Crime Immemorial

In the summer of 1980, a young woman would go missing from her hometown of Nashua, New Hampshire and later turn up dead in the deserts of Arizona. Though she remained unidentified for decades, referred to as Pima County Jane Doe or “Flower Girl,” she was finally given her rightful name in the summer of 2015: Brenda Gerow.

In 1980, Brenda was twenty years old and working two jobs: as a clerk in a convenience store, and as a bartender at a biker joint in Massachusetts. At the time, she was dating a twenty-six-year-old man by the name of John Kalhauser, known as Jack to his friends.

At some time in July of 1980, Brenda told her family that she and Jack were either moving away together or going away on a trip, though it is unclear if she told them where they were going specifically, or when they would be returning. According to her parents, Brenda did keep in contact with them for several months following her departure, and her brother later confirmed that she had called him from New Mexico approximately two to three weeks after she left. At one stage she even told her family that she would be coming back home soon. It was a promise that she would ultimately be prevented from keeping.

When months had passed with no word from their daughter, Brenda’s parents tried to report her as a missing person, but police seemed less than helpful, informing the Gerows that Brenda was an adult and was perfectly within her rights to take off around the country without telling her family where she was.

It would be nine months before a body was found, and even then, the Gerows had no idea it belonged to Brenda until well into the twenty-first century.

On April 8th, 1981, hunters driving along Interstate 10 in Tucson spotted a denim jacket hanging from a tree just along the road. They stopped to investigate, and thereafter happened upon the decomposed body of a young woman, clad in jeans, brown shoes, and a dark blue blouse with a floral design and red, puffy sleeves.

The victim, unidentified at the time, was thought to be around five-foot-two and one-hundred-five pounds, with long, light-colored hair and a white spot on one of her upper front teeth. A post-mortem examination determined that she had been sexually assaulted and then murdered by ligature strangulation, approximately two days before her remains were found. It was also assumed, from the presence of numerous scratches on her skin, that she had been running through a wooded area shortly before her death, presumably in an attempt to escape her killer.

Fingerprints were later taken, but matched no missing persons on file. Because the distinctive blouse she was wearing led some investigators to surmise that she had been working at a nearby county fair, photos of the clothing, as well as a rudimentary sketch of the woman’s face, were released to the public, but no leads emerged from this avenue of inquiry either. For a time, it was even theorized that she was possibly a victim of Golden State Killer Joseph DeAngelo, who at that time was still unidentified.

It would be late 2014 before a definitive break in the case would occur. In that year, authorities were looking into a link between the unknown victim and a photograph they had found in the possession of a man named John Kalhauser back in 1995. Kalhauser had been arrested for assault, and the photograph—of a young woman holding a bouquet of flowers in an area of what appeared to be Massachusetts—was confiscated during a search of his home, though the suspect refused to identify the subject of the picture.

The woman in the photograph was later noticed to bear a striking resemblance to the reconstruction of the victim found in the Arizona desert in April of 1981, then known as Pima County Jane Doe. After releasing the photo to the public and then contacting the family of twenty-year-old Brenda Gerow, who had moved away from Massachusetts in the summer of 1980 with then-boyfriend John Kalhauser, a definitive identification of the murdered woman was finally made and confirmed through DNA in 2015.

Because the photograph of Brenda was found in Kalhauser’s home and had been taken between 1979 and 1981, and because Kalhauser was the last known individual to have seen Brenda alive, investigators quickly considered him a person of interest in her murder. Adding to their suspicion was the fact that Kalhauser was, in 1999, convicted of the 1995 murder of his wife Diane Van Reeth; had formerly been convicted of yet another homicide—that of Paul Chapman in 1974—and indicted for an attempted murder in 1979, though he jumped bail shortly after this indictment and lived under an assumed name for a time. He served his prison sentence in Massachusetts on the second-degree murder charge stemming from the disappearance of his wife, and was released in 2019.

Though other candidates for Brenda Gerow’s killer were considered—including an unknown man who Brenda reportedly left a nightclub with—most investigators are leaning heavily toward the theory that John Kalhauser murdered his one-time girlfriend and dumped her body in the desert. But as no solid evidence of his guilt has yet been uncovered, her death remains officially unresolved.