Crime Immemorial

The date was April 24th, 1981, and farmer Greg Bridenbaugh was driving along Greenlee Road near the city of Troy, Ohio, when he saw what appeared to be an incongruous piece of clothing in the dirt just off the shoulder. Upon stopping his vehicle and examining the scene more closely, he was shocked to discover the remains of a red-headed girl curled into a fetal position and lying in a ditch.

The victim was fully dressed, but wore no shoes or socks. The fact that the bottoms of her feet were clean indicated that she had been killed elsewhere and then dumped along the road, which was only five miles from the busy Interstate 75. An autopsy determined that the girl had probably only been dead for a few hours before her remains were found.

She was thought to be in her late teens to early twenties, stood around five-foot-five, and weighed approximately one-hundred-twenty-five pounds. She had light brown eyes, freckles, a sun-tinged complexion, and a small, pointed nose. Her red hair was braided in two plaits on either side of her face, and bound with blue rubber bands. She was clad in a pair of Wrangler jeans, a brown and orange sweater, and a very distinctive, fringed deerskin poncho that appeared handmade and was lined with purple fabric. It was this striking garment which had first alerted Greg Bridenbaugh to her presence, and it also gave her the name by which she was known until her identity was restored nearly four decades later: Buckskin Girl.

The coroner found no evidence of sexual assault, though the victim had clearly been beaten severely around the head and neck, and had suffered a lacerated liver. The cause of death was determined to be strangulation.

Authorities at first surmised that the young woman had been a runaway, as they were quickly able to determine that she was not from Ohio. Though there had been at least one unknown serial killer prowling the particular area where her body was discovered—a killer who purportedly went by the CB handle “Dr. No” and exclusively targeted exotic dancers and sex workers—Buckskin Girl did not seem to fit this profile, and had not been raped like the other victims of this elusive perpetrator.

Fingerprints and a facial reconstruction were duly produced, but years passed with no progress toward identifying the woman or her likely killer. Then, in 2016, analysis of particles on the victim’s clothing indicated strongly that the girl had been wandering around the country for some time prior to her death, making stops in the northeast as well as Fort Worth, Texas and southern Oklahoma.

And in 2018, after the victim’s DNA was analyzed by the DNA Doe Project, the young woman was definitively identified as twenty-one-year-old Marcia King, who had last made contact with friends and relatives in late 1980, in Little Rock, Arkansas. After her name was made public, witnesses came forward and claimed to have seen her in Louisville, Kentucky approximately two weeks before she was found murdered.

Though Marcia had never been officially reported missing, as her family simply believed she was traveling the United States and living her own life, her mother had never ceased looking for her, and had deliberately remained in the same house and kept the same phone number, in case her daughter should decide to return. Sadly, Marcia had only been alive for a few months following her departure from home.

Beginning in 1991, investigators attempted to establish a link between the death of Marcia King and the serial killer who was preying on sex workers in Ohio, but though some aspects of the crimes were similar—the fact that the victims had all been beaten and strangled, for example, and had some pieces of clothing and jewelry taken by the killer—other attributes did not seem to jibe, such as the fact that Marcia had not been sexually assaulted, was very clean and well-groomed, and had been simply left in a ditch as opposed to being wrapped in a sleeping bag and kept refrigerated for a time, as at least one of the serial killer’s other victims had been. The theory was also put forth that a different serial killer, one who had perpetrated a series known as the Redhead Murders, might be responsible, but this line of inquiry was also eventually ruled out.

The possibility remains that Marcia was hitchhiking around the country and ran into the wrong person, or alternately was killed by an individual she was involved in a romantic relationship with. Though the King family was grateful to finally be able to lay their daughter to rest, the question of who murdered her still remains an open wound.