February 2nd, 1962 was a Friday night, and pretty high school senior Judi (sometimes spelled Judy) Reeder was planning her usual night out with friends in Bend, Oregon. The seventeen-year-old got into her car in the early evening and headed toward town, but she evidently never made it to her destination.
The following morning, her car was found abandoned on a bridge in Drake Park, and beneath the bridge, half-submerged in the icy waters of the Deschutes River, lay the body of Judi Reeder.
Initial autopsy reports suggested that the cause of death was drowning, but significantly, the coroner also discovered more than a dozen wounds and deep bruises around the young girl’s head, indicating that she had probably been beaten to near death, and had subsequently been either thrown into the river to drown, or had been left to die and had crawled to the river herself. It did not appear that she had been sexually assaulted.
Motives and suspects for the crime were difficult to establish from the very beginning of the investigation. Around twenty potential witnesses and persons of interest, including friends and classmates of the former homecoming princess, were interviewed and given polygraph tests, but one by one, all were eliminated.
Authorities were momentarily relieved when a transient named Donald Doran came forward and confessed to the murder, but it was quickly confirmed that Doran had been in another state on the night of the slaying. A man named Albert Rose, who had been traveling with Doran and was arrested alongside him, was also questioned, but had no pertinent information about the killing of Judi Reeder. Both men would eventually become patients at the Pendleton psychiatric hospital, where Albert Rose, bizarrely, would later confess to murdering his mother, who it was believed had died of natural causes approximately three years previously.
A few other promising leads were investigated, including a tip from a man who reported to police that he had recently bought a used car that had what appeared to be blood stains in the trunk. Items from the vehicle’s trunk were sent to the Portland crime lab, but no link to Judi’s murder could be established.
The case was periodically revived in Oregon newspapers in ensuing years in the hopes that new leads would be generated, but as of this writing, investigators still have no clues as to who beat Judi Reeder to death in the early days of 1962.
Crime Immemorial 