July 26, 1974,
A girl who was hiking with her family at Providence Race Point Beach in Massachusetts found the naked body of a woman on a beach blanket.
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The FBI said the victim was found with his head nearly cut off, leaning against folded jeans and his hands missing, or that the killer had taken away fingerprints to avoid police investigation.
After a further autopsy, the medical examiner determined that she had been killed weeks earlier as a result of a blow to the head.
Such a cruel case immediately triggered a large-scale investigation.
The F.B.I. searched motels and apartments, reviewed thousands of reports of missing women, examined every vehicle that moved on the dunes, and even recreated her might have looked like with clay models.
But without key fingerprints, her identity is still unrecognizable, and she can only be called "Lady of the Dunes".
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Her case, which has plagued that generation of investigators and Cape Cod residents, has also become the oldest unsolved victim in Massachusetts.
As clues dwindled, some speculated she was killed by South Boston's notorious gangster boss, James Whitey Bulger.
Stephen King's son, writer Joe Hill, believes she may have been an extra in the movie Jaws on nearby Marthae Island.
In 2000, the FBI exhumed her body from a cemetery in P-town to extract a DNA sample, hoping to use DNA technology to identify her.
But it wasn't until late October 2022 that the FBI finally identified her through genetic genealogy.
On Monday, Oct. 31, the FBI announced a major breakthrough in the unsolved case of "Daughter of Dune" in P-town, Massachusetts, and the victim was identified as Ruth Marie Terry, 37 years old from Tennessee.
And all this is thanks to the journey of an American uncle to find relatives.
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Richard Hanchett was born in Michigan in 1958, but his birth mother, Ruth Marie Terry, who was 21 years old at the time, chose to entrust him to a couple.
The couple were Mary's colleagues at the auto parts factory.
When Richard grew up, he heard stories about his birth mother, about how beautiful she was, with red hair and blue eyes, and loved to sing.
So, the long journey to find relatives began.
In 2018, in order to find her, Richard successfully found his birth mother's family in Tennessee through DNA testing through Ancestry.com.
That's when Richard learned that his birth mother had been missing since the early 1970s, and that her relatives had been searching for her for decades.
Although there is no information that Mary ever reported the missing person to the police, Mary's niece, Marilyn, has been conducting her own investigation using genealogy websites and DNA tests, and even in her later years, Mary's family still wants to find her.
Richard, 64, a retired software engineer at General Motors, used her address and name to start searching the Internet after reaching out to Marilyn.
Last week, at the request of FBI investigators, Richard submitted a DNA sample to confirm the identity of the daughter of Dune.
On October 31, 2022, the family finally knew Mary's whereabouts.
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On Wednesday, Nov. 2, the FBI said it was looking for information about a deceased man named Guy Rockwell Muldavin (Guy), who Mary was believed to have married shortly before she was murdered.
Born in 1923 and a former antique dealer, Guy arrested Guy in 1960 after police found the dismembered body at his Seattle home, convinced that the man was linked to the disappearance of his ex-wife and daughter.
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In this case, Guy received a suspended sentence and was released in 1962.
Court records show that Guy married Mary in Nevada in February 1974, just a few months before she was killed.
At 60 years old, Mary's nephew Jim recalled,
He last saw Mary in July-August 1973, when she and Guy were in a motel room in Tennessee. His mother thought Mary was going to California, while his father thought she was going "north."
They haven't heard from Mary since.
Later, Richard shuddered when he and Jim learned that Guy was involved in the disappearance of his wife and daughter in Seattle.
With the identity of the Dune Daughter confirmed, the FBI announced Monday that it would turn its attention to finding the killer, tracking Mary's history and seeking clues from the public.
At the press conference, the FBI did not mention Guy, who died in Salinas, California, in 2002 at the age of 78, according to records.
The Cape Cod district attorney said the killer was likely dead, but it was difficult to say for sure whether Guy was the killer, and if the killer was still alive, the message they wanted to send was: "Here we are."
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Richard later recalled that when he was about 13 years old, Mary tried to contact him once, but he rejected her offer.
He regretted this and hoped that Mary would be buried next to her parents in Tennessee.
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