Crime Immemorial

In the summer of 1974, a gruesome find near a beach in the Northeastern United States would mark the beginning of one of Massachusetts’ most compelling mysteries.

It was the afternoon of July 26th, and a thirteen-year-old girl was looking for her dog, which had run from a nearby cottage on the Cape Cod National Seashore near Provincetown. Not long into her search, the beagle’s barking attracted her attention. She had found the dog, but she also found something else.

Situated about fifty yards from the path was the dreadfully decomposed body of a naked woman, lying face down on a green blanket. The victim’s wadded-up Wrangler jeans and a blue, bloodstained bandanna had been stuffed underneath her head.

When investigators examined the remains more closely, they determined that the cause of death was a massive trauma to one side of her skull, likely caused by some type of military entrenching tool. It also appeared that she had been strangled, and there was evidence she had been sexually assaulted after she was dead.

In addition, some of her teeth, both of her hands, and one of her forearms had been removed, possibly in an attempt by the killer to conceal her identity. Due to the fact that there were no obvious signs of a struggle, police theorized that she had either known her killer or had been attacked while she was sleeping. Forensic examination concluded that she had been dead for approximately two weeks.

The murder victim, dubbed The Lady of the Dunes, was thought to be around five-foot-six-inches tall, with a weight of about one-hundred-forty-five pounds. She had long, reddish hair tied back into a ponytail with a gold band, and was believed to be somewhere between twenty-five and forty years old, but possibly as old as forty-nine. Her toenails had been painted with pink polish.

Because the woman had distinctive, extensive, and rather costly dental work, authorities were confident that they would soon be able to identify the brutally murdered young woman, but sadly, this was not to be the case. Despite scouring missing persons reports and dental records within a several-state radius, detectives produced no hint as to who the victim could be, or why she had been slaughtered so viciously.

Months after her body was found, in October of 1974, The Lady of the Dunes was given an anonymous burial, and though her remains have been exhumed three times since (most recently in 2013) in order to obtain DNA evidence and generate new facial reconstructions, her identity is still a mystery. A handful of individuals have come forward, claiming to recognize the woman, but so far none of the leads have panned out.

Though her name remains unknown, however, a couple of other names have been put forward as possible suspects in her murder. Probably the most often cited of these is infamous mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who was convicted in 2013 of complicity in eleven murders, as well as several racketeering charges, and who died in 2018. Bulger was known to remove his victims’ teeth to stymie identification, and was reportedly seen in the company of a young woman resembling The Lady of the Dunes at around the time the woman would have been killed.

Further, Bulger wore a size ten shoe, a significant fact in light of the size ten prints seen in the sand at the site where The Lady of the Dunes was murdered. Bulger also allegedly worked as a hustler out of the nearby Crown and Anchor, a popular gay hangout that featured green beach towels very much like the one found with the victim’s remains. In spite of the circumstantial evidence, though, Bulger was never charged with the crime.

Another person of interest in the case is convicted double murderer Hadden Clark, who at this writing is serving a seventy-year-sentence in Maryland for the slayings of six-year-old Michelle Dorr and twenty-three-year-old Laura Houghteling.

Clark actually confessed to the murder of The Lady of the Dunes in 2004, stating that he knew who the woman was but refusing to identify her. He also claimed that he had buried evidence from the crime in his grandfather’s garden, and produced a map of the location where the body had been found, as well as a sketch of a woman’s body in which he drew the victim without hands.

Authorities didn’t take Clark’s confession entirely seriously due to his paranoid schizophrenia, but a search of the garden in question undertaken in 2000 had uncovered about two-hundred pieces of jewelry, one of which was a class ring belonging to known victim Laura Houghteling. Though nothing was found that was able to be directly linked to the Lady of the Dunes case, investigators are keeping an open mind about Clark’s involvement in her death, believing that the jewelry might represent trophies taken from multiple victims.

In a strange postscript to the case, author Joe Hill informed police in 2015 that while watching the classic 1975 horror film Jaws, he had spotted an extra in a crowd scene who closely resembled the reconstructions of The Lady in the Dunes. This young woman was clad in jeans and a blue bandanna, and some investigators are exploring the possibility that the movie extra and the murder victim were the same woman, even though the particular scene in Jaws was filmed around one-hundred miles away from where the body of The Lady in the Dunes was discovered.

The investigation remains open, and is the source of much speculation in Cape Cod to the present day.