Man questioned in Seattle double murder linked to ‘Lady of the Dunes’ victim Ruth Marie Terry

For nearly half a century, the Lady of the Dunes was one of the most enduring and intriguing mysteries in America.

The horror began in the summer of 1974. On July 26, a girl walking her dog along the Race Point Dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts stumbled onto what she initially thought was a dead animal. It was a woman, dead for perhaps several weeks.

When police arrived, they found a nightmarish scene. The woman was nearly decapitated, with her hands and some teeth missing — likely a forensic countermeasure by the killer. Investigators guessed she was between 25 and 40 years old, but they had little else besides her physical description to go off of. She had long auburn hair pulled into a ponytail, blue Wrangler jeans, a blue bandana and was about 5-foot-6. She had been left face-down on a beach blanket, and there was no sign of a struggle, so she may have been attacked while napping or by someone she knew. Her case of death was blunt-force trauma to her head.

Although the grisly murder scene was huge news in Cape Cod, no one came forward with the woman’s identity. She was dubbed the Lady of the Dunes and, as years turned to decades, she became Massachusetts’ oldest unidentified murder victim.

This week, the FBI announced the Lady of the Dunes has a name: Ruth Marie Terry.

Ruth Marie Terry, known for decades as the “Lady of the Dunes” unsolved Cape Cod murder victim, was identified in October 2022. Terry is seen here as a teenager.

FBI/Handout

Census, death and marriage records reviewed by SFGATE begin to coalesce a portrait of Terry’s life. She was born in 1936 in rural Marion County, Tennessee to Johnny Terry and Eva Lois Keener. A death certificate shows Terry’s mother died a year later of epilepsy.

When Terry was 20, she married Korean War veteran Billy Ray Smith, and it seems Terry left Tennessee for good sometime after the wedding. The FBI says Terry had ties to Michigan, California and Massachusetts, although specific cities were not named. It’s not clear if Terry and Smith had children, but FBI Special Agent Joe Bonavolonta referred to Terry as a “wife and mother” in a Monday press conference.

Terry’s first marriage didn’t last. A few months before she was murdered, Massachusetts police say she married Guy Rockwell Muldavin. In 1960, he made national news as a suspect in the disappearance of his wife Manzanita Mearns and her 18-year-old daughter Dolores Ann in Seattle. According to media reports at the time, Muldavin, 37,  was a sometimes actor and DJ in California, an antiques dealer in Seattle and a “bunco artist and great lover” everywhere he went. The New York Daily News reported he had “three wives and many sweethearts” by 1960 and was known around Greenwich Village for his nightly soirees with “beatniks, art lovers, celebrities and celebrity hunters, all bound by Muldavin’s magnetism and offbeat philosophy.” 

Guy Rockwell Muldavin, born in 1923, was believed to have married Ruth Marie Terry in 1974.

Massachusetts State Police/Handout

After the disappearance of Mearns and Dolores Ann, Muldavin went on the lam. Police searching his Seattle home discovered a disturbance around the septic tank; when they pulled it open, they found pieces of human flesh inside. Without DNA testing at the time, they couldn’t definitively say who it belonged to, but it seemed a safe assumption the missing women had been found.

Muldavin was discovered in Greenwich Village and taken into custody for questioning. Based on newspaper reports from 1960 and 1961, it appears homicide charges were not filed against him. The same conclusion was reached by famed true crime writer Ann Rule, who wrote about the Muldavin case in her 2007 book “Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder.” Rule, unknowingly, was the first to report on Muldavin’s marriage to Terry, noting the man had married “a woman named Teri in Washoe County, Nevada” before slipping out of the public eye.

“As infamous as he was forty-seven years ago, the winds of time have swept away his dilapidated buildings, his alleged crimes and his memory,” Rule wrote.

She would be proved wrong. On Wednesday, Massachusetts State Police, the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office and Provincetown police announced they are seeking information about Muldavin and his whereabouts in 1973 and 1974. The agencies believe Muldavin and Terry married in February 1974, and both went by a number of other names including Raoul Guy Rockwell, Guy Muldavin Rockwell, Teri Marie Vizina, Terry M. Vizina and Teri Shannon.

Searches by SFGATE in newspaper archives discovered more details about Muldavin, who was born on Oct. 27, 1923 in New Mexico and died in Salinas, Calif., in 2002. After the 1960 manhunt made Muldavin an infamous figure across the nation, investigators in Humboldt County probed him as a suspect in a 1950 murder of truck driver Henry Baird and his teenage girlfriend Barbara Kelly at the Table Bluff overlook. A deputy in the sheriff’s office told the Eureka Humboldt Standard that Muldavin had been a resident of Fortuna, but was “believed to have left this area several weeks before the Table Bluff mystery occurred.”

In 1985, Muldavin was the subject of a profile by The Californian for his radio show on KAZU in Pacific Grove. The public radio show was aimed at older residents and handled “topics such as cuts in Social Security, Alzheimer’s disease and feelings about old people having sex.”

“Muldavin has introduced programs dealing with homosexuality, the erosion of culture and his belief that killing has become a habit,” the article reads.

In the story, Muldavin claimed to have “worked with youth through the Santa Monica Police Department” and had once been told “the only job an employment agency could find for him was as a Santa Claus at Macy’s.”

An obituary for Guy Rockwell Muldavin that ran in The Californian in March 2002. Massachusetts police are seeking information about Muldavin in relation to the Ruth Marie Terry murder case.

The Californian/Screenshot

Since Terry was found brutally murdered in the dunes of Provincetown, generations of investigators — professional and amateur — have taken up her case. Her remains were exhumed multiple times in the hopes of making DNA matches to living relatives. Sketches were made and remade as science improved. Even author Stephen King’s son, Joe Hill, got involved in theorizing about the Lady of the Dunes.

During a 2015 viewing of “Jaws,” which was filmed in Provincetown around the time of Terry’s murder, Hill noticed an extra who looked similar to the description of the Lady of the Dunes. She was wearing a blue bandana and blue years and, now compared with known photographs of Terry, does bear a striking resemblance to the murder victim. His theory catapulted the case back into the spotlight, turning the Lady of the Dunes into one of true crime’s best-known unsolved cases.

As with many recent identifications, the breakthrough was finally achieved through genetic genealogy, the process by which investigators use publicly available DNA profiles from genealogy kits to trace down living relatives. Terry’s DNA was compared to other samples, creating a family tree that grew narrower and narrower until a close relative was found last week. On Monday, FBI investigators told Terry’s living family members before announcing the discovery to the public.

Ruth Marie Terry, known for decades as the “Lady of the Dunes” unsolved Cape Cod murder victim, was identified in October 2022.

FBI/Handout

“This is, without a doubt, a major break in the investigation that will, hopefully, bring all of us closer to identifying her killer,” Bonavolonta said.

Anyone with information about the case is asked to contact the FBI tipline at 1-800-225-5324 or the Massachusetts State Police at 1-800-527-8873. Tips can also be emailed to tips.fbi.gov or MSPtips@pol.state.ma.us.