CALIFORNIA 1974 Cold Case Solved – The Killer Was the Security Guard

Arless Perry had been married for eight weeks. She was 19 years old, a Sunday school teacher from Bismar, North Dakota, who had just moved across the country so her husband Bruce could finish college at Stanford. On the night of October 12th, 1974, she walked alone to Stanford Memorial Church to pray. She never came home.

 The man who reported finding her body the next morning was a campus security guard named Steven Blake Crawford. He told police he discovered her in the East Transcept near the altar. Investigators put him on the suspect list almost immediately. That was October 1974. By the time deputies arrived at Crawford’s apartment with the DNA evidence to prove it, 44 years had passed.

 And instead of facing a courtroom, Crawford put a gun to his own head. The case file closed the same day it was solved. This is the story of how a 19-year-old bride was failed by four decades of conspiracy theories, mislabeled evidence, and a killer who never left the scene, and how one detective finally brought her home. If you’re the kind of person who sticks around for the cases that take decades to crack, you’re in the right place.

Drop a like on this video and subscribe to Cold Case Redemption so you never miss one of these deep dives. Arles Perry’s trust in the world around her, the quality her family loved most about her, would become the very thing that put her inside that church alone on a Saturday night in October. But in 1955, it was just the warmth of a little girl growing up in the safest place she knew. Arlus K.

 Daikima was born on February 22nd, 1955 in the small town of Linton, North Dakota. The youngest of three children,  she grew up in the kind of family where church wasn’t something you did on Sundays. It was the center of everything. Her parents, Marvin and John Daikima, owned an auto dealership in Bismar, the state capital, and helped found the Bismar Community Church after the family moved there in 1963.

Faith wasn’t a weekend hobby for the Dykmas. It was the foundation the entire family was built on. Everyone who knew Arus said the same things about her. She was warm, kind-hearted, joyful in a way that felt genuine, not performed. She was a cheerleader at Bismar High School, a Sunday school teacher at her church, and a volunteer with Young Life and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes.

 Her father Marvin described her as sheltered, someone who had rarely left Bismar before the age of 19 and who wanted to see the best in every person she met. That desire to see the best in people ran deep. It defined how Aras moved through the world with an openness that the people around her in North Dakota considered beautiful.

 In a small city where everybody knew everybody, where doors were left unlocked and neighbors watched out for each other, that kind of trust wasn’t naive. It was normal. It was how you were supposed to live. The problem was that Arles was about to leave that world behind.  And the place she was going didn’t operate by the same rules.

She met Bruce Perry at Bismar High. He was a track and field standout and a strong student. The kind of kid who could have gone to college anywhere. He chose Stanford, more than 1,500 m from North Dakota. And the two of them maintained a long-d distanceance relationship for about a year, while Arles attended Bismar Junior College and worked at the dental office of Bruce’s father, Duncan Perry.

 Bruce proposed in May of 1974. They married on August 17th of that year at the Bismar Reformed Church with their families and their community surrounding them. Arus was devoutly religious and had not wanted to live with Bruce before they were married. The wedding was the beginning of everything she had been waiting for.

 About 6 weeks later, the couple packed up and moved to California. They settled into Quillin Hall in Escandido Village, the student housing complex on Stanford’s campus. Bruce resumed his sophomore year as a premed student studying human biology. Arless took a job as a receptionist at a PaloAlto law firm called Spaith Bass Valentine and Klein, helping to support them while Bruce studied.

 California was nothing like Bismar. The Stanford campus in 1974 was a world of counterculture energy, political activism, and a social openness that would have been startling for someone raised in conservative North Dakota. Aras had spent her entire life in a community where everyone  shared the same values, the same faith, the same basic assumptions about how the world worked.

 At Stanford, those assumptions didn’t apply. She struggled. Making friends was harder than she expected. The social rhythms of a California university campus were completely foreign to her. She felt isolated, disconnected from the life she understood. She wrote letters home to Bismar constantly, sometimes daily, filling pages with updates about her new life and questions about the one she had left behind.

 Those letters were her lifeline, the thread that kept her connected to a world that made sense. But there was one place on campus where Arles felt grounded. Stanford Memorial Church, a massive stone building at the heart of campus, became Arles’s sanctuary. She went there to think, to pray, and to find the kind of peace  she had always found inside the walls of a church.

 In Bismar, a church was the safest place in the world. There was no reason to believe it would be any different in California. There was one strange detail that surfaced in those early weeks at Stanford. Someone on campus had taken out a telephone listing under the name Bruce D. Perry, even though  it wasn’t them. When Arus’ best friend back in Bismar tried to call, and when Bruce’s mother tried to reach them, the calls went to the wrong number.

 It was confusing, a little annoying. In a letter to a friend dated September 27th, 1974, just 2 weeks before the murder, Arlus mentioned the mixup and laughed it off. Years later, investigative journalist Mory Terry would seize on this detail as evidence that Arus was being stalked, that the phone listing was part of a deliberate campaign by a satanic network to isolate her from her support system.

Mainstream investigators never supported that interpretation. It was most likely a coincidence, the kind of bureaucratic mixup that happens at a university with thousands of students and staff. But it sits there in the record like a splinter. Impossible to fully dismiss, impossible to fully explain. By October of 1974, Arles had been at Stanford for about 6  weeks.

 She was adjusting slowly to a life that felt nothing like the one she had left  behind. She had her job at the law firm. She had her letters home. She had Bruce. And she had Stanford Memorial Church, the one building on the entire campus where she felt like she was exactly where she was supposed to be. She had no way of knowing that the building where she felt safest would become the place where her life ended.

And she had no way of knowing that the man responsible was already there, already walking those hallways, already carrying the same set of keys, already watching the same doors she walked through  every time she went inside to pray. If this story is already pulling you in, hit that subscribe button.

 We cover cold cases like this every week. The forgotten ones that finally got their justice. The evening of October 12th, 1974 started with something so ordinary it barely deserves mentioning. Around 11:30 at night, Arles and Bruce walked together across the Stanford campus toward a mailbox. Arus wanted to send letters home to her family in North Dakota. It was a Saturday night.

 The air was cool and the campus was quiet. On the way, they fell into a small disagreement. Nothing serious, just a minor back and forth about whose responsibility it was to check the air pressure in one of their cars tires. The kind of argument married couples have a thousand times and forget about by morning.

 Arless told Bruce she wanted to go to Memorial Church to pray and be alone for a while. Bruce walked back to their apartment in Escanido Village. She headed toward the church on her own. She arrived at Stanford Memorial Church sometime around 11:35. The massive stone building was still open and a few other people were inside. The security guard on duty that night, Steven Blake Crawford, told the remaining visitors that the church would be closing in about 15 minutes.

 Crawford later told investigators he locked the church doors around midnight. He said everyone had left by then. He said the building was empty. What happened inside Stanford Memorial Church between midnight and 5:40 in the morning is something only two people ever knew. One of them was dead by sunrise. The other one never told the truth.

 Bruce waited in their apartment in Escanido Village. He expected Arless to be gone for maybe 20 or 30 minutes. Midnight came and went, then 1:00 in the morning, then two. He paced. He watched the clock. The campus was dark and quiet outside. Every minute that passed made the silence heavier.

 By 3:00 in the morning, Bruce was scared enough to call the Stanford campus police. Officers drove across the dark Stanford campus to the church, checked the exterior, and tried the doors. Locked. The building was sealed. Nothing appeared wrong from the outside. No broken windows, no signs of forced entry, no sounds from inside.

 They filed the report and  left. And somewhere in that enormous stone building behind those locked doors, Arles Perry was already dead or dying. The officers had been standing feet away from a crime scene and had no way of knowing it. 3 hours passed. 3 hours where the campus was silent and the church was dark and nobody went inside.

At 5:40 on the morning of October 13th, Crawford radioed in to report that he had gone to open the church for the day and found a westside door open, apparently forced from the inside. He said he went in and found the body of a young woman in the east transcept near the altar. His exact words over the radio, as reported by multiple investigators and later confirmed in case records, were chilling in their casualness.

We have a stiff in here. That is how Steven Blake Crawford reported finding the body of a 19-year-old bride lying on the floor of the church he was hired to protect. Not, “There’s been an incident.” Not, “I need help. There’s a woman hurt in here.” Not any of the things you would expect a security professional to say upon discovering a dead body in the building.

 They are responsible for a stiff like he was reporting a plumbing problem. The crime scene inside Stanford Memorial Church stunned investigators.  Arles had been strangled and beaten. [clears throat] An ice pick had been driven into the back of her skull with enough force to break the handle off, and the handle itself was missing from the scene entirely.

Her body had been deliberately arranged near the altar with candles positioned in a way that immediately struck everyone who saw it as intentional, theatrical, staged. The church’s dean, Reverend Robert Hamilton Kelly, was among the first to see the scene. He described it publicly as ritualistic and satanic.

 The Associated Press picked up that characterization and printed it. Those two words, ritualistic and satanic, would define this case in the public imagination for the next four decades. I mean, think about that for a second. A respected minister’s gut reaction to a crime scene, spoken to reporters in the shock of the moment, essentially wrote the narrative for this case before the investigation even began.

 That single quote would spawn best-selling books, conspiracy theories, and an entire mythology that buried the actual evidence under years of noise. The word spread across campus within hours. A young woman murdered inside the church, stabbed, strangled, staged. Students who had walked past Memorial Church a thousand times without thinking about it suddenly looked at the building differently.

 The heavy wooden doors, the stone walls, the dim interior, all of it now carried a weight that hadn’t been there  before. Stanford University offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. On October 15th, just 2 days after the body was discovered, a memorial service was held inside the same church where Arus had been killed.

The decision to hold the service there was deliberate, an attempt to reclaim the space to honor Arus in the place she had loved. More than 180 people attended. Reverend Kelly led the service. Bruce Perry sat in the front row. He was 20 years old. He had been married for 8 weeks,  and now he was sitting in the same building where his wife had been murdered, surrounded by people he barely knew, more than500 miles from everyone who loved him.

 At the end of the service, he broke down in tears. His parents flew in from Bismar. Arless’s family gathered and then there was the terrible business of flying her body home to North Dakota for burial, packing up the apartment they had shared for 6 weeks, and trying to figure out what a life looks like after something like this.

The investigation began with what detectives could collect from the crime scene. There was semen found on a kneeling pillow near the body. There was a partial palm print recovered from one of the candles used in the staging. Both of these were significant pieces of physical evidence. In a modern investigation, either one could have led to an arrest within days, but this was 1974.

 DNA testing for criminal cases was still more than a decade away. The technology to match that semen to a specific individual simply did not exist. The palm print could be compared to known prints, but only if investigators already had a suspect’s prints on file. Without a match, the evidence was a locked box with no key. Investigators did what they always do in a case like this. They started with the husband.

Bruce Perry was the last known person to see Arlus alive and the first to report her missing. In any homicide investigation, the spouse is the first person you look at, and detectives looked at Bruce hard. He cooperated fully from the very beginning. He voluntarily gave biological samples, submitted to a polygraph examination, and allowed investigators to compare his fingerprints and blood type against the evidence recovered from the scene.

 None of it matched. The polygraph came back clean. His prints didn’t match the palm print on the candle. His blood type didn’t match the seaman. Bruce Perry was cleared. Crawford was a different story. As the security guard on duty the night of the murder, Crawford was an obvious person of interest.

 He was the last known person to have contact with the church before it was locked for the night. He was the one who claimed the building was secured around midnight, and he was the first person inside the building the following morning. When investigators asked other potential witnesses and persons of interest to take polygraph examinations, most agreed.

 Crawford refused. His account of what happened that night shifted over the course of multiple interviews, and there was one detail that n gnawed at the detectives. Bruce Perry had called campus police at 3:00 in the morning to report Arlus missing. Crawford, the guard responsible for the church, told police he would keep an eye out for her, but he never checked inside the church.

 Not at 3:00, not at 4:00, not at 5:00. He waited until 5:40 in the morning to go inside and only then because he said he was opening the building for the day. For a security guard whose one job was to protect that building, the gap made no sense. An FBI behavioral profiler reviewed the case and built a psychological portrait of the likely killer.

 The profile described a young male, possibly with a military background, a loner who was socially isolated and likely kept a detailed diary or personal records. The profiler believed the killer would have taken a trophy from the crime scene, some personal item of the victims to keep as a momento. Investigators made a note of that detail because Arus’ eyelasses were never recovered from the church.

 They simply vanished. The most critical conclusion from the profile was about access. The crime scene staging, investigators estimated, would have taken at least 30 minutes. Whoever did this was not rushed. They were not afraid of being caught. They knew the layout of the building, the schedule, the patterns of foot traffic, and the locking procedures well enough to be confident they would not be interrupted for at least half an hour in the middle of the night.

 That profile pointed toward an insider, someone who worked in the building, someone with keys, someone who understood exactly when that church would be empty and exactly how long they would have before  anyone came looking. The investigators knew all of this in 1974. They knew the profile. They knew Crawford fitted.

 But knowing and proving are two completely different things. And the gap between them can swallow decades. Without DNA technology, without a confession, without a single witness who saw anything after midnight, the investigation had nowhere to go. Detectives cast a wide net checking the alibis of known serial killers active in California during that period, including Ted Bundy.

He had been out of the area that night, refueling his car somewhere else entirely. Every lead ran cold. Every promising thread unraveled into nothing. And hanging over all of it was the context of what was happening on and around the Stanford campus during those years. Arles Perry was not the only person murdered near Stanford in the early 1970s.

 Leslie Pearlov had been killed in February of 1973. A physics student named David Lavine was murdered in September of  that same year. Janet Taylor was killed in March of 1974, just 7 months before Aras. The string of deaths terrified the campus community and led to widespread speculation that a serial killer was operating in the area.

Investigators looked hard at whether the cases were connected. Ultimately, the sheriff’s office concluded that Arlus Perry’s murder was separate from the others. Her killer, they believed, was someone else entirely, someone closer to the church. They were right, but it would take more than 40 years to prove it. The case  went cold.

 And in the vacuum left by an unsolved murder, something else rushed in to fill the space. Something far stranger and far more destructive than anyone could have predicted. The staged crime scene, the church setting, and the growing American fascination with occult crime in the 1970s created the perfect conditions for conspiracy.

 And that single quote from Reverend Kelly, the one the Associated Press printed calling the scene ritualistic and satanic, acted like an accelerant poured on dry wood. Within months of the murder, rumors had already begun spreading across the Bay Area. A young woman killed inside a church, candles arranged around her body, an ice pick through her skull.

 It sounded like something out of a horror novel, and people treated it that way. The actual forensic evidence, the seaman, the palm print, the locked door, the security guard with the shifting story. None of that made for a good campfire tale. But a satanic ritual murder inside a Stanford chapel  that traveled. For years, the conspiracy stayed local.

A dark story people told about the campus. A cautionary tale parents whispered to their kids. But in 1987, a journalist named Mory Terry published a book that would blow the Arless Perry case into an entirely different orbit. The book was called The Ultimate Evil, and its central argument was staggering in scope.

 Terry claimed that David Burkowitz, the son of Sam Killer, who terrorized New York City in the summer of 1976 and 1977, had not acted alone. According to Terry, Burkowitz was a foot soldier in a nationwide satanic network connected to an organization called the Process Church of the Final Judgment. Terry drew lines between the Son of Sam killings, the Manson family murders, and a web of ritualistic crimes stretching across the country.

 And one of those lines led directly to Stanford Memorial Church. Terry argued that Arles Perry had been  targeted by this network, that she had been hunted, stalked, and followed from North Dakota to California. That her murder was not a random act or a crime of opportunity, but a planned ritualistic execution carried out by members of an organized satanic cult operating within the United States.

 To support this claim, Terry pointed to something genuinely unsettling. In 1979, David Burkowitz, sitting in a New York prison cell, mailed a copy of a book called The Anatomy of Witchcraft to a sheriff’s department in North Dakota. Inside, Burkowitz had underlined and annotated a passage with  the words Arles Perry hunted, stalked, and slain, followed to California, Stanford University.

 Burkowitz also referenced a mysterious figure he called Manson the who he claimed was the actual killer. Investigators took the lead seriously enough to travel to New York and interview Burkowitz in prison. Their conclusion after sitting across from him and hearing what he had to say was blunt. Burkowitz had nothing of value. He possessed no genuine inside knowledge of the crime.

 He was doing what serial offenders frequently do, inserting himself into a high-profile case to maintain relevance and notoriety from behind bars. And no, I’m not making that up. A convicted serial killer mailing annotated occult books to law enforcement from prison trying to take credit for a murder he had nothing to do with.

 That actually happened and it worked not on the investigators, but on the public. Terry’s book became a bestseller and it landed at exactly the wrong moment. The 1980s and early 1990s were the peak of what historians now call the satanic panic, a period of widespread moral hysteria in the United States, where communities across the country became convinced that organized satanic groups were operating in their neighborhoods, infiltrating their schools, and targeting their children.

daycare abuse scandals, recovered memory therapy, and sensationalized media coverage. All fed into the fear. And into this fertile ground dropped Mory Terry’s book, connecting a Stanford murder to a New York serial killer through a web of occult organizations. The satanic angle fused permanently onto the Arles Perry case like scar tissue.

For the next three decades, online forums, true crime communities, and conspiracy theorists treated the Stanford church murder as irrefutable proof that a shadowy occult network was operating across America. Every few years, someone would write a new blog post or record a new podcast episode rehashing the same theory.

 The process church, the son of Sam connection, the ritualistic staging, the candles, the ice pick, the church. It all seemed too deliberate, too theatrical to be the work of one man. Except that’s exactly what it was. Retired FBI behavioral science agent Kenneth Lanning, one of the foremost experts on ritualistic crime in the United States, later reviewed cases like the Perry murder and reached a conclusion that cut through decades of mythology.

 These satanic appearance of crime scenes like the one inside Stanford Memorial Church was almost always staged misdirection. Killers who arranged their victims in ritualistic patterns were not performing actual rituals. They were creating a false narrative, steering investigators toward imaginary cults and away from the real perpetrator.

 It was a smokeokc screen. And in the Perry case, it worked for 44 years. The actual evidence, the actual suspect, the man with the shifting story, and the refused polygraph got buried under all of it. Steven Blake Crawford sat quietly in his apartment in San Jose year after year, decade after decade, while the internet argued about satanic cults and the processed church and David Burkowitz.

Nobody was writing best-selling books about a disgruntled security guard with a grudge against his employer. That wasn’t a dramatic enough story. It didn’t have the scope, the darkness, the conspiratorial grandeur that true crime audiences craved. A lone, bitter man with a set of keys is mundane. A nationwide satanic network is terrifying.

 People chose the terrifying version. The 2021 Netflix documentary series The Sons of Sam: A Descent into Darkness, directed by Joshua Zean, would later chronicle Terry’s decadesl long obsession with the case and the increasingly erratic path his investigation took. The series noted the bitter irony at the heart of the entire saga.

 Terry’s grand conspiracy theory about a nationwide satanic network was never substantiated. The process church connection fell apart under scrutiny. The Burkowitz link was a dead end. But Mory Terry was right about one thing. He correctly identified Crawford as the likely killer, even a broken clock. The question that hung over the case for 44 years was never really about cults or conspiracies.

 It was simpler and uglier than that. Who was Steven Blake Crawford? And what would drive a man to do something like this inside a church he was paid to protect? Crawford was born in 1946 in Los Angeles. He served in the United States Air Force and after his discharge, he found his way to Stanford University in 1971 where he was hired by the Department of Public Safety as a police officer.

 It was an armed position with real authority on campus. Crawford carried a gun and had genuine law enforcement responsibilities. Then in 1972, everything changed for him. A new police chief took over the department and launched a reorganization requiring every officer to reapply for their position. Roughly threearters of the force didn’t make the cut.

They were offered a demotion to unarmed security guard. Crawford was one of them. He went from carrying a firearm and a badge to walking unarmed patrols through campus buildings. According to journalist Scott Herhold, who followed this case for 40 years, Crawford complained bitterly about the demotion. He told friends he deeply resented what the university had done to him.

 The institution that employed him had in his mind stripped him of his identity and his authority. He stayed at Stanford until 1976, 2 years after Arless Perry’s murder, and then left. But the resentment never went away. If anything, it calcified into something deeper and more corrosive. Over the following decades, Crawford took a slow, deliberate revenge against Stanford.

 He stole rare books from the university, somewhere between 200 and 300 volumes by various accounts. He took Native American art and bronze statues. He took a human skull. He took a walking cane that had once belonged to Leland Stanford himself, the founder of the entire university. And in perhaps the most revealing detail of all, Crawford got his hands on a blank Stanford diploma and had a print shop create a fraudulent degree with his name on it.

 The man who had been told he wasn’t good enough to be a Stanford police officer decided to make himself a Stanford graduate instead. Think about that for a moment. The stolen books, the art, the artifacts, the human skull, the founders’s walking cane, and the fraudulent diploma. Every single item was  a piece of Stanford. Crawford wasn’t stealing for profit.

 He was stealing pieces of the institution that had rejected him. Collecting trophies from the place that had taken away his badge and his gun. The diploma was the most telling of all. He couldn’t earn a Stanford degree, so he manufactured one. He couldn’t be the authority figure Stanford wanted, so he became the thief Stanford couldn’t catch.

In 1992, police finally connected Crawford to the stolen items, and he was arrested for receiving stolen property. During the arrest, he told officers something that investigators in the Perry case would remember for years. He said he had stolen from Stanford because he was angry. Angry at the university for demoting him, angry at the detectives for treating him as a murder suspect.

He framed himself as the victim, the wronged party, the man who had been pushed too far by an institution that owed him more than it gave. He received a six-month suspended sentence. That was it. He went home to his apartment in San Jose and continued living his quiet, unremarkable life. People who knew Crawford through his square dance group, one of his few social outlets, had a nickname for him.

They called him the provericator, the liar. He told constant tall tales, including a story that his parents had died together in a car crash when he was young. They had not. They died separately of natural causes when Crawford was in his early 20s. Crawford lived alone for decades in the Dell Coronado Apartments on Camden Avenue in San Jose. He never married.

 He had no children. He got by on social security and whatever retirement income he had accumulated. Neighbors described him as normal, if unusually private. He did not cause trouble. He kept his apartment tidy. He was a quiet old man living a quiet life in a quiet apartment complex on a quiet street in San Jose.

And that was the thing that made Crawford different from the profile that the FBI had built in 1974. Most killers who stage crime scenes this elaborately who take trophies, who demonstrate this level of planning and control, they do not just stop. The behavioral science literature says these offenders almost always escalate.

They kill again. They cannot help it. Crawford, as far as anyone knows, never killed again. Whether that’s because he satisfied whatever dark impulse drove him that night or because he frightened himself with what he was capable of or because the constant presence of investigators circling back to him every few years kept him in check.

 Nobody can say. Crawford took that answer with him when he pulled the trigger in June of 2018. What we can say is this. For 44 years, a man with a proven history of lies, a documented grudge against Stanford University, a track record of stealing from the institution as an act of personal revenge, and DNA evidence that placed him at a murder scene, lived freely in the same metropolitan area where he had committed the crime.

 He attended square dances. He collected social security checks. He slept in his apartment every night with a suicide note dated 2016 sitting on the table beside his bed. And nobody stopped him. For all those decades, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office never completely abandoned the Arless Perry case.

 Cold case units would periodically pull the file, re-examine the evidence, and submit items for DNA testing as the technology improved. Every few years, there was a new round of hope that the science had finally caught up. Every few years, the results came back useless. The detective who finally broke the case open was a man named Rick Atlantis, who held the rank of sergeant and was later promoted to lieutenant.

 Atlantis took over the Perry case with a focus that went beyond professional duty. He kept a photograph of Arless Perry on his desk positioned so he would see it every day. He later said the photo was a constant reminder that her life in this case had value. Atlantis did what cold case detectives do. He started over.

 Not from the theories, not from the conspiracy angles, not from the suspect profiles, from the physical evidence itself. He went back through every item in the case file with the kind of attention that only comes from someone who has decided this case will not die on their watch. He looked at the evidence bags.

 He read the original processing notes. He compared the inventory against the lab submissions and that’s when he found it. The mistake that had buried this case for over four decades. The pants. The pants that had been labeled as Arless Perry’s clothing and submitted for DNA testing again and again over the years. The pair that every lab had analyzed and every detective had pinned their hopes on were too  large.

 They were not the pants of a 19-year-old woman. They were the pants of her husband, Bruce. Somewhere in the chain of evidence, most likely in the chaos of the original crime scene processing in October of 1974, the two pairs of pants  had been mixed up, mislabbled, filed under the wrong name.

 And from that point forward, every DNA test, every lab submission,  every round of hopeful analysis that the cold case unit had run as the technology improved over the decades had been performed on Bruce Perry’s clothing, not Arles’s. The evidence that could have solved this case was sitting in the same evidence room the entire time.

 It had been there through every review, every cold case reassessment, every new round of DNA testing. Investigators had walked past it, handled  it, cataloged it, and sent the wrong item to the lab instead. For over four decades, the key to Arles Perry’s murder was locked in a bag with someone else’s name on it, gathering dust on a shelf while conspiracy theories filled the vacuum outside.

 It just had the wrong label on it, that’s all. a clerical error from 1974 that cost a family 44 years of answers. You’d think someone would have caught it sooner. Nobody did. When Alana sent Arus’ actual clothing, the correct pair of pants for DNA analysis in 2016, using the far more sensitive testing methods that had become available in the intervening years, the results finally came back with something they could use.

 Semen found on her clothing matched the DNA profile of Steven Blake Crawford. 42 years. That’s how long a mislabeled evidence bag kept a killer free. To make absolutely sure, to eliminate any possibility of contamination, coincidence, or legal challenge, detectives collected DNA samples from other individuals who had been inside the church that night.

 Every one of them was excluded. They also obtained Crawford’s DNA independently from a discarded object he had thrown away, confirming the match without relying on any pre-existing samples in the system. The science was airtight. The match was confirmed from multiple angles. There was no ambiguity, no margin for doubt, no room for a defense attorney to challenge the methodology.

 After 42 years of wrong pants, dead ends, failed tests, and conspiracy theories that sent the public chasing ghosts, a single detective’s decision to look at the evidence with fresh eyes had broken the case wide open. Rick Alanis had done what 44 years of investigation, FBI profiling, best-selling books, and prison interviews with serial killers could not do.

 He found the right pair of pants. And those pants told a story that had been waiting to be heard since  1974. The DNA on Arless Perry’s clothing belonged to the man who claimed to have found her body. The security guard. The one who refused the polygraph. The one whose story changed every time he told it.

 The one who had keys to every door in that church and knew exactly when it would be empty. After 42 years, the physical evidence finally existed to arrest the man who had been sitting on the suspect list since the morning he picked up his radio and said those five words. We have a stiff in here. If this is the kind of deep dive you come to YouTube for, take a second to like this video and subscribe.

 It helps us keep telling the stories of the people who waited the longest for justice. By the spring of 2018, the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office had what they needed. The DNA match was solid. The case against Steven Blake Crawford was strong enough to support an arrest. And according to Sheriff Lorie Smith, a conviction.

 After 44 years of frustration, dead ends, and conspiracy theories, the answer was exactly where investigators had always suspected it was. the security guard, the man with the keys and the shifting stories and the refused polygraph. On the morning of June 28th, 2018, deputies from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office drove to the Del Coronado Apartments on Camden Avenue in San Jose. Crawford was 72 years old.

 He had been living in the same apartment for decades alone, getting by on fixed income, carrying a secret that had followed him for nearly half a century. The deputies were there to serve a search warrant. They approached Crawford’s apartment and knocked on his door. According to the official account from the San Jose Police Department, deputies made verbal contact with an occupant  through the closed front door.

 When they attempted entry, they saw Crawford standing inside holding a handgun. The deputies immediately backed away. A short time later, a single gunshot echoed through the apartment complex. No deputies discharged their weapons. When they eventually entered the residence, they found Crawford dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

  He was pronounced dead at the scene. Inside the apartment, investigators found two items that told a story of their own. The first was a suicide note sitting on a computer table about a foot from Crawford’s bed. It was dated 2016, not 2018, 2 years earlier, around the same time that Detective Atlantis had intensively re-introgated Crawford and submitted Arus’ actual clothing for DNA testing.

Crawford had written this note and then lived with it for two more years, sitting a foot away from his pillow every single night. Sheriff Lorie Smith later described the note as rambling. She said it did not  directly mention the murder of Arless Perry. The second item was found in a folder with financial papers.

 It was the jacket cover of Mory Terry’s book, The Ultimate Evil,  the bestseller that had spun the Arles Perry case into a decadesl long conspiracy theory about satanic  cults and the Son of Sam. The book that had drawn public attention away from the real killer and toward an imaginary network of a cult murderers operating  across America.

 The book that had turned Arles Perry from a murder victim into a character in someone else’s conspiracy narrative. The actual killer had kept that book cover in his apartment for years, maybe decades,  tucked between bank statements and bills. Think about what that means. For all those years, while Mory Terry wrote chapters about satanic networks and David Burkowitz scribbled annotations in prison and online forums debated whether the process church had ordered the hit on a 19-year-old Sunday school teacher from North Dakota, the

man who actually killed her was sitting in his San Jose apartment, possibly reading the theories about his own crime, watching the world chase shadows while he sat in plain sight. Whether he kept that book cover as a trophy, a source of grim amusement, or simply a way to monitor how close anyone was getting to the truth, we will never know.

 Crawford took that answer with him. Crawford died carrying whatever truth remained about that night in October of 1974. There would be no interrogation, no trial, no testimony under oath, no chance for Arless Perry’s family to sit in a courtroom and watch the man who killed her face the consequences. He took that from them, too.

 That evening, Sheriff Lorie Smith held a press conference at the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. She stood in front of cameras and microphones and for the first time in 44 years, named the killer publicly. We followed all the leads and unraveled the entanglement of the elements associated with the murder of Arles Perry.

 Smith said, “This is a case that eludes us no longer.” She described the crime as callous and cold. She confirmed that the DNA evidence was strong enough to have supported an arrest warrant, and in her judgment, a conviction had Crawford lived to face trial. She spoke about the investigation with a weight that suggested this case had been more than professional for her.

 She said it had occurred shortly after she first joined the sheriff’s department and that she had always taken it personally. She talked about Detective Atlantis, about the photograph of Arus that he kept on his desk where he would see it every single day, about the years of quiet, relentless work that led to the discovery of the mislabeled pants and the DNA match that finally cracked the case.

 And then she said the words that closed a 44year-old book. We finally have closure on this case. The Arles Perry murder was solved. The killer was the security guard. The man standing by the church door on October 13th, 1974. The one who radioed in to report the body. The one who refused the polygraph. The one who stole books and forged diplomas and lived quietly in San Jose for nearly half a century had been the answer all along.

But solved and over are not  the same thing. Not for a family that waited more than four decades for this moment. When the news broke, Arles’s sister, Karen Barnes, spoke to reporters by phone from Bismar. Her reaction was exhaustion  as much as relief. After all these years, she said, “It’s about time.

” She added that she wasn’t surprised by the identity of the killer because Crawford’s story had always changed over the years. The family had lived with suspicion and uncertainty for so long that confirmation felt less like a revelation and more like the world finally catching up to what they had always felt in their bones. Their mother, Jean Daikima, was 88 years old when the case was closed.

 She told reporters she was heartbroken that the killer hadn’t been caught sooner, that the investigation had dragged on for so long while the man responsible lived freely in his quiet apartment in San Jose, walking to the grocery store, attending his square dance group, sleeping in his bed every night with a suicide note on the table beside him.

And then there was the detail that makes this story almost unbearable. Arus’ father, Marvin Daikima, had spent decades carrying the weight of his youngest daughter’s unsolved murder. As he aged, as the years stretched on with no arrest and no answers, his desperation grew. His dying wish, the thing he wanted more than anything else at the end of his life was to know who killed Aras and why.

 Marvin Dima died in early 2018, 3 months before the case was solved. He missed the answer by roughly 90 days. A man who waited 44 years for justice for his daughter came within 3 months of hearing her killer’s name, and he didn’t make it. Bruce Perry’s path  after the murder took a direction that nobody could have predicted.

 In the years following Arus’ death,  the young premed student from Bismar threw himself into his studies with a focus that seemed to draw directly from the trauma he had experienced. He earned both an MD and a PhD from Northwestern University. He became one of the most respected child psychiatrists in the world, specializing in the neuroscience of childhood trauma.

 Bruce founded the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, and spent his career working with children who had survived the worst things the world could do to them. He was called in after the Waco siege, after the Oklahoma City bombing, after Coline. He wrote The Boy Who Was Raised as a dog, a book about how trauma reshapes the developing brain and dedicated it in part to Arus’ memory.

 Years later, he co-authored a book with Oprah Winfrey called What Happened to You? The man whose wife was murdered inside a church at the age of 19  spent his entire professional life trying to understand what trauma does to the human mind and trying to help others survive it. In an interview given years before the case was solved, Bruce reflected on what the murder had done to him.

 I had to get in control of what had happened instead of having the event control  me. He said, “When anyone is traumatized, they’ve got to make that transition away from being a victim.” He also said something that still resonates decades later. He said that when he finally accepted that death was a part of life, it did not matter that much anymore what the person who killed her looked like or was like.

Bruce Perry never spoke publicly about the resolution of the case when the sheriff held her press conference in  June of 2018. The family reactions quoted by reporters came from Arus’s mother and sister, not from Bruce. After 44 years, he let the silence speak for itself. There are still questions that will never  be answered. Crawford never confessed.

His suicide note didn’t mention the murder. Some of the original detectives, even after the DNA evidence was confirmed, reportedly questioned whether Crawford had the capacity to commit a crime this violent and elaborate. The why of Arles Perry’s death will likely remain unresolved forever. But the best theory comes from Scott Herhold, the journalist who covered this case for four decades.

 Herhold believes Arus was not the intended target. She was a victim of opportunity, killed by a man whose real grievance was against the institution of Stanford itself. Crawford’s grudge ran deep. The demotion, the stolen books, the fake diploma, the walking cane taken from the university’s founder.  Every piece of Crawford’s biography pointed to a man consumed by resentment toward the place that had, in his view, humiliated him.

 Herhold told reporters that he had always believed the crime was committed by an insider because it took a while for the insider to lay her out the way she  was done. He said this was someone who was not going to be interrupted and he felt confident he was not going to be interrupted. Crawford’s revenge against Stanford took many forms over the years. Theft, fraud, deception.

And on one October night in 1974, inside a building he had the keys to, it took the form of something far worse. No satanic cult, no nationwide conspiracy, no Son of Sam connection, just a bitter, dishonest man with a set of keys, a grudge against a university, and the confidence that nobody would interrupt him inside the building he was supposed to be guarding.

 For 44 years, Arless Perry was a case number, a conspiracy theory, a chapter in someone else’s book about satanic cults and serial killers. She deserved better than that. She was a 19-year-old girl from Bismar, North Dakota, who taught Sunday school and wrote letters home to her parents and walked into a church to pray on a Saturday  night because that’s where she felt closest to God.

 The building where she felt safest became the place where her life ended. The man paid to protect that building was the one who took it from her. And the people who loved her spent 44 years waiting for the world  to say his name, Arlus Perry. Born February 22, 1955 in Linton, North Dakota. Murdered October 12, 1974 in Stanford, California.

 Justice delivered June 28, 2018. This is Cold Case Redemption. We tell the stories of the people who waited the longest and the investigators who refused to stop. If Arus’ story meant something to you,  share this video with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe so you’re here for the next one, and leave a comment telling us which cold case you want us to cover next. We’ll see you in the next one.