At a little past ten p.m. on the evening of May 18th, 1977, eighteen-year-old Brenda Lee Ritter left the residence of her boyfriend Larry Bonazza and began the short drive back to her own home in North Strabane. She never made it there, and the following morning, her vehicle was found abandoned in South Strabane.
Before an all-out search could be commenced, police officers scouring the hillsides in a helicopter saw Brenda Ritter’s body lying on the ground less than a mile away from her car. Brenda had been raped, and then strangled with a garrote fashioned from her underwear and a nearby stick.
Because authorities found it unlikely that Brenda would have given a ride to a stranger, considering a rash of murders that had been occurring in the area, some rumors began to swirl that perhaps the killer had been posing as a police officer in order to lure his victims. Fueling this hypothesis was the bizarre suicide of county Sheriff Hanna Johns, who shot himself only a few days after Brenda’s body was found. Detectives looked into this possibility, but quickly dismissed Johns as a suspect, though his memory remains linked to the crime by locals in the area to the present day.
DNA evidence seemed to eliminate a suspect named David Robert Kennedy as well, who was convicted in 2005 of the murder of Debbie Capiola. The connection between some of the other area murders and the death of Brenda Lee Ritter, then, is still unclear.
Crime Immemorial 