Crime Immemorial

It was August 14th, 1979, and a body was discovered lying face down in a casino parking lot near the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. The victim was a white female, believed to be between fifteen and twenty-five years old, with wavy brown hair and brown eyes. Unusually for one so young, the girl had no teeth, and wore both upper and lower dentures, though the bottom plate was strangely missing.

The young woman’s identity was unknown, and she was dubbed Sahara Sue because of her proximity to the famous hotel. She had been stabbed multiple times in the abdomen, and the autopsy determined that she had died approximately three to four hours before her body was found.

The homicide investigation was hamstrung from the start, and detectives had no leads concerning either the identity of the killer or that of the victim. Fingerprints were obtained from the girl’s remains, but matched none on file, and a 2003 DNA comparison likewise yielded no clues as to who the victim was.

In 2016, police finally got a bit of a break when they discovered that the young woman’s name might have been Shauna or Shawna, and that it was possible she had lived at a nearby trailer park and was employed at the Holiday Inn on Las Vegas Boulevard. In addition, an analysis of pollen found on the victim’s jacket seemed to suggest that she had recently been in Central or Napa Valley.

In December 2023, Sahara Sue was finally identified through DNA as nineteen-year-old Gwenn Marie Story, who according to her family had left her hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio in the summer of 1979 to go to California to search for her biological father. She was accompanied on the trip by two male friends. Her relatives told investigators that they never heard from her after she departed, and her friends returned without her in August of that year, claiming they had left her in Las Vegas, Nevada. Police are currently still seeking information about the friends and Gwenn Story’s final days.