On a hot July day in 1974, a 12-year-old girl walking her dog through the windswept dunes near Provincetown, Massachusetts, made a horrific discovery: The nude body of a woman, lying face-down on a beach towel, her hands missing, and her head nearly severed.
Investigators determined she had been dead for as long as three weeks. For nearly half a century, no one knew her name, as the mystery came to be known as the Lady of the Dunes.
Police said the killer had removed the woman’s hands to prevent fingerprinting and nearly decapitated her, possibly to disguise her identity. She had been placed carefully on a blanket with folded jeans nearby, as if arranged deliberately. Forensic experts estimated she had been killed sometime in late June or early July of 1974.
Despite sketches, clay reconstructions, and exhumations in 1980, 2000, and 2013, the woman’s identity remained unknown. Investigators explored hundreds of leads, including mob connections.
The “Lady of the Dunes” “Jaws” theory
In 2015, author and podcaster Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King, suggested that the unknown woman might appear briefly in the background of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster Jaws.
Filmed on nearby Martha’s Vineyard around the same time the murder occurred, the movie included an extra in a blue bandana and jeans resembling the clothing found beside the victim. Hill speculated that if the woman in the frame were the same person, it might help determine her identity or establish when she was last seen alive.
Hill’s theory, however, was proven untrue in 2022, when the FBI Boston Field Office announced a breakthrough using investigative genetic genealogy. DNA extracted from the victim’s remains was matched with distant relatives, finally revealing her as Ruth Marie Terry from Tennessee.
All signs point to her husband
Born in 1936, Terry lived in Michigan and California before marrying antiques dealer Guy Rockwell Muldavin in early 1974. Family members said she vanished soon after the marriage. When Muldavin returned from a trip that summer, driving what was believed to be her car, he claimed his new wife had died, providing few other details.
Before his marriage to Terry, authorities connected Muldavin to another set of mysterious disappearances. In 1960, more than a decade before Terry’s death, Muldavin’s ex-wife Manzanita “Manzy” Muldavin and her teenage daughter, Dolores, vanished from their Seattle home under suspicious circumstances.
According to reports, neighbors recalled a foul odor coming from Muldavin’s property shortly after their disappearance, and police later discovered human remains in a septic tank tied to the case.
Although Muldavin was considered a prime suspect, he was never convicted of murder; instead, he served time on unrelated fraud charges. He resurfaced years later under a new identity and married Terry in 1974, only for her to meet the same grim fate.
Nearly 50 years later, the pieces came together. In August 2023, Cape & Islands District Attorney Rob Galibois declared Muldavin, who died in 2002, responsible for Terry’s murder. And with that, the case was officially closed.
Investigators believe Terry’s slaying likely occurred shortly after she and Muldavin visited her family in Tennessee that summer. A motive, why she ended up on the remote stretch of Cape Cod beach, and whether there’s definitive evidence linking Muldavin to the crime were never publicly disclosed. Authorities say the careful staging of her body suggests Muldavin intended to delay discovery and obscure her identity, and for decades, he succeeded.
