On July 26, 1974, a teenager walking a dog through the rolling beach grass of the Race Point Dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts, stumbled upon the partially skeletonized body of an adult female. Her hands had been amputated at the wrists to thwart fingerprint identification, and her skull was shattered by a massive blow. For nearly half a century, Cape Cod's most haunted enigma was known as the "Lady of the Dunes."
Crime Scene Forensics & The Mutilation Pattern
The victim lay face-down on a blue-and-white pine-patterned beach blanket, resting on an olive-drab beach towel. Her head rested on folded Wrangler jeans and a blue bandana. Pathologists determined the cause of death was blunt force head trauma that crushed the left temporal bone; her head was nearly severed from the cervical vertebrae.
Most chillingly, the killer had systematically severed both of her hands at the distal radius and ulna, taking them from the scene. Additionally, six of her front teeth had been extracted postmortem to obstruct dental record matching. Despite this gruesome tampering, forensic dentists charted highly sophisticated gold restorations valued at thousands of dollars—a critical identifier known in dentistry as the "New York style" crown work.
Chronological Case Timeline
| Year / Date | Location | Event / Investigative Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| July 26, 1974 | Provincetown, MA | Body discovered in the dunes approximately one mile east of Race Point Coast Guard Station. |
| 1980 & 2000 | Provincetown Cemetery | Exhumed for skull reconstruction and early STR testing. Initial CODIS queries return zero hits. |
| 2013 | Provincetown, MA | Third exhumation conducted; Massachusetts State Police secure cranial bone samples for future genomics. |
| 2015 | Pop-Culture Theory | Author Joe Hill notes physical resemblance to an extra in Steven Spielberg's Jaws; FBI later disproves. |
| Oct 31, 2022 | FBI Boston Field Office | Special Agent Joseph Bonavolonta announces identification as Ruth Marie Terry through genetic genealogy. |
| August 28, 2023 | Barnstable DA Office | Official finding: Husband Guy Rockwell Muldavin named as the perpetrator; case officially cleared. |
The Genetic Genealogy Resolution
In 2022, the FBI's Boston Division, collaborating with the Massachusetts State Police and Othram, extracted nuclear DNA from the deeply degraded skeletal material recovered during the 2013 exhumation. Genealogists used SNP whole-genome mapping to reconstruct family branches rooted in Tennessee.
On October 31, 2022, the FBI officially identified the Lady of the Dunes as Ruth Marie Terry, born in Whitwell, Marion County, Tennessee in 1936. She was 37 years old at the time of her murder. Ruth had lived in California and Michigan before marrying antiques dealer Guy Rockwell Muldavin in February 1974 in Reno, Nevada.