Crime Immemorial

Autumn of 1980 began to fall, and out in the American West, two brothers were driving along a dirt road in Henderson, Nevada. It was about nine-thirty p.m. on the evening of Sunday, October 5th.

Suddenly, one of the brothers, off-duty police officer John Williams, spotted something strange lying in the scrub off State Road 146. The men pulled over and got out of their truck, and upon closer inspection, realized that the object they had seen was the nude body of a young girl, lying face-down and seemingly posed on the ground.

The victim had been dispatched with appalling violence. It appeared that she had been punched repeatedly in the face, so hard that one of her bottom teeth had been knocked out. She had also been bludgeoned several times in the back of the head with what the coroner believed was likely a framing or roofing hammer. And as a grim coup de grace, her killer had also stabbed her seven times in the lower back with some unknown, two-pronged implement.

There was also evidence of sexual assault, and whoever had murdered the girl had washed the body, and left a scrap of a yellowish-orange shower curtain nearby, suggesting that the victim had been slain at a house or motel room in some other location and subsequently dumped along the roadside. A post-mortem estimated that she had been dead for less than twenty-four hours before her remains were discovered.

A description of the young woman was duly released to the public. She was thought to be somewhere between fourteen and twenty-five years old, but most likely around seventeen or eighteen. She was white, stood five-feet-two-inches tall, and weighed about one-hundred-three pounds. She had light brown, shoulder-length hair, and eyes that were variously described as blue, hazel, or possibly green.

In addition, she had several fillings, a notable gap between her upper right central and lateral incisors, and impacted wisdom teeth. She had also undergone a dental procedure known as suturing to straighten one of her teeth, leading investigators to believe that she came from a relatively affluent background, as the procedure was expensive and purely cosmetic.

Further, her ears were pierced, and she wore silver nail polish. She also sported a fresh, amateur tattoo of the letter S, etched in blue ink on the inside of her right forearm. It is unclear whether she drew the tattoo herself or whether it was administered by someone else, possibly her killer.

Detectives naturally commenced a far-reaching probe to identify the victim as well as bring her murderer to justice. But despite all their efforts, the girl remained nameless for decades, and was known only as Arroyo Grande Jane Doe. John Williams, the man who found her remains, paid for her headstone, and visited her burial site regularly with his wife in the ensuing years.

The body of Arroyo Grande Jane Doe was exhumed four times—in 2002, 2003, 2009, and 2016—and fingerprints, facial reconstructions, and a DNA profile were all kept on record in the hopes that the victim and her killer would finally be identified.

At last, in late December of 2021, the young woman was given back her identity: she was seventeen-year-old Tammy Corrine Terrell of Roswell, New Mexico, who had last been seen alive on September 28th, 1980, after she was dropped off at the Roswell State Fair. Later that same night, she was allegedly spotted in an area restaurant in the company of a white man and a white woman, but the identity of her killer or killers is still unknown. The investigation remains open and active as of this writing.