in Seattle, where he was also a suspect in the mutilation deaths of his previous wife and stepdaughter in 1960, but he was never charged with murder.
Muldavin died in 2002, but it wasn't until last year that prosecutors determined that he was responsible for Terry's death and the case was officially closed.
