Identifying the 'Lady of the Dunes' took nearly 50 years but her killer remains a mystery

PROVINCETOWN — Ruth Marie Terry was a free spirit, according to her family.

By age 20, she left the coal mining town in the mountains of Tennessee where she was born, grew up and married. In Michigan, sometime around 1957, she took a job in car manufacturing. She became pregnant, had a son and gave him, permanently, to a family there that she knew well. She left town again.

In 1973, though, she arrived in her Tennessee hometown of Whitwell with a new husband. They were traveling the country looking for antiques, they said. They may have been headed back to Massachusetts..

Her family never heard from Ruth Marie Terry again.