Crime Immemorial

On Monday, April 12th, seventeen-year-old high school student Janice Snow got out of classes at around three-thirty in the afternoon, after which she and two friends—Sally South and Judy Young—proceeded to a nearby bowling alley that was a popular hangout spot for local teenagers.

A little more than an hour later, Sally’s father picked up all three girls from the bowling alley, and then dropped them off in downtown Des Moines, Iowa. The friends spent a few happy hours going from shop to shop, trying on Easter clothes, and at around dinner time ducked into a café for French fries.

As the chilly spring evening wore on, Janice and the girls realized they had better start heading home; it was a school night, after all. At first, Janice was considering sleeping over at her best friend Sally’s house, but then changed her mind. The three of them headed for the intersection of Sixth and Locust Streets, where they said their necessary goodbyes. Sally and Judy were going to take a bus headed north, while Janice had to take the eastbound route.

Before boarding their separate buses at a little past nine p.m., Janice borrowed a dime from Sally so that she could phone her father to pick her up from her destination bus stop, which was nearly a mile from her house.

Janice’s father Bill Snow phoned Sally South’s house a short time later, only to be told that Sally had not arrived home yet. Bill assumed that Janice was going to stay overnight with Sally and that both girls were safely en route to the South home, so he went to bed without calling a second time.

On Tuesday morning, though, Sally herself called Janice’s house in order to ask her best friend to bring a purse to school that she had wanted to borrow. It was then that Bill Snow became aware that his daughter had not spent the night at the South home after all, and had never returned to her own home either. He immediately called police to report her missing.

It would be nearly fifty hours of anguish for the family and friends of Janice Snow before her whereabouts were discovered, and after that, the anguish would become unbearable. At around eight a.m. on the morning of Thursday, April 15th, workers along a wooded stretch of Park Avenue in Des Moines found the lifeless body of the missing high school senior at the bottom of an embankment, her arm wrapped loosely around a tree trunk. The site was about three miles from where she was last seen.

Janice had been stabbed fourteen times with a long blade which had punctured her lungs and liver, as well as inflicting additional wounds in her head, chest, and back. She was fully clothed, save for her missing shoes, and had not been beaten or raped.

Because the area had for the past few days been plagued by heavy fog and rain that might have washed away some of the evidence, it was never solidly determined whether Janice had been murdered at the spot where she was found, or whether she had been killed elsewhere and her body dumped. The inclement weather conditions also made pinpointing exact time of death problematic, though the coroner believed Janice had been slain on Wednesday night and subsequently disposed of along Park Avenue.

Investigators made a public plea for tips concerning Janice’s whereabouts between the time she was last seen alive on Monday night and the presumed time of her death on Wednesday. Unfortunately, no one came forward who had seen her during those uncertain hours. Though Sally South told police that she thought she had seen Janice getting on the eastbound bus on the night of her disappearance, she could not be entirely certain, so the possibility remained that Janice had been waylaid by her killer before she even had a chance to board.

Authorities interviewed dozens of persons of interest, including an acquaintance of Janice’s who she had spoken to in the café on Monday night, but everyone the police questioned was eventually cleared of suspicion. Neither Janice’s shoes nor the murder weapon was ever found, and no inkling of the identity of her killer has ever been established. The teenager was buried on the day before Easter of 1965. Her father Bill died in 2009, and her mother Betty Jean in 2010, without ever receiving closure or justice in the tragic case.