The Lady of the Dunes

On a hot summer afternoon in July 1974, a thirteen-year-old girl walking her dog in the sand dunes near Race Point Beach, at the very tip of Cape Cod, found a woman lying on a green beach blanket.

She was lying face down, as if she were sunbathing. Her jeans were folded beneath her head like a pillow. She had been dead for some time.

She had been murdered. And whoever killed her had done something to make sure she could never be identified: they had removed her hands.

For nearly fifty years, no one knew who she was. Provincetown called her “the Lady of the Dunes.”

The Investigation

The Provincetown police, the Massachusetts State Police and the FBI investigated. The woman appeared to be in her late twenties to forties, about five feet six inches tall, with long auburn or red hair pulled into a ponytail with a gold-flecked elastic band. She was athletic in build. She had had extensive, expensive dental work — thousands of dollars’ worth, investigators estimated — which suggested that she had come from a family with some money, or had someone who had paid for it.

Investigators distributed her description across the country. They checked missing-persons reports. They created sketches and clay reconstructions of her face. They checked dental records. Over the decades, they exhumed her body more than once to collect more evidence, including DNA.

Nothing led to a name.

Provincetown in 1974

Provincetown was, and is, a vibrant, artistic beach town at the end of Cape Cod — a fishing village that had become a haven for artists, writers and the LGBTQ community, and a busy summer tourist destination. In the summer of 1974, thousands of visitors passed through. The woman in the dunes could have been anyone: a tourist, a summer worker, a drifter, someone passing through on her way somewhere else.

One theory that circulated for years involved the film Jaws, which was being shot on Martha’s Vineyard, not far away, in the summer of 1974. Some amateur sleuths spent years examining crowd scenes in the film, believing that a woman in a blue bandana and jeans among the extras might be the Lady of the Dunes. That theory was never confirmed.

The Name

In the end, the answer came from the same science that has solved so many cold cases in recent years: genetic genealogy.

Investigators sent the woman’s DNA to a laboratory that could build a detailed genetic profile. Genealogists then compared it with DNA from distant relatives who had uploaded their profiles to public genealogy databases, and slowly built out her family tree until they found her.

On October 31, 2022, forty-eight years after she was found, the FBI announced the Lady of the Dunes’ name.

She was Ruth Marie Terry, born in 1936 in Tennessee. She was thirty-seven years old when she died. She had lived in Tennessee, Michigan and California. She had a son.

The Investigation Continues

With her name, investigators were finally able to begin to piece together the last part of Ruth Marie Terry’s life — where she had been living, who she had been with, and how she came to be lying in the dunes at the tip of Cape Cod.

Authorities said that they had developed information about a man she had married shortly before her death, who has since died. They have not publicly charged anyone with her murder, and the case remains open.

Ruth

For almost fifty years, the woman found in the dunes was a mystery, a puzzle, a sketch on a poster, a theory on an internet forum. The newspapers called her the Lady of the Dunes.

Now we know that she was Ruth Marie Terry. She was a daughter, a sister, a mother. She came from Tennessee. She had a life, a family and a story, and someone took all of it from her on a sand dune in Massachusetts, and then tried to erase who she was.

They didn’t succeed. It took nearly half a century, but she has her name back.