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How the 1975 Film Jaws Brought Attention to the Lady of the Dunes Mystery
Stephen King's son, Joe Hill, published his idea on his blog, and continues to speculate to this day if The Lady of the Dunes was also a Jaws extra.
It’s been five decades since a naked and decaying woman was found lying face-down on a green towel — her head nearly decapitated — in a remote area of Cape Cod beach dunes.
“She was definitely posed there,” retired Provincetown, Massachusetts police chief Warren Tobias told People magazine. “She was laying out on a beach towel as if she was sunbathing.”
She was nicknamed Lady of the Dunes by authorities and the media, a name that would stick with her until DNA testing confirmed her true identity decades later. In November 2022, the Lady of the Dunes was finally identified by the FBI as 37-year-old Ruth Marie Terry, as previously reported by Oxygen.com.
Although 50 years have passed, it's only recently that detectives were able to determine who killed Terry. The perplexing case will be re-examined in an all-new three-part documentary Oxygen series Lady of the Dunes: Hunting the Cape Cod Killer, premiering Friday, Nov. 29 at 8/7c on Oxygen.
But before the case was solved, people thought the answers to her identity could be found in the popular film Jaws.
“What if the young murder victim no one has ever been able to identify has been seen by hundreds of millions of people in a beloved summer classic and they didn’t even know they were looking at her?” author Joe Hill, son of Stephen King, wrote in a since-deleted blog post in 2015, according to People. “What if the ghost of the Lady of the Dunes haunts Jaws?”
Joe Hill theorized the movie Jaws could identify the Lady of the Dunes
Joe Hill theorized that before she died, the Lady of the Dunes may have been an extra in the film, which was shot about 100 miles from where her body was found. He pointed to a moment 54 minutes and 2 seconds into the film, when a crowd gathered for the 4th of July on the beach.
“He spotted an extra — a fit, young-looking woman with brunette hair wearing a blue bandana, who bore a ‘startling resemblance’ to a composite sketch of the lady herself,” People reported.
Hill also speculated about the timing of Jaws filming and the murder in his now-deleted blog post.
“It is impossible to say with complete precision when they filmed the ‘July 4th Crowd Arrives’ sequence, which is where this shot appears,” he wrote, according to The Independent. “But we know it was almost certainly shot in June, because they filmed all the ‘on island’ scenes they could, early. The water was too cold for swimming, and the malfunctioning shark wasn’t ready for the ‘at sea’ material until late July.”
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“We also know the 'Lady of the Dunes' was alive in June and that the filming of Jaws was a big deal, locally,” he added. “Lots of folks turned up to try and get a peek at the stars, or see the shark, or to see if they could sneak into a shot.”/
Was the "Lady of the Dunes" in Jaws?
Joe Hill himself has noted the theory isn’t perfect. In blog posts, he admitted the extra was not wearing the same type of Wranglers that were found with the Lady of the Dunes. He also noted six other women in the movie were seen wearing blue bandanas, according to People.
Police were also skeptical of the theory.
“Do I think it is her? I don’t know,” Tobias told People. “Is there a resemblance? Yeah, I think some, but it was the '70s. I mean, hundreds of thousands of young women dressed that way — blue jeans and bandanas, with their hair down. Is it possible? Sure. Is it likely? Probably not. Just mathematical odds.”
After the Lady of The Dunes was identified as Ruth Marie Terry, Hill brought his theory to light again on Twitter, now known as X, posting pictures of the extra and Terry side by side.
“Her hair color is different. The rest? Well, see for yourself,” he posted. “They might not be the same person…but I also think one has to admit they might be.”
“My opinion: Maybe,” he said in another tweet that day. “Probably not? But maybe. The facial similarities are there, so is the way she holds her shoulders. But the hair is really quite different, and I wonder if the woman in the Jaws photo is too young.”
Although many people tried to find a complete list of the names of Jaws extras, the film’s casting director had passed away before the theory became popular, the Independent reported.
“Two astonishing things happened on Cape Cod in the summer of 1974,” Hill told the Washington Post. “One is that Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws, and the other is that someone murdered this woman in the dunes outside Provincetown and got away with it. Anything that stirs people’s memories could potentially be productive.”
To find out how investigators learned the woman's true identity and that of her killer, watch the two-hour premiere of Lady of the Dunes: Hunting the Cape Cod Killer on Friday Nov. 29 at 8/7c and the conclusion on Saturday Nov. 30 at 9/8c on Oxygen.
