Texas Sheriff Trying to ID Girl Strangled 35 Years Ago

She was found naked on side of highway in Huntsville
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Nov 4, 2015 9:00 AM CST
Texas Sheriff Trying to ID Girl Strangled 35 Years Ago
Police in Walker County, Texas, need help identifying this woman, found dead in 1980.   (Walker County Sheriff’s Office)

Thirty-five years ago on Halloween, a young woman showed up in Huntsville, Texas, asking for directions to the Texas Department of Corrections' Ellis Prison Farm. The next morning, on Nov. 1, 1980, a passing trucker spotted her body on the side of the highway, reports ABC13. Likely aged 15 to 20, the girl was naked and had been strangled. Not only could police not find her killer, but no one at Ellis Prison Farm could identify the girl—who was white, five and a half feet tall, with brown hair and hazel eyes—and an investigation that followed offered no clues about who she might be. Now, Sheriff Clint McRae and the Walker County Sheriff's Office hope that sharing the few facts they have will lead to new information.

Authorities say the girl—last seen wearing jeans, a yellow shirt, a white knit sweater, a rectangular brown stone pendant on a gold chain, and leather sandals—first visited a gas station on the city's south side, where workers gave her directions to Ellis Prison Farm. She left on foot, eventually arriving at a truck stop on I-45 on the north side of Huntsville. There, she again asked for directions, which employees wrote down. When they asked if the girl's parents knew her whereabouts, she said, "Who cares?" She did, however, say she was from the Rockport and Aransas Pass area about 260 miles away, per the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, though no one there could identify her. A search of police and school records has turned up nothing. (Cops recently identified a missing woman in a similar cold case.)

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