MURDERED: Marina Ramos

In December 1989, four friends from Ohio were driving through the Arizona desert looking for a ghost town marked on their map. They never found it. Instead, they stopped to take a picture in front of a lone yucca tree, then turned around and headed back. Something nagged at them about a shape they'd seen near the tree—what they first thought was a dead animal. They went back for another look. It was the body of a young woman, naked and violently killed, left in the middle of nowhere. That chance discovery launched a mystery that would take thirty-six years to begin unraveling, and the case is still not closed.

The Crime Scene in the Desert

The woman had been murdered right where she was found, six to twenty-four hours before the friends discovered her. She died from blood loss after suffering blunt force injuries all over her body and slash marks at her neck. Her clothing was gone—likely cut off with the same knife used on her throat, though investigators did find one piece of a bra strap. The only other items at the scene were an empty Coke bottle, a long piece of black yarn, and used toilet paper near a spot where someone had defecated in the sand.