They had been searching for her for decades
They had been searching for her for decades.
They did not know what had happened.
They only knew she had left with a new husband and never come back.
On October 31st, 2022, 48 years, 3 months, and 5 days after the body was found on the Race Point Dunes, Joseph Bonavolonta, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston division, stood at a press podium and said the words >> >> Provincetown had waited nearly half a century to hear.
The Lady of the Dunes had a name.
Her name was Ruth Marie Terry.
>> >> She was 37 years old when she died.
She was from Tennessee.
Bonavolonta called it a major breakthrough and said it would hopefully bring all of us closer to identifying the perpetrator.
Ruth’s family was notified that same morning before the information was released to the public.
Astrium Labs in Texas had done what 48 years of traditional investigation could not.
From a severely degraded DNA sample earlier labs had abandoned, scientists at Astrium assembled a genetic profile and compared it with public genealogical databases.
The result led to the Terry family in Tennessee, the same family Richard Hanchett had connected with through ancestry.
com in 2018.
Two threads crossed.
DNA from the Lady of the Dunes matched the Terry line.
>> >> And Richard Hanchett, the man who had spent his life looking for his birth mother, finally found her.
Only she had died before he ever had the chance to know who she was.
She had lain in an unmarked grave in Provincetown for 48 years, more than 200 and 400 miles from Tennessee, and no one in the world connected those two facts until now.
To understand who Ruth Marie Terry was, you have to go back to Whitwell, Tennessee, a tiny town among the Appalachian Mountains, >> >> where life turned around coal mines and churches.
Ruth was born on September 8, 1936 in a cabin on a mountainside.
Her father, Johnny Red Terry, worked in the mines.
Her mother, Eva Lois Keener, was only 23 when she gave birth to Ruth.
On September 20, 1937, when Ruth was just 1 year and 12 days old, Eva died of epilepsy at 27.
Ruth grew up without a mother in extreme poverty in a family her nephew, Jim Terry, later described in a few words.
She came from a background of poverty to the extreme.
She married Billy Ray Smith when she was only 13, a child taking a husband.
In Tennessee in the late 1940s, that was not unusual, but it was also not a free choice.
That marriage was the only way a poor motherless girl could escape the life she was living.
They separated, reunited, then divorced again.
In that time, Ruth had a son, but she could not keep him.
She arranged for the boy to be adopted by Richard Hanchett Sr.
, a co-worker where she worked, in exchange for his paying her debts.
After the adoption was complete, Ruth left.
She tried to contact her son again in 1972, but he was not ready.
They never saw each other again.
Around 1957, Ruth left Tennessee completely.
From then on, her life became a string of gaps.
She had ties to Michigan, California, and Massachusetts.
She used multiple aliases: Terry Marie Visina, Terry M.
Visina, Terry Shannon.
A woman constantly changing identities, living at the edge of the system, leaving few paper traces.
The years from 1958 to 1974 are almost completely missing from the record, in part because the people who could have told the story died before anyone thought to ask.
Her son, Richard Hanchett, when he finally learned about his mother, told reporters she was kind, almost to a fault.
That is how a son described the mother he never really knew, a mother who gave him up so he could have a better life, then vanished from the world without anyone knowing.
When the FBI announced Ruth’s identity, the Terry family in Tennessee finally had an answer to the question that had followed them for nearly five decades.
Nephew Jim Terry remembered the last time he saw his aunt in a hotel room in Chattanooga in July or August 1973, together with her new husband.
His mother thought Ruth was going to California.
His father thought she was heading north.
Niece Brittany Novonglosky told investigators that her aunt was not herself around the new husband, that he was possessive and demanding.
That new husband, within days of the FBI announcing Ruth’s identity, investigators uncovered a detail that completely changed the nature of the case.
On February 16, 1974, only about 5 months before her body was found on the Race Point Dunes, Ruth Marie Terry had married a man named Guy Rockwell Moldavin in Reno, Nevada.
And when investigators began looking into Guy Rockwell Moldavin, what they found turned the case from mystery to horror.
Moldavin was born in 1923 and adopted as a child.
He was educated in Connecticut, New York, and Switzerland.
People who knew him described him as a charming rascal with the gift of gab.
He was 6 ft 3 in tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested with curly hair, and he knew how to make women trust him.
He had been an actor, a DJ, an antique stealer, and according to the press of the time, a con man and a great lover wherever he landed.
He married at least five times, and not all of the women who passed through his life survived.
In 1958, under the alias Raoul Guy Rockwell, Moldavin married Manzanita Eileen Manzi Ryan in Kootenai, Idaho.
Manzanita had a daughter of her own named Dolores Ann Merns, 18 years old.
Both mother and daughter moved in with him in a house by a lake in Seattle.
Between April 1 and 3, 1960, Manzanita and Dolores disappeared.
Neither was ever seen alive again.
Moldavin claimed his wife had run off.
He filed for divorce.
Six months after mother and daughter vanished, police searched Moldavin’s house and found freshly poured concrete on the septic tank lid.
When they opened it, they found pieces of human flesh and body parts inside.
The FBI issued a nationwide warrant.
Moldavin was arrested in an apartment in Greenwich Village, New York in December 1960.
But without direct evidence, he was never convicted of killing Manzanita or Dolores.
>> >> He was convicted only of theft, sentenced to 15 years, then released early after agreeing to repay the money.
And 14 years after Seattle, that predator found his next prey, Ruth Marie Terry.
Massachusetts State Police took over the investigation.
They asked the public for any information about Terry’s or Moldovan’s presence in New England in 1973 and 1974.
Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe stood in front of reporters and said a sentence carrying the weight of 48 years.
It is very possible the person who did this is dead.
But if they are still out there, the message for them is, we are coming.
When investigators began putting the pieces together, the picture of the last months of Ruth Marie Terry’s life came into focus, clear and terrifying.
To understand why Ruth ended her life on the Provincetown dunes, you have to understand whom she met and whose orbit she had stepped into.
Guy Rockwell Moldovan was not the kind of killer you picture when you think of a murderer.
He did not hide in the dark.
He stood in the spotlight and he liked it there.
The well-known true crime writer Ann Rule wrote about him in Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder, describing him as a predator with lethal charm.
He was born in New York in 1923, adopted as a child, raised on a cattle ranch in New Mexico, educated by private tutors and at prestigious schools in Connecticut, New York, and Switzerland.
He could talk about art, literature, philosophy.
He knew how to walk into a room and make every head turn.
The 1960s press called him a con man, a flimflam artist, and a great lover.
People who knew him used the phrase charming rascal with the gift of gab.
He was 6 ft 3, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, curly-haired.
He attracted women as easily as breathing and he destroyed them just as easily.
He had married at least five times.
His first wife, Jo Ellen Loop, was driven out of their home and shared shop.
His second wife, Manzanita, and her daughter Dolores died in a septic tank in Seattle.
His third wife, Evelyn Emerson, he married only 4 months after Manzanita and Dolores disappeared, then swindled her stepmother out of $10,000.
And his fifth wife, Phyllis, he lived with for nearly 50 years until he died.
Between all those women, there was Ruth Marie Terry.
On February 16, 1974, Ruth married Mul Deven in Reno, Nevada.
When she signed the license, she used the alias Terry Marie Vezina.
He used the name Guy Rockwell Moldovan.
Two people living a false life under names that were not entirely their own.
After the wedding, the couple went to Whitwell, Tennessee to visit Ruth’s family.
That was the spring of 1974.
That was the last time the family saw Ruth alive.
And what they saw worried them.
Niece Britney Novonglosky later told investigators that her aunt was not herself around Moldovan.
He was possessive.
He was controlling.
Ruth withdrew, grew quiet, no longer the woman the family remembered.
Nephew Jim Terry remembered the last time he saw his aunt in a hotel room in Chattanooga.
And he was there, the big man with curly hair Jim described as big, burly, curly hair.
Jim’s mother thought Ruth was going to California.
Jim’s father thought she was heading north.
No one knew for sure.
But everyone knew she was going with Guy Moldovan.
After the visit to Whitwell, the couple left for a summer honeymoon in 1974.
What happened on that trip, no one knows in detail.
But investigators know this.
When the trip ended, only one person came back.
Late in the summer of 1974, only a few weeks after Ruth’s body was found on the Race Point Dunes, Guy Rockwell Moldovan appeared in Tennessee.
He went to see Ruth’s family.
He was driving a car the family believed was Ruth’s.
And he brought a story.
>> >> He said Ruth had disappeared from their home in California.
According to sister-in-law Jan Terry, he stayed a short time and simply said he did not know where Ruth was.
>> >> No panic, no worry, no offer to call the police.
He just said it and left.
But when Ruth’s brother asked more, Moldovan told a different version.
He told the brother they had argued on the honeymoon >> >> and he had not heard from his wife since.
Think about that.
A husband tells his wife’s family that his wife has vanished and he does not report it to the police.
He drives her car home.
He says, “We argued and that is all”.
And he expects the family to accept that answer.
Ruth’s brother did not accept it.
James Terry hired a private investigator to find his sister and the investigator came back with an answer that, looking back now, >> >> clearly came from Moldovan.
Ruth had sold all her belongings, left voluntarily, and joined a religious cult.
That story was enough to keep the family from digging deeper.
Not because they fully believed it, >> >> but because they had no means.
This was a family of miners in Appalachia.
They did not have money to hire more investigators, no power to force police to open a federal investigation, and no reason to think Ruth was lying in an unmarked grave in Massachusetts.
And Ruth was never officially reported missing.
No one filed a report.
No one called the police.
She simply vanished from life and Moldovan made sure no one went looking.
In the decades that followed, the Terry family handled Ruth’s absence the way many poor families in America handle losses that cannot be explained.
They accepted it.
Ruth was listed as deceased in family obituaries.
There was no funeral, no grave, no closure.
Her sister Carol offered a theory of her own.
Ruth was in witness protection and could not contact the family.
That was how a sister tried to explain why her little sister disappeared without saying goodbye.
It did not make sense.
But it was easier than the truth.
And the truth was that Ruth Marie Terry was lying more than wafting 400 miles from Whitwell under a stone that read unidentified female body.
And the man who killed her was living free, breathing free air, and never paying a price.
Moldovan continued his life after Ruth as if she had never existed.
He remarried.
>> >> He settled in the Monterey area of California.
He became a radio host on KAZU in Pacific Grove.
>> >> In 1985, a local paper in Salinas wrote about him and his radio show.
The article noted that Moldovan introduced programs about homosexuality, cultural erosion, and the belief that killing had become a habit.
A man suspected of killing at least three people was on the radio talking about killing as a social issue.
No one knew who he was.
No one connected the Pacific Grove radio host to the man wanted in Seattle in 1960.
No one connected him to the nameless woman’s body on the Provincetown dunes.
Moldovan lived with his fifth wife, Phyllis, for nearly 50 years.
He died in Salinas, California in 2002 at the age of 79.
His obituary did not mention Manzanita.
It did not mention Dolores.
It did not mention Ruth.
He died as an ordinary citizen, a father, a husband, a former radio host.
He was never convicted of killing anyone.
He took the secret to the grave.
In August 2023, nearly a year after the FBI announced Ruth Marie Terry’s identity, Cape and Islands District Attorney Robert J.
Galibois stood before reporters and made the statement the Terry family had waited 49 years to hear.
Based on the investigation into Mrs. Terry’s death, it has been determined that Mr. Moldovan was responsible for Mrs. Terry’s death in 1974.
The case was officially closed.
After nearly half a century, the Lady of the Dunes not only had a name, she had a killer.
But justice, if it can be called justice, arrived with a bitterness nothing can wash away.
Guy Rockwell Moldavin had been dead since 2002.
He was never tried.
He was never convicted.
He never had to sit in a courtroom and look into the eyes of the family of the woman he killed.
He died a free citizen, buried respectably, with an obituary that mentioned none of his victims.
He had 28 years of freedom after killing Ruth.
28 years Ruth did not have.
And when the truth was finally exposed, he was no longer here to face it.
Investigators also confirmed that Moldavin was the primary suspect in the 1960 Seattle murders of Manzanita Rockwell and her daughter Dolores Ann Merns, >> >> and that he was also investigated in connection with a double homicide in Humboldt County in 1950.
Let that number sink in.
At least four suspected victims spanning three decades from 1950 to 1974 in at least three different states, and he was never convicted of killing any of them.
Guy Rockwell Moldavin was not an impulsive killer.
He was a systematic predator.
He found vulnerable women, women living at the edge of the system, women whose disappearance would leave no one powerful enough to demand answers.
He married them, isolated them from their families, and when they vanished, he invented a story and moved on.
The wife ran off.
The wife joined a cult.
The wife died.
Every time the same script, every time he walked away.
And the justice system in every state, in every decade, failed to stop him.
When the case was closed, Richard Hanchett, Ruth’s son, was the one who felt its weight most clearly.
He had spent his life looking for his birth mother.
He found her through an ancestry.
com DNA test, connected with the Terry family, then discovered that the mother he had never known had been brutally murdered and left in an unmarked grave for 48 years.
He wrote a memoir titled Through His Eyes, published in 2024, telling the search for the mother he never met and the truth he wished he did not have to know.
Oxygen produced the three-part documentary Lady of the Dunes: Hunting the Cape Cod Killer about the case with Hanchett at its center.
He told Fox News Digital, “I am grateful the case was finally closed, but deep down I am sad because this case should have been solved a long time ago”.
He was right.
If Ruth had been reported missing in 1974, if someone in the family had had the means to force police to investigate instead of believing a private detective, if the system had not allowed a poor woman from Appalachia to vanish without any agency recording it, then perhaps Ruth would have been identified within weeks, not 48 years.
But Ruth lived at the edge.
She used aliases.
She had no thick file in the system.
And when she disappeared, the system simply did not notice she was gone.
That was not only Moldovan’s failure, it was the failure of that system itself.
And Sandra Lee, the 9-year-old girl from that day now nearly 60, could finally do what she had waited nearly half a century to do.
She could go to Saint Peter’s Cemetery in Provincetown and say the name of the woman who changed her life.
No more Lady of the Dunes.
No more unidentified female body.
Ruth Marie Terry.
She laid flowers on the grave and said thank you by her real name.
Provincetown also changed the headstone.
The cold line unidentified female body found at Race Point Dunes July 26, 1974 was replaced with her real name, Ruth Marie Terry, 1936 to 1974.
After 48 years, the grave finally knew who lay inside.
The Lady of the Dunes case is not only the story of a murder and 48 years of waiting.
It is living proof of the power of investigative genetic genealogy, the method that has revolutionized criminal investigation and given names to hundreds of unidentified victims across the United States.
It proves that time does not protect a killer.
That 48 years is not too long.
That a 9-year-old girl running from domestic violence can become the keeper of memory for a victim the whole world forgot.
That a son searching for his birth mother through a DNA test can accidentally help crack the oldest cold case in the state.
That a family of minors in Tennessee never really stopped looking even though they had no money, no power, and no clue except an absence.
And that a poor woman, motherless from early childhood, married at 13, who gave her child up for adoption and lived under aliases at the edge of society deserved to be called by her real name.
The Race Point Dunes are still there.
The Atlantic wind still blows through the low pines and the beach grass.
Visitors still come to camp and sunbathe in summer, laying towels on the sand, not knowing that not far away, nearly half a century ago, a woman lay on her own blue beach towel for the last time.
But now, if you go to Saint Peter’s Cemetery in Provincetown and walk down the hill behind the chapel, you will see a headstone.
There is no longer the line unidentified female body.
The stone reads Ruth Marie Terry.
And beside the stone you may see a fresh flower or a seashell.
Sandra Lee still visits.
Only now she knows whom she is visiting.
This is Cold We tell the stories of forgotten victims and the people who refuse to let them stay forgotten forever.
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