It was late on the afternoon of Saturday, September 28th, 1974, and seven-year-old Patty Lee Kuzara had been at the home of her babysitter, located in a subdivision in Poway, a suburb about twenty miles from San Diego. At around dusk, with the permission of her mother, she decided to walk the two-and-a-half miles back to her own house on Putney Road. Her mother Nancy was going to meet her in the car and drive her the rest of the way home.
Numerous witnesses saw Patty Lee at various points on her journey, and the last time she was seen alive, she was crossing the parking lot of a Safeway store, only five blocks from her family’s residence.
When Nancy couldn’t find her daughter anywhere along the route, and Patty Lee hadn’t arrived home by a quarter to eight p.m., her frantic mother called the police, and search parties were immediately organized. Officers followed the route that she had taken, finding footprints that likely belonged to the child. Ominously, her footprints seemed to veer suddenly off the path and into a field off Midland Road, leading authorities to believe that perhaps someone had called to her, or had somehow forced her to change her course.
The following morning, at around ten-thirty a.m., a group of three boys on their way to church services on Midland Road discovered the battered body of the seven-year-old, lying in a brush-covered lot near the church. She had been raped and killed by several brutal blows to the head. The murder weapon was never found.
Investigators had few leads, though they suspected that the killer was someone who lived in the neighborhood. According to an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, though, an individual named Ian McQuage, who was also around seven years old when Patty Lee Kuzara was murdered, was in the Poway field near the church that evening, and was also threatened by the killer. He apparently told police that the man had forced him to lie face down in the dirt, and then stated that he heard Patty Lee being killed. He didn’t get a very good look at the man, saying only that he had dark hair. No suspects were ever generated from the boy’s description.
The murder of Patty Lee Kuzara has been periodically reopened over the years. Detectives looked into the case anew after the 2002 kidnapping and murder of seven-year-old Danielle van Dam in San Diego, a crime for which a neighbor, David Alan Westerfield, was subsequently convicted. Though authorities did not believe that the two homicides were related, they hoped that the 2002 murder might help to jog memories of Patty Lee’s 1974 cold case.
The investigation was most recently reexamined in 2014, but no new leads have been forthcoming.
Crime Immemorial 