Twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth “Betty Jane” Berquist lived in an apartment on Seneca Street in Greenock, Pennsylvania with her two-year-old daughter Tara. Betty Jane had previously had a job as a server at the Canopy Restaurant in McKeesport while she was making her way through nursing school, but just recently she had got her first nursing position at the hospital now known as UPMC McKeesport.
On Saturday, December 17, 1977, Betty Jane finished up her shift at the hospital and then dropped off her daughter at her parents’ house so that she could go out for the evening. She evidently had a date, though she didn’t mention the name of her date or where the pair planned on going. Still clad in her nurse’s uniform, she left her parents’ residence and headed back to her own apartment a short distance away to get ready.
But Betty Jane never came back to pick up her child, and as the hours went by, her worried parents phoned the authorities and reported her missing. Upon searching her apartment, police discovered Betty Jane’s nursing uniform lying across the bed. Her car was still parked in the driveway, and her purse was left in the residence untouched, with all of her identification still in it. Of Betty Jane herself, though, there was no sign whatsoever.
Investigators speculated that perhaps an ex-boyfriend might have been to blame for Betty Jane’s disappearance; she had recently been discharged from the hospital for a severe head injury, and word around town was that her former partner was abusive. But until Betty Jane could be found, speculation was largely all the detectives had, and it would be four months before that sad event would occur.
On April 15th, 1978, a man named James Grimm walked into his backyard and noticed that his dog was playing with something that looked sort of peculiar. Upon closer inspection, the object the dog had found turned out to be a human skull.
The skull was eventually determined to belong to Elizabeth Jane Berquist, who had vanished from her Greenock home the previous December. Despite a massive search of the surrounding area, the rest of Betty Jane’s body was never found, and her cause of death was uncertain.
Authorities had a few definite suspects in the case, but the scanty evidence insured that none of them was ever formally charged. The case was reopened in 2013, though detectives are doubtful that the crime will ever be solved unless someone with definitive information about the case decides to come forward.
Crime Immemorial 