Twenty-six-year-old Roberta Elam was a native of Minnesota, but in early June 1977 had moved to a convent in Wheeling, West Virginia, and was preparing to become a nun. Known as Sister Robin to the other women at the Sisters of St. Joseph Mother House, Roberta was last seen alive on the morning of June 13th, as she grabbed a bite to eat in the convent kitchen before setting out to a pleasant and secluded field near the convent’s orchard, where the other nuns often prayed and meditated.
Several hours later, the body of Sister Robin was discovered not far from a bench where she had presumably been sitting in prayer. She had been raped and strangled. The area around her remains was strewn with cigarette ashes, and flattened sections of grass suggested that the killer had lain in wait for his victim for quite a while before pouncing on her.
The crime shocked the town of Wheeling, unsurprisingly, but only later was a connection made between the murder of Roberta Elam in West Virginia and a handful of other killings that had taken place less than fifty miles away in Pennsylvania: these included the slayings of Susan Rush, Debbie Capiola, Mary Gency, and Brenda Ritter.
In recent years, police have attempted to link Sister Robin’s murder with the DNA of David Robert Kennedy, who in 2005 was finally convicted of killing seventeen-year-old Debbie Capiola in 1977, but so far they have had no luck. Some detectives have even explored the possibility that some of the Pennsylvania and West Virginia slayings were the work of a known serial killer, such as Ted Bundy or Edward Surratt, but as of this writing, no definitive links have been made.
Crime Immemorial 