On April 18th, 2002, a man out taking a stroll found a woman’s body floating in a lake in Reynolds Nature Preserve in Morrow, Georgia. Though it was clear the woman had been murdered, her identity remained unknown for four years.
Then, in July of 2006, through a joint effort by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the missing persons unit of the Decatur Police Department, the woman was finally identified as forty-eight-year-old Christine Allen, who lived in Decatur and worked as a file clerk at an Atlanta law firm. As it turned out, her roommate had reported Christine missing on April 19th, 2002, the day after her body was found. The roommate had become concerned when she hadn’t seen or heard from Christine for the week prior to reporting the disappearance.
The police didn’t release Christine’s cause of death to the media, but left no doubt that it was a murder, and implied that she might have been killed by someone she knew.
Interestingly, the victim herself seems as though she was something of an enigma. For example, her roommate told authorities that Christine claimed her entire family was dead—her parents in a car crash, her brother a suicide—but later investigation demonstrated that Christine’s mother was alive and well, as were her four siblings, although it seems the family hadn’t heard anything from Christine for several years.
Though Christine’s brother Steve told the media that he and his sister weren’t estranged, Christine made it clear that she wanted to make her own way, and that the family basically let her get on with her own life.
Other people who knew Christine also paint a contradictory picture of her, as it appears she never told anyone the same story about her origins, leading one investigator to compare her to a secret agent. This same investigator also told the media that Christine had absolutely no personal possessions, making it very difficult for them to probe through her background for clues as to who her killer could have been.
The frustrating case remains open and unresolved.
Crime Immemorial 