Crime Immemorial

In the spring of 1974, in the American Midwest, a young woman would go missing from an adult bookstore and then turn up dead two days later.

Twenty-four-year-old Patricia Webb was a complicated individual. Described by friends and family as beautiful, popular, compassionate, and loving, she was also something of a restless spirit. She had enrolled twice at the University of Nebraska, but had dropped out both times. She had married her high school sweetheart shortly after graduating in late 1968, but had divorced him less than a year after the wedding.

By 1974, she had taken a job as a clerk at an adult bookstore in Lincoln, Nebraska. Perhaps even more uncharacteristically, she also had a recurring side gig as an undercover narcotics informant for the Lincoln police, mostly working minor cases involving marijuana or amphetamines. Since the beginning of her employment in late 1973, she had helped put at least two dozen people behind bars.

On April 18th, 1974, Patricia was working at the adult bookstore alone, on the overnight shift. At some time past midnight, the young woman disappeared from the shop, along with thirty dollars, a calculator, and more than fifty bondage magazines. Whoever had taken Patricia had also cut the phone line and left the establishment’s door unlocked when they exited.

The search was on for the pretty twenty-four-year-old, as police were concerned that Patricia’s undercover work might have made her a target. In fact, she had been scheduled to testify in a narcotics case on the very next day after she vanished, and was supposed to give evidence at a future hearing as well. Because she was now missing, several of the cases she had worked on subsequently had to be dismissed.

Two days later, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 20th, a farmer named Oscar Fiene was feeding some cattle on a piece of property he owned southeast of the city when he discovered the body of Patricia Webb, partially concealed beneath a bale of hay. She was naked, but had been covered with an extra-large jacket that did not belong to her. She had been shot six times in the head and four times in the body, both with a .25 caliber semi-automatic pistol and a .22 caliber Mossberg rifle. Her mouth had also been taped shut. Authorities estimated that she had been dead for approximately twelve hours before her remains were found.

From the very beginning of the investigation, detectives were pursuing several different lines of inquiry. The first of these was that Patricia had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and had been the victim of a robbery gone south, or alternately, had been abducted by a random psychopathic killer.
Patricia’s work as a police informant, however, was another avenue that could have made her some enemies, and investigators found it significant that she had been killed only hours before she was set to testify in a case. Despite this fact, though, it seemed slightly farfetched that anyone would murder her over what were relatively minor drug charges, and at any rate, Patricia had stopped actively working undercover months before she was slain.

Because Patricia had not been raped, and had been shot several times in what appeared to be an execution-style crime, the possibility was also explored that she had become involved in some sort of Mafia activity surrounding the adult bookstore where she worked. There was a common perception in Lincoln that any business that traded in pornography was somehow tied in with the mob, though there is little evidence to support the allegations in the case of the particular shop that employed her.

Investigators diligently worked on the clues they had. Patricia’s clothing was never found, but her purse was recovered from a ditch more than a mile away from the dump site. Nothing significant could be gleaned from its discovery, however.

The fact that Patricia had been shot with two different weapons suggested at least two assailants, and this scenario was bolstered by witness testimony. Several individuals came forward and stated to police that at around one a.m. on the morning of April 18th, they had seen Patricia leaving the shop in the company of a black man and a white man, and getting into an older model vehicle that might have been a Buick or a Cadillac.

The main piece of evidence that authorities hoped would produce a lead was the jacket that had been found with Patricia’s body. Since it was not hers, it stood to reason that it had belonged to one of the killers. The jacket was made of dark blue cotton with a yellow quilted lining, and significantly, it was only one of one-thousand-seventy-six produced as a promotional item for a local feed mill. Out of all the jackets, which had been distributed to employees and customers of the feed mill throughout Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, only one-hundred-forty-three of them were extra-large, as the one found covering Patricia was.

Though the specificity of this clue seemed promising, the investigation soon hit a dead end, and no further progress was able to be made. Detectives have theorized that Patricia Webb might possibly have been murdered by Wesley Peery, a man who would later be convicted of killing Lincoln coin shop clerk Marianne Mitzner in 1975 and also confessed to several other murders before his death in prison in 1988.

The Patricia Webb case was reopened in 2007, and though police reexamined the evidence thoroughly, no new leads emerged, and the case went dormant again in 2009. Authorities still field tips about the murder, but so far, none of them have panned out, and the tragic slaying of Patricia Webb remains unresolved.