Unmasked by DNA After 48 Years: The 1968 Cold Case Solved

Unmasked by DNA After 48 Years: The 1968 Cold Case Solved

A woman went to buy a hair dryer. She never came home and for 48 years nobody knew why. This is not a story about a monster, not yet. This is a story about a Sunday afternoon, a newspaper ad, and one small decision that broke a family apart forever. This is the story of Wendy Jo Halison. September 29th, 1968, a Sunday afternoon in Los Angeles.

 Fairfax Avenue was busy the way it always was. Cars moving, stores open, nobody paying attention to anyone. They did not have to. A perfectly ordinary day for everyone on that street. Everyone except one family. Wendy Halison was 22 years old, a senior at San Fernando Valley State College, the school now called Cal State Northridge. She studied art.

 She was driven, warm, and genuinely happy with the direction her life was heading. She grew up in Los Angeles on Sterns Drive, south of Carthay Square. Her father, Lee, was a real estate salesman. Her mother, Kathleen, had been a bookkeeper before becoming a homemaker. They raised two daughters, Linda, the older one, and Wendy.

 The sisters grew up painting together and playing piano together. The kind of close that does not need explaining. Wendy had a smile that showed up in photos and still reached through them decades later. She had a boyfriend she cared about, a little poodle named Pierre who followed her around the house. She had, as her brother-in-law Gil Court would later recall, everything going for her.

 That morning, she spotted a newspaper ad, a hair dryer on sale at the Thrifty Drug Store on the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue, a 10-minute drive, a simple errand. She called Linda. Did she want to come along? Linda had two young boys at home that Sunday. She said no, she wanted to spend the day with her family.

 It was the most ordinary decision a mother makes. It would haunt Linda for the rest of her life. So, Wendy drove alone. She parked, walked into the Thrifty, found the hair dryer, paid for it, and left. Then she pulled into a gas station just down the street and filled up her tank. A woman running errands on a Sunday afternoon, nothing unusual about any of it.

 That was the last time anyone saw Wendy Halison alive. Whatever happened to her happened in the gap between that gas station and her front door, a stretch of road she had driven a hundred times before. A Sunday afternoon, a city full of people in every direction, and nobody saw a thing. By evening, the Halison house was too quiet in a way that felt wrong.

 Wendy was not the kind of person who went silent without a word. If her plans changed, she called. She was reliable in the way only people who truly love their family are reliable. When the hours passed and the phone stayed quiet, her family did not wonder whether something was wrong. They knew. Her mother Kathleen called the police and explained what had happened, that her daughter had left that afternoon to run a simple errand and had never come home, that this was completely out of character.

 The police told her to wait. They could not open a missing person’s case this quickly, they said. She would probably turn up. Wendy did not turn up. The night passed slowly. Inside the Halison home, no one slept. The family sat with a fear that had no clear shape yet, not knowing if Wendy was hurt, if she was lost, if she needed help, not knowing anything at all, just waiting for a phone that did not ring.

 All they could do was wait for morning and hope. What they would find the next morning would stay with every one of them for the rest of their lives. Monday morning arrived with the kind of fear that does not go away when the sun comes up. Wendy had been gone all night, no call, no message. The police were still not moving fast enough, so Gil Court moved instead.

 Gil was not just Wendy’s brother-in-law. He was a private investigator. He understood that in a missing person’s case, the early hours are everything. He made calls, organized a civilian search party, and hired a helicopter to sweep the neighborhood from above. Less than an hour into the search, Wendy’s boyfriend was up in that helicopter scanning the streets below.

Fairfax Avenue stretched beneath them, a long corridor lined with hundreds of parked vehicles. Finding one specific car from that altitude, at that speed, was close to impossible. The boyfriend pointed down and said, “There, a green Ford Thunderbird parked on Fairfax near Olympic Boulevard, just south of the Thrifty store.

” The helicopter pilot was stunned. He said later he had no idea how the boyfriend had spotted that specific car from that height. It was like finding a needle in a haystack, except the boyfriend had gone straight to it, almost without hesitation, as if he already knew exactly where to look. That detail would not go unnoticed by the detectives who heard about it.

 Gil came down to the car. He looked through the window. The keys were not in the ignition. They were lying on the floor of the back seat, as if dropped there in a hurry. He picked them up, walked to the back of the car, put the key in the trunk lock. He opened it. He would later say, simply, quietly, that it was the worst day of his life.

 There are no other words for it. Gil went back to the house. Linda was on the front porch watching the street, waiting the way people wait when they do not want to think about what the wait might mean. She saw Gil walking toward her, and she knew, not from his words, but from his face. In all the years she had been married to this man, she had never seen him cry. She was seeing it now.

 “We found her,” he said. Linda’s heart lifted just for 1 second. “She’s gone,” and it broke completely. When detectives arrived and examined the scene, the evidence was clear on several things. Wendy’s life had been taken forcefully, and the instrument used by the perpetrator was left behind at the scene.

 Signs at the scene indicated she had fought back bravely against her attacker, refusing to go quietly despite the element of surprise. Her watch and jewelry were still on her body. Robbery was ruled out immediately. This was not about money or valuables. Whoever did this to Wendy wanted something else entirely. Then, one small detail that nobody could explain.

 The hair dryer was missing. The only thing Wendy had gone out to buy that day, gone, never recovered. No reason ever found for why a killer would take it. That question has never been answered. Detectives moved quickly on suspects. Wendy had told Linda about her errand that morning, which meant someone either followed her from the store or already knew she would be out alone.

 That pointed toward people in her life. Four men were brought in for questioning, her current boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend she had remained friendly with, her brother-in-law Gil Court, and a close male friend. Detectives reasoned that this type of personal assault is rarely random. It is often a crime that requires deliberate proximity and intent.

 This felt like someone who had targeted Wendy specifically and knew she would be alone. The investigation focused most heavily on the boyfriend and the ex-boyfriend. Both had a personal connection to Wendy. Both would have known her routines and habits, and both had reasons, in the detectives’ theory, to potentially want to harm her. That theory would hold for 30 years.

 It would also turn out to be completely wrong. All four men agreed to take polygraph tests. Gil passed immediately and was cleared as a focus within days. He understood the procedure. As a private investigator, he had always known this kind of scrutiny came with the territory. The boyfriend failed. A failed polygraph is not evidence of guilt.

 Courts do not accept polygraph results for exactly this reason. But combine that failure with the way he had spotted Wendy’s car from the helicopter in a way that left the experienced pilot genuinely speechless, and the suspicion around him became very difficult to ignore. Detectives could not walk away from him. For a long time, they did not.

Years later, when DNA evidence would clear him entirely, the weight of what he had been carrying would become impossible to fully describe. He had found Wendy. He had loved her. He had grieved her. And the entire time, the investigation had quietly treated him as a possible killer. That is not a burden that disappears just because someone eventually says you were innocent.

 But in 1968, none of that clarity existed. There was no physical evidence connecting him or anyone else to the crime. No arrest was made. Then came one more lead. A witness had seen a white man near Wendy at the Thrifty store that afternoon. The same man was spotted again at the gas station just down the street. Both times Wendy was there.

 He had followed her from the store to the station without her noticing, but no one got a name. No one caught a plate number. No usable description. Just the fact of his presence and then his disappearance. A ghost. Weeks turned into months. Months turned into years. No arrests were ever made. No charges were ever filed.

 The case went cold and somewhere out in that city, the man who had followed Wendy Halison step-by-step on a Sunday afternoon was still walking free and no one knew his name. If Wendy’s story is gripping you, hit that like button, drop a comment, and subscribe for more deep dives. Want to uncover even more mysterious cold cases? Check out the curated playlist linked in the description below.

 Now, back to the case. After the investigation stalled, the Halison house changed in a way nobody put into words. Wendy’s room stayed exactly as she had left it. Her clothes, her art supplies, her books, all untouched, all in the same place she had put them on the morning she drove away. As if the family was holding the space open, keeping it ready just in case. It stayed that way for years.

 Her father, Lee, carried her absence in a way that had no off switch. Wendy had been born on his birthday, the same day, the same celebration. Every year when that date arrived, her absence sat right there at the table. Not in the background, right there in every candle, every quiet moment when the room felt one person short.

 He could not celebrate his own birthday without feeling, somewhere beneath everything, who was missing from it. He did not stop trying. He made regular trips to the local police station, asking if anything new had come in, asking if the technology had changed, asking if someone had remembered something. he offered rewards.

 He kept showing up year after year because showing up was the only form of fighting he had left. He almost always left without anything new. As Lee’s health declined, he called Linda to his side and said the words that she would carry for the rest of her life, “Don’t forget your sister. Do what you think you can do to find out who did this.” It was not a request.

 It was a promise he was asking her to keep in his place because he knew he was running out of time to keep it himself. Both Lee and Kathleen passed away without ever learning who killed their daughter. They had lived through the investigation, through the suspects, through the years of silence.

 They had held onto hope through all of it, and they died without the answer. Then, in 1998, 30 years after Wendy’s murder, something shifted, and it started with a detective who refused to accept that this case would die with the people who first worked it. Detective Frank Bolin went back to the evidence room and pulled Wendy’s case files.

 He brought in LAPD criminalist Harry Cla in Jr. and asked him to re-examine everything collected from the crime scene in 1968. The reason was a single word that had been quietly transforming law enforcement for years, DNA. At that point, the LAPD had only been using DNA forensics for about 4 years, but what the science promised was unlike anything before it.

 A genetic fingerprint left at a crime scene could survive for decades and still identify a killer. Science could now go back in time. Klein examined Wendy’s preserved clothing from 1968. What his colleague found stopped everyone cold. Forensic specialists managed to isolate an unknown male genetic profile from the preserved clothing evidence.

 The killer had left behind his genetic signature. It had been sitting in an evidence room for 30 years waiting for the science to catch up with it, and now it had. Detectives moved fast. Blood was drawn from all four original suspects, the same men who had been questioned in 1968. The boyfriend, the ex-boyfriend, Gilcourt, the male friend.

 Each sample was compared directly against the DNA from Wendy’s clothing. Everyone connected to this case held their breath. The boyfriend had failed that polygraph in 1968 and had never fully escaped the cloud of suspicion. His name had remained in the conversation for three decades. Was this finally the moment it would all come together? The results came back.

 All four men were completely cleared. The boyfriend was innocent. Gil was innocent. Every single person who had been under suspicion for 30 years had no DNA connection whatsoever to what happened to Wendy. The real killer had never even appeared in the investigation. The case dropped back to absolute zero. But now there was another problem.

 The DNA sample from Wendy’s clothing was too small and too degraded to upload into CODIS. The national database that could match unknown DNA against profiles of convicted offenders. They had the killer’s genetic signature. They just could not match it to a name. In 2000, Klan tested the sample again with updated methods. Not enough.

 In 2009, the most advanced techniques available at the time were applied. The results were better, strong enough to definitively clear the original suspects, but still not strong enough to generate a database match. Three tests across 11 years, three dead ends. Klan remembered a night standing outside Tom Bergen’s bar, just down the street from where Wendy’s body had been found.

Detective Frank Bolland stood beside him in the dark, cigarette in hand, looking out at the street. “This case will be solved long after I’m gone,” Bolland said, not bitterly, just honestly. The kind of honesty that comes from years of pushing against the wall that will not move.

 Bolland eventually retired, and then he was gone. He never saw what came next. Because in the summer of 2016, Harry Klan Jr. sat down with the DNA sample one final time. The technology had advanced in ways that simply did not exist in 1998. He ran the test. This time, the result was different. He picked up his phone, he typed four words to Detective Bankson, and pressed send.

“Are you sitting down?” Frank Bolin had been wrong. The case was not going to wait until after he was gone. It was being solved right now. Detective Richard Bankson had been working Wendy’s case for years. He was one of the original eight detectives assigned to the LAPD Cold Case Unit when it was created in 2001.

 And by 2016, he was the only one of those original eight still working there. Wendy’s murder book, thick binders of reports, evidence logs, and interview transcripts sat neatly on his desk. He had read through it so many times he could recite parts from memory. When Klan’s text came in, Bankson called him back immediately.

 The DNA had finally produced enough genetic markers to run a search against the state database, and it had come back with a match. Bankson asked for the name, Edwin Dean Richardson. The name meant nothing to him at first. No connection to Wendy, no connection to her family, her friends, her neighborhood. Edwin Dean Richardson had never appeared in the investigation.

 Not in 1968, not in 1998, not in 2009. He was nobody Wendy Halison had ever known. He was something far more dangerous than that. As Bankson began pulling Richardson’s background, the picture that emerged was deeply disturbing. Richardson was not a jealous boyfriend or a man with a personal grievance. He was a drifter. A man who had spent his entire adult life moving from state to state, working odd jobs, staying nowhere long enough to be remembered or tracked.

 His criminal history went back to his childhood, escalating from small offenses to serious ones. In 1960, he was convicted of attempted robbery and kidnapping in San Diego and sentenced to eight years in prison. He served the full term. In April 1968, he was released on parole. Five months later, Wendy Halison was murdered. Five months.

 That is the distance between the prison gate and Wendy’s trunk. Then came the detail that made Bankson’s blood run cold. Richardson’s mother lived in Mid-City Los Angeles. He was not a random stranger passing through. He was local. He knew that neighborhood. He knew Fairfax Avenue. He had reason to be in that part of the city in the weeks after his parole because his mother was there.

Think about what that means. While Wendy’s family spent decades wondering who could have known she would be on that street at that time, the answer was no one. Nobody had to know. Richardson was not there because he had been watching Wendy specifically. He was there because his mother lived nearby and he was a freshly paroled man with nowhere to be. Wendy was not targeted.

She was simply there. And now that 1968 eyewitness report clicked into place. A white man seen at the Thrifty while Wendy was shopping, the same man spotted again at the gas station while she filled up her tank. Both locations, both times. He had followed her step by step without her ever knowing. That was Richardson.

 He had walked into that store, seen a young woman alone, and made a decision. Not from personal history or emotion, from cold, calculating, predatory instinct. He selected her. He watched her move. He followed her to the gas station. And when the moment came, he acted. Wendy Haleson never had a chance to know what was happening until it was already too late. And she was not the only one.

 As investigators dug into Richardson’s history, they found a pattern repeated across multiple states and multiple years. In November 1977, a 21-year-old woman named Joann Boner disappeared from Belmont County, Ohio after leaving a family gathering. Her body was found on New Year’s Eve, dumped in a ravine across the West Virginia border.

 Young woman, alone, followed, car abandoned. Identical to what happened to Wendy nine years earlier. Richardson had fled Belmont County before anyone could catch him. An investigator named Tom McCourt spent three years chasing him across the country before a discarded phone bill found in a trash can traced him to a trailer park in Mesa, Arizona.

 He was arrested there and extradited back to Ohio. On the flight back, Richardson did something that revealed exactly what kind of man he was. He started talking calmly, almost with pride. He began to detail his past actions, calmly describing another unsolved case where he had concealed a victim’s remains and left them in a remote location.

 He described it the way a person described something they are quietly proud of, not a confession driven by guilt, a boast. What Richardson did not know was that investigators already knew exactly who that woman was. They knew her name, they knew where her body had been found. Every word he spoke on that flight was not a secret being shared, it was a case being closed.

 The woman Richardson had boasted about on that flight had a name, Marla Gene Hiers, 23 years old, a wife, a mother of a 2-year-old child. On the morning of October 29th, 1972, she left her home in Stanton, California before sunrise to get extra work done at her job as a claims adjuster in Rosemead, an ordinary Tuesday morning for a woman with a family to take care of.

 She never arrived at work. Her body was found the next day at the Yorba Linda Country Club, wrapped in old carpet and drapery, thrown down an embankment. Her car had been abandoned at a bank drive-thru with the keys still in the ignition, exactly as Richardson had described it on that plane with that calm, satisfied expression.

 In 2004, DNA from Marla’s case was matched to Richardson, already sitting in an Ohio prison for Joe Anna Boner’s murder. Justice moved for Marla. By 2006, a 70-year-old Richardson stood before a California court on an oxygen tank, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and was sentenced to life in prison.

 He died behind bars in 2013 at age 77, 4 years before his DNA was finally matched to Wendy Jo Halison. When Banks and confirmed the DNA match to Wendy’s case in 2016 and realized Richardson had been dead for 4 years, his reaction was immediate and unfiltered. He cursed. “Even alive and in prison is better than dead,” he said, “because then I get to go to him and say, ‘Guess what? I’m going to put another charge on you.

‘” That moment had been stolen by time. Richardson had died without knowing that his DNA had been found on Wendy’s clothing, without knowing that the case he thought he had buried in 1968 had been reopened three times, tested four times, and finally solved. He died believing he had gotten away with it. He had not. There is something deeply unsatisfying about a killer dying before the full accounting arrives.

 No final courtroom scene, no moment where he has to hear Wendy’s name said out loud by a judge, no chance to look him in the eye and tell him his name is now permanently attached to what he did. For Bengtson, for the family, for everyone who had worked this case, that absence stung, but the identification still mattered. Because Richardson being dead did not mean the truth could not be found.

 It just changed how they found it. Because Richardson was dead, investigators could not take a new sample from him directly. Instead, they went back to the Orange County case, the Marla Hiresh investigation, and used the blood sample already confirmed as Richardson’s during that prosecution. They ran it directly against the DNA recovered from Wendy’s clothing.

 It matched, confirmed, absolute. After 48 years, four DNA tests, and a killer who had already died in prison, it was him. But Wendy and Marla were just the ones science could prove. In 1969, 1 year after Wendy disappeared, a young woman named Margie Shoemaker vanished near that same Thrifty store on Fairfax Avenue. Her body was found in Burbank, beaten and strangled.

 Her car was recovered in the Thrifty parking lot, the exact same lot where Wendy had shopped the day she was killed. Same location, same method. Richardson was still in the area. Detectives believed he almost certainly killed Margie Shoot as well, but the physical evidence from her 1969 case had been lost over the decades. No DNA left to test.

 Her case remains officially unsolved. Bankston had spent months studying Richardson’s pattern, the victims, the locations. The gaps in his record where nothing was documented, but something almost certainly happened. He said it plainly, “This guy didn’t stop at one or two or three. There’s no chance in hell.” Richardson had spent decades moving through American cities.

He drifted. He worked odd jobs. He never put down roots in any single place long enough to be remembered or tracked. He killed, and then he moved on, and then he disappeared into the next town, the next state, the next ordinary street where nobody knew him. That pattern, combined with the confirmed victims, the suspected victims, and the years he spent moving freely, painted a picture of a man whose actual body count was almost certainly far higher than what was ever officially connected to his name. How many cold case files across

the country carry a woman’s name that should also carry his? How many families are sitting with the same unanswered question that Wendy’s family carried for 48 years? That question may never have a complete answer, and that might be the darkest part of this entire story. In the summer of 2017, Bankston picked up the phone and called Linda.

 Linda Trosino, Wendy’s older sister, the woman who had said no to a Sunday shopping trip 48 years earlier, and had never entirely put that moment down, was out at brunch with her husband when her phone rang. She did not recognize the number. She assumed it was a telemarketer and let it go to voicemail. Think about that for a moment.

 48 years of waiting, of her father’s promise, of carrying the question of who killed her sister, and the answer arrived as a voicemail she almost did not listen to. Later, sitting alone in her car, she pressed play. An LAPD detective asking her to come in. He had something he needed to tell her about her sister’s case. Her hands started shaking before the message even finished.

 She drove to LAPD headquarters and walked inside wearing Wendy’s necklace around her neck. He sat down across from Detective Bankson and retired Deputy District Attorney Peter Berman, the two men who had worked Wendy’s case for years, who had kept those thick binders on their desks when everyone else had moved on, who had refused to accept that the answer would never come.

 When Bankson walked her through Richardson’s criminal history, who he was, what he had done, how many other women had crossed his path, Linda shook her head slowly. “Unbelievable,” she said. On the table between them sat two old cardboard boxes. Inside were Wendy’s belongings, recovered from her car in 1968 and kept in evidence ever since.

 School papers, personal letters, her driver’s license, objects that had been sitting in a storage room for 48 years. One box still carried the original evidence tag tag that the detectives had filled out in 1968. The paper wrapping inside had aged so long it was beginning to fall apart, disintegrating quietly after nearly half a century of waiting.

 48 years of evidence from a life interrupted on a Sunday afternoon, sitting in two cardboard boxes, waiting for their owner to be found. Bankson looked at Linda and said the words her father had died waiting to hear. “We found who killed your sister.” Linda sat quietly. No sudden outburst, no dramatic reaction. Just the slow, heavy feeling of 48 years of not knowing coming off her shoulders at last, gently, like something that had been pressing down for so long she had forgotten what it felt like not to carry it. “I wish there was some way I could

thank you,” she said. “It just means so much.” When the meeting ended, Bankson and Berman carried those two boxes out to the car. Linda’s husband, Tony, stood there watching, then turned to the detective. “The LAPD did its job,” he said. “The case is closed.” But it will never really be closed because we will never forget Wendy.

 A woman went to buy a hair dryer on a warm Sunday afternoon in 1968. She drove down Fairfax Avenue, bought what she came for, and started heading home. She never made it, but her father made a promise before he died. Her sister kept it for decades. A criminalist ran the same test four times because four times is what it took.

 A detective refused to close a murder book that everyone else had shelved. And 48 years later, in a room with two disintegrating cardboard boxes and a necklace that once belonged to a 22-year-old art student, the truth finally came home. Wendy Jo Halison is not a cold case file anymore. Is a woman who loved her poodle, played piano, and smiled in photographs that still light up a room.

 She is a sister who called on a Sunday morning because she did not want to shop alone. Is a daughter whose father kept walking into a police station year after year because showing up was the only way he knew to fight for her. Is a 22-year-old art student whose life was stolen on an ordinary afternoon by a man who had just been released from prison five months earlier, who had chosen her at random from a store on Fairfax Avenue, and who had died years before justice could reach him by name.

But her family did not forget. The detectives did not give up. The science finally caught up, and the world knows what happened. The world knows her name. If this story stayed with you, drop a comment and tell us why. Do you think Richardson had more victims out there that science will never be able to officially connect to him? After watching how long this family had to fight for the truth, do you think cold cases should ever officially be closed, or should every unsolved case stay open no matter how many years pass? And if you were Linda, sitting in that room after 48 years of waiting, what would you have said to those two detectives?