Not long after midnight on January 24th, 2000, emergency services were called to the scene of a fire in the parking lot of the College Avenue Baptist Church in San Diego, California. Once the fire was out, authorities were shocked to find a badly burned body amid the ashes.
A post-mortem determined that the remains belonged to a white female in her twenties, standing about five-foot-nine and weighing around two hundred pounds. The victim had been stabbed and strangled before being set alight, and her killer had also removed both of her hands and part of her left calf, presumably to delay identification.
Sadly, this brutal tactic seemed to be effective, because the young woman remained unidentified until 2021. In November of that year, police announced that DNA had revealed the victim to be twenty-one-year-old Nicole Weis, who had run away from her home in Michigan in the early 1990s. Her family had lost track of her in the ensuing years; she was believed to be living in Los Angeles at the time she was murdered.
The case remains open, and a thousand-dollar reward is on offer from the San Diego Police Department for information leading to the conviction of Nicole Weis’s killer.
Crime Immemorial 