August 5th, 1979 was a Sunday, and fourteen-year-old Karen Oatley decided to go on a bike ride, setting out from her home in Lansing, Michigan at approximately six p.m. When she hadn’t returned after four hours, her worried parents reported her missing.
At around noon on the following day, Karen’s grandfather found the girl’s abandoned brown ten-speed behind Gardner Junior High School and shortly after that, police discovered her lifeless body in the same area, only blocks from her home. She had been suffocated, and her throat was slashed.
Police followed up on several tips from the public, and evidently one person of interest was questioned and given a polygraph test, but other than that, the case was plagued by a heartbreaking lack of leads.
Two days after Karen Oatley was found dead in Lansing, a nine-year-old girl named Kelly Martin was found alive after having been abducted in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Her kidnapper, sixty-seven-year-old Harold Sumpter, was taken into custody, and it was revealed that he had only just been released from prison on July 9th, after having served time for a previous abduction.
On the same day, August 8th, Ricky Bills, Jr. and James Harris were charged with kidnapping and murder in the death of seventeen-year-old Lorri Richardson in Jackson, Michigan, only a little over one-hundred miles from Lansing.
Whether the three crimes were related is not known, but the murder of Karen Oatley has never been resolved, and the case remains open.
Crime Immemorial 