The Stanford Cold Case

Arlis Perry was nineteen and newly married when she and her husband, Bruce, moved from North Dakota to Stanford University in California in the summer of 1974. She took a receptionist job with a Palo Alto law firm while he returned to his pre-med studies. On the night of October 12 the couple had a small argument while out walking, and Arlis said she wanted to stop at Stanford Memorial Church to pray on her own. When she had not returned by three in the morning, Bruce reported her missing.

At about 5:45 a.m. on October 13, night security guard Stephen Blake Crawford radioed that he had found her body near the altar. Arlis had been strangled and killed with an ice pick, and the scene had been arranged using candles from the church. Crawford was questioned and set aside. For more than forty years the case attracted theories about satanic groups and about Ted Bundy, none of which the evidence supported.

In 2016, cold-case investigators discovered that jeans filed as Arlis’s were in fact her husband’s, and that her own had never been tested. DNA from semen on them matched Crawford. On June 28, 2018, sheriff’s deputies arrived at his San Jose apartment with arrest and search warrants and the seventy-two-year-old shot himself. Sheriff Laurie Smith announced that same afternoon that investigators considered the case closed.