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Who Was the Lady of the Dunes? All About Ruth Marie Terry's Life and Death
In the summer of 1974, the handless body of a woman was found along the beaches of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her identity, along with the identity of her killer, would remain unknown for nearly 50 years.
The Lady of the Dunes was the epithet for a Jane Doe whose brutalized body was discovered in 1974 along the New England coast. Now, Oxygen is exploring what really happened to the former Jane Doe in the documentary The Lady of the Dunes: Hunting the Cape Cod Killer, playing now on Oxygen.
For years, authorities in and around Provincetown, Massachusetts — a lively beach town colloquially known as P-Town at the northern tip of Cape Cod — scrambled to learn the identity of the murder victim... and who could have been behind such savagery.
“It was a horrific, brutal crime,” Provincetown Police Chief Jeff Jaran told the Cape Cod Times in 2010, then unaware that in 2022, scientific advancements in DNA testing would help officials identify Jane Doe and her killer.
Keep reading to learn about decades-old mystery of The Lady of the Dunes.
The Discovery of the Lady of the Dunes
On July 26, 1974, at the peak of the summer holidays, a 12-year-old girl walking with her family made a grisly discovery in the sandy Race Point Dunes, according to NBC Boston affiliate WBTS-CD. There in the dunes was the nude body of a woman. Her nearly-decapitated head was crushed in and her hands were gone, presumably an attempt by the killer or killers to deter authorities from identifying the woman, as stated by the FBI. She’d been dead for several weeks.
No murder weapon was found at the crime scene, and the cause of death was determined to be a blow to the head, per Provincetown’s government page. City officials said the victim laid on one half of a beach towel “as if she’d been sharing it with a companion,” and her head rested on a pair of folded jeans.
Local and state police had little to go on, though the victim was determined to have auburn-colored hair tied in a ponytail, pink-painted toenails, and was believed to be between the ages of 25 and 45, per a 1983 report from the New York Times.
“For nearly five decades, investigators have worked tirelessly to identify this victim through various means, including neighborhood canvasses; reviews of thousands of missing-person cases; clay model facial reconstruction, and age-regression drawings,” a press release from the FBI read.
The mystery, once the oldest case in the state’s unidentified persons clearinghouse, haunted those living in the seaside town.
As reported in the Cape Cod Times, efforts included exhumations in 1980, 2000, and 2003 all of which yielded no solid leads. For years, the woman’s stone marker in Provincetown’s St. Peter’s Cemetery named her only as “Unidentified Female Body.”
“For many police investigators at the end of their careers, there is often an unresolved case that haunts them, that intrudes upon the days, years and decades of the rest of their lives,” Massachusetts State Police (M.S.P.) Col. Christopher Mason told NBC News in 2022. “This case has been that for generations of Provincetown police officers and Massachusetts state troopers.”
The Theories About the Lady of the Dunes Jane Doe
Early on, the case for “The Lady of the Dunes” produced lead after lead to no avail. Tough-as-nails Provincetown Police Chief James Meads took the case especially close to heart as the killing took place under his watch, making him determined to solve it, he told the New York Times in 1983.
“It’s my case!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never let anybody else touch it. When you put your heart and soul in a case, you really want to solve it.”
One of the more promising leads, above all others, was that the victim could have been missing 24-year-old Rory Gene Kesinger. According to The Doe Network (International Center for Unidentified & Missing Persons), Kesinger was an alleged gunrunner and drug smuggler arrested on assault charges after allegedly shooting an officer during a Pembroke, Massachusetts police raid.
On May 27, 1974 — less than two months before the discovery of Jane Doe’s body — Kesinger escaped the Plymouth County Jail, and her whereabouts remain unknown.
But the 2000 exhumation of Jane Doe and DNA comparison proved Kesinger was not the Lady of the Dunes, per the Cape Cod Times.
As for the killer, in the early days of the murder investigation, authorities looked into whether the unidentified victim was the handy work of nearby Truro, Massachusetts serial killer Tony Costa. However, Costa died the May before the murder occurred. Convicted killer Hadden Clark also confessed to the murder, but his confessions were widely believed to be delusions rooted in paranoid schizophrenia, as detailed in Lady of the Dunes.
Removal of the victim’s hands also led to speculation that the homicide was connected to infamous Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger.
Renewed interest in the case came in 2018 when horror writer Joe Hill, the son of famed author Stephen King, brought up for the second time online his theory that the unidentified woman was an extra in the 1975 film, Jaws.
Then, on October 31, 2022, Othram labs utilized forensic genetic genealogy to identify Jane Doe as missing Tennessee 37-year-old Ruth Marie Terry nearly 50 years after her murder, as previously reported by Oxygen.com.
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Lady of the Dunes Ruth Marie Terry's Disappearance
Terry was 21 when, in 1958, she entrusted a couple with whom she worked at an assembly plant in Livonia, Michigan with her infant son, now named Richard Hanchett. Sixty years later, the adopted son took a DNA test via Ancestry.com in search of his biological mother, leading him to seek out her family in Tennessee who had searched for Terry for decades, according to the New York Times.
“Everybody that I talked to who knew her adored her,” Hanchett said to the New York Times. “I wish I could have just talked to her, touched her once.”
Terry’s relatives had different versions of where she said she was going after her last visit to Tennessee in the summer of 1973. Some reported that Terry planned to return to California — where she lived for at least part of the 1960s — while others believed she was heading north.
“We just never heard from her again,” Terry’s nephew, Jim Terry, told the New York Times. “I was a kid. I just remember a big smile and her auburn hair.”
Court records obtained by the New York Times revealed that in February 1974 — five months before her death — Terry married former antiques dealer Guy Rockwell Muldavin in Reno, Nevada.
Feds named Muldavin as their prime suspect just days after identifying Terry, as previously reported.
"The fact that he touched my mom kills me, but the fact that he got away with it pisses me off more than anything," Hanchett told WBTS-CD.
Who killed the Lady of the Dunes?
On August 28, 2023, Capes and Islands District Attorney Robert J. Galibois announced that “Mr. Muldavin was responsible” for Ruth Terry’s 1974 death.
“Through investigative efforts, the Massachusetts State Police learned that Ms. Terry and Mr. Muldavin traveled during the summer of 1974. When Mr. Muldavin returned from that trip, he was driving what was believed to be Ms. Terry’s vehicle and had indicated to witnesses that Ms. Terry had passed away,” per the D.A.’s press release. “Ms. Terry was never seen by her family again.”
Terry’s brother reportedly questioned Muldavin about the woman’s whereabouts. However, Muldavin claimed he and Terry fought on their honeymoon, “and he had not heard from his wife again,” according to the official statement.
Muldavin died in 2002. According to an obituary in The Californian reviewed by Oxygen.com, he was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and died at age 78 in Salinas, California. He was cited as an “artist, actor, and poet” who left behind a wife and sister.
Once described as a “bunco artist and great lover,” according to Bay Area’s SFGATE, the New York Daily News cited Muldavin as having a heavy presence in New York City’s Greenwich Village with “beatniks, art lovers, celebrities, and celebrity hunters, all bound by Muldavin’s magnetism and offbeat philosophy.” He reportedly worked as an actor and disc jockey in California and, according to CBS Seattle affiliate KIRO-TV, had been married at least five times.
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The Lady of the Dunes' Husband Guy Muldavin's Marriages and Crimes
In 1960, Muldavin — then using the name Raoul Guy Rockwell — was suspected of killing his second wife, Manzanita Mearns-Rockwell, 40, and her 18-year-old daughter, Delores Ann, after they were found dead on the family's Seattle property. Mother and daughter were last seen alive in April 1960 and reported missing after the pair stopped making their monthly trips to Vancouver to visit Mearns-Rockwell's ex-husband, per the Seattle outlet.
Muldavin, whom acquaintances described as a “charming rascal,” married his third wife in July 1960, and immediately borrowed $10,000 from his new mother-in-law before going on the run.
He made national headlines the following month after authorities found human flesh, hair, and seemingly-burned bone fragments in the septic tank of the Seattle home where Muldavin lived with his missing wife and stepdaughter. Though forensic testing wasn't available at that time, they were believed to belong to the missing women.
Within the next few months, Muldavin underwent a rhinoplasty in New York and found himself in Provincetown and elsewhere around Cape Cod, presenting himself as a Vancouver magazine writer, according to KIRO-TV.
Muldavin was arrested in New York City on December 1, 1960, and extradited to Washington. He was charged with unlawful flight to avoid giving testimony in connection to the human remains on his Seattle property, though state prosecutors didn’t believe there was enough to charge Muldavin with the double murder. He was convicted only on larceny charges and received a suspended sentence, according to KIRO-TV.
In light of the publicity surrounding Muldavin, he was later sought in another two unsolved cases in California: the June 18, 1950, shooting death of Henry Baird, 28, and the disappearance of Baird's girlfriend, Barbara Kelly, 17, per SFGATE.
Like Ruth Terry, Baird’s body was discovered on a beach in Table Bluff, according to the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. A 1963 report by the Eureka Humboldt Standard reviewed by Oxygen.com stated Baird’s naked body (he was stripped of everything except his shoes) rested atop Kelley’s neatly folded clothes.
Kelly’s whereabouts remain unknown, though the case of Ruth Terry has been closed.
Learn more in The Lady of the Dunes, available to watch now on Oxygen.
