'Lady of the Dunes' podcast: What is the story of Provincetown MA's 1974 cold case
It has been nearly 50 years since Alyssa Metcalfe’s sister found the handless body in the dunes 2 miles east of the old Coast Guard station in Provincetown. Since then the The "Lady of the Dunes" case has had a permanent place on the Provincetown Police Department's website.
The "Lady of the Dunes" has now been identified as Ruth Marie Terry from Tennessee, 37 at the time of her death, according to a Monday announcement from the Federal Bureau of Investigation Boston Division.
The news was announced at an Oct. 31 Federal Bureau of Investigation press conference, and included Provincetown Chief of Police James Golden, Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O'Keefe, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Josh Levy, as well as state and federal law enforcement authorities.
The FBI identified Ruth using investigative genealogy, a unique method that can generate new leads for unsolved homicides, as well as help identify unknown victims. This technique combines the use of DNA analysis with traditional genealogy research and historical records to generate investigative leads.
What we knew in 2019Can a new method to study DNA solve give a name to the 'Lady of the Dunes'
Over the years, the “Lady of the Dunes” case has caught the attention of each police chief and detective in Provincetown, starting with James J. Meads, Sr., who was chief when the body was found. Meads died in 2011.
In 1980, the body was exhumed from the burial plot in the church cemetery for blood samples; 20 years later, it was exhumed again for DNA sampling, to see if it matched that of a woman who came forward as possibly the mother of the victim. A clay model was made of the woman’s head, and age-regression drawings were completed in 2006.
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In 2009 and 2010, then Provincetown police Detective Monica Himes and then-Police Chief Jeff Jaran worked with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Alexandria, Virginia, and other investigators who convene regularly to discuss cold cases, to come up with a three-dimensional, color composite image of what the “Lady of the Dunes” might have looked like at the time of her death.
Over the years, researcher Bruce Jackson, who ran the undergraduate biotechnology and forensic DNA science program at Massachusetts Bay Community College in Wellesley, continued his studies of the case, including a visit to the site in the dunes in 2015 with five students. After Jackson died in 2016, the state medical examiner’s office removed the biological materials that Jackson held at the college, Neil Buckley, the college’s vice president for finance and administration, said in 2019.
As a forensic DNA expert, Jackson had a standing relationship with the Provincetown Police Department since the 2000 exhumation, Police Chief James Golden said in 2015. The sampling taken in 2015, with the students, consisted of tablespoons of sand, Golden said at the time.
In 2019, prosecutors were examining a new method for the use of DNA evidence and genealogy to generate leads in cold criminal cases on Cape Cod and the Islands. The “Lady of the Dunes” was one of two cases that were the primary targets of the effort, Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe said then.
Learn more about this cold case:How to find out more about the 'Lady of the Dunes,' identified as Ruth Marie Terry
How the Lady of the Dunes was found
In Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket counties, there are four unidentified bodies and another 16 instances of unidentified human skeletal parts, which have been found mostly on beaches and in fishing nets, according to a government clearinghouse of missing, unidentified and unclaimed person cases in the U.S. In total, there are 11 unsolved homicides in the jurisdiction of the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s office dating back to the 1970s, according to a spokeswoman for the office.
Among the four unidentified bodies are two cases that overlap with the unsolved homicides, including “Lady of the Dunes.” After almost a half-century and countless hours of investigation, the case is the oldest unidentified dead person in Massachusetts included in the clearinghouse records.
On July 26, 1974, Metcalfe, who was 10 years old at the time, had stayed in town to go to the horse stables while her parents and her sister, Leslie, visited with friends at the C-scape dune shack.
Previous coverage:Lady of the Dunes mystery reinvigorated
“We’re going to examine everything that we can with respect to what’s left of the remains,” O’Keefe said of the “Lady of the Dunes” case.
Leslie, then 12, and their parents had been hiking back to the Province Lands Visitor Center after a day at the shack with friends. A couple of their friends’ dogs were following them, when one of them caught a scent.
“The dog kind of started barking at something as they were hiking across, so my sister went to follow and see what the dog was barking at,” Metcalfe said of what her family told her. “That's when she found the body.”
Photos:Provincetown cold case 'Lady of the Dunes' identified as Ruth Marie Terry of Tennessee
Leslie Metcalfe, who died in 1996, primarily remembered that the body had no hands and that it appeared to be a dead deer, based on the coloring of the woman’s skin, her sister said. Their parents and Leslie doubled back to the dune shack to tell everyone there, and then someone took a Jeep to find park rangers and bring them out. The woman’s head was nearly severed from her body, and she had been in the stand of scrub pines for at least a week, having died from a blow to the head, police said at that time.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: 'Lady of the Dunes' podcasts: What is the story of Ruth Marie Terry
