On December 20th, 1976, a teenage boy walking near one of the supports of the three-hundred-foot bridge spanning the Lehigh River in White Haven, Pennsylvania, came across a ghastly tableau: two open suitcases with a severed head, a torso, and a dead baby spilling out of them. A third, unopened suitcase lay nearby.
When officers arrived at the scene, they discovered that the third suitcase contained the arms and legs of the adult female victim. Presumably, the killer had attempted to toss the suitcases off the high bridge and into the river before speeding off in a vehicle heading west, but he had missed his target by at least twenty feet: the suitcases had landed in the nearby woods, and two of them had broken open upon impact.
Examination of the victims revealed the horrific fate they had suffered. The woman, dubbed Beth Doe, had been nine months pregnant at the time she was murdered, and the trauma had apparently caused the fetus to be expelled. Beth Doe had been viciously raped and strangled, then shot in the neck for good measure. The killer had then cut off her ears, nose, and breasts to keep as souvenirs before expertly cutting up the rest of the body with a serrated knife and dumping the pieces and the dead baby off the Lehigh River bridge.
Investigators tried to determine the identity of the victim or that of her killer by analyzing the items found along with the remains. While the suitcases themselves were not particularly unusual on their own—two of them were red, white and blue striped, while the other was a tan plaid—it seemed odd that the suitcases had been spray painted black at some stage and had the handles removed.
Police also found wet fragments of the September 26th edition of the New York Sunday newspaper, which they later determined had been printed somewhere in northern New Jersey. The origin of the orange chenille bedspread recovered from one of the suitcases, however, was never able to be confirmed.
Detectives then turned to the victim herself. She was white, and aged around seventeen to twenty-four years old. Later forensic analysis determined that she had likely been born in Serbia or Croatia, but had lived in the United States for the previous five to ten years, probably in Tennessee or somewhere else in the south.
She was a small woman, standing only about four-foot-eleven to five-foot-four, and had shoulder-length, dark brown hair. She had two moles on her face which the pathologist believed had developed during her pregnancy, and her teeth showed extensive signs of decay, as well as several fillings.
Strangely, detectives found letters and numbers written in ink on the victim’s left hand, but were unable to determine if she had written them herself, or if someone else had written them. The letters were WSR, though the numbers were less clear: the first one was a four or a five, the second one a four or a seven.
Several facial reconstruction images were produced between 1976 and 2015, but the identity of Beth Doe was not definitely established until 2021, when DNA revealed the victim to be fifteen-year-old Evelyn Colon of Jersey City, New Jersey, who was of Puerto Rican origin.
Once the identity of the victim was known, it wasn’t difficult to zero in on the teenager’s likely killer: her then boyfriend, Luis Sierra, who at the time of the murder was nineteen years old and was the father of her unborn child. Sierra had once lived next door to the Colon family, and once he got Evelyn pregnant, her parents allowed the two of them to move into an apartment together.
Reportedly, a short time prior to the slaying, Evelyn Colon contacted her mother, saying she wasn’t feeling all that well and asking her mother to bring her some soup. However, when Colon’s mother arrived at the apartment, nobody was there. Neighbors then told Colon’s family that Evelyn and Luis Sierra had moved away.
In January of 1977, the family received a letter from Sierra, postmarked from Connecticut, in which he wrote that Evelyn had given birth to a boy and that everything was fine, adding that Evelyn would contact them if she needed anything.
Colon’s family initially didn’t report her missing because they believed she was safe with Sierra. But after a few years with no contact, they attempted to report her disappearance to authorities; because of the letter, though, police declined to file a report.
Sadly, by the time Colon was identified, her parents had both passed away. Luis Sierra was subsequently charged with the victim’s murder in spring of 2021; at the time of his arrest, he was residing in Ozone Park, New York and was sixty-three years old. He was extradited back to Pennsylvania, and first appeared in court on April 28th of the same year. His case is ongoing.
Crime Immemorial 