PROVINCETOWN — Mike Meads remembers coming into the basement of town hall, which was then the police station, to find his father, Police Chief James Meads, studying the crime scene photographs of a woman whose body was found one mile east of the Race Point Ranger Station on July 26, 1974.
The gruesome photos did not look real, said Meads, who was nine at the time.
His father retired in 1992, after 22 years as Provincetown’s police chief, during which time he never stopped hoping to solve the crime. He talked to psychics and appeared on television multiple times with a clay rendering of the murder victim’s head.
When Meads died in 2011, not only was the murder unsolved but no one could even give the victim a name. She was still “the Lady in the Dunes.”
The unsolved murder seemed an impossible paradox in a town so small that, as Mike Meads put it, “you know when someone gets a flat tire.”
Now the auburn-haired woman whose story has been a mystery for so long has a name: Ruth Marie Terry. She born on Sept. 8, 1936 in Tennessee, according to the FBI, and was 37 at the time of her death.
The agency held a press conference on Oct. 31 at which it was explained that forensic genetic genealogy technology had finally matched the body with Terry. She was a “daughter, sister, aunt, wife, and mother,” said Joseph Bonavolonta, FBI Boston special agent in charge at the press conference.
“Now that we have reached this pivotal point, investigators and analysts will turn their attention to conducting logical investigative steps that include learning more about her as well as working to identify who is responsible for her murder,” Bonavolonta continued. “We are asking the public to review Ruth’s seeking information poster, and if anyone has any information concerning this case that could help the investigative team we’re asking you to contact either the Massachusetts State Police or the FBI.”
On Oct. 31, Mike Meads’s daughter Emily, 23, called her dad at work and told him to get home and turn on the TV. He watched the FBI press conference at 11 a.m.
“I didn’t see any of the other investigators’ faces,” Meads said. “I just saw my dad.”
