The Lady of the Dunes

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This episode takes us back into the world of true crime since you guys seem to like it so much! As per the usual we are looking at an unusual unsolved murder case. The reason it's unusual is that we have no idea who did it, we have no motive, and we have no idea who the victim is. See, unusual! Could the victim have been one of the casualties of a crazy serial killer? Could she have been an extra in the movie Jaws?  Nobody has the answers to these questions. And as of now the mystery remains as to the identity of The Lady Of The Dunes! 

 

As far as this case is concerned there's not a ton as far the actual murder goes. Given the fact that the victim and the killer are unknown there's not much to go on. But here's what we know.

 

On July 26, 1974, twelve-year-old Leslie Metcalfe was walking with her parents and their friends through the dunes at Race Point Beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Their friends’ dog was tagging along with them when it became excited by something and rushed into a stand of pines. Leslie heard the dog barking and ran over to see what was going on. That was when she found the Lady of the Dunes lying face-down with her hands amputated. Leslie could see that the woman was nude and had clothing neatly folded under her head. She ran back to her parents and immediately told them what she saw. Her father went to verify the gruesome scene and, subsequently, notified the park rangers.

 

Another young girl, Sandra Lee, who is now a crime author, claims that she too saw the Lady of the Dunes as she was taking a walk with her dog a couple of days before Leslie found the body. Sandra says she noticed that the lady had a head injury. She could also see what looked like a slash across the woman’s neck. However, Sandra was too afraid to tell anyone about it. Therefore, most people credit Leslie for the discovery of the woman. 

 

When police got to the crime scene, they found the victim lying on one side of a green beach towel. A pair of Wrangler jeans and a blue bandana lay under her head in what appeared to be a makeshift pillow. Where her hands should have been, there were piles of pine needles. The perpetrator had practically decapitated her and pulled out several of her teeth. Detectives theorized that the removal of hands and teeth were efforts to conceal the woman’s identity. One side of her head showed signs of blunt force trauma, which investigators determined was the cause of death. There were also signs of sexual assault. About 15 feet from where the victim’s body lay, there were tire tracks. Leading away from the corpse were two sets of footprints. The estimates for time of death ranged from ten days to three weeks. One promising lead broke early in the investigation. Pathologists realized that the victim in Race Point dunes had high-quality dental work worth thousands of dollars done on her remaining teeth. This dental work, classified as ‘New York style,’ did not come cheaply. The age of the victim was somewhere between 20 and 49. However, a more accurate estimate is 25 to 39. The five-foot six-inch woman had an athletic physique and auburn hair. She may have been asleep at the time of the murder; the blanket under her body was undisturbed. 

 

As far as the investigation goes, it was tough for anyone to make any headway due to the fact that they couldn't identify the victim. Detectives poured over missing persons reports trying to find a match. Others tried to follow the lead of the expensive dental to no avail. Yet another group hunted for a vehicle that could have left the tire tracks at the scene. And while all of this was going on, more police were searching the cringe scene another time but did not come up with anything. Appeals to the public with a sketch of the victim garnered some fresh leads. One woman from Maryland got in touch with detectives regarding her sister that had gone missing. Like the victim, the sister had auburn hair. Both sisters had lost contact with one another when the missing sister moved home to Boston. However, the police never confirmed a match. 

 

Another possibility was that the woman was a female bank robber. Her name was Rory Gene Kesinger. She had been arrested for the attempted murders of two police officers in Pembroke, Massachusetts. She was initially arrested with members of an organized crime group she belonged to.

 

Police are suspicious that Kesinger was killed by members of the group following her escape for their own protection, and if she was, her body would have been disposed of locally. One of those arrested with her in 1973 claimed the rumor of Kesinger's murder was true. 

 

Police considered this a vital lead, and DNA information was collected in the years following. Initial comparison proved inconclusive; a 2002 test eliminated the possible match. Another lead down the drain. 

 

A more recent and interesting theory had been proposed by none other than the son of horror legend Stephen King. In 2015, Joe Hill, king's son, posited a theory that the Lady of the dunes could actually have been an extra in the movie Jaws! He was already very familiar with the case and while watching the movie he noticed something that struck a chord halfway through the movie. One of the extras that appeared for a scene shot in Martha’s Vineyard wore a pair of blue jeans and a bandana. As well as similar clothing, this young woman bore a passing resemblance to the victim. Jaws began filming in May of 1974, just a couple months before the Cape Cod murder. Provincetown is only a few hours from Martha’s Vineyard. Such an idea might seem far-fetched, but at least one FBI agent has postulated that ‘odder ideas have cracked cold cases.’ 

 

Without an identity the police also had no idea who may have murdered the woman. There are a couple interesting leads with major criminal ties. 

 

The first one is Whitey Bulger. Yes, that Whitey Bulger, the mobster! Bulger was a mob boss who led The winter hill gang in Massachusetts. He was also an FBI informant. On December 23, 1994, Bulger fled the Boston area and went into hiding after his former FBI handler, John Connolly, tipped him off about a pending RICO indictment against him. Bulger remained at large for sixteen years. After his 2011 arrest, federal prosecutors tried Bulger for nineteen murders based on the grand jury testimony from Kevin Weeks and other former criminal associates. At one point police learned that Bulger was seen with a woman who resembled the lady of the dunes around the time she was presumed to have been killed. Bulger was also known to remove teeth and haha and fingers of his victims similar to how the Lady was found. Unfortunately Bulger was murdered in prison before a link could be established. 

 

Several serial killers were also looked at as being suspects. One of those was Tony Costa. Tony Costa was suspected in the killings of 8 women while being convicted of 2.  The case gained international attention when district attorney Edmund Dinis, in comments to the media, claimed "The hearts of each girl had been removed from the bodies and were not in the graves…Each body was cut into as many parts as there are joints." Dinis also claimed that there were teeth marks found on the bodies. While he was an early suspect in the case he was eventually eliminated.

 

The second serial killer that's connected to the case is freaking Hadden Clark! If you're not aware of Hadden Clark then you must not be into serial killers. And we know that comes off as an odd statement but… Whatever. As for Clark we could definitely do a whole episode on this dude if we were ever so inclined but we'll give you a summed up account of him taken from parts of his visit as found on murderpedia.com. 

 

             Hadden Irving Clark (born July 31, 1952) is an American murderer and suspected serial killer, currently serving two 30-year sentences at Eastern Correctional Institution in Maryland for the murders of 6-year-old Michelle Dorr in 1986 and 23-year-old Laura Houghteling in 1992. He was also given a 10-year sentence for robbery after stealing from a former landlord.

 

Family life

Hadden Clark is the second of four children, and was born and raised in Troy, New York. His brother, Bradfield Clark, strangled a woman in California before eating several body parts. Clark's parents were both alcoholics and often fought with each other in front of their children. Clark's mother would dress him in girls' clothes when drunk and addressed him as "Kristen.” His father eventually committed suicide. As a teenager, Clark would torture and kill animals owned by children who bullied him.

 

Clark trained as a chef and served in the United States Navy until he was discharged after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Over the years, he held a number of menial jobs but was mostly homeless. Clark was arrested multiple times for theft and retaliation. He was also arrested for robbery after he vandalized a former landlord's property and stole several items.

 

Murders

On May 31, 1986, Clark was ordered by his brother to move out of his Silver Spring, Maryland home. Michelle Dorr, a six-year-old friend of his niece, came over looking for her. Clark took her up to an upstairs room and stabbed Michelle to death. Clark then drank some of her blood and stuffed her in a duffel bag. He buried her in a park 12 miles away.

 

On October 18, 1992, he killed 23-year-old Laura Houghteling in Bethesda, Maryland. Clark was working as a gardener for Laura's mother Penny when she accused Hadden of stealing tools from her backyard shed. Clark entered the house through the back door and stabbed Laura to death in her bedroom with a kitchen knife and suffocated her with a pillow. He carried her body in a bedsheet through a wooded area and buried her a half-mile away.

 

He left behind a pillow with his fingerprint as he moved the body. He later returned and dressed up in a wig and women's clothes and left through the front door to make people think Laura left the house alive to buy time to clean the scene. Police soon discovered the bloody pillow and linked the print on it to Clark. Clark confessed and led police to Laura's body eight months after the murder.

 

Police later began looking at him for Michelle Dorr's murder after discovering he lived just two houses down from Michelle's father at the time she disappeared. Police later tested his brother's old house for blood and found Michelle's blood in the wooden floorboards of an upstairs bedroom. Clark later led police to her body in January 2000. Clark has confessed to murdering dozens of people starting as a teenager. How does this coincide with our story? In 2004, Clark sent a letter claiming he had killed an unidentified woman in Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1974 known as Lady of the Dunes. Clark explained that he had buried evidence from the crime in his grandfather's garden and that he knew the woman's identity but was not going to tell authorities because he claimed they mistreated him. Hadden said of the claim: "I could have told the police what her name was, but after they beat the shit out of me, I wasn't going to tell them shit. ... This murder is still unsolved and what the police are looking for is in my grandfather's garden." Police aren't sure whether there is any merit to this confession but He led police on December 15, 2000 to his grandparents' former property where they discovered a plastic bucket of over 200 pieces of jewelry. Among the items were Laura Houghteling's high school class ring. Clark claims they were "trophies" taken from his victims.  So were any of these trinkets items that belonged to our Lady? We may never know. 

 

The Lady of the Dunes’ body lies at the St. Peter’s Cemetery, except her head, which law enforcement kept for ongoing criminal investigation. The first facial reconstruction using clay came in 1970. Then in 2010, a high tech scan helped to create another model of her face. Her body was exhumed twice. In 1980, forensic investigators took blood samples from her corpse. However, the evidence did not offer any new information about her murder. Then in 2000, they unearthed her again for DNA testing to see if she could be the offspring of Rory Kesinger’s mother. As noted, she was not.

 

     In 2019, District Attorney for the Cape and Islands Michael O’Keefe opened up a new investigation for the Lady of the Dunes. He plans to utilize ‘genetic genealogy,’ which is a method in which criminal investigators use genetic databases to find family members of a perpetrator or victim to solve crimes. Evidently, this method helped detectives find suspects for 28 cases in 2018, including the ‘Golden State Killer,’ Joseph James DeAngelo, after a nearly 50-year-old search.

 

So there you have it, the lady of the dunes. Not only unsolved but we don't even know the identity of the victim. A couple of high profile suspects but nothing more to go on. We may never know who she is or who killed her. People in the area and those close to the case are holding out hope though. 

 

https://www.ranker.com/list/best-massachusetts-horror-movies/ranker-film