The 100th Episode of the podcast is a special super-sized show.
This episode focuses on everything to do with the infamous Lady of the Dunes Cape Cod murder mystery.
We dive deep into the case itself, the documentary produced by Frank Durant, the forthcoming book I wrote, and the startling new revelation of the Lady of the Dunes being identified as Ruth Marie Terry.
This super-sized show is made up of a special four-part podcast mini-series that was due to be available exclusively on the upcoming website The Lady of the Dunes.com.
However as a thank you to everyone who has listened now through 100 episodes, it was decided to share these mini podcasts as one big show here.
Whether a true crime buff or simply someone looking to learn about this case for the first time, this special 100th episode will provide any listener with what they are looking for.
Thank you to everyone who has tuned in to any of the first 100 episodes of the podcast. I appreciate all of you taking the time to check out my Cape Cod and New England passion project.
Helpful Links from this Episode(available through Buzzsprout)
Listen to Episode 99 here.
The 100th Episode of the podcast is a special super-sized show.
This episode focuses on everything to do with the infamous Lady of the Dunes Cape Cod murder mystery.
We dive deep into the case itself, the documentary produced by Frank Durant, the forthcoming book I wrote, and the startling new revelation of the Lady of the Dunes being identified as Ruth Marie Terry.
This super-sized show is made up of a special four-part podcast mini-series that was due to be available exclusively on the upcoming website The Lady of the Dunes.com.
However as a thank you to everyone who has listened now through 100 episodes, it was decided to share these mini podcasts as one big show here.
Whether a true crime buff or simply someone looking to learn about this case for the first time, this special 100th episode will provide any listener with what they are looking for.
Thank you to everyone who has tuned in to any of the first 100 episodes of the podcast. I appreciate all of you taking the time to check out my Cape Cod and New England passion project.
Helpful Links from this Episode(available through Buzzsprout)
Listen to Episode 99 here.
Part 1: The Case
In July 1974, in the remote dunes of Provincetown on Cape Cod in the state of Massachusetts, one of the most enduring and gruesome unsolved crimes of the 20th century occurred. The nude body of a young woman was found mutilated in a ghastly way, her hands missing, her head nearly severed, and some teeth pulled out, all in the hopes of concealing her identity. For nearly 50 years, this mission was accomplished, but now, in 2022, she has been identified. Here is the story of the Lady of the Dunes murder mystery.
On the hot afternoon of Friday, July 26, 1974, a woman's body was found in the dunes roughly a mile east of the Race Point Ranger Station in Provincetown, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. A young girl named Leslie Metcalfe had been chasing a dog when the dog stopped and began barking at something. When the girl caught up to the dog, she saw what she thought was initially a deer laying in a pile of pine needles, some sand surrounded by scrub pine trees. It didn't take too long for young Leslie to realize that this was not a deer. It was, in fact, a human body.
The body was in an advanced state of decomposition from sitting in the hot July sun for potentially up to a few weeks. Leslie found her mother, and the two of them went to find somebody in authority to bring back to the scene. The first such authority to get there was park ranger James Hankins. He was quoted in a local newspaper interview saying that the scene was ‘ghastly.’
The body in the scrub pines was determined to be female anywhere between 20 and 40 years old, roughly 5’ 6 ½” tall, and 145 pounds. She had long auburn or reddish blonde hair tied in a ponytail with a rubber elastic. Her nude body was lying face down on half of a light green, heavy cotton beach blanket with her head resting on a pair of folded blue jeans and a blue bandana nearby.
Upon closer inspection, the scene was even more gruesome than you could imagine. The woman's hands had been removed with one arm removed closer to the elbow, which is presumably to preclude fingerprint identification and other distinguishing markings that could have been on that forearm. Although the exact means of death might not have been able to be identified, it seems like it was blunt force trauma that crushed the left side of her skull. In addition, the young woman's head was nearly severed from her body with an instrument that was possibly similar to a military trenching tool, although no weapon was found at the scene.
Park ranger Hankins was quoted in a Boston newspaper saying there was no sign of a struggle, and even the grounds and sand around where the body was found looked like they hadn't been disturbed. Initial coroner's reports had her death occurring anywhere from ten days to three weeks before the discovery.
Anyone familiar with Cape Cod summers, which can be quite hot and humid, can just think back and imagine something being left out in the hot beach sand for upwards of possibly three weeks and imagining what that would do to a body. A simple crime scene photo is available on Wikipedia showing the body lying on its side, facing away from the camera towards the patch of scrub pines. It's hard to tell from the photo since it's black and white, but people at the time said that her skin had the appearance of a rotting black banana peel.
Once the initial discovery was made and the police were alerted and the body was removed from the sand, it seemed like almost immediately there were stumbling blocks like the investigation was going through mud. The attempts to identify the woman were unsuccessful at the time. In a Boston newspaper article that was nearly five months after the body was found, there were very few leads. Two sets of footprints had been found nearby, as well as a set of tire tracks located about fifty feet from the body. However, there had yet to be any suspects that were seen as case breakers.
This was not due to a lack of effort from the local police, specifically Police Chief James Meads, who made it his life's mission to try to solve this case. Sadly, Police Chief Meads died in 2011 without seeing any resolution to this case. With the woman unable to be identified and thus no family to contact, no history, and no story to be known, she was given the simple nickname of ‘the Lady of the Dunes.’
With no family or hometown where her body could be sent for a proper burial, she was buried at St. Peter's Cemetery in Provincetown on October 19, 1974. She was given a simple granite marker that stated: ‘Unidentified Female Body Found, Race Point Dunes, July 26, 1974.’
The body of the Lady of the Dunes was found in an area not far from some of the remote dune shacks located in an area called the Province Lands. There are a total of nineteen shacks that are built out there. Many of them are more than a century old with some passed down in families for generations. Maybe not quite as much today but back half a century ago it was very much a tight-knit community where all the families knew each other would go out there in the summer. It was a vacation within a vacation on Cape Cod. The discovery of such a savage murder within the area of those dune shacks shocked the residents and kind of shattered the illusion of the little oasis out there in the dunes.
Those that are familiar with the dune shacks, or those that have been out there, know that it is inhospitable terrain. There is soft sand, rolling dunes, and marshy areas that tend to flood in the summer. The idea of a body being out there in the state would have been seen as unbelievable before that July day.
Once the Lady of the Dunes had been found and removed, it did not take long for word to spread into town. Cape Cod was, and still is in many ways, a very tight-knit community. It's seen as a vacation destination, a paradise by many. The news of this savage murder spread quickly across Cape Cod, Massachusetts, New England, and the country.
As previously stated, despite the best efforts of Provincetown Police Chief James Meads, the Lady of the Dunes could not be identified. Pertinent questions kept popping up. Who was she? Why was she killed? Who killed her? How did she end up so deep in those dunes?
Growing up on Cape Cod and being familiar with this story, the often peddled motive as to why she was out there was that it was a lover's quarrel which was why the sand wasn't disturbed. She was not expecting to be attacked. The answers came slowly, if at all.
A little sidetrack. To better understand the shock of the Lady of the Dunes case, it's important to go back to Cape Cod in the early 1970s. The year-round population on Cape Cod in 1970 was 96,656. For reference in 2020, it was 228,996, more than two and a half times 1970. It was a time when the hippie generation was still strong. Bell bottoms, Volkswagen Beetles, free love, and a more transient nature with some of that generation going from place to place exploring. It's an admirable quality to have, to pack up a car with some belongings and drive to see what the country has to offer you.
That moving from place to place, with no one knowing where you are at times, can lead to something like the Lady of the Dunes. Someone ends up in a place where they are not from and nobody knows them and nobody knows where to find their family. In the late 60s, and early 70s Cape Cod was a hippie's paradise. It was a place where you could go and get lost. Still to this day, the Cape Cod National Seashore is more than 44,000 acres of mostly open land. It was the same 50 years ago. There were miles and miles of open beach, a lot of it with nobody around. It was common back then for people to just sleep on the beach, there was no fear, and it felt safe. That feeling of safety is interesting to think about because only a few years before the Lady of the Dunes, Tony Costa went on his infamous murder spree in the town of Truro.
As previously stated, the Jane Doe was given the nickname of The Lady of the Dunes. For 48 years, her identity remained unknown. There had been extensive dental work done and many different composites done of her face. These composites evolved over time. For many years a popular theory was that The Lady of the Dunes was a woman named Rory Jean Kesinger. Kesinger was a young criminal. She was part of a gun-running and drug-smuggling group that had been able to elude capture from authorities in Alaska, Texas, Kansas, and California. In May 1973, Kesinger was finally caught in Pembroke, Massachusetts. She was able to procure an officer's gun during a scuffle but was unable to use it before being subdued.
Kesinger was taken to Plymouth County Jail on May 26, 1973. While awaiting her trial and likely a lengthy jail sentence, Kesinger used a smuggled hacksaw to cut through the bars of her cell. She then repelled down the wall using bed sheets and escaped in a waiting getaway car. It was literally like something out of a movie. Upon her escape, Kesinger has never been seen again. She was not connected to the Lady of the Dunes until 1990. Former Provincetown detective Warren Tobias believed that Kessinger was the unidentified female body found in the dunes. She matched the body found in age range and most physical features. Tobias said in an interview with the Provincetown Banner newspaper in 1995 that he thought Kesinger was murdered by accomplices that feared she might turn snitch and her body was subsequently dumped in the dunes.
The Lady of the Dunes’ body was exhumed three different times in 1982, 2000, and 2013. The second time, in 2000, she was exhumed in the hopes of using DNA technology to identify her. A sample had been taken from Rory Kesinger's mother for comparison and the results seemed to rule out Kesinger as the Lady of the Dunes, at least according to those who did the testing and saw the results.
An interesting side note coming out of the fact that the Lady of the Dunes has been identified as Ruth Marie Terry is that it shines a light back on Rory Jean Kesinger. She has not been seen since 1973 and it does lead to curiosity as to what happened to her. Was she murdered by accomplices but left somewhere else in this country? Is she still alive? She was 24 when she was arrested in 1973. That would make her approximately 73 years old today. So it is highly possible that she eluded capture for all these years and is still alive somewhere in the world.
For a long time, up to 2022, the story was the people that did the testing of the DNA and saw the results said it didn't look like it was Rory Jean Kessinger. How many people saw the results and how many did the testing? Could they have been told to keep it quiet if it was her? We now know that that wasn't the case, but that was another popular theory.
In May 2010, new facial recognition software allowed forensic experts from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Smithsonian Institute to create a composite of the Lady of the Dunes’ face, again in the hopes of her being identified. Provincetown police chief at the time, Jeff Jaran, brought the Lady of the Dunes’ skull down to Washington, DC. There a new 3D model was made. These composites of her face are easily found online, there are five or six. Despite that new composite image, it was another twelve years before she was identified.
Sadly, unsolved murders are not uncommon in the United States. According to the FBI's Uniformed Crime Report data, as of the year 2020, there were 250,000 current unsolved murders in the United States. That number is estimated to grow by roughly 6,000 each year. Some of the most infamous unsolved murders and murderers include the Black Dahlia, Jon Benet Ramsay, the Zodiac Killer, and Jack the Ripper in England.
For those that live with an unsolved murder or a missing person, it must be so frustrating and just psychologically torturing to not have the answers. Throughout the end of the 20th century, there was only so much that could be done to identify somebody without hands for fingerprinting. With dental records proving inconclusive, it seemed as though all the police could do was wait for the killer to slip up.
In the decades since the lady of the Dunes was found, there have been potential suspects, some that seemed feasible, others that seemed convenient, some that seemed like pie in the sky. Serial killer. Hadden Clark once confessed to killing the Lady of the Dunes. He was also diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic with his story changing repeatedly. There was the talk of it somehow being connected to Whitey Bulger. Although Bulger had a deep connection to Provincetown in the 1970s, it was more convenient and pie in the sky that because he was in Provincetown and an infamous mobster he just happened to be involved in the Lady of the Dunes murder.
The talk of it being a lover's quarrel that turned violent doesn't hold water when you realize where the body was found and how ghastly mutilated it was. There was talk at the time and a sense that it could have been a rogue fisherman because they would know how to filet a body like a fish. Another theory was because of the transient nature of Cape Cod and Provincetown at the time, it could have been somebody that just came into town, did the deed, and left.
It was believed from the start that it was not somebody from Provincetown. As previously mentioned Cape Cod is a small, close-knit community still to this day in some ways. Word would have spread quickly that somebody from town was missing and that never occurred. The thought was that the Lady of the Dunes was somebody from somewhere else. They could have been working in the summer or vacationing. July is a hugely popular month for tourists to come down. She could have been a college girl down for the summer, met somebody who ended up being sketchy, and ended up in the dunes. One thing that seems to be agreed on, at least by locals and maybe some in the authorities, is that whoever was the killer or accomplices to it had to have intimate knowledge of the access roads to the dune shacks. If you're trying to drive a vehicle out to the dune shacks and you don't know how to navigate those roads, you're going to get stuck and stranded. Either the killer knew all about how to navigate those roads or they had a driver that knew how to navigate those roads.
For more information on the Lady of the Dunes projects, check out The Lady of the Dunes.com. There you can access Frank Durant’s documentary. If you want to order your copy of the documentary, visit Oldies.com and search for the lady of the Dunes. For more information on the book Searching for the Lady of the Dunes, again visit The Lady of the Dunes.com. That is the one-stop for all information about the case and the projects associated with the case.
Part 2: The Documentary
This is going to focus mostly on Frank Durant's actual documentary, what appears on the screen. The beginning goes back about three years to when Frank was working on his project before The Lady of the Dunes, a film on Henry David Thoreau. For those unaware, Henry David Thoreau is a famous author who was connected to Cape Cod through his book entitled Cape Cod. He made several journeys down to Cape Cod in the mid-19th century. These included walking the entirety of the Great Beach, which extends from Coast Guard Beach in Eastham to Race Point in Provincetown.
Frank spent five months working on the Thoreau documentary, including several trips to Cape Cod and walking the Great Beach. As the Thoreau documentary, wound down he wondered what his next project would be. The hope was to do some sort of Cape Cod murder mystery series. This was when the Lady of the Dunes was mentioned.
Despite summering on Cape Cod in the town of Dennis when he was growing up, Frank hadn’t heard of the Lady of the Dunes. He paid it no mind the first time and even the second time. The third time that somebody brought up doing a documentary on the Lady of the Dunes murder mystery, he knew that this was more than a coincidence.
At the beginning of working on the documentary, he researched every newspaper article, clips from the television news, and YouTube videos to get the overarching facts of the case. Even before he got serious about the documentary the question ‘Why?’ was front and center. Why hadn't this case been solved? Why hadn't this woman been identified in well over four decades?
Frank also wanted to approach it differently than all of the other reporters, interviewers, and content creators had. The best way to get information that no one else had was to speak to those people that had intimate knowledge about the case and Cape Cod at the time. At the start of his research, he was having a hard time finding people that had boots on the ground in Provincetown in the late 60s, and early 70s.
When doing his research, the first name that stuck out to him was Chief James Meads. He was the Provincetown Police Chief for more than two decades and worked extensively on the Lady of the Dunes case. Chief Meads passed away in 2011, leaving an interview impossible. However Frank found someone just as good, and that was Chief Meads's sister. She became the linchpin opening the floodgates for other people to come forward to speak with Frank.
At first, she was hesitant, possibly because others that came before Frank looking to research the Lady of the Dunes were less than reputable or less than ethical characters. From the beginning, Frank came into the Lady of the Dunes documentary with no agenda, except for wanting to know why the case hadn't been solved in nearly 50 years. He was not looking to exploit the victim, town law enforcement, or anybody that had been associated with this case over its 40-plus-year span. That sincerity came across to Chief Meads's sister, and it prompted people like Chief Meads's two sons to speak with Frank and even agree to be in the documentary.
This lowered the guard of a lot of other locals. When Jimmy and Michael Meads agreed to be in the documentary, it showed that Frank was someone that could be trusted. This led others like Dennis Minsky, Steve Desroches, Jeanette de Beauvoir, Dr. Gerard Kinahan DMD, and several other locals to agree to be interviewed. Every one of them gave their knowledge and opinion of the Lady of the Dunes and Cape Cod at the time.
Despite getting some help from people that knew Chief Meads' sister, Frank was met with some resistance while doing his due diligence. That included contacting law enforcement looking for some answers and contacting local newspapers to try to get some press about the case and the documentary as well. The vast majority of law enforcement either refused to speak on the record or refused to speak at all. That included a lot of hang-up phone calls. Some people told Frank that he was chasing ghosts, and others told him he needed to just leave this case alone and walk away.
There was a part of the Provincetown, and Cape Cod in general, community that wanted to let the story rest despite it having no conclusion. The reasoning could be simple, innocent, and innocuous, or it could be that people involved with the case, with the murder, still live in Provincetown. It should be mentioned that around the same time that Frank began the documentary process of research and setting up interviews, there was another Lady of the Dunes documentary project that was trying to get off the ground.
This one had a few bigger names attached to it, meaning they were looking for a big money deal to produce and distribute the documentary. One of those involved with that documentary was an author named Peter Manso. He wrote a book that perfectly encapsulated Provincetown during the 1970s called Ptown: Art, Sex and Money on the Outer Cape. Frank had several conversations with him including Manso telling him he needed to read that book to get a better idea of what Cape Cod was like back then. Manso passed away in April of 2021, and the Lady of the Dunes project that he was involved in seems to have died with him.
Around that same time, at the beginning of 2021, the popular American Horror Story franchise television show was filming in Provincetown. So possibly the locals were a little bit weary of people making films in their little town. Regardless of that, Frank continued to make new contacts and used some of his old ones to get deeper behind the scenes. He started uncovering information that may not have been common knowledge. Some were rumors and innuendo of potential missing evidence or mishandled evidence. So because Frank was just a filmmaker, not a private investigator or any sort of law enforcement, he decided to hire his own set of private investigators from the National PI Services in New Hampshire. Frank Santin and Sue Smith who are both also in the documentary. The term malfeasance kept coming up. That term is not mentioned much in the documentary but is the idea that something was accidentally, not intentionally, mishandled. Malfeasance could have contributed to the case going cold for so long.
Frank had a good crew behind the scenes, getting him all the information that he would find useful to start the documentary off. He also knew that at some point he was going to have to go to Provincetown to be there to see the places that people were telling him about and get the vibe for himself. When he showed up, some of the longtime locals that Chief Jimmy Meads's sister had put Frank in touch with told him some stories about the dying days of the Wild West that was Provincetown in the 1970s.
Some of these insiders told Frank that he was the talk of the town, that everybody knew what he and his crew were doing there and what they were looking for. Some thought it was about time that the Lady of the Dunes case had the light shone back on it. Others were not thrilled and wanted it left alone. God forbid some outsider, that wasn't even from Cape Cod, come down with his film crew and start poking around. Frank said at times the paranoia overwhelmed him. He would look at people walking up and down Commercial Street wondering what they knew or if they knew him. Anyone that stared too long, cars that slowed down to look at him, they were all suspicious. He said he never feared for his life, but there were plenty of times that he felt so uncomfortable, like he was a bird in a cage, being watched by everyone. Frank persevered and set up his interviews at the Provincetown Theater. Three days were spent there filming to the point that he had more than 50 hours worth of footage. It was after he had all of this footage that people started telling him he had enough for a book. Frank needed an author to come aboard because there was so much information and he wanted his documentary to be tight 90 minutes. He did his Google research and found himself a Cape Cod author.
After doing his interviews, a few major landmarks began to stand out to Frank as being important concerning the case and Provincetown in the 1970s. These included the Crown and Anchor hotel and bar on Commercial Street, St. Peter's Cemetery, the dunes themselves, and the dune shacks that reside out there. Away from Provincetown, there was a place called the Combat Zone in Boston. This was a small two-block area that back in the 1960s through the 1980s, was filled with sex workers, strip clubs, and peep shows. Sometimes it was safe and fun. Other times, people got robbed, stabbed, or murdered.
Provincetown and the Combat Zone of Boston were not exactly connected like a pipeline. However, the fact is that famed Boston mobster Whitey Bulger spent time in Provincetown. This was stated on the record by then Crown and Anchor owner Stan Sorrentino in a court case in the early 1980s. So even if Whitey Bulger had absolutely nothing at all to do with the Lady of the Dunes, he still was in Provincetown during those times.
One interesting note that came from Frank's interview with a fire lieutenant from Southeastern Massachusetts came from the crime scene photo that can be found on Wikipedia. It was the way that the body was arranged, the lack of blood, and the way the feet were crossed over, that is highly likely that the Lady of the dunes, Ruth Marie Terry, was not murdered in the dunes. She was murdered somewhere else and then brought out there. It's a drop site, not a murder site.
A handful of people said the same thing to Frank when they saw the photo, that she was not murdered there. Then the talk goes to where was she killed. Where is that location? Is there any evidence at that location that could tie the killer to her? Also, how did she get out into the dunes? Was there a driver that knew the area? Frank walked out to the drop site a couple of times in the process of this documentary, so he knows the rough terrain about walking out there. He also was driven out to a dune shack owned by a woman named Mildred Champlin.
She and her husband Nathaniel own the Mission Bell dune shack. Nathaniel's passed on, but Mildred is in her early 90s. They've owned that shack for 70 years. Frank interviewed her. She was out there when the body was found and has vivid memories of it and made it a point to tell Frank that whoever drove out there to drop the body off had to know the area because there are certain parts of the access roads where you'll get stuck. Thoughts go to locals that rented out their dune shacks at the time or locals that had off-road vehicles to drive out there to the outer parts of Race Point Beach. Ruth Marie Terry could have been murdered by someone not from Cape Cod or New England. However, it seems like for her to get out to where she was, somebody with knowledge locally would have had to have helped out in some way.
As for theories of the Lady of the Dunes' identity, people interviewed in the 1970s, all the way up until the documentary was filmed, agreed that she was not local. She was possibly transient. She could have been a summer college girl there working or someone there visiting one of the dune shacks, possibly renting one of the dune shacks. Everyone agreed that she was not local because when the body was found, there were no whispers that somebody had gone missing around Provincetown or the Outer Cape.
One thing the documentary focused on is the possibility of sex work and sex trafficking, specifically with the connection to the Combat Zone in Boston. And the idea that Ruth Murray Terry had one of her forearms removed in addition to just the hand, led people to think that there had to be some sort of marking there. In the documentary, there is an interview with a woman who survived sex trafficking. She said she was branded by her owner. So it was thought that maybe the lady of the Dunes had some kind of a marking, a tattoo, a barcode.
Another interesting road that the documentary takes is Frank’s consulting with five different psychic mediums. Jimmy Meads Jr. had told Frank that his dad had consulted a psychic when working on the Lady of the Dunes case. Frank was of the mindset that if it was good enough for Chief Meads, it was good enough for him. Some fascinating information came out surrounding Steven the Medium. He does this amazing thing called his Note.
He went to Race Point Beach in Provincetown and sat and allowed the Lady of the Dunes to communicate with him. He wrote down whatever she wanted the people to know. There are some interesting points surrounding the circumstances that led to her death because despite her being identified, we still don't know the circumstances that led to her death. In Steven's note, the lady of the Dunes mentions, days before her death, seeing a blueprint of something, possibly a building, and that there was going to be an extensive robbery to take place, perpetrated by people that she was associated with.
Her killer was a man, likely someone she was involved romantically with, and he got aggravated when she would drink because she would talk too much. At first, this man tried to give her some pills for an overdose. She refused that. So then she was hit in the head, knocked out, and never regained consciousness. She mentioned this man as being mentally unstable, bipolar, and possibly schizophrenic. He lost his child, possibly a son, and was never the same. His name started with a J or a G. Ruth Marie Terry's third husband was named Guy Muldavin, Guy with a G. Her killer, whose name started with a J or a G, had assistance covering up the murder and keeping it unsolved.
There is a fabulous scene in the documentary of something called a table-tipping between two other mediums Susan Ahern, who is the Cape Cod Happy Medium, and Jo Petrie of Heartfelt Angel Connections. The table-tipping is almost as if Jo and Susan have a conversation surrounding the Lady of the Dunes, where they find out information about her like they're putting together her life story. When they came up with her birth date, they determined it as September 6. Ruth Marie Terry's birthday is September 8. They also mentioned her having many different nicknames. Looking at her photos in the FBI poster, each one, she looks a little different. She was likely a chameleon. Besides being born in Tennessee and her life ending in Massachusetts, Ruth Marie Terry also had connections to California, Michigan, and Nevada. There's still about a decade of her life that is unknown currently. Some other things that were in the table tipping with Susan and Jo, or in Steven's note, could come to light in the future weeks and months that turn out to be true. Things like her having many different aliases names like Lauren and Anna.
The resolution of this case came down to forensic genetic DNA. In the documentary, Dr. Claire Glynn of the University of New Haven talked about how it was easier than ever to solve these cold cases using forensic DNA. A big sticking point though was the fact that the DNA Doe project from California had offered three times to run the DNA of the Lady of the Dunes, including in 2021, and they were turned down all three times. Even in 2021, when Frank’s documentary was being filmed, the DNA Doe project was turned down to do testing on the DNA of the skull from Ruth Murray Terry. What changed in the time since then when suddenly law enforcement did the DNA testing?
Whether directly or indirectly, through the documentary being out there or through the questions and interviews that Frank did leading up to it, he was specifically told by one of his law enforcement connections that his documentary, without a shadow of a doubt, played a part in pushing the Lady of the Dunes case back to the forefront and getting Ruth Murray Terry identified.
It's hard to talk about the documentary and not mention the Hadden Clark connection. If you're not familiar with him, Hadden Clark had deep connections to Cape Cod. His grandparents owned a house in Wellfleet. He was in Provincetown that summer when the Lady of the Dunes was murdered. At different times he said he did it, that he was there when it happened, that he saw her body after, and that he had no idea who she was. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and his story changes all the time.
One of Frank's contacts told him to get in touch with a man named Ed Tarney, who was in law enforcement that worked on the Hadden Clark cases. He’s been kind of like a handler of his for more than two decades down in Maryland where Clark is currently in jail for life for two murders. Tarney told Frank that the best thing to do would be to ask Hadden Clark himself if he had anything to do with the Lady of the Dunes murder. So he did, and he ended up with seven or eight different letters of correspondence from this convicted serial killer. They're mentioned a little bit in the documentary. They are far more prevalent in the book as they are transcribed word for word allowing a reader to get a look into the madness of a serial killer.
This documentary and subsequently the book became like a spider web. At the epicenter was the Lady of the dunes herself, Ruth Marie Terry. Pulling away from the center, you see all of these other things in the spider web. Tony Costa and his victims, Whitey Bulger, Hadden Clark, the Combat Zone, and Provincetown itself. The Lady of the Dunes case and the spider web connection are a lot like the maze of fire roads that dot the Truro woods. With these fire roads, there are many different ways into the same area. Provincetown in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, there are many ways to get there. Ruth Murray Terry, Tony Costa, Whitey Bulger, Hadden Clark, they're all different routes to get to the same area. Just because The Lady of the Dunes was the epicenter of Frank's documentary, she could be more of a sidecar in other works about those other names. It is a fascinating look into this interweaving of all of these different infamous cases and people in an area known as a vacation destination.
In the end, when it came down to it, a lot of people told Frank that this was a documentary that needed to be made, this case needed to be solved and that Frank was doing something important. It was something important because the desire was to give the lady of the dunes her name back. Frank jokes that even though his law enforcement sources told him that his documentary helped push this case forward, he knows that he'll never get any sort of credit for it, and he doesn't want any credit for it. He set out not to exploit Ruth Marie Terry, or the case, or the town, and he has succeeded.
He's not looking to profit from the documentary. He might be looking to make his money back, but it was no cash grab. He even spent time donating free DVD copies to local libraries. All in all, though, Provincetown ended up being good to Frank. For all the detractors that told him to walk away, there were many more that were cooperative, that wanted to be interviewed, people that donated rooms for his crew in hotels in the town. Frank returned it in kind.
When he did the premieres of the documentary at Cape Cinema in Dennis and the Provincetown Theater, it was free. He just wanted it to be seen. He wanted The Lady of the Dunes in the front of everyone's mind. At the very beginning of the film, it is seen that Frank dedicated it to Sydney Monzon. She was one of the victims of Tony Costa. She became a symbol to him of the darker side of Cape Cod at the time along with those people that wanted the case of the Lady of the Dunes to remain dead and buried. He formed a connection with Sydney and her sad story, being so young, having a rough life, and having such a sad young ending. She sort of mirrored The Lady of the Dunes, at least the mythos of her before we knew most of her actual story as Ruth Marie Terry. The documentary is the tip of the iceberg and the book is the rest of what's underwater.
Visit The Lady of the Dunes.com to watch the documentary, buy the documentary, and connect with some of the people that were associated with it. To anyone out there who helped keep The Lady of the Dunes name alive or helped to push the case forward from me Frank and the rest of us associated with these projects, we thank you.
Part 3: The Book
What we're going to do is talk a little bit about myself, my writing, how I came aboard this book, the process of writing it, and also some of the things that are highlighted in the book that there was no room for in the documentary or came out after the documentary was done. The documentary is like the tip of the iceberg and the book is the rest of the iceberg underwater that you don't see.
I'm a 12th-generation Cape Codder. My family is the Doane Family Deacon John Doane who helped to settle the town of Eastham, Massachusetts. He is my ninth great-grandfather. I have deep connections to Cape Cod. Growing up in the 1980s, the Lady of the Dunes case was still relatively fresh, so I was quite familiar with it. Currently, I have seven published books, three through Schiffer Publishing. They are all entitled In My Footsteps, they're travelers guides to Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket. I have a trilogy of Cape Cod history books through the History Press of Arcadia Publishing: Historic Restaurants of Cape Cod, Cape Cod Nights, which is nightlife, nightclubs and bars, and Iconic Hotels and Motels of Cape Cod. The newest one is through Fonthill Publishing of Arcadia Publishing, kind of a smaller side branch. It's a Cape Cod photography book, photographers America, Cape Cod Beyond the Dunes.
I also have a blog, the in My Footsteps Podcast blog at Blogger.com. I mentioned that because I've written lots of Cape Cod and New England history articles, I became interested in Cape Cod history in college. So that led to me writing about basic Cape Cod history, some mysteries and unknown, some true crime. This is all coming together as to how I got involved in The Lady of the Dunes documentary. In late May 2021 out of the blue, I got a random message through Facebook asking me if I would like to talk about the Lady of the Dunes murder mystery.
Despite having a pretty public presence with all of these books and articles, I'm still wary of just chatting with anyone that comes into my DM’s. So I said to Frank, I didn’t think I'm the foremost expert. You might want to check with other people, police, historians, and such. He was not feeling that. I think they hadn't helped him much. So he started describing to me what he was doing with the documentary and that he was looking for somebody to write the book based on the documentary and the information that it had found. Frank said he had Googled Cape Cod authors and I came up. This is where the books and the historical articles and such paid off for me.
We finally agreed a week or so later to meet in person. Frank was coming down to the Cape to meet with a reporter I believe in Truro, and also meet with one of the higher-ups at the Cape Cod National Seashore. On the way back, he wanted to meet up with me. I said I lived in Yarmouth and we could meet at this Dunkin’ Donuts, grab a coffee and just chat. There he could give me his pitch about the book. I went to the Dunkin’ ahead of time and noticed that due to the Covid Pandemic, they weren't having indoor seating. I called Frank and told him, we can't go in the Dunkin’, but not far away is a parking lot for the bike path and we could meet there. He told me later that he immediately had red flags where this guy he'd never met was changing the place where they were gonna meet to somewhere way more secluded. Plus it was a misty foggy day. When he showed up at the parking lot, I was there with a black hoodie on and trying to keep my head warm. I definitely looked sketchy, but we chatted for like an hour.
Frank's main thing was he knew there was enough stuff that he had been researching to do a proper book and a good book, a true crime book. Since this Lady of the Dunes project was so important to him, he wanted to make sure that I was all in. He couldn't risk a year from then having me say, ah, I'm not gonna do this anymore and now he's scrambling. I assured him I was all in. He gave me his email and what began after that was the process of me asking him questions. Some of them were big ones like what places were important to the case, potential suspects, and people that he had interviewed, others were mundane, asking him how he felt on certain days and all the little minute details that might come up.
Years ago I wrote a series of articles for Cape Cod Life magazine called The Shape of the Cape that had to do with Erosion and Shoreline Change. The then-editor of the magazine, a man named Matt Gill, would send me questions with my rough drafts of articles that would aggravate me at the time because he wanted details and specifics. Instead of saying, for example, a pond was large, he would say how large it needed to be acres or square miles. The reason for this was so that readers would not have to stop and Google anything. You give them as much information as possible so they can paint the picture in their mind. I say that because I joked that it aggravated me at the time, but now I use that as part of my writing process, getting as much information in detail as possible, thinking that I'm gonna be sending the copy of the book to Matt Gill so he won't write me any questions.
I knew right away that I wanted to do this book because as a 12th Generation Cape Codder, I was familiar with the Lady of the Dunes case. Plus Frank's pitch sold me. He said from the beginning, his motive was to give the Lady of the Dunes her name back. He didn't want to exploit her exploit the case, exploit Provincetown, or Cape Cod. That wasn't why he was there and he didn't want any sort of recognition or fame or anything from the documentary or the book. When I recommended that we write the book kind of from his perspective, since all of this happened because of his work, he wasn't even sure if he wanted to be a character. We compromised where instead of him being Frank Durant in the book, he has an alter ego, Victor Franko, but he needed to be front and center because obviously, the documentary does not happen without Frank. The book does not happen without Frank. So he has to be there. It's all about his hard work, his interviews, the journey, and the roadblocks he faced trying to get any information he could.
All in all, Frank ended up with more than 50 hours of footage that he shot for the documentary that had to get paired down to 90 minutes. That included a lot of leads that they didn't follow, that didn't fit the documentary and a lot of interviews that didn't get used. I had access to all of that. There's a lot of really good stuff, fascinating, captivating stuff that didn't get into the documentary. I have 85 pages worth of notes just from questions I asked Frank through emails and just through chatting on the phone and meeting up. I'm going to go through some important points from the book, but I'm going to try to not give you everything the book has. The book is 91,000 words. So there's a lot of information in there from the beginning.
Once Frank got vouched for through the Meads family in Provincetown, and once he was able to start reaching out to his previous contacts, he did have law enforcement that helped him out. The thing was they wanted to be behind the scenes. They did not want to be named. They even specifically told Frank to not name them as it could jeopardize their jobs or if they were retired, their pensions. In the book, you will find three of them and they have the very fitting detective movie type names of agents, X, Y, and Z. It's like something out of a James Bond movie. To this day, I only know the true identity of one of those. It's mainly out of respect for Frank and his sources.
Agent X was first, Y came second, and Z was third. Agent Z reached out to Frank after the Lady of the Dunes was identified to congratulate him and say that the documentary and his hard work helped to push that identification. That's where you can choose to believe what you want, but according to Agent Z, in their mind, Frank was at least partially responsible for Ruth Marie Terry being identified.
I have in my possession all of the letters, I believe it's seven different letters that convicted serial killer Hadden Clark sent Frank. He was warned that Hadden Clark liked to mess with people. He was asking for Tom Brady's autograph and Cape Cod postcards. Clark’s story kept changing. He was the killer, then he was there at the time, then he wasn't there but knew who it was.
In the final letter, in the final paragraph of that letter, Hadden Clark brings up another cold case, totally unprompted. It was the 1973 disappearance of two teenagers, Bonnie Bickwit and Mitchell Weiser. He brought up the fact that he was probably one of the last people to see Bonnie alive because he worked at a camp Wel-Met in upstate New York. Frank said he must have just glazed over and not even noticed that. Because I transcribed all these letters into the book, I reached out to Frank when I read that. I said, he's maybe not implicating himself in their disappearance, but he's a person of interest.
I had to reach out to Sullivan County in New York, and the people that run a website dedicated to finding Bonnie and Mitchell and tell them about this. Thus far nothing has come of it, but still, it's one of many times that I felt like I was living in a movie where I'm reaching out to a sheriff's department with potential information about a missing person's case.
Then there's the whole debacle of going onto the property behind Hadden Clark's grandparents' house in Wellfleet. Hadden said that he buried a diary on the property back there in the woods and that it was in a sealed container, sort of like what you would put your money in at the bank when you do the drive-through. And he gave us vague clues and said, if you go out there and find it, it's got more information about what I was up to back in the early 1970s.
I went with Frank, one of Frank's cameramen, and a couple of metal detector guys out on the property. We went to Hadden's grandparents' house, it's owned by different people now, and asked for permission first. It was Halloween and incredibly, another one of those movie-type moments. Look up the story of the man who said he was swallowed by a humpback whale, a Wellfleet guy. His story is unbelievable. And while we were out there looking for this diary, the guy shows up, he says, ‘I'm the whale guy,’ out of nowhere. Granted, he lived right near there but there were plenty of times working on this book when things would happen that I felt were destiny.
When we were working on the documentary and the book, we all had our favorites as far as who we were hoping the Lady of the Dunes really would be. This was based on the composites. Agent Z reached out to Frank and told him to watch this movie and he sent him a link. And the movie ended up being a soft-core adult film from 1970 named Judy. It was filmed in the Chestnut Hill section of Boston, and it seems like most of if not all of the actresses in it worked in the Combat Zone.
There was one named Lee Sherry, or at least that was her stage name, and she played a woman named Regina Fairchild and she looked different than all the rest like she didn't fit. There are still images of her if you go to the IMDb site and look up Judy, there are images from the movie that Frank put up there. Lee Sherry looked an awful lot like some of the composites of the Lady of the Dunes. Even though there is a roughly 10-year section of Ruth Marie Terry's life that is unaccounted for right now, I find it highly unlikely that she was Lee Sherry. They don't look the same and likely aren’t the same age, but some of these closed doors open different avenues.
Just because Lee Sherry is not the Lady of the Dunes the Judy movie is still fascinating. Most of the people associated with it either have no other film credits or you can't find any information about them. Sure, maybe they were embarrassed by the movie from making the movie, but for nearly every single one, there's no information. That's just something to think about in the book.
There's a lot more about the dealings with the different mediums, specifically Steven the Medium. Susan the Cape Cod Happy Medium and Jo Petrie. The first time I met Steven, we went to St. Peter's Cemetery in Provincetown and I shot a video of him communicating with the Lady of the Dunes standing beside her grave. He mentioned the Lady of the Dunes said she really liked the person that was working the camera and that was me. So I was just over the moon. What I missed was what he started talking about after he started mentioning the name Mary/Marie, and then he mentioned Rose. He kept saying Rose repeatedly.
I've learned it's the hard R where it could be Rose, but it could be something else, Ruth. So you believe what you want, think what you want but there was a Marie and there was a hard R that came from the Lady of the Dunes to Steven. This was many months before she was identified. There is a lot of information that Frank and his team discovered that could be true as we wait for these open years in Ruth Marie Terry's life to be filled in. There was the table tipping where they got her birthdate nearly spot on. So I'm waiting and hoping for more revelations on her life and I'm hoping that this book, the website, and the documentary, help to lead to more conversation and more information coming forward.
There's the interesting fact that Frank was trying to get interviews and articles about the Lady of the Dunes case to bring it back to the forefront. He reached out to local newspapers, and Boston papers, and he was either told that they didn't wanna run a story or the interview actually took place, but then the reporter was told they weren't going to run the story. Interestingly, Frank bringing this case back to the forefront was met with resistance in so many places, including the media, and a lot of law enforcement.
He would keep saying to me, think about that. Why do they not want this story out there? Why do they not want to just get her identified? There are a lot of other people that weren't in the actual documentary but are in the book. For those that were not in the documentary, I found myself having to change their names for the book. Even though none of these people are written about negatively, I don't know how many of them want to be characters in a book. So you gotta change their names to make them vaguer.
For example, there was a former state police officer that Frank had wanted to talk to and he spoke with, and this person didn't work on the Lady of the Dunes case, but they did work on the Tony Costa case. They admitted to Frank that a full reconnaissance of the Truro woods, that wide open area, was never done. Tony Costa was convicted of two murders, but it's common knowledge that he killed four. The thing is that he could have killed as many as eight. When he was in court getting sentenced, the judge said, ‘do you have anything else to say?’ He said, ‘yeah, keep digging.’ Well, this former state cop told Frank they didn't keep digging. They got enough to put Tony Costa away and they said, that's it. So what that means is there are potentially undiscovered bodies out in the Truro woods from 50-plus years ago. That area near the Pine Grove Cemetery in Truro is in the middle of nowhere with several fire roads. People love to walk their dogs out there or mountain bike out there. You could be mere feet from a body buried underground. That part is terrifying but fascinating.
Circle back to the Lady of the Dunes and where she was found in the remote area of the Province Lands dunes. If she was dumped out there, who's to say there isn't another or two more or three more? I'm not trying to spread rumors, I'm just saying it's an interesting thought that finding Ruth Marie Terry, the Lady of the Dunes, could be only the starting point. There will likely never be a full reconnaissance of those woods or dunes because there are more pressing things that money can go towards.
When Frank went to Provincetown and did a three-day shoot there, he set up shop inside the Provincetown Theater. People came in and did the interviews there. He had all of his equipment and any relevant files and papers there. It was on the second day that somebody dropped off the actual file of the Lady of the Dunes murder case. Frank said he was paranoid because he was pretty sure he wasn't supposed to see it. He had to call his attorney to ask what to do as it was left for him. The attorney said since he didn't take it, it was left for him, and that he was safe. Frank was able to read the actual case file and see other photos that aren't public and look at the information that was not public. This helped to influence his opinions, which then influenced the book because he's seen things that others haven't seen. I feel pretty confident in saying that any other YouTube video documentary that's been out there about the Lady of the Dunes, they have not had access to the actual case file. Frank said he had an idea of who left it for him and when he returned it to that person, they didn't question it. So it kind of cemented that they were the ones that left the case file for him.
There are lots of potential suspects who talked about some names. Some people are still alive in Provincetown and others that had passed on. When Frank spoke with longtime locals and people that had worked at the Crown and Anchor, they all had opinions. This is why I had to change their names and keep vague the names of the suspects they talked about. That's been my biggest fear with writing this book is the potential of implicating someone or naming names. So I'm trying to be very cautious and Frank jokes that I’m writing it about him, his experiences, and his notes so I’m safe. I also don't want to be irresponsible as a writer. It's always good to leave an air of mystery. I did a lot of research into true crime writing, how much you can say and keep yourself safe from any litigation, and also creating a little more drama and intrigue.
The bottom line is I kept the book as close to factually accurate as possible. True crime is a different animal than anything I've ever written. I've done travel guides, and history books, I wrote fiction novels when I was younger that are on Amazon's Kindle store. True crime is different because you have facts that you can find and you can use in your story. The thing about facts is that other people can find them too. So if you're wrong, people can find out you're wrong. I was lucky to be able to pick Frank's brain. At times there would be two dozen emails in a week just trying to get as many of the details as possible.
Readers can be there and feel what it was like for Frank to do this documentary, but you can also put yourself in the position of those who were living in Provincetown in the 1970s. Readers can get an idea of what it might have been like for the Lady of the Dunes, Ruth Marie Terry. There is a look into Tony Costa and his victims based around Sidney Monzon. It comes down to Frank's perseverance. He had the feeling from the beginning that this was a very important project he was working on. He wanted to give the Lady of the Dunes her name. Whether or not he or the documentary or the book will ever get any shred of credit for helping to push it along is probably doubtful. Why would big-time law enforcement want to say that some small-time filmmaker and small-time Cape Cod author helped to light a fire? That's fine because I think the people that watch the documentary will see the effort, see the intentions, see the result and appreciate all of Frank's hard work. The book will give even more detail and see my intentions and my hard work.
I feel that this book about the documentary could make its way into a film itself complete with flashbacks to the 1960s and 1970s. Finishing the book was a chore because all the time new revelations kept coming out. This was the fact, especially over the last summer when Frank was done with the documentary, but he wasn't done with trying to help solve the case. So he was always making phone calls, getting new information, and that information kept getting funneled to me, I think the book had three different endings where it wasn't the ending, but now it ends with her being identified as Ruth Marie Terry is the perfect ending for this book to have a resolution.
Readers know, going into this book that the Lady of the Dunes is identified, so there is no ambiguous ending. Sure, we need concrete proof of who the killer or killers were but there is a definitive ending. She has been identified finally and her family has a resolution. There were showings of the documentary and all of the questions after would be either ‘who do you think she was’ or ‘who do you think her killer was?’
I'll reiterate the importance of this story and my belief in this project is strong. This story needs to be told, it needs to be read by all of you out there. It's been one of the most enduring murder mysteries of the last 50 years. Now there's finally a name, but the story's not over. There's so much more in the documentary and the book.
Part 4: The New Revelations
On Halloween Day 2022, early in the morning, I was heading to get new tires for my car. My phone started going off and it was Frank he said that Steven the Medium had reached out to him to let him know that there was going to be a press conference with some important revelations about the oldest cold case in Massachusetts. The only one that could come to mind was the Lady of the Dunes. At first, there was a little confusion about where the press conference was to be held. Was it Provincetown? Was it Barnstable County Courthouse? No, it was Boston.
I downloaded the news app, so I could watch the press conference live. I went to the beach and sat by myself among the dunes, and I'll never forget that first camera zoom on the FBI poster with four different images of a woman named Ruth Marie Terry. She was the Lady of the Dunes. It was a little bit emotional to finally see her face when you have in your mind an image of what someone looks like and then you see their true identity, it's kind of startling. I said out loud ‘hi, and it's nice to finally see you.’
It was shocking that the case was solved, at least in the terms of the Lady of the Dunes being identified because we had several screenings of the documentary throughout 2022 and there would be Q&A after some of them. We had people asking Frank when he thought the case might be solved and when the Lady of the Dunes might be identified and Frank would say, every time that law enforcement has everything they need to solve this. He said he thought they could solve it by the end of 2022 and lo and behold, they did.
It was early this year, January 2022 when Frank and I, and another person, had talked to the local police about whether they could release anything from the case file to us, through the Freedom of Information Act. This was when the police let Frank know that they were still actively working on the case, which kind of drove home the point that just because their work isn't known publicly doesn't mean there's no work going on. Law enforcement had let us know that we could pay them for the service of having people look through their records about the Lady of the Dunes case, but that they couldn't guarantee that there was anything they could share with us. I ended up telling Frank to not spend our money on what would be a charitable donation to the police. I didn't see us getting anything from them. So we politely passed back in January.
I can say after working on the book for about 16 months at the time of the identification of Ruth Marie Terry, being so deeply connected to the case, through the book, through the documentary, and through growing up on Cape Cod, there was this tiny bit of validation because I've only done a small part. Frank is the one that deserves all the credit for putting together the documentary, finding the people to interview, doing the research, and busting through roadblocks to get such a great movie out there. That's why I have a little bit of validation because my goal, just like Frank's goal was to give the Lady of the Dunes her name back. I get this little hair strand worth of validation. Frank gets a lot more and law enforcement will never share this, but Frank had a few of his sources, those that were connected to law enforcement that reached out to him on Halloween to congratulate him. Whether it was the documentary itself or Frank kind of sniffing around asking questions of the right people, these sources told Frank that he had at least some influence on pushing this forward to get this identification out there. Frank and I have joked that law enforcement is not gonna give any credit to a small filmmaker or small author.
Hopefully, if you watch the documentary or read the book, you'll see that you can't give out congratulations without having Frank at least in the back of the room.
What about the identification itself? Ruth Marie Terry differed from my vision of the Lady of the Dunes, her backstory at least a little bit. She was born in Whitwell, Tennessee, which is part of the greater Chattanooga area, a very small town, with less than 4,000 people. Steven the Medium in his note had mentioned the Lady of the Dunes said to him that she was born in the mid-Atlantic area. So I don't know how far you would consider Mid-Atlantic if Tennessee is part of it. She was also 37 at the time of her death. I had always assumed she was a college-age student in, her early 20s.
She had a big family that was looking for her. This was not a girl that had gone missing and been murdered and nobody had ever even looked for her. Even up until this year, Ruth Marie Terry's family was looking for her. I guess that makes me feel good knowing that she had a caring family. The big thing that I found out that shocked me was that she's a mother and she was a wife. It's hearing these things where the human element comes back into it, where this isn't a board game where you're trying to solve a murder. It's a real person with a real family. And knowing that her family now finally has closure after almost 50 years, you can't put a price tag on that.
I've gone to Ruth Marie Terry's grave a few times since she was identified, and each time I go to St. Peter's Cemetery in Provincetown, her grave has something new on it. There was a stone with Ruth Marie Terry engraved in it. When I went there just the other day, she now has a sign with her name and photo. So her being older and having a family that was looking for her, were ways that she differed from what I thought. But a way that she kind of fits into what people had thought of the Lady of the Dunes is her transient nature.
I guess that sounds like a bad word. I don't mean it that way. She moved around a lot. She's got, besides Tennessee connections to California, Michigan, and Massachusetts. She's got connections to Nevada because her final marriage was in February 1974 and it was in Reno, Nevada. So this leaves large gaps in Ruth Marie Terry's life that have yet to be filled in. This is where some of the other names that were brought up by the mediums in the documentary and the book could still be in play. Just because her name wasn't Helen or Morgan or Anna doesn't mean that she couldn't have had a nickname and we don't even know what she did for work basically through her life. These are all things that are still in play. I want more of those details to be true because those are what I put in the book.
There was the initial shock. The Lady of the Dunes was identified as Ruth Marie Terry from Whitwell, Tennessee. Naturally then with half of the puzzle solved, it turned to how she ended up dead in the dunes in Provincetown. In February 1974, Ruth Marie Terry was married to a man named Guy Muldavin. If you Google him and look at his photos, he looks like someone that's a less-than-savory character. I'll just say that he had a very checkered past, including other dealings with murder. This included his arrest in 1960 for the murder of his wife and stepdaughter. Police at the time said bits of human remains were found in a new septic tank at the home in Seattle.
Guy Muldavin was known as an antique dealer, and that sounds like a front for something else, something more devious like the mafia saying they're in waste management. Guy Muldavin currently is seen as the primary suspect, although it's not known whether he committed the murder or if he had someone else do it. He has connections to Provincetown, specifically through his father Albert. In the 1940s into the 50s, Albert Muldavin owned a lot of real estate in Provincetown around the Bradford Street area. I don't know if Guy Muldavin ever lived on Cape Cod in Provincetown, but he had to have had connections there.
If you saw the documentary or if you read the book, you know that there was a connection between Boston organized crime and Provincetown. There was drug running out in the dunes at Race Point because there is nobody out there. The Crown and Anchor on Commercial Street was a hotbed for criminals like Whitey Bulger. It's not much of a leap to think that Guy Muldavin didn't want to get his hands dirty because of his old murder charges so he hired someone else to kill Ruth Marie Terry, possibly drive her out into the dunes and leave her there. I feel that Guy Muldavin had connections because despite being seen as a suspect in the death of his wife and her daughter, homicide charges were never filed against him.
After Muldavin married Ruth Marie Terry in February 1974, they found their way to Cape Cod. Interestingly, Muldavin had several aliases, Raul Guy Rockwell, and Guy Muldavin Rockwell, but Ruth Marie Terry also had aliases. Terry Marie Vizina, Terry M Vizina, and Terry Shannon. We know she was married twice for sure, but that Vizina last name, V-I-Z-I-N-A, Frank and I have been trying to figure out if that is a middle husband, a second one kind of wedged in there. That's where this 10-year gap in her life comes into play. A lot can happen then you start to wonder what did she do in California. In Michigan? What did she do for work? Who did she know? Even though she was born in Tennessee, at the age of 20, she married, I think it would've been her high school sweetheart, Billy Ray Smith. It seems like Ruth left Tennessee for good right after that.
So what did she do? Well, according to some, they had seen Ruth in the summer of 1974 with Guy Muldavin in Provincetown, and they described the vehicle they were driving in as either a Jeepster or the Volkswagen Thing. Think about a larger dune buggy, basically something that could carry a body out into the sand without too much trouble. It's not sure if Guy Muldavin rented it and was out there or if he owned it.
Mildred Chaplin, who has owned a Dune shack out there for over 50 years, said that you need to have certain skills and knowledge of those roads to drive out there, otherwise you're gonna get stuck. Did Guy Muldavin hire somebody who knew the roads, maybe a local who was of low moral character, maybe a criminal to dispose of Ruth Marie in an area where they knew she wouldn't be found right away? Did Guy Malvin know people in Provincetown thanks to his father having all those real estate connections in the 1940s and 1950s?
After Ruth Marie disappeared, Guy Muldavin told people that she sold all of her belongings and ran off with the Jim Jones cult, and eventually ended up dead in Jonestown. That is not the truth, but why did he come up with that story? It's because he was involved in his wife's murder and then the cover-up after. When it comes to a case that's almost 50 years old, a resolution is often hard because we could say that we believe Guy Muldavin is the prime suspect in Ruth Marie Terry's murder, but he's been dead for over 20 years. So people involved may be also dead, although that's not for sure. At the press conference on Halloween, they said young people that could have been involved at the time, even in their early 20s, would be in their mid-70s now. It just makes finding those suspects a little harder.
It is fascinating that despite the Lady of the Dunes being identified, there's still so much that's left unknown. Ruth Marie Terry was a wife and mother, she has a son and Frank has spoken with him several times. You can imagine he's overwhelmed. I won’t share much of his story, his identification, none of that out of respect, but I sent him a copy of my book manuscript. Frank sent him the documentary so that he could see it and know what our intentions were our motivations, and that we feel we did right by his mother. We hope to eventually meet him face-to-face. In a perfect world, I would love him to write a little passage for the book, just his thoughts on what it means that his mother was the famous Lady of the Dunes. I can't imagine having all of that dumped on you.
This all circles back to the fact that I've now had to rewrite the book again, not so much the meat of the book, but the beginning and the end. Since it is based around the timeline of Frank and the documentary and all of his work, I was never going to go back into the book and change things to make it fit the current narrative. For example, I wouldn't go back into the book and have one of the mediums say, my name is Ruth Marie because that's not reality. I've got a certain amount of integrity in my work that I want people to know when they read the book that it's faithful to the reality of what happened. When it says true crime, I want it to be true.
That's why I bring up the 10-year gap in Ruth Marie Terry's life because there's still a chance that some of this information that's in the book ends up being validated. So an interesting sidetrack as far as this whole identification of Ruth Marie Terry goes is based around the other potential identifications of the Lady of the Dunes before Ruth Marie Terry was known. Who is Anne Dolce? Why was her name written on an envelope that Provincetown Police Chief James Meads had in his possession and thought was important enough to keep? Frank believed and still believes that Anne Dolce is somehow connected to the Lady of the Dunes case. What happened to Lee Sherry? There was a soft-core pornographic film from 1970 sent to Frank by Agent Z titled Judy. The lead actress was named Lee Sherry, and she looked different from all of the other women in the movie like she didn't belong she was the one that I focused on that I wanted to be the Lady of the Dunes. It was more of a romanticized solution.
She would be a college-age girl who came to Boston. Maybe she got into films like that to help her pay for her tuition but just based on photos, it's not her. Lee Sherry is not Ruth Marie Terry, but I've never been able to find anything about her. It's like she's a ghost. So what happened to Lee Sherry, who she was maybe insignificant to 99.9% of people listening to this, but to me, that's my white whale. I'd love to know who she was.
Then there's Rory Jean Kesinger, who was originally thought to be the Lady of the Dunes because when she escaped from prison in 1973 and she was never seen again. The story, the rumor and innuendo was that she was a criminal messing around with the wrong people and she was then silenced. But Ruth Marie Terry's body was exhumed three times and Rory Jean Kesinger was never connected to her. So we circled back around what happened to her. Is she still alive? She would be in her mid-70s now. Is it possible that she has alluded capture for 50 years? Or is it possible that Rory Jean Kesinger met a similar fate to the Lady of the Dunes, just not in Provincetown?
Where one thing gets answered so many other questions pop up. Who is Helen Dennison? During a table tipping with Susan and Jo the mediums, they came up with her name Helen Dennison and some of her backstory, hell, when they gave her birthdate, they gave her birthdate as September 6th. Ruth Marie Terry's birthdate was September 8th. That's so close. So is Helen Dennison another alias? Ann Dolce? Lee Sherry? It's like the case has been solved, but it's not over as far as myself and Frank and the book and the documentary and all of the leads that we found.
I would love to tie all of those up so that people don't read the book or watch the documentary and kind of at the end there's finger-pointing saying, now you figure it out. We were always worried that that was what it was going to be. We were gonna give all we knew and there would be no resolution. So it'll be up to the viewer, the reader, to kind of keep digging. It's great that this case got solved before the book is published because it can give people a resolution.
The very first words in the book are Ruth Marie Terry, and that is such a great feeling to be able to share that with readers. And I wish with this final part of the podcast series that I could give you more concrete information, but there are still things we don't know and a lot of it would just be speculation and that doesn't take a lot of skill to speculate.
Hopefully, 2023 will see the full resolution with the naming of her killers and if there were any accomplices. I went out to the actual site where Ruth Marie Terry was found with Frank. There are very few people who know the real drop site. Frank had it confirmed by three separate sources who know it. All I can say is it's not a random spot. Whoever put her out there knew exactly where to put her. They had intimate knowledge of those dunes, whether they had rented dune shacks before, whether they were locals that just went out there all the time, they knew where to put her so that she would be found eventually, but not right away. It's very creepy and somber to stand there to know that so few people have been to that spot or at least been there knowing what happened there. To have that knowledge and be there, was just kind of a little overwhelming and that's what brings it back around to the human side.
Even before she was identified, I had said The Lady of the Dunes was a real person. She had a real name, a real backstory, a hometown family, and friends, and at the very least, she deserved her name. Her family deserved closure, and that all has come. That resolution has come. This experience of working on this book alongside Frank with the documentary has been one of the most fulfilling of my life. I have seven published books, 100 podcast episodes, a couple of hundred articles in different publications in my blog, and countless dozens of videos on YouTube, and nothing tops this. The chance to be associated with the Lady of the Dunes case and to be actively working on a book when the case was resolved was destiny. I got to meet so many great people. Ones that worked on the documentary with Frank, people like Susan the Cape Cod Happy Medium, and Steven the Medium, Elix, and Liza Rodman.
I had great adventures searching for Hadden Clark's diary behind his grandparents' property, getting to stand where the Lady of the Dunes, Ruth Marie Terry was found when so very few have ever done that. Getting the chance to share my manuscript with Ruth Marie Terry's son so he could see my work and hopefully understand that I was trying to do right by his mother. These are things even two years ago I wouldn't have believed I grew up with the Lady of the Dunes case on Cape Cod. I never would've thought I'd have been associated with it even in such a small way.
Now we come to what going forward here as we're in 2023. The plan was if a traditional publisher was not interested in the book at this time, I would get a short run of this book published so that people can read it and I can build an audience to make the book undeniable that publishers have to listen. It's a very important, impactful, true crime case. How often does a 50-year-old true crime case get solved? It's not that often, and that's why I put my money where my mouth is with purchasing The Lady of the Dunes.com, building the website, and going through the process of getting a book self-published.
I'm doing right by Ruth Marie Terry, and I'm doing right by Frank, who put his confidence in me to write the book based on his documentary we had said we wanted to give the Lady of the Dunes, her name back, she now has that name, Ruth Marie Terry. The next hope is to solve what happened to her that night that ended up with her left in the dunes in Provincetown. It's important to me that this case doesn't just fade away. That's why there's this website with everything you could want about this case.
I'll keep updating the site with news as it comes out so that even though the documentary's done and the book is done. The website I will keep updating and hopefully, we'll be able to put the final pieces of the puzzle of the case together. Read the book if it's available to you and to the Lady of the Dunes, Ruth Marie Terry, may you now rest in peace and all of us associated with the documentary and the book Hope that we did right by you.
Visit The Lady of the Dunes.com and watch the documentary. That is the one-stop for all information about the case and the projects associated with the case. If you have any information about Ruth Marie Terry, formerly known as the Lady of the Dunes, anything to do with her life, or the potential murder suspect(s), go to FBI.gov. You can leave anonymous tips at 1-800-Call-FBI(1-800-225-5324). Or you can call the Massachusetts State Police at 1-800-KAPTURE(1-800-527-8873). To submit tips online, go to tips.FBI.gov or MSPtips@pol.state.ma.us.