Sixteen-year-old Pamela Conyers was a student at Glen Burnie High School in Maryland. At a little past eight p.m. on the evening of Friday, October 16th, Pamela had just returned home from a pep rally, and planned to spend the hours before bedtime working on the outfit she was going to wear to the school dance on the following night.
However, during her preparations, she discovered that she needed some white shoe dye, so she asked her mother for the car keys and a few dollars so she could drive to the nearby Harundale Mall to buy some. She set out on this errand at half past eight, and never returned.
Three days later, on Monday afternoon, a man spotted the family’s 1967 Dodge abandoned in the wooded median strip of Route 100, a road which was partially under construction at the time. Investigators fanned out from the car, and soon came across the body of Pamela Conyers, lying about three hundred yards away.
Pamela had been raped and strangled. She was found mostly clothed, though the sweater she’d been wearing was inside out, and her underwear were missing. Likewise, neither her purse nor the car keys was ever found.
A clerk at the Harundale Mall confirmed that Pamela had been in the store that night and had purchased a bottle of shoe dye, leading police to believe that her killer had perhaps been waiting in or near the car for her when she left the mall and returned to the parking lot. A thorough examination of the vehicle determined that it had been completely wiped clean of fingerprints.
Dozens of known sex offenders in the area were subsequently questioned, but all were eventually released for lack of evidence. The already paltry number of leads quickly began to dissipate, and by the time a few weeks had passed, the investigation went into a holding pattern which lasted for more than half a century.
In March of 2023, however, authorities announced that they had identified a suspect in the murder using genetic genealogy: Forrest Clyde Williams III, who would have been twenty-one years old at the time of the slaying. Williams had been arrested several times in the early 1970s for drunk and disorderly behavior, so police were able to locate a mug shot of him that was taken at around the same time as he allegedly killed Pamela Conyers.
Williams, who died in 2018 of natural causes, was not believed to have known Pamela prior to the murder. Although investigators told the media that had Williams still been alive, there would be sufficient evidence to charge him with the homicide, they emphasized that the case is still open, as there may have been others involved who have yet to be identified. For this reason, they are still encouraging anyone who may have information about the crime to come forward.
Crime Immemorial 